In which recent events are finally made clear, Wizard Lenin and Lily stroll down memory lane, and Wizard Lenin reintroduces us to the strange world of Lily where everything is not quite as bright and cheerful as it once seemed.

Apparating from the burning brothel was more jarring than Morgan, no Lily, was used to. As if they had torn through far more than simply time and space when they left Wizard Trotsky behind. Still, with the taste of the so recently swallowed red pill in her mouth, and the great crack of teleportation ringing in her ears, she stumbled to her feet and took in her new surroundings.

It was an opulent bedroom, perhaps a guest room. The kind with wealth written into every corner and every gilded silver leaf decorating the walls and ceiling, the kind of room she imagined would have been quite at home in Versailles. It edged on gaudy and ridiculous yet was not quite there for how much the room seemed to glitter. However, where Versailles was golden, this room was a study in green and silver, serpents carved into the furniture with emerald eyes staring out at Lily and the man, Wizard Trotsky's older doppelganger, the accidental horcrux Wizard Lenin.

Somehow, though she didn't know how… Perhaps from Eleanor Lily Potter's forgotten memories, the place reminded her of the Slytherin common room. The same desperate attempt for grandeur existed here as there, the same colors, and the same tone…

Softly, carefully, as if Lily was far more fragile than either of them could remember her being, Wizard Lenin ushered her towards the silver bench at the end of the large bed which seemed to be drowning in entirely too many pillows.

For a moment too long his fingers, long and pale and strangely smooth, lingered on her jaw as he looked into her eyes. For all that he looked like a grown Wizard Trotsky, she thought, he looked nothing like him either. This wasn't an expression that Wizard Trotsky was capable of wearing, it was too old, too worn, and the sympathy, fear, and concern inside of it was a subtler thing than Wizard Trotsky's passion ever allowed.

Wizard Trotsky, in many ways, had worn his heart on his sleeve.

With a wordless sigh Wizard Lenin stepped away, summoned the great dark green chair resting by the fireplace and sat in it across from Lily, for a single moment the very picture of domesticity. In the perfect silence he snapped his fingers, summoning a shaking and terrified house elf.

It looked at him with too large eyes, dressed in ragged fabric that could barely be classified as clothing, entire shrunken body quivering at the sight of this man as if it were staring up at a cruel and indifferent god.

"Two cups of tea and tell your master we are not to be disturbed until I myself say otherwise," Wizard Lenin commanded, barely looking at the creature before it disappeared with another too loud crack.

Tea appeared moments later, and then there was silence once again.

Quiet, why was it so quiet? There had been so much noise in the brothel, so many thoughts, so much rage and feeling and yet here she was still buffeted by the storm and had nothing to say and nothing to ask.

She could still hear Wizard Trotsky screaming, begging her not to go, not to leave him there again even as she and Wizard Lenin disappeared right before his eyes.

No, now the only thing she could think of was that moment, the terrible choice, and that she had chosen to reject the reality that was Morgan Gaunt. Not because it was any less believable than Eleanor Lily Potter but rather because she could not bring herself to believe in it.

Wizard Lenin's voice, though soft and calm and collected, jarred her thoughts just as the crack of a gunshot might, "We're at the Malfoy residence. I don't suppose you have any recollection of Draco Malfoy at the moment, but Lucius Malfoy was once a follower of mine and, on my resurrection, was kind enough to offer a spare bedroom for my use."

Lily swallowed, her throat suddenly dry, as his words seemed to border almost on nonsensical for how much context she was missing. She could only say, "The Prophet article on Hogwarts mentioned Draco and Lucius Malfoy. Draco's a second-year student, he… blamed Dumbledore for the semester. Lucius Malfoy is on the Hogwarts board of directors."

He only stared at her for a moment, for a flicker of a second his lips quirked into an amused smile, but it disappeared all too quickly as something grim took its place, "That may have been the most sensible and accurate description you've ever given a pair of human beings."

"Oh," was all Lily, Morgan playing at being something other than Morgan, could say to that.

That fond, almost nostalgic smile, briefly returned as he stared across at her, "For the record, you fondly refer to Draco Malfoy as Mini Pimp, as you were convinced from the moment you met him on the Hogwarts Express that he was putting on the airs of a minature pimp without a prostitute to his name. As for Lucius, the few thoughts you've spared on him thus far has been to call him Bigger Pimp, and bemusement and confusion over Draco Malfoy's constant use of him as a threat."

With a small laugh, as he sipped at his tea, he said, "If Draco Malfoy were to have a catch phrase it would be, 'My father will hear about this, Potter!"

However, the silence persisted, and whatever good mood there was to be found in nostalgia dripped away as they reconciled that in many ways, in this moment at least, they were from two entirely different worlds.

She searched for Wizard Trotsky within him even now, noting the similarities and differences even as she'd always compared Wizard Trotsky to someone unseen. He, for his own part, searched for Lily and Eleanor Lily Potter in Morgan Gaunt.

Finally, he continued, "Regardless, I have been staying here in the weeks since I left Hogwarts, the day I later learned you yourself disappeared from Hogwarts. Rabbit, Lepur Rabbitson,.."

He trailed off, eyes drifting to a corner of the room, fingers gripping his wand as he did so. Lily herself turned and there was the boy from the arcade, suddenly without any noise or indication of his arrival, inside of the room and standing in the corner, staring out at both of them with those black eyes.

"Him," Lily said, pointing, and though she should have had more to say about this, to say about this unnatural thing wearing the body of an adolescent boy she couldn't find the words.

"Yes, I was wondering when he'd show up," Wizard Lenin groused, looking about as pleased to see him as Lily herself was, "You have always been convinced that he's an abomination that exists outside of our reality and will one day devour existence itself whole. I have never been as convinced as you, but regardless, I have always found him a touch unnerving."

A touch unnerving, was that what it was called now?

For his own part the boy glanced at Wizard Lenin, and again there was nothing in it, just those cold, dark, endless eyes that stretched on like the void of space without any stars left inside of it. A stark contrast to the pale, blank, white that was his skin and hair.

Yet for all that he was expressionless, eldritch even in this pale perfect body of his, there was something that looked at Wizard Lenin and judged.

"He's…"

Whatever she meant to ask Wizard Lenin didn't answer, instead, motioning to the boy he explained, "He came to find me, a few days ago, to come and collect you as it were. A very out of character move for him, but none the less, it did help greatly in tracking you down."

"I see," except she didn't see, because even though she was still Morgan Gaunt in all but name, some part of her rebelled at the idea of this boy, this rabbit in human skin, doing anything for anything's sake.

He seemed removed from action just as he was removed from sentiment.

The idea of him going and seeking Wizard Lenin of all people…

Wizard Lenin's face relaxed somewhat at her concern, a spark of relief and amusement entering his eyes, "Yes, you would have found it just as unnerving a few weeks ago."

Then it was business as usual as he concluded, "There are others here, many of my servants for my revolution as you liked to call it, who will come in and out of this place. Severus Snape you once knew, and loathed, I don't think you've met any of the others. However, they shouldn't give you too much trouble."

"Right," she echoed rather lamely, then they stared at one another, waiting for the other to speak first.

Her eyes kept moving to the pale boy, but he wasn't doing anything, was in fact actively doing nothing as he stared forward with all the focus of a corpse out at the room. Yet she was almost certain that he was watching her, focusing on her as he had in the arcade and as the pixels representing him had in the paper.

However, that seemed to be the extent that he was willing to act today. There were no words, no greetings, nothing as he just stared forward, ignored completely by Wizard Trotsky's counterpart as if he wasn't even worth dismissing.

"What exactly did he tell you?"

She looked back over to Wizard Lenin, and with the dark and frustrated look on his face she felt he was perfectly aware of what a difficult question that was. Wizard Trotsky, after all, hadn't told her anything. No, she'd just… Woken up one day and he'd always been there, since that day he'd come to find her in Little Hangleton.

And she hadn't questioned that he had come for her, that one day Tom Marvolo Riddle had appeared on a hill in his school uniform to come and find Morfin, no some part of her had always known that he would find her.

Or that perhaps… Perhaps Wizard Lenin would find her.

So, all she could do now was look at him, the older version of Tom Marvolo Riddle, and tell him everything she knew, "My name is Morgan Gaunt, unwanted bastard daughter of Morfin Gaunt and some unnamed prostitute that I no doubt resemble. For most of my life I lived in Little Hangleton with Morfin, living in the cupboard beneath the stairs and prying snakes from the walls, until Tom Marvolo Riddle, Merope's bastard orphan son, arrived on our doorstep."

She paused, closing her eyes and tasting the words, the memories, so much more than she could ever condense into a few short sentences, "He killed his family that same day, framed Morfin, came back for me but put me into a coma I don't remember. The diary, Wizard Trotsky, woke me up years afterwards, and here we are."

She opened her eyes, he was staring at her, and at once he looked almost alien to her. There was a noble aristocratic grace to him, a stillness and calm, that had never been there in Wizard Trotsky. Yet their eyes were the same color, and both, in their own way, burned when you stared at them for too long.

And though you couldn't tell it by his expression, even by the way he held himself, there was an unseen rage building within him at her words.

"I never had a cousin," he finally said, a terrible edge to his quiet voice, "Morfin died in Azkaban childless. When I met him, before meeting my father, it was hissing drunken Morfin Gaunt who greeted me and Morfin who slammed the door in my face. There was no one else."

So, Morgan Gaunt had never existed in the first place.

She laughed, slowly at first and then the terrible hilarity of it overwhelming her. Holding her sides together, Wizard Lenin and Rabbit watching her, she couldn't help but think that it was overbearingly simple, everything she'd suspected and doubted squeezed into that one small sentence.

He waited until she finished, which was far too long, because at the end it was still both funny and horrible. So, when she stopped laughing she just felt… empty.

"Morgan Gaunt was an invention of my other half, Trotsky as you call him, false memories bestowed upon you to artificially explain your presence in his life," unexplained was why Wizard Trotsky had done this, what had been in it for him, and why he had seemed to cling to it both desperately and loathed it at the same time.

Hadn't he always seemed to cringe, when he thought of Morgan as his cousin?

"In truth you were born July 31st, 1980, to Lily Evans and James Potter, and October 31st, 1981, halted my revolution in its steps and became the infamous girl who lived," he continued, expanding on what he'd said in the brothel, that name that hadn't surprised her in the slightest, Ellie Potter.

"Yes, I read about that in the paper…"

"You've always gone by Lily though, since we first met," and there was that smile again, the one from the brothel, the one from before that was both familiar, fond, and so very sad.

Lily, Wizard Trotsky had always called her Lily too. For a moment, she wondered if Ellie Potter was any more real than Morgan Gaunt, if Lily was what she had always called herself.

His smile faded, he sighed once again, and at last they seemed to come to the crux of the matter, "Memory manipulation is more an art than a science and hardly the catchall that the ministry's obliviators would like for you to believe. Even small, singular, moments can be tricky and spread this out to replace a person's life and it becomes infinitely harder. At its heart, the implanted memory must be something a person can believe, a moment where they can fill in the blanks of sight, smell, and sound. You give them a suggestion, say, the idea of an apple, and they supply what the apple in question looks like. The memory has to coincide with their lives, their world, it has to be something that they imagine could be possible."

With a motion towards her, almost unwillingly impressed, he said, "What Trotsky did, theoretically, should be impossible. One cannot replace almost all aspects of a person's life, for the illusion of Morgan Gaunt to hold up as long as it did, still hold even now when you no longer believe it, is almost miraculous."

Here he leaned forward, a strange speculative look in his pale eyes, "However, if Morgan Gaunt is really Lily in all but name, if the world she grew up in mirrored Eleanor Lily Potter's home life, then it could be done."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"It means that I highly suspect that Morfin Gaunt, the young Tom Riddle, everything you think you remember is in truth coming from your real memories buried beneath the suggestion of Morgan Gaunt," he leaned back, and in the motion regained something of his authority and casualness, as if here, in action and explanation rather than sentiment, he was once again at ease, "The solution, I think then, is to look into your mind and separate the idea of Morgan from Lily which rests beneath."

"Look into my mind?" she leaned back, at once feeling uneasy, not entirely sure what she or even Wizard Lenin would find up there.

"Yes," Wizard Lenin said drily as if he was even now reading her mind, "And here I had told myself that I'd never look back once I'd torn myself out of there. None the less, it's the fastest and in some ways the easiest way I can think of."

He leaned forward, motioning for her to look at him, look him directly in the eyes. She tensed beneath his fingers, at once his face far too close and his eyes far too sharp.

He hesitated for a second, "Can you trust me, Lily?"

Trust.

Had she trusted Wizard Trotsky enough for him to have broken it? No, not as Morgan, but none the less there was some feeling of betrayal there, one she didn't dare to look at too closely and yet now would be forced to.

But even if she didn't trust him she trusted Wizard Lenin, she knew that, there had been something almost unconditional in his reappearance in her life. She had been waiting for him to show up, she now realized.

So firmly, she said, "Yes."

He said nothing in return, but his eyes seemed to grow larger, no, that wasn't quite right, it was more as if she herself was falling into them, lost somewhere in that pale ice river that flowed in his irises…

The world around his eyes began to fade into gray and then into black, disappearing entirely and she herself with it, until that pale almost colorless blue was all that remained.

Then, suddenly, she wasn't in the Malfoy guest room at all.

She was back in the Gaunt shack, inside of her cupboard beneath the stairs, the walls littered with colorful drawings and broken toys, the floor occupied by the thin and bare mattress. At once it seemed more cramped than she had remembered it being, the walls darker and jagged, and spiders looming above her head just out of sight.

"Trust you to make this wretched place somehow smaller."

There, sitting next to her, curled in on himself to avoid hitting the ceiling, was none other than Wizard Lenin, dressed in the red and black that Wizard Trotsky himself had worn that morning. It suited him yet didn't in the same moment, it fit him, but he didn't seem to enjoy wearing it for all he seemed resigned to it.

"You're here," Lily said in surprise.

"Neither of us is here, Lily," he said with raised and rather judgmental eyebrows, "Right now we're in your memories, further than any sane legilimens would dare travel."

Glancing around with distaste but a distinct lack of surprise he asked, "I take it Morgan Gaunt also lived in a cupboard beneath the stairs?"

Lily nodded, slowly and uncertainly, and as she did the drawings themselves flickered, the contents morphing and changing instead to reveal scenes of train stations, Wizard Lenin himself in various communist outfits, and a man with crows feathers for hair.

He moved towards the door, opening it and stepping out into the hallway as he spoke, leaving Lily to scramble behind him, somehow lost in her own memories, "You lived in the cupboard beneath the stairs for as long as you could remember until you were five years old when you conditioned your relatives into giving you the extra unused bedroom."

The hallway was that of the Gaunt shack, creaking and dilapidated, Morfin Gaunt drunk and slouched against the wall, head in one hand and a bottle of fire whisky in the other. However, even as she watched Morfin seemed to flicker, replaced by the image of a great, overweight, mustached man.

"Your Uncle Vernon Dursley," Wizard Lenin explained, watching as the memory of Morfin Gaunt flickered out, "He wasn't a drunk, but he was abusive, and entirely too concerned with punishing you for your extraordinary abilities."

The house began rearranging itself, changing into the image of white-washed suburbia, familiar pictures of this perfectly ordinary family in this perfectly ordinary suburb hanging on the walls without Lily in any of them.

As if they were desperately writing her out of her own life as Wizard Trotsky had.

Pointing at the nearest one, Wizard Lenin's finger lingered on the image of a severe thin looking woman with a perpetual grimace, "Your Aunt Petunia Dursley, your mother's sister, who clearly took out her relationship issues with her sister on you."

Finally, he pointed to the overweight whale of a boy, the son, "Your Cousin Dudley Dursley, Dudders as you often called him, whose chief characteristics were his weight, his bullying, and his unbelievable stupidity."

It was with a fond smile towards her that he noted, "For all the years you lived with them, from the beginning until you were eleven, you never once were convinced they were sentient or capable of any thought or emotion of consequence."

"They are automatons," Lily repeated as she stared at their picture, the Dursleys, a strange sense of déja vû and exhaustion overtaking her, as if these were words she had once said and could even now full heartedly believe in once again, "Thoughtless simulations of humanity that serve no real purpose. They like to think they can think, and they put on a good show, for the most part. But if you're around long enough it all falls to pieces and the bugs in the programming show through."

And at once Number 4 Privet Drive, like a terrible dream, shifted into place and focus in her mind. Yes, the Dursleys, she remembered now, she could mark Morfin Gaunt for the cheap imitation of Uncle Dursley (himself a cheap imitation of the dream that was humanity) for herself.

Little Hangleton, the Gaunt shack, crumbled from her memory leaving the Dursley's residence in Surrey, in Little Whinging, standing tall and proud.

And yet, she thought as she looked around, there was something so bleak and cheap about this place. Not that it was any more or less real than Morgan Gaunt's reality, but for all that it stood truer it was made flimsier and cheaper for it, there was no romanticism here to paint the walls a different color.

Wizard Trotsky hadn't come to rescue her from this world.

"Ah, there we are," Wizard Lenin said as the last of the walls shifted into place, an almost relieved smile on his features, as if he couldn't quite see this place for what it was, "Good, there's plenty of more places to see before we're done."

Stepping outside it wasn't Surrey that greeted them but rather a strange formless world, that of Lily's ever shifting consciousness, and she couldn't help but think it wasn't what she would have expected of herself.

The world was dark, a picture of grays and blacks, a truly bleak and surreal place of shifting shadows and gray upon gray. Here and there though, were bold, almost desperate splashes of light and color, as if to distract from the true nature of the place.

Stepping forward, on shadows and stars, Wizard Lenin and Lily walked towards a great tree that was even now rising in the middle of the pavement in front of Number 4 Privet Drive. It grew, taller and taller, scraping the ceiling of Lily's mind and growing further still.

A spiral staircase had been carved into the tree's trunk, and without hesitation Wizard Lenin, then Lily behind him, began to climb, leaving Little Whinging to grow smaller and smaller behind them.

"Lenin," Lily said at one point, after they had climbed past the thick layer of clouds towards the moon and stars all crowding around the sky, casting an almost divine spotlight on Lilyand Wizard Lenin, "Do you think… Do you think Morgan's life was much worse than Lily's?"

"I think they were roughly the same," Wizard Lenin answered without even looking back, "That's how he pulled this off. Why, are you afraid?"

"No but I…" she stopped, paused, not certain of how she wanted to put this.

There had been more… optimism, to Morgan's existence. Not the forced, desperate, optimism that seemed to exist in Eleanor Lily Potter's, but a true optimism represented in none other than Wizard Trotsky.

For whatever he was, for whatever he had done to her and wherever he was going, there had been something cathartic in that memory he'd crafted for her. Or… Not cathartic, that was the wrong word, something hopeful and true and precious for all it had never happened.

Maybe it wasn't so much that it had reflected Lily's life, but that when he'd given it to her, she'd wanted to believe in it.

"It is what it is, liking or disliking won't change who you really are," Wizard Lenin said, his back tall and straight even as they kept climbing, forever and always, past where any ordinary human would dare to travel, "And you are the last person who should run from yourself."

And that seemed to be the trigger, enough to bring them to the branches of the tree, up and up, to where they converged together into a pale platform, Kings Cross that served as purgatory, where Death himself, with black hair and her eyes, waited at a café table with a cup of tea in front of him.

The exiled god emperor, banished to Lily's purgatory forever and always…

Even as she approached, his voice, the memory of his strange ethereal voice, sounded out in the train station, "Do you know why I like Jenga better than chess?"

Without looking towards her, without glancing at her, the memory of Death poured her a cup of tea and she felt the station shift into terrible focus, bringing with it the memory of a summer's day in Albania when Hogwarts was the last place Lily had wanted to be.

"Chess is a game of strategy, of warfare, of two people placed together attempting to outwit one another until there is a clear victor. It's a metaphor that speaks to wizards and non-wizards alike, one that pervades through time, until it is used even when the chess itself no longer exists. But life is not like chess."

She walked towards him, the sight of him almost blinding for all it represented, as Wizard Lenin himself had been almost blinding when he first walked into that brothel. There was such feeling represented in this man that she could hardly stand to look directly at him.

"Life is not so easy as winning or losing; as being the black or the white. We lose too many pieces along the way, or we lose them only partially, because they are still visible, but they are out of reach. Chess does not account for the things we almost have or the things we have almost lost."

And the tea, she could taste the tea from all the years in this very moment, at once sweet and bitter on her tongue as its memory poured itself down her throat.

"Jenga has no end. There is only the tower, and the attempt to build it out of the pieces you already possess. You try to take the safer route but then sometimes you are forced to remove the pieces you do not wish to touch. And sometimes it falls as you fear it must, but sometimes it doesn't."

And Lily had said, looking at him almost in desperation as she had run out of lines and excuses, "I'm not going back."

And he'd smiled at her, his shadow in her mind smiling at her now, at once so different than Wizard Lenin's smiles, and she remembered at once that Death was the first real person she had ever met, "Perhaps not, but then, you have left so very many things undone."

And finally, the ending of that conversation, Death's final words on her twelfth birthday, "I have been down this path you're on, Lily. I have run from myself, from my past, from every doubt I had until I couldn't run any further. And when I finally stopped, when I forced myself to stop and turn and look at where I'd been, I realized I hadn't gone anywhere at all. We are tied to ourselves, Lily, and we cannot run from that."

Tied to themselves, yes, she was, wasn't she? Even when Morgan, even when Eleanor Potter, Lily was still tied to Lily. It was how she could stand to take the red pill. And yet, she wondered as she stared at Death, certain she was forgetting… something, something important, why was she so desperate to run now?

Wizard Lenin was strangely quiet, compared to what he'd been before, staring at this memory of Death, listening to his words, and looking as if even inside Lily's memory he could not quite understand the man.

Of course, Lily remembered, Wizard Lenin had shown up after Death had. They had never understood one another.

Lily turned, looking away from Death, Death's train, Death's King Cross, and instead to the other side of the station, the exit. Calmly, as if in a dream she walked towards it, leaving the ethereal cleanliness of this Lily's King Cross behind and instead entering back into the rabble and rubble that was her memory of the physical plane.

There they were, in the gray monotone of Diagon Alley, wizards selling their strange charades of human thought for a few galleons a piece, there at the end of the alley way in a darkened corner yet somehow filled with light was Riddle Incorporated. Frank lingered outside the door, a secretary in all but name, greeting the sight of her with that wary yet pleased smile of his.

This… This was her world.

How familiar, yet how strange, it looked.

"You never did see Diagon Alley quite the way I did," Wizard Lenin noted, and looking at him Lily realized that he and Death were a pair in this, or rather, they were set apart, there was no caricature to him, he was solid and real and wore his own colors well. For all that he shouldn't belong in this world of hers there was nothing unnatural about him as he stared out at Lily's Diagon Alley with fondness and exasperation.

"Just look what you've done to Ollivanders," he said, motioning to a rather faceless building that looked like all the others, "And Gringotts, and the Leaky Cauldron… None of them made any impression at all."

"From the very beginning you were unimpressed by this place," he said, that amused smile only growing as if that was just like Lily, like he had expected nothing less from her, "Oh, for me it was the opposite, the magical world was my glimpse into my true home. In my mind, even now, I am sure Diagon Alley glitters as if the streets were paved with gold."

Lily turned, shoving her hands back into her pockets wordlessly, suddenly entirely too sure of what would come next. Yes, walking forward through the streets, past the warped Gringotts on its grey tilted pillars with its faceless goblin bankers, she found herself in a different, bleaker, Kings Cross with a mockery of the Hogwarts Express waiting for her.

Except… She hadn't seen that at the time, the first time. No, then it'd looked just like Death's train, perhaps a sign of good things to come.

Echoing her eleven-year-old steps she stepped on board, finding her way to that first compartment with Ron Weasley, the snake loathing caricature, grinning at her, "Cor, are you really Ellie Potter?"

Then the door opened, a cheery, unfamiliar, Hermione Granger opened it, prattling onward with an academic enthusiasm that bordered on obnoxious, "I'm Hermione Granger, by the way. I was very excited when I got my Hogwarts letter, I'd never known about magic before all this. I've been practicing spells though. They've all worked for me so far, and I've been reading all the text books too, so I won't be behind."

Then, suddenly, she flickered to the Hermione Granger of the next year, sitting on this same train, her eyes dull and haunted and her face bitter in the vein of Wizard Lenin's bitterness and rage, "There's a war in Albania, I read about it at Neville's, it was in the Prophet. A vampire revolution, they took over the capital and now a vampire warlord is in charge of the ministry…"

The train kept rushing towards Scotland though, regardless of Hermione or Ron, Lily staring out the window and watching as Hogwarts loomed larger and large like an indomitable wave about to crash over all their heads.

"This was where you met Draco Malfoy, by the way," Wizard Lenin mentioned, ignored by both Ron and Hermione, "He came waltzing in here, saw the Rabbit on your head and Weasley on the other end, and went waltzing right back out."

Wizard Lenin though, for all his fondness, for all the strange fondness he held for her memories couldn't seem to see them like she could. He couldn't see the grim base coat beneath them, and how desperately even Lily had painted them.

It had taken Morgan, the idea of Morgan Gaunt, for her to recognize this place for what it was.

The train pulled into the station, and together with the mob, she and Wizard Lenin walked towards Hogwarts.

"God only knows what we'll find inside," Wizard Lenin mused as they approached, "Default I'm certain, Lepur Rabbitson (though I'm surprised he hasn't made an appearance yet), trolls in the dungeon, Quirrell, Lockhart…"

However, Lily already knew something terrible waited for her in Hogwarts, something she had been all too willing to leave behind.

And indeed, stepping in, the other students vanished and instead the castle seemed at once too large and too small. The walls ran red with blood, T.S. Eliot's poetry painted on the walls with the philosopher's stone as a tell-tale heart thumping away inside the school, Quirrell, Lockhart, and Ginny Weasley all dead as Wizard Trotsky approached her with a basilisk at his heels.

"Lily?"

Lily turned, began to run, but the stone beneath her feet moved in the opposite direction, drawing her backwards into a great never-ending pit. As she ran points were docked from both Default and Slytherin in equal measure, quidditch teams pointed and laughed, Wizard Lenin looked at her in his solid body and dismissed her entirely as he turned to his own revolution, Dumbledore asked her if she knew the Dursleys loved her, Neville Longbottom silently accused her of unleashing a basilisk on the school…

"Lily!"

It all was rushing back, oh yes, Lily remembered it now. Every single moment, from first being sorted into Slytherin, that first disastrous week of school, the philosopher's stone, Rabbit in his human form, the troll, Squirrel, Dumbledore, Hermione's transformation, Albania, Luna Lovegood and her strange eleve-year-old optimism, Default, the Default quidditch team, the Chamber of Secrets, Lenin's twelve year old body, those grief golden moments of Default, and then everything falling apart without her even noticing.

No noticing, then forgetting, over and over and over again.

At once she hit the floor of the chamber of secrets, staring up at the dead basilisk, herself bleeding, staring at a stunned Wizard Trotsky masquerading as Ginny Weasley.

"Oh, Lily…"

She staggered to her feet, slowly, uncertainly, gripping the sword of Gryffindor in shaking and failing fingers, feeling death creep up on her inch by inch. Ginny Weasley stepped out of reach, face torn between horror, regret, and satisfaction as she watched Lily march to her grave.

("I will ruin you if I must, just as you will ruin me. Just as you did ruin me, eleven years ago," he'd said that then, only moments before the basilisk had appeared, before Lily had had to close her eyes and fight blind…)

Except, standing in the memory she had lost, Lily couldn't help but ask as she walked, "How did I lose?"

The blood against her arm was warm, the poison seeping towards her heart, and yet with each breath she asked herself, "I was far more powerful, even in that moment, so if I lost I must have wanted to lose. Even if I didn't know it, some part of me wanted it. Was I tired, two years in and tired already?"

Mirrors appeared on either side of the chamber, propagating Lily and Wizard Trotsky, wearing the cheap mask of Ginny Weasley, into infinity, "Or did I see this being the rest of my life, eternity, our prisoner's dilemma? If neither of us lost, then how could either of us win? I saw this endless infinite game of infinite stakes and I hesitated. And in that moment, for that single flicker, I must have been more than prepared to lose."

"For a moment," Lily concluded as she finally reached Wizard Trotsky, now removing the mask and moving forward to cradle her in his arms, his expression the same as from the brothel, that torn desperation, "I was more than willing for Eleanor Lily Potter and her farce to die."

And so, she allowed him to rewrite her, over, and over, and over again until finally he went to far and created Morgan Gaunt for the pair of them.

Hogwarts began to crumble at its foundations. Neville's suspicions, Hermione's use of Lily's abilities, Dumbledore's cold suspicions and machinations, Wizard Lenin's distance, Zabini and Greengrass's indifference, all of it began to crumble away until nothing of Hogwarts remained.

Only the single, horrifying moment of the train station, after she had died in Wizard Trotsky's arms in the chamber, bleeding out and poisoned in the same instant, as she faced Death and cried out, "I've failed, Death, I've… I've failed!"

Except she wasn't staring at Death and she wasn't in the train station, rather, she was in the arcade again playing Mortal Kombat, Rabbit standing beside her, as if he'd been here in her head the entire time.

And Rabbit, eerie, emotionless, yet filled with some unknowable inhuman emotion as always, said, "He has refashioned you in hi sown fragmented image, it doesn't suit you… You give him too much freedom."

Suddenly Lily knew exactly what he meant, where Morgan hadn't had a clue. Morgan had asked for clarification, Lily swallowed whatever questions Morgan might ask.

None the less, black-hole eyes burning, Rabbit concluded, "He has always had too much nerve for a human that doesn't even have the decency to remain human."

"No," Lily said Rabbit, to herself, her memories, suddenly exactly where she'd left them, exactly where they should be, "No, I've seen more than enough…"

And Lily, just like that, was alone.

Wizard Lenin was nowhere in sight, likely still inside Hogwarts somewhere, somewhere in those early days when it had not been so terrible. Just boring, just endless, but hardly terrible.

Lily looked out towards the horizon, nothing in sight at first, then walking forward, a bridge into the ether appearing. One that would lead her out of the realm of Lily and to some other world, some other stage with another play that Lily hadn't seen before…

So, with confident steps, blood still staining her Hogwarts uniform and dripping down her torso, Lily walked across the void, out of the play known as Eleanor Lily Potter and into Tom Marvolo Riddle's mind and memories.

Author's Note: Well, this turned out to be a very surreal chapter. Still, we figured some stuff out and as you can guess, next time we learn some of Wizard Lenin's major secrets. I'm excited. With that, to summarize the reveal here since people have been very confused for the last three chapters, Morgan Gaunt was never a thing, just something Wizard Trotsky made up. Lily's only been missing for a few weeks and, well, here we are. New in the world of "Lily" is "Blue Skies on Mars" which features Lily's Total Recall inspired dream and Rabbit as Kuato and "Morilden" which is a spin-off "Lily" but The Little Mermaid style.

Thanks for reading and reviewing, reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter