Work Text:
It was in fifth year that Remus finally noticed Evan Rosier, actually looked at him and saw him. It’s not that he hadn’t been aware of a Rosier-shaped blur on the fringes of his awareness. He might even have remembered that the other boy’s name started with “Ro.” “Roseeran” or “Roshier” or some such. Certainly, once fifth year began, Remus could pick him out of a crowd as the unfortunate Slytherin who had missed almost an entire year of schooling and had to start fifth year over again.
Still he had no reason to give any thought to Rosier. Gryffindors and Slytherins rarely socialized, and the two of them had no friends in common. So even though they shared a class or two, Remus didn’t pay much attention to him.
While it was a Potions lesson that changed all of this, there was no reason to expect changes to come from that direction. In fact, the first several weeks of fifth-year Potions were much the same as fourth-year Potions. During lessons, Remus worked hard to note down any facts buried in Professor Slughorn’s genial ramblings. He also tried to subtly discourage the worst of James’ and Sirius’ tricks. Sometimes he succeeded, but it was usually a hopeless cause. His friends knew they could rely on his silence. So all too often, he winced as a cauldron suddenly went up in flames and James or Sirius acquired a slightly too-studied look of innocence.
Outside of lessons, Remus worked just as hard. He read his potions book until it looked like he had been sleeping with it (and until James joked that he’d been kissing it).
Yet Remus was far from the star of the class. He was simply too quiet for that. He never volunteered to answer questions or did anything to draw the teacher’s attention, though he had clearly done the reading and his potions were always mixed correctly.
However, when the third week of Potions arrived, nothing went as expected. A strange wizard was covering all of Professor Slughorn’s lessons; and the new professor seemed determined to turn tradition on its head. He took one look at the seating pattern, with its strict division of Slytherins and Gryffindors, and shook his head before assigning new seats to everyone. Remus felt entirely off balance as the room was divided into impossible pairings, each with a shared cauldron. James with Snape! What was the professor thinking?
He found himself sitting in a place that was usually deep into Slytherin territory, eying his new brewing partner. He quickly discovered that he was going to be doing most of the work himself. Rosier was not a good person to have as a potions partner. While the rest of the class was taking notes on the day’s potion, Rosier was sketching out quidditch strategies and dueling moves. When it was time to brew, things got worse. Rosier made a game of tossing the ingredients in so that they hit an imaginary bullseye in the center of the cauldron.
Remus stared. Then he shrugged and started working to save the potion. It was almost like brewing with James, when James was trying to chat up the Evans girl and didn’t notice what he was doing. It was so familiar that he soon forgot who he was sitting with, all his attention on rescuing the potion. Still, in spite of all his hard work, Remus couldn’t completely save the potion. Its blue was closer to a foggy gray than the sky blue they were aiming for. But it didn’t explode. It didn’t quiver. It didn’t even smoke. It was utterly acceptable.
As the lesson ended and everyone began filing out the door, Remus sighed in relief. At least he was relieved until he saw Rosier’s face. It was a study in pure unadulterated hurt. Then Rosier sped out of the room, before Remus could do much more than gape.
Remus had no idea what he had done wrong, but suddenly he wanted to do whatever it took to be forgiven. He couldn’t make sense of it. He didn’t even know why he wanted anything from Rosier. So instead of taking action -- any action at all -- Remus simply became more and more awkward whenever he was near him.
Everywhere he went, he studied Rosier; and when he couldn’t see him he replayed the things he had already seen. He didn’t get another chance to sit with Rosier in Potions. Slughorn’s return made sure of that. Yet he could still watch him at a distance. Rosier was a constant presence in Potions, and Remus discovered that Rosier was also in his Defense Against the Dark Arts lessons. He wondered how he had ever been able to ignore Rosier.
He collected facts. Rosier’s name was Evan, Evan Rosier. He had two sisters. He never ate soup, but sometimes ate stew. He could use his left hand as well as his right.
Remus collected impressions. Evan was all long limbs and wiry grace. He was pale skin and blue eyes. But most of all he was motion, constant and unstopping motion. His hands twitched out invisible spells. His feet tapped out quiet rhythms in the library. And even in Potions, bloody Potions, Rosier was still in motion, stirring rod waving, knife tossed carelessly in the air.
Evan simply didn’t exist as a stationary object. To imagine Evan was to imagine motion. Imagining a still Evan was like picturing dry rain, silent music. He was a choreography. He was a series of events. He was a chain reaction. A whirlwind. A tornado.
Unsurprisingly, it was in the dueling lessons in Defense Against the Dark Arts that Evan shone brightest. Somehow he was everywhere at once or nowhere at all. Sometimes he seemed to have disarmed his opponent before they even began.
As for Remus, he dreaded dueling practice even as he looked forward to it. He enjoyed simply watching the better duelers move, and loved the feel of a well-executed spell, but he hated the tension of wondering who he might be matched with. It was as bad as being forced to ask girls to a dance, but with no control over who his partner would be.
Remus usually came away from dueling practice with no clear idea of the overall sequence of events that had occurred, just a kaleidoscope of moments. The smell of sweat. The sharp prickle of badly-controlled magic bouncing across the room. James showing off a complicated grip change. Sirius tossing his hair back in a gesture so casual, it had to be planned. Peter chanting a steady litany of the spell words he wanted to remember. Snape dark and brooding. The shifting shadows on Evan’s face and the play of muscles in his arm as a sleeve fell down to his elbow.
Then came the day Remus had been dreading. He was matched with Evan as a dueling partner. By now he had realized his mistake in publicly rescuing Evan during their only shared Potions assignment. There wasn’t room for gestures of goodwill in the endless politics of being Gryffindor or Slytherin. What he had done in good faith looked condescending, when viewed through the endless house rivalries. So he understood all too well the cold look in Evan’s eye as they circled each other preparing for the first move.
Then Evan struck, and suddenly Remus didn’t care about understanding. He was angry. He was hurt. And he had a wand in his hand. Neither one of them paid attention to rules, or limits, or fair play. It took two professors to separate them, and by that point neither one was moving well, though Remus had clearly got the worst of it.
By the time they both got out of the infirmary wing, it was almost midnight. The nurse wrote them each a note and then sent them their separate ways. However, against all logic, they took a common route as long as they could, then stood there awkwardly at the parting of ways. Finally Evan said, “I can show you some better defensive spells.” Remus didn’t know if he imagined the way Evan seemed to be looking at his old scars, but he just nodded, and they made plans to meet. As long as Remus remembered to bring the telltale map with him, his friends would never know.
At first, defensive lessons with Evan focused entirely on the practicalities of magic. Evan showed him the advantages of different grips, most of which had never been discussed in lessons. He also showed Remus how to change his posture so that he presented a smaller target and how to move unpredictably. His mantra was that everything you couldn’t block, you could duck, and everything you couldn’t duck, you could block.
Once, Evan said, “A near miss by a killing spell, a real one, a strong one. Did you know you can smell it? It smells like ozone. And your hair, your skin-- you get gooseflesh and anybody watching can see your hair standing on end. If you’re wearing metal it buzzes like it’s full of bees. Not many people know that.”
More often though, it was a lesson without words. Of course Evan talked a little bit about what he was showing Remus, but more often he simply moved Remus into the correct position. Remus liked the feel of Evan’s hands guiding his wand hand through the motions of a spell. It was like dancing together in the empty classroom. The rest of their lives were something that happened in another universe. Rosier never asked about the scrapes, abrasions, and scars, or about Remus’ occasional “illnesses.”
Four months into the school year, James and Sirius finally mastered the animagus transformation for the first time; and Remus no longer had new scrapes and cuts, or at least no more than simple healing could dispel. Soon after, Peter achieved his own transformation.
Evan’s only comment on the changes was the light touch of his hands on Remus’ unscratched skin, but his teaching became more relaxed and conversational. Soon they were meeting more for talk than anything else. Not that they put much effort into talking. Sometimes the pauses were longer than anything spoken aloud, but the silences felt as comfortable as the speech.
Around that same time, Remus forgot to bring the map one evening. If things had gone as planned it might not have mattered. However, James got out of detention early and saw their names side by side on the map. It was a disaster. Remus scrambled for an explanation. He told his mates that he had met Rosier to arrange to borrow a rare book, which Rosier was rumored to own. To his complete surprise everybody believed him.
Peter looked worried. “Moony, you could’ve got hurt.”
James, on the other hand, looked like he was considering shaking Remus till he rattled, but he settled for putting a protective arm around Remus. “He’s not the sort you want anything to do with. And by yourself? Are you mad?”
Sirius nodded. “Fucker does dark magic. That whole family is crawling with dark magic.”
“I heard,” Peter said slowly, “that he got caught in the crossfire when aurors raided his family.”
“Yeah,” said James. “That year he missed? You must know he spent it in the Janus Thickney ward. Got grazed with a really black curse. Wasn’t supposed to live.”
Sirius snorted. “Crossfire, bollocks. I heard his father aimed at him.”
Afterwards, Remus felt both guilty and relieved. He owed James, Peter, and Sirius so much. They had stood by him, even once they knew what he was. His loyalties should not be divided like this. Yet, he already knew that he would seek out Evan at the next opportunity.
Their old meeting place felt too risky, now that he had been spotted there once. So he and Evan took to roaming over the winter-cold quidditch stands, practicing their warming charms and fighting the occasional mock duel. Instead of school they talked about things they had wanted to be as children, songs they liked, dreams... bits of random conversation floating on the night.
Remus was no better liked by Evan’s Slytherin friends than Evan was liked by Remus’ Gryffindor friends. It was often difficult for them to meet. Sometimes Remus found himself unable to leave the castle, or managed to arrive only to find no one there. However, their only outward nod to house rivalries was a silent one, and that was their habit of sitting in the neutral Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff sections.
Later, as the snow lessened, they sometimes wandered the quidditch pitch itself, or sprawled out on the ground. Lying on their backs, looking up at the sky, Remus felt that he could float away into the stars. Here, nobody and nothing had a claim on him. He could just be. Every now and then, Rosier’s voice would speak out of the darkness; yet there was no pressure to answer. It was an easy flow of silence and words that neither one felt the need to push at.
“Do you ever wonder,” asked Evan’s quiet voice one night, “if the centaurs are right about the stars?”
“The muggles say the stars are just other suns with their own worlds.”
“Muggles!” said Rosier with an all too expressive snort. Then after a long silence, “Do you believe them?”
“I don’t know. When I was ill, I used to look at the stars out the window and imagine there was another boy out there looking back at me.”
“Yeah, I used to look up at the constellations the same way. Father used to tell me all the stories about the Giant, the Werewolf, and the True Wizard. There he is, the wizard constellation. Look--” A flare from Evan’s wand jabbed towards the sky. “Right there. You can see his wand hanging from his belt. They were always fighting in the stories. I think I was supposed to learn that giants and wolves were untrustworthy bastards; but I asked him why they couldn’t all be friends. Old Merlin’s goolies did he yell.”
During that spring Remus came to love the night sky. Sometimes he fancied the skies were a map of their slow, desultory conversations, bright clusters of words separated by long restful darkness. And like the constellations, many things were hinted at: dots that might be a head or an eye or a hand. Yet there was no need to spell things out.
Remus never said that he was a werewolf. The closest he ever came was a casual, “Werewolves, they aren’t what everybody thinks. Not all of them.” Evan, Remus was sure, kept some of his own silences. He never talked about the year of school he had missed, nor what illness he had had. Neither did he ever explain how he could know the feeling of a near miss from a killing curse.
That was fine. There were questions he didn’t want Evan to ask. There were questions he knew better than to ask. There was safety in the long pauses between words, safety in Evan’s presence.
It was late spring when the silences first turned into fumbling in the dark. That first night, he thought he noticed Evan shifting more restlessly than usual, but discounted it. After all, Evan was always moving. Slowly the gap between their bodies narrowed, so slowly that at first Remus thought he had imagined it. He worried that he was the only one who wanted to be close. Then they were touching. Not touching by accident. Not touching to learn a wand motion. Just...touching.
Remus wasn’t sure what one did with a boy. Surely it wasn’t any of the things his friends talked about doing with girls. Well -- there was kissing. He was fairly sure of kissing, so he started there, a light touch of his lips that missed Evan’s face and ended up somewhere by his ear.
It was strangely freeing to have no idea at all what he was doing. There were no textbooks to study, no maps, and no theory. There was just lips and skin and the dried salt taste of Evan’s skin. Remus touched blindly, feeling out Evan’s shape in the dark. And Evan touched back, kissed back, pushed back, until they seemed to be trying to crawl into each other.
Remus walked home feeling like he was walking on air. It was hard to be quiet when he wanted to shout to the world. Evan had kissed him! Evan!
He wanted to sing. He wanted to dance. He wanted to set off firecracker charms.
By the time he’d reached the portrait door, he had stuffed all of that happiness back inside where he hoped it didn’t show. Still, he couldn’t help hugging his pillow and whispering to it, “He kissed me.”
Remus was sure that this was the best year of his life. He should have known that the careful balance couldn’t last.
Towards summer, some of Evan’s talk became speeches, as he ventured into the political spaces that they had always carefully talked around. “There’s going to be big changes. Wizards are going to reclaim their birthright. But it’s going to get worse before it gets better. You have to chop down a tree to make a wand.” Remus felt no need to reply, though he felt that he was losing something. He had thought they had an unspoken agreement not to discuss some things.
Evan didn’t let it rest. “Remus, I have an invitation. He needs strong wizards, ones with pride in who they are. And well, I know you worry about someone in your family, the werewolf. You, you made me change how I think about werewolves. I’ve been working to convince him, and if you come with me, you can help him see it too. I think he’s got room for an alliance with weres. He’s considering a meeting with Fenrir. If you come, this is your chance to help them. You could make a difference.”
Remus knew he wouldn’t go. He didn’t tell Evan he had no intention of going, that the meeting was everything he hated. That Fenrir was a monster. That he didn’t want Evan to go. There would be all next year to talk about it. They had infinite time for Remus to say what he needed to say. To be brave.
But Evan didn’t come back to Hogwarts the year after his O.W.L.s. There were no more quiet conversations under the stars. No more sweaty fumbles at night. No more chances to say the unsaid.
Remus never saw Evan again, though he heard about him often. As a member of the Order, Remus was neck deep in desperate plans and he saw his share of duels and dark magic; but somehow he always seemed to be somewhere else when Evan entered the fray. Sometimes friends told him they’d seen Evan fighting. They spoke about his skill with reluctant admiration. Remus’ feelings were more complex. He dreaded the next time he would face Evan over a drawn wand, but he also wished he could see him one more time. He never got that wish though.
Yes, when Alastor asked him to identify the fallen Death Eater who had died fighting him, Remus told him the body was Evan Rosier. It wasn’t though. Nothing that still could ever be Evan Rosier.