James paced the length of Evan’s living room for the hundredth time. It was completely dark outside now, the hazy orange glow of the streetlights spilling in through the tall windows and laying long strips of amber across the floor. He checked his watch. Two hours since Evan had left. It felt longer. He needed to do something. He was not going to survive doing nothing. He found cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink. And then, in a narrow cupboard off the hall, a mop and bucket—blue plastic, never used by the look of it. James stood and stared at it for a long moment, his brain, unhelpfully and without his permission, presented him with the following: a trophy room. A cold Saturday morning. A boy he didn't know yet, holding out a plastic bucket not entirely unlike this one, expression impassive.
James pushed the image away, picked up the bucket, filled it with hot soapy water, and carried it back to the living room. He didn't use his wand. Didn't even consider it. He got down on his knees in front of the couch, rolled up his sleeves, and started. He worked in silence—methodical, deliberate, scrubbing in slow circles, wringing out the cloth, starting again. It took three buckets of water, each one emptied down the sink the dark, dirty red-brown colour of old blood. When he was done he stood up, looked at the couch—clean now, or close enough—and for a moment there was something like satisfaction, but it was short lived. He went back to the kitchen. It gave him nothing new. The total sum of Evan’s pantry consisted of: cornflakes, ketchup, tea, coffee, sugar, and enough Firewhisky to get a Hypogriff drunk. The fridge was worse: beer, milk, French mustard. James grabbed a beer, opened it against the edge of the stainless steel kitchen island, and stood there drinking it for a moment in the dim room.
Then he went into the hall. He passed the door he already knew led to a bathroom, and kept walking, until he reached the foot of the wrought iron spiral staircase that curved up into the ceiling. He stopped there. Looked up. He'd never been upstairs, and as it was something to do—he went. Not for any reason other than moving felt better than being still. He took the steps slowly, one hand trailing the railing, beer in the other. The upper floor opened out into another large space, same bones as below, same industrial windows—but here the ceiling arched above his head, higher than he'd expected, giving the whole thing the feeling of something that had once been something else entirely.
James tried the nearest door.
Darkness behind it. He stepped in and waited, let his eyes adjust—then turned, squinting at the vague shapes in the black. Something moved at the edge of his vision and his heart lurched sideways. He drew his wand—
—only to be met with his own face. Wandlight, startled, staring back at him.
He exhaled. A long, slightly shaky breath.
An entire wall, floor to ceiling, was mirror. He lowered his wand and looked around properly. It was a training room. A punching bag hung suspended from a ceiling beam, worn smooth at the centre in a way that suggested regular use. Black mats were stacked against one wall. A rack of weights against another.
Somewhere in the back of James's mind—behind all the circling thoughts, behind the dread he was working hard to hold at bay—he registered that Evan had, at some point, had gone to the considerable trouble of installing a home gym, and yet, had not, at any point in that same time span, seen fit to stock his kitchen cupboards with even the most basic non perishable items.
James moved around the room slowly, beer in hand, examining. Some things he recognised—a pair of boxing gloves, hanging from a hook. Other things he didn't. Several rubber bands of varying thickness hung in a neat row. And then, against the far wall, a set of drawers—dark wood, unassuming.
James opened the top one.
The inside was lined with dark material, sectioned into neat fitted slots. Slotted into each was a small, star-shaped metal object, small enough to sit in his palm, four points on each, each point coming to a very fine and deliberate tip. James stared at them for a moment. Weapons, clearly. The purpose of them—the specific purpose—he wasn’t sure. He closed that drawer and opened the next. Knives. Over a dozen of them—each in its own fitted space, ranging from a silver dagger barely the length of his palm to long, narrow blades the length of his forearm, their edges catching the wandlight with a quiet sort of eeriness. There was one empty space. The imprint of an absence pressed into the dark material—James looked at it for a moment.
He thought of a knife that had been on top of the piles of Evan’s things in his parents' laundry, the one he’d watched Evan slip into the side of a boot. Was that the knife that was missing he wondered. James closed the drawer. He left the room—he didn’t want to think about why Evan had a training room, or an entire draw of scary looking knives.
The next door led to a bedroom, it looked unused—no personal belongings save a set of women’s dress robes hanging in the wardrobe. Another bedroom followed. This one also empty, perhaps one of them was Evan’s but James didn’t think so. Neither felt lived in. The next door led to a bathroom. Larger than the one downstairs—a long rectangular bathtub sunk into an alcove of dark tiles at one end, a walk-in shower at the other beneath exposed copper pipes that glinted warm against the dark stone. A rough-cut stone sink and counter in the same dark material as the bath. A large mirror mounted above the sink.
The room was a strange mix of luxury and austerity, beautiful the way the rest of the place was—open space, spare, industrial lines made sleek. Unlived in, in the particular way of a space that was used but not inhabited but beautiful in a way because of it.
James turned the tap and splashed cold water over his face. He straightened, stood for a moment staring at his own reflection—and when it provided no answers to any of the questions circling his head, he looked away. Reached for the towel hanging on the hook beside the sink. Dried his face.
He was about to turn and leave when his eyes caught on the toothbrush holder sitting on the edge of the sink. Black. Ceramic. Ordinary.
And yet the sight of it made his gut turned over.
He stood very still unable to look away—at the completely ordinary, completely devastating fact that there were two toothbrushes. Two. Not one. Something slotted into place in his chest with quiet, horrible precision.
Two toothbrushes in a black ceramic holder in a bathroom that smelled faintly of something, maybe soap, maybe cologne, James wasn’t sure, only that he had already learned to recognise that smell without meaning to, recognise it as Evan. It came back in a flash. Green flames. Evan's face half in shadow. His own hand moving without permission. And then Evan’s hand on his chest—certain, immediate—and Evan’s voice, echoing through his mind; don't, Tosspot. Just don’t
James had been so consumed by his own panic, his own guilt, the sheer overwhelming avalanche of his own emotions that James had forgotten about Crouch. Of course Evan had stopped him. Of course he hadn’t wanted James to kiss him—a fresh wave of shame crashed over him, only this time it was accompanied by something else, something worse—something much worse. Something that stung like rejection, but wasn’t, something that hurt more than that, something that claws and teeth and wanted to shove the black ceramic tooth brush holder off the sink and watch it smash against the tiled floor.
James set the towel back on its hook with deliberate care. Then he turned and went back downstairs, leaving the rest of the upper floor unexplored—a decision made not out of respect for Evan's privacy but out of cowardice. He didn't want to open another door. Didn't want to find himself standing in Evan's bedroom, looking at whatever version of a life existed in there. Didn't want to know if there was a silk tie hanging over the back of a chair somewhere—the kind Crouch wore as he took the speaker's podium at Wizengamot—or a tailored suit jacket, dark and immaculately cut and expensive—hanging in Evan’s wardrobe.
Eight o'clock came and went.
Then nine.
James sat at the table and watched the hands of his watch move and tried not to think about the bathroom, about why the sight of two tooth brushes made him feel ill. Tried not to think about his own hypocrisy. At ten past ten he remembered, with a lurch, his mother's parting words—and swore under his breath. He closed his eyes, concentrated: the stag bounded silently through the wall and was gone, carrying with it the vaguest possible version of I'm alright, I'll contact you tomorrow. He didn't go back upstairs. He sat, and he waited, and watched the hours move with the particular cruelty of hours that know they are being watched. The first bang made him jump. He was on his feet with his wand in his hand before the second bang had finished echoing. He crossed to the window in three strides, scanning the street below—dark figures, movement, anything—his heart slamming against his ribs, eyes raking the pavement, the opposite rooftops—a third bang. And then a cascade of gold, blooming bright against the black sky, dissolving slowly into a shimmer of falling sparks.
Fireworks.
James exhaled. Pressed his forehead briefly against the cold glass. Someone, somewhere down the street, was letting off fireworks.
It dawned on him slowly, as he stood there watching them crack and scatter against the dark—that it was New Year's Eve. He checked his watch, watched the minute hand crawl toward midnight with an almost vindictive slowness. Some small, stupid, entirely irrational part of him fixed on the idea—not quite a hope, too absurd to be called a hope—that when the hand struck twelve the Floo would roar to life. That Evan would step out of it.
The hand struck twelve. The sky outside erupted—gold and silver and deep bursting red, the distant sound of cheering rising up from the street below.
1981 arrived, and the Floo stayed cold and dark and silent. James watched the fireworks die.
At one o'clock James cracked, he went back to the kitchen, retrieved a bottle of firewhisky. Then went in search of a glass—he opened the nearest cupboard and stopped. Mugs. A shelf of them, lined up with the same neat organisation Evan seemed to apply to everything in his space, including—apparently—mugs. His eyes found the nearest one immediately, yellow, black text across the front in blocky capital letters:
HAVE A BREW-TIFUL DAY.
The room tilted slightly on its axis for a moment. Evan had to come back. The thought slammed into him with force. He had to come back and drink tea out of his stupid novelty mugs. Had to come back and call James Tosspot. Had to come back so James could tell him—something. James didn't know what exactly, but something. That he was sorry for nearly kissing him, maybe. Or that he wasn't sorry maybe. Maybe, he didn’t know. All James knew, with a clarity that cut through everything else, was that Evan needed to come back. Full stop. Everything else could be sorted after. He breathed. In, and then out. Picked a mug at random and he pulled it down, shut the cupboard, and poured himself a generous measure of Firewhisky.
James took the Firewhisky back to the living room. He didn't sit on the couch. He'd done a good job with it— it looked the same as it had before. But the memory of the blood sat in the leather anyway, the knowledge of what had been there, and his eyes kept finding it in his peripheral vision, kept imaging the red brown stain that had been there. So James avoided it, pulled out one of the chairs at the table instead and dropped into it. There was a packet of cigarettes on the table. He looked at the packet for a moment. Then he picked it up, tapped one out, and lit it with his wand. He drew in a long breath now and held it, and the familiar bite of it was grounding in a way that the Firewhisky alone wasn't quite managing.
As the whisky burned through his system he stopped fighting, let the thoughts he’d been pushing away wash over him—surrendered—and with the surrender came a slow, inescapable truth that settled into his bones like something that had always been there, waiting.
He had feelings for Evan. James felt unbearably stupid for not realising sooner. Worse, for laughing at the suggestion. The specific, horrible memory of it. Lily finding Evan's notes—accusing him of cheating—and James laughing, because the idea had seemed so absurd. So wildly, categorically wrong. Except it hadn't been wrong, had it. Not entirely. She'd gotten the details wrong, there wasn't anything between him and Evan, there never had been—but she'd sensed something. Had looked at James and seen something James hadn't even had the self-awareness to see in himself, and she'd been right, and he'd stood there and laughed.
He wondered, with a slow sinking dread, whether Evan had known too—before James had tried to kiss him—whether he'd seen it the way Lily had. The embarrassment came first. Then the guilt. Then both receded, leaving something quieter and considerably worse in their wake.
An ache. Low and specific. The ache of grief and of loss. The pain of realising too late that you’d lost something, lost something without realising, without noticing. Maybe that, James thought, was the real reason he'd been hiding. Because he hadn’t been ready to reckon with the loss of another love. Because James Potter was—by self-admission, and by the reluctant testimony of most people who knew him—capable of many things. Creativity. Finding a way around almost any set of rules. Recklessness. Sentimentality. Bravery. Pure pig headed stubbornness. The list went on. But he was certain, with the kind of certainty that lives in the bones rather than the head, that there was one thing he was not capable of, and that was being in love with two people at once.
Eventually the light of day crept over the skyline outside the windows. James made coffee—drank it standing at the kitchen counter, looking at nothing, and waited. The morning became afternoon in the slow, indifferent way of winter days, the grey light outside shifting almost imperceptibly toward a slightly different shade of grey.
At some point around four he decided to go in search of food. He'd found Muggle money in a box on the shelf in the living room, and if Evan came back—he caught himself on the if. Corrected it deliberately. When.
When Evan came back, he'd need to eat.
The street outside was quiet in a way that felt different from last night's quiet—emptier, more deliberate. Closed shutters on the shops. Nobody much about. A vague memory surfaced, something Lily had mentioned once about Muggle holidays—that they took New Year's Day off, that it was a thing, a whole day given over to recovering from the night before. The memory arrived with Lily's voice attached to it, warm and familiar—making his chest hurt. James rubbed a hand over his face—pushed back the slight lump in his throat and focused on putting one foot in front of the other. He walked for nearly half an hour before he found a corner shop with its lights on—a small place, cramped and overlit, a bell above the door. There wasn't a lot on offer but he made do, moving through it mechanically, picking things off shelves. Bread. Eggs. Milk. Beans. Chocolate. A few other things that could at a push constitute the components of a meal. Unpacking it all in Evan's kitchen afterwards, he thought briefly and wistfully of the lamb he'd left marinating in his parents' fridge.
The evening passed in the same register as the day—slowly, and without event. The sleepless night before found him somewhere around ten o'clock, arriving without warning. He was lying on the couch half-heartedly reading a Tutshill Tornadoes match report, the words blurring on the page. He put the magazine down. Meant to get up.
Didn't.
James woke to bright, harsh morning light—and Evan standing over him.
He was on his feet quicker than should've been possible for someone who'd been asleep three seconds prior, relief surging through him warm and immediate—and he moved, already reaching, to pull Evan into a hug. Remembered, approximately half a second too late, about the almost-kiss and everything that had followed. James aborted the motion quickly and with all the grace of a Niffler in a jewellery shop—the result a deeply unconvincing squeeze of Evan's shoulder. The slight raise of Evan's eyebrow told James he hadn't gotten away with it. Thankfully, Evan didn't comment.
Instead he just said, "Do you want coffee?"
"Tea," said James, and then, remembering that Evan was injured, added, "I'll make it."
Evan nodded, and lowered himself onto the couch opposite with the careful economy of movement that James had come to recognise over the last week as Evan’s response to pain.
In the kitchen, James waited for the water to boil. He felt jittery—the way he used to feel before a Quidditch match. Not nervous exactly, but something, like his skin was slightly too tight for his body. He poured coffee into a Falcons mug with We Aim to Fowl printed across it for Evan, then dropped a teabag into a second mug, this one purple. He noticed, just as he lifted the kettle to pour, that it bore a pink unicorn caught mid-wink—beneath it, a single word in sparkly cursive: Horny?
James stared at the mug for a long second. Then, feeling a bit ridiculous, he put the kettle down, fished out the teabag, and swapped it for a mug with a silly dragon pun—a mug that didn’t feel like something caught between a personal attack and a confession.
Evan looked up when he re-entered the living room.
"When I said stay here, I didn't expect you to take it so literally. Figured you'd go home."
"Wanted to make sure you were alright." James handed him the Falcons mug and settled into the opposite couch, wrapping both hands around his tea.
"You know there are four beds upstairs," said Evan, “could’ve used any of them.”
"I didn't mean to fall asleep," James said, with a sheepish smile.
He didn't add that he hadn't slept at all the night before. That he hadn't been able to.
Evan looked better—-in fact he looked good, and oddly formal for the time of day—more formal than James had ever seen him, actually. A soft dark grey button-down beneath a black silk waistcoat, tailored trousers, dress shoes that had been kicked off, his socked feet now propped on the coffee table between them. He was watching James steadily over the rim of his mug—eyes sharp—face impassive.
“Should probably talk," said Evan.
James sat his mug down and tried not to wince as he ran a hand through his hair—”look," he said. "I’m sorry. I—" he couldn't quite make himself say the words I shouldn’t have tried to kiss you, so he went with: "I wasn't thinking," instead.
“Not that,” said Evan with a frown, “I meant talk about the Order.”
James blinked, “the Order?” he asked
Evan nodded. "Do you believe in it? Think it’s worth fighting for, worth dying for?"
"Yeah I do," said James.
"Then why," Evan asked slowly, "haven’t you tried to get me to join, to flip—to work for the Order? Had plenty of opportunities, know what I can do—know how useful I could be, and yet you’ve never asked. I want to know why, Tosspot?"
James opened his mouth—then closed it.
Out of everything—everything, every conversation he’d imagined having with Evan since he’d been left standing alone in this room, all the possible things he could say to Evan, all the things Evan might say to him, might ask him—that hadn't even been on the list. He tried to think of an answer, one that made sense—one that wasn’t painfully raw, that didn’t expose everything that he’d only just realised he felt. He couldn’t. Evan's eyes were steady on him, steady in a way that told James he was willing to wait as long as it took to get an answer, and James considered lying but the thought was fleeting. He wouldn’t lie, not to Evan. Not now.
"Because I'm a coward," he said finally—and it felt, as he said it, like facing down his own gallows. "And I wasn't willing to risk losing you."
Evan didn’t so much as blink. "What exactly does that mean?"
James looked at his hands for a moment, then back up. "In the beginning—it meant I was afraid that if I pushed, if I asked you to be something you'd already told me you weren't, to fight a war you said you didn't believe in—then you'd stop turning up.” It was the truth, be it one he hadn’t realised at the time. He picked his next words carefully, deliberately. “You became important too quickly and so I just—didn't push."
"In the beginning," Evan repeated. "That implies it's not your reason now."
“No.” James met his eyes. Held them. "Now," he said, "it's because you're more important than the war. I won't put you at more risk than you're already at. Not even if it benefits the Order. Not for anything."
The room was very quiet.
Evan looked at him for a long moment—something moving behind his eyes that James couldn't name and didn't try to. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose, leaned back against the couch cushions, and looked at the ceiling.
"You realise," he said, addressing the ceiling rather than James, "that the chances of both of us making it out of this war alive are slim to none, right?"
"I do," said James. "That doesn't mean I won't do everything I can to make it happen."
The words landed in the room with weight and stayed there, suspended between them for several long seconds until Evan turned his attention from the ceiling and back to James. To anyone else he might've looked relaxed—arms crossed, expression mild, the particular brand of stillness that looked, to anyone who didn’t know him, like boredom. James knew better. He'd learned, slowly and without noticing he was learning, to read the difference between Evan at rest and Evan deploying nonchalance as a shield.
"And if it does?" Evan said. "Best case—your side wins. Because if mine does, there won't be any Order members left alive. You understand that." Not a question. A statement delivered evenly, without inflection, the way you'd state a fact about the weather. He continued before James could respond. "As for me—with the things I've done. The things I'll probably still have to do." A pause, short and precise, like a full stop placed deliberately. "Put it this way. I'd rather die than face the Kiss. Rather die than Azkaban. You should know that."
James's stomach dropped. He felt it like a physical thing—the sudden vertiginous panic that this was Evan walking it all back, Evan telling him the arithmetic didn't work, that he'd thought it through and the numbers didn't add up, that James wasn't worth the risk and neither was any of it—
"I want you to understand that the chance of this," Evan gestured between them, a small precise movement—"of you and me, and whatever the hell you want to call what we’re doing—working out in either of our favours, is non-existent as things currently stand. I knew that getting into it. Didn't much matter, because I wasn't expecting to live long enough for it to become a problem, but as it turns out—I have. ”
He said it plainly, said it without emotion. James waited—waited for the rest.
“And as far as I can see, the only version of this shit show in which we both somehow manage to walk away with a life worth living—is if we're both on the winning side." He looked at James steadily. "The same side" A beat. "Which we are not."
"Yeah," said James, and his voice came out lower and rougher than he intended. "I get that. What’s your point, Evan?"
"My point is," said Evan—and then stopped. He looked down at the mug in his hands, and for a moment James thought that was it, that whatever had been coming would stay unsaid. But then he looked back up. "My point is it doesn't have to be like that. I’ll work with you to try and get us both out of this alive if that’s what you want."
James didn't speak. Just stared at him.
"But," said Evan, eyes steady on James, fixing him to the spot, "I need you to be certain it is. Might cost you, probably will. I know what I'm willing to give up and what I'm not—the second list is short. My sister. Barty. That's about it. Everything else I'll burn to the ground if you tell me to." His eyes were very blue as he watched James. "So think about it. Ask yourself what you're willing to lose. Ask yourself if I'm worth it."
The answer was in James's mouth before Evan had finished the question.
"Yeah," he said. "You are."
Evan held his gaze for a moment. Something passed across his face—there and gone, too quick to name. Then he nodded, once.
"Alright," he said simply. "Then contact Moody. Or whoever qualifies as leadership on your end. Tell them I'm coming in. That I'm going to help you bring down the Dark Lord."