Thank you everyone for your lovely reviews on our extra long update from last week! Sorry that I'm a few days late getting this update out. I'm finally a few chapters ahead of our updates so hopefully these will start coming out weekly now. I hope you enjoy Chapter 28!

Louisa didn't meet her eyes as she carefully maneuvered the steel instruments in her hands to peel away the yellowing gauze around Charlie's legs.

"I'm sorry," she called as Charlie hissed, "I know it hurts. Almost done."

She'd been saying that for nearly an hour.

The air hit Charlie's leg like a cold reprieve. The flesh was angry and purple, peeling at the joints and slicked with bloodied blisters.

"Don't look at it, Charlie."

More than the sight of it, Charlie reasoned, the smell made bile rise in her throat. The other hadn't been so bad, she reasoned. In comparison, it had been a papercut to a severing charm. She had sobbed when Louisa had done her shoulder, looking at the angry marks that would leave silvery scars to her already maimed figure. A smell of cooked meat filled the room.

Charlie thought she likely didn't have any tears left for her leg.

Her eyes turned to the ceiling as Louisa began to clean the cooked flesh.

"Severus said he would be taking a sabbatical," the healer interjected the even breaths Charlie sucked through her mouth in an attempt to stave off the smell, "Is he taking the whole year off?"

She didn't really know.

Albus had come while she slept. He had left her a tin of sherbet lemons, and even if she hadn't hated them she still would have thrown them across the room. Severus had silently cleaned away the cloying yellow sweets while Remus stood in the doorway.

He'd stayed in the bed with her until Louisa had arrived, his chin resting against her hair as his fingers errantly smoothed the tears from her cheeks.

She'd been sleeping for nearly three days.

"We should be able to move you to Finch Street," Louisa's hands slicked a thick layer of butter-yellow dittany onto Charlie's leg as her mouth tightened against the noises of pain that threatened to escape her, "Might be a bit tricky with this one, but I think I can manage it."

"I'm fine here."

The words gritted between the teeth of her straining jaws.

"I think it might be a bit comfier for you at home. I'm just down the street. I could stay with you until you're back on your feet. We could have a couple of wine nights, listen to some romance dramas on the wireless," Louisa smiled weakly.

Severus had stayed taut beneath her, even as the sleeping draughts he'd been force-feeding her to sleep off the worst of it began to creep over her. His hand had eventually wiped away the tears at her cheeks and had stayed there, pressed against her face, his thumb running across her bottom lip in slow, barely-there strokes.

It had been a cheap shot.

She knew from her excursion into Snape's mind that he loved her. It was a twisted version of it – morphed by jealously and a thirst for reputation. It had been encouraged by her looks, certainly, but it had stemmed from his hatred of Sirius. Maybe there was a sprinkling of her personality he enjoyed, and he liked her intelligence on his favorite subjects. Severus hadn't known friendship for the better years of his life, and he had found it with Charlie in her last year at Hogwarts. The feelings had festered until they rotted into what now hung between them.

His mind had been screaming it at her as she bled out on Narcissa's marble floors.

No one had ever loved him. Severus hadn't had his own Sirius or Regulus the way she had. In the raw corridors of his mind, he craved it. She had seen each fleeting memory, the way his chest constricted when affection was given to him.

She had seen it the night she had kissed him in the living room just beneath her. The tightening of his chest, the breathlessness in his lungs, the panic at this throat.

She was a shitty person for exploiting it.

Just as she'd been shitty for ruining Regulus's prospects.

Charlie had done it anyway.

Louisa watched her for a moment as they waited for the dittany to sink into her ruined flesh, the odor of cooked meat hanging in the air.

"What's on your mind?"

A carefully drawn brow had risen on Lou's face.

"Do you think I love Snape?"

The healer blinked in surprise before she leaned forward on her elbows. Charlie didn't know how she wasn't vomiting from the smell being so close to her nose.

"He's good to you, Charlie. Even if he was wrong at the core of it. I think he really loves you. The best way that he knows how to, anyway," Louisa fanned her hand over the drying salve, "I think he's done more for you than anyone aside from Reg."

"Why?"

Louisa snorted, "You never believe that anyone's capable of loving you. You never believed that Reg did, despite every obvious thing he did to show it to you. I think if he'd screamed it at you, you still would've thought he was lying. What I have always struggled to understand is why you believed Sirius did, after everything he did to you – and how you accepted his love, but not anyone else's."

The blonde seated herself on the edge of Severus's bed, "He cheated on you. He lied to you. He used your feelings for him to get away with every nasty thing he ever did. He abandoned you to that monster. Regulus thought you were the sun and you never believed it. Are you really going to live the rest of your life thinking Severus doesn't believe you hung the stars?"

Lou blew a wisp of hair from her face and paused, her teeth working on the corner of her lip.

"Yes, I think you love him," the blonde leaned forward and tapped her head, "Up here, you do."

"How do you know that, and I don't?"

Louisa crossed the room to grab the gauze to begin wrapping her leg, "Because I don't have that monster upstairs in my head telling me otherwise."

She sat and began unrolling the fabric, her fingers measuring a long length before snipping it with a pair of shears. Her face was solemn when she looked up, her mouth twisted in a frown.

"And, I never had to learn love from someone who didn't know how to give or receive it."

Charlie remained silent as she bandaged her leg and moved to her foot. The feeling in her toes hadn't come back, and Louisa wasn't sure that it would. It was another scar from the war that never seemed to want to release her.

Sirius had been a bit of a bad boyfriend, she allowed.

He hadn't wanted anyone to know they were together. He'd promised it was to save her from any abuse from his mother, but maybe he'd just done it for his own means. He had liked to chase the girls at Hogwarts, and having Charlie hovering around in the corridors wouldn't have helped him. She had been able to turn her eyes for a time, accepting the excuses of her safety from his lips as truths.

Until Regulus had punched him for it.

He'd seen her crying after catching Sirius with Astrid in the Slytherin dungeons and had left the common room with poison in his eyes. Regulus had always been cleaning up the broken pieces of her that Sirius had left behind him.

"Maybe you just give it a try, Charlie," Louisa said quietly, "Just help him figure it out. Maybe that's what'll fix all of this for both of you. I think you both could use a reprieve. I saw you love Sirius better than I've certainly loved anyone. You just need to give that to someone who can give it back to you."

A stone had formed in her throat. Her voice was a whining whimper when she spoke.

"I don't know how to do to that anymore."

Louisa stopped and pinched her nose, "I know, honey. I know it's been hard for you."

The healer stopped her bandaging to crawl across the bed and pull Charlie against her chest as broken noises left the dark-haired witch's throat.

"You've been so strong and I'm so proud of you," Louisa's voice cracked, "You're trying so hard."

Her fingers wiped away the hot tears at Charlie's eyes.

"You're the bravest girl I've ever met, you know. I've never met anyone who gets out of bed every morning and fights a monster no one else can see. So, I know that you've got this, honey. It's not stronger than you are."

After the blonde had clipped her bandages and tucked the covers back over her gauze-wrapped legs, she disappeared from the room. She came back with Snape's wireless radio tucked under her arm and a tray of shortbread and tea.

"Doctor's orders. Tea, biscuits, and trashy drama radio."

Charlie snorted as the blonde forced a biscuit into her hand and arranged herself next to her on Snape's tartan comforter.

Her fingers touched the fabric and the crispness of it.

Green tartan shot with silver and gray.

"It's new, do you like it? I thought it was a bit gaudy. Too much Slytherin for me, but Severus does head the House now. Suppose it's suitable. He brought it home yesterday."

The air filtering through her nose felt thinner.

"I think I'm going to be sick," she said as she felt the bile rising in her throat.

Quickly, Lou slipped from the bed and ran out the room. The door smacked against the crisply painted walls – still the dark gray Charlie had painted them two years ago. She reappeared with the silver bin from the washroom and thrust it beneath Charlie's mouth just as vomit pressed against her tongue.

"Severus! We need some water!"

Louisa called out the door as she reached across the filling bin to pull Charlie's hair from her face.

"No, I don't-!"

But Snape was already in the doorway, his brow furrowed as Charlie's stomach heaved again.

"Too much sugar. You haven't been able to eat anything. We need to get some salt in you. Sev, could you grab some of those tablets from my bag? They're in the green glass bottle. Just smash it up in the water glass, and we'll be right as rain again."

It wasn't the sugared shortbread.

It was the green tartan laying across her legs, and the knowledge that Severus knew what she'd done. He'd seen it all, playing in the corners of her mind as she slept off the obscurial fit.

When Severus reappeared with a sweat-slicked glass, she gulped the water in mouthfuls she swished between her teeth as Louisa smoothed cool hands across her forehead.

"I'm ordering more rest," Louisa stood, "She doesn't leave this bed. I've got Clarice at work covering my shifts, so it shouldn't be a problem if you need me tonight. Broth for supper until her salt comes up. She can have tea or water – no sweets."

Severus followed her from the room as she fished the bin from Charlie's fingers and pressed a kiss to her temple.

"Feel better, honey," the blonde called, "I'll be back in the morning to check your bandages."

He knew the terrible thing she'd done in Grimmauld Place. Snape had seen everything. He'd be disgusted with her – he'd laugh over her own protests at his actions. Was what he had done so different?

When he reappeared in the doorway, he leaned against the frame and watched her as she closed her eyes and feigned interest in the romance playing on the wireless.

"Do they still hurt?"

"No," she mumbled.

"Liar," his voice was soft as he moved to the bedside table, searching through the drawer, "Take it."

She didn't protest as he thrust the uncorked vial at her, grimacing as the sour draught ran across her tongue. He sat next to her on the bedspread, taking the emptied glass from her when she'd finished, and rested his back against the headboard she'd bought the last month she'd lived in his room.

He listened to the radio show with her in silence, his eyes closed, and his arms wrapped comfortably around his chest. The sound of his breath as his shoulders rose and fell into pace with the story as it unraveled. Occasionally, his mouth would turn in a smirk or a grimace with the dialogue. A snort escaped his lips during a cliché monologue.

"You can change it, if you want to," she mumbled, her own eyelids heavy.

Severus shrugged, his head resting against the slate gray wall. A single eye cracked open and his arm reached across to tuck the tartan comforter around her hip.

"I was watching," he said finally.

Her stomach dropped.

"I seem to learn more about you in your sleep than I ever do when you're awake," his voice was soft, his eyes still closed, "Remind me to murder Dolohov before I return to Hogwarts."

A smile pulled unconsciously at her mouth.

"I didn't give you anything like they promised you," he continued, "I won't love you like Regulus did. I won't forget myself in pursuit of you. I don't think I ever have."

Charlie froze.

"You've known how I felt about you, and you left. Even though my disposition towards you had changed drastically over those years. You saw what I did, and you left me for it. But I saw what you did."

Her eyes squeezed shut.

He'd send her back to Finch Street with its silence and to Mad-Eye and his lies.

"My father was a horrible man," Severus picked at his trousers, "He had a problem with liquor, and he liked to hit my mother. When she was done, he'd come for me. I wasn't a prize for anyone. There weren't any appearances to keep up."

The skin on Charlie's neck crawled.

"I won't make excuses for my behavior, but you weren't a person to me then. I saw an opportunity to get out of this godforsaken house, and I seized it. It was wrong," his eyes opened to stare at her, "I will never articulate how greatly I regretted this. I think you know how that feels."

She did, after all.

She'd seen it in the way Regulus had paced the corridors of their gold-leaf wallpapered home in London. In the edge to his voice when they argued. She'd taken away his chance of normal. The regret had filled her to the brim until it spilled over and she'd go to him in the night and let him run his hands over her and fill her with tension and want.

Just for a chance to give him a sliver of what he could've had – a normal wife, a normal home. He'd cling to her those nights when they'd finished, gulping in the air around her hair like a lifeline, his arms trembling around her sweat-slicked body.

"You were dying on my lawn four days ago, screaming like an animal."

Charlie swallowed thickly.

"Do you know what that's like for me? To see you thrashing against something I can't kill for you. You're screaming for people who aren't alive anymore, and I don't know how to watch you do it anymore."

His voice had grown hoarse.

"But this time, do you know what you were screaming?"

She shook her head.

"You were screaming for me. You were screaming until your voice broke and you just went limp. I thought you were dead, Charlotte. Have you ever held someone as they die feeling for them the way I feel about you, and you can't do anything at all?"

His hands trembled on his lap, "I can't do it anymore, Charlotte."

"I have cautiously felt this way for you because you are so fragile. Lily left for something so marginally terrible in comparison to what I've done to you. I had to watch her with Potter for years after she'd gone, but I don't want to only have memories of you as my wife and you sitting here on my bed and talking about the terrible things we've done in our lives."

Louisa had said she could move her back to Finch Street, she reminded herself as tears gathered in her eyes once more. She wondered if a person could run out of them.

Surely, there couldn't be much more in her.

"I am a terrible man, Charlotte. The pieces of good in me are far outnumbered by evil. I did not watch your dreams and think of how awful your life was. I thought about crushing Dolohov's throat with my bare hands."

Severus smiled sadistically, "I still may. He comes for drinks with Malfoy at the Wyvern."

"But I am not like Regulus. I won't be satisfied with pieces of you. I know every evil you've thought you've done, and I know the best parts of you. I know all of it. I know you better than Black could have ever hoped to."

He slipped from the bed and adjusted his rolled sleeves.

"It gives me a bit of satisfaction that I've had more of you than he has. But I'm a terrible man, Charlotte, and frankly, I've grown greedy. I'm not satisfied with more of you than Black had. I want more."

His eyes were obsidian when they landed on her face.

"I expect you tell me things, instead of waiting for me to creep into your dreams. I'm not Black. I won't be horrified by the things you've done. I'm certain there is extraordinarily little you could do that would shock me. I'm a cold-blooded murderer, Charlotte. That's who I am. Tell me honestly or I will tear it from you by force."

Charlotte nodded in agreement, her nose burning.

"Do you want me to love you?"

She blinked.

It was an incredulous question, she reasoned. Love wasn't ordered or directed. It grew unbidden. Love had blossomed under the dim light Sirius had cast over it and shrunk over the sun Regulus had given her. It had lived stagnantly in her for a wizard she would not see again her lifetime, who had given her little to love, but she had loved every piece of it.

Charlotte desperately wanted to be loved, she realized.

She had begged for it from Sirius. Her hopes for him had ruined her. Maybe Regulus had really loved her, in an organic and romantic way. She'd been too blinded by the way Sirius had taught her love to recognize it. It had seemed gaudy and cheap. Love was supposed to come by desperately clawing for it. That was the only way she had ever received it.

"Once I start, Charlotte, I won't be able to stop."

How long had she wanted Sirius to say those words to her, unbidden by pleas?

She wondered how she would have blossomed under soft sunlight, instead of throttled between a clouded sky and a blinding summer day. A love that didn't put her on a pedestal, but that she never had to chase.

You just need to give that to someone who can give it back to you.

Louisa's voice rang in her ears.

She recalled the warmth across her belly the first night Severus had moved her to his bedroom, the way her heart had fluttered when he pressed his cheek to her head in his sleep. Charlie remembered his desperate eyes as his hands pressed against her bleeding abdomen, his urgent, sharp voice as he had forced her awake despite the cool draw of exhaustion.

Severus loved her in fleeting caution. He didn't know affection, or what it felt like to be burned or neglected by a sun. He lived in a world of logic and assured certainty. She was an uncertain calamity in his life. Tomorrow, she could stop breathing in her sleep if the obscurus pressed its smoke hard enough against her nose and suffocated her in her dreams.

It was a terrifying thing, to love someone who could disappear.

But she wanted it.

Selfishly, she wanted to remember what it felt like to have someone worry about her. She wanted him to stay up at night waiting for her to come home from the Wyvern with Louisa, and hover at the door of his classroom at the end of summer, eager to return home.

She wanted him to have that, too.

They had suffered too long not to have it.

It didn't even need to be perfect, she thought. He could love her so minimally. He'd never have to give her a baby, though the thought difficultly crept to her mind. Maybe she could find happiness in a love that was simply good on its own.

They were both broken, with sharp, fractured corners and rotten pieces.

It couldn't be worse than being broken by herself, she thought.

"Charlotte," his voice called her back to his obsidian eyes, and for a moment, the sharp pressure against her mind dug into her temples.

She let him in. He could find the answer she couldn't.

Severus dug through the broken shelves of her mind until he closed his eyes, his expression unreadable, and she felt the pressure release between her temples.

He walked from the bedroom, and she felt her chest constrict.

But before she could dislodge the stone in her throat to shout his name after him, he was coming back through the door with his shirt unbuttoned and a stack of parchment.

"I'll do the lesson plans for Slughorn while you sleep."

Snape slipped the shirt from his shoulders and made a spot for himself alongside her in their bed, carefully setting an inkwell on the bedside table.

Briefly, she wondered if he had found his answer in the disorganized mess of her mind.

But he leaned over and pulled the comforter over her shoulder, and his lips brushed her hair.

It wasn't a kiss.

It was a soft, fleeting touch of uncertainty.

Charlotte pressed her cheek into the pillow. It was uncertain, but it was there anyways, she thought, as she listened to the scratch of his quill.

He was trying, as best as he could. He would learn, she reminded herself, just as she would. They'd make their own version of it.

"Go to sleep, Charlotte," he snapped, and she smiled.

He was still sharp on the corners, but she was, too.

She had reached the threshold of her resistance against Snape's sleeping draught, and her eyelids felt heavy against her cheeks. She took deep, even breaths, willing herself to listen to the scratch of his quill just for a few more moments. She had been so smothered by silence at Finch Street.

The sound tickled her ears as she drank in the smell of his aftershave - sharp spearmint, and a quiet whisper of wintergreen.

"Astrid Crabbe smelled like boiled cabbage," she heard him mutter, "She failed half her OWL's."

Beside her, the bed moved.

She could've been dreaming it, she thought.

Severus's lips hovered against her forehead, brushing against the worry-line that had formed above her brow. Cautiously, they pressed against her forehead, and brushed across her skin until his lips hovered over her ear, his breath hot against her cheek.

"Go. To. Sleep."

A smile split her lips and she cracked an eye open to see his irate face peering back at her.

"But what if I wake up and I'm alone?"

Severus snorted, "Where would I go?"

"I don't know. You could just leave."

His mouth tightened, "Do you worry about that?"

I expect you to tell me things, he'd said.

She nodded.

"It isn't simple to leave you, Charlotte."

"You didn't even write to me when I left."

The scratching of his quill stopped, "No, I didn't."

"Louisa said you didn't ask after me, either."

Severus cleared his throat.

"I didn't need to," he said finally.

Her puzzled eyes drew an annoyed sigh from him, "I've tapped your fireplaces, Charlotte. Do we truly need any further confessions today? I've exhausted them. Slughorn is bound to pass every dunderhead in my NEWT class, and I'll have to answer to their apothecary masters all summer when they burn through cauldrons if I do not leave strict instruction."

A bubbling laugh escaped her lips.

"Go to bed, Charlotte. I can't do this if you're looking at me like that."

"How am I looking at you?"

Severus narrowed his dark eyes, "The way you looked at Black. I am unable to focus if you're going to continue."

Her eyelids were growing heavy again as she dropped her cheek against his thigh. The scratching of his quill resumed.

It wasn't right, she thought.

It wasn't possible to be in so much physical pain and feel so light inside.

Maybe it was the draught, she mused, as it pulled her deeper into exhaustion.

Snape's fingers absently reached to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers lingered, tracing the curve of her ear into the contour of her jaw.

"I can't sleep if you're going to touch me like that, Severus."

His fingers froze at her mumbled, sleep-thick voice.

They remained still against her cheek as she felt the dark pull at her until her breaths evened.

In her sleep, she laid across a blanket on the shore of Hogwarts Lake, baking under a soft, warm glow of sunlight with soft whispers of wind that brushed her eyelids and traced the curve of her lip.

The black smoke hovering over the lake came no closer, flinching from the sun on her skin.

Its sinister whispers were drowned by the sound of the trembling branches of the Whomping Willow as the breeze hummed her name.

I really love this chapter. It's a bit shorter than last week's but I think we're finally moving in the direction we've been hoping for! How long will it actually last?

My own update - my actor's choice for Regulus is Cillian Murphy (specifically, the first season of Peaky Blinders, because I love how his eyes contrast with the dark hair. I think because I've always envisioned the characters differently than their movie interpretations, I think this is more on par with how Regulus probably looked). I got married on the 10th of October and am still rifling through the mounds of boxes we received after our Zoom-based ceremony. No one told me how many gifts you get when you get married and I was entirely unprepared. My front hallway looks like an Amazon warehouse barfed in it.

BRING YOUR HOUSE TO GLORY!

Drop your Hogwarts House in the Reviews Section to get +5 Points towards the Hogwarts House Cup!

This chapter's bonus points (+5) will go to whoever leaves their House and an actress they think looks like Charlotte :) I'd love to see your interpretations. Mine is a dark-haired Emilia Clarke, as we can see from our lovely cover art.

Gryffindor - 200

Ravenclaw - 105

Hufflepuff - 120

Slytherin - 150

Look at you badgers go, overtaking Ravenclaw. Mr. Kestrel is quite pleased, being a Hufflepuff himself.