Disclaimer: Not JKR, not making any money.

Chapter Warnings: Smoking, a bit of language, general darkness


Severus knocked on Lily's door. The flat was on the second floor of an old brick building, and the hallway was drafty and cold. Severus tucked his hands into his coat and stomped his feet, trying to warm up.

"Who's there?" Her voice came drifting out from behind the door. Severus hesitated and for a moment almost lost his nerve entirely.

"Hello?" Her voice sounded closer, as if she were right on the other side of the door. Severus could hear music playing, something faint and sad.

He put his hand on his wand. Just in case.

"Lily," he said. "It's me. I mean - it's Severus."

No answer except the music. Severus closed his eyes. His heart pounded like he was scared. He pressed his head against the door as he spoke. "Lily," he said. "Are you - hurt? I saw what happened at the pub - it wasn't me, I swear it, but if you're still hurt, I think I can heal you."

The music stopped.

"How did you know about my arm?" Her voice was right there, he could tell, and if there hadn't been a door between them he would have been close enough to kiss her.

"I didn't," Severus said. "Until now. What's wrong with it?" A sudden, horrific thought dawned on him. "It hasn't fallen off, has it?"

"No." One heartbeat, another. "Will it?"

"I don't know. Let me in so I can see."

A long pause.

"Let you in? You think I'm that stupid?"

For fuck's sake. "Then come out into the hallway. I swear to you that I'm alone." I only saved your fucking life a week ago, you think you could give me the benefit of the dou-

The door swung open.

She had her wand out, but what caught Severus' attention was her arm, strapped across her chest, the bandages thick beneath the sleeve of her jumper. And she looked pale and drawn, her hair mussed as if she hadn't been sleeping.

Lily stuck her head into the hallway and looked down one end and then the other. Her wand trembled.

"I told you. Just me," Severus said.

"Why are you here?" Lily stepped back into her doorway.

Severus pointed at her arm.

"You said you didn't know about that."

"I thought you might be hurt. That curse - " He didn't look at her as he spoke, but down at the mud-encrusted hallway carpet. "It should have killed you."

"Then why didn't I die when you cast it?" Severus forced himself to look up. She wasn't pointing her wand at him, he realized. She had it out but she wasn't pointing it at him.

"Let me explain inside," he said.

She stared at him, her eyes fierce and bright despite the dark circles hollowing out her face. "Are you going to kill me?"

"No. Let me in."

Lily pressed her mouth into a tight thin line, but she stepped aside.

Her flat was small and tidy and cold. It smelled like cigarette smoke and lavender soap. Like her.

Lily closed the door behind him and stood beside it, her good arm dangling her wand at her side. Severus walked up to a scratched, rickety table and set down his briefcase, filled with with potion ingredients and a few notes scribbled on scraps of parchment.

"Let me see your arm," he said.

"Tell me why the curse didn't kill me."

Severus looked up at her. Her face was twisted with emotion - anger, maybe, fear, confusion. He thought about how she looked whenever she smiled.

He cast a protection ward, a small one, just enough to muffle their conversation. Lily didn't protest.

"I diluted it," he said.

"You what? Is that even possible?"

Severus hesitated. It is when you're the spell's creator. "Sometimes."

Lily held his gaze for a second or two. "Why did you -"

"Why do you think? They would've killed you. Bella Goodfellow." He hadn't meant to bring up the name, but sometimes his frustration came tumbling out like that anyway.

Lily looked away. "I didn't know anything about that when I went in - "

"Well, I'm not looking for an explanation. Fair enough? We both escaped with our lives."

Lily didn't say anything.

"What's wrong with your arm?"

Lily pushed her hair away from her face. For a moment he was afraid she would ask after more details about the Dolor curse, but she just shook her head and sighed. "It won't heal," she said. "It's bruised and - really quite gross-looking, honestly. And it hurts. I've been taking some Soothing potion and I've used about fifty healing spells on it. I even got some morphine off Petunia. No clue how she got it but - doesn't matter. It didn't help. Nothing did."

Severus frowned. "Take off your jumper."

Lily looked at him.

"I didn't mean - " Severus felt himself blushing, which infuriated him. "Look, I can't see it through the jumper, okay? Take off the bandages too."

And for a moment Lily's eyes sparkled, and he thought maybe she was going to laugh. She didn't. Instead, she unhooked the sling and pulled the jumper off her arm - slowly, carefully, occasionally hissing through her teeth. Severus thought he should offer help but doubted she would want him to touch her. At least she used her wand to unwind the bandages.

The sight of Lily's arm made Severus sick to his stomach.

"Is that where it hit you?" he asked, pointing at the red mark cracking across her skin. Forcing himself to look at it.

Lily nodded. "It bounced off the mirror. Fil - the healer who looked at it thought maybe that's why it didn't kill me."

Severus stared at the wound for a few moments, thinking. A rebound would have killed her; he'd designed the curse with that particular quality in mind. Of course, he couldn't tell Lily that. He shook his head. "No," he said. "I think it didn't kill you because of the diluted version I cast on you earlier. It acted as a -" he waved his hand, trying to remember the word - " a what is it? The Muggle thing. I got one as a baby."

"Inoculation?"

"Yes. An inoculation."

"Did you do it on purpose?"

Severus looked up, and her face was still serious but also suffused with a warmth and a kindness that he hadn't seen for a long time.

"No," he said. "I told you, I just wanted to trick my, uh, the Death Eaters." Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Happy accident."

Lily smiled. It wasn't the wide smile she used to give him in school, the one that made the whole world fill up with light, but it was still a smile, and Severus' heart fluttered.

He turned away from her and snapped open his briefcase, started pulling out vials and jars. "I'll need you to drink something," he said. "A mild euphoria elixir. It isn't Dark," he added, when she opened her mouth to speak.

"I was going to say I remember learning that in school." But her eyes sparkled again, and this time Severus smiled.

"Glad to see you retained some of my notes."

"Of course. I even mixed up a nightmare suppressant. All by myself."

There was a forced lightness in her voice that made Severus pause. "You're having nightmares?"

She didn't answer.

He pulled out a jar of euphoria elixir and turned toward her. Her face had gone pale and drawn again, and she picked at the hem of her jumper with her good hand. He wanted to ask about the nightmares but decided it could wait until after her arm was healed - assuming he was able to heal it. "Here," he said. "Drink half the bottle."

Lily sniffed the jar and then wrinkled her nose. But she drank the potion down in a couple of gulps.

"Oh," she said. "You always put peppermint in it, didn't you?"

Severus shrugged.

"Now what?"

"The counterspell." Severus pulled his wand out of his robe - for a moment he thought he saw Lily tense, but then he decided maybe it had only been his imagination. "Hold still," he said. "Hopefully this won't hurt too much."

"Too much?"

Severus didn't answer, just walked over beside Lily, beside her mauled and rotting arm, and rested the tip of his wand on the center of the flare of red. The euphoria elixir should counteract the despair, but he had nothing to give her for the pain -

Lily cried out, covered her hand with her mouth, but she held still, she didn't jerk away. Severus took a deep breath, and then he began to sing.

The language was Dark, although in truth it didn't sound the way you'd expect a Dark language to sound - Severus had always found the cadence more haunting than anything, beautiful in the way that mist and moonlight are beautiful.

Lily stared at him as he sang, biting down hard on her bottom lip, her eyes shining.

He knew he was hurting her. He almost stopped because of it, but when he turned his eyes back to her arm, the red had gone out of her skin, the spell drawn halfway into his wand, where he could keep it safe until he disposed of it - on some evergreen in a park somewhere, most likely. The tree would crack with rot and collapse into dust within a day or two

Severus's arm began to shake, and he forced his thoughts back on the spell - how long had he been holding it? Lily's eyes were gazed over, her expression soft: all the hallmarks of enchantment. Most of the red was gone out of her arm, but he wasn't sure how deep the curse had worked underneath her skin, and so although his fingers had gone numb and sweat was prickling along his spine, he sang as intensely as ever. He'd never held the spell this long before, he was sure of it, and now his thoughts were drifting away from him, memories unspooling like film, most of them terrible: here was his father, here were Black and Potter, here was his first victim as a Death Eater.

His wand dropped to the floor, made a noise like a thunder crack.

"Sev?" Lily's voice came drifting through the fog of the past. "Sev? What happened? I feel so - Sev!"

He felt her hand on his back.

"Look at me! Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." He lifted his head - it weighed about a thousand pounds, and his throat ached and his temple throbbed, but at least his memories had slipped back down into the darkness. "Could you just - give me a minute."

Lily was kneeling beside him, her expression still cloudy. "What did you do?"

Severus pulled away and stumbled toward her couch, ratty and threadbare, and sunk down into its thin cushions. He rubbed his forehead. Lily stood off to the side, her jumper still pushed up around her neck, revealing her now-healed arm, the smooth pale skin of the side of her stomach.

He could see the bottom part of her bra, as well, the strip of shiny white fabric.

"Does your arm hurt?" Severus asked, voice scratchy and rough. It hurt to speak.

Lily stared at him, looking confused. Then she blinked. Her expression crystallized. "No," she said. "No, it doesn't -" She lifted her arm up, pulled it across her chest. "It's gone. The bruising and the -" Her eyes came back to him. "You healed me." Then she slipped her arm back into her jumper.

Severus shrugged. Pain stabbed at the place between his eyes. "Told you," he said.

"God, Sev, what's wrong with your voice?"

"The spell - the singing -" He stopped. Her face had gone pale.

"Dark Arts," she whispered.

"A Dark counterspell, yes. It only drew from me." He closed his eyes to block out her anger - he couldn't deal with that now. Speaking exhausted him. "Not you."

There was no answer except for a long crackling pause, and then footsteps. Severus opened one eye, then the other, too exhausted to be wary, knowing he shouldn't let his guard down. But Lily had only gone over to the kitchenette area across the room, where she'd set a kettle to boiling on the narrow little stove. She pulled a few canisters out of the cupboard, a pair of mismatched teacups. All by hand. Something about that amused him, made the pain diminish slightly.

She brought the tea back over to the couch. Handed him one teacup - it was cracked, the flowers around the edge flaking. The tea smelled of lemon and some herb he didn't recognize, something green and musty. He didn't drink right away, just looked at Lily over the edge of the cup.

"I'm not going to poison you," she said.

Severus looked down at his tea. It was the color of river water.

"Go on. It'll help your throat."

Unlikely. But Severus drank anyway, and the warmth was a comfort if nothing else.

They drank in silence. Ice pinged against the windows. The radiator tucked away in the corner rattled and hissed.

"Thank you," Lily said.

Severus drained the last of his tea and set the cup on the floor. He didn't look at her.

"Not just for my arm," she said. "For the night at the Dog and Duck -" Her voice trailed away. "Thank you."

Something swelled up inside Severus, something bright and warm, like summer rain showers, the sun refracting off a thousand drops of water.

"I will never let you die," he said.

Lily lifted her head. Her hair fell around her shoulders. She opened her mouth, closed it.

"Why do you have nightmares?" Severus asked.

"What?" She didn't ask why he changed the subject - good. He didn't feel like explaining himself. Really, he wasn't entirely sure why he had said it.

"You said you made nightmare suppressant."

Lily picked up the teacups and carried them over to the sink.

"Does it work?" Severus asked. "The suppressant?"

The twinkle of ceramic against stainless steel. Lily walked back across the room, picked up a pack of cigarettes off a table near the window, lit one. She stood for a moment, cautious, smoke ringing around her head.

"Yes," she said. Then: "At first."

This is exactly what Severus expected.

"Had you ever seen someone die before?" he asked.

He realized too late that this was the wrong to question to ask. Lily's eyes went wide and she trembled and leaned up against the wall for support. But he needed to know - there were some maladies in the world the Dark Arts were better suited to than healing magic.

He began to try and explain himself, but Lily interrupted.

"No," she said. "Had you?"

Severus stopped. He should lie.

"Yes," he said.

Lily dragged deep on her cigarette. She knew, he thought. Of course she knew. You're a fucking Death Eater.

"Let me give you something," Severus said. "For the nightmares. Better than nightmare suppressant - it'll dull them down to insignificance. Lasts longer, too."

"Do you have nightmares?" she asked. "About the things you've done?"

This time Severus did lie.

"Sometimes." He did not mention his Occlumency, the walls he built for himself inside his own head. Maybe if he didn't have that, there would be nightmares. It was impossible to say.

"And you have done things - you've hurt people - "

"I'm not talking about this." Severus stood up and the movement made his head scream, made his spine twitch. Images flashed through his head: the Ministry man shrieking in agony, the nameless woman lying slumped on the floor. He ignored them best he could and rummaged through the briefcase until he found the potion he was looking for - a potion to manipulate the mind. He shoved the bottle at Lily, who looked at it the way she might a wasp, or a poisonous snake.

"Get that away from me," she hissed.

Severus scowled at her. He slammed the bottle onto the table, yanked out a parchment and quill, and scribbled the spell instructions. "I know how talented you are at stealing my notes," he said, and he could feel the nastiness in his voice but he didn't care. "I'd suggest you take extra care with these."

"I'm giving that to the Order," she said.

"Oh? And what will brave, valiant James Potter say when he hears you can't stomach a few dreams -"

Lily picked up the ashtray and threw it. Ash arced out like a comet's tail, silvery in the winter light. Severus kept writing. He didn't even flinch. The ashtray missed by half a meter and shattered on the wall behind him.

"At least James Potter isn't a murderer," she said.

Severus froze, quill hovering above the parchment. Those words hurt him in a way he had thought no longer possible. Rage flared like a sunspot inside his head, but he kept his mouth shut and scrawled out the rest of the instructions, the letters thick with blotted ink.

When he pulled out his wand, Lily paled, but he only used it to cut away a lock of his hair.

"Don't lose that," he said, dropping his hair on the parchment. "I doubt you'll deign to come fetch another. Wouldn't want to be seen with greasy little Snivellus, would you?"

Lily suddenly looked ashamed. Severus grabbed his briefcase, for once not caring if the bottles broke and the ingredients spilled, and stomped towards the door. His head had started to hurt again. His throat felt like fire.

When he stepped out into the hallway, he thought he heard crying.