Disclaimer: Not JKR, not making any money

Chapter Warnings: Language

Two and a half weeks passed. The world stayed frozen and grey, and snow fell on into February. More and more, Lily slept at Severus's house.

She was sleeping now, tucked away beneath the pile of blankets on his bed. There had been dreams last night, nightmares filled with green light and ash and blood. He'd gotten a flash of them, inadvertently, when she woke up screaming and he moved to comfort her and her eyes locked into his.

The fear had been so thick he nearly choked on it.

She eventually fell asleep after casting Lumos on her heart, but even then Severus could tell that her sleep was fitful and strained. She tossed and turned beside him on the bed, and the glow in her skin was too bright in the darkness. He had lain on his back for close to an hour, staring up at the ceiling and listening to her whimper in her sleep, when it occurred to him that he hadn't felt the faint, insistent tug of the Dark manipulation draught he'd made for her before Christmas. He'd gotten used to it, that sensation pulling at the edge of his thoughts, and now it was gone. It'd been gone for - what? The last few days? Longer? He couldn't remember.

She ran out. He wondered why she didn't say anything. Still afraid of the Dark Arts, probably. Willing to use it even after the battle at Dankworth Manor, but not so willing to ask him for more.

Severus crawled out of bed and dressed. It was still dark outside, but when he walked into his study he could hear the rumbles and whistles of the factory as it started up its day. He could remember waking up to that racket every morning as a child - the call to work, the mechanized voice shouting through the speaker system, urging on higher productivity or whatever it was factory foreman concerned themselves with. He could never quite make out the words, only the scratchy, incessant droning. When he came home after his first year, he cast a silencing spell on his room to block out the noise, and that was the end of it. He wasn't supposed to do magic as a minor but his mother let him do what he wanted, because she didn't give a shit. Not about Ministry rules, and not about him.

He pulled the ingredients for the manipulation draught off his shelf and lined them up on the desk. Potions, as a discipline, was closer to the Dark Arts than any of the magic taught at places like Hogwarts and endorsed by people like Dumbledore - all those spiders and lizards sacrificing their lives so wizards could change their hair color at will. Regular Potions came naturally to Severus, almost instinctually, and always had. But Dark Potions was different. Philistines thought dragging a knife over your palm and dropping in a few drops of blood was all it took to turn a Potion dark, but the truth, like all truths, was more complex. Dark Potions required thought - literally. Your thoughts were the sacrifice. Your memories, your impressions of the past. The tapestry of your emotions. You had to regulate yourself very carefully if you did not wish to lose something too precious.

Severus had his Occlumency, but it was still difficult.

He lit the bottom of the cauldron and set the first three ingredients to simmering. He pulled a book off the shelf and flipped through the pages, half-reading, half-listening to the gurgle of the potion. He let down the barriers enough to pluck a memory for the sacrifice - it needed to be something pleasant. This potion was to serve as an antidote for madness and sorrow. You could not fight fire with fire.

He dropped far, far back, all the way to his third year. He and Lily were standing at the back of Zonko's, and Severus pulled a Frog Spawn Soap off the rack and poured water over it so that the soap would dissolve into a hundred tiny frogs that exploded across the shop. When Lily laughed she covered her mouth with her hand and her eyes sparkled as she looked at him, and he knew he had made her happy.

That one would do.

Severus picked up his wand and leaned over the cauldron. The potion was dark blue now, almost black, the surface shining like oil. He dipped his wand in and stirred twice, then added a sprinkle of asphodel and whispered the incantation, a sentence in a Dark language, calling for a road into the mind.

He remembered making Lily laugh.

The shields protected his other memories, and they kept out the misery that would ruin the potion beyond repair. As he stirred, he closed his eyes and watched Lily laugh over and over, her hand coming to her mouth, her eyes sparkling.

The colors drained out first, turning muted, then muddy, then shades of grey. The shadows disappeared, the light. There was a only a flat silver expanse where his memory had been, and the sound of Lily's laughter, twinkling like starlight.

Then that disappeared as well.

Severus removed his wand and tapped it against the side of the cauldron. The draught lightened as he watched, turning a color like the sky at twilight. The sheen transformed into the streaks of pale silver that gave the potion its distinctive glimmer.

He sighed and slumped back in his chair, head in his hand, hair falling stringy and lank around his arm. The Dark Mark lay in wait, silent and painless. He wished he could have sacrificed some memory of the Dark Lord, or of Avery or Malfoy, any of them, instead of - it was gone, of course, but he knew it had been about Lily.

When he'd told her that his only happy memories concerned her, that day in the woods, he had not been lying.

Severus poured the draught into a jar and clipped off a lock of his hair. Then he went into the kitchen and rummaged around in one of the drawers until he found a scrap of old ribbon that must have been left there when his mother moved away, and he tied the hair to the jar. The potion was still warm.

He slipped it into the bottom of Lily's purse, which was lying in a puddle next to the front door.

When he walked back into his bedroom, Lily was stretched out across the bed, her eyes open, her hair fanning out across the pillow, dull auburn in the shadows save for that strip of white, like moonlight. Whenever Sev looked at it, that piece of white hair, anger flashed like lightning, bright and brief: anger at Dumbledore and Voldemort, at Lily, at himself.

He never Occluded it away.

"Sev," she said. "Why are you up so early?"

"You snore."

"I do not." She laughed. The sound jarred something inside of him, something he couldn't quite identity. "Come back to bed. My feet are cold."

"That's not a compelling reason for me to crawl into bed with you." But he did anyway, and she curled up beside him, one hand stroking the side of his neck. Her feet were cold, but the rest of her was warm. She didn't say anything now that he was beside her, and he felt her mood settle and dim.

He pulled her closer, and she nuzzled against him, and they stayed that way, waiting for sunlight to come.