Chapter Text
Twas also observed that he was troubled with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits; for ever and anon he would intimate so much by words. HOPEFUL, therefore, here had much ado to keep his brother’s head above water…
—John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
"—Melted my sodding wand.”
Although Evan had never thought he’d be the sort of husband who didn’t pay attention to the details of a spouse’s upset monologue, this bit of Spike’s traditional post-Tuesday rant jolted him out of a reverie he hadn’t realised he’d fallen into.
The watercolours were to blame, he was sure. Evan had, after a long and bitter struggle that everyone around him cruelly found hilarious, made peace with watercolours. More or less. The key bit, as he’d explained to Spike (once Spike had stopped biting twitching lips closed under fox-trotting black eyes to prevent himself laughing out loud, which was at least an effort so Ev supposed he had to appreciate it) was not to use them for portraits. They were fine for unmoving illustrations and landscapes and sold very well, especially to muggle-raised wizards who wanted to share their world with their family in ways that wouldn’t upset Secrecy.
But watercolour portraits… it wasn’t that they didn’t work. A photograph-like topcoat in watercolour did move and repeat a short motion like waving at the viewer, when that was what the customer wanted, and the person did wake up in a watercoloured portrait after they died. But those portraits had a dreamy, ethereal quality that Evan had always found deeply upsetting. When Evan explained, Spike had used the phrase ‘uncanny valley’ and gone on for a cosy hour about creepy muggle dolls and things like that while stirring up six different cauldrons for the Pomfrey (who Evan was supposed to call Poppy now; he kept forgetting).
Evan had eventually been forced to stop sketching new portrait backdrop ideas and take him to bed for being a marvellous multitasker once it was down to two cauldrons that could be spelled into stasis, even though Ev was actually quite excited about his composition idea for a library full of pets and hadn’t really wanted to put it down. Spike had recently made a brilliant suggestion about how, since people could travel between their portraits even if they had different artists and Evan didn’t have to do an Initial Sitting every time he painted someone unless they’d aged quite a bit or lost a body part or something, why couldn’t you just do an ‘Initial Sitting’ (the quotes had been audible; it wasn’t as if Spike’s profession didn’t have jargon and short technical terms for long technical processes) for eye-catching animals with decent personalities and ‘import’ them into the paintings of people who liked animals but didn’t have them. He’d then started talking about ‘therapy dogs’ and how the fish in a watercolour of a seascape Evan had done recently looked stoned even for fish, and had Evan ever asked dead painted people in watercolours… er, something about being stoned?
The seascape had been the point where Evan had lost the thread and fallen into, as now, a happy Spike-is-lecturing-about-things-I-don’t-need-to-know-about reverie, lost with blissfully curling toes between his work and Spike’s beautiful voice. He should, however, pay attention when Spike was ranting about class, he told himself guiltily. Especially on Tuesdays.
The problem with Tuesdays was that Albus Dumbledore was an idealistic moron with the social skills of, well, a Gryffindor who genuinely believed that if one let children essentially raise themselves everything would turn out for the best and the good ones would rise to the occasion. He really thought that. Evan had given him that awful book which was about kids and not flies for Yule three years in a row until he’d figured out that Dumbledore didn’t actually read books.
Evan had taken an embarrassingly long time, for a pureblood, to realize that most wizards didn’t read books for fun as Spike did. He, of course, had been raised in a house with only nonfiction and no library nearby, but when he got to school enough of the kids he’d grown to like did read that he’d reckoned that his family was just too artsy to bother with reading. Later he’d realized that most of the kids he’d grown to like were either Ravenclaws or had one foot in the muggle world and therefore knew that fiction existed. Dumbledore, he’d since learned, spent his cozy evenings knitting or reading the alchemy journals to chamber music while taking bubble baths, though the bubble baths were probably just a rumour.
The secondary problem with Tuesdays was that Minerva McGonagall (while not that stupid) was extremely overworked and had never learned to see past either a brave face or a poker face. She had, over the years, learned to understand Spike better—not well by Evan’s standards, but well enough that he’d mostly stopped dreaming up elaborate murder plots to think about when Spike came home with that particular Gryffindor’s Head of House Does Not Do Her Job twitch. If the Tartan really understood how bad Spike’s G&S classes could get (Spike referred to them as toxic GaS in public so people would get off his back about House bias, because Evan was not Lily Evans and trying to code the complaints as Gilbert & Sullivan references hadn’t worked), especially for certain classes and during Quidditch season, she would probably have stopped smirking at him and helped.
And what made all these problems impossible to fix was that Severus was a really good potions teacher.
Not in the sense that his students learned better than under other teachers, of course. He was too scared of children hurting themselves during at least half his classes to be as good at explaining as he was to Evan, calmly, at home, and his nerves (and shouting) kept many of the more sensitive children too agitated to focus. Which then got Spike periodically scolded by colleagues who had been his teachers, which made him more tense and agitated and liable to shout, et cetera ad infinitum.
The students did learn; Spike’s record of OWL student scores was quite respectable both historically and compared to other schools. But every year at least four classes, nearly always G&S, went into a horrible downward spiral that Albus ‘What Are These Things Called Nerves’ Dumbledore couldn’t understand and didn’t really believe was real.
And Spike certainly wasn’t a good teacher in the sense that most children enjoyed his classes, though he did as well as any of his colleagues but Filius at conveying his love of the Art to enough students in each year that Hogwarts’ NEWT potions scores were a feather in Dumbledore’s cap.
No, even Ev would have had to admit, if someone had waved a threatening torch at his waistcoat closet, that Spike wasn’t a good teacher for a) large groups, b) teenagers, c) students who weren’t motivated to learn, and d) students who didn’t understand that potions were genuinely dangerous if you mucked them up and therefore took it personally when Professor Snape got tense at them.
He was actually, as Spike would have admitted even if no one threatened to take away his tea and in fact did admit all the time, an extremely, er, difficult teacher under those circumstances and would be doing a much better job in the Defense classroom where he didn’t have to convey information in an understandable and memorable way while monitoring 16-30 often-unstable cauldrons and (pause for breath because this was where the at-least-yearly rant got irate) where presumably more students would understand that the curriculum was more dangerous than making soup and, presumably, be amenable to basic safety instructions like not flicking lightning bug eyes into a fellow thirteen-year-old’s Pepper-Up because you had a crush on her and were an (insert snarl) idiot male child who could not properly processes either feelings or hormones.
No, nobody was having fun in Professor Snape’s classes, but (almost unfortunately) he had one of the best safety records in the world. Accidents happened all the time in his class, but Spike’s reflexes and range of attentive perception were second to none and he had so far always managed to prevent serious damage. He had one of the best records for preventing any harm of anyone since Winnifred the Woebegone in the thirteenth century, who had by all accounts been a crackerjack herbalist but, as a squib, hadn’t even tried to teach her students anything that required actual magic to brew and had somehow got away with this for eight years. And even she’d had students who got burned and scalded and breathed in steam they shouldn’t have. Spike’s classroom was (physically and magically) safe on a level that foreigners were sure was a bald-faced lie.
Horace Slughorn’s classroom, though a much less stressful learning environment (Ev was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to get away with scribbling cartoons in Spike’s class, although Spike was good about letting students take pictorial notes if he was sure they were actual notes), had been much more typical, safety-wise. Spike had personally, as a bullying target who refused to lie down in submission and let his bullies win and also as a mad genius who didn’t entirely trust the textbook, been hurt many times in class. This, of course, was why he was so good at keeping things safe now; he knew the look, sound, and smell of an experimental cauldron that was about to go bad, and he had a finely-honed (or, more accurately, terrifyingly and painfully honed) sixth sense for adolescent malice and mischief.
Summed up, the Fundamental Issue was that Dumbledore and the Tartan didn’t really believe that their favoured students had behaved as appallingly on a regular basis as was, in fact, the case. So they didn’t understand how good at recognizing problems fast Spike had been forced to become, so they didn’t understand what his safety record meant. They thought it meant Horace had been slapdash and Severus was reliable.
Which, of course, was true. But what they meant was that Horace had created his own safety problems by not having enough classroom discipline and Severus, as a teacher in the Tartan’s style, must be behaving appropriately even if the students complained. So no matter how often Severus tried to explain or show them memories, they just kept smiling tolerantly and trying to give him biscuits as they reiterated that students from Houses that tended to clash had to spend some classes together to learn to get along (not Transfiguration, though, because the Tartan was the schedule-approver and was apparently as immune to recognizing her own hypocrisy as any other Gryffindor), and even if nobody was particularly enjoying Severus’s classes, they were still going quite well, weren’t they?
They could say this because Spike was, in Evan's and his cousin Narcissa’s fond opinions, quite bad at being a Slytherin and was never going to risk either his record or student safety to achieve a larger goal. Even if he decided that he ought to, Spike would never find himself able to turn away from a developing explosion or stop himself from flicking out a reflexive shield or mass bubble-head. It just wasn’t in him. So the scheduling problem was probably never getting solved.
Evan had tried repeatedly to point out to Spike that he didn’t have to put all his bad classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He did have some control over his own schedule; he could spread the worst of it out. Have good mornings every day and then come home right after the bad classes, for example. But Spike had told him that he’d rather have two bad days than five but couldn’t take two in a row regularly, and if Fridays were intolerable he would find himself giving notice at the end of the week, and if Mondays were intolerable he’d just not come back after weekends and hide under the couch and confound all the owls that got in to find him.
“Go back,” Evan had corrected him, frowning in concern. Their little Sherwood tower was home, not Hogwarts. But Spike had, alarmingly, just given him dead eyes.
So Thursday had become, every week, every year, the day that Severus came home after being occluded to the eyeballs all day and had a nervous breakdown because the kids were usually worse so close to Friday. The occluding actually started on Wednesday evenings, because otherwise pre-Thursday anxiety would have ruined their night every week of the academic year, but that probably made things worse. You weren’t supposed to occlude all night and all day, although to be fair Spike was rather prone to nightmares and ulcers under any circumstances.
Though Tuesdays were better, he still came home in a lesser but still significant state of post-occlumency overload and shouted a lot and held his hands so tightly fisted that they cramped. Usually he shouted at the cloak-rack; sometimes he’d start seeing the person he wanted to shout at. Early on he’d had a few panic attacks out of fear he’d scared Evan by yelling in his direction, which wasn’t the case in the way that he meant it. Evan had taken to giving him massages and coaching him into taking ‘but tomorrow has just the NEWT classes’ as a mantra.
He was giving Spike a hand massage now. He hadn’t particularly been attending to the details of the day; Severus generally didn’t need him to. Spike just needed to shout for a while without getting an argument back until Evan’s peace soaked into him and calmed him down. This was, in fact, generally easier if Evan didn’t pay too much attention, because Ev was not a fan of people upsetting his Spike and Spike wanted to shout freely, not have to talk Evan out of murdering children.
Not that Evan actually would. Not murder them.
But Spike had, a few times early in his teaching career, talked Evan out of taking notes about children’s bad behaviour that would later influence the quality and composition of their future portraits or gossiping to potential future employers and parents of desirable potential future spouses. Nobody but Potter and Black deserved that, he claimed.
Evan had to admit that his Gryffindor cousins had been uniquely horrible and there was merit to Spike’s mercy. Still, when he listened to the ways that teenagers kept trying to scar Severus for life even more by mostly-accidentally trying to kill each other in front of him he did get rather tempted. So he’d stopped paying close attention to the Tuesday rants unless something really stood out.
“Really melted?” he asked, fascinated, looking up from where he’d been running calming circles with his thumbs into Spike’s palms, waiting for the ranting to start losing steam so he could really start digging in.
With gratifying reluctance to take his hands out of Evan’s, Spike wordlessly reached into his holster. Thankfully (though not surprisingly), it was Spike’s secondary wand, the one he’d bought from Ollivander that he used in public, not the Heartwood one that had been with him since he started school and was only used at home.*
* His tertiary wand had been in a closet for years, shrunken and stowed in the heel of an old boot along with a silvered-bone mask and a few black rags. It had never seen much use, thanks to Severus’s convincing argument that if Riddle wanted him close to Dumbledore then Riddle also wanted him to have plausible deniability, but it had been used to prepare potions that gave Spike nightmares and that he wouldn’t talk to Evan about. The Heartwood wand was the one he’d used for their cures. The Ministry still had no idea who their supplier had been. Severus was sure they’d have known if he’d used his Ollivander wand, even though adults were, at least theoretically, free of the Trace.
The black wand hadn’t become the sort of puddle one would expect if metal or glass had melted. It had gone oily and brittle, though, as though the oils and cell plasmas that kept even dead wood supple-ish had seeped out of it. Spike’s grip had crushed the handle and the tip had crumbled away, showing the bright burst of feather that Spike said had made the wand a terrific professional partner since it sometimes reacted to student stupidity even before he did.
“Ergh,” Evan opined sympathetically. “Do you want to bury it in the wards or plant a new tree? Or we could put it in the vault with the wills if you like, though I don’t see it getting reused in that state.”
“I’ll talk to Dickon about it over the weekend,” Severus said without enthusiasm.
“Not Ollivander?”
“That creep,” said Spike, in tones that made it an answer. The words ‘government stooge’ floated silently in his scowl.
Evan kissed the scowl because turning its edges up was his superpower and he liked to show off to Spike. Successful, he took advantage of the slightly lightened mood to slide himself into the small spoon of a delicious sofa-cuddle. Spike was a bit the smaller in both height and breadth, but he had long enough limbs that this didn’t matter. “You’ll have to go see him anyway, though, unless you want the Ministry to notice you don’t have a wand they know about.”
Spike sighed, morose.
Since that was not an argument, Ev suggested, “He probably won’t be closed yet. Or at least he’ll probably be fetchable.”
“Living above one’s shop is stupid,” opened Severus, who hated his job very much.*
* Except for the bits where he got to coil himself around his Slytherins and hiss. And therefore had outfitted his school-to-home Vanishing Cabinet with a doorbell so his prefects could drag him out of Evan’s bed when they thought there was an emergency. Evan charitably refrained from pointing out this almost-Gryffish bit of cognitive dissonance because he liked Severus's head and did not want it to explode.
“It’s not as if he makes a lot of sales regularly except in August,” Evan pointed out, making a distracting nuisance of himself trying to keep snuggling Severus while their boots were summoned and cleaned. Severus obliged by using a spell to get them both shod instead of freeing himself to put his own boots on by hand. This meant he was feeling a bit brittle and Evan should keep on being octopus-like until they were in public. “So he wouldn’t want to miss someone who came with an emergency. You’ll probably boost his sales for the month by at least half.”
“Capitalist business-owning pig-dog,” Severus accused, his arm around Evan’s waist and the side of his mouth upcrooked.
“Only technically,” Evan protested, squeezing back. “But I do have to let Selwyn and Delphine explain things to me sometimes.”
This was, he might have admitted if pressed, a lie. He had definitely put his own mark on Rose & Yew, and of course he kept his finger at least on the edges of every pie there. He had, after all, been one of the Slytherins Slughorn took an interest in, and he couldn’t really imagine what hands-off bosses were thinking. But he still had difficulty thinking of himself as a grown-up sort of person, let alone one who had to make decisions about other people.
Thankfully Selwyn agreed with him; she and Delphine ironed out most of the snags before they made it to his door. Unaccountably, his artists did not seem to agree. Severus also couldn’t explain that, but was very smug about it in the way that meant he had won a bet with Narcissa without cheating.
On their way out, Evan caught sight of himself in a particularly shiny section of smoky jade wall and let Severus go to fetch their cloaks while he fixed his hair. It had worked its way half out of its loose queue and was doing an excellent impression of an electrocuted lion. This would have been unacceptable even if Ev had been wearing a business-meeting waistcoat; in this burnt-orange with the sunshine-squiggly patterns* he looked like a strawberry-blond Phil Lovegood on especially potent drugs. Not that Ollivander would notice or care, but Ev wasn’t going to actively try to embarrass Severus on a Tuesday.
* His last meeting of the day had been to explain to the muggle parents of a seventh-year Hufflepuff student from Glastonbury what illuminators did and set up a graduation sitting. Spike had assured him that the squiggles made him look ‘unthreatening, if deranged and a bit juvenile’. This always worked for Dumbledore, so Evan cheerfully took it as a recommendation.