Alfred wasn't surprised when Evander walked in so much as annoyed; he'd been expecting him to come sooner or later, after all, but he (in true Evander fashion) had picked the worst possible moment for it. They'd been having a moment — a sort of sad and hopeless moment, it was true, but a moment nonetheless. Evander knew the answer to that question before he'd asked, but Alfred assumed he'd asked it because he wanted to be lied to. He wanted to be assured that nothing was going on and there was no context here that he was missing, even though that was obviously not the case, and then he wanted to move on as though nothing had happened — as though this moment that he'd interrupted had never existed in the first place.

"Yes," he said, defiantly, while he simultaneously heard Zelda say Not at all.

Whoops. She was willing to play this game, apparently, that he had no patience for. That made sense, all things considered. Zelda worked for the Ministry, and lived in Hogsmeade during the entire year, and (at least by comparison to Alfred) she was conventional, and appropriate. These things mattered to her, because they had to. While normally he would have had no trouble respecting that, he had almost died today, and... well, he just wasn't in the mood to pretend to care about what Evander thought, at the moment, or what anyone thought. Not when this might be the last chance he had to hold her. His grip on Zelda tightened imperceptibly, signalling his reluctance to let her go, no matter who was looking.

But she wasn't his to hold on to, at the end of the day, and she was willing to pretend Evander hadn't interrupted anything. What right did he have to stop her? With a sigh, he let go and moved both of his hands to the bed behind him, leaning back on his arms as he turned a sulky glance towards the floor. No one had forced him to move his arm away, but he felt forced, and he was frustrated — with Evander, with the situation, with Zelda's family, with life.

"This is my brother Evander," he told Zelda, though she probably already knew that either from meeting him at the Ministry or at the very least from context (no one else would be bursting into his hospital room). To Evander, he continued, "This is Zelda Fisk. She's working on the Voyager and she saved my life today. And before that," he said, glancing briefly at Zelda as though she might stop him — though, of course, she had no idea what he was about to say. "I tried to marry her, only — it might surprise you to know — I'm not particularly marriageable — so that didn't work out."

This was probably not helping anything, but at the moment Alfred couldn't really bring himself to care. The message he was trying to get across was: Yes, Evander, you were bloody interrupting.