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Chapter Seven—The First Conversation

"It is—quaint," Orion said as he looked around the flat that Evanson had led him into. Or, truly, not even a flat, only a room behind the shop where he worked, with one door on the far wall that probably led to a bathroom. In one corner was a small, neat bed, and a table took up most of the center. The table had scars on it that Orion associated with acids and curses.

Evanson nodded, a half-smile lingering on his lips for a second. "Well, it's home." He glanced at Orion, then around the room, as if he expected a house-elf to appear from somewhere. "Would you like some tea?"

Orion concealed his dismay at drinking something brewed in these surroundings, and nodded. There were chips missing from the floor, he saw from the corner of his eye. "It would be welcome."

Evanson nodded, but no house-elf appeared. Instead, he went over to another, smaller table tucked in the corner opposite the bed and bent down to pull a teapot, cups, and the tea itself from a cupboard beneath it.

Orion took the chance to study the man's movements. They were nothing special, he thought at first. Evanson was lean with muscle, but more like a Quidditch player than an Auror. His hair was untamed and shaggy, curling around his face in a maddeningly familiar way. He made the tea with motions adept enough to show that he'd endured these cramped rooms for a long time.

But Orion's father had made sure that he had talents at looking beneath the surface, and that was what Orion did now.

Evanson kept himself perfectly balanced at all times, even when he had to kneel to get something else out of that wretched cupboard. His face gave little away despite his wide, glistening eyes. When he drew his wand to cast a charm to warm the water, Orion was sure that his hand had twitched in a way that indicated the wand was an afterthought.

By the time Evanson came back to the ugly table with the tea, Orion was ready to accept that the Divination bowl in his house had known what it was doing. He sipped the tea and admitted to himself that it was only the fourth-worst he had ever tasted. Evanson pushed a tray with sugar, lemon, and milk on it towards him and sat back. The tray had been silver once in a distant lifetime.

Orion put down his teacup and reminded himself, again, of the way his father had looked when Orion had deposited Walburga in front of him and related what had happened in Diagon Alley. Orion owed Evanson a debt for that moment of happiness. "You said you had wronged my family once already. How?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that."

Orion didn't rise, but he did sit back. Evanson had turned to look at him, and the mildness had vanished from his eyes. Now Orion saw the will that had let Evanson shrug off his wandless compulsion. For the moment, Evanson was still smiling, but he looked as though any second, he would strike.

"Perhaps you will tell me in the future?"

"No."

"It is hard to have a duel of words with someone who issues simple refusals."

"Then perhaps you should leave."

Orion made himself take another sip of the tea, instead. Evanson was pushing hard to get Orion to leave him alone, despite the pretense of hospitality he had enacted so far. His teeth were all but bared. "Why do you want me to leave?"

"Because you don't owe me a debt and it's nonsense to say you do," Evanson said flatly, his eyes a wild thing's. "You'll bring yourself and your sons misery by getting mixed up with me. Go away."

"If you wanted me to do that, you could give me specifics."

"What kind of father are you, that you're putting your desire to find out more above the safety of your sons?"

Orion felt anger run like a current of hot water up his throat, and opened his mouth. The only thing that kept him from saying something was the softly-growing smile of satisfaction on Evanson's face.

Orion settled back heavily in his chair and pretended to drink his inferior tea. "A father who has been passive for too long," he said. "My wife cast some spells on our sons, but only ones—I thought—that she was permitted to cast as part of traditional discipline. I never caught her actually using some of the ones that would have meant I could divorce her, although several times I believe I was about to. And now this. She was stupid enough to attempt murder in a public place. Divorce is going to be quick and painless."

Evanson watched him now with a blank face, utterly still. Orion could read his posture better than his expression. Evanson was ready to defend himself if someone came after him with a wand.

"Will you tell me," Orion asked softly, leaning forwards, "why you are so determined to drive me away? If you will not tell me about the harm that you believe you have done to the Black family, then tell me why you believe that I owe you no thanks."

"I did what anyone should have done."

"What I should have done, I believe you are saying."

"I would never have stayed married to a spouse that I believed a threat to my children."

"Under wizarding law," Orion said, anger moving cold and slow through his soul, "spouses have equal rights to their children unless one is proven a threat. And what happens in the privacy of the home cannot be testified about—they see it as forcing spouses to testify against each other—unless it happens in front of someone who is not part of the family, or unless one of a certain number of lines that are believed to damage children irreparably are crossed. You are unfamiliar with wizarding law, I believe, Mr. Evanson?"

"Yes. Because I'm not a 'proper wizard,' I'm sure you would say." Evanson formed huge hooks in the air with his fingers as he spoke. "So you wouldn't want to waste your time with me."

"I have already told you that you cannot make me simply ignore you by pretense."

"But this is as much reality as pretense." Evanson leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs with an infuriating nonchalance. "I can't be the kind of influence you want because the kind of influence you want is someone just slightly outside of the norm, someone who would care enough to interfere with your wife's murder attempt but not enough to care that you hate people like my mother. I'm not that kind of person, Black. I care a lot about Muggleborns and I don't think you do even if you say that word instead of Mudblood. I may be ordinary and pretty stupid, but at least I didn't come out on the other side of an expensive education having learned fucking nothing."

Orion was still. No one had spoken to him like this before, not even the Mudbloods who had stood up to him at school because they were Gryffindors and he was a Slytherin. They would squeak about their rights, of course, but inwardly, they still shook with terror—and feared what he could do to them. Orion had always known that they were the common rabble who were only brave enough to attack in a mob.

There was absolutely no fear in Evanson. Orion could get him sacked from his job, or set Aurors on him with a word. There were a lot of people in the Ministry who would do anything to oblige a Black.

And still Evanson wouldn't bend.

"You were a Gryffindor, I assume," he said.

"You assume I went to Hogwarts at all."

Orion flicked his fingers, incidentally using a bit of magic that Vanished the rest of the terrible tea. "Your accent is that of someone native to Britain, and you are highly magical. You would have attended."

"Unless my parents couldn't afford it. Unless my mother was someone who had an illegitimate child by a pure-blood, perhaps, and couldn't send me because his family would have made her life even worse than they already did."

Orion blinked rapidly. "You are illegitimate?"

Evanson smiled at him like a jaguar. "Why else would I carry my mother's name?"

Orion had to sit still and think about that again.

He's buying it.

Harry didn't do anything but smile. Still, he felt a slight clench of relief inside himself. Black had been annoyingly persistent, even after he knew Harry was a half-blood. And Harry couldn't afford to deal in outright lies because he didn't know how skilled a Legilimens Black was, although Harry basically assumed he must be one.

But speaking in hypotheticals stepped around the issue nicely. And while part of Harry mourned the chance he would lose to make contact with Sirius and Regulus, maybe even James Potter, he had no idea what their lives or their destinies were like here, in this broken universe. He had meddled enough. At least he could let them live as best as they could with their wounds.

"If we must end this association the same day we began it," Black began in strangely formal tones, "then there are a few things I would like to understand. Things that only you can explain to me."

"I already told you how little I'm willing to explain to you."

"Why did you stop my wife from casting the Killing Curse?"

"So that your children would be spared the trauma of seeing a murder in the middle of the street. And that other child would be spared the trauma of losing the woman I assume is his mother."

"It was about the children." Black studied Harry from under lowered eyelids. "I don't think the harm you caused the Black family was deliberate, then."

"Why?"

"Because you would know that I have children. And whatever reasons you might have for wishing harm on me, or Walburga, or my father, or any other adult members of the family, you would want to spare Sirius and Regulus."

Harry grimaced. He had always been ridiculously transparent when it came to things like that, he thought. He shrugged after a moment. "It's true that they didn't do anything to hurt me," he said, which was the most he was willing to give Black. "And I don't wish them any harm."

"But?"

"You're presuming that I mean them some good."

"You do, if you wished to stop their mother from becoming a murderer in front of them."

Harry sighed and rubbed his forehead for a second. "I don't have any money that I can give you to get you to go away," he muttered. "I wish I knew what you wanted, besides answers I can't give you."

There was a long silence. Harry almost hoped for a moment that Black had got up and left, even though he would have heard the chair creak and the door open if that happened. But when he dropped his hand from his eyes and looked up, Orion Black was still sitting there.

With a rather different expression on his face.

"You were trying to get me to leave by telling me your background?" he asked in a softer tone, his fingers curling around his knee.

Oh, shit, Harry thought blankly for a moment, and then shook his head. This still didn't mean that Black knew his real name or the real circumstances. Harry forced a sneer instead, draping haughtiness over him like the Invisibility Cloak. "You didn't understand that so far? So much for pure-blood superiority."

How much of this was a ploy? And to what end?

But at the moment, Orion's indignant fury was enough to sweep away his concerns about why Evanson had wanted to manipulate him. It was enough to know that he had tried, and nearly succeeded.

"No one else I know would have thought the attention of a Black a thing to despise."

"As I think we've established," Evanson said, his voice clipped, "you know some pretty stupid people."

It had been a long time since Orion had had to struggle with his temper. Most of the time, people were willing to cringe in front of him for a scrap of the attention he had already given Evanson. Now, though, he had to curb his natural reactions, since those reactions with the things Evanson wanted, and draw on the lessons in politeness that his father had drilled into his head as a child.

"If you would only let me know what I could do to win your regard," he began.

"There's nothing, you arrogant bastard."

"Video potentiam!" Orion snapped, thoroughly fed-up, and watched the spell strike Evanson before he could move from his chair.

The charm was a simple one; it revealed the true extent of someone else's magical power. It simply wasn't well-known outside the Black family, and so neither was the countercharm. Evanson had no chance to cast it before the spell slammed into him.

Orion ducked his head, his hands over his eyes, as the room lit up. Someone could have torched the wall behind Evanson with a Conflagration Curse and cast much the same amount of light. Orion gasped through it and loosed the countercharm when he had had enough of his eyes being fried.

The room went dark and quiet again, quiet enough for Evanson's words to be heard as the threat they were. "What did you do?"

Orion lifted his head slowly. Evanson was crouched in a battle-ready position, his wand aimed at Orion, his eyes wide and his lip curled so that he appeared to his bare his teeth in a snarl. But Orion would never compare him to an animal, the way Muggleborns and the children of Muggleborns, were so often compared. Not after that.

"I used a spell to sense your magical strength," Orion said quietly. "Please sit down, Mr. Evanson."

"The hell I will." Evanson wasn't moving and wasn't standing. His wand remained aimed, and his voice deepened to a level that meant Orion would have moved out of his way if he'd met him in Diagon Alley. "You're going to walk out of here and forget that you ever saw me."

"You can't control me that way," Orion said. "Neither can I control you. I apologize for ever attempting to do so." He was a little breathless as he stared at Evanson. Normally, someone like this would have been discovered and pulled aside during his first weeks at Hogwarts by a Black family member attending school there. Evanson wouldn't have been able to leave the school without being made an asset, ally, or even future marriage prospect, although of course he would have had to marry into a lesser branch of the family.

But because Orion had been the one who had discovered him, that meant it was up to Orion to determine what sort of future relationship the Black family had with Harry Evanson. The freedom, the power, dazzled him.

Not to mention the chance to secure someone on his side who would challenge him and wake him to life as marriage to Walburga had not. Orion knew himself. The need to protect his sons would keep him awake for a little while now, but not for very long. And when the divorce from Walburga was done with, he would need a continuing prod to keep from sinking into a daze where he cared for Sirius and Regulus, made a few easy political moves, and did little else.

The Divination visions had sometimes done that for short periods, but Orion could not depend on them to arrive regularly. Now, however, perhaps they had brought him someone who would always be there.

"Then I accept your apologies, and you can go away."

"I think you know as well as I do that that tactic won't work either, Mr. Evanson."

The man closed his eyes in what looked like exhaustion. Orion ignored his own sense of wrongness, that nothing should ever make Evanson look like that. He could do nothing to help until Evanson gave up on this resistance.

"I've endangered your family so badly already," Evanson said. His eyes flickered open and focused on Orion, the tiredness in them far more than this situation could have caused. "You don't know. And I can't tell you because it's other people's secrets as well as mine. I can't even commit to being your exclusive ally. I have other responsibilities."

"Then I won't press for an explanation until you feel that you are ready to give me one."

"And I just told you that that would be never."

"Things may change, Mr. Evanson."

"Including how much value you feel I can add as an ally."

"That is true," Orion said. It cost him nothing to do so, not when Evanson was studying him with quiet eyes. He had hooked his fish. "But for right now, I could use someone who cares for children to aid in their education. Their mother has—cast spells that I didn't know about, I'm certain. Someone who works for a Defense expert could probably find evidence of them more easily than I could. And have other knowledge worth offering to the House of Black."

"I don't want payment. What Mr. Palmer pays me to work in the shop is sufficient."

"A Black is hardly going to object to the fact that you don't want gold," Orion said dryly, although he knew his father probably would. Arcturus had said often that the safest way to pay an ally was with money. But this was Orion's decision. "There are other things I can offer you."

Evanson nodded slowly. "All right. I—when should I come to your house and meet your sons? Or would you prefer to meet me elsewhere first and not invite me into a place that must seem almost sacred to your family?"

"Why do you think our home is sacred?"

"Isn't that the way it usually is with pure-blood families?"

Orion let that go for now, but as he and Evanson discussed the particulars of the arrangement, curiosity burned in his belly. There were too many things he didn't understand about this stranger, too many things he wanted to know and didn't.

But he would take the chance anyway. He thought it would pay off in much more than Galleons.