rabastan lestrange headcanon
evan rosier / relations — specific to @warreurs
rabastan has very few meaningful relationships in his life and even fewer people he’d call friends. rodolphus and bella are family (and so eventually too is regulus). friends are incredibly rare for him, especially at school. he had violent outbursts constantly (not because he wanted to, but because he has an debilitating phobia of human touch and being in a room with ten people or more makes him intensely ill, so school was torture). the first friend he ever made was evan rosier, who he met when he was eleven. they were in the same year, and were assigned the same dormatory at school.
rabastan hated him at first. he thought evan was pushy and annoying. rabastan had no socialization in his childhood past the age of six and he didn’t remember it later so it may as well have never happened. his only human contact largely came from his older brother. for the first year, evan could barely get near him and rabastan, who lashed out violently (out of his own control, but still) the few times evan tried to touch him early on. rabastan assumed from personal experience that he would leave, but he didn’t. he stayed persistent. he wanted to be rabastan’s friend.
bastan really didn’t know what that meant for a long time either. he had delayed speech development from being so isolated and talking was hard, but evan never made fun of him for it. he learned some sign (rabastan’s first language) for him and communicating got easier.
it wasn’t until they were twelve and rabastan killed his mother, though, that they really became friends. it had been an accident and got covered up, but rabastan confided in him what he’d done. evan was delighted, and rabastan, for the first time ever, felt seen and understood. that moment came to define their relationship later on.
rabastan has never had a normal relationship with anyone, and evan is no exception. as they grew older, their feelings for one another shifted toward romantic and vaguely sexual, but that level of contact is too much for rabastan for most of his early life so it was more just mutual pining. evan, however, was always sleeping around and in one relationship or another, so there was never a definition for what was between them. evan was also much more aware of it than rabastan, who has no concept of what relationship lines are like, as many of his get blurred in different respects.
it’s not until rabastan’s father yanks him out of school that he really understands what he means to evan. he disappeared for a year and evan (unbeknownst to him at the time) continued to look for him. when rodolphus eventually killed their father and let rabastan out of the room he’d been locked in, evan decided, essentially, to move in and be there with him full time. he’d had enough of life without him.
the war started soon thereafter and both of them joined the death eaters young, which bonded them in more ways than they could’ve imagined. they’re both efficient killers, and unrepentant ones, who have no shame or remorse for their actions. it’s early into the war when rabastan realizes he loves evan and finally has a name for it.
their relationship stays more or less the same until evan’s death at the end of the war, and rabastan was devastated. it was the second major death of one of his few trusted people (regulus being the assumed first). his death sent rabastan into a downward spiral, and so he did not object to his siblings’ plan to torture the longbottoms despite knowing they’d likely be caught. he stopped caring, since without rod and bella, he’d have nothing left to lose.
evan is, even after his release from azkaban, still one of the most important people in his life. he hallucinates him occasionally when he gets back on the self-medicating habit he had during the first war to manage his haphephobia, and is one of the few consistent hallucinations. he never stops mourning him or missing him, and never quite forgives moody for killing him.