Disclaimer: Not JKR. Hopefully you don't care.
A/N: In case it helps, I'd like to point out that once I've established an explanation for a character's thoughts and motivations, I might not ever repeat it again. Sometimes characters will go over and over something in their minds, if I think it's necessary for them, but at other times I count on your mad reading skillz to recollect and connect from chapter to chapter. I'm pretty intransigent that way.
December 30, 1976
It was dark when the train pulled into King's Cross Station.
Lily had never taken the train down to London on September 1st; she and her parents and Petunia had always driven. In fact, they'd always gone down on the last day of August and spent the night in London, since the trip was so far. She had sometimes complained about having traverse half the country to get to the school train (especially in company with her sister), only to go back up through her own shire and onward to Scotland. Why couldn't they just drive up to Hogsmeade from home? It would have cut the trip in half. As an adult she understood—you couldn't have hundreds of Muggles driving through the streets of Hogsmeade; she'd been stupid even to think of it—but more than a couple of times, she wished she lived in the south. Especially since Petunia always made it a dreadful two days.
She had never gone down to London with just Sev, the way she was doing today. And they weren't headed to Hogwarts today. They were going to London so Lily could put him in St. Mungo's.
The train ride took about three hours, which provided Lily with enough time to inform Severus in categorical terms how daft his amazingly daft plan was. But the infuriating git only half-listened with an expression of polite boredom while reading first a copy of the Yorkshire Post and then an old Rolling Stone magazine with Led Zeppelin on the cover.
The irony of now badgering Sev about his plan to evade the Death Eaters, when five of her years ago she had been badgering him about his plan to enter the Death Eaters, was not lost on Lily.
"I had forgotten a great deal of this happening," Severus said, folding the newspaper away.
"Well, it's been a long time." Lily flipped through the Rolling Stone, but nothing in it really interested her. She only knew Led Zeppelin because Sirius had listened to them. He'd tried explaining what he called "the artistry" to her, but Lily had found technical discussions of music only slightly more interesting than Quidditch. What had amused her most was the idea of a pure-blood boy from a family whose motto was Always Pure explaining the intricacies of Muggle rock to a Muggle-born witch.
"How d'you think we'll do in school?" she asked. "I wonder if I remember anything about Herbology . . . "
Severus was folding the creases in the paper so finely, she thought he might tear it down the middle. Something about the movement made a little warning light blink on in her head. But all he said was, "I imagine your Charms work will stun Flitwick."
"And your Potions old Sluggy. Sev, why are you trying to destroy that paper?"
"I am simply trying to be tidy," he said, laying down the paper with care on the table they'd commandeered.
For a few moments she fiddled with the magazine, trying to figure out what he wasn't telling her. She watched him—or his profile—but the monstrous curve of his nose gave nothing away. He simply sat with his hands folded on the Formica top and his face turned toward the darkening window. The deepest point of the sky was the color of a new bruise, paling in strips toward the horizon, which shone icy blue above the shadowed ground with the last light of the sun.
"You're going back to school, aren't you?" she asked slowly.
When Severus didn't answer right away, she knew her suspicion was right on the mark. She found that she was doing to the magazine what he'd done to the newspaper, pinching her fingers along the creases, and dropped it to the table.
"Sev!" she whispered.
His eyes cut toward her, but he didn't move from his prim, simple posture. "I had not decided," he said, as if she'd asked him whether he wanted to get curry for lunch or fish and chips.
"Sev, how can you just not go to school?"
"By not going," he said. "Quite easy, really."
"But—but what about your—tests?" It sounded lame even to her.
"If you mean how will I obtain employment without graduating, I'm sure I could figure out a way," he said. "But strictly speaking, I may not live that long."
A chill blew through her—all the way down into her soul, it felt like. "Severus Snape," she said, her voice half a whisper, "if you are feeling suicidal, you can find someone else to assist you in popping off." When he didn't say anything, she almost gasped. "Is that—is that what this is about? Getting me to hex you—to put you in the—are you trying to—"
"No," he said, sharp and hard. "I am not asking you to murder me."
"Aren't you? Because this curse, this curse you want me to do to you, it can kill, Severus."
He did not answer right away, but his eyes had begun to glitter strangely again. Lily's stomach clenched. He said:
"I would not think Dumbledore invented that curse to be kind. Tell me about the counter-curse."
"I will if you tell me what you're planning to do about school," she insisted. When he gave her an impatient look, she gave him a stubborn one right back, as if to say, Well?
He sighed, sounding irritated. She resisted the urge to roll up the magazine and thwack him. "It seems particularly pointless for me to return. For one thing, I was a professor for seventeen years, if you will remember."
"Oh." Lily blinked. "Oh . . . Lord, that'll be awkward, won't it?"
"All I need do is slip up and call Minerva by her first name. I am accustomed to giving detentions, not serving them."
"You call her 'Minerva'?" she said, awed. "She was in the Order and I didn't dare call her that."
"It is difficult to maintain personal distance from someone when you've seen them napping in a pool of sunlight. And when you've spent years taunting one another over the Quidditch cup—we'd despise Filius and Pomona whenever they won it—which wasn't much," he said with faint smugness.
Lily tried and found it easy imagine Severus gloating about Slytherin's taking the Quidditch cup, and Professor McGonagall flexing her claws at him. It would have been in the staff lounge, and the other professors would be there, maybe with essays for marking . . . did they read them out loud to each other, mocking the particularly woolly ones? Did they swap stories of points they'd taken for this stupid transgression or that one? And now he was going to have to go back to taking instructions from those people, from being on a level with the Heads of House, a peer, to being a student . . .
"Wait, does that mean you were Head of Slytherin?"
"I was. Really, it was dreadful," he added. "My students bothered me incessantly. The things adolescent pure-blood girls get up to would make your hair curl." He shuddered. "Merlin, I hate teenagers," he muttered to himself.
And to go from a position of absolute authority to being subject to the authority of more than two dozen people . . . Severus wasn't even a prefect.
She studied him, biting her lip. He wasn't looking at her; she didn't think he was looking at anything inside the train. There was an almost . . . faraway glaze on his face, as if he were looking back into the past, into those memories. He'd said to her, "Hogwarts was my home." Not 'is' but 'was' . . .
What was he thinking?
"I can see why you don't want to go back," she said, watching him carefully. "I'm not even that thrilled about it, and school's not so far back from me."
"I don't merely not want to go back; I dread the possibility." The expression of consternation that followed a split second later told her he hadn't meant to admit that. "But it is not just the students. I don't have confidence in my ability to act . . . unobtrusively. I have forgotten too much what I was like." He fell silent then, returning his gaze to the window.
Lily thought back to her own school days . . . and realized with a sickening jolt something that had not previously occurred to her, because she was some sort of absolute idiot: if she went back to Hogwarts, she was going to be around James and Remus and Sirius and Peter every single day. She was going to go to class with kids she knew were going to grow up to be Death Eaters. She was going to eat breakfast with people who had been dead to her. And she was going to have to pretend that everything was normal.
She had been concentrating just on getting from one day to the next; hiding everything from Mum and Petunia, trying to understand what had happened to her and Severus; and then pushing everything but this Death Eater nonsense out of her mind in order to deal with it, because it wasn't nonsense, it was a dark, haunting presence in their future, close enough to touch . . .
"Severus . . . "
A tired-looking Muggle with a red nose and a briefcase came through the train car door with a hiss of hydraulics, shifting down the aisle to the seat behind hers. She got up and slid around the Formica-topped table onto the ugly-patterned cloth seat next to Sev, who looked startled for a second—but then it vanished beneath his Occlumency, like a fish darting beneath the surface of a lake.
"Sev, how deep in this Death Eater thing were you at this point?" she asked, keeping her voice low.
Severus looked at her along his cheekbones. He had gone quite still—moving beneath the surface of his Occlumency, she knew, to that place where emotions were quiet.
"I was meeting the Dark Lord on a personal recommendation, Lily."
Whether it was the versatility of his practiced voice, his words or the idea, Lily felt cold down to her bones. It wasn't because of who he'd been, because that boy was as gone as if he were dead; she knew that absolutely. She felt cold because of what it meant for Severus . . .
For the first time, she saw his insistence that she hurt him to be a mark of determination to get out of this Death Eater thing alive. She remembered Sirius, when Regulus had died from defecting, trying to look hard and uncaring, but his eyes hadn't glinted, they had shone all over; the kind of shine you only got when you were trying not to cry. "Got in and couldn't take it . . . but you don't leave the Death Eaters . . . not on your own two feet, at any rate . . . " He'd smoked cigarette after cigarette, until Lily hadn't been able to smell that sickly imprint of smoke without thinking of Sirius and Regulus, whom she'd only ever seen from a distance in the halls of Hogwarts.
"Sev, is it true that Death Eaters who defect . . . " She had to bring herself to say it. She'd fought them, and she was going to be fighting them again; she would bet all her powers on that. "That they—"
"Death Eaters, yes." And she wished she wasn't grateful to him for cutting her off, but she was. "At this point I have not been Marked; I haven't even met the Dark Lord. When I miss his meeting, he will simply write me off as useless. It is Lucius and the others I will have to answer to, and they won't kill me."
"What will they do?" Her fingers had crept onto his arm and were digging in, the stiff, sharp follicles of the woolen coat she'd bought him piercing beneath her fingernails.
"Nothing I can't survive."
Tears pricked at her eyes, because he wasn't being sarcastic. "Is this part of why you don't want to go back to school?"
"It would be unpleasant," he said, looking out the window once again. "But I am used to . . . that sort of thing."
To being targeted . . . bullied . . . hated, whispered her personal dementor. And—oh God, at this time James and Sirius were still bullying him. The memory was like a solid punch to her gut. She couldn't watch that. For a long time after she'd sunk into their unit of friendship, she'd been unable to reconcile those monsters who targeted Sev with the young men who were so kind and generous and loving . . . it was as if they were two different sets of people. But Sev had never seen that side of them because they'd never shown it to him, the same way he'd never shown anyone but her the side of him that had made her ache every day they were apart. And how he would feel, returning to all that, to them, to their treating him like that . . . How could she endure it . . .
She pressed her forehead against his shoulder. "Some afterlife this is," she whispered, her half-smile feeling painful on her face.
Severus did not reply for so long that she thought he wouldn't at all. Then he said, his voice quiet and—normal, not liquid or seductively dark or poisonously perfect; just normal, like the Sev she had heard since she was nine: "It has its moments."
She moved her eyes so that she could see his face, but he'd turned it away again, toward the window. The scattered lines of his reflection lay over the glass, patchy against the darkness. She could see the washed-out red of her hair folded over her shoulder on one side, against his arm on the other.
"Yeah," she said, keeping her voice quiet in the space around them. "It does." She moved her cheek slightly, to get it more comfortable against his shoulder. "If it hadn't—if you weren't here . . . if you weren't I'd have gone mad. I couldn't have made it through this."
"You'd have survived," he said, turning his face away scantly more. She wanted to touch his chin, nudge him to look back at her, but she didn't have the courage. "You are strong."
"Survived, maybe. But you're the only reason I have any hope."
His chest hitched—just a bit, so slight she might not have noticed it on the other side of the table.
"A pretty dim hope," he said, his voice as faint as if it were coming through a poorly tuned radio.
"Never in a million years."
In London's cold semi-darkness they prowled through back streets, wands out but low against their hips, until they found an abandoned lot nestled in between a graveyard of empty warehouses and a broken-down old neighborhood. A single white house with vacant dark windows that reminded Lily of Severus' Occluded eyes stood at the end of the overgrown lot, whose asphalt was cracked with weeds.
"This place?" Lily said, shivering in her coat. It was not so much the wind, since the warehouses blocked it to the left and the tall brick houses to the right, but there was something so . . . desolate about it. Mr. Snape's funeral had been two hundred times more cheerful than this place.
"Yes," Severus said, his back to her as he looked it over. His movements were precise, cautious, careful. She envied the way he could move so silently; every step of hers seemed to crack into the heavy silence. "No one will run us out of here, and I don't trust the warehouses. We will be safe, Lily," he added, glancing at her face. "Lucius won't search Muggle London. These precautions are so that no one sees us until we wish for them to."
Sure, they were very totally safe. Until she hurt him. "Well, if we're done scouting, let's get in," she said, scrubbing her hands over her upper arms, "before I turn to a block of ice and that's our plan shot to hell."
They threaded out of the back alleys, Severus moving ahead of her but close, navigating them around voices that drifted occasionally around corners, so they never saw anyone, nor anyone them. Out on the larger street, where traffic lights blinked on and off and cars puttered, they found a pub hazy with smoke and stuffed with laughter, most of it drunken. They stayed there till last call, cigarette smoke soaking into their clothes and hair, Lily trying to find something stupid to talk about, because sure enough, she was thinking of Sirius and Regulus again; Led Zeppelin and the way Remus' eyes used to crease when Sirius lit a cigarette with a snap of his fingers.
They checked into the first hotel they found. Only the O in its sign was still working, but its windows shone patches of light down the sidewalk, which was how they found it; the only thing lit on that dark side street down from the pub. The hotel reminded her of Sev's house: cramped, dark, with cheap, peeling paint on the walls.
Their room had two beds, of course, rickety old twins. Some unidentifiable thing must have occurred to make Sev nervous in the time between scouting the lot and getting to the room; he was obviously in jitters, moving about the room as if every piece of crappy furniture was made of glass and twitching at loud noises on the street, like a pub-ful of drunks stumbling home. And his jitters were affecting her; or perhaps it was the desolation of the room, with its press-wood furnishings stuck with peeling contact paper to resemble wood, and the walls with funny stains, and the water that ran rusty in the sink for a couple of seconds after you turned the knob in the loo down the hall. Aside from her dread of tomorrow she felt fluttery.
The drunks were all gone home by the time they put lights out to try and sleep, but the radiator rattled like an arthritic rhinoceros, and her bed was so uncomfortable that she kept rolling over to find a good spot, except there wasn't any.
"Lily." Sev's voice coming out of the darkness made her feel very odd, sort of prickly and hot all over, as though nettles burst under her skin. "Do you want to switch?"
"What?" She realized she was whispering, which was stupid. "Switch what?"
"Beds. You keep twisting."
"Am I keeping you up? I'm sorry—"
"I've slept on worse, but this one might be slightly better if you—"
"It's fine," she said. "I'm fine. I'm just—I don't think I could sleep if it was the feather bed of the Queen of Sheba."
At first she thought he wasn't going to reply. She lay cramped on her left side, trying to ignore a spring poking at her. The bed probably creaked when she moved.
A moment later, she knew it did when Sev's bed launched into a symphony of squeaks, creaks and groans as he got up. She heard him shifting around the room in the darkness. When he opened the door to the hall and grainy yellow light washed in, she sat up, squinting.
"Sev, what—"
"I'll return in a moment or two." He went out.
Wondering what on earth he was up to, she turned on the lamp between the beds. Surreptitiously she poked his mattress, but it was every bit as bad as hers.
When the door clicked open, she looked up to find he'd brought two blankets with him, although she didn't know why, because the beds already had blankets.
"Up," he said, pointing at her bed. Nonplused, she rolled out of it; he peeled back her covers and sheets and stuffed the blankets underneath them, atop the mattress. He had brought her padding.
"Where's yours?" she said. "One of those should be for you."
"I don't need it."
"You should have something! These beds are a nightmare— use the duvet, there—"
She wreaked the same havoc on his bed, folding up the duvet and trapping it beneath the sheets. She lay down again, experimenting, and found it was just shy of decent. A symphony of springs wasn't digging into her anymore, at least.
"That's pretty brilliant," she said as he moved to turn out the light.
"Hardly," he said, clicking it off before she could see his face.
She wondered if he had thought of it on the spur of the moment, or if it was an old trick.
December 31st, 1976
Severus was up long before dawn; an old habit that lingered after following a school schedule for so many years, and from living down in a dungeon, where the walls grew so cold and damp you woke up from shivering. He dressed with the lights still off, and after penning a sightless note to Lily in the dark escaped the hotel to find a place with coffee, at the very least. As it happened, a tiny shop on the corner was already open, no doubt used to serving the rush of businessmen plodding to work in the dark of winter's pre-dawn.
He bought two cups of something hot and strong-smelling, and fresh pastries, took them back through the cold and up the creaking stairs that smelled of wet carpet. He found Lily sitting at the table in the wretched hotel room, her hair unbrushed and her eyes puffy, squinting over his note in the light that spilled down from the table lamp. She had opened the curtains, but the sky behind her was charcoal grey.
"The forecast for today is overcast and cold," he said, putting the coffee down in front of her, along with the white paper bag of pastries.
"Surprise, surprise." She smiled at him, not perfunctory but weak. She looked tired. He shouldn't have let her insist this place was fine, last night.
Or perhaps her fatigue came from what he was going to make her to do him.
Checkout time was eleven AM. Until then they stayed in the room that smelled no different from the stairwell, drinking the coffee and eating the pastries, because at least the room had a radiator, sputtering damp heat. Since he'd paid in full last night, Severus let Lily instruct him to leave the key on the room's table and simply walk out, past the bored boy not-so-surreptitiously reading a Hustler behind the peeling front desk.
Outside the decrepit hotel, traffic on the streets was erratic; many people seemed to have the holiday off. Their bright faces and laughter and pleasant mania felt like a surreal contrast to Severus' state of mind, as if feelings inside his head were being reflected in grotesque and garish shapes on the people around him.
He kept a close eye on Lily, making sure she was never more than an arm's length away. If she had to stop to let a group of manic shoppers clomp by, he stopped on the other side. If she had to detour around a bicycle rack or a bus station or a traffic obstruction, he met her on the other side. He wouldn't instigate a touch, but she kept taking his hand, and he let her, even though it made the bright lights and sounds of London seem even more grotesquely vivid.
They wound back through the alleys of Brixton until they found the gap in the bricks that opened to the lot. It was deserted, as he'd thought. The sounds of human traffic didn't even filter back to it.
Not wanting to court the possibility of being spotted in the city, they had agreed to spend most of the day in the house. Severus didn't want Lily to curse him too early, just in case the spell went horribly wrong and she had to reverse it immediately . . . or in case it simply went horribly wrong. If this curse was Dumbledore's, and if even the Dark Lord had barely been able to undo it, he knew St. Mungo's Healers wouldn't have a chance of reversing it. All his hope had to rest on Lily.
He hoped he had managed not to communicate that fact to her. He was far better at shredding confidence than boosting it.
They were lucky it wasn't raining, since half of the white house's roof and upper floor had been ripped away, opening the house to the cold winter sky. As the Muggle weatherman on the coffee shop's television had predicted, New Year's Eve was overcast, turning everything in the house to monochrome. The floor he and Lily walked over was matted with white-gray sheetrock dust and debris, bird and rat droppings, shadows of old liquor stains and things even less sanitary.
The place made last night's hotel look like King Solomon's palace. It was good, he told himself, to visit these places with Lily. It would be a good reminder to him, when she went back to Potter, that this only was the sort of shit Severus could bring within her reach: Death Eater threats; miserable markers of human civilization; fatigue and despair; the force of having to do the last thing you wanted in order to survive.
He sensed that he should be locking her up rather than dragging her out into the open, forcing a wand into her hand, and ordering her to curse him. But she was not a child, and this was very unfortunately part of growing up. Lily had been married, she'd become a mother, she'd endured months of fear hiding away with her son; and now Severus was going to have to teach her a lesson he despised, perhaps most for its truth: there were times when all you could do was go on because you had to.
Either she would learn that lesson today, or she would balk and sit the fight out from then on. Severus didn't know which was his hope, or even which hope was more selfish.
Lily was wearing her green jumper today. While it made her look lovely, even with her hair dull and messy and her eyes bruised from lack of sleep, he hoped it wasn't going to be the last thing he ever saw. He was not as confident about this as he'd pretended to her. He kept remembering Avery, the way the Dark Lord had shrugged and said, "Really, Severus, you do not think we should simply let him die? Is a man who falls to the curse of a Mudblood witch is worth saving?" But it was the simplest way to accomplish what they wanted; of that he was certain. The only emotion the Death Eaters and their applicants would feel for him after today was contempt. There would be no awkward questions, only disgust; they'd have no need for a wizard who could be so easily incapacitated by someone they barely allotted human status. And one thing you learned, after almost thirty years as a Slytherin and a spy, was that simple was always what you needed. Overthinking was an unproductive form of worry.
He and Lily sat on old crates probably dragged in by neighborhood boys who'd used this place long ago for drinking and literal pissing contests and smoking joints; but not even they had been here in a while, because the weeds were all untrammeled and the dust on the floor undisturbed. He and Lily nibbled at cold food they'd bought from Tesco on the way there, Severus forcing himself to eat it, because his body would probably need it to fight off the curse. He wondered if the curse would hurt him more than it had Avery. Was it more painful when your heart was already a morass of self-loathing, or did its power deepen with the desire of the caster to hurt you?
Lily spent most of the day trying to talk in a steady voice about Hogwarts, as if he'd agreed to go back there after all. He suspected she was doing it to force herself to believe in normalcy. The urge to dip into her mind and learn what she really thought, really felt, was strong, but he resisted it.
And anyway, he didn't want to see her thinking about the boy or James fucking Potter or the green light or himself in his Death Eater mask looking down on her in the burning field after he'd saved her from dying in agony.
Around half past three the sky began to darken as the sightless sun started to retreat, melting even the muted colors away until the world looked like a faded old Muggle photograph. Lily rustled around in her coat pocket and produced his empty pencil jar, perhaps to do her star lights—but then she handed the jar over to him.
"Go on," she said, her smile hard to see in the fading light, but bright in his memories. "Did you do them yet?"
Severus had, but he didn't want her to see them. "It's the same branch as Patronus magic," she'd said; so of course his stars had turned out to be the exact same as hers, a network of golden lights. He had never shown her his Patronus. He had a feeling the stars wouldn't give as much away as the silver doe, but he didn't want to take the chance, even if it was only the formation of her surprise.
"I haven't been able to do them," he lied. In fact, they had come easily, thinking of Lily beaming at him when he told her it was brilliant, of Lily in the glow of her stars, of her looking up from her violet stationery and saying, Because you're my best friend. "I was never as good as you at Charms."
Her face fell just a touch with disappointment, but he grabbed the urge to cast the spell and take her slight unhappiness away, and strangled it to death. It was better than her pity, her guilt, her one day saying, Severus . . . you know me and James . . .
She pulled out her wand and made the stars glow to life in the jar. Then she capped it and set it on the ground between them. For a while they were silent. At some point the crate she was sitting on had drifted close to him, so that her leg kept brushing his when she moved. Lily was a restless person.
"We should do it soon," he said, watching the stars swirl around each other in the jar.
"Can we wait a bit longer?" she asked in a tiny voice.
He could force her to curse him, he could make her spend a miserable night and day in two separate shit holes, he could even refuse to perform the charm she so hoped he would; but he had his limits, apparently, and it was that voice. So they waited.
At full dark, a light clicked on outside the house, across the lot. Lily went rigid. Severus got up quietly to peer out the half-naked window, its glass broken into jagged teeth; but it was only the floodlight, same as last night, an orange lamp high on a pole above the warehouses, turning the lot outside into a network of shadows.
Spying had given Severus an exacting internal chronometer, and one hour later he decided it was time. It was growing too cold out there, even with Lily's star-lights to warm them. Severus was pretty sure she had meant for them to be held close in to the body, and he would rather be hexed into madness than cast his own and show her the one thing he would never tell her.
Lily did not deny him, that time. She got up without a word, taking out her wand—but then she just stood there, looking at him in silence.
"All right," he said, crossing his arms tight across his chest, hoping he just looked like he was cold. "Repeat to me your instructions." God, he was treating her like a student. It didn't help that she looked like one. It was going to be even worse if she managed to get him back at school.
"I'm to curse you, then Apparate with you to the alley out back of St. Mungo's," she recited, with an expression eloquent of her opinion of these instructions. "They're going to ask me what happened to you, but I'm to tell them I don't know, I didn't see who it was, and I didn't hear what he cast."
"And you're to stick to that, no matter what they say or threaten," he reminded her, hearing the sharpness in his voice. Apparently he couldn't help himself. "They will have no proof it was you, and without proof—"
"They can't do anything dreadful to me. I get it, Sev," she said, but her face and voice were troubled, not angry.
"And what else?" he said, to spur her along, before she lost her nerve.
"If they can't figure out how to negate it themselves, I'm to set off this—" She pulled out one of the ersatz Decoy Detonators he'd made before coming down here; a model off one of the wretched Weasley twins' products. In all fairness, they had been brilliant inventors . . . to anyone who hadn't suffered their wretched tomfoolery in a Potions classroom for seven years. Severus could never hear the names 'Fred' or 'George' or 'Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes' without a shudder of revulsion.
"—and block them out of your room and heal you myself."
"Correct," he said. When she'd told him the counter-curse—Ignosco—he hadn't been able to restrain his disdain and loathing; but the guilty look on Lily's face had said she thought the same. "I forgive"—that was very much the work of Albus Dumbledore, Severus had to admit: creating a curse that made you die of remorse, with a counter-curse of bloody forgiveness.
"Might as well get started," he said, letting no sign of his own loathing for this plan show through. "We don't want to be late."
Lily nodded. He wondered if she had looked like this when walking into battle. The closest thing he could compare to her expression was the one she'd worn the first morning of O.W.L.s, when he'd been afraid she was going to show everyone her breakfast in reverse.
They drifted apart, across the trash-spattered floorboards. Severus realized he was moving warily, as one expecting an attack. How fitting. Lily's every step was stiff, as if she were made of tin and her joints had rusted over.
She turned toward him, her jaw set, her face grim and determined. When she stretched out her arm, he could see it shaking across the room in the faded, moon-tinted light pouring in through the hole in the roof.
"Contrapasso," she called.
Nothing happened. Severus resisted the urge to do or say something insensitive.
"I think you have to want to do it a bit," he called back to her, apparently not able to resist hard enough.
Lily stared at him. He thought her hand on her wand tightened.
There was a long moment of silence; of nothing. He watched her across the room. Her wand arm was held out a bit from her body. A wind blew through a boarded-up hole behind her, slipping pieces of her hair into her eyes.
Then she raised her wand and pointed at him, as if she was aiming for his heart. He saw her lips move, but he didn't hear the curse, either because she had whispered it or because—
What he experienced was not pain; it was not anything so simple . . . it was the remorse he had felt at everything he had ever done that deserved it, so tightly compacted it hurt— everything he had hated himself for, everything he'd known he shouldn't have done; should have stopped, should have turned away from, should have stepped forward to do; shouldn't have thought, or felt, or believed, or wanted— The guilt, the compunction, the sorrow had always been there, at the back of his mind, in the bottom of his heart, but never fully acknowledged, always denied . . . but it could be denied no longer, and it was rising through him like a wildfire . . .
It happened in less than a moment, and yet he thought in some way it was slow, starting as a spark and then growing to consume him, scalding his veins, melting through his bones, flowing through his blood—
Somewhere in the distance, he thought he heard someone calling his name, sobbing.
To be continued. . .