Something in the family felt appropriate for Evander, because it was safe and traditional. Alfred had no desire to press for details there. He assumed Alfred would be out of the running, and probably Barclay, too. Whatever wisdom their father had imparted to the two of them during his life, the audacious manner of his death had probably sullied the legacy in Evander's book. He'd want a nice safe name, Alfred thought, something that brooked no chance at adventure — not that names were telling in this regard, of course, since Alfred himself had started out life with nothing more prestigious than John.

Evander's faltering caught him off guard. It was not difficult to extrapolate what he might have been referring to; there were only so many things that could have been good cause for not getting ahead of oneself. Despite this, Alfred had a hard time believing it. It seemed wrong that something like that would have come up in this context, like how dream logic sometimes skipped right past the middle of a story. He wasn't sure if he found it more unbelievable that Evander wouldn't have told him about something so serious when it had happened, or that he would have said anything about it at all. A faltering sentence was hardly confiding secrets, but it still seemed unreal that Evander would have let him in on anything if he'd previously decided not to talk about it. This entire conversation could just as well not be happening, for all the sense it made — if he woke up next to Zelda in bed and discovered he'd imagined this whole thing, he wouldn't even have been surprised.

"August," he replied. "You, uhm — want some coffee?" he asked, apparently having forgotten that he was the guest and not the host in this scenario. Coffee after dinner and before dessert was the sort of thing people did when they had company over, and it seemed to Alfred to provide a fitting way to slide back towards something mundane and normal, because it didn't feel very appropriate to launch into a discussion of baby names, but he felt even less up to the task of interrogating what Evander had just said.

---

No wonder that Alfred could not fathom anything to say about that, since Evander couldn’t fathom why he had said it. He hadn’t meant to, of course – but he couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t been plaguing his thoughts. And he didn’t dare bring it up with Caroline, since things had been so fraught between them when it happened, and Caroline already thought he worried too much, he knew, but... well, perhaps when one bottled up a little too much worry, it tended to leak out at the cap.

His brother, mercifully, said nothing. This convinced Evander that Alfred hadn’t understood, or hadn’t really been listening in the first place – which both confirmed equally timeworn opinions of his brother’s character – and this derision made him feel markedly better.

So – “September, ours,” Evander mustered, in his relief (and even if he couldn’t stand the thought of Alfred’s child being the elder cousin of the pair, he would be pleased as long as they were not in direct competition as yearmates at Hogwarts). And: “Please,” he added, of the coffee, not because he actually wanted any; but because coffee, as much as anything could, felt like an appropriate escape from this conversation for them both.

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