James moved without thinking, hurrying forward—Remus’s face was a horrible, bloodless grey, his skin slick and clammy. A thin stream of blood had run from one nostril, tracing a dark line over his upper lip. His head lolled against Evan’s shoulder, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. He was completely limp. James ducked beneath his other arm and pulled it across his shoulders. Remus sagged heavily between them, utterly unresponsive, his head dropping forwards until his chin nearly struck his chest.
“Living room,” Evan said shortly.
Together they lowered Remus onto the cushions of the couch, Evan catching the back of Remus’s head before it could fall heavily against the arm of the sofa and easing him down, while James lifted his legs up after him. For one horrible second, laid out motionless and pale beneath the lamplight, Remus looked dead.
Then he groaned. His face tightened and he stirred weakly against the cushions—Evan moved with more speed than James had ever seen from him. His wand was in his hand in a flash. James didn’t even register him drawing it. Black ropes burst from the tip and snapped around Remus’s wrists and ankles, winding themselves tightly around each before James had even understood what was happening.
“What the fuck—” began James caught between surprise and outrage—
“He set off the wards,” Evan said, his voice perfectly calm, as though he were commenting on the weather.
For several seconds, the words simply did not make sense.
James stared at him, trying to reconcile them with the scene in front of him—with Remus lying pale and bloodied on his sofa, black ropes wound around his wrists and ankles, and Evan standing over him with his wand trained steadily on his chest.
“Wards,” James repeated finally. “I don’t have—”
He stopped as understanding slowly sank in. His eyes dropped from Evan’s face. Not to the hand holding the wand, but to the other one. His right arm. The scars. The ones he’d noticed that morning, the ones lining the inside of Evan’s forearm, thin and pale. He stared at them for what felt like an eternity as understanding slowly registered—they were ordered, neat, and almost perfectly straight—not the mark of injury, no these were delibrate—cuts deliberately made with the edge of a knife. The kind of cuts someone might make if the point wasn’t pain. If the point was blood. And there, just above Evan’s wrist, was the newest one. The thin pink line barely healed—
James looked from the cut to Remus. Then back to Evan.
Evan, who had already been awake and dressed when James had woken in the middle of the night.
“This was you?”
The words came out wrong, tangled somewhere between accusation and disbelief.
“I mean,” James corrected, “you put wards up while I was asleep?”
Evan gave a short nod. One single inclination of his head. A confused tangle of emotions rose in James all at once. For one disorientating second, he wondered if Evan had ever actually intended to leave. James had assumed so. Except now James was looking at the fresh cut on his arm. Had Evan been dressed because he’d been leaving? Or had he been dressed because he’d been moving quietly through the flat in the middle of the night, bleeding into whatever strange, vicious magic he’d wrapped around it while James slept? James wanted to ask. He wanted to know whether Evan had planned on telling him what he’d done.
But, more than that, he wanted to know what would have happened if he hadn’t woken up. Whether Evan would have left while James slept. Or whether he would have slipped his clothes off again, climbed back beneath the covers and curled himself around James as though he’d never left the bed at all. The desire to know was so strong that, for a moment, James forgot why they were standing here. Forgot that the reason he knew about the wards at all was because Remus was currently unconscious and tied up on his couch. He forgot right up until Remus made a low, slightly pathetic groan.
James’s attention snapped back to him.
“He’s coming round,” said Evan.
His attention had returned to Remus too, wand still trained steadily on him. His voice remained even, almost conversational. To anyone else, it might have sounded casual.
James knew better.
It was careful. Evan’s armour was up. Whatever Evan was thinking, he was making very certain James wasn’t privy to it.
“I don’t think he means you harm,” Evan continued. “He'd be in worse shape if he did. But something set them off.”
He looked at James then.
His expression was neutral, unreadable, but his blue eyes were hard.
“He stays tied up until I know what.”
“Evan—”
“Might not be him.” Evan’s gaze shifted back to Remus. “Could be someone wearing his face. Could be someone trying to get to you or the Order.”
Another groan came from the couch. This time, Remus moved. His face screwed up as though even that small movement hurt. His eyes open, blinking slowly at the room, then he tried to push himself upright. The ropes around his wrists pulled taut. Remus stopped. He stared down at them with confusion. Then he looked at James.
“Why am I tied up?”
His voice was rough and mildly dazed.
“I’ll untie you in a minute, I just need to make sure you’re you.” James dropped into a squat in front of him, bringing them eye to eye. “Who’s my favourite Muggle band?”
Remus blinked.
“What?”
“Just answer me.”
“ABBA.”
James nodded. Easy enough. Anyone who knew him reasonably well would know that.
“What did Sirius get me for my nineteenth?”
Remus frowned, clearly struggling. “A hip flask.”
“What was engraved on it?”
Another pause.
“Property of Lily Evans.”
James almost smiled.
Two.
“One more. Last year, when you came round for dinner, you and I talked in the kitchen. Just us—no one else was there.” James held his gaze. “What did I tell you?”
Remus’s eyes flicked briefly towards Evan.
“You told me you knew what it was like to love someone you couldn’t tell anyone about.”
James let out the breath he’d been holding.
Remus.
Definitely Remus.
Which meant Evan was wrong.
Or the wards were wrong.
Unless—
The thought struck James so abruptly he nearly swore aloud.
Of course.
He turned.
Evan was still standing behind him, wand trained steadily on Remus.
“Untie him.”
“James—”
The word stopped him.
His name sounded strange on Evan’s lips. Wrong somehow. Alien.
James.
Not Tosspot.
James.
There was no irritation in Evan’s voice, no mockery, none of the dry amusement that usually accompanied almost everything he said to James. His tone was flat, stripped entirely of emotion—and James understood the warning contained in it.
Evan thought Remus was dangerous.
And he was right.
Remus was dangerous. Dangerous enough, James realised suddenly, that whatever magic Evan had woven around the flat might very well have recognised him as exactly that. But Remus wasn’t dangerous to James. James knew that. The problem was, he couldn’t tell Evan how he knew. Not without explaining what Remus was, and that secret wasn’t James’s to give away. So he said nothing. For a long moment, neither did Evan. He looked down at James, blue eyes cold and intent, his wand still trained steadily on Remus.
The silence stretched. James could feel the question sitting between them. Could see it in the hard set of Evan’s expression.
Why?
James was certain he was going to ask. But he didn’t. Instead, Evan turned his attention back to Remus. His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied him, as though weighing what he could see against whatever it was he knew James wasn’t telling him. Then, without another word, he flicked his wand. The ropes around Remus’s wrists and ankles loosened at once, slipping onto the cushions before dissolving into nothing. Remus pushed himself slowly upright, wincing as he rubbed at his wrists.
“You all right?” James asked.
“I think so,” Remus said slowly, he looked past James to Evan—his gaze went instantly to the Dark Mark, plainly visible on his arm.
James became suddenly—painfully—aware of the two half-eaten plates of eggs sitting on the coffee table. Of Evan’s still-damp hair. Of his bare feet against the rug. Of the way James’s Ballycastle Bats T-shirt stretched across his shoulders and chest, a T-shirt James had owned for years—a T-shirt Remus had seen him in countless times. He watched Remus’s gaze move slowly from Evan to the coffee table, lingering on the two plates sitting side by side before travelling back to Evan, watched understanding settle across his face. And as it did suddenly James was seventeen again. The cold stone of the dungeons beneath him as he sat waiting outside the Slytherin common room waiting. Then Regulus’s fingers digging into his arm as he hauled James to his feet and dragged him away, out of sight. The anger and panic in his voice:
You can’t be down here.
You’ll ruin everything.
James looked up at Evan from where he still knelt beside the couch. The movement was instinctive—-he searched Evan’s face for some indication of what he wanted James to do. Some warning. Some tiny shift in expression that might tell him whether this was bad, whether Remus finding him here in James’s clothes was bad, whether James needed to say something quickly and make this something other than it was.
There was none.
Of course there wasn’t.
Evan stood exactly where he had been, wand still loose in his hand, his expression so carefully blank that James might as well have been looking at a wall. Not a flicker of alarm. Not a warning. Not even irritation. Nothing James could use to work out what Evan wanted from him. For one panicked moment, James didn’t know what to do with that. With Regulus, there had always been rules—places James couldn’t go, things he couldn’t say, people who couldn’t know. James had learnt to look for them without being told, to anticipate where the line was so he wouldn’t accidentally cross it. But Evan gave him nothing. No line. No instruction. James was on his own. He looked back at Remus, who was staring at him with a sort of weary confusion, as though he wasn’t entirely certain he was seeing James properly.
And, with no one else’s wants to follow, James was left with his own. James met his brown eyes and made a choice. Made a choice he’d never been brave enough to make—he chose himself: chose what he wanted. Because James didn’t want to lie about Evan. Didn’t want to scramble for excuses for why he was here, as though this were something shameful. Something that had to be hidden or made smaller before anyone else could see it.
So James cleared his throat and said; “do you want some tea, or I think there’s still some coffee?”
A small crease appeared between Remus’s eyebrows—he considered James for a long minute and then nodded. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “tea would be great, thanks.”
James stood and headed for the kitchen. He felt rather than saw Evan follow him, then heard the soft click of the door closing behind them.
When James turned, Evan was leaning back against the closed door, arms folded across his chest. For a long moment, he said nothing. His eyes moved slowly over James, studying him with an intensity that made James feel strangely exposed.
James waited.
He expected Evan to say something about Remus. About what had just happened in the living room. About the fact that Remus knew now—or, at the very least, knew enough.
Instead, Evan said, “My wards don’t malfunction.”
Evan’s voice was even, his blue eyes steady on James. Whatever had been going through his head in the living room was still locked firmly behind that carefully neutral expression.
“I need to know you’re going to be all right before I take off.”
James stared at Evan for a moment, taken aback, then pulled himself together and nodded.
“He’s not dangerous.”
Evan raised one eyebrow.
“Not to me,” said James.
Evan considered him for another moment, then nodded slowly.
“All right.” He pushed himself away from the door. “I’ll get out of your hair, then—”
“You don’t have to,” James blurted.
Evan stopped. He tilted his head slightly, studying James.
“You want me to stay?”
James shrugged, suddenly uncertain.
Whatever had brought Remus here—Remus, who James had barely seen in two months—whatever he needed to say or wanted from James, would probably be easier without Evan standing menacingly behind him. But at the same time, James didn’t want Evan to think he was being kicked out. Didn’t want him to think that Remus arriving had changed something, that now someone else was here Evan suddenly needed to disappear.
That wasn’t what James wanted at all.
He just had no idea how to explain the confusing mess of emotions inside him without making it into something much bigger than he was currently capable of saying aloud.
“I just mean, you don’t have to go,” he said eventually.
The words fell frustratingly short of what he was trying to say.
Evan regarded him for another moment, then glanced towards the closed kitchen door.
“Probably best I take off unless you need me to stay.” His eyes returned to James. “Need to see my sister anyway. Pretty much came straight here after getting back.”
He offered James a small smile. It didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Imagine she’s got some choice things to say to me by now. Best I face up before I find all my clothes have mysteriously developed holes in them.”
The kettle whistled, reminding James that Remus was still in the next room waiting for tea. He poured the hot water into the mug, added a splash of milk and carried it back into the living room.
Evan followed him out of the kitchen but didn’t linger. Without so much as a backwards glance at Remus, he crossed the room and disappeared through the door leading to the hallway—and James’s bedroom. James handed Remus the tea, then flicked his wand at the two half-eaten plates on the coffee table, Vanishing them before perching on its edge. He leant forwards, elbows braced against his knees.
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
Remus nodded. “I think so,” he said slowly. He took a cautious sip of his tea, then frowned down into the mug. “What was that?”
“My fault.”
Evan’s voice came from behind them. He had apparently helped himself to James’s sock drawer and now sported a pair of dark red socks. He crossed to the dining table and collected his jacket from where it hung over the back of one of the chairs.
“I’m in the process of updating James’s security,” he said, shrugging it on. “Wards registered you as a threat and acted accordingly.”
He collected his boots and pulled them on, then straightened and considered Remus for a long moment. His gaze was cool and assessing, as though he were still trying to work out precisely what the wards had seen.
Finally, he turned to James, reached into his pocket and withdrew a small glass vial. He tossed it to him. James caught it automatically. Something silver swirled inside, moving strangely against the glass, caught somewhere between liquid and gas.
“Memories,” Evan said. “From France. For the Order. Figured it was easier this way. Something happens to me, at least you’ve got definitive proof of which of the French families have agreed to join.”
James’s fingers tightened slightly around the vial.
“Tell Moody Armand Delacroix-Feuille is with us too.” Evan frowned, nodding towards the vial. “He’s not in there. Moody’ll have to take my word on him. If he’s got questions about Armand, I’ll talk to him. Just let me know the usual way and I’ll be there.”
James wanted to ask when he would see Evan again. The question rose so quickly it almost escaped him.
And me? What if I want to talk to you? What if I just want to see you?
But he couldn’t ask that. Not here. Not with Remus sitting three feet away watching them. It felt too vulnerable.
So James just nodded.
Evan glanced back at Remus. “Wards shouldn’t attack you again while you’re here. Not unless you mean him harm.”
Remus’s eyebrows rose slightly. He considered Evan for a moment. “Out of curiosity,” he said, “what would happen if I did mean James harm?”
“You’d die.” It was said casually, without threat or emphasis, as though Evan were simply explaining how the wards worked.
Remus’s eyebrows climbed higher. He looked as though he was about to say something else, but Evan had already turned back to James.
“Can’t promise they won’t go off again in the future. Can fix that, but I’ll need to know why they tripped in the first place.” His eyes held James’s for a moment. “Leave that up to you.”
James frowned slightly. It was the first acknowledgement Evan had made that James was keeping something from him, and even now there was no accusation in it. No demand for an explanation, just stated as something that was: James knew something he didn’t, and whether James chose to tell him was apparently James’s decision.
“He’s been hit with something fairly close to the Cruciatus Curse,” Evan continued. “Might want to give him some medical attention.”
Then he was moving, stepping towards the fireplace. Green flames roared suddenly to life as he reached it, throwing eerie, dancing shadows across the room. Evan stepped into them. They flared brilliant green around him and, a second later, he was gone. A long silence followed, broken only by the crackle of the flames as they slowly died down.
Remus cleared his throat.
“Nice guy.”
“Most of the time,” James replied absently.
He was still staring into the grate, at the spot where Evan had disappeared, his mind caught somewhere several moments behind.
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Remus, scepticism heavy in his voice.
It took James another second to remember that Remus had just been rendered unconscious by Evan’s wards. He dragged his attention away from the fireplace and back to him, rubbing a hand over his face.
“I’m really sorry, Rem. None of that should have happened. It didn’t exactly occur to me to tell him I’m friends with a werewolf. I assume that’s what tripped them.” He glanced at Remus’s still-pale face and grimaced. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Remus nodded.
James pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
He returned a few minutes later with a pain potion and a muscle relaxant. He’d stocked up on both after his first week of training with Alice.
“Here.” James uncorked the vials and handed them over. “These should help.”
Remus accepted them without comment and drank them one after the other, grimacing slightly at the taste before setting the empty vials on the coffee table.
“I should have owled.”
The words stung more than they ought to.
James wanted to point out that Remus had never felt the need to owl before turning up at the cottage. There had been a time when none of them had. They simply arrived, let themselves in, raided his cupboards and stayed as long as they pleased.
Instead, James forced himself to take a breath. Remus had just been knocked unconscious, woken up tied to the sofa and then been informed, with remarkable casualness, that the man responsible had installed further protections capable of killing him.
“You don’t need to owl before coming here,” James said. “You never have.”
Remus didn’t answer.
His gaze drifted instead towards the fireplace, now cold and dark, and lingered there for a moment.
“Are you going to ask?” James said.
Remus looked back at him. “I’m not sure I want to know,” he said finally, ““I assumed that you and Lily had broken up because of Regulus—”
James looked down at his hands. “No”
“I see,” said Remus.
A long silence followed.
“Rosier said you were friends,” Remus said eventually. “Under the truth potion. He said you were friends, and you said the same thing. That you’d known him since second year.”
“We are,” said James, “I mean we were,” he ran a hand over his face, and then met Remus’s eyes, “this is new Rem—it wasn’t going on while I was with Lil.”
Remus nodded. “Is he who you were talking about? When you told me you knew how hard it was–you said there was a friend who knew. Someone who made you feel normal.” Remus’s eyes stayed fixed on James. “Was that Rosier?”
“Yeah,” said James.
Something shifted in Remus’s expression.
“Why didn’t you tell me? You knew what I was.”
There was something wounded beneath the words now, however carefully he tried to keep it from his voice.
“You knew about Sirius. Why did you trust Rosier and not me?”
“I didn’t.”
Remus blinked.
“I didn’t trust Evan instead of you,” James said. “I didn’t tell him.”
“Then how did he know?”
“Assume Regulus told him.” James rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “He just knew—I didn’t know he knew, not until this one time when Regulus sent a message through him—Evan was just normal about it, gave me shit. It wasn’t a big thing—I mean it was to me but it wasn’t like we had some big heart to heart, it was just normal you know?”
Remus didn’t say anything for a long minute, and then, when he did speak his voice was quiet, “no,” he said, “I don’t know what that’s like James.”
James swallowed—feeling suddenly guilty for some reason. “I wanted to talk to you Rem, back when I first figured out what was going on between you two, I did. But I felt like I couldn’t, not without explaining Regulus—and I couldn’t tell you about him because he made me promise I wouldn’t. It had to be secret.”
He looked down at his hands.
“And afterwards...” James shrugged. “It hurt too much, Rem. I wanted to forget him. Pretend none of it had ever happened. By the time I could’ve told you, I didn’t want to talk about it at all.”
Remus was quiet.
“Look” said James, “Me and Evan weren’t sneaking off somewhere to play Exploding Snap and tell each other our deepest secrets behind your backs. We just sort of... kept bumping into each other over the years. Ended up in detention together a few times. Got along. I didn’t know about him back then either,” James added. “Not until—”
He stopped—deciding that Remus did not, in fact, require the details of precisely how he had discovered Evan Rosier liked men.
“Not until later,” he finished.
“But you were sneaking off behind our backs to be with Regulus?”
“I was,” said James.
“For how long?”
“A year,” answered James, “give or take.”
“I don’t understand,” Remus said. “Any of it. I don’t understand how you could want to be with one Death Eater, let alone two.”
The words hurt, or maybe it was the expression on Remus’s face that hurt.
“Regulus wasn’t a Death Eater when I was with him.”
“But Rosier was—he is.”
“Yeah,” James said. “He is.”
“I’d like to understand Regulus but I think I need to understand Rosier first. I need to understand what happened with Lily—why you trust him enough to bring him into the Order.”
“All right,” James said, feeling suddenly very tired.
James looked down at his hands, studying his interlaced fingers.
“It’s all the same story, really. Regulus, Lily, Evan—all of it.” He frowned. “And I suppose, really, it starts with Evan. I met him before anything happened with Regulus, like I told you all that night. Met him when I was twelve. We had detention together. Can’t remember what I’d done, but he was there because he’d set fire to something he shouldn’t have.”
“Seems to be somewhat of a defining characteristic of his,” said Remus. “I remember what he did to Mulciber.”
His voice was stiff. Cool.
“Right.” James held Remus’s gaze steadily. He would not apologise for who Evan was, any more than he would apologise for the way he felt about him. “Well, this was just curtains,” he said.
Remus looked away.
And James continued. He told Remus about meeting Evan in detention. About the broom shed and the boy who’d told him that he would be making the quidditch team the following year—he told Remus about realising who Evan was, and about wishing they could have been friends. Then about Regulus. He told him about loving Regulus and losing him, and about Evan being there through all of it, somewhere in the background, the only person who knew. Then he told Remus about Lily. About the way James had tried to use her to mend the hole Regulus had left behind, without ever quite admitting to himself that was what he was doing. He told Remus about everything that had happened since. About learning of Regulus’s death, and discovering that grief could apparently reopen wounds James had spent years convincing himself were healed: about how alone he’d felt. And then about everything that had happened since, about Evan saving his life—warning him about Peter—about the ministry, about how they’d become friends in the year since James had found Evan drunk in the Queen's Arms.
There were certain things James didn’t tell Remus. He didn’t tell him about kissing Evan in the broom cupboard on the fifth floor. He didn’t tell him about sitting beside Evan’s bed for days, bargaining with every deity he could think of and praying with everything he had that Evan would live. He didn’t tell him about the misery of the last two months, or the nightmares, or the number of times he had woken with Evan’s blood still vivid behind his eyes. It wasn’t that James was hiding those things, or hiding what Evan was to him. Not exactly. It all simply felt too personal to give away. It had been different with his mother. When James had told her the same story, he had wanted her to know Evan. Really know him. He had wanted her to understand how important Evan was to him, how much he had done for James, how many times he had been there when nobody else had known James needed someone. Without quite realising it at the time, James thought he had wanted his mother to love Evan too.
This was different.
Perhaps it was because of everything that had happened between him and Evan in the last twelve hours. Perhaps it felt wrong to sit here and tell Remus that he was in love with Evan when he hadn’t told Evan himself. Perhaps it was the doubt that still lingered in Remus’s brown eyes. Perhaps James simply felt protective of this new, fragile thing between them, whatever it was. It felt unbearably precious now that he had it, too new to hold out for someone else’s inspection. He told Remus only that it had taken him far longer than it should have to realise that what he felt for Evan wasn’t friendship. He told him that he had never meant to hurt Lily, and that he was sorry he had. But he wasn’t sorry for choosing Evan. That, at least, James could say without hesitation, after he’d said that—James stood. He went to the kitchen and made them both another cup of tea, giving Remus time to think and himself something to do with his hands. It wasn’t until James returned, set a mug down in front of him and took the seat beside him on the couch that Remus finally spoke.
“I’m sorry.”
James looked sideways at him. “For what?”
“For missing so much,” Remus said slowly. “For not paying enough attention to realise how much you were hiding.” He lifted his gaze to James. “I don’t like that you lied—but I understand why you did.” He paused. “I think maybe there was a lot Sirius and I never saw because we were too busy hiding ourselves.” Remus looked away again. “I should have realised there might be things you couldn’t tell us too. I should have noticed what was happening. To you. To Peter too, whatever it was that made him join them—I missed that too..”
James said nothing. For a long time, Remus was quiet too.
Then he said, “You need to talk to him.”
James looked over.
“You owe him the truth about Regulus.”
James didn’t need to ask who Remus meant. “Got the distinct impression he already knew plenty about that.”
Remus gave him a long look.
“No,” he said eventually. “I think he knows just enough of the truth to be angry with you and not much more. I think he thinks you’ve replaced him with Rosier, and I think he’s lost his brother—”
Remus stopped for a moment, frowned slightly.
“I think, more than anything, he needs his best friend.”
James rubbed a hand over his face. He knew Remus was right, he did owe Sirius an explanation for Regulus—had owed it to him for years. That didn’t make the prospect of the conversation any more appealing.
“Right.”
Remus gave him a small smile.
James swallowed. There was one more thing.
“Would you mind not telling him?”
Remus’s eyebrows drew together.
“About Evan, I mean. I’ll tell him. I just...” James shifted uncomfortably. “I want some time to figure all of this out myself first. And Sirius doesn’t exactly like him.”
To James’s surprise, Remus chuckled.
“Yes, I had noticed that,” he said, amusement creeping into his voice. “He’s fairly committed to the idea that Rosier has somehow deceived you and is engaged in an elaborate plot to undermine the Order and sell us all to Voldemort,” Remus continued. “He’s tried to convince Mad-Eye of it more than once.”
James sighed.
Remus smiled, it was small, but it was something, but after a moment it faded into something more thoughtful. “I don’t like keeping secrets from him,” he said. “But I will.” Then the smile returned, a little wider this time. “Consider it an apology for ruining your breakfast.”
“Thank you,” said James.
Remus nodded. He took another sip of his tea, then regarded James over the rim of the mug.
“Does Rosier make you happy?” Remus asked.
“Yeah.” James didn’t have to think about it. “He does.”
Remus nodded, seeming to consider that for a moment. Then one eyebrow lifted and something close to teasing crept into his expression. “And it doesn’t bother you even a little bit that he’s absolutely terrifying?”
Something inside James released. His chest felt suddenly lighter, and he laughed.
Remus gave him a long, wry look. “I’m fairly certain this is the part where you’re supposed to reassure me that he’s not nearly as terrifying as he seems. That once you get to know him, he’s actually quite lovely.”
“Oh, no,” James said with a grin. “He’s way, way more terrifying once you get to know him, trust me.”