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Chapter Text

Foreword

Evan Rosier had been a seer as long as he could remember. He had always had odd dreams, odd little moments of knowing and feeling things without quite understanding why. His first significant birthday party, at seven years old, had given him an unfortunately rosy picture of what it might be like to live life always a step ahead, always knowing the delights that were in store.

At the time, he’d been ecstatic. Every toy he’d dreamed of in the past few weeks had been piled there on a side table, just waiting to be unwrapped by the shaky fingers of old Wibble, and while Mother had stormed off after the fourth present, and Father had been on his knees in front of the sitting room hearth, arguing with business correspondents more or less the whole way through, Evan had gone to bed that night feeling very accomplished, supremely at peace with his place in the world.

Things had only gone downhill from then.

First, some few months later, the persistent cough that always afflicted Wibble in the winters turned into a deep, hacking thing, a coarse sound that frightened Evan so much that he nerved himself up to brave the terrors of sneaking into his parents’ bathroom to ransack their potions stores. He had come forth victorious, clutching the half-empty vial of noxious purple stuff that he vaguely remembered Wibble forcing on him for his cough sometime last month. He had even managed, with the aid of some very stern glares and outright lies, to bully the querulous old house elf into drinking most of the stuff.

Wibble’s cough had eased a little– a very little, played up into significance by Wibble’s stammered, feeble thanks and copious tears– and for a few hours Evan felt accomplished again, industrious, invincible. The fact that his new etiquette master bored him silly, or that his writing lessons made his hand hurt abominably, or that Mother never did remember to buy him a new broom to replace the one that she’d smashed to kindling in one of her rages, that was all nothing; he could see the way to fixing bad things before they took root, and that was just excellent, wasn’t it?

Then Mother had come home, and gone to the potions cabinet in the bathroom, and come out wide-eyed and shaking. Wibble, in his trembling efforts to explain his misappropriation of Mistress’ precious vial, had somehow forgot to point the finger at Evan, which seemed all to the good until Mother drew her wand and spat the curse for a beating.

Evan had seen beatings before; they were not new. He had even received one, months ago, when he’d been found hiding from Mister Watkins and his dogged determination to drill Evan on letters he was never going to be able to write in the smooth, sinuous way Watkins demanded they be written. That beating had shaken him, had made him– for a few weeks– very determined to be good indeed, and yet it was nothing to what Mother did to poor, squeaking Wibble.

He could usually watch a beating, or any other such punishment, and feel only a little sick. For this one, he was sick, literally, into his shaking hand, and he did not watch Wibble’s sufferings for more than the first minute, and still he saw it all, somehow, in those moments of shivering behind the curtain in the alcove nearest to the bathroom door, and in dreams in the dead of the night that followed.

The meaty, awful sounds, the horrible, hacking cough that bent Wibble in two after it was over, when he had just managed to stand, the heavy tang of blood, all of it roiled within Evan, forming into one great, churning wave, unstoppable, unyielding, terrifying in its portent.

He had wanted very much, that night, for the horrible wave of knowing he had in his gut to be wrong, for Wibble to mend as he always did, and reappear in Evan’s room a day or so later, now sporting a couple more scars, still coughing now and then in the polite way he always did. Ten days passed, and Wibble never came, and so Evan braved everything to try and see him– Mister Watkins and his switch, Mother and the way her heavy-lidded gaze always found Evan when he least wanted it, Cook and the horribly obvious lack of patience she had for him…

He found, at length, a small square stone set into the scrubby patch between the kitchen garden and the maze hedge that surrounded the main garden. “Elf Wibble”, the inscription on it read, and Evan spent two bitter afternoons there, weeping as he talked to the still, dark earth.

He swore, to Wibble, who had always been his favourite, that he would do better in future. That he would see, somehow, the way to ensure that he was not the cause of bad things, that he did not pull them into being with his actions.

Which was utterly impossible, and something he knew at the time, in the very back of his mind, underneath the fear and panic and rage and helplessness and the bronzed pattern on the bathroom tiles that he tried to see instead of remembering every blow of The Beating while he was awake. He swore anyway, because not to swear was to accept, to weight himself down with that foul memory and be a coward, until he too became a dirt-filled square near the kitchen garden.

Finally, his choked, whispered promises ran out, stifled by a new, worse feeling, a knowing that reached out of that memory, the memory of Mother’s wand raised high. Evan knew, suddenly, that he would cause– and do– things that were just as bad as the curse she’d turned on Wibble. He knew, the same way he had known the glittering pinwheel would be his first present. He knew, the way he knew that Mother really was his mother, and Father his father, and neither of them inclined to foster him out or, better still, give him up to the lesser Rosier branch, as Father had threatened, once, when Evan had run shrieking past his study at an unfortunate time.

Trembling, Evan cut a painful gash into his left hand, to seal his vows the way Father had taught him. He watched his blood drip into the bare dirt around the gravestone, and though he did not feel the hooks of the vows’ magic sink into him, he knew he had sworn true.

How Not to Get Caught

The future, merciless, uncaring, went on showing itself to Evan. He read all the Divination books and primers and pamphlets he could put his hands on, sourcing them from the mouldy, sparse lot of old Hogwarts textbooks found in a stuffy corner in the general library. He only let himself look at the shiny, tightly bound books he saw at the Malfoys’ estate, because his gut curdled at the thought of being seen, by anyone, to actually pick one up. He bought nothing at Flourish and Blotts for much the same reason, though by then he was beginning to understand why the thought of doing so made him so sick, for he had got far enough into Signs and Their Portents to understand the most common fate of a well-known seer.

Which was, if not death, the sort of unwilling isolation that might as well have been death. Famous Seers lived only in the public eye long enough to make some great and terrible prophecy; otherwise, they were thought to be in such-and-such a place, or known to have been forced into service by local lords or other authorities. The only moments Signs was certain of, regarding well-known Seers, were their prophecies and their largely tragic, untimely deaths.

That the Rosiers were not known for peering into the future was no shield; anyone who paid even a little attention to Evan’s family tree would find all of the support they needed to make sense of the idea that he might have inherited the Sight. Mother was a Trelawney on her mother’s side. Father’s grandfather had married the daughter of Cassandra Vablatsky, the other famous Seer named Cassandra. And then of course, their son– Father’s father– had gone on to marry Louisa Spiros, a great match that Father loved to highlight to his Continental business partners. The Spiroses were famous for being quite fantastically rich, and slightly less famous for somehow managing to marry, in the same generation, the daughters of both Mopsus and Calchas, the famous Greek Seers.

All of this, to anyone who knew nothing of Evan’s awful burden, was merely a bit of interesting trivia. To him, it was a source of terror and vexation, and the foundation of his reputation for wildness. To cover for his most serious attempts at obtaining better futures, he tried to be as disruptive and contrary as he knew how. Before he set fire to the gardens to quell the sickness that had kept him awake for three nights in a row, he set fire to the portraits in the green room, and to his bed, and to the heavy peerage that Watkins had insisted he learn from cover to cover.

He grew accustomed to Mother’s wide eyes and vicious grip, to Father’s deadly cold silences, to the sideways looks and frightened shivers from the house elves. He grew accustomed to being beaten, to being cursed.

One unfortunate side effect of his long reign of terror was that Mother did not trust him to attend the little school sponsored by the Rowles without embarrassing her, which meant that he only ever met anyone of his age when the whole family was invited out. Initially, he was thankful for the extra separation, the extra room for scheming, for making sure that everyone around him saw only what they needed to see. But, as his eleventh birthday drew nearer, bringing with it the spectre of Hogwarts, of exposure and uncertainty and patterns he could not easily predict, Evan began to wish that he had not remained so deliberately wild.

He knew the right names, knew the most important of his future peers well enough to nod to. But he did not know them, know what their sideways looks and small smiles meant. He did not know all their jokes, did not know why so many of the things he said (for he was always talking, half to fill the silence in between the future’s terrible, pitiless, soundless whispers, and half to feel that he existed) were so very, very amusing to them.

He learned. Quickly, since the mere thought of not being aware of how his words and actions made him seem to his peers made him gut-wrenchingly ill.

The first year he spent at Hogwarts was particularly instructive. He realized, almost immediately, that there was no right path through the simmering societal struggle (not that he called it that to anyone, out loud), already an issue from the moment he stepped onto the train. He was a Rosier of Rosier Lodge, the only offspring of the heir to the main branch. Certain paths, mad and sensible both, were closed to him.

Or, more correctly, the little he could see down them made him sick. He tried, very hard, to force his eyes away whenever Sirius Black came rampaging into view, which was often. “A little mad, the Blacks,” Father had said, once, after what Evan could tell had been a strained dinner party. “And it is all of them, regardless of what they’d like to think; it is every last one of them, root and branch.” That hadn’t stopped him from doing business with them, or for them, but then, it was easy to ignore someone’s madness when you couldn’t also see sickening glimpses of where that madness might take them.

Occlumency helped. Safely ensconced in the library at Hogwarts, supposedly rooting about for books on Runes (“Dunno why we’ve got to wait till third year to learn all the best shortcuts; I know I won’t…”), Evan copied, by hand, key passages from the book with the proper exercises, a book he’d found (Seen) squashed between two large, dusty primers on spell-assisted irrigation. He practised the exercises every night, even when it didn’t seem to be helping, even when focusing on clearing his mind just sharpened the awful picture he’d recently begun to have of a large stone box with his name formally inscribed at each end. It took him some time (half a year, at least) to realize that that was the good ending. The one he might possibly stretch to reaching if he played the hand dealt to him perfectly, with absolutely no mistakes.

Mistake: getting on anything more than a nodding acquaintance with Severus Snape. Snape, for all his sour, perpetual silence, broken only by grunts and biting sarcasm, had almost immediately attached his gangly, greasy self to Evan’s side like some large, sniffy limpet. Evan couldn’t even entirely blame him for it; Wilkes and Avery, the other two boys in their year, had years of etiquette lessons and social encounters between them, years of rubbing along quite well together. They might laugh at Evan’s not-quite-jokes, but they clearly saw him as some sort of wild animal, socially. Someone who you’d speak to now and then, but not much more than that.

Severus, well, poor Severus was a halfblood, and a poorly raised one, in both senses of the word. Poor little Severus tried to make up for what he lacked in manners and good breeding with a really quite nasty set of curses, but since one could not hex one’s social betters into treating one with respect, Severus ended up rather firmly situated on the edge of things. Which was where Evan was, by choice, which therefore meant that Severus flocked determinedly with Evan, even when it meant losing house points because Evan had taken it in his head to try to swim all the way down to the mermen’s village one bright winter afternoon.

It wasn’t one of Evan’s really very important expeditions, the sort of thing he’d feel physically sick about when he thought of anything going wrong. It was all right, that afternoon, to treat it all as a test of Severus’ mettle, a test he very naturally passed in flying, glowering colours. Once Severus had determined that Evan did not expect him to wish to come along, it had been the devil’s own task trying to drive him off, a fact that Evan had known, just known, as soon as he’d opened his mouth to try it.

He’d tried anyway, for a good fifteen minutes, because he recognized that if Severus would not be put off at a distance now, when there were points and the fierce, if temporary shunning from their fellow Slytherins at stake, he would not be easy to put off later. Which would very soon become a problem, because Evan had eyes, and he knew that to associate with Severus Snape, poor and uncultured halfblood, was to also associate, by extension, with Lily Evans, poor and perhaps slightly less uncultured mudblood.

He only ever called her that in his head. First, because the sight of her blinded him, the red hair and flashing green eyes and quietly smouldering temper. Her future was almost comforting to look at, despite being all fire and blood, for it was steady, soothingly steady. Fixed. Quite unlike that of Sirius Black (greyness, and a cold, cold wind) or Esther Urquhart (an unsettling rain of ever-changing numbers). Evan did not like the comfort he felt around Lily Evans, did not like that he felt safe near her, so he called her the ugly truth of what she was, if only to himself, to remind himself not to rely on the feeling, on the certainty she seemed to carry around with her.

Lily Evans also disliked him. From the first, the mad laughter he provoked and delightedly indulged in seemed, in and of itself, to offend her. Sometimes, during the first few weeks of the very first term, he had felt her staring at him across the classroom, her green eyes wide, her mouth a flat line, as if she could not comprehend what on earth was so amusing about any of his behaviour. Once he had drawn in Severus, her shocked stare became a considering, hostile frown, deeper than the ones she graced Potter with. Potter, (and Black, and Pettigrew, and Lupin) she disliked, for being so hellishly determined to make Severus’ life a living hell, but Evan himself, he was sure, was utterly despised, though he thought his sins were far less weighty.

He did not fully experience her dislike of him until his second year at Hogwarts, late one evening midway through spring, when he had strayed away from the library table he shared with Severus, only to return and hear him arguing fiercely with Evans.

“–seriously think I’d face Potter and his lot alone? Even with Rosier along, it’s still two against four, and you know how Potter plays dirty, you know he’d only get worse if I were alone.”

“That didn’t mean,” Evans practically hissed, “that you had to send them all to the Hospital Wing! You got detention!”

“Fair trade for seeing Potter lose half his teeth.”

The whispered argument went downhill from there. Evans demanded to know where he’d learnt such an awful spell, and when she was told, defensively, that it was none of her business, Evans made the appropriate mental connection, and said, in a low, venomous tone, that it was one of Rosier’s, wasn’t it?

That was when Evan decided to make an entrance. “Right you are, Evans!” he said, brightly. “That hallowed spell was indeed, one of mine, one of ours, I should say, a very special Rosier speciality. We’re no use at Healing, or at the arts, but, by fire, when you need an enemy bankrupted or knifed, or you wish his teeth would fall right out of his head, we are at your service.”

Severus’ face, as Evan made this unnecessarily long proclamation, was quite the picture. Yet he did not flinch, or look even the slightest bit embarrassed when Evans turned her scornful green gaze on him, as if to say, ‘can’t you see how mad he is?’.

Merlin, Evan remembered thinking, glumly. What on earth will it take to get rid of him? For it had been all too obvious, just then, why an association with Snape meant one with Evans also; they had their own shorthand, their own inside jokes and wordless, meaningful glances, their own years of socializing together as neighbours (Severus had said to him, deliberately offhand, that her family had moved in down the street some few years back, before Hogwarts, and that you couldn’t avoid everyone). Evan did not know precisely what Severus Snape felt as he looked upon his supposedly unwanted neighbour, but it was obvious that he felt it strongly, and even more obvious that he would bleed himself dry to avoid the loss of Lily Evans’ good opinion.

Except in Evan’s case. Which, in that moment, was so very maddening that Evan found himself nearly frowning, right as Evans– all right, Lily, it was a little ridiculous otherwise– turned to look at him. She saw him frown, and narrowed her eyes at him, then turned her burning green gaze back on a now slightly nervous-looking Severus. “I did say I wouldn’t bother you for long,” she said, tightly. “See you later.”

“What about me?” Evan had said, unable to keep from being annoying half out of habit, and half because he couldn’t stand the way she’d noticed him frowning, looked at him and then just looked away, as if his slip of expression hadn’t even been worth commenting on. “Don’t I get a talking-to as well, Evans? Since you hand them out so freely.”

It was worse of a dig because it was true, because Lily was a staunch enough friend that she wouldn’t just glower at Potter and company for venting their frustrations on Severus, she’d march right up to them and yell, shrilly, and occasionally take her swishy wand right out to try and interfere. It wasn’t very kind of Evan to twist that back on her, but then Evan hadn’t been in a kind frame of mind since he was seven years old, his thoughts crammed full of every awful future.

As well, there was the fact that it would look particularly suspicious if he ever was kind to her. No one would understand that it was only that she was steady in the future, a fixed, calming point. No one would think that his being nice to her was anything but questionable and filthy.

Evans– no, Lily turned her burning gaze back on him after his needling comment, staring at him for a long, really quite uncomfortable moment. No, he’d expected her to say. You don’t even listen to your own mother. Or: You only ever do what you like, anyway. Or, simpler still, what would be the point?

He had something funny thought up to counter all three of those possible responses, though the last thing he’d wanted was to keep on with that horrid conversation by practically daring her to give him some useless little talking-to. Then Lily just sniffed and said, “no. You don’t get one.” And then dared him with her eyes, to comment further.

Pinned by her hard green gaze, Evan had found that he didn’t want to comment at all. Worse, that he nearly didn’t dare to. And then she turned smoothly on her heel and set off, and even though he could very well have called out something after her, all he did was watch her walk away.

He and Severus watched her leave together, the quiet scuff of her boots against the polished wooden floor of the library the only sound between them. Then, as it faded away, they wound up eyeing each other, warily. “She worries too much,” Severus had hastened to say, his careless tone matching poorly with how quickly he spoke. “It was only a detention.” But his pleading gaze and hunched, tense shoulders said another thing, begging Evan to let his too-bold mudblood friend alone. “I was always trouble at home. I dunno why she thinks I’ll turn into an angel here.”

“Oh no, Snape, that wouldn’t do at all,” Evan had found himself saying. “The two of us were born to be devils, black-hearted through and through.” But inside, he quailed. He had not been surprised that Lily disapproved of him, or thought him a bad influence, or, as was most likely, that she was jealous that Severus was growing to rely on him in a way he quite clearly disliked to rely on her– those were all simple, obvious, and expected reactions, for her.

As for her dislike, well, Evan didn’t get a Howler from the Lodge every week, but that was only because his parents had long since wearied of sending them. Lily Evans’ dislike did not upset him; her pointed disfavour would have no bearing at all on his life, or his future.

What was truly unnerving was that he had been sure, that he had known bone-deep that she would say one of those three expected things to him, and she had not.

Fixed as she was, she should have been predictable. Fixed as she was, she had not been predictable, and while that had meant nothing in the moment of a petty, unspoken argument over whether Evan deserved to steal away one of her friends, Lily Evans’ strange sort of slipperiness could mean far more later down the line, when the stakes were life or death.

So Evan watched Lily closely, and learned, for his trouble, that she was simply very, very, very contrary. Not always, of course, as that would have made it too easy by half. Her general stubbornness was constant, it was there in her every action, but she only really seemed to dash through people’s expectations in that unsettling way when things were particularly emotionally charged. It was as if she somehow focused on her current opponent, saw, somehow, what they most expected of her, and then deliberately found some way to go against it, some way that pleased her and left them goggling.

It drove Evan mad. The usual reaction from most girls, by the time his second year at Hogwarts was almost over, was to squeal or shriek or lecture or laugh reluctantly, whenever Evan did or said certain things. Lily, variously, ignored him, stared at him, stared at him blankly, sniffed, turned away, yawned, sighed, asked Jemima Burrows what she thought might be for dinner, or frowned and turned a page in her book. That she was doing it on purpose some of the time was clear; the rest of the time, it left Evan worrying, fuming internally over how someone was sure to notice her pointed, deliberate indifference to him, and wonder what was behind it, and then start digging unnecessarily.

On the train home, he swore to himself that he would better his Occlumency, that he would study hard at the few summer balls his contemporaries would invite him to. That he would understand Evans’ unpredictability by the time he saw her again, or exhaust himself trying.

Then, that September, when he saw her again on the train, he saw that she’d shot up a bit again in height, that she’d gotten to looking just as gangly as Severus himself, though she wasn’t yet tall enough that Evan had to crane his neck up to see her eyes. No, she was just markedly taller, enough to look down her nose at him quite easily, and her hair was longer, and somehow the way she flipped it over her shoulder had become oddly hypnotic.

Hypnotic as in, if he watched her do it long enough– not difficult, once they were at school proper, and he could watch from the corner of his eye– it gave him a quite persistent stiffie. From the way Potter and Severus both kept eyeing her, she was hypnotizing them too. It was not to be borne, Evan thought, one night, as he tossed and turned, hard and guilty and disgusted with himself. He wanked, furtively, and then set himself to ignoring Lily entirely without quite making it obvious.

Which didn’t work, not even when he started fooling around a bit with Priscilla Whitby. Who was prettier, and would kiss him, and giggle delightfully at all his jokes, and wriggle even more delightfully in his lap, but didn’t look at him the way Lily did. Which was, he decided, halfway through the year, also not to be borne.

He ended things, as indecisive as they were, with Priscilla. Who seemed quite amiable about his dropping her, since Charles Nott was currently eyeing her, and he was the one she’d had her eye on from the beginning. Then, after an appropriately dramatic interval of moaning and weeping exaggeratedly and filling Nott’s bed with spiders, Evan set himself to the task of, well. Not courting Lily Evans, not seriously, but perhaps seeing if she were at all interested. If there was something in the way she glared at him and flattened her mouth, now and then, when he made what he knew was a particularly good joke.

He was also slowly becoming less concerned about the fact that he could not always predict her. So far, it just seemed to mean she openly disliked him, and very occasionally agreed, not quite out of his hearing, that he was indeed a total prat, and then turned around and spotted him and looked surprised, but meanly pleased, that he had been there to hear her. No one but him seemed to see anything out of the ordinary in her reactions to him. No one was going to watch her rolling her eyes at his jokes, or doggedly ignoring him just when it would needle him most, and think, ‘a-ha! So very odd! Rosier must be a seer!’

His not-quite-courting campaign went poorly. Paying Lily any direct attention seemed only to make her bristle in response. Worse still, was Evan’s discovery that her bristling at him like that, at reasonably close quarters, only made him more… excited. Then, while he was still guiltily at it, half because it would look odd not to taper things off as if he were naturally getting bored of her, and half because it was the only way to rid himself of the urge to touch her hair, Lily turned the tables on him again, and started reacting by very tensely not reacting at all.

Blissfully exquisite torture. He had reddened, visibly, and she had given him a steely, challenging look, and he had looked at her mouth and wanted to kiss it, and known, in his bones, that he would not like the way Lily reacted if he did that. That her not wanting him would matter. That he had decisively lost.

He licked his wounds for weeks. Watched, in a sort of stupid, jealous haze, the open attentions paid to her by Potter, and, bizarrely, by a sick-looking Manfred Warrington, who visibly wavered between staring dreamily at her silhouette and scowling fiercely whenever she was looking at him, such as one unfortunate time in Potions the other day, when he asked to borrow her ingredient scales.

She had lent them to him, too, and not timidly, not cringing or leaning back from the way he was deliberately looming over her desk. She had given him a flat look and handed them over and told him he’d buy her a new set if he managed to melt hers the way he had melted his (deliberately– Evan had seen him quite obviously nudge them into the coals beneath his cauldron).

“Good grief,” Warrington had thundered, slamming the scales back down on her desk. “Keep ’em, then, if you’re going to be so blooming fussy.” And then had gone stamping back to his desk to be miserable, while glaring at Potter as he just happened to saunter past and make a big joke of it.

Warrington, ham-handed as he was, was at least brave enough to do something. Potter, well, if Evan had been anyone else, not a seer, and so not cursed with feverishly pretending to be anything but one, Evan would have said that Potter didn’t count because he was just utterly shameless. But Evan was shameless too, in everything else. He didn’t know why he’d lost his bottle with Evans. He thought he should really be far more upset that he’d lost his bottle at all, but he wasn’t; he was only, stupidly, thoroughly upset that it had failed him with her.

Somehow, a week later, he found himself strolling up to her in the library, a wide, teasing smile up, to cover the terror beneath. He made silly comments. He wanted desperately to know what she was reading, and lamented dramatically when she refused him. Then, when she turned that tense, steely look on him, he bowed floridly, and declared he would now retire, for fear of his life.

“Oh?” Lily said, shocking him. “I thought no one could make you do anything.”

“You alone, Evans,” Evan said, quite sincerely, because no one at all was nearby to overhear it. “You alone are dear to me.” Which was not at all what he had meant to say, and, thankfully, not at all taken seriously.

“Piss off,” Lily said, without looking at him (another surprise. He’d been certain she’d just ignore him). And, gratefully, with alacrity, he did as he was told.

From then on, he continued his now slightly more occasional attentions to her, and carefully spread them around to a few other girls. He was still afraid of Lily, of how keenly he felt about her, but less afraid that he was utterly transparent to her. It was clear to him by now that her quite decided bias against taking him seriously was his shield, his best protection against embarrassing himself with her, and he tested it just often enough to know that it was still intact. And to reassure himself that someone that apparently could consistently, deliberately defy his expectations could also not really see all the way beneath his mask.

The years rolled on, and on. Potter attained new heights of shamelessness; Severus descended to new depths of cruelty, of raging, naked insecurity. Evans developed still more attractions: long hair and a slow, maddening smile and ripe, pronounced curves that were nothing far out of the ordinary and yet still managed to absorb one’s attention. It was torture not to look at her, and torture to look, but worse, because she almost always knew when you were looking, and would look back, challengingly.

“Uppity little bitch,” Liam Mulciber named her, when she failed to return his leers with either the nervousness or capitulation he wanted, because in his case, when she looked back at him, she’d put her hand in her pocket, deliberately, as if she’d like nothing more than to use her wand. Yet for all that the other boys clustered at the Three Broomsticks’ bar had rumbled angrily in agreement when Mulciber spoke, none of them ever quite managed to come to the point of pressing Lily Evans, the way some other less fortunate girls had been pressed. There was Potter to consider, for one, shameless Potter, whose inability to draw Evans’ attention in the manner he desired had only made him more vindictive in defence of her.

And then there was Severus, whose public, humiliating breach with her had turned her very name into an unmentionable in his presence. “Only I,” he had hissed, into the bleeding ear of Remington Pritchard, who had some months ago been unlucky enough to be overheard making certain comments, “may call her a mudblood whore. Do so again in my hearing, and I will cut out your tongue again, permanently.” That he had healed Pritchard afterwards, with one swift, focused Episkey that made him flinch in pain– hurting him once more, while smoothly erasing most of the evidence of cursing him– had only made people more wary of him.

And then there was Lily herself, who, for all her bright smiles and generally polite, teacher-approved behaviour, had an obvious temper, and enough skill with a cauldron that Slughorn sang her praises nauseatingly often. Certain contact poisons were not difficult to brew, and as much as Lily would probably end up in Azkaban for a year or two if she vigorously applied them to someone that had greatly wronged her, it wouldn’t be something they could gloat over, seeing as they would be too dead to gloat over anything.

So, when Evan’s sixth year began with the sickening realization that nothing he’d been doing all these years was enough to nudge himself decisively towards the less gruesome version of his death, he decided to take a stroll by Lily’s library desk again, the way he’d been doing on and off all these years, consistently, just to see if he could perhaps nudge her into murdering him then and there.

The results were shattering. From his first glimpse of her, he’d seen the telltale shimmering in her future, the fire surging higher than the blood, the one sign that meant that her fixity would somehow hurt him. In those times he approached her with her fate’s heat haze up, she had always ended up looking at him, making him feel seen, and mad, and crushed, and utterly despairing. She isn’t for me, he’d tell himself, after, as he walked away laughing, or grinning. She isn’t for me, and I need to stop this. But he always went back, of course. He couldn’t bear not to.

That day, his teasing was perhaps a little sharp, a little too revealing. Because Lily tensed– exquisitely– and then reached up her sleeve to palm her wand right away, which she didn’t usually, and then looked at him, so that his heart beat fast and loud, almost loud enough that he couldn’t hear himself.

He heard her, though. “I don’t know why you do this,” she said, bitterly, into the first lull he left in his words. “You know you don’t– Christ, you know I know you don’t believe it, you’d have actually tried something, before, if you wanted me, which you don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“Would you even do anything, if I said yes?”

Yes, Evan thought, but he did not, could not say it.

“To all of you, it’s a fucking joke,” she went on, barely leaving a space for him to breathe. “‘Oh, Evans, I’d do her’. As if, if I’d lost my mind enough to do it, I’d ever let a shit like you put your cock in.”

She wasn’t supposed to know those words, or say them. She knew that, and said them to him emphatically, mouthing them with relish.

“You and I both know very well,” Lily said, her eyes alight, her expression mercilessly mocking, “that I think far too well of myself, for that. That the only way I’d let a bastard like you touch me, is if you went on your knees and begged to lick my cunny.”

“Oh?” He nearly cringed, hearing himself. Somehow, Lily seemed to mistake the desperate arousal in his roughened voice for anger, because she smiled maliciously, her hand tightening around her wand, and went so far as to lean back and stretch out her legs below the library desk, spreading them significantly.

“If you were that mad for me,” she said, sweetly, “you’d be down there right now.”

Clearly, she was expecting him to throw some sort of sullen tantrum, or to back off red-faced, to show disgust or embarrassment, to do anything other than come up with halting steps and go to his knees before her. She, of course, scooted back in her seat, closing her knees immediately, though her robes were long enough that he had no chance of seeing anything. “What? What are you doing?”

“What you told me to,” Evan said, trying to sound and seem as non-threatening as possible. Her fate was more than shimmering now; fire danced before his eyes, almost in time with the thud of the blood in his veins, the blood that wasn’t rushing downwards, taking away all his sense with it. He looked ridiculous and he knew it, but he could not bring himself to care; if I will die, he couldn’t help but think, I will die having done my best to taste of her. “Do you want to watch me do it?”

Lily’s mouth worked, opening and closing on nothing. “You– you’re–”

Mad, he could almost hear her say. You’ve gone totally mad. “Yes,” he agreed, as he shifted, still on his knees, around the edge of the desk, so he was facing the side of her chair. “I am just this mad for you.” When she squirmed, he tried not to read anything into it, tried to see nothing but her trembling wand, the most obvious sign that she would almost certainly turn him down by cursing him. “You said to beg, didn’t you?”

Lily made a wordless sound, then. And again, when Evan bowed his head to the same level as her booted feet. He saw them both turn toward him, felt and suppressed, with all his might, the sudden urge to try and kiss her boots, because if he did this wrong, played this wrong– he did not want to die to her, from her, of her, not in that way. He did not want to die knowing that he’d frightened her.

“Please,” he said. “Let me lick your cunny. Only that. Only that, I swear on my magic, heart and soul.” Not much of a vow, not quite the right phrasing, he was just too nervous, scrambled, embarrassed.

“You’re not…” Lily said. “You’d never…” And, when he looked up, he saw that her lips were parted, and that she was breathing a little more quickly. And she was looking right down at him, her gaze on his mouth, as if she were thinking about it. Thinking about what he might do to her with it.

“May I?”

She didn’t say yes. But she shifted minutely in her chair, one knee swinging out a little toward him, and when he carefully, very carefully, touched her there, lightly, she made another short, wordless sound, and turned a little more toward him.

She was still holding her wand. Evan was lightheaded from the fact that she was letting him– letting him put his hands, heavily, on both her knees, letting him grip and bunch up her robes there, pushing all that heavy black cloth up and over her knees. Her stockinged legs were revealed to him. He saw, with a watering mouth, the place the stockings stopped, held up by narrow bands and magic, the buzz of some cloth-fixing charm under his fingers, and then the smooth, warm skin of her bare upper thigh.

He was so hard he could barely think. “You can’t,” she said to him, softly, weakly, and he got even harder, because he knew what that meant.

The taste of her. Strong and musky and so very, very good– her hair was red, there, and trimmed, and he wouldn’t ever forget it, would never ever forget the way she smelled, the way her thighs flexed, the way she rocked herself against his mouth, his tongue.

Her breaths– oh, she wanted it, she liked it. He thought of fingering her and then put the thought away, striving for perfection, perfect compliance with her stated terms (“lick my cunny”). She moaned, quietly, as his tongue entered her, so he did it again and again, suckling her clit with his lips when he could, until she finally shook against him, the hot grip of her thighs almost strangling him.

Afterwards, he’d tried to be smug enough that in her irritation with him, in her worried fear, she would forget that he had folded her thin cream knickers– just a bit damp, when he pulled them off her– and slipped them into his pocket. That whatever happened, whatever would happen, he meant to keep them.

He invited her to share herself with him again. Swore, because he could see she was worried, a proper vow of secrecy, more than happy to keep it, when it was such a deliciously dirty little secret. He went away, flushed and hard and victorious, with Lily Evans’ knickers burning a hole in his pocket, certain that she would avoid him thoroughly henceforth, certain that while he’d spend several hours in the library on the date of his blithely suggested rendezvous, he wouldn’t see so much as a flash of red hair near her usual table in that time.

Then… he turned the corner, hoping for nothing, one whole week of useless nerves and constant, furious wanking gone, and Lily was there. Waiting for him, her future burning fixed and bright, welcoming him.

He knew, in that moment, that she could be his ruin, his certain death, even, and still he would shed blood to have her. That he would shed his blood and die smiling.

Chapter Text

Seizing the Dying Day

Even wanting Lily as much as he did, Evan had been convinced they wouldn’t have anything to talk about, that they’d have nothing of substance to share. And, for their first few, furtive meetings, that supposition held true. Not at all in a bad way, though, because if one couldn’t talk to a girl, or were unsure you could talk to her without making a fool of yourself, burying your face between her thighs was a more than acceptable compromise.

He had thought, when he imagined a relationship with Lily Evans, that the sheer satisfaction of being inside her would be enough to carry him through the days he did without her. That they’d come together, that it would be all fierce, glittering fireworks, and he’d trot back off and live his life in modest, self-satisfied bliss until it was time to see her again.

The bliss only seemed to last a day, at best. An hour or two, if he was unlucky, if they managed to meet on the weekend, or before afternoon lessons, and he was left aching to catch glimpses of her for the rest of the day.

He had been annoyed by Potter, before; annoyed with a side of feeling reluctantly, disgustedly impressed at Potter’s suicidal bravery, at the way he went on throwing himself on the rocks of Lily’s pitiless gaze again and again and again. Now, however…

“I find I am growing to quite despise,” he found himself saying, short of breath, just after they had disengaged, “certain suicidally persistent idiots, idiots who won’t take your obvious ‘no’ for an answer.”

“Oh?” Lily said, her arch, sideways glance adding an extra layer to her otherwise innocent tone. “Didn’t think you were the self-hating sort.”

Evan felt his face get warm, and then realized his mouth was hanging open. He shut it, and then, feeling her gaze on him, feeling her waiting for his response, he found himself saying, stupidly: “I didn’t– I didn’t mean myself.”

She looked at him again, eyebrows raised, pulling her tights up in two swift stages, her brief, focused motion making him think, briefly, of how hard he had been when he watched her take them off. “Really?” she said, jolting him back into their conversation. “Who did you mean, then?”

Potter, but he couldn’t say that now, could he. He hadn’t been meaning to actually have to name the bastard when he made that stupid, roundabout comment; he’d wanted her to be the one to bring Potter up, so he could agree, and get some pointed, witty jabs in. “I wasn’t,” he found himself saying, instead, even as he remembered just how often he had found himself walking by her library table, and had decided to stop in solely because she was alone, with no one there to see him make a fool of himself. Potter at least was brave enough to be rejected before an audience. “I hardly– I mean, it didn’t seem to me, with you, as if…”

As if I were entirely unwelcome, he half thought of saying, only to look at her again and abandon the idea, because he knew she’d only have to blink at him, and perhaps murmur something about some how boys always thought that, no matter how unwelcome they obviously were, and then he’d just be stuck there in front of her, knowing she was seeing him open-mouthed and foolish. Knowing that perhaps, in her heart of hearts, he was just a little despised.

“Don’t torture yourself too much,” Lily said, suddenly, nudging his left boot with her re-stockinged foot. “Silly as you are, you do have your uses.” The look she raked him with left him in no doubt what uses she was thinking of. “And very nice uses, too.”

Evan didn’t know why that made him flush again, or why he suddenly felt halfway crushed, proud that she enjoyed his efforts, and yet full of yearning, a mad urge to see if he could please her even more. When logically, it shouldn’t please him so, being thought to be useful in that way, by some lowly muggleborn with no real prospects.

But he knew, even as he felt himself think that uncharitable thought, that he was only doing it to seize some mental mastery of the situation. To soothe himself, should she come to her senses and cast him aside, in favour of the handful of other panting idiots simply dying to be useful to her in this particular, filthy way.

“Day after tomorrow?” she asked, now, over her shoulder, half her attention on buttoning her robes. “Wait, you don’t take Arithmancy, do you?” And the moment of danger passed, swept away by their need to talk of practicalities, though even those felt flirtatious, coming from Lily’s mouth, the mouth that she had put on his cock, the mouth he had been dying to kiss for years.

He kissed her rather a bit too much, probably. But she didn’t seem to mind it, didn’t seem to mind ending their meetings like this, angling up to meet him, her mouth soft and warm, her body pressed right against his.

“Till then,” she said, each time, and, flushing, he echoed her. Thinking all the while that anyone hearing them part might think that they were desperate lovers. He wasn’t in love with her; it would be the height of stupidity. All he was, and would allow himself to be, was obsessed.

Obsession made him want to talk to her. To tease out her opinions on safe subjects. To listen as she ranted. Which wasn’t at all as often as he might have imagined.

When Lily spoke, generally, it was to say something practical, like “Oh, there, right there,” and “I’ve an essay due this Friday, so I’m afraid I can’t meet at all, for a bit.” When she strayed from those sensible essentials, it was to fling him some little bit of gossip she thought was unknown to him, just to see how he reacted.

“Slughorn really hates you,” was the first thing she said in that line, having just listened to him complaining about the man. When he stared at her, then protested, because he’d never been quite so unwise as to do anything out of bounds when the man was there to see it, she smiled at him, just a little. And added: “you’re alright in his class, but you don’t behave anywhere else, not even for McGonagall.”

Which he’d never even once considered, not as the source of the man’s dislike. Evan had made it his business to be viewed as intractable, as a force you could only lightly steer, and most of the teachers had long since accepted it, save for Slughorn, who watched him, always, and held him back after Potions about once a week, though never for anything but one of the more obvious causes: a missed essay, or another report of misbehaviour.

Initially, Evan had expected the man to one day break down and subject him to one of those ‘shape up’ talking-tos (McGonagall’s still rivalled all the others he had received, for sheer explosive force). But, when the talking-to had never materialized, he’d began to shrug off the weekly delays, well able to endure those moments when Slughorn would frown at him in silence, and then reluctantly say he could go.

“You’re one of his,” Lily went on. “You’re obviously clever enough that you know to behave around him, and that you don’t do anything to give anyone else a real reason to want you expelled, but you don’t bother to do more than that.”

“Why on earth would I?” Evan said. “The occasional suspension is annoying, but I’d far rather cop one than play the lamb day after blasted day.” But he didn’t bother to come out with the rest of his usual spiel, which was either about being too free a spirit for social conventions, or too irritated by said conventions to brook them for long, depending on his audience. “Bully for Slughorn, then; I don’t mind being hated.”

From the wry, sceptical look Lily directed at him, that last thing was probably what he should have come out with at the start, if he’d wanted to be believed. But she didn’t pursue the matter further, then or in future, no matter how much he dreaded that she would. No matter how often his deliberate antics gave her the opportunity.

He had of course, by sheer practical necessity, reduced the scope of said antics. He was not at all interested in wasting any of his brief, shared madness with Evans on having to trudge home for even half a day.

He understood, too, why she was so wryly accepting; they neither of them had needed to put into words the fact that their relationship was temporary. That it must be temporary. Lily Evans, for all her early, futile interference in the poisonous dynamic between Severus and Potter and company, for all her willingness to speak up or lash out on behalf of someone being unfairly wronged, was a very pragmatic girl. Seeing that Evan was bent on misbehaviour, bent on reinforcing his mask of intractability, she sighed pointedly, made the occasional biting comment, and generally left him to it.

He found out, in early January, that she wasn’t all serene indifference. Half-prepared for her to frown, to look up at him and end things, he’d watched, shocked, as she touched his left arm. Gingerly, as if she were afraid his new mark of ownership– of someone else’s ownership– would hurt, would somehow snap at her.

He’d touched himself that way, when it was done and he was home, similarly irrationally afraid of yet more hurt.

That she had hit him after, following her surprising tenderness with such pure, unthinking violence…

That she’d screamed at him so loudly he could barely distinguish each word, so loudly he worried that the silencing ward might not be enough…

Of course he’d fucked her. Good and long and hard, for he hadn’t known it would matter to him that she cared, that she was that afraid for him, even if he were only her dirty little secret. Christ, she’d said, after, wincing as he withdrew, but when he apologized, she only gave him a look that said, plain as day, ‘this is what you’re sorry for? Just this?’

He’d fallen into bed, afterwards, and wondered if he was truly mad. If it was at all sensible to be so desperately glad that she’d fucked him, but not forgiven him.

It had to end sooner than he would have liked.

Unexpectedly, too. One moment, Evan was laughing off the idea of her with Potter, soothing her unvoiced fears with a wicked joke, and in the next, she was in his arms, red-eyed but committed, retreating back behind the line he had so perilously crossed some five months ago.

“All right,” he had said, coolly, since that was how he’d planned to take it, when the inevitable happened.

“You bastard,” she had said, and assaulted him. And then gone on to shake in his arms, clinging tightly as he made some very stupid, very heartfelt, and very useless promises. “Mine?” she had said, as if she couldn’t tell how desperate he was to be just that. To be able to be hers in public.

Somehow, that made it easier for him to let her go.

Letting her go didn’t mean that he stopped watching her, or stopped watching the usual reactions to her, even after she took up with Potter. Only once did he allow himself to intervene, half because he knew that he would get away with it, and half because it rankled, it bothered him that Mulciber could slander her almost to her face, and edge in close and smile his sharkish smile upon her, while the most that Evan could do was watch her out of the corner of his eye.

He was careful, of course. He made sure Mulciber slept the whole way through his revenge, though he could feel himself wishing he’d miscast the Soporare, and that the next tiny cut he made on the other boy’s back would be the one to wake him, and wake him screaming.

Somehow, that was the first moment Evan truly felt as if the mark on his arm was more than decoration, more than a simple, ugly compromise. As he’d stolen into the Hospital Wing, he’d known that what he was about to do wouldn’t necessarily help. He’d known that Lily was safe from Mulciber’s depredations, with James Potter and his merry band storming about in defence of her honour, and yet, there Evan was, his footsteps quietened, his presence as veiled as he could make it as he crept towards the bed Mulciber lay senseless in.

His first kill had been forced on him last summer, with Father watching, Father on hand to finish the job if he found that he couldn’t. Evan had hated every moment of it, and had raged inwardly against the futility of it, the waste of one poor, balding muggle man’s life on his murderous education.

This kill, though, if he let it go that far, if he added a rune just there, to the edge of the small, neat pattern he’d carved into Mulciber’s back… Evan knew how good it would make him feel.

Shaking, Evan obscured the fever pattern with painstaking precision, just as he’d been taught. Pat their skin dry, with a clean cloth, Mother had always said. Then burn the cloth, offering their blood to the fevered flame… He finished the ritual with a weak Episkey, leaning close in over Mulciber’s bared back, making sure that the cuts healed only on the surface.

Then, breathing hard, he turned Mulciber over and punched him in the face, twice, because he couldn’t stand that Liam Mulciber was the one to show this to him, wake this demon in him. And because if there was to be no kill, no final judgement, Evan yearned to leave a mark that everyone would see.

Shaking still, he made sure to banish the ashes, to dust his hands free of them, to make sure he left no other evidence of his presence. It felt futile. As he began the journey back to Slytherin, back to his house and his bed, he felt as if the ash clung to him, though he had looked, and checked, and checked again.

Evan was already in the habit of deliberately forgetting, or at least obscuring certain of his memories that might betray him to his parents, his peers, or his new master. It was easy to fold away his memory of the last two hours, easy to twist it, to rewrite it just enough to pass muster. I have always been cruel, he told himself. The only shock, tonight, was realizing how little I like holding back.

When next he saw Lily again, after graduation– saw her, and was seen– Evan wished he was dreaming, that seeing her trim, tantalizing figure there in that drab muggle village was only down to exhaustion, to firewhisky, even, though he didn’t drink.

He’d somehow managed to carry that off, carry all of his planned, prissily dangerous persona off, much as he’d feared he wouldn’t. I don’t drink, he always said, to a group he hadn’t been in charge of before, and I don’t fuck the lesser-thans, but I don’t care if you do it, so long as it is strictly on your own time. And then he had enforced the unspoken threats, taking animal joy in the rush of it, at being empowered to wield knife and wand against someone he knew deserved it.

He never disabled anyone, not on the first offence. Never denied them the potions and the care they required to become useful again for their lord. But Evan was always watching, always prepared to mete out serious punishment, though he had only been obliged to do so just the once. Then, he had made ceremony with it, had gone before his lord on bended knee, requesting a viewing.

After that, no one had dared to cross his orders, not where he could see it. He hadn’t intended for that to happen; had only done it because Avery had been amusing himself by putting it about that Evan didn’t rape because he was incapable, or because he had a weak stomach, or perhaps because he was hiding some truly disgusting tendency. Not for men, either, as those were accepted targets as well, were they sufficiently lowborn.

Lord Voldemort, who, as far as Evan could tell, had only the slightest interest in anything sexual, or indeed in anything but pain, had closely watched Evan’s public display of the historical Rosier talent for flaying, but he had hardly been entranced. He had no love for the use of muggle tools. But he had been appreciative nonetheless, publicly approving. He had made the point, again– as he always seemed to do, at truly private gatherings– that such brutal, unyielding punishment could not sensibly be reserved for use merely against those who were lesser, or against those who opposed.

It is meet, Lord Voldemort had said, in that cold, rich voice that convinced you he could only ever speak the truth, that the unfaithful and the undisciplined should also feel the lash.

How much he would approve, if he ever found out, if he ever discovered the sick terror Evan felt, while he laid rough hands on his beloved! He saw her stripped, and felt his heart stripped; he saw her ripe breasts handled, and wished, with a fervour that shamed him, to handle them himself, wished desperately to fight off all comers and spirit her away, to be plundered at leisure. He wished he did not know, or could forget, that claiming her, that denying her to the others would only doom him.

She had nearly doomed him already, by just appearing where she had, forcing Evan to dictate the use of the one Rosier property that he knew to be unwarded against blood magic. It should have come as no surprise that she went on dooming him, that the first really significant response she showed beneath his fellows’ sordid punishment came about in response to him, in response to her recognizing him.

“Evan,” she named him, when she had so far refused to speak to anyone. “Please…”

She had not precisely been asking him for anything. Desperate, despairing, and certain she would die, she had still spoken his name, as if she thought he might be contrary, be selfish enough to have to be begged to do what he could.

Somehow, his second trip up to Dunwoody to receive the judgement on what to do with Lily Potter had not turned into the deliberately over-long affair that would mean her inevitable rescue was not entirely, obviously his fault. He’d been weak enough to give in to the urge to touch her once, yes, but he had promptly disengaged. He’d given his men strict instructions, feeling safe to make them as forbidding as he dared, knowing they would not live to relay the betraying details to anyone. Knowing that his lack of supervision of them when they lost her would mean he was due some torture, but no direct blame.

Yet, once Evan had bowed his way into the Dunwoody house, waited to be seen, and then bowed his way out, he could not keep himself from immediately Apparating back to Lily’s side. From killing, in maddened, joyful sequence, men that he knew were already good as dead. From wrapping her in a sheet– a sheet, rather than robes, rather than anything at all sensible– and lounging with her in his arms in the upstairs sitting room.

It was more than madness; it was precisely the kind of sheer, suicidal lunacy that would most likely lead to his untimely death. Yet he had done it, and done worse, giving into her keeping the most important secret he had ever kept. Binding her, uselessly, to never speak of it, as if that might somehow save her.

He’d already decided, well before the time that Potter and Black showed up, that the only way he’d have a chance of surviving the coming consequences was if he played this new streak of madness out fully. If he could represent it in just the right manner.

He ended the whole farce by rutting into his hand on top of her, whispering that it was necessary, though he’d been unsure if it would help. If that brief, horrifyingly pleasurable betrayal of her would even be enough to save him.

That, hours later, it did help– that he could use nearly every facet of that memory, that entire shameful, moment–

“Well, well,” Lord Voldemort said, his voice rich with pleasure, barely louder than Evan’s wordless sobs, “such an unfortunate weakness.”

There was something particularly terrifying to Evan about enduring a great deal of unpleasantness all while knowing, bone-deep, that it could be worse. That it would be worse, if he didn’t hold out long enough.

The knowledge was worse, almost, than the pain.

It was some age, some dreadfully long age, before Lord Voldemort was convinced that Evan had not meant to lose her, had not deliberately engineered the possibility of rescue. It was another, deeper torture, feeling his lord’s close attention on the worst of his feelings, the bone-deep jealousy of Potter, of Severus, of anyone and anything allowed to be freely close to someone Evan knew he could not have. Someone he knew he shouldn’t even want, and hated wanting, and still wanted, nonetheless.

He’d been right to be careful, last year, while he terrified her into staying at Hogwarts for Christmas. His Lord dwelt on that memory, savouring every filthy nuance, desperately amused at how Evan had been so quick to slur her, even as he pressed his fevered body against hers.

“I am unfaithful,” Evan whispered, when finally offered the opportunity to explain himself. “I am an aberration.”

The Dark Lord laughed. “So little a thing,” he said, dismissively. “You do know you could have asked.”

Evan, his heart beating hard, his blood on his lips, on his temporarily broken hands, knew not to contest that. He knew, too, to make no mention of Severus’ possible prior claim, or of the unwiseness of crossing him by making a counterclaim. Evan knew that his lord would prefer to make that connection by himself, would in fact only believe it if he were the one to think of it.

“What will you do,” his lord finally said, “if I think to grant you this small boon?”

“Anything,” was the right answer. Was, shamefully, the first thing that came to Evan’s lips, heartfelt and eager and truly meant. “I am weak in this, my lord. I am wretchedly weak.”

“You are not weak,” his lord said, “to see a thing and wish to own it, worthless though it may be.” And that was how he knew he had done it, that he had been believed. “Rise, Evan. Rise, and worry not; you may have your trinket, in time.”

Afterwards, Evan went about to be as openly obedient as he could, knowing as he did how thin the ice had grown beneath him. For the first time in years, his worries for his future grow fainter, eased by the new, mortifyingly reassuring solidity of that vision of himself in a coffin, the vision of his cleaner death.

It might come to pass this year, or come to pass sometime in the next few decades; he was sure, at any rate, that on that front, he was doing all that he could. That it was bitter, thankless, disgusting work, and that the chances he could safely take for other people’s futures had grown painfully few… Well. Evan had known, on making this bed, that he would not much enjoy lying in it.

Days after he’d recovered from his narrow escape, he had listened, dully, while Severus paced and fumed and cursed him in the foulest possible language, berating him for having led the team that put their hands on Lily Potter, and yet not having notified Severus immediately.

Never mind that they both knew how it would have looked, how it would eventually have put both their necks directly on the chopping block. The Dark Lord only desired to preside over one conspiracy, a conspiracy in which all the involved parties answered solely to him. He tolerated the petty politics, the jockeying for status and privilege and pride of place, but he tolerated no strong friendships, no personal associations that looked to rival his place in the hearts of his followers.

“You know very well,” Evan said, in the end, when his one-time friend’s vituperative words had finally run out, “why I did nothing.”

“Why you left her with them?” Severus ground out. “Why you ever thought to leave her with Simmons?”

“In a poorly warded house,” Evan had said, coolly, “with a man known for thinking first with his cock, and so on and so forth. I’ll thank you to remember, Severus, that I’ve already been thoroughly punished– and pardoned, too– for the great crime of losing track of one mudblood.”

It no longer hurt, by then, to say the word about her, and see the way Severus forced himself not to react. Over the last two years, his friend had managed to pare down whatever upset he felt from a scowl, to a brief, betraying blink, and then, more recently, to a minute tightening around his eyes. Evan would have been proud of him if he hadn’t hated him so much, hated that he had had so many years with her, so much fervent history, and had still been stupid enough to set it all alight with one word, and walk off stiffly while it burned behind him.

Severus had watched him leave the room, his black eyes empty, and Evan had felt almost glad to have finally lost his trust.

Then, months later, in the grey hours of an otherwise unremarkable morning, Evan had woken in a paranoid rush, wand out, only to see Severus looming over him. “He’s dead,” Severus said, almost wonderingly. “Potter’s dead.”

Blinking, squinting, reassured that he felt only tired and not sick, Evan had cleared his throat and said, “tell me you didn’t.”

It was surprisingly heartening, after everything that had passed between them, to be subjected to that familiar, utterly withering look. “Much as the world might have thanked me for it,” Severus said, “it has never quite been possible, not for me.”

Unsaid, as always, was the fact that Severus, like Evan, had been very careful all along about not quite having that supposedly yearned-for chance at Potter. Or the fact that at least half of the hatred he nursed for Potter was due to the fact that Potter was so obviously, fiercely cherished by his wife.

“Do you know who…?”

“Wilkes,” had been the short, oddly pleased response. “Who expired anyway, for all his trouble, before Potter quit this sphere.”

Well. That explained the tone; Severus had never liked Wilkes, and would have liked him even less, had he survived the act of taking down Severus’ much-hated enemy. That Wilkes had died had also neatly headed off the problem of Severus’ undoubtedly lacklustre public reaction to his great deed. Without Wilkes around to make sneering little comments about how glad Severus must be to have Potter’s pretty little mudblood wife free for the taking, it would be easy enough for Severus now to lean on his hatred of Potter, and attribute any displeasure he felt or showed on the matter to the fact that he had not been the one to strike the final blow.

“Just three of them left, now,” Severus had murmured, from over by the sole window in the cramped little room Evan had commandeered the night previous, asleep on his feet from yet another worthless excursion through some nameless muggle town. “Black might prove an issue, yes, but as for the other two…”

“Severus,” Evan said, replacing his wand in its holster, “plan your revenge somewhere else, will you? I was trying to sleep.”

He’d even slept, once Severus had gone, insensible to everything, numb even to the thought of what Potter’s death must have done to Lily. He’d reasoned, at the time, as slumber claimed him, that Severus would have been more agitated if something had somehow happened to her. Evan had told himself that surely now, for her, the war would be over, that she would see sense and pack herself off to America or Australia or wherever else, taking only as much of the Potter wealth as she could easily lay hands on.

She was a practical sort, after all. She’d feel guilt, yes, guilt that she was evading the fight, but he’d been quite certain that she wouldn’t let any amount of guilt stop her from taking the proper, sensible steps, from making sure she was provided for.

Then, two mornings later, Evan had opened the Prophet, his eyes automatically searching out the small, tasteful obituary notice that he had been watching for, and on seeing it, felt suddenly, gut-churningly ill.

No, he’d told himself. She will leave. She must. But he had known, somehow, that she wouldn’t, just from looking at the picture she had chosen. It was Potter at his roguish best, his smug smile frozen forever by a muggle camera. It was a statement of defiance, subtle but unstinting, a clear sign of where she stood.

She should leave, Evan thought, and wished and wished that he dared risk sending her one more note, one more blunt direction. But that way lay even more sickness, even more gut-clenching warning, and so he folded the Prophet and set it aside, and tried to bury the thought of what could so easily happen to a stubbornly visible mudblood witch in these dark times.

He could not quite bring himself to attend the funeral, though he– as the Rosier heir, mind– received an invitation. Obviously, Potter (he could not afford to slip up any more, to slip and name her Evans or worse, Lily) had a death wish, had not even the sense exhibited by the smallest infant.

He wondered who it was that had talked her into holding a traditional funeral, one scrupulously worthy of the twenty-eight. Listening to the lively gossip after it, in which her figure (still slim), her hair (scandalously short), her attire (adequate) and her bearing (vengeful) were all discussed, Evan yearned again for some way, some manner of getting word to her. Some way of making her understand that now was the time to leave well enough alone.

“Guess who was there, pressing her hand,” Malfoy said, his tone rich with amusement. “No, really, guess.”

Black was named, then Pettigrew, then the Prewett twins. Then, Malfoy, satisfied that he had stumped them all, revealed that the mystery man was one Anthony Smith, who’d decamped as far away as Moscow to manufacture a reason for not answering the last and most significant of their lord’s famous letters.

“I almost feel sorry for him,” Malfoy said. “Imagine how he feels, being summoned back to take his chances with us, all so the Smiths can take another futile run at getting at the Potter vaults.”

Anthony Smith’s cousin, a cool-eyed Ravenclaw the year below Evan, had done her stiff best to throw herself in James Potter’s way, but had never seemed so much disappointed in her failure as any of her peers. If Evan remembered correctly, she had gone on to snag Mark McLaggen just this summer, and was reputed to rule him mercilessly.

“I don’t feel at all sorry for Smith,” grumbled Nott. “He cut in front of my Aunt Emma in the receiving line, and he didn’t seem the least concerned with anything but looking down Potter’s robes.”

“He’s tall,” Mulciber said, in Smith’s defence. “There’s no getting away from having to look down at her, when you’re that tall; just because he was spoiling your view–”

“Bite your tongue,” Nott said, coolly. “You’re the one who’d have been spoiling for a view, if you’d been there.” And then there was a brief, tense silence, everyone waiting to see if Mulciber was going to let that dig go, or if Nott was going to chip anything in and try to make it worse.

The fact that no one ever said anything about how Mulciber was, with low-born women, at least not directly to his face, only added to the hush.

“Such tension!” Malfoy said, in that bright, indulgent tone Evan had always envied him for. Evan could mimic the tone, but had never been able to elicit the same sort of response, the way people visibly relaxed even as they scoffed and rolled their eyes and grumbled under their breaths at the way Lucius always had to be mocking someone. “Do remember, Charles, that Potter is quite the heiress now, with access to more than enough galleons as to make even the most righteous, most faithful wizard waver toward her.”

“Probably,” Yaxley said, smirking, “dear old Charles is just jealous that he’s no longer unattached, and eligible to offer for Potter the way I did for Ms. Knight.” Ms. Knight, heir to a more than tidy sum by way of her mother being a Darrow, had equivocated for a month, playing off Yaxley against the Pritchards and the Wilkes. She and her whole family had then dropped off the map, their vaults at Gringotts mostly stripped, and Yaxley had gone on an unpleasantly long bender after being tortured for his failure.

He seemed happy enough to laugh at it all now, though, as did Charles, who sniffed at the general teasing, but contented himself with a polite laugh and a thin smile. He never spoke of how lucky he had been in his proper, parentally-approved love match, but it was always obvious when he was mentally lording it over everyone. Evan hadn’t had the heart to do anything but smile and nod mechanically at that wedding, watching Priscilla Whitby’s fixed, too-bright smile as she watched her pureblood cousin glow in Charles’ arms, and receive the same smug, glowing smile in return.

It won’t last, he’d wanted to tell them all. None of this will last. But he’d known that none of them might listen. He’d known that if they did listen, it would certainly only make things worse. So he smiled now, too, laughing a little, and only dared excuse himself from the post-funeral gossip when several others had already wandered off.

Some weeks later, one moment, Evan was falling wearily asleep the same way he always did, and in the next, he’d sat up, seized by white-hot feeling, by the terrifying certainty that something was different, something was about to be changed.

The feeling had never come on this strongly. Had never lingered in him, not this way, so he barred his door and warded his room again and again, and dug about in his robe pockets for the automatic quill he’d started carrying around last week for no reason he could name.

It wasn’t a very good quill. He was frowning down at the messy scrawl it had made to his careful mutter of ‘test, test’ when the world fell away from him. He fought, he fought the feeling, fought the emptiness with everything, every Occlumency technique he had against blacking out, against memory loss. He felt his lips move on nothing, on emptiness, and wished to scream, wished he could do anything to stop it.

I am a seer, then, he thought, surrounded by nothing, with nothing speaking through him. I didn’t imagine it all. For he had feared that too, sometimes, feared that all along he had simply been utterly, irretrievably mad.

But this was it, the final proof. Seers– true seers– prophesied, at least once in their lives. The Department of Mysteries would have a marker for Evan, now, some sigil to signify the power that had flowed through him. They would be looking for him, eventually, trying to discover the name behind that secret marker.

He came awake in a burst, trembling, still seated on his bed, with the auto-quill and the supporting book and the parchment ready on his lap. Panting, wiping at his eyes, his mouth, his forehead, Evan looked down, shifted the fallen, quiescent quill, and forced himself to read the messily scrawled sentence that lay beneath.

Then he blinked, and read the words again, and again, and covered his eyes and very nearly sobbed with shaky laughter. The lady rises, his prophecy read, through pain, through shame, in flame.

He shook with laughter. That his first prophecy, his first sign, his seal of condemnation, could be so useless! ‘The lady’, indeed! The ridiculous rhyming! He had been so afraid, had so feared that he would speak something to do with the Dark Lord, something that would force him to act or even to run, and yet–!

Shaking his head, Evan cut away the stained, blotted, written-on parchment from the rest of the sheet, then took out his dictation case and pencil. For storage, he scribbled, on the enclosing note, in case of need. Remind to revisit a year from today, E.R. Probably, it would lie dormant and unneeded in the file vault at Stratham, Nitchley & Associates until he perished of old age; he would not be handing anything prophecy-related to anyone at the Ministry until and unless he saw that doing so would not harm him.

Possibly, if Evan was very lucky, he would live to see the Dark Lord’s heir rise to prominence at her father’s side, and he could perhaps ingratiate himself by suggesting having heard, from a friend of a friend of a friend, that her recent ascension to power had been prophesied, and that only now did he, Evan Rosier, realize that it must be her, and not some other newly established, possibly foreign Dark Lady that the prophecy had been referring to.

Until then, Evans would fold up his useless prophecy and shut it in the dictation case and gladly forget that he had ever been afraid of its existence.

The events that followed that frightening, mortifying morning did nothing to lessen Evan’s resentment towards the contrary nature of his Sight. The Order, it seemed, were no longer on a passive footing; they worked, now, in the shadow of the Aurors, who had long since dropped any pretence of lawfully mandated neutrality. When Malfoy Manor went up in undoubtedly Order-sanctioned flame, the Aurors arrived some six hours after their help was requested, and their chief response to the still-raging blaze was to closely question if Lucius and Abraxas had somehow conspired to torch the grounds for the insurance.

“Unnatural,” had been the word, upon their paltry inspection of the raging blaze. “Most definitely, this fire is unnatural in origin.” And then they’d stood there, unconcerned, questioning the Malfoys over and over again, until the fire had gone out on its own.

Malfoy had been so incensed by the treatment that he had raged on and on of it before the Dark Lord, oblivious to the growing chill of their lord’s manner.

“Lucius,” the Dark Lord had finally said, so coldly that even Evan felt slightly sorry for the man, “your family survived, did they not?”

Malfoy, finally sensible to the danger, said hastily that yes, they all had. Then could not refrain from adding, bitterly, that that was why the Aurors had been so ridiculously suspicious of them. “Our elves,” he said, through gritted teeth, “babbled of being warned by some apparition, to me, to the Aurors, to even the peacocks they saved! It was clearly some ploy by those, those pathetic blood traitors of the Order of–”

His resentful tone choked off into a sudden scream. The Dark Lord had not bothered to vocalize the Crucio currently wracking Malfoy, which could either be taken as a mild failure of etiquette– the sort of thing one did with captives and prisoners– or a singular sign that their lord’s patience had run very, very short.

When Malfoy rose again, he was white-faced and bleeding from his bitten lip, and very respectfully silent.

“Your family survived,” Lord Voldemort said, tonelessly. “This is true, is it not?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Your son. Your wife, your father, and your cousins. All unharmed.”

Malfoy was starting, just a little, to tremble. “Yes, my lord.”

“But you lost, of course, in the fire, all your property,” the Dark Lord said, almost thoughtfully. “Everything in the house?”

Evan had not thought Malfoy could get any paler, could look any more sick, but he did, for one hushed, awful moment. Then he fell to his knees with an audible thump, trying to prostrate himself fully, only to be caught up by magic, a harsh, spectral glow that seized him and forced him back to his feet, biting into his robes and his flesh to do so.

Evan froze, just the same as a good half of those who were gathered in the circle, even though he was not at all expecting Lucius Malfoy’s untimely death to result from this unpleasant public tête-à-tête. Lucius, he thought, enviously, was just one of those cockroaches that could and would outlive nearly anything.

“My lord,” Malfoy was gasping now, through tears, “I beg– I beg your forbearance–”

“Was there time to retrieve anything?” Voldemort asked, softly, so softly that they should not all have been able to hear him. “Anything other than those of your blood?”

There was that in his tone, and in his steady gaze, that hinted he begrudged the fact that Malfoy had taken the time to Apparate his whole family out. That the object the Dark Lord had quite obviously given into the keeping of the Malfoys was judged to be worth more than any of their lives.

“The elves,” Malfoy choked out, “my lord, the elves would not– they would not let us remain. Prevented– return–”

“The elves,” the Dark Lord said, disgustedly, and the unearthly glow of his active, angry spell shivered into nothing. Malfoy fell to the ground with a jarring thump, coughing and twitching, sobbing incoherent apologies; Evan sympathized, reluctantly, for he knew exactly how it felt to lie at their lord’s feet, anticipating a painful, shameful death.

He didn’t sympathize too much, of course, knowing that Malfoy junior would walk away from this encounter, bleeding and terrified but otherwise unscathed.

Malfoy senior, on the other hand…

“Abraxas,” the Dark Lord said, lowly, his tone almost regretful. “Step forward, old friend.”

Abraxas Malfoy, hunched, coughing– “some smoke inhalation, my lord, nothing of importance”– and ever proud to be faithful, stepped forward from his place in the circle’s inner rim, from between Nott’s mother and Yaxley senior. Abraxas corroborated his son’s account without once looking at him, without once seeming to notice that Lucius was even there.

“It grieves me,” Lord Voldemort said, “to ask this price.” But of course he asked it, even though he sounded truly grieved, truly upset. Evan watched, hollowly, as Abraxas stooped, with careful manoeuvring and some help from his cane, to lower his head and lay a shaking hand on the right boot of his lord.

“We failed you,” was the last thing he said. “The price is just.” He offered his throat, and moved not an inch as it was cut. After the cut, of course, was another story.

“Go to your family, Lucius,” Lord Voldemort said, once the wet, choking gurgle had ceased, and the flow of blood had slowed. “Do not fail me again.”

As awful as it all was, as awful as the next few weeks were, Evan bore up under it, terrified, yes, but indifferent. You could only feel so much fear for so long a period; after a while, fear blended into fear and became the air around you, breathable, survivable.

Lucius Malfoy, it seemed, was the sort to channel fear into anger. He was righteous, disgustingly righteous, thereafter, unforgiving and unbeatable. Where others hung back, visibly thinking of retreat, or caution, he plunged in, bright-eyed and reckless. He even won, once, the sort of victory that would let him bow meekly beneath Voldemort’s approving gaze, though he no longer was of the disposition to come out of the meeting and lord his success over everyone.

Malfoy had been unable, so far, to divine precisely which Order member had played the part of the so-called apparition. The apparition, by the way, on whose behalf the Dark Lord had spent the lives of five Malfoy house elves, in trying to divine or scry some sort of clue that might lead to their identification. Uselessly, of course. None of the house elves could agree on who or what the apparition had been; and much as Lord Voldemort clawed through their memories, he found nothing to wipe away the small, terrifying frown that he had been wearing since the fire. Even the capture– at Malfoy’s direction, naturally– and private, personal interrogation of Caradoc Dearborn did nothing at all to lift the mood of their lord.

Then, on the eve of some perfectly routine raid, Evan checked the lie of his wand in his holster and looked over the motley crew that had been assigned to him, and saw, with sudden, terrifying clarity, that they were nearly all to die that day.

He did not react. He wished, for one long, useless moment, that he had not this power, this painful sight. Little as he loved any of these men, it rankled to see them blustering quietly about how the muggles would never know what had hit them, how so-and-so would probably trip over his dick and not even get a single kill again, ha ha, even as it was shown to Evan that both so-and-so and the friend that was loudly mocking him would soon be in their graves.

“You’re wanted, Rosier,” Avery called out behind him, in the serious tone he reserved for speaking of their lord, and so Evan had to turn around and follow him, to hurry up the stairs in his wake, to hasten through the narrow upper halls. Soon enough, they came to the small, neatly furnished upstairs drawing-room his lord generally used for private audiences, and then Avery was the one to hang back, to follow Evan in through the open door.

“Leave us, Avery,” was the first thing Voldemort said, with a small, curt gesture. “You too, I’m afraid, my dear.”

“Of course, my lord,” murmured Bellatrix Black– no, Lestrange, Evan kept forgetting. The wedding had been what, two months ago, and already she was angling higher, parading her svelte figure and fine dark eyes before their lord at every opportunity. She wasn’t the only witch that felt called to wield her wand in service of the Dark Lord, or even the only witch or wizard that sought to draw his eye, but she was the only one to do both and earn more than a token smile and an amused, distant sort of tolerance. “Manchester again?”

“Yes,” the Dark Lord said. “Don’t linger; you have but one target, tonight.”

“Not even if I come across something that might amuse you?” Lestrange said, her eyes modestly lowered, her teeth biting gently at the corner of her lower lip as she awaited the Dark Lord’s decision. When his only response was a long, pointed silence, she sighed. “Then, my lord, I will be swift as thought.”

Internally, Evan rolled his eyes; externally, he moved aside and inclined his head, politely, as Bellatrix Lestrange swished her way out of the room, humming under her breath. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the way the Dark Lord watched her exit– not greedily, not the open, leering way Evan might have expected of most older men when faced with Bellatrix’s open, suggestive manner. Instead, his lord’s stare was thoughtful and intense, and his usual frown got just that bit more marked.

Avery had already left. The door clicked shut in Bellatrix’s wake, and Evan went to his knees, afraid again, so much so that he was nearly sick with it.

“My lord,” he murmured, down toward the familiar paisley pattern of the carpet. “You sent for me, and I am here.”

Silence.

Then, into the choking silence, a small, weary sigh. “I have a special task for you, Evan.”

Silence, again, as Evan waited to hear the task, waited with his heart in his throat, and then, shakily, scrambled to say: “My lord, I am ever ready to–”

“Yes, I know.” Another sigh. “You will speak of it to no one.”

“Of course, my lord.”

Silence. Then: “you will locate, for me, the Potter woman.”

“Yes, my lord.” The right answer.

“You will determine, beyond all doubt, whether she is pregnant, or has recently been with child.”

“Yes, my lord.” Again, the right answer, though his heart squeezed unpleasantly within him, though he dreaded whatever his lord would ask for next.

“If she is with child,” the Dark Lord said, “or if she has already been delivered of a child, you will bring both her and the child to me.”

“Yes, my lord.” Merlin grant that she had no child, that she had either escaped or potioned away that ugly result of her capture at his hands.

“I will examine her, of course,” the Dark Lord continued, “but I care not what you do with her, afterwards.”

“Yes, my lord.” A full prostration, now, a slight tremor in his voice. “You are too generous.”

“Hm.” Another brief, terrifying silence. “Why her?”

“My lord?” Evan had not even let himself think that question, had not dared to. “I don’t–”

“I mean, what the devil draws you so, to her?”

Evan gulped. “It is lust, my lord,” he muttered, trying not to think of it, of her, of anything at all. “Shameful, simple lust.”

The short, mocking laugh of his lord made him cringe; the sudden creak that signalled that his lord was rising from the chair made Evan go utterly still. “Lust,” Lord Voldemort said, softly. “Simple, shameful lust, is it, when we both know lust moves you not at all?”

Evan lay there, seeing nothing, expecting curses. When, presently, none materialized, he licked his lips and said, “Madness, then, my lord.”

The Dark Lord sighed. “Really.”

“I could have,” Evan said, through a mouth dry with fear, “I could have forced it on her, at school. At any time.” Truth. “I told myself I could, if I just– if I just had the bottle.” Also true, shamefully, just the once. In fifth year, he had been taught the memory charm at home, just before Christmas. Evan had made careful, delicate use of the charm under his tutor’s approving eye, and had let himself imagine using it for something frivolous and unimportant and wrong. “I didn’t, of course.”

“Because,” Voldemort said, his tone low and mocking, “you were mad for her, I suppose.” The informal phrase seemed wildly out of place when said by that smooth, dangerous voice. “Madly in love, perhaps.”

“Never,” Evan said, flatly. “It is– I know it is an obsession, an unseemly one. I am not– I could never–”

“Oh, I am sure,” Voldemort said, drawing abruptly close, his finely worked boots coming to a stop before Evan’s desperate, lowered gaze, “I am quite positive, in fact, that you love her. Which,” and then he jerked Evan up, with the burning threads of his magic, “which is how I know you will bring her to me.”

“I will, my lord! I won’t fail you, I would never–”

“Ssh. Calm yourself.”

Evan clicked his mouth shut, trying not to shake. Submitting as much as he could, without any more stray thoughts.

“It is not precisely urgent,” the Dark Lord said. “However, I do expect this task to be your highest priority, henceforth.”

“But, my lord, the raid–”

“Avery will lead it,” was the unyielding answer. “Go now, Evan. Find her.”

Evan went, shaking. There was no one who dared stop him, or slow him to ask what on earth he had been about; his men, the men he had been supposed to lead, were already gone, possibly already dying, and there was nothing in his heart for them, nothing at all. All he felt in that moment was a vast, unceasing dread.

Point: he could feel nothing good about the thought of bringing Lily Potter here, to be examined by his lord.

Point: he could feel nothing but sick about the thought of somehow engineering another lucky escape for her, an escape, perhaps, to Australia, an overseas move he had not uncovered or suspected in time to stop.

Point: he felt just as sick at the idea of somehow faking her death, and returning empty-handed and cringing, or of faking both their deaths, and dragging her as far away from this cursed country as he possibly could.

Death, real death, was facing one of them, and he could see no way around it.

“So,” Evan whispered to himself, back behind the wards of his shitty little room in the west wing of Dunwoody Court, the last room he would likely ever have any kind of personal claim to, “this is it, then.”

It was not a freeing feeling, facing his certain death. It was a bitter silence that almost crushed him, almost made him throw up his hands and depart, directly, for the first of the addresses on the list he had long ago memorized, and buried in his mind, beneath a weight of trivial things. The starchy feel he liked his sheets to have. The way he felt just that bit more grounded, more steady, with a knife in hand. The sound of the evening bell at Hogwarts.

The way her hair–

No.

He would not think of her until the last, until it was actually safe.

Chapter Text

Facing It: How to Prepare for Your Untimely End

With death ahead of him, and death behind, Evan was very diligent. He stamped about and raged, with the rest of his brethren, at the awful loss that fell on them on the day of that one, trivial raid that he had been made to miss, the way the Aurors and the Order had both struck, and had both been distinctly merciless. He owled his banker and his lawyer openly, and paid a visit home to rage at his father the usual way, quietly, from behind a smile.

“I would have thought,” Father said, “that your little independent ventures could by now support anything our lord should ask of you.” He hadn’t thought that at all, of course; he knew it, and Evan knew it, but he made a show of it anyway, to twist the knife an extra inch.

“I am shamed,” Evan said, with a wide, uncaring smile. “I am ever so shamed to request your assistance, in this thing.” The way his father’s eyes narrowed at this obvious, blatant lie was the only pleasure to be had of making this request. “Come now, Father; don’t make me beg.”

And beg he would, if so prompted. He would beg floridly, uncaring of all dignity, his voice loud, his fervent supplications long; he’d done it once or twice, when Father had pushed him to it, had signalled a true fight. The little irritation Evan felt at bowing and scraping before his father in that fashion had nearly always been outweighed by the sheer pleasure of watching as his father struggled to conceal the the faint, unmistakable marks of his disgust.

The way a thin line formed between his eyebrows; the way he held his breath as Evan bowed far too low, as if breathing too much of the same air as his son did might infect him with the same strange, mad shamelessness. “Well, Father?” Evan said, shifting purposefully in his chair in preparation for rising to his feet; the most formal supplications necessarily began that way. “Shall I beg?”

A curt gesture stopped him halfway out of the chair. “I will write,” his father said, his tone tight with disgust, “to Gringotts.” It was always ‘Gringotts’, never ever Mr. Gurgthock, though Gurgthock’s sound advice had been at least a third of the reason for the Rosiers’ continued success in certain investments. “You may go.”

“Oh, Father,” Evan said, “you’ve never loved me, have you? And yet you always come through.” Lies, both of those merry statements. “I don’t deserve you at all.” Truth; a better father might have taught Evan to hope, and then where would he have been? Just as dead, most likely, only quicker, because he’d have been daft enough to think he might have anything he wanted. “Give Mother my love.”

“If you really wanted–”

Evan Apparated clear away, rejoicing in his father’s narrowed expression as he rose and turned on his heel. He felt not a moment’s sorrow at doing so; his parents had indeed loved him in their own stiff, cruel fashion, but he had given up his love for them on the night that he was marked. Arbitrary, considering that he’d known all year, for two years, really, that the guilt-laced feeling he had clung to for their sake was fading.

They have never truly seen me, he had planned to think, when the Dark Lord first touched him. But it had been, at that moment, the bitter, wholly meant truth.

It had not been until in that closet, days after, with her–

Stop it, he told himself. Just stop it.

Evan stalled for two more days, though everything was ready. He had nothing to worry about in that regard, of course; he had told Mr. Gurgthock to wait a week following his death before executing his instructions, and Mrs. Stratham, his lawyer, had been told to wait a month. He stalled anyway, Apparating here and there, walking invisibly through quiet villages, pretending, still, to check the list.

Then, on the third evening, his lord called him again, offering good, precise information, and a strict mandate to act on it the very next morning. And Evan dutifully said yes, and looked up at him in passing as he withdrew from the drawing room, and did not know what to think.

“Get out,” Lord Voldemort snapped at him, and so he hurried off, wondering what the new vision of strange, slowly drifting snow in his lord’s future signified. Wondering, uselessly, because it was that or run stark raving mad, from the future he had chosen.

When Evan lay down on his last night, he dreamt, as usual, of the quiet coffin. It felt restful, still, to do so, at least while he was buried in the dream; waking, of course, was a different thing entirely.

Usually, upon waking, chill, fatalistic terror would sink back into him until it felt as if he had always been so heavy, so weighted with what he knew was coming. However, on that last, bitter morning, Evan woke with the taste of blood in his mouth. Blood and a pure, all-consuming fear, for his left arm was burning, cramping and throbbing, aching so fiercely that he curled in on himself and sobbed, breathless, thinking that he had somehow been discovered, thinking that if he didn’t act, didn’t move, didn’t go right now, to Lily’s–

The pain stopped.

He lay there, panting harshly, waiting stupidly for it to begin again.

It didn’t.

Presently, he pulled his shaking arm from beneath the covers, not because– not hoping–

Knowing, almost before he looked, that the mark, his lord’s mark, would no longer be there.

Alright, that was an exaggeration. The faint outline… “Yes,” Evan muttered, tracing his thumb over his newly pale skin. “Only just visible.” Which meant, if Evan was remembering sigil-based bonding theory correctly, that the Dark Lord must have suffered greatly indeed, to come so close to death that the mark he had placed on Evan’s arm could almost be some pale shadow, some brief trick of the light. “Oh dear,” Evan said, below his breath. “Best to be upset.”

It was easy, when he went out of his room half-dressed, to show that particular emotion. It was contagious, really, when every hallway rang with panicked, shouting voices, and people clattered in and out of rooms, hurrying to unknown purpose while others followed them, haranguing, cursing at them to go faster.

The entrance hall was the centre of the vortex, the place toward which everyone seemed to be headed. Within it, Death Eaters shouted and cursed and sobbed, surging this way and that, some masked and some not, every man and woman either crying up a theory, or working to cut one down. Disagreements flowered freely, going from spat words and menacing glares to sudden, bloody violence. In the northern corner of the hall, a man and a woman brawled viciously, hacking at each other with near-lethal curses, paying only the least attention required to keep from cursing anyone other than each other.

A ways off from that, in the midst of a relatively calm pocket somewhat near the hallway that Evan had just come through, Bellatrix Lestrange paced back and forth, clutching her still-splinted arm, her eyes wide and furious behind her lopsided mask. “Someone must know where he went,” she said, desperately. “You– Rosier, you saw him, you were one of the last, last night–”

“Do you think I’d be here listening if I knew?” Evan snapped, waving his own mask for emphasis. “He told me nothing, just like he told you nothing.”

“He gave you a task,” Bellatrix said, her furious gaze still fixed on him. “He spoke of it to me, he told me–”

“That he had given me a task, yes,” Evan said. “Did he tell you precisely what he wished me to do?”

It was obvious that she had not been told. She shook there before him, supremely furious, her dark eyes glittering with unstinting rage. Her breaths hissed in and out of her, but brought few intelligible words with them. “You– you dare– to me, who was–”

“This is a waste of time,” Malfoy said, coldly. “Searching for him would be a great deal more useful.”

“Searching where?” Bellatrix spat, half in concert with Avery and Nott. “He could be anywhere, Lucius, simply anywhere–”

“Obviously,” Malfoy said, “we need to quarter up Britain and go thoroughly over any locations of interest. We can expand the search to France later in the day, if our efforts fail.”

And, just like that, the general cry for assigning everyone to separate locations had gone up. Evan, detached within, furious where everyone could see it, argued hotly to be assigned the area that included a good chunk of North Devon, that (though he did not mention it) only just included the town he now knew a certain widow lived in. He made good arguments, and anyway everyone else seemed keen to stick to the areas they knew best.

His final, acknowledged remit was his desired area, followed by a detour to the area around Rosier Lodge. Then, whatever he’d found, he was supposed to report back here, to compare notes.

There was something supremely intoxicating about swearing to do just that, and knowing, just knowing he wouldn’t. Knowing, as well, that at least three of his so-called comrades would never again set foot in this wretched house, not unless the Aurors dragged them in by their short hairs for some arcane Ministerial purpose. Knowing, by the general dour drift of his comrades’ futures, that Lord Voldemort’s unyielding cause was dead and done, even if the man himself still lived somewhere, and would allow himself to be found.

Which was something that Evan, knowing his lord as he did, rather doubted would be allowed. Not now, not while he was weak; he was not so loved that all his followers would rise against anyone that had the strength to bring him low. And his followers were not all so pure-hearted that their first instincts, on seeing their lord laid so low, would be to succour him rather than blaze a new, bright trail for themselves by becoming the author of his death.

Humming under his breath, Evan pushed through the disintegrating scrum in the entrance hall, his robes finally fastened, his mask fixed properly to his face, his hand tight about his wand, Bellatrix on his right, Lucius a step ahead of him. He very nearly smiled as they all stepped out into the grey dawn, and proceeded to the spot several meters from the entrance, where the anti-Apparition jinx and anti-Portkey wards deliberately didn’t reach.

“We will find him,” Bellatrix murmured, her tone low and steady. Assured, the way it hadn’t been a few moments ago, before her faith was so uselessly bolstered by her fellow Death Eaters’ vehement agreement to conduct the vital search. “We will make them pay, when we find him. When we find the ones that did this.”

Lucius nodded at her, at everyone, and was the first to Apparate away, never to return. Evan bit back a smile and followed his example, Apparating first to the poorly shielded, dilapidated wizards’ walk in Devon, and then, after a moment to make certain that he had neither been tracked nor followed, to his shadowed, tiny flat in Bristol.

He drifted, then. He checked his faded mark again and again and again, counting the minutes as they crawled by. He patted himself down, checking absently for the essentials: dictation case, pencil, potion cache, foldaway tent, e.t.c. Once a half hour had passed, he took one last, lingering look at the room around him, wondering when he would see it again. Then, shrugging, he Apparated back to Dunwoody, putting himself a nice way out from the main house, just in case.

No one was there; the hustling crush of distressed Death Eaters was entirely gone. Evan waited a few moments in watchful, slightly anxious silence, before proceeding rapidly to the side door.

No point in stopping by his old room. Everything of value was already on his person, and besides, it wouldn’t look good to the Aurors if he couldn’t truthfully say that he’d gone after the prisoners first. Which was, of course, the only reason he was here. Looking in on Lily could and would wait; bolstering his record of atonement could not.

Silencing his footsteps, Evan sped up just a touch, making his way through the empty rooms and corridors with his senses sharp. The mask, as always, was a nuisance, but not one he could safely discard until he was sure no one would impede him.

He took the narrowest staircase down to the cellars, half because it was closest to the bleak rooms the remaining living prisoners were kept in, and half because the narrow corridor that led out from the bottom of the staircase would be easy enough for him to block off or defend. When the corridor split, he took the right-hand branch, and then took out his wand, slowing a little as he approached the stout, double-barred door that sealed off the dungeons from the rest of the cellars.

“Master Rosier!” the house elf that had been guarding the door squeaked, straightening abruptly out of their listless-looking slump against the wall beside it. “Begging your pardon, but Horton is wondering if there is any news…?”

Horton, thank goodness it was Horton, the stout little elf Evan’s mother had been happy to give over into the Dark Lord’s service. Horton had never had any trouble following orders, you see, so long as you gave them to him in the simplest terms possible. And then remembered to summon him and give him more tasks, for otherwise he would happily stand about in place at the site of the last given errand, twiddling his thumbs and staring blankly into space.

Evan had been assigned Horton as his personal elf sometime in the middle of his fourth year at Hogwarts, and had, at the time, been very nearly tempted to be visibly grateful for it. An elf that would simply sit about in the kitchens and occasionally fetch a snack if asked, and that never seemed to remember to pack Evan’s trunk or carry on a message from home unless deliberately ordered? That had been the elf of his dreams.

“There is news, Horton dearest,” Evan said, unable to keep from breaking into the low, merry tone he generally used around elves when he was fully in his role. He’d always liked that Horton never seemed to stiffen when he spoke; he wasn’t sure that that wasn’t down to Horton simply having no real understanding of how dangerous Evan could be, but he still liked it, nevertheless. “The Dark Lord has fallen! Only imagine the chaos it will bring!”

“Master Rosier is…” Horton’s habitual good cheer was not so ironclad that it could bear up in the presence of Lord Voldemort; one of the few times the elf ever sounded even vaguely serious was when he whispered about his new master, about his orders or his mood. “Master Rosier is pleased that the Dark Lord is fallen?”

Evan grinned. “Ecstatic,” he said, nodding emphatically. “You don’t mind, do you, coming back into the family?”

Horton’s expression brightened, then fell. “Mistress was very glad to send Horton away,” he mumbled, as he turned and reached up for the heavily runed door handle, wincing as he pressed a trembling hand to it. “She will not like to take Horton back, sir.”

“Who said anything about her coming into it?” Evan said, stepping forward into the space Horton had left, his wand out, only half his mind on the words he was saying. “You’ll be my elf, naturally. Just like at Hogwarts.”

“If Master Rosier is sure,” was Horton’s dubious answer. The wards on the door shimmered and thinned; the door handle turned with a muted shriek, the door swinging in on noiseless hinges. “Master Rosier wishes to have a prisoner?”

“Master Rosier wishes to have all the prisoners,” Evan said, taking a careful step forward. The strange, biting pressure he had been feeling on the back of his neck as he approached the door intensified for a moment, then broke, as the weakened warding on the door frame shattered under his focus. “Come along and open doors for me, there’s a good chap.”

Doors Evan could open on his own, but not without terrifying the wits out of anyone who was shut behind said doors. Had Horton not been on duty, Evan would have surely had to compel the obedience of whichever elf had been keeping the door; that he simply need wave at Horton and demand, grandly, that he open every door in the narrow, miserable hallway sped the process of freeing the prisoners up remarkably.

Without Horton, or even some other shivering, wide-eyed, reluctantly obedient house elf, the process would have gone thus: the door, creaking open, followed by a near-soundless whimper or even a hoarse scream, followed by Evan being forced to drag out someone cowering at the very back of the cell. As it was, the cowering and screaming and carrying on only happened when each prisoner, or set of prisoners, came creeping and stumbling out into the hallway, and then laid eyes on Evan, or, more precisely, on Evan’s mask and robes.

Not all of them screamed or cowered or whimpered. Some froze. Some simply stood, or leaned, or crouched, and eyed him with a deep hatred. Some– some had to be moved, by him or Horton, and that wasn’t pleasant, but Evan managed it, all the same.

There was a moment, of course, when the hallway between the cells was choked with people, and the unopened doors were down to just two, and the awful stench coming from behind both of them, and the awful stillness he saw when he looked within with a quick spell, made it clear that there were really no doors left. In that moment, two of the standing, hate-filled sorts moved another inch toward the spot where Evan stood, having spotted each other and exchanged meaningful glances long before the hallway filled up.

“No further,” Evan said, smiling, his tone hard, and both of his potential attackers, a man and a woman, went still. Not permanently still, not cowed, precisely, just watchful. “Now, if you’ll let me introduce myself–”

“Why?” That was someone else, someone towards the back, man or woman, he couldn’t tell. “What the fuck could you possibly want?”

“The same thing you want,” Evan said, his wand still raised, his magic still tensed to react, his free hand lifting slowly, deliberately, to his face. This was perhaps a bit theatrical, but he knew in his bones that it was necessary. With one simple gesture, he unstuck the mask and lowered it from his face. “Freedom.”

Silence met that overdramatic proclamation. Silence, and a certain, narrow-eyed look of shared concentration, of staring at his exposed face, memorizing his features though they didn’t all know who they belonged to, or even if the memory might ever be useful. Death Eaters, as a rule, did not shed their masks before those they perceived to be unequal to them. They might not all remember his face, now, but they would certainly try to.

“Bullshit,” said the woman that had been eyeing him, glaring flatly at him, ever since the moment she’d staggered out of her cell, the only one mobile out of a group of four. “You’re all– you’re all fucking liars. Don’t any of you listen to him. It’s just him, and all of us–”

“Shut up,” someone else said. “I’ll, look, is there something…? If you’ll let me out, I’ll do–”

“Not him, me! I’ve been down here for weeks–”

“Quiet,” Evan said, busy shrinking his mask and slotting it into an inside pocket of his robes. “You’ll have one chance at flying the coop, and you’ll all have one chance, every single one of you. For those that can arm themselves– Horton, be a dear and fetch the blanks and spares, would you? If you wait a moment, there may even be a wand for some of you.”

The tumult raised by this short speech of his was considerable; people sagged, or straightened, or shivered, and they demanded, at varying volumes, who he was to say such a thing, who he was to do this, if it was some sort of sick little game, if he thought they’d all lost their fucking minds, why wouldn’t he just let them go…

None of them were stupid enough to try to press forward, even when Horton popped away to do as he had been told. Though of course some of them looked like they wished they dared to.

“Why?” The loudmouth from the very back was demanding. “Why do this? What could you possibly gain?”

Now, he could say it. “The Dark Lord has fallen.” Faced with sudden, shocked, disbelieving silence, Evan smiled, and made a deliberate production of rolling up his left robe sleeve, so they could see the faded mark.

“It’s a trick,” someone said, but no one looked like they wanted to believe them. But no one was rushing forward, either, to touch, to confirm the way Evan himself had needed to do to confirm, to understand that he had not dreamt it all up.

Horton returned with a loud, triumphant pop, brandishing three rather dusty wands. His expression was not completely triumphant, though, too wide of eye and quivering of lip. “Master Rosier,” he said, as he offered the wands, “Horton believes Master Mulciber is returned.”

The first name sent a shock through some of the crowd, increasing the distance they had left between him and them; the third drew forth an audible, panicky gasp, and made them all go still.

“Well,” Evan said, doing his best to sound unconcerned, “I suppose that means you all have to hurry. Who among you can still cast?”

Two shaky hands went up, both women, one old and shaking and looking very much convinced it would be the last thing she did. The second would-be attacker, a man that had been scowling at Evan since the beginning of this ill-advised endeavour, waited a moment, watching Evan float over two wands, before raising his own hand.

“Right,” Evan said, looking at the man closely. He didn’t feel precisely confident that, once armed and disillusioned, the idiot wouldn’t hang about and try to work up to cursing him, but Evan didn’t feel wrong, either, about giving the last wand into the man’s keeping. “I’ll cloak each of you with a spell as you pass,” he said. “My elf will lead you a good way off the property; if you all stick together, you’ll all make it out, and you’ll hopefully all get as far away from this wretched pit of a house as you can.”

“Master Rosier, where exactly is Horton to be leading these folk?” A surprising amount of forwardness, on the part of an elf that never, ever, ever volunteered for any task, though now wasn’t the time to hang about taking notice of it.

“Through the garden– the kitchen garden, I mean– and all the way to the back wall,” Evan said, immediately, though before he’d heard that Mulciber was back, he’d been dead set on having them all guided right out the side door he’d come in through, rather than on a route that’d take them through the vast kitchen that sprawled a few rooms over from these dungeons, level with the duelling hall and, of course, the torture rooms. “Protect them if you can, but do not stop for anything.”

“Yes, Master Rosier,” was the cheerful, perhaps too cheerful response, and then there was nothing for it but to begin the process. Evan ignored the flinches and the indrawn breaths as he cast again and again and again, focusing on durability more than finesse. Everyone that shuffled or limped past him got a Disillusionment Charm and a Notice-Me-Not layered below it, along with a very quick, very gentle Episkey for the few that looked like they wouldn’t survive a tramp through the lower levels of the house without it.

He wished he dared to ask Horton to request help from his fellow elves. However, if Horton could truly only hold to one or two main tasks at a time, it would be rank madness to distract him with some abstract second thing he should be thinking about doing on the way, other than shepherding the whole of this injured flock to the border of the property.

And something was telling Evan that he didn’t have time for any more instructions, that he barely had time for each charm, each spell he bestowed on each prisoner. Finally, he was down to the three shivering sorts that couldn’t, or wouldn’t get up from where they’d slumped by the hallway’s narrow back wall, or by the doorways of their former cells. For those three, it was three long, drawn-out, not-so-gentle Integros that made each of them scream and sob and writhe, as bones resettled, as things reknitted themselves– draining, very draining for him, and of course for them.

He wasn’t at all surprised to feel a wand jabbing in at the back of his neck, when he finally recovered his breath. “Drop it,” the man from earlier whispered, proving himself an idiot in truth, because it was no effort at all to reach backwards and drag him down by application of force, gravity and a neat little Jelly-Legs, and then wrench the wand from his shaking hand. “You bastard, you fucking bastard–”

“Oh, shut up,” Evan said, still a little breathless. “Surely you at least understand how an Integro works. Or at least, how it works when you’re not a fucking Healer, and there’s no time for pain potions, no time for anything but getting the fuck up and getting in with it.”

“Playing with your food, I see,” Mulciber called out, from the vicinity of the entrance to the cells, the place where Evan had been carefully not looking for the last few moments, even as he inwardly cursed his luck. “And people say I’m the one with the mudblood problem, the one who can’t help himself.” He was coming closer; his voice indicated that, though he’d obviously shrouded himself somehow, even down to the sound of his footsteps. “I’ll never understand why he liked you more than me.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Evan said, turning around, his expression testy, his wand lowering just a touch. Then he thought a fierce Lumos, closing his eyes and readying a shield as he did so, and the duel was on.

The slight advantage of surprise was evened out by the fact that Mulciber had no one in his corner, no one to protect, and Evan had three probable muggles and one idiot wizard who could only seem to cower back against the wall along with the muggles even though Evan had made certain to toss him back his wand. Mulciber took quite obvious relish in tossing curses in the prisoners’ direction in one breath, and then redirecting one to try and sneak it up on Evan, which never worked, but complicated his shielding efforts in a most annoying way.

Then, at the worst possible time: “Master Evan!” Horton squeaked, having just popped in between him and Mulciber, setting the air roiling with the strange energy any house elf could employ when they really, really wanted your attention. “Mistress is sending Egby to me to command you to call!”

Mulciber, laughing madly, delighted with the interruption, managed to clamp Evan’s arm– and, from Horton’s panicked squeal, Horton’s entire body– in a shadowy trap. Evan fell, screaming freely, and counted his former not-quite-comrade’s slow, deliberate steps– audible, now, because he’d left off masking his location in the heat of the fight. “Can’t believe you still have that stupid elf,” Mulciber said, stepping over Horton’s wheezing, gurgling body without giving it more than a brief glance. “Do you know, I really believe your mother will thank me for getting rid of it.”

Evan forced his eyes back open, and watched Mulciber get closer, and thought grimly, angrily, about what it might mean that he could not at present see an inevitable death creeping up upon his hated comrade in a nicely immediate fashion. He refused to lie there helpless, and hated that the thought had crossed his mind for even a moment, just on principle, just because trying and failing to murder Mulciber here and now might be that much more bitter than allowing him to do what he wished.

It was an effort. It hurt, pulling and pushing with magic, with anger, with will, against the teeth of the trap that was still digging into him, but it did work, and the sudden worry he saw in Mulciber’s eyes was worth the pain. Worth each laboured breath, as he rolled away and staggered up and went on casting, even though he could not see, could not predict a pleasant end to it, at least not for himself, not clearly.

“Stupefy,” someone said, shakily, and Evan was hard-pressed not to roll his eyes at the sheer futility of it, or would have been if that one, useless utterance didn’t draw Mulciber’s attention to the bright shield Evan had kept up between their duel and the huddling prisoners, leaving him open to mischief.

Easy enough, then, to press him back, forcing him to give ground, give way. Mulciber had perhaps only wanted some opportunistic torture, some smug gloating over this and that while he savoured Evan’s screams, but Evan wanted nothing more than to make a nice, neat corpse, so he could get these last few hapless prisoners out, and perhaps see that the only elf in his household that wasn’t afraid of him didn’t spend its last few moments bleeding on the floor of these miserable dungeons.

Mulciber, desperate, clawed back with a channelled spell that bit deep, one designed to sap some portion of your magical strength in trade for robbing your victim of all but their breath. Evan drew his knife and bulled forward even as he felt it land, and let momentum and sheer will carry him across the remaining distance between them.

Mulciber dodged, best as he could, the first wild stab, but not the second. Evan stabbed him again and again and again, tearing at him, deliberately brutal, the first few cuts the foundation strokes for the rune for diminished concentration, the rest for nothing but pure spite. Mulciber’s wand clattered to the floor; he bent double, retching and sobbing. Evan wheezed, and hit him with a weak Stupefy, thinking that that would be enough. That it would have to be enough, if he wanted to cast very much more, and have a prayer of Apparating away at the end of it all.

“Master,” Horton muttered, when Evan crawled over to him and waited a moment, marshalling his forces. “Master should take care.”

Evan, ignoring him, dropped the shield, dropped everything he had been holding up, and forced himself to look over at the prisoners. “Get out,” was all he said, and to his relief, they hastened to obey. They scrambled to their feet, shaking, one muggle leading the wizard and the other muggles, and they all picked their way past Mulciber’s bleeding, insensible body, and made straight for the open door that led out of the cells. “Did you manage, Horton, with the rest of them?”

The Integro Evan was thinking at the elf’s bruised, trembling body resisted for a moment, then sank in properly, making something deep in his chest untwist. Right, he found himself thinking, fuzzily. One less death, to my credit. Though really, he hadn’t been looking very closely at the elf’s future as he cast, not wanting to see anything, so perhaps that hasty, painful spell hadn’t even been needed.

“…to the garden,” Horton was saying. “They went to the wolf, and then Egby would not wait any longer, sir, and so I…”

“All right,” Evan said, then stunned him. Clearly, he’d been getting loopy with the pain. Could probably do with a potion or three, once Evan had sorted his own shaky, painful situation. Though the more he lingered here, slowly fishing out his potions satchel, picking through for the most useful of them, the more he felt that he really should be getting away.

Not to his mother’s either, to the warm, exquisitely furnished drawing room she maintained some few doors down and across the hall from Father’s study. Not if Evan had a thing to say about it.

Mulciber continued to bleed, but, regrettably, he looked very likely to survive it if left alone. Evan tossed back two healing potions while glaring at the other man’s prone body; he very much disliked the increasing sense he had that he now had a choice between properly extinguishing Mulciber’s worthless existence, and getting Horton set up somewhere nice and warm and free of any stupid orders until he was his charming, forgetful self again.

Still, he knew immediately what choice he would make, if he had to. What he’d already half decided on doing, from the moment he’d looked over at Mulciber.

“Never you mind, Liam,” Evan muttered, as he closed his potions satchel with shaking hands. “I’ll be back for you. Hopefully, it’ll be sometime soon.”

Quitting Dunwoody House a second time, while burdened with an insensible, surprisingly heavy house elf, and with the four remaining prisoners that had somehow gotten lost, was a trial like no other. They met no other Death Eaters, which was probably the only reason they all made it through safely; as they went, Evan blundered hazily through door after door, cursing under his breath at his abysmal luck, trying at each step to remember how he’d used to navigate through the back of the house.

“I do hope,” he finally wheezed, once they were out in the kitchen garden, beneath the incongruously bright autumn sun, “I do so hope you can manage yourselves from this point.”

“Thank you,” the leading muggle woman said, tearfully. “Thank you, we’ll be away now.” And then she was hobbling off as fast as she could, pausing only to snatch up a fallen rake and two small, elf-sized spades, the latter of which she handed on to the other two muggles dogging her footsteps.

The wizard, of course, stayed stubbornly by Evan, his wand hand shaking, his frightened gaze flicking rapidly between Evan and the absconding muggles. “I–”

“A debt for a debt,” Evan said slowly, pointedly. “Do you agree that blood has been repaid, in truthful effort, with a free and hopeful heart?”

“They… My house…” the wizard mumbled. “I don’t know where to go. They– they burned it all.”

Somehow, Evan repressed the strong urge to roll his eyes. “Surely you have family,” he said, pointedly. “Or friends, perhaps; friends that are yet among the living. I do. That’s where I’m going.”

There was something really obscenely satisfying about watching the wizard’s expression go from blank shock to sudden, terrified comprehension, his fretful gaze lowering to Evan’s bloodied, distinctive robes. “I’m sorry,” he said, stumbling back a step. “I, of course, I have them. Friends.”

“And the debt?”

“Oh, of course, the, ah, my saving you and, er. That’s, well, I should think we’re even…?”

Evan smiled, nodding calmly, and watched the wizard hurry off in the general direction of the muggles that had just disappeared off through a gap in the tall hedge that separated the kitchen garden from the front lawn. Then, his smile fading, he checked Horton’s pulse, satisfying himself that it was not much slower than it had been down in the dungeons.

“Home,” he muttered to himself. “Home, then hers.”

It was a disaster. Not in the way he would have thought, being told about a week ago that he would soon be fainting near the edge of Lily Potter’s herb garden, after having delivered Horton into the shocked care of the elves at Rosier Lodge, and then having cast, as the elves wrung their hands and begged him to at least leave a note for Mistress, an ill-advisedly strong barrier ward that surrounded the kitchens.

Which was something he could do, as acknowledged blood heir to the line, that his mother could do little to counter, should she wish to relieve her irritation with him by venting her ire on the elves. He’d never bothered to do it before, knowing it wouldn’t stop his father from going down amongst the elves in Mother’s stead. Which Father would have done, to reinforce for Evan the lesson that he had been so careful to drum into him from fourth year and onwards: that he was a Rosier, and his responsibilities as the heir to the line did not include wasting his precious blood or even more precious magic on shielding or serving anyone unimportant.

With Father guaranteed to be absent– no doubt already closeted with his lawyers– Evan had strained, forcing out the barrier ward in waves, anchoring it in hastily spilt blood, laughing madly as the magic left him, giddy with the thought that he was done with all of it, done with his vaunted responsibilities. The elves cowered. The ward dug into the walls of the kitchen, crawling in and over them, fizzing strangely. “If Mother asks,” he said, unsteadily, “tell her I went on an extremely important errand.”

He’d Apparated then and there, aiming for the lane nearest to the address he could finally allow to unfold in its entirety in his memory, the address he’d yearned to seek out the moment he’d known that he might be free. He’d walked up the lane, panting, stumbling. Feeling his way around the edge of the really quite alarming thicket of wards that had been raised about what was most likely Lily’s property.

He didn’t remember falling asleep near her garden. He remembered looking at it, at how small it was, how cosy, greens and vegetables mixed in amongst simple flowers. A small, stoutly built shed with a weathered roof. A bench, somewhere near the back windows of the house. It was lovely.

It was nothing so lovely as his coming slowly, blearily awake to the low, familiar murmur of her voice. “…just needs a bit of Strengthening Solution.” Her elf responded. Her elf did not want him here; her elf wanted him at Mungo’s, which he of course spoke up to protest at.

Things went downhill from there.

Evan couldn’t stop looking at her. There was something sharp about her– her crudely short hair, or perhaps the way she held herself. She burned him, looking down at his prone, exposed body, smiling in a way he was not at all familiar with.

He saw, for one brief, awful moment, the ghost of his death, at her hand, in fire, and so he reacted, the way he always did in these situations. Fighting. Fighting, and then, because it was her, begging, like the coward he was at heart, begging to be spared.

He did not– he could not believe everything that followed that shameful moment. It was all muddled, all strange. It was as if he were in Hogwarts again, dreaming, feverishly dreaming a girl who wanted him just the way he wanted her, a girl who would hit him and hold onto him and demand that he not hold anything back, that he give it all over to her, as if he had anything worth giving.

As she helped him upstairs, to her creaky, cramped little attic, she spoke to him of house elves and how they were slaves, actual slaves, and how upset she was that she had not known. In return, he told her that the Dark Lord had wanted him to deliver her up. Not the specifics, of course, but the general idea.

The way she’d looked at him, after that, that was what had finally woken him up, reminded him that this was not his dream. That Lily was not for him. That she had never been meant for him.

“Try to sleep,” she’d said, shakily, and escaped off down the ladder, her expression stricken, her only obvious thought on the situation she had just boxed herself into, offering guest-rights to a Death Eater on the same day that one of her so-called friends had given up another of her friends into the fallen Dark Lord’s grasping hands. “We’ll talk about turning you in in the morning, eh?”

As if she had no kind of sense, as if she wasn’t truly planning to walk down to her fireplace and place a hasty call to the Ministry, while Evan’s thoughts were still foggy from the combination of over-exertion and the potions she’d pushed on him. While Evan was still so very weak, weak and grateful and full of the stupid, relentless hope he could not seem to kill.

“You were going,” he reminded himself, lowly, after she had left, “to just look in on her. Not– not lie about letting her touch you, letting her tuck you in.”

He already knew he wasn’t going to leave, though, sensible as that might be. Not until the Aurors materialized to either kill him (unlikely) or drag him out onto the patchy front lawn while he made the worst kind of scene by shouting out his hopeless desire for Lily (hopefully just as unlikely).

With an effort, Evan forced himself to sit back up. To withdraw the true instruments of his salvation: pencil, parchment, dictation case, and the slightly squashed auto-quill. The broken auto-quill, he soon discovered, cursing under his breath as he blotted away the ink that had spilled all over his left hand.

He let himself have one more stupid moment, then, pushing up his sleeve, tracing his faded mark. Remembering the way she’d looked at it, the way Lily had kept on squinting at it, as she sat beside him in that cramped, strange little laboratory. As she helped him up the stairs. As if it were just some faded, unsightly, unimportant tattoo, something she couldn’t help looking at, idly.

Then it was back to matters, to everything that couldn’t wait, to hunting up a stubby pencil and turning out letter after letter of warning, of painful questions, careful, considered answers, and of sober instructions. His hand began to ache, but he ignored it. He wondered, idly, how many of his peers might be carrying on just this sort of hurried correspondence right at this very moment. Mostly, though, he thought about himself, about how to properly ensure he did not end up minced within the Ministry’s vengeful machinery.

He tried not to think of Lily at all, not beyond what was practical. Not beyond what he could realistically expect her to do.

When she came in again, nervous, her hair slightly damp, her hands in her robe pockets, Evan tried not to think of anything. Distance, he told himself, again and again. A prudent, careful, considered, proper distance.

He still ended up fucking her.

Raping her, at her whispered request. Confessing, confessing again and again, like the colossal fool he was. Letting her goad him into it, into sordid, filthy disclosure.

Evan thought, guiltily, that his lord had been right in this one thing, too right, cursedly right, that he had been in love with her. That he was in love with her, from mouth to cunt, her scarred feet, her glower, her low, angry, commanding voice, her soft round arse, her hair, her words, every one of them.

“Don’t say a fucking word,” she’d said, through gritted teeth, and it was– she was so wet. Evan hadn’t been able, still didn’t feel able to understand the fact that she could be wet for him, after everything.

Not that it had stopped him. He fucked her just the way she wanted, then just the way he wanted, and then he didn’t even think as he approached orgasm, of anything, anything sensible, other than, than mine, mine, my whore, my whore, my sweet little whore…

Afterwards, he waited until she’d fallen asleep, waited just so he could curl himself around her. Still very much in denial of the fact that she was not his, that there was no sane way for her to be his anything, unless…

Unless she was daft enough to marry him. Which she wasn’t, even if she were the sort of girl, of woman, now, that’d ever think of it. It hadn’t occurred to her, back when they were still in school, that she could have Potter for the asking. Now, titled and rich, and with the Ministry newly ascendant, Lily needed no one’s name or strength or family history to protect her. She did not need to remarry.

She certainly did not need to marry him. So Evan would let himself think of it, imagine it, like the idiot he was, but he would not ask. He would ask for something sensible; would put before her the careful, respectfully phrased request that she consider having her lawyers draft her a supporting statement in his favour, something that could add nicely to his case with the Ministry. That would be a good idea.

Naturally, that wasn’t what he did.

And there wasn’t anyone to blame, not really. Not anyone but Evan himself. He went on expecting that Lily would see reason and pull away from him, abandon him in some selfish, sensible manner, and then, when she didn’t, he floundered mentally, staring at her, making her defensive, uncomfortable.

Which wasn’t at all smart to do to a woman who’d just stunned a drunken, raving Sirius Black on your behalf, Sirius Black that, from the cut of his dark robes, was an Auror-in-training, and one that was apparently accustomed to turning up to her house and being allowed into her private rooms. Someone she really, really shouldn’t have stunned on Evan’s behalf, in other words, and then sent her house elf off to fetch something that would most assuredly keep him stunned, just on Evan’s say-so.

So, Evan thought, half-seriously, half-mocking himself for even considering it, when the attic trapdoor swung shut behind her and her elf and the limp, thoroughly potioned body of Black, so I’ll ask her to marry me, and she’ll stare at me, or laugh it off, and then I’ll ask for a letter of support.

But when it came time to do it, he found that he could not be anything but stupidly, obviously serious about asking for her hand in marriage. Or, as he was careful to phrase it, the right to offer for her hand in marriage, useless as it would currently be for her to tie herself to him.

Lily cried. Then, as she let him hold her, she made, or tried to make, a stupendously morbid joke about how he should be thinking twice about marrying her, rather than the other way around. Then, as Evan tried to soothe her, all while internally cursing himself for having ever brought up marriage at all, she told him, point blank, in that firm, deadly serious tone of hers, that their marriage wouldn’t work.

Somehow, it felt like the opposite of a rejection. He hadn’t expected her to think about how whether it could work; he certainly hadn’t been expecting her to clearly be nursing a quiet little grudge over the fact that marriage had never been mentioned before, in their earlier days. Evan had hastened to explain himself, explain the other harsh realities that had kept him from trying for her, but even as he spoke, he felt that he must be dreaming. For he could see, suddenly, the kind of path they might walk together, once the Ministry was satisfied that he had paid his debt to society in coin and blood.

Lily mightn’t acknowledge him in public, after he got out of Azkaban, not more than was strictly polite. But she would claim him in private. She might let him linger by her side in her lovely little house, and have him see to– to improving her already stalwart wards? To expanding her garden? He’d see to something, at any rate, as well as seeing to her every night.

And, if his luck held, if he played this glorious, marvellous hand absolutely perfectly, and he made the right, careful moves in public, she might just consider marrying him, in time. It would be, even if he didn’t rush things, the most magnificent scandal; those few of his former comrades that he did not utterly betray in his dealings with the Ministry would consider him a blood traitor and a fool, and they would be right.

Her fool, Evan thought, and knelt again before her, so glad, and so eager for her that it hurt.

So, when her elf came cringing into the attic, saying that the Aurors were out in the lane, Evan did not panic, did not clutch at his hope like an idiot, openly. He sealed his wild emotion all away, and listened to his love’s low, slightly pleadingly phrased instructions. And when she called for him, when she had her trembling elf come back in to get him, he went out to her, his head held high, his heart full, ready to obey.

Chapter Text

Further Practicalities

Somehow, in all of that emotion, the not-quite-prophecy Evan had allowed himself to so rashly say right to Black’s uncomprehending face went utterly forgotten, at least until when, some long, boring hours later, Black stormed into his narrow, private cell in the DMLE’s portion of the Ministry’s extensive dungeons.

They weren’t dungeons per se, not to look at, at least. But the drab cream-and-grey walls and floors and the small, pretty landscapes that faced the entrance of each tiny room that opened off of the wide, twisting corridor that led down the centre did nothing to detract from the sense that this was a place where the Ministry’s undesirables were left to stew, to worry about their coming fate.

Evan, who knew perfectly well that he would not end his life here, was quite disposed to enjoy even these spartan conditions while they lasted. Or, at least, he had been enjoying them until Black’s bruised, glaring face loomed through the narrow panel in his cell door, reminding him of a fate that had not come out at all the way he had expected.

He had spoken to Black, had made himself illuminate the ghastly shape of what he saw in Black’s future, entirely for Lily’s sake. He’d been unsure, when he heard Black’s awful drunken singing, whether his presence there meant he was any kind of favourite of Lily’s, only to have it confirmed when her elf practically shouted to direct him upstairs– not at all the sort of thing one’s elf did with distant friends.

So, despite the punches Black had managed to land, despite the murderous gaze the man had turned first on Evan (unsurprising) and then on Lily (vexing in the extreme), Evan had warned him. Had untangled the awful truth he could almost feel Black desperately trying to ignore, and laid it all out before him plainly, so that if he did meet the ugly, sudden end Evan could see ahead of him, Lily might at least allow that he had been warned against it. That Evan had done nearly everything in his power to prevent the man’s death, even though he knew his warning wouldn’t be heeded.

‘Nearly’, because Evan had been quite unable to keep himself from being rather pointed as he spoke to Black. He’d never much liked Black; watching Lily hurry to go down to him, and then hearing his delighted laughter when she met him, had made Evan rather stupidly cross, even though he knew that his jealousy had no place in such a precarious moment. So Evan had given his warning and sat back, meanly satisfied by Black’s incoherent shouting, and had thus been watching when Lily’s stunning spell washed over him, and his awful future suddenly winked out, leaving nothing but the usual comforting haze of a far-off, peaceful end.

Now, with Black’s gaze directed down and to the right, occupied in his struggle with the fussy combination of clockwork and spells that locked Evan’s cell door, Evan could not help but peer at him again, scrying his future instinctively. He’d worried, for one bleak moment, while being marched across Lily’s front lawn, that the change in Black’s future would not hold. Then Evan, forced to turn around, had caught one last glimpse of him and relaxed, having seen nothing to worry about.

Finally, the cell door swung open, presenting Evan with a full view of Black’s tall frame, as well as his still-innocuous future. “Come on,” he said, motioning at Evan with a bandaged hand. “Get your worthless arse up.” His words were slurred, almost mumbled, likely due to the enormous, yellowing bruise splashed across the left half of his face. “Hands out in front.”

Evan straightened, holding his hands out at what he thought was the right distance. It still hurt when the chains boiled out of the pretty, abstract pattern on the cell walls, coiling into place around his hands and feet, forcing him to widen his stance even as his hands were pulled together in front of him. Worse, there was something alarming about the way Black watched him as it happened; he didn’t smile, or just look meanly pleased, the way the other two Aurors had as they deposited him in his cell. Black was nearly expressionless as he watched, and somehow that was worse.

“So,” he said. “You’ve done well for yourself today, haven’t you?” He took a few, careful steps backward, motioning Evan forward with a negligent gesture. “You’ve said whatever’s necessary, and, since it’s worked, you’ll probably keep doing it. Stand directly by the portrait.” The cell door Evan had just followed Black out of shut with a jarring thump. “Turn around and start walking.”

“May I ask–”

“Didn’t say you could talk,” was the low, almost pleasant response, so Evan subsided. “Now, where was I? You’ll say anything, you’ll give up anyone, and your lawyers, I hear, have already been filing on your behalf. Though I do find it funny you’re not one of those claiming the Imperius made you do it. Why’s that?”

By now, they had turned the corner, and were passing by a small niche where a blank-faced older woman in Auror robes sat guard, an ornate, heavy tome spread open on the table in front of her. “Hurry it up, Black,” she said without looking up. “Malfoy’s walker’s waiting on your fat arses, so shift it.”

In response to that, Black slowed deliberately, which caused the woman to glance up at him, her expression caught between approval and exasperation. “Wouldn’t be fair,” Black said, clearly to her, “if Malfoy deprived Rosier here of his chance of a nice, long, relaxing walk.”

The woman smiled and returned her attention back to the tome, turning over a heavy gilt-edged leaf. Though Black had slowed, they soon came to the next sharp corner in the corridor and, in a few more steps, had left her behind them. “I asked you a fucking question, Rosier,” Black said, as if he hadn’t just told Evan moments ago that he wasn’t allowed to speak. “Don’t make me ask again.”

“The Imperius curse doesn’t work on me,” Evan said, his tone calm but carefully deferential. “It’s a Rosier tradition, that the heir is trained to withstand it; Father made sure of that, when he was training me in–”

He’d thought he’d have more warning when Black snapped. He didn’t. One moment, he was speaking, walking carefully in step with Black’s slow, slightly uneven stride, and then he was convulsing, writhing on the floor, his nerves alight with the pure, stinging fire of what must be an Acerbe Stimuli.

“Don’t give me that,” Black said, his voice low, his voice the only thing Evan could seem to hear. “You’re not the only one whose father made sure; all of our fucking fathers make sure. That’s what our position means, remember? The stars of this great isle, the sacred twenty-eight.”

The spell faded, admitting other sounds again. Black’s heavy, uneven footsteps. The rustle of Black’s robes as he came closer. The harsh, panting breaths of someone– no, that was just Evan, he could feel, with a sudden strange jolt, the limbs and parts that the spell had made him forget, in that wash of pain. He could feel himself panting. “I’m resistant,” he managed to say, through trembling lips. “Even… the Dark Lord… difficult, but I could…”

“You and everyone else,” was the inexorable answer. “Do you know, that when I was sent to fetch you, Lucius Malfoy was just insisting that his father, that Abraxas Malfoy didn’t die of the pox that should have got him at least a fucking year ago, oh no, he died at the hands of your lord. Which means that the most recent Imperius Lucius suffered under was cast by Lord Voldemort himself, rather than his dying invalid of a father.”

“Load of shit,” Evan muttered, hoping that wouldn’t incite any new spells, and he was right, blessedly right. Black, instead of hexing him for speaking out of turn, just gave him a long, hard look and straightened up, taking a step back. “I’m a Rosier,” Evan added. “We don’t deal in such weak excuses.”

“Really,” Black said, tapping his wand on his thigh. “What is your excuse, then? You bore the Mark, no, you only ever considered taking the Dark Mark, because of your hopeless crush on a certain muggleborn witch, and your fear of what might happen to her…?”

“I feared for my life,” Evan said, loudly, not liking where this could be going. “It was death in exile, or the mark, so of course I took it. I didn’t like what I had to do, so from time to time, when I could, when it was safe, when it wouldn’t get me fucking killed, I’d let someone slip away.” That he wanted Lily nearly more than he wanted air, and that at any time, her involvement in his bleak, grimly chosen path might have spelled his bitter, equally grimly chosen end, none of that was any of Black’s business. “That’s it,” Evan added, into the expectant silence. “That’s all of it.

“You’re joking.”

“No, I am not fucking joking! I kept a list, my lawyers think it’s just a section of my kill list, but it’s not. Every time I updated it, I sent along a blood sample. A standard Scruto should show that several of those people are still alive. A Scruto, by the way, which my lawyers will have performed, and will allow the DMLE to replicate whensoever they wish.”

Black was staring down at him, his expression hard to read, partly because of the bruise, and partly because his normally expressive features had once again settled into an odd, waiting stillness. “How did you choose who to let go?” he asked, his tone low and curious. “Why choose her? Lily, I mean.” And then, when Evan stared up at him, he rolled his eyes and made a sharp, dismissive gesture. “Oh, come off it, it’s obvious she was one of those you let slip. We– I always thought it was awfully suspicious how easily we found her at your house.”

Did you, now, Evan couldn’t help but think. He hadn’t forgot the Black’s little bit of mockery about his supposedly hopeless crush on Lily; he’d wager, at this point, that Black believed there had been such a crush, or something enough like it that Evan would have wanted to spare her. Why ask why I let her go, then, if he already thinks he knows? “You were right,” Evan said, his tone deliberately careful. The way Black’s gaze was boring into him did not at all match his almost offhand tone; it was profoundly worrying. “I did let her go.”

“Because the two of you used to be friends?” Black said, the pointed emphasis he laid on the word ‘friends’ giving Evan an ugly shock. Somehow, it had not at all occurred to him that Lily might have said anything to Black about that. “More than friends, according to her, but, well. She’s only a muggleborn; she wouldn’t have understood that, by our way of looking at things, she was barely a friend at all.”

With anyone else, anyone Evan didn’t fear to lay into in order to defend himself, he would have made whatever flavour of brief, obliging answer he thought they wished to hear, while sketching a precautionary rune into the floor with his heel. With Black, however, Black that Lily had so very casually floated down to tuck into her own bed, Evan’s hands were tied.

“Do you really care to know that, friend or not, I felt I owed it to her to let her go?” he said, as calmly as he knew how. When he saw the way Black’s expression barely changed in response to that, he tensed inside, preparing to be cursed again. But he went on speaking anyway, because it was the only avenue of attack that was left to him. “For goodness’ sake, we both already know you’ve an opinion on why I did it; why’d you even ask?”

Then, with the full weight of Black’s glittering, rage-filled gaze fixed on him, Evan remembered, with a sudden shock, the way Black had asked his question. Why choose her, he had said, and Evan had thought he meant ‘why did you choose her’. It came to him, too, that the last time Black had looked at him like this, he had just been speaking of Caradoc Dearborn’s ugly end, and the even uglier complicity Pettigrew must have borne in it.

“Oh,” Evan said, just as Black began to raise his wand, “you wanted to know ‘why not him’.” And then, when Black froze, wand half-raised, his face blank with shock, he dared to add: “Am I wrong?”

For that last, deliberately flippant question, Evan fully expected to be cursed again. It seemed as much of a surprise to Black as it was to Evan when no curse was forthcoming, and when, indeed, Black simply lowered his wand. “No,” was all he said, in a low, rough tone. “You’re not wrong.”

An awkward silence fell. By now, Black was no longer looking down at Evan, or indeed at anything at all; he stood there, his hands in tight, painful-looking fists, his frame rigid, his expression twisted with something that looked like both anger and grief. For once in a very long while, Evan found himself utterly without words, without even a hint of an idea of the correct thing to say.

It didn’t help that he was inescapably aware that he was trapped in a hallway in the Ministry that had goodness knew what wards clinging to the walls, and that he had better not say anything that might make anyone overhearing them even think of his having the Sight. And then there was the fact that Black might not be asking– that Black likely was not asking after Dearborn’s fate in the way one did with a Seer. Possibly, he’d simply thought Evan’s dramatic earlier warning had been made off the back of some extra knowledge he had of Pettigrew’s temperament. “The Dark Lord took charge of Dearborn personally,” Evan finally managed to say. “None of us were permitted to watch his questioning, or his death.”

That, from the way Black’s expression stilled, was probably explanation enough. Yet Evan could not keep from adding, in a carefully neutral tone: “Potter, on the other hand, was not so important that her questioning could not be left to me.” A slight simplification; the order had been to question and (of course) amuse himself with her, but had also been to keep her in relatively good health. Had Evan not loved her, or simply just not known her, he might even have judged it prudent to wait to engineer her ‘death’ in the general cells at Dunwoody some few weeks later, rather than risk more certain punishment for allowing her to escape. “Unimportant as she was, my lord was still quite vexed that I was so very careless with my security.”

That drew Black’s gaze back to him, and better, purged his expression of most of that disconcertingly strong mix of anger and grief. So Evan, moving slowly, held up his chained hands, turning and spreading them so the scars on his palms were visible. “For my mistake, he broke my hands. Do you see?”

“I see that he healed you, afterwards,” Black said, contemptuously, his gaze cataloguing and dismissing that faded evidence of injury with the callousness of someone that had seen worse. “Looks like he did a neat job of it, too.” But he was now only glaring at Evan the way he’d more or less been doing since the moment he’d spotted him in Lily’s attic; there was no longer any special, terrifying stillness in his gaze, or any unwonted emotion. “On your feet.”

The chains clanked and dragged and wore at Evan’s wrists and ankles, making the whole task of standing up without any help excruciatingly slow, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. Black didn’t suddenly have a change of heart, didn’t give in to baser urges and try to cut him down then and there, perhaps after a false, rallying shout, to make sure his fellow Aurors had an excuse to support his murdering a DMLE prisoner.

No, he simply watched Evan struggle to stand, his scornful gaze intense, his wand arm relaxed. “On you go,” he said, once Evan was on his feet, and so on Evan went, going on and on around the corridor’s corners and twists, until they came to another alcove with an Auror leafing boredly through another heavy tome. “Taking Rosier upstairs for initial hearing, Max. Not too slow, was I?”

“Not slow enough, by my reckoning,” was the muttered answer. “Go on through, you’re pre-cleared.”

“Aye,” Black said, dryly, “and so is he.” The other Auror snickered unpleasantly, even as he picked up and held out a pinned scroll and a quill. Black wrote smoothly, despite the poor condition of the latter: ‘The Hon Evan Rosier, conveyed by Auror Black during 4th shift’. “See you later, Max. Pub tonight?”

“’Course,” was the murmured answer, and then they were past the alcove, moving down a curving, shadowed corridor that Evan vaguely remembered from his original trip down here. Spell-shrouded, of course; one moment, all he could make out was an endless, shadowed stretch of corridor both ahead and behind, and then in the next they were approaching the noisy workings of the lift that ferried prisoners between the dungeons and the DMLE’s sprawling offices.

There was not much in the way of activity in the office Evan was marched through, less, perhaps, than there had been when he was first led in. Black steered him past empty, cluttered desks and the occasional bleary-eyed DMLE denizen, the Aurors no less exhausted or prone to seizing catnaps than the Hit Wizards.

For one long, wild moment, Evan fought the urge to volunteer that he himself had once had vague dreams of someday becoming an Auror, half due to how very smart their robes had seemed to him that one winter night they’d had reason to call on his father some years ago, and half due to the fact that Father had laughed and smiled and made anxious jokes, the kind he only made around those business acquaintances that truly worried him.

With everyone else, Father had always been Lord Rosier, condescending to be affable or cool or freezing, but always maintaining a sort of pointed, deliberate reserve. With the Aurors, though, Father’s behaviour had allowed that there was no distance between his status and theirs at all, not even the slightest thought of one. Evan, at ten years of age, had spied him at it, and come away with an insubstantial hope that one day, he might be just like one of the tall, spare, grim-looking wizards standing over his seated father.

Now, well, now, there was most definitely no hope of that happening. Prisoners who were led through the Auror offices in chains did not somehow win free of Azkaban only to be offered a job, any job in the DMLE. The few Aurors that were awake and alert enough to eye Evan in passing might condescend, if pressed, to allowing that they trusted he would peach on several of his former comrades in arms, but none of them would ever trust him.

Which was all, by the way, exactly within Evan’s expectations. Which was why, as he was finally shoved into a small, narrow room bare of anything but a sturdy metal desk, a frowning woman, and a pair of darkly glowering Aurors, he did his best to appear not to notice the tense, clipped fashion in which he was read his rights under the terms of the Accord.

The seated woman, a plump, weary-looking sort, began laying out the blank parchment and Ministry-standard dictation quills with the practised ease of one long-used to dealing efficiently with them; that and the fact that she didn’t bother to look at him as she demanded that he state his name for the record immediately pegged her as an Adjudicator, one of those hapless souls charged with the unenviable task of seeing that the Ministry dealt fairly with prisoners.

Her crisp dark robes and brief, cold glare had made him want to lump her in with the Aurors that were still now glowering at him; most likely, the adjudicator had only looked on Evan with loathing because his lawyers’ strident request for her assistance had meant her being dragged up out of bed at an unseemly hour. But of course, if that was truly the only reason she took him in violent dislike, it was hardly likely to be the only reason once she was done with his interview.

“You are aware,” she said, “of the several and severe charges laid against you?”

“Yes.”

“And will you answer questions regarding those charges, and enter your pleas to those charges at this time?”

“No, I’m afraid I’d rather wait for my lawyers to join us.” Ah, there it was, the slight deepening of her frown, the new, ironic set to her expression. No surprise, she was clearly thinking, when it had been, and still was a surprise to him that he was here at all, alive to be here, despite the astoundingly poor odds he would have assigned to the chances of any of this happening not two days ago.

The Dark Lord’s fault, that, Evan thought wryly, struggling to put aside his useless, unaccountable discomfort. I doubt I’m the only one that would have done things differently if I’d known he’d succumb to an ill-wish from a dying Auror. Which was what it had had to be, to result in his former Lord dropping dead when he tried to cast something on the squalling offspring of said dead Auror– details Evan had not known, and that had been all but forced on him by the Aurors that processed him earlier on.

Dreadfully unlucky for him, one of them had said, with her eye on Evan, her tone just slightly too loud, perhaps due to the fact that their callous speculation on the exact order of events had yet to draw a reaction from him. Fitting, though, that in the end, he died like any other common criminal: at an Auror’s feet.

Evan, no fool then, had kept his gaze lowered and his mouth shut, almost in the same way that he was doing now, pretending to be unmoved by the impatient stares and outright glares of all the people around him. Some moments later, just when he had got to counting nervous sheep in his head and biting the inside of his cheek to keep himself quiet, the door creaked open behind him, admitting the pleasantly familiar bulk of Mrs. Stratham, followed by her twitchy assistant–Highly? Henley? He could never remember.

“Mr. Rosier,” Mrs. Stratham said, pinning him with a pointed, quelling look. “Mrs. Englewood, good morning. I trust you are prepared to receive and authenticate our evidence?”

“If such evidence exists,” the adjudicator said, politely, her expression strongly suggesting that she did not believe it did. “Ms. Hammond here is qualified to perform an initial analysis, if that is acceptable to you…?”

“It is,” Stratham said, firmly. “Now, as to the charge of disturbing the peace on July twenty-third of nineteen seventy-nine…”

Evan forced himself to relax, to let his shoulders droop a little out of the tight, tense line they had assumed from the moment he’d seen Black walk into his cell. He had not prepared for that, and it had justly worried him, but this? This, he had hoped for, and planned for, though not in the exhaustive detail he had planned for his impending and expected death.

He could handle this. He would handle it; he was, by all that was good in the world, planning to handle Azkaban, for perhaps as much as a very long, and very miserable year. What really worried him was what would come afterwards, after the trial and the sentencing and the imprisonment behind grey, wavering cell walls. He had briefly dreamed of them while he lay curled in around Lily, wishing that there would only ever be that moment, that strange, bright moment, when she closed her eyes and trusted her drowsing form to him.

“…regarding the claimed life debts,” Ms. Englewood was saying, “the Ministry respectfully requests–”

“Life debt,” Mrs. Stratham interjected. “My client claims only one debt.” Her professionalism was such that she managed to make it sound as if she had been the one to very firmly advise him on that course of action, rather than doing just the opposite. “My client is aware, of course, of the relevant rules regarding the public negation of the second claim.”

“Ah,” was the immediate response, followed by a brief, contemptuous look in Evan’s direction. “I don’t suppose you’ve an explanation of why multiple debts were referenced in the arrest report…?”

“It was a charged situation,” Mrs. Stratham said, blandly. “An unfortunate misunderstanding, I assume, of things said in the heat of the moment.”

Ms. Englewood narrowed her eyes at Evan, then snorted, looking back down at the messily annotated scroll before her. “Well,” she said, as she drew a line through a word, and hastily scribbled in another one, “as to the claimed debt…”

Inwardly, Evan sighed, wishing once again that he could know a lot more for certain than his useless ability would tell him. He’d felt he had to warn Black, and had done it. He’d known the general approach to take with the Ministry once he’d known that the Dark Lord was dead, and here he was, lawyers in tow, doing his general best to adhere to those careful plans, and what he could feel as a result was an increasing certainty that he wouldn’t live the rest of his life shut up in Azkaban.

Which should have been enough, but was not. He wanted to know what shape his life would take, after the Ministry was done with him. He wanted to know, with certainty, whose dreary parties he would be attending. Whose balls and entertainments would pointedly exclude him. Who he would deal with, on a day to day basis, and what on earth he would be trying to accomplish during those days, besides dull, dry business reckonings, the moments of reading delivered reports and making petty decisions about whether or not to extend a contract or discard it.

He knew he would see Lily again, in some fashion or another. In the street, on Diagon, if nowhere else. But he did not know if, when they passed each other, she would look at him, or look deliberately away. Or if, if she chose to look at him, there would be anything involved other than a very prudent sort of wariness, born of the equally prudent worry that he might choose to take her continued rejection ungraciously.

Don’t be hasty, old chap, Evan told himself. You know how it is; you find these things out as you go, one way, the way he preferred, well ahead of time, or another, which was how things tended to shake out, when they involved her. The future does usually take care of itself, you know.

Hopefully, in this case, it actually would. With his lord no longer ascendant, it was certain that things would quiet down in general, if mostly for those that had used to count themselves among Voldemort’s chosen style of victim.

Well, almost certain. In these things, the devil was very much always in the details.

Azkaban hurt.

Not the walls, not the bare fact of Evan’s imprisonment, Evan’s thoroughly curtailed freedom. Not even the Dementors, though they certainly increased his misery during his stay there.

The problem was with Evan alone. With the thoughts and fears and resentments he had brought in with him, along with a spare change of prisoners’ robes and a really quite paltry set of Ministry-issued linens for the pallet in his cell– expensive comforts he had recklessly purchased with money from his personal vault, though he had originally planned to go without, planned to invest every last knut in such schemes as would keep him comfortable in future years. Schemes that, with some dedicated effort, might even increase his personal wealth enough that it wouldn’t be assumed that his dogged pursuit of Lily’s hand was all for the sake of the Potter fortune.

He had indeed seen Lily, before they shut him away. First, in an unexpected encounter in the bowels of the Ministry, he had come upon her while being escorted to yet another interminable interview, and though he saw the fire surge high in her future, he had hoped for better. He had supposed, like a fool, that he would come in for some sort of teasing comment or even just the bare politeness due to the awkward situation.

Instead, she had savaged him with one look, and a handful of carefully spoken words. She, that had so deeply believed his warning for Black that she had betrayed Black’s trust, had had second and third thoughts about what she’d chosen to do, or had come to fear the unflattering interpretation that others might derive from both her actions and his. That was what Evan had told himself, to stay sane, to keep his countenance while she stormed away up the stairs.

It had not occurred to him until much later, the most probable, and mortifyingly simple reason why she had thrown away her faith in him. One of the Aurors he remembered from the tense standoff at her house had dropped by his cell to gloat, and had been sporting much the same heavy bruising as Black had, and Evan had gone from sitting stiffly with his head deferentially bowed to struggling against the urge to collapse into hysterical peals of laughter.

Of course, he’d thought, biting his lip, shivering with repressed hilarity, of course she decided I’d lied– with the deadline I gave, the very way I warned Black, of course she’d assume I was making it all up from whole cloth! He left, did he not, before it had been the full twenty-four hours, and yet he lived…

For some time, he’d been able to console himself with the thought that, when next he saw Lily, he might explain himself, explain the misunderstanding that had transpired. And that if she didn’t believe him then, it would hurt, but it wouldn’t be altogether surprising. It was a hard thing, to repair your trust in someone you thought had betrayed you deliberately, and considering the current circumstances, he wouldn’t have been surprised if he failed to even implore her to listen to his explanations.

Then, some days after his sentencing, one of the Aurors on the guarding shift– Bailey, the one that never ever spoke to Evan directly when grunts and silent, impatient gestures would do– came to Evan’s cell and rapped smartly on his door, then entered and shut the door behind himself with a flourish. “Visitor, Mr. Rosier?” Bailey had asked, and Evan had hauled himself into a seated position, unaccountably worried that someone whose family he’d hurt had paid the necessary bribes to be allowed a ‘visit’ with him. “Will you see her?”

That such a visit had not yet happened to Evan gave him no certainty that it would never happen. And of course, he had known better than to enter into Bailey’s malicious pretence that he had any say in who entered his cell. “I am at her disposal,” Evan had said, shifting to sit nearer to the crude protection runes he’d traced onto the hard wooden frame of his bed. “Send the lady in, if you would.”

Bailey had smirked at him. Had seen that Evan was properly, safely chained, all while watching him with the bald anticipation of someone certain they were about to see a delightful show. When he was finally satisfied, he backed toward the door, reopening it, his eager gaze still trained on Evan, and then he had said, “You’re clear to enter now, Lady Potter.”

Evan had held his breath. Had looked, desperate, into her future, and had tried to feel relieved that it was in a tame state, the fire no higher than the blood. He had bowed to her, low as he dared, and had said something, something appropriate and polite that passed between his lips and left no lasting memory.

“I’ll be brief,” she had said, making him tense. Lily Potter being brief, he had thought, with a sinking heart, was starting to seem to him a very bad sign. “Sirius told me your warning saved his life, so I thought I’d apologize for the scene I made over it when we last met. It was unworthy of me.”

A textbook, impersonal apology, said in just the right sort of tone, firm and forthright and only slightly deferential. It was a pureblood apology, and one glance at Lily’s cool expression was more than enough to tell him that it was the only sort of apology she would stoop to give.

“I am honoured,” was all Evan had said, had been able to say, though his every instinct screamed to urge him to embroider on that empty, formal phrase. Black can’t have told her everything, he’d thought. Or what he did tell her, he must have slanted against me. Why else would she be here like this? Why else would she have wanted to apologize so publicly, while making it clear she’ll never forgive me? “Was that all you wished to speak of, my lady?”

“Yes,” Lily said, already turning away. “Thank you for obliging me.” That last phrase, she said with no emotion, not even the slightest hint of mockery at the fact they both surely knew, the fact that Evan had not the power to oblige anyone but the Ministry these days. Somehow, that was what had hurt him most, seeing that she was so disgusted with him as to be entirely indifferent, unwilling even to spend any energy in directing some parting barb at him. “Good day, then.”

And then she had gone, without waiting for the polite reply Evan had been struggling to prepare himself to give.

The Dementors showed him that scene over and over again. He’d known he would see something, known that their unearthly chill and insidious magic would rouse foul memories, but he had thought, until he encountered them, that he had put it well enough aside so he could function.

That scene wasn’t the only thing they showed him, but it was always the last; it was as if they knew, somehow, that the best way to hurt him was to show, in tortuous sequence, all the terrible things he had done to preserve his life, followed by the death of his faint hope that he might share that life with someone he loved. When the Dementors were away, he told himself to buck up, to remember that they fed on despair, that their foul magic was always bent on eliciting it, and that none of them cared, or could even really understand what they were doing to him, save that his pain was their nourishment.

They are parasites, Evan told himself. It isn’t personal. Yet, whenever he saw one of them drift by through the bars of his cell, he watched them with a mad, terrible focus, and sought, like he had never consciously done, for a future in which he lived to destroy them all.

It came to him slowly. Fire, he thought, some five weeks into his three-and-a-half-month sentence. A fire that is hidden in the world; a fire that consumes. And with that fractured thought, with that threadbare, pieced-together prophecy, Evan set himself to endure.