Previously in the Darklyverse: Lily pressured James not to get involved with Dumbledore. The Gryffindors broke Emmeline free from the Imperius Curse. Unable to return to her old life for fear of being captured again, she resolved to work with Dumbledore to find the remaining Horcruxes. Dumbledore asked Mary to breed a basilisk. Lily agreed to several meetings with Snape, much to James's horror when he eventually found out.

xx

April 4th, 1982: Lily Potter

She's worried about Emmeline. Tonight is the first time Lily's seen her in three weeks, since Emmeline stood in Lily's kitchen and announced that she'd written to Dumbledore and would be departing that evening to join him on whatever it is he'd been doing. It surprised Lily then, and still surprises her now, that Dumbledore even agreed, but she supposes it makes some sense—Em couldn't go back to her old life, not after breaking out of the Imperius Curse, and to Dumbledore, runaways are apparently expendable. It's how Dumbledore treated James when he first asked him to join him, before Lily herself shot that down, and it's how Dumbledore's treating Emmeline now.

Emmeline's face is haggard; her skin is pale, and she looks like she's lost a few kilograms. She's smiling, though: not a smile of joy, but one of—relief? Satisfaction? Lily can't quite pin down the emotions in her friend's expression. She would have expected Em to be unhappier, being stuck on the run hunting Horcruxes and knowing that the Death Eaters could come after her at any moment.

"I still think you should have invited Albus here tonight," Em says; her voice sounds hoarse, too. (Albus? Lily thinks.) "I'm working with him now. He's going to find all of this out anyway."

But Lily's a little glad that Mary insisted on Emmeline coming alone. Lily doesn't know how deeply Dumbledore has indoctrinated Emmeline into his insistence on not telling anybody else what they're doing; Mary's probably right that Em wouldn't speak as freely in front of him.

The meeting was Em's idea. Two days ago, she sent an owl off to Sirius saying she needed to talk to the other six of them, and so here they are, crowded in the Potters' little living room, Harry down for his afternoon nap in the nursery. Emmeline is leaning back against the front door with her arms folded across her chest. Lily sits with Mary and Remus on the couch, while Alice's back is ramrod straight from her seat on the armchair. James's and Sirius's shoulders and elbows brush against each other as they plop down on the floor.

"I don't have long," Em continues. "He knows I'm with you, and he's got to know what we're doing, but he won't like it."

"He's not your keeper," says Sirius, rolling his eyes. "You have every right to be here."

"Let's just get to it," sighs Mary. "So—Horcruxes. What have you two been doing all this time, anyway?"

It sounds like an accusation, and sure enough, Emmeline raises her eyebrows until they disappear into her overlong fringe. "Digging into Tom's history—I mean, Voldemort's, before he was Voldemort. Tom Riddle was his birth name. We've been chasing down the people who knew him—we tracked down his uncle, who's in Azkaban, for example, and took his memory of meeting Tom to put into the Pensieve. McGonagall's been letting us Floo into the castle periodically."

"And that's supposed to help somehow?"

Em purses her lips. "It helps a great deal. We've already found one Horcrux, for instance."

"What?" demands Lily as Alice squeaks, "You have?" Sirius and James both say, "Where?" together, while Remus's jaw drops and Mary straightens up in her seat.

"It was in the shack where Tom's mother grew up," says Em coolly. "It was a ring that had been passed down his maternal line for generations. We think Tom made it into a Horcrux after killing his father and grandparents—the Riddles were Muggles. He wore the ring for years after the murders, but eventually went back to his mother's family's home to put it there. It was a ramshackle old place; I doubt he ever suspected anybody to go looking there. Albus, the dumbass, tried to take the ring from me and put it on his finger when I found it, but I managed to get it away from him—Tom had placed a curse on it.

"But we don't have any way of destroying it yet. We need Mary's basilisk for that."

"Why?" says Mary, pursing her lips.

"Because basilisk venom is one of the only things that can destroy a Horcrux. How soon is it hatching?"

"Soon. Later this week, probably. I'm telling Reg that I'm spending a long weekend traveling with Lily—I'll be at your flat, of course, where Remus and Alice are still watching it for me, so that I can be there when it hatches."

"My flat?" says Emmeline, sounding amused. "I've never set foot in the place."

"Just because we had to move while you were away doesn't mean you don't still have a place with us," says Remus quietly. "Your bed is still there waiting for you."

"You'll have your own bedroom now and everything—we don't have to share anymore," says Alice, smiling.

As Lily recalls, Remus and Alice weren't thrilled about having to move for fear of Death Eaters targeting Em and breaking into the place, but it was a small sacrifice to make to keep their lives. At least Alice and Remus can still work, unlike Emmeline. Maybe she'd be safe back in her old life—after all, all the Aurors' identities are known and Death Eaters don't murder them all in their homes, so there's no reason to think that they'd target members of the Order any more so. But Em didn't want to take the risk, and Lily can't fault her for that.

Lily and James are covering Em's portion of the rent while she's away—it hasn't been cheap, losing all of her income after resigning from Scrivenshaft's, but as far as Lily knows, Em and Dumbledore are crashing on the forest ground every night and using magic to get them everything else they need. You can't conjure food out of nothing, but Emmeline admitted in her letter to Sirius that they've been conjuring up the same Vanished picnic basket of food every day and replicating its contents. Apparently, she's eaten enough pot roast and rolls to last multiple lifetimes.

"Do you have a plan to extract the basilisk's venom, Mary?" Emmeline continues.

Mary says, "Well, basilisks aren't born fully developed—it will be another three weeks or so before its venom reaches max potency, I think. The good news is that its eyes don't fully develop until then, either, so when it's born, it won't be able to kill any of us with a single glance like adults can. I can blind it when it's born, but if you want me to collect its venom, we'll have to keep it somewhere safe as it grows, and I don't know if Alice and Remus are equipped for that."

"You can just keep it caged, can't you?" says James. "How big are basilisks when they're born? How close together would the bars have to be for it not to be able to slip through?"

"It'll be small—remember, it'll be small enough to fit inside a chicken's egg—but it'll grow much, much larger very fast. By the time it's three weeks old, it might be too big to even fit in Em's entire bedroom. We could enclose it in a solid metal cage—no bars—for the first few days, but we'll quickly need somewhere big to put the thing. I don't have access to a place like that, but I was thinking Sirius could smuggle it into the room with the lost things."

Everybody's eyes dart over to Mary's, but nobody, including Lily, follows. "You know—the room with the lost things at Hogwarts, kind of near the Fat Lady's portrait on the seventh floor."

Sirius frowns. "Mare, James and Remus and Peter and I have been over the castle a thousand times mapping the place out, and we've never seen any kind of room of lost things."

"Yeah, because it only appears when you need someplace to hide something. I found it in sixth year when I wanted to get rid of my old diary—you know, my gossip log. I was on my way back from the shower thinking about how much I'd like to just ditch the thing or burn it or something, and I think I was pacing back and forth a little, and this door appeared that hadn't been there when I'd gotten there. When I went in, it was full of abandoned junk, so I left it in there. It was huge—whole aisles of crap piled up—more than big enough to house a basilisk."

"Don't you think it wold be too, well, dangerous to keep a basilisk at Hogwarts?" says Alice. "After all, if anybody else tries to use that room—"

"It'll be blind, and its venom won't be potent yet. I still have to figure out what to do with it after I harvest the venom, but—"

"You're not going to kill it?" asks Sirius loudly.

Mary scowls at him. "It's a living thing, Sirius. It's like I told Dumbledore—it feels pain. It's bad enough that I'm going to have to blind it. If I can just figure out how to inactivate its venom—I'll be there for those three weeks to socialize it, so—"

"Hold up," says Remus with a frown. "You're planning on socializing the thing? Like, going into its cage and into this—this room of lost things, as you put it, and—?"

"Well, why did you think I was taking a whole four days off to be with it when it's born? The hatching itself only takes a few minutes, and we can make sure the toad and the egg are inside of the cage before that happens. If I'm in the cage with it, I can—"

"Mare, you can't go in there. Even if you blind it, this thing could bite you or strangle you to death or—"

"I've tamed dragons," she says calmly. "I know what I'm doing. Em, besides the ring, do you have any other leads on what any of the Horcruxes might be?"

"We have a couple of locations in mind," says Emmeline. "There was a cave where there was some incident between Tom and a couple of kids in the orphanage where he grew up—we've been working on tracking down its exact location. And we know that he's given at least two Horcruxes to Death Eaters because Snape was able to find out that Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange are both holding onto artifacts he gave them, but we're nowhere closer to finding out exactly where they're keeping those artifacts or how we're supposed to get them back from them. Malfoy has some old diary of Tom's, and Lestrange has a cup that belonged to Helga Hufflepuff. We think Tom might have been targeting things that belonged to all the Hogwarts founders—the woman he stole the cup from also had an old locket of Salazar Slytherin's."

"Well, that's easy," says Lily. "We can get all four of them through the Sorting Hat and see which ones are Horcruxes."

Everyone gives Lily bewildered looks, and she grins. "James Potter, you have a N.E.W.T. in History of Magic. The rest of you I can forgive, but you, my darling husband, have no excuse."

"No excuse for what?" says James.

"No excuse not to know that the founders of Hogwarts enchanted the Sorting Hat so that any worthy Gryffindor can pull the Sword of Gryffindor from it. In theory, it's supposed to work with any of the Hogwarts founders' artifacts—if you're from the right house and the Hat deems you worthy, you get whichever of the four artifacts comes from that house: Gryffindor's sword, Hufflepuff's cup, Ravenclaw's diadem, or Slytherin's locket."

"So we need somebody from each house," says James. "Gryffindor will be easy—all of us are in it for the right reasons. Frank and Kingsley are both Ravenclaws; one of them could get the—you said Ravenclaw had a diadem?"

"Yeah. It's too bad we lost Dorcas and Benjy—and Elisabeth. They could have gotten the locket and the cup. Mary, do you think Reg would help us get the cup if you asked him to?"

"Honestly? No, I don't think he would," says Mary with a sigh. "He would need to know why he was doing it and have the right intentions for it to work, wouldn't he? And if I tell him what we're up to, he's going to freak."

"Sturgis was a Hufflepuff," says James. "And that just leaves—"

"Snape," says Lily. The room goes deathly silent, and after a moment, she adds, "We need Snape. He's the only Slytherin left in the Order."

She carefully avoids meeting James's eyes, which isn't to say that it's much less awkward looking at anybody else: by now, they all know that Lily met with Severus not once, but twice. Alice says haltingly, "I can write to him and ask for his help, but I don't know if he'll listen to me. He might—"

"—Demand a meeting with you," James finishes, and his voice sounds hard.

"Then I'll give him a meeting. I'll Apparate to New Zealand or somewhere. This is more important, James."

"Like hell," he mutters, but Remus says, "She's right, mate. We can't do this without him."

"And if he's not worthy?" James demands. "If Lily risks her neck to see him, and he comes with us to Hogwarts, and he doesn't pull the locket out of the Hat? He said himself that he doesn't have a problem with Dark Magic—he told Lily so explicitly when she saw him. He's not in this for the same reasons as we are."

"James, it's the only chance we have," says Lily. "We have to try. We have to get Harry to Hogwarts, remember? This might be the only way."

She looks at him now, but it pains her to hold his gaze. She knows what he's thinking—that Lily just wants an excuse to see Severus again, that it could have been him hunting Horcruxes with Dumbledore instead of Emmeline if it weren't for Lily, that Lily's holding him to a double standard and treating Em like she's expendable. It's nothing they haven't fought about a dozen times in the last three weeks, and it's not going to change: James is always going to want to be in the middle of the action, and Lily is always going to want to keep him (relatively) safe for Harry's sake.

But James has nothing to say in response, no ammunition that will hold up in the court of their relationship, and he stays silent, narrowing his eyes at her so that she knows he's tallying this against her. "It's settled, then," says Alice, breaking the spell. "I'll write to Snape in the morning, and if he asks to see Lily again, I'll set up a meeting."

Not long after that, Remus and Alice step outside to Disapparate to their flat, and Sirius takes a pinch of Floo powder to get himself back to his living quarters at Hogwarts. "Are you sure you're going to be okay going back on your own, Em?" Mary asks as she's getting ready to leave. Ever since Emmeline's Imperius Curse, they're all on the buddy system—no one is ever left unprotected.

"I'll be fine," says Em unconcernedly. "I'm meeting Albus in The Leaky Cauldron—nice and crowded."

The door closes behind them a moment later, leaving Lily and James alone in the house. He looks at her, and she looks at him. "Lily…"

"I have to check on Harry," she whispers. When she heads toward the nursery, James doesn't follow her.

xx

Sure enough, Severus asks Alice for another meeting with Lily, and she gives Alice a date, time, and location for them to meet. Her throwaway suggestion of New Zealand seems like as good a place as any, so she grabs a New Zealand travel guide at a Muggle bookstore (she has to try three stores before she finds it) and picks out a restaurant in Auckland. Apparating to places where you've never been before is always tricky, but they've all gotten used to it after the number of raids they've made sight unseen, so she concentrates hard on the back of the building and steps forward into the void.

When the compression loosens and she comes out on the other side, it's raining, because of course it is—the downpour drenches her robes, and the unnaturally strong wind slaps across her face and body. Glancing around surreptitiously and confirming that no one is in sight, she casts a quick Impervius Charm on herself to deflect most of the water and hurries around the building to the front. She tries the front door, but the restaurant is all locked up. The place lists its business hours in the window, and it ought to still be open; there's no signage anywhere to indicate why it's closed.

She doesn't have long to wonder, though, because she hears a crack in the distance and turns to see Severus walking up the length of the building from the back. "Hello, Snape."

"Hello," he replies just as coolly.

"They're closed," she says. "I don't know why."

"It's mid-morning here. The streets shouldn't be empty like this."

Lily looks around—sure enough, she can't see another soul anywhere along the intersection. The rain is picking up, to the point that she's drenched in spite of the Impervius Charm. The streets, she notices, are flooded: her feet are sopping wet. The sky is dark, too dark for one o'clock on a Friday in April. (Ten o'clock Saturday, she reminds herself. It's already ten o'clock Saturday here in Auckland.) "You don't think…?"

"I haven't heard anything about an attack today," says Severus immediately. "We have no business outside Britain yet."

"Yet?" she repeats. "You mean Voldemort is planning on expanding outside of Britain soon?"

But Severus ignores her, pulling out his wand and looking around warily. "It's possible that someone intercepted Alice's owl confirming that you would be here today. Of course, if the Dark Lord knew we were meeting… realized that I was working with you…"

Lily gets out her wand, too, and revolves slowly on the spot, keeping an eye out for any sign of Death Eaters. She startles a little when she sees a figure emerge from a house across the street, but the man isn't wearing robes, for one thing, or carrying a wand. She nudges Severus in the ribs, but before she can say anything, the man across the street shouts at them, "Are you crazy? Get inside and away from the windows! Do you want to get caught in the cyclone?"

"Cyclone?" Lily calls back, frowning.

"Cyclone Bernie started yesterday! Where have you been? Goddamn tourists…"

She and Severus exchange a look. "Thanks," she says, and she hurries to the door of the restaurant and whispers, "Alohamora!"

They slip into the restaurant; when Severus closes the door behind them, they can see and hear the wind rattling the door and windows. "Bathroom," he says curtly, pointing straight ahead.

It's a single-occupant restroom, small and dark, even after Lily flicks on the light switch. She closes the door behind them and sits down on the floor against the door. "You really know how to pick them," says Severus with a hint of laughter in her voice. She almost laughs, too, but restrains herself.

When he sits beside her, their shoulders brush together, and she reflexively scoots to the side away from him until she can't feel the heat of his skin through their robes. In the dim fluorescent lighting, Severus looks sallow and tired. "Abbott said something about a Slytherin artifact," he says dully.

"We're looking for artifacts from all four Hogwarts founders. A worthy member of each house should be able to pull their artifact out of the Sorting Hat, but—we need a Slytherin."

"And you think I am?"

"What?"

"Worthy?"

She studies his pallid face for a moment. His eyebrows are knitted together, and there's a shadow of a smile on his lips. "I'm disgusted by your intentions," she says, and the smile disappears, "but you're our only hope."

"No, I'm not," says Severus quietly. Lily frowns. "Didn't any of you think about Andromeda Tonks? I know she only joined recently, but she's in the Order now, and she was in Slytherin. I'm sure her intentions are much nobler than mine."

But instead of feeling relieved at not needing to work with Severus after all, or angry that she's come all the way out to New Zealand in the middle of a cyclone for nothing, Lily just feels—disappointed. She doesn't understand why: it's not like she wants to work with Severus. Even if she did, Lily won't be one of the ones going to Hogwarts to try on the Sorting Hat—it'll be Sirius doing that on Gryffindor's behalf, as he works at Hogwarts and she can't enter Britain for anything anyway.

Maybe part of her just wanted to hear that Severus would try on the Hat and get the locket—to confirm that she wasn't best friends with a monster all along. Severus seems to be thinking the same thing because he says, "No need to despair. It's not like you haven't known all these years that I'm no hero. You think I want to take a field trip to Hogwarts with Sirius Black just to prove that I can't do the only thing you've asked of me in years?"

Lily hesitates. "You were wrong, you know, when we met before. People are good. My friends are good. You just have to see past all the bullshit on the surface."

Severus puts his elbows on his knees and buries his face in his hands, scrubbing it for a moment. He looks at her again, and his eyes are crinkled sad. "You used to make me believe I was good—or at least that I could be. You made me think there was a point to all this. And then you left, and it turned out I was wrong about myself—that you were wrong."

"You still could be," she breathes. "Good, I man. Goodness—all it is is love, Severus. But you can't just—just love me and have it out for everybody else. You have to see the world with empathy."

"Like how you see me with so much empathy," he mutters.

Rage flares up inside of her. "That's not fair. I saw past your shortcomings for years. I forgave you for your awful pre-Death Eater friends, your cruelty to the other Gryffindors, the way you called everyone else of my blood 'Mudblood.' Even after—"

"Please. You've made it perfectly clear how evil you've decided that I am."

"I don't think you're evil," Lily whispers. "But I don't think you're good for me anymore, either."

They sit there like that for a while longer, Lily a little terrified that Severus is going to reach over and try to hold her hand or something, but he doesn't. "If I hadn't called you… what I called you… would we still be friends? Would you still be married to Potter?"

"Well, I wouldn't be married to James," she scoffs, "but… I don't know if we'd still be friends. I suppose that depends in part on whether you still would have joined the Death Eaters."

"I wouldn't have," says Severus right away. "Not if I could still have had you in my life. I would have wanted to live up to your expectations."

"And you stopped caring about living up to a moral code as soon as I stopped being there to give you validation? This is exactly the problem. You and I—"

"You and I are nothing," Severus snaps. "I'm not deluded. I know that much."

"We have to stop meeting like this. It's not good for me, and—I don't think it's good for you, either, to hold onto something that we just can't have anymore."

"Can't we?" says Severus. "We really can't ever go back?"

And Lily is struck with a terrible reminiscence, an ache she thought she'd long left behind. "It's too late," she breathes, but she can tell that her face tells a different story. She can still hear the wind faintly through the walls, and she says louder, "We should go before the building caves in. I should be getting back before James starts to worry about me. He doesn't like me leaving… the place where we're hiding, and he's right, you know. I'm not protected when I see you."

"We can't have that, can we?" Severus muses, but he doesn't sound entirely sarcastic.

Back home, when Lily tells James that Severus suggested using Andromeda instead to join the party going to Hogwarts, he reacts with equal parts pleasure at leaving Severus behind and annoyance that they didn't think of this before Lily met with him. She knows he's worried about her safety, and she knows he's right to do so—but she can't help hearing an edge of what she thinks is jealousy in his voice.

She considers telling him that Severus has nothing that James should envy, but she hesitates to bring any of it up to James again. Instead, she crosses the length of the room and kisses him—really kisses him—in a way she hasn't done in what feels like ages. She's already undoing his robes in the short time it takes him to push her away and say, "Lily, what are you doing?"

"We're married. Can't I be intimate with my husband?"

"But you just came from seeing Snape, and I don't want—I don't want you thinking about him when you're with me."

"Who says I'm thinking about him?"

She is, of course—thinking about Severus, that is—even though the whole reason she's coming onto James is because she wants to push Severus out of her mind. It works, for now.