In which Sirius is brave, Evan is laid-back and chatty, and Severus reads Beowulf.
In which Sirius is trying, Evan has a lot of opinions, and Severus is patient.
In which Sirius is a cowardly lion, Evan is a circling fin in rough waters, and Severus delegates.
Everybody's a hat-stall; take your pick.
Warnings: Frankly? Too relieved to think of any. :D :D :D
With the usual swirl-and-gust of disturbed air, the portkey dumped a startled Evan Rosier on his arse next to Snape. He was wearing a smock over his cutting-edge fashionable shirtsleeves, all dripped over with paint and the sleeves themselves bound tight to his arms and spotless. An impervious, probably, so Sirius couldn't think why he needed a smock unless it was to be picturesque. For all his affably befuddled expression, his hand had flashed to his wand as quickly as anyone could want before he looked at Sirius and then at Snape for a pair of long moments and then let it fall.
Clapping his hands three times, he said, pleasantly and unhurriedly into thin air, "Linkin, make my apologies to my client and pack my things home, will you? Tell them it was an emergency and I'll come back same time tomorrow unless they floo Delphine to arrange for something else. Thanks." Without any noticeable change in tone or expression, he turned his gaze back to Sirius and inquired, "You made my Spike cry?"
Snape flinched, and Evan scooted over instantly and wrapped an arm around him. There wasn't much of a response. Sirius didn't really expect screaming and punching, given that Sniv had let Evan kiss his head earlier, but it was still hard not to be surprised.
"Uh, I think it was Lily, actually," Sirius said. "Er. Not on purpose. She said you should firecall her so you'll be sure I'm giving her back all the portkeys."
"Portkeys," Evan repeated, smiling gentle confusion.
"We were doing okay and then James flooed in and he scarpered," he explained, gesturing at Snape.
"Do you generally let people just floo into your flat?" Evan inquired with a blink of mild bovine surprise.
"Not people," he said defensively.
"And it didn't occur to you to mention to one of us that someone might?"
"It didn't occur to you?" he shot back. He thought everybody knew he and James were fifty times more family than some common great-whatever grandfather made them. Of course Jamie was keyed into his wards. It should have been obvious.
"That you treat your home like the Common Room? No, Siri, I will admit that it wouldn't have occurred to me that anyone would do that. Or even if it had, given the obvious delicacy of the situation I'd expect anybody to at least lock the floo temporarily."
"They'd have barged in thinking something was wrong," he explained.
"You lock the floo," Evan said patiently, eyes hard. "To no entry at all. You lock the door. If someone tries to use either, you let them know everything is fine but it's not a good time. When they ask questions, you put them off or lie. "
"I didn't exactly have time to think it all out, Evan! You started him thinking about how to torture my flatmate! It wouldn't have been funny and harmless! They are not friends anymore! "
Sniv raised his head just enough to shoot Sirius a poisonously nasty and whose fault is that sneer. Sneer wasn't really the right word. He pulled his upper lip up to bare his crooked front teeth, exactly like a wolf who had decided which artery looked most delicious.
Evan sighed and pulled Sniv closer into his side. "Spike, what happened?"
Snape just tightened around his own knees and tucked his face away again, though Sirius thought he'd leaned into Evan a bit.
"He didn't like that Lily told me where to find him," Sirius made his bid for the Understatement of the Week Award.
Evan hummed meditatively, and Sirius was suddenly overwhelmingly glad he wasn't Lily.
"Look," he said, "I did my best. Honest."
"I'll keep that in mind," Evan said with a kind and understanding nod.
Sirius flinched before he could stop himself, and then stuck his chin out. "Look, can I talk to you a minute?"
"Sure," Evan said generously, not moving. Sirius gave him a come on, please look, and he sighed and squeezed Snape. "Are you okay for a minute, Spike?"
"I want to go home," Snape said in a thick, furious, strangled voice.
"We will," Evan promised, squeezing him again. "Do you need to go this second?"
A short pause, and then Snape stiffly shook his head. Evan pressed a kiss down on the top of it and squeezed him one more time, lingeringly, before getting up. Sirius couldn't imagine how he could stand to kiss that mess, but this was definitely not the moment to ask. Not that he actually wanted to know, anyway. "Is that your book over there?"
Snape shrugged listlessly and Evan wand-flicked it over to him.
They walked a little distance away, leaving Snape dispiritedly checking his book for damage, and Sirius lowered his voice. "Look," he started.
"You keep saying that," Evan said mildly. "I promise, I am looking. I'm looking hard, Siri."
"Listen," he tried again, exasperated. "I don't mean it as an insult this time, but you know your boyfriend's completely loony, right?"
"Severus says all humans are monsters," Evan reflected meditatively. "So I s'pose not being what a human thinks is sane could be a good thing."
"...Uh," Sirius said, distracted. "You know you're human, right? I mean, I know our family's…" he twirled a finger around his ear. "But, you know, still."
"He says I'm a space alien," Evan said with a distinct note of pride, smiling mostly with his eyes. Sirius, on consideration, decided that even Sniv had to be right about something occasionally, although he personally would have chosen the term 'giant stealth nutjob.' "Anyway, what about it?"
"Okay," Sirius said, "So we were talking about school."
"Talking?" Evan repeated, raising mildly impressed and rather sceptical eyebrows.
"Yeah, just talking," he promised. "Uh, a bit of shouting. Basically talking."
"Sure," Evan agreed, seeming to believe this more.
"I don't even know how to explain this," Sirius said, mostly to himself.
He tried, but it came out in a complete mess. Not that it hadn't been one from the start, but this wasn't really like trying to weave through an answer in class when he'd only skimmed through the homework. He didn't have the basics down to help him fake the details.
"And, look, it's not like I'm trying to tell you that understanding His Snideness is my dearest ambition," he eventually wound down, "but I swear, it was like trying to have a conversation with a centaur."
"I don't know what that's like," Evan said, adding thoughtfully, "I'd love to paint some, though. Might be worth a try. Think of the poses you could do. There are muggle paintings of centaurs, but they always get the spinal curvature wrong, and the hairlines—"
"I mean," Sirius explained, "you say Good morning, and they say, Jupiter is on the cusp of the Pleiades—"
"If that makes sense, I must have been sleeping through Astronomy."
"Exactly! And you say Looks like rain, and they say Mars shines bright in the House of Halley's Comet and you say er, what? And they say Jupiter is on the cusp of the Pleiades again and you're just left going, okay, I recognize all those words so it's not a language problem, but is it possible we are living in completely different universes where all the rules are different?"
"Well, obviously you are," Evan said, blinking. "On or off the Tapestry, you're still a Black, Siri. Spike's a Prince."
Sirius vaguely recalled Narcissa and Reggie saying something about that once, trying yet again to convince Mother that Sniv was all right to know. "Most people who aren't Blacks still make sense when they talk."
"Mostly," Evan conceded. "But most of them are kind of paisley."
"Oh, Merlin, more centaurs," Sirius groaned.
Evvie laughed. Sirius looked over at Snape, feeling guilty and not knowing why. Snape was looking at them over the top of his book, pretending to read it but not pretending hard. His outer-space gaze grew challenging when Sirius met it.
"I mean," Evan was saying, "the shape they take up in the world doesn't really make a lot of sense, when you look at it. Not haphazard, exactly, but paisley is so busy. And sort of demanding, don't you think? In order to take the whole thing in, you have to look at it for a long time, because it's got so much going on. And it doesn't interlock, so you have to give each motif quite a lot of room around it if the whole piece is going to look good. Which it usually doesn't in my opinion, but I seem to be in the minority there, which is fine, no accounting for taste, but it's just usually so loud."
One might have commented on the fact that Evan was commenting on busy fashion choices while wearing a waistcoat made of ten million tiny scraps of suede whose various shades of soft red-brown came together to vaguely suggest the shadow of a different bird every time one looked at it.
Unfortunately, if one did that, Evan was certain to peer in a puzzled manner at one's chest and ask why one was choosing to be a public advertisement for personal entertainment devices and make comments about how he'd thought pistols were mechanical wands muggles killed each other with and he didn't mean to pass judgment on one's irrepressible need to attract attention, exactly—if one had emotional needs he was all for taking care of oneself—but surely the death-wands would make for an unwise combination with private entertainment activities and maybe it was a bit irresponsible for one to walk around making a dangerous suggestion like that and surely one could think of a better way to be shocking?
And even if Evvie didn't know what he was looking at, he would know everything coming out of his mouth was nonsense. But he'd still spend an agonizing ten minutes making Sirius try to explain about band names, and somehow it would be impossible to call him on it because of that stupid-and-innocent thing he did with his eyes that somehow worked even when you knew he knew exactly what he was doing and was very quietly enjoying your aneurism.
"I'm still just hearing Halley's Comet whistle past," Sirius informed him, taking the better part of valour.
"You and me, Narcissa, Andi, even Bella," Evan tried again. "We decided what was important, and that's what's important, right? The Hat thought I might do well in Hufflepuff; did it say that to you?"
"I guess," Sirius said. "It didn't consider it very long, though. I think it just goes through all of them, like a checklist, unless you're like James and you're too much of one thing for it to even get on your head before it starts shouting."
"I don't think it mentioned Ravenclaw or Gryffindor with me," Evan said, "but I wasn't really paying attention."
Sirius gaped, "You weren't—"
Evan shrugged. He wasn't uncomfortable with the topic; he clearly didn't care about how he'd been Sorted now and hadn't cared at the time either. Sirius didn't like agreeing with anything Snape had thought of, but 'Evvie is not of this world' was a hard theory to argue. "Anyway, people like us, we don't make geometry cry the way paisley does. We're rather simple, when you get down to it, don't you think?"
"Speak for yourself."
Evan smiled forgivingly and, with an air of letting Sirius win because it wasn't worth the trouble, corrected himself. "Our motivations are simple. But then you've got people like Reggie. He's still figuring out what he cares about most, poor kid. He loves you and Bella and Severus and Grandad, and there's no possible way he can please even two of you at once, so it's hard for him. Most people are more like that. They've got too much going on."
"Busy," Sirius repeated.
"Right. And what they think is most important at any given time is going to change based on the situation, and what's right in front of them. So you have to give them room, because they might go off in some direction you never expected at any moment. Unless you've studied them for so much longer than ought to be normal, you won't necessarily be ready for it or understand why."
"Snape goes off in every direction most of the time," Sirius remarked.
"Well, if I've ever found anything Spike didn't think was important, I don't remember what it was," Evan said placidly.
"So, we're triangles and he's squiggly," Sirius said dubiously.
Evan smiled. Only 99.9% as innocently and straightforwardly as though he didn't understand what he was calling Sirius, he opined, "I'm a circle, I think; you might be a square." The smile lightening to the point of glow, he finished, "He's a honeycomb and every cell has a different something squiggly." It was just his eyes saying I could look at it forever, but they were shouting. Goopily.
"Like larva," Sirius had to say, because that was just gross on so many levels.
"You mean almost every cell is stuffed with delicious nourishment and the rest with potential?" Evan fired back amiably. "Potential which does not want to be eaten and which people don't want in their mouths or anywhere near them but will chew to death anyway if they're not stopped? Yes, I suppose so." He called, "Where are you at, Spike?"
Snape looked up just as if he hadn't definitely been blatantly eavesdropping, and read, "'He gesecean sceall hord on hrusan, þær he hæðen gold warað wintrum frod, ne byð him wihte ðy sel.'"
Evan frowned. "That doesn't sound familiar."
"I'll turn back to where we were later."
"Cheating," Evan declared sadly.
"I've read it before, Ev," Snape said, with a tone very like exasperation but also very like a smile. Then he remembered Sirius was there and scowled at him. "Aren't you done yet?"
Sirius said, "No."
Snape stuck out his tongue (it took the gaping Sirius a second to remember he was playing young for Evan) and retorted, "'Deað bið sella eorla gehwylcum þonne edwitlif.'"
"He left it dead," Evan said placidly, "and, with its head, he went galumphing back."
"That's later," Snape said severely, rather obviously trying not to smile. What his eyes did when he was scolding Evan for show was just so, so disturbing.
"That's not a word," Sirius protested. They both politely pretended he hadn't spoken. Well, Evan had the I Will Politely Ignore The Dumb Thing Sirius Just Said expression, at least, even if he wasn't really trying to look polite. Snape just twitched a little in pain around the throat area before taking on the Very Deliberate I Heard Nothing Because There Was Nothing Worth Hearing look. Sirius considered asking whether he was paying Remus royalties, but he knew it would just turn up Evan's facial volume.
"You're not the only one who can read ahead," Evan sniffed, grinning, and turned back to Sirius. "No?"
"No," he agreed. "I don't think what you were talking about is what I meant."
"Oh," Evan said, looking sad and not meaning it a whit.
"I just—what did he want to happen at school?"
Evan blinked. "Er? Good marks, be a better Slytherin, have fun arguing with everyone in classes, all the teachers to be as good as Babbling and Flitwick, you lot to leave him alone, Evans not to be a frothing cow? You can tell her from me, by the way, that I will not be calling her, I will simply trust that she can control whoever she sends to do her dirty work for her and make sure she pays for any fallout, and the next time she thinks she gets to decide what's good for Severus after dropping him from a hundred feet onto his head into a crowd of rabid hyenas she can either do a better job or keep out of it, or... well, I'll think of something."
He smiled with unworried sleepiness. All the hair on the back of Sirius's neck stood up, and his skin crawled.
"I'll, uh, tell her something like that," he said quickly, resolving to never bring this up again unless she tried to do something similar in future and needed to be dissuaded.
"Just so long as she understands," Evan agreeably nodded.
"Right. But, what I don't get is, if he wanted us to leave us alone, why didn't he do something about it?"
Evan paused. "Ah."
"Thank you!" Sirius exploded, throwing his hands up. "I tried to ask him that about twelve times and he acted like I was speaking sodding Greek."
"He speaks Greek," Evan said, evidently constitutionally unable not to brag about Sniv.
Sirius sighed hard at him.
Evan shrugged. "Why didn't you act like your mum wanted you to? While she was looking, at least."
"Because I liked seeing her turn purple."
"Siri."
Sirius scowled. "Because she was trying to marry me off to Alecto Carrow and I needed to keep her focused on anything that was not that until I could get out. Besides, she was either going to poison me for my own good in a way that meant I'd have to keep taking trace amounts for the rest of my life or she was going to poison me as a punishment in a way that meant I actually had to be treated for it."
"You were sick a lot," Evan pointed out mildly.
"Yeah, but Kreacher hates me. I wouldn't put it past him to miscalculate an ever-increasing dosage and call it an accident the minute he was sure the pater wouldn't be mad at him for it, even if it meant the Being Division would execute him, and the way Dad drinks he is not going to live forever. I didn't want to spend every morning for the rest of my life shaving off twelve kinds of poisons to take for immunity! Keeping antidotes around is way better. If someone sneaks you something that works too fast for an antidote, then at least you go out fast, am I right?"
"You would have started missing days the first week," Evan nodded understandingly without actually agreeing. Which, given who he lived with, was worrying. "Dead in a month, I expect."
Sirius had an initial insulted impulse to argue with that. On the other paw, calculated discipline wasn't his brand. "Yeah, so actually I was better off with her mad at me all the time. Long-term better off, anyway. I really didn't care what names she was calling me—it's not like I wanted someone like that hag to be proud of me. And by the time she hated me enough to get serious about the Alecto thing I was faster than her draw, so keeping her pissed off was fine. Anyway, James would have had his parents take me in pretty much as soon as we met. I was just sticking around for Reggie until it went so far she was going to have me betrothed or dead by the end of the summer."
"Oh," Evan said thoughtfully. After a moment's further thought, "Okay, that's more sensible than I thought you were being. Still, you could have come and stayed at the Hall, you know. Mum and Dad wouldn't have cared, even if they'd noticed. Linkin would have been delighted to have more people than me to look after. I could never think of enough to keep him busy, and he does weird things to the curtains when he's bored."
"Wouldn't have worked," Sirius said shortly. "Your elf couldn't say no to Mother unless he had actual orders from your parents. They might not have minded my coming, but they wouldn't have said no to her when she said I had to come back. They sure as hell wouldn't have interfered with her heir-betrothal decisions. Dorea and Charlus just laughed in her face."
"Did they?" Evan asked, eyes lighting in intrigue.
"Well, that's what they meant. The whole argument was by owl. They were cordial." He grinned. "Ever see Dumbledore tell someone off when he means it but doesn't care much? It was like that."
Unlike Dumbledore being actually disappointed in you (which was unnervingly awful even without being paired with Jamie also being disappointed on you and Remus not talking to you for a month and Peter walking on annoyingly crunchy eggshells until everybody stopped), Dumbledore telling people off was a lot of fun. Sirius had mostly seen it at deadly dull parties stuffed full of Important People's families.
Evan had probably been at most of these, even when his parents were away, but he'd also probably spent most of the time wandering around the hosts' houses looking at the furniture and the gardens and chatting with the portraits. Sirius wondered whether he could still get away with that, now he was adult-sized.
Probably. It was hard to look at Evvie and imagine him abusing your hospitality except out of accidental, absentminded, painterly eccentricity. Even when what he was doing would look like spying or casing the joint on anyone else.
And then if anyone asked oi, what do you think you're doing in the middle of my house, he'd just start waxing enthusiastic about the furniture varnish and what it had probably been made with back in the sixteenth century and which pigments could be used with how much paint thinner to recreate its translucency if you were trying to paint the room, until it became clear that there was no space in his fluffy head for ulterior motives.
"Can't say I have, but maybe I should sit in on one of the really silly Wizengamot cases," Evan said with a plotful sketch-hungry gleam in his eye. "Could be fun."
"Wish I could come with you, but I do believe the Hobgoblins will be playing that day."
"The noise you young people do listen to. Severus," Evan said in the same light tone, "would have done pretty much exactly what you did, in your place, but he wouldn't have thought of any of that." He paused. "No, he'd have thought of all of it, and also claimed not getting her own way without a fight was good for Aunt Wally's soul, but it would have all been a justification."
"Well, I'll grant you anyone would kick against marrying Alecto," Sirius said dubiously, "but I doubt he'd have minded the prospect of mithridatizing for the rest of his life as much as I did. If I hadn't needed to duck out of that it would have been better to get on good terms so I could persuade her out of the match, or delay until an accident could be arranged."
Evan nodded, acknowledging the sense of this, but said, "Sure, but he wouldn't have been doing it for your reasons, Siri. He wouldn't have thought about it at all—well, no, he would have thought, but he wouldn't have been doing it for reasons. He just… wouldn't have been able to do anything else."
Sirius frowned. "Listen, it wasn't easy. It was a giant pain in the arse, actually, and not fun at all, and Reggie didn't even remotely understand and kept begging me to make up with her. Practically anything else would have been easier, tell you the truth."
"I know, Siri," Evan said soothingly. He didn't say that he wouldn't have done things Sirius's way, but then again he wouldn't have had to. He would have had Kreacher eating out of his hand. All the elves and grown-ups had loved Evvie and his sad eyes and the little sketches he made 'just for you' and not at all because he was bored and didn't think they were good enough to keep and show his Rosier grandfather, oh no.
Mother would never have been able to poison Evan that way; elves could be sneaky when they actually wanted to look after one of their House's kids. Look at the way Kreacher had reasoned himself into knots to lighten every punishment Reggie had ever earned very nearly out of existence (which was unfair on paper but not really. Reggie'd been a third-year before he stopped crying when you snapped at him. It had probably been hanging around Sniv that had finally got him acclimated, but if Sniv expected thanks for being a jackass every time he talked he could go whistle for it). And if Evan had wound up engaged to a hag like Alecto, Sirius expected that either she would have turned up dead before the wedding or he would have convinced her to elope with someone else, using Amortentia on both of them if necessary.
"So I don't get it."
Evan raised an orange eyebrow. "Don't you?"
"I really don't. If you don't have a reason to put yourself through all that, why would anyone?"
"To make her turn purple?" Evan suggested lightly. "I don't think I've seen anyone turn purple, come to think of it."
"Evvie."
Evan sighed and met his eyes solidly, suddenly tired. "Because your mum is a nightmare, Sirius. She's awful, and she's wrong about everything. Nobody agrees with her about anything but muggles. And even when it comes to muggles, even Dad thinks she's… misguided, overreactive, and uncouth."
"Your dad's right about that."
"They usually vote together, Siri. And even he thinks that. That's how awful she is. I'm sorry to say this about your mum—"
"I'm not."
Evvie blinked in that way that meant someone else would have been rolling their eyes. "I'm sorry to say this about Reggie's mum, but she and Uncle Cygnus are both just these… crashing walls of awful. I'm sure Great-whozit Elladora would have been very proud. Spike wouldn't have been able to give in to her. Not about anything. He just couldn't. It's not in his nature. He can't let people win when they'd take the victory and do bad things with it."
This was accompanied by what was, for Evan, a sharply pointed look.
"That's so dumb," Sirius said helplessly. "You can't just rule out letting people win. You'd never be able to stop."
"You don't call it dumb when it's Potter," Evan said mildly. "'Oh, he looks like he's planning something, Sirius. We have to stop him, Sirius. It may look harmless but he's a bad sort and he's Slytherin so it could turn out to be secretly terrible, Sirius. We have to make his life a complete misery so he won't have the time or energy to do something really evil, Sirius.' Stop me when this starts to sound familiar."
"James doesn't talk like that," he said mutinously.
The corners of Evan's mouth curved up, but Sirius wouldn't have called it a smile. It made him look like a manticore wearing a human-suit. "Tell me he doesn't think like that. Look me in the eye, Siri. Tell me he doesn't think like that." His hair was pulled back, but not tightly, and the frizziness-at-the-edges of his coppery hair threw the sun like a halo. It should have looked bloody, like Lily's highlights did sometimes, not golden. The contrast with that flat mongoose-smile was obscene.
"That's just an excuse," Sirius said desperately. "He really just wanted to make Sniv look bad in front of Evans to have a better chance with her."
Evan just looked at him quizzically. "Is it important for you to be able to think that?"
Sirius looked away—at Snape, who, as far as he could tell, was actually reading now. "I think we're near his house," he mentioned. "His dad showed up during one of the shouting bits."
Evvie's eyes went even icier than when he'd been mocking James. "Oh?"
So Sirius didn't have to explain. Good. He didn't want to think about the cords in Sniv's throat seizing in the second before he dropped from the branch, and he really didn't want to tell Evan about it while Sniv was this size. "I thought we should put him in a room with Mother."
"If you put him in a room with someone," Evan asked lightly, "can't it be me?"
"At least Mother isn't three times my size," Sirius said, despite being fully aware that defending his own childhood stupi—tenacity was making it clear that he was bothered—by Sniv—which was not cool.
"She was probably four times your size at one point," Evan said practically. "And she knows curses you couldn't name."
"Yeah, okay, but Mother is actually worth opposing, Evvie. She controls a seat on the Wizengamot, people do vote with her, she goes to parties and gets people to be quoted agreeing with her. There's actually a reason to get her so mad she can't think straight. It's like you said Jamie would think; if she's distracted her agenda gets slowed down. What's the point, with a muggle like that? What can he do? He was trapping rodents for dinner, for Merlin's sake. He was pretty clear it was because he was hungry, Evan, not because he likes to hunt as a blood-sport for fun."
Evan looked at Snape. He looked sad—actually sad, not the way he did when he didn't want to argue with you but did want you to know you were being infantile. "I think the point's just not to give up and let awful people win, Siri."
"Okay," Sirius allowed, "but yelling at people like that doesn't get you anywhere, if you can't follow through."
"If you can't follow through, there's nowhere to get to, is there?" Evan asked reasonably. "If they won't improve and can't be persuaded and you're not going to take them off the board, what's there left to do but decide what you have to do to be able to live with yourself?"
"Uh," Sirius pointed out, "let them think they won so they don't spend more time also refusing to lose, and then later you can get at them from another angle, which you wouldn't have time to look for if you were spending all your time locking antlers?"
He regretted that immediately, but kept it off his face. And there was no reason for Evan to read anything into it. They were two Englishwizards standing in a forest. Perfectly natural to think of deer.
"It's really a pity," Evan said meditatively. "Reggie's not going to be half as good at politics as you would have been."
"No fear," Sirius said fervently. "I don't want to talk to Mucus Malfoy all day."
Snape had left his book open on the grass. He was hip-deep in the flowers now, picking bluebells and stuffing them into a big phial. He had his Merlin-blasted back to them. It was the most insulting thing Sirius had ever seen. He was lost in admiration for a split second before he caught himself, and then when he realized why it had hit him that way he felt suddenly sick as hell.
"I hope he remembered the tick-repellant this time," Evan frowned. "He didn't always in first year. I don't think he had the ingredients for it at home."
"Evan," Sirius said, his voice sounding hollow to him, because as much as he'd been trying to slough off that pointed look, it had wiggled its way through his skin and was trying to etch something nasty at the lowest notch of his spine. Snape had his back to them. He wasn't relaxed. His spindly shoulders were tight, and he wasn't turning around or looking at them at all. "Where did the hat want to put him?"
Evan turned and looked at him with sympathy. "Suppose I told you what you're afraid I'll tell you. Would you hate him more, for trying to throw away what you want most and still living what you can't grasp?"
Sirius's jaw worked. He couldn't answer.
"I can't say it to him about you, either," Evan said. "Though, really, that's because it's you, not because he's defensive about it. He knows how to get around what he can't do. We could teach him that much, at least, even if he was raised by the stubbornest Prince who ever refused to change her mind about a really stupid decision she could actually have walked away from at any time."
"I didn't have to argue with it," Sirius said, trying hard to keep his voice down. "It puts us where we belong."
"Some years it says that," Evan allowed. "Other years it says 'suits you best' or 'in the richest soil' or 'where you ought to be' or whatnot."
"Same thing."
"Not remotely. I'll tell you this much: it wouldn't put him where he wanted because he's such a natural Ravenclaw that living in that House couldn't have taught him anything. Ravenclaw is where you learn to be good at the books kind of smart, and he was already good at that. To grow the way he wanted to, he needed to learn something he's bad at. Something he could be great at, if he ever gets over how most of it is completely unnatural for him."
Sirius slowly became aware that Evan wasn't so much looking at him as Looking At Him. He set his chin and refused to answer.
"I always think it's a pity," Evan mused, "that… well, believe me, Siri, I understand how comfortable it can be to live with people who think in straight lines and black and white and simple pictures. They can be very likeable, as long as they decide you're one of them and you don't upset their little dogmas. But I always thought it a pity that the first person you decided to trust thinks there's something fundamentally wrong with us. With the way we are. I don't see how that could be comfortable at all. How do you ever relax?"
"You don't understand anything," Sirius said stiffly. If he'd been Reggie, he would have been hugging himself.
James did know him, and did trust him, and could trust him. Sirius had switched sides to the one he belonged on. James hated people who ought to be hated, and Sirius was not one of those. He wasn't a weak link in the Gryffindor chain, and he wasn't a cheat. Not where it mattered.
Maybe he couldn't relax the way Evan meant, but he wasn't a fake. Maybe he couldn't quite rely on his own judgment the way he could on James's, on Remus's. That just meant he was better for the things that needed a little imagination, and he had to make sure that the straightforward stuff went to the three of them who could think straight. It wasn't a problem. They relied on him being a Black, even if they didn't know it, and as long as he didn't rub their noses in it, everything was fine.
Evan was looking sad at him again, though (Sirius firmed his jaw further) there was absolutely no reason why he should.
"Okay," Evvie said, sympathetic again. "I didn't come to argue with you, coz. You can do your own thinking; I expect you will if you want to. Just be sure to tell Evans what I said." He smiled, pleasantly, but his eyes were lichen-encrusted steel and he wasn't even pretending to mean it. "Tell her so she'll understand. She had her chance, and I gave her more room to come to her senses than she deserved. She can't swoop in and make decisions for him anymore. She doesn't care enough to be good at it, and he's mine now."
He gave a civil little wave and walked off towards Snape, who had clearly been still spying on them because he had met Evan halfway, book tucked away in one of his alleged pockets. "Aren't you finished yet?" Snape asked, doing a scary-good impression of an overtired and pouty little kid.
"So finished," Sirius muttered.
"Just delivering some food for thought," Evan said cheerfully, and bent down to scoop him up. "Home for tea, sweetheart?"
"I'm making it," Snape insisted, a bit gushingly, with huge, horrified eyes. Sirius couldn't tell whether the horror was because of the tea or because Evan was being unabashedly cuddly, with little face-touches and blatantly affectionate body language in about fifty other only slightly more subtle ways.
Evan laughed and said okay and kissed his temple. "I can put the kettle in the fire for you, though, can't I?"
"You should have kids," Sirius told his cousin. A large part of him was revolted, but what with the Lily-being-the-size-of-a-small-barn situation he was probably going to have to get used to this kind of behaviour.
"It wouldn't be fair," Evan said lightly, and squeezed the humiliated Snape in his arms. "I wouldn't like them as much as this one."
Snape turned red, not blotchily. He turned his face into Evan's hair, which hid it more effectively than his own limp curtain ever did.
"Your mum'll come after you eventually." Aunt Callisto was Dad's sister and about a million times nicer, saner, and less controlling than Sirius's mother, but that was a pretty low bar. Sirius didn't know what she was capable of and never wanted to find out. It would have scared the whiskers off him to be the one she expected grandchildren from. You could get Mother mad enough to cut you out of her life one way or another; Aunt Callisto was the other kind of pureblood old-family witch. She probably would have been more reasonable about the who, but once she'd made up her mind Sirius wouldn't have known how to get out of it.
"I can put her off long enough for something to change," Evan told Snape. "Don't you worry."
"Put me down," Snape said, pulling back with the sort of expression that meant he was forcibly ignoring a prospect too horrific to be acknowledged. When he was back on the ground, he walked over to Sirius and held out his hand. Eerily polite, he said, "Thank you for looking after me this afternoon."
And then, when Sirius warily bent down to shake, the little hand turned into a fist and punched Sirius so hard in the knee that his leg gave out in an explosion of sharp, shooting fire.
Polite smile still carved into his half-sized face with its giant, melted-looking nose, Snape looked down at him and casually instructed, "Never hunt me down again."
"Ow, ow, you little sod!" Somehow, even though his knee was absolutely not hurting any less, he couldn't help laughing. It wasn't because Sniv was ridiculous, purring threats from the menacing height of three feet, although he absolutely was. This was the laughter of pure, incredulous relief, and he was glad no one would ever ask him why. It felt like the first thing Sniv had said all afternoon that he'd understood, or possibly ever. But if explaining to anybody would have bought Moony a cure, Sirius wouldn't have known where to start. "Fuck, did you break it?"
"Don't know, don't care." Sniv had gone brightly, glitteringly cheerful, like the edge of a bread knife in the firelight. It was weirdly not-malicious. "Don't come back here, and don't follow me again."
"I didn't want to this time," Sirius exclaimed. He would have thrown up his hands, but they were both plastered to the shrieking knot of lava formerly known as his knee.
"Then we understand each other," Sniv said, with a sharp, satisfied nod and a smile like a snaggle-fanged fruit bat.
He trotted off back towards Evan, who scooped him up again and remarked, amused, while kissing the side of his head, "Pretty sure you don't, Spike. Can you get to St. Mungo's without splinching yourself, coz?"
"After one measly punch from Bitty Britches? Please." To Snape, he said, "I hope you broke your hand, though."
Sniv let go of Evan's neck long enough to wave all ten tiny-but-somehow-still-vaguely-spidery fingers at him. Mockingly. A soft trace of brassy shimmer was fading from his knuckles.
"Bruise balm for you anyway," Evvie scolded him, snatching the relevant hand with his free one and peering at the no-longer shimmering back of it.
"But I'm making the tea."
"I dunno, Spike, that wasn't very nice of you. I think maybe I should make it this time," Evan said with a very grave voice but also a soppy grin he was making no effort to hide.
"You could ground me instead," Snape suggested with enormous eyes that were trying to look innocent and repentantly tragic but were only managing Obviously Up To Something.
Evan blinked. "Like electricity?"
"It means I have to stay home for several days and not see anybody but you," Snape explained, hanging his head like he knew what shame was and wasn't radiating hopefulness.
"That's a good idea," Evan said, agreeably, "and we'll owl your lab and tell them you had a somebody-else's-potion accident as soon as we get home, but I was also thinking a responsible person would probably punish you for bait-and-punching my cousin."
"It is a punishment!" Snape insisted indignantly. Evan laughed in his face before apparating them away.
"You've got grass stains on your arse," Sirius told the space where they'd been, but it didn't make him feel better.
Next: Immoveable force vs irresistable object (epilogue)
Notes:
1. Severus is reading Beowulf, and Evan is (for the sake of giving proper citations even though I assume you all realized) quoting Jabberwocky (for no particular reason except that it sprang to mind because one of the words sounds a bit like 'dead'). Severus doesn't think that Beowulf brings a head home, and Evan hasn't actually read ahead.
2. Mithridatization, or trying to acclimate one's body to certain toxins through low dosages, is a real technique that is absolutely not recommended. It doesn't work on all toxins and can go lethally wrong in several ways.
Despite Sirius's assumption that Severus is enough of a nerd to do it safely, Severus has done his research, concluded that it's an incredibly bad idea (although he will probably never stop trying to develop the theoretical universal-poison-immunity potion called Mithridate), and also just keeps antidotes and bezoars around instead.
You don't have to worry about Reggie. Walburga has indeed ordered Kreacher to add poisons to his food, but she has not ordered him not to remove the poisons immediately, not to also introduce neutralizing agents, or not to accidentally drop the food on the floor and have to make a new plate and move any resulting extra expenses to the numbers on her husband's wine receipts.
3. Yes, rabbits are lagomorphs, as of 1912. None of these characters except Severus care about getting this right. Sirius may actually not be aware, because Peter talks about rabbits as if they still are considered to be rodents.
Peter isn't actually confused about this. He'd just rather think that when people say 'rats' they think about bunnies rather than dungeons and the black plague. He thinks this might actually get him somewhere if he can get Sirius and James mixed up about it, because they have charisma and he is constantly amazed by the amount of bullshit people seem to accept as true-enough when they say it.