A/N: For disclaimers, see Part I. Only Rebecca Stanhope Flack belongs to me. The others are the property of J.K. Rowling and Anthony Zuiker respectively.

"A Horcrux," she said to him. "A variant, anyway." She looked at him without smiling and swiped the back of her bloody hand across her forehead, leaving a tacky, red smear.

The admission was so blunt that he couldn't process it at first, and when the words finally sank in, all he could manage was, "What?" Strengthless and muddled, Neville Longbottom with a faceful of tit.

"A Horcrux," she repeated.

He belatedly remembered his wand, which sagged in his stupefied, clumsy fingers. He re-established his grip and leveled it at her. "Give me your wand," he ordered.

"No. Besides, we both know neither of us needs one if push comes to shove." No challenge, just a bald statement of fact.

"I'll not ask you again. Surrender your wand, or I'll Bind you and take it."

She rolled her eyes. "If you were going to, you would've done it by now," she said dismissively.

"Rebecca-,"

"I loved you then, and I love you now. If I were going to kill you, you'd be dead. I give no warnings. You know that."

Too right you do. Warnings were for fools and corpses, and the former almost always became the latter. She had no compunction about Cursing someone in the back or stuffing mud into the mouth and nose of a fallen enemy to drown them in dirt and ensure that there would be no hex spat from a dying mouth. She took no pleasure in it, but she didn't shy from it, either, and she gave no quarter on the basis of age. Children died alongside adults and merited the same number of tears-none. A handful of black, oozing mud for the lot of them with no hesitation.

You and the other children of the Light were so appalled the first time you saw her stuff thick, bloody mud into the gaping mouth of a fifth-year Slytherin who had been laid open with a Flaying Charm. You and Dean Thomas were going to leave him where he lay, give him a faint chance of being tended by a Healer and cheating Charon, but she followed behind, picked up the mud, and slopped it into his mouth.

You stared at her in disgusted incredulity. What the bloody hell are you doing? You're going to kill him. He was throttling on the black, bilious earth, his tongue a fat, pink earthworm beneath the bubbling mud.

She gazed dispassionately at him. No, I won't, she said. The wound will, though. Then she turned her flat, stony gaze on you. Besides, isn't that my job? To kill them before they kill me? Then she faced forward again and crawled over the body of an Auror who had been two seconds slower than his foe.

Dean was repulsed by her, called Lucifer's whore, and to be honest, you were rattled to the marrow yourself by her detached pragmatism in the face of morality's rude upending. But three weeks later, Dean was dead, skull cleaved like a rotten melon by a troll's club, and she was still alive and perversely vital amid the mayhem. She was still crawling over the bodies, and he was one of them, and so it was that you adjusted to survive.

That was the hell of war. It stripped the varnish from the world and made a mockery of the catechism you had been taught at your mam's knee. There was no room for politeness or civility or even decency in shades of grey. There was only black and white and unapologetic scarlet. A month after your stomach turned at the sight of her cramming mud into a fifteen-year-old's mouth, you brought a wet rock down onto the head and neck of a thirteen-year-old girl because it was her or you and you wanted to live.

Not that you could wrap your head around what you had done at first. After it happened, you staggered to your trench and collapsed into it, and you spent the next few hours hugging your knees to your numb chest and sicking into the mud. You couldn't get her face out of your mind. She had been plaited and wide-eyed with shock, and the only difference between her and the third-years you were dying to defend had been the side on which she stood when the hexes had begun to fly. You were sure you were headed for eternal damnation.

Rebecca sat next to you in the trench while you blubbed. She didn't touch you, and she offered no useless platitudes. She just watched, archless feet splayed indelicately in front of her and bony back slumped against a crumbling wall of mud. Her skinny, boneless legs and inscrutable, reptilian eyes reminded you of a crocodile, ageless and fathomless. You knew that when she opened her mouth, there would be too many teeth, needle-sharp and yellow with old death.

You did what you had to, she said when you vomited for the third time. It was the only comfort she could offer.

She was thirteen, you screamed, as if her youth made the crime worse. Not even old enough to have bubs. It was a stupid thing to say, but the thought was lodged in the back of your mind like a pebble in a mill wheel, and you could turn your mind to nothing else.

You looked? she asked mildly, and drew a circle in the mud with a black-nailed finger.

You could only gape uselessly at her. Snot dripped onto your lip in a clear, cold runner, salty and bitter as blood and iron. It's just something blokes notice, you muttered dully.

She was old enough, she went on, as though you had never spoken.

To die? you snapped.

To choose her side and the consequences that came with it.

What if she chose the way she did because somebody told her it was the right thing to do? you insisted.

A craggy, inelegant shrug. So? Isn't that why you chose to follow Dumbledore?

No. I followed because it is the right thing.

How can you be sure? A humorless smile played at the thin corners of her mouth, and you thought of Dean Thomas calling her Lucifer's whore. Because the Headmaster said so?

What if it was us, there on the other side of the line?

She sundered the circle she had drawn in the mud with a scrape of her nail. Then we'd be fighting just as hard to stay alive. Life makes right. She patted your hand with her cold, dirty fingers. Don't worry, Seamus, she assured you. You'll learn to live with it in the end.

And damned if you didn't. You had wicked awful nightmares for years after the War, but they gradually faded, and when you think of the girl and her flat chest during waking hours, they inspire nothing. You no longer worry about damnation because the question has long been settled. You know you're going to Hell, but you've made peace with it because you know you can handle it. After all, you've been there before. With Lucifer's whore as your guide, perched on your shoulder and steering you towards the light of survival with the most savage of rods-pitiless, remorseless truth.

Lucifer's whore. That was what Dean Thomas had called her once upon a time, and that was who he was seeing now. She was a queen of blood and bone, stripped of all childhood softness. She sat in her chair, bathed in blood of wool and man. It was on her hands and flecked in her hair, and beneath the swath on her forehead, her eyes were bright and beautiful in the night. He was repulsed, but he was also fascinated, and though he was loath to admit it, the carnage had lent her an eerie beauty.

"Whose blood is that?" he demanded.

"Lessing," she said. "A Muggle from New York."

"You murdered him?"

"I gave him his hell as he gave me mine." She shifted in her chair, and his wand arm tensed in preparation for an attack, but she only said, "Are you going to kill me now? I believe that's the statute."

Yes, it was, as a matter of fact. By law, the sentence should have been carried out ten minutes ago, and she should be ashes cooling to cinders in front of the Shack. But too much has passed between them for him to kill her without thought, without knowing why she had given up all pretense and let the death mask have her. She had saved him once, and he wanted to save her if he could.

I loved you then, and I love you now.

"You don't seem too concerned about the possibility of dying," he observed, and moved to sit on the rickety steps of the Shack. He let his wand dangle loosely between his knees, and the tip nudged him in gentle reminder of his duty.

She laughed, a raw, throaty rumble. "I'm tired," she said. "Do you remember how tired we used to get?"

How could he not? Seventeen and staggering through days filled with mud and blood and the stench of burning flesh, eating stale biscuits from the Headmistress' battered tin because that was all there was. Popping maggots like kettlecorn to amuse themselves and lessen the burden of mortality, children still in the face of atrocity.

War had not allowed for the luxury of sleep; it was snatched in increments, found in the scant shelter of squelching mud or against the boles of ancient trees. For a few days at the beginning of battle, they had taken refuge in the passageway beneath the Whomping Willow and slept nestled against one another like kits, but Peter Pettigrew had wasted no time in divulging the passage to his Lord, and they had fled their cramped sanctuary with sleep and rain in their eyes.

Until then, he'd never known true weariness. He had slept in soft beds and dreamed of Quidditch. Sometimes his calves had burned with the pleasant throb of a day on the pitch or his head had grown heavy and nodded on the thick stem of his neck with the dullness of slumber delayed. He had even known the boneless joy of satisfaction after a good wank, but he had never longed for rest. His body had never wept for it, pores and nerve endings open and raw to the world in a desperate search for it.

And then the War, and true hunger, for food and for sleep and for a scrap of sanity. His belly had cramped with the emptiness of too little, and his head had pounded with the fullness of too much. Too much seeing, too much hearing, too much knowing. He knew how blood tasted on the tongue and felt on the teeth and lips. He knew what a human skull sounded like when it shattered beneath a troll's club and what burning hair smelled like against the dewy greenness of a spring dawn. He had never wanted to add those truths to his store of knowledge, had never pondered them in his idle moments, but there had been no blessed sleep to repel them, and so they had become his.

They had all forgotten sleep, kept awake for days by the constant threat of death. Wakefulness had settled into their bones like ague and made them heavy and clumsy. They had lived in a world of fever dreams, and phantoms had lived beneath the thin membranes of the world. Some had hallucinated and succumbed to madness and run, raving, across the moor until enemy fire had granted them sleep.

Some, like Rebecca and Loony Luna, had coped well in that hallucinatory, twilight world. Luna had survived the War largely unscathed and had taken over the publishing and distribution of The Quibbler, and in many quarters, it was deemed more credible than the Prophet, whose reputation had been in tatters after the War. Luna lived quietly in Kensington, spinning tales of Crumple-horned Snorkacks and doxy-human hybrids and tending orchids with Neville Longbottom in the garden behind the flat.

There had been few nightshade lilies, though. Most had simply endured and learned to sleep on their feet or in a crouch, and those fortunate enough to have friends among the Healers had cultivated addictions to Pepper-Up Potions or Biliwigs, and as an Auror, far too many of his days had been spent canvassing the alleys and flea-ridden flophouses for soldiers cum addicts whose lives had been reduced to the next fix. Last year, he had caught Parvati Patil selling her once much-coveted quim for five quid and a phial of Pepper. He had offered her a robe before he took her in, but she had only stared at him in dull-eyed indifference and gone to the station with her emaciated breasts on display.

The lack of sleep had been both boon and curse on the battlefield. Fatigue had made them slow and uncertain, and he was convinced that weariness had killed Dean Thomas as surely as the troll's club had. He had simply been too tired to take the step that might have saved him. It had been easier and kinder to stand where he was and let the end come with the wet, muffled grate of exploding bone.

If one went without sleep long enough, they could see around the wavering, displaced curves of the world. The stuporous heaviness of limb and mind gave way to a giddy, nitrous reality. They grew light inside their dirty skins and were attuned to the slightest noise or flicker of movement. Reflexes improved, and hesitation vanished until they became dust-dancers in the night, whirling and crouching and stabbing in an airless ballet that required neither bone nor muscle. The hyper-awareness was more addictive than the Pepper-Up that provided it, and he suspected that that release from thought was what had led beautiful girls like Parvati to shed their dignity and their clothes in squalid, tavern rooms that stank of Firewhiskey and filthy wool and wood rot.

In truth, you're addicted to it just as much as she was and is. The need for it is another reason why you joined the Aurory. What is Aurory but organized, undeclared war on the unsavory souls who haunt the world in their dirty, black-hearted bodies? There is precious little time for sleep even if you've a soft, feather-stuffed four-poster in which to do it. You can stay up for days, until the leaden exhaustion sloughs and leaves bird-bone lightness in its place, until the prickle and scald of eyestrain peels away the filter behind your eyes and lets you see the shadows behind the light.

You don't use Pepper-Up or Biliwigs to thwart your body's need for sleep, though God and Merlin know you could; the evidence vaults below the Ministry are rife with both, and no one would blink if the counts were off by a phial or two, not with the notorious shambles record-keeping has become in the wake of new Ministry regulations and the decimation of the goblins, who clung to their neutrality until it slaughtered them.

You use tea and sugar and chicory coffee and high-bollocked Irish stubbornness. Those are in never-ending supply and perfectly bloody legal. You tell yourself that your wakefulness is naught but what the job demands, and it's true, but what is truer is the fact that you've acquired a taste for dancing on the edge of barking madness. Standing on that thread is life undiluted; it feels so good and hurts so bad, and after a while, you can't tell the difference.

"You're not sleeping, then?" he asked.

"When I first moved to New York, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't used to the cold after being home in Florida. I could turn the radiator up until it was like dragon's breath, and the sheets would still be frozen. Then I met my husband, and he kept me warm. He was a frigging heatbox. And then the bastard blew him up, and the cold got into him, too."

He blinked. He had no idea what she was on about. "Blew him up? Your husband's dead, then?"

"No!" It was a scream, short and shrill, jagged glass in the darkness. "No, no, no." An anguished moan. "He didn't kill him, but he t-tried. Tore a hole in his abdominal wall and let the cold inside." She began to rock back and forth in her chair as though soothing a restless infant. It was too dark to be certain, but he suspected she was crying. "I couldn't wake him up, and I couldn't make him warm, not for a long time. But I tried."

"I know," he said, and he did. Rebecca might have been Lucifer's mad whore, milked and forged from blood and sorrow, but she was not faithless. Her enmity was unfailing and eternal, but so was her loyalty. If she said she loved, then so it was, and it would not be turned aside, and there was nothing unconscionable in the quest to protect what was hers.

"He was my Prince Charming," she went on, and now there was no doubt that she was crying. The salt of tears was rough and smothering in her throat. "All those years, you and the twins and Harry, you tried to tell me what life could be, that hatred and bitterness didn't have to be all there was to the world. And then he came along and showed me you were right. It was like flying all the time, like freefalling with my arms outstretched. But it was all right because I knew that someone would catch me."

"Not only did he catch me, Seamus, but he bloody married me, stood in front of God and everybody in St. Patrick's Cathedral and told them that out of all the women in the world, I was the one he wanted. This to a girl whose own mother told her that no one would want her like that. And there he was, offering me…everything."

"Life didn't hurt anymore. I caught myself waking up and looking forward to the day. He made love real and not some bullshit fairy tale that people made up to make themselves feel better. He kept promises. If he said he'd bring me sunflowers, then he brought me sunflowers-big bunches of yellow flowers that got pollen and the smell of green things on his hands. It was all right to dream with him because he wouldn't break them if he didn't have to. Before that morning, we had started talking about a baby, and then Mac called him in, and oh, holy fuck-,"

She slowly folded in on herself, spindly arms wrapped around her middle as though she were trying to keep her insides from becoming outsides and slipping through her cold fingers onto the frozen, black earth. He knew he should go to her and offer what comfort he could with his clumsy embrace and surrogate warmth. He had done it without thinking as a boy, had covered her body with his own while the castle had shuddered and groaned around them, but the ease of childhood was far away and long ago, and even if he could have persuaded his adult-heavy legs to close the distance between them, his mouth would never rise to the occasion. He would just loom over her, mute and stupid and a piss-poor substitute for the true comfort she so clearly needed.

Your beloved bloke's not the only one who got blown apart that morning, is he? he thought as he watched her from the corner of his eye and scuffed his embarrassment into the dirt with the toe of his boot. You did, too, and then you stitched yourself together again with your contrary hands. It wasn't a thorough job, though. There are missing pieces and sharp, fractured edges that draw blood from tender places and send it into your mouth, where you taste it and lust for vengeance. The only reason you're still walking about is your pig-headed refusal to die.

"Five years, and everything was fine, and then it went tits-up with the press of a goddamned button. Five years out of twenty-six. Shit," she swore, and he heard her wiping mucus on the sleeve of her robes. "He was fine, and then he wasn't, and there were assholes asking me to dole out pieces of him like sweetmeats while I'm still grappling with the possibility that he might lea-be gone." A muffled low of suppressed grief.

She heaved herself upright and scrubbed at her face with bloody hands. "You ever wonder why things never stay fine, but they'll stay fucked up as long as you please?" she mused. Too old for her years. That much had not changed, at least.

He did, indeed. "More than a few times."

A lifetime ago, he had asked her a simple question, and he had never suspected where it would lead him. He had learned more about her in twenty minutes than in the three years of their childhood friendship. She had made a patchwork quilt for him, fashioned it from all the secret hurts she had never conceded or shared. Words and fragments of a life unconsciously chosen to paint a picture of who she had become and who she had always been behind her towering fortress walls. It was an unbidden confession, and not just to the blood gone sticky and dry on her restless hands.

"He tells me he's all right now," she said quietly. "That it's over and we can just go on. There's a scar where the cold got in, all wattled and puckered. He's warm now when I touch him, like he used to be, but I can still feel it underneath my fingertips, that cold, razorblades on the pads. It's underneath his skin, hidden in the tissue, and I know it'll never leave him. It's just waiting for the next opportunity, and there's no guarantee that he'll come back to-,"

She stopped. "It's on his lips, in his blood. I can taste it on him, just like I can taste the copper and tin of his badge. It's not his fault, God help me, but I can kiss goodbye on his mouth and tongue, and I-I don't want to." A moaning wail, wind soughing through broken chimes.

"What did you do, Rebecca?" he prodded, grip slick around the shaft of his wand and belly heavy with apprehension.

The answer, when it came, was inevitable, and later that night when he sat in his bedroom, secure in a haze of Firewhiskey and snuffed tapers, he would admit to himself that he had been expecting it from the moment he had stepped from the bushes with his wand drawn.

"I fixed it. I couldn't fix him; they wouldn't let me, so I did the next best thing. I found Lessing, and I fixed him instead. The outside to match the inside."

She hated to lose, to be seen as inferior. That's why she took on Snape the way she did: she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of being right. You and Neville told her a thousand times to forget him, to skate through your detentions like everyone else did, but she wouldn't hear of it. She answered that imperious bastard's summons every night and came back to the Common Room with her hands bloody and cramped into claws from gripping a pestle for hours on end in the cold and damp. Sometimes, she'd be so stiff the next morning that it was all she could do to grip her wand or quill, and no matter how often she went into the dungeons, it was never enough.

Sometimes, she just sat by the fire in the Common Room and cried, rocked slowly back and forth in her with her clawed, bloody fingers wrapped around her shoulders. You'd fume and swear and beg her to tell the Headmaster, but she'd just shake her head.

No. If I do that, it's an admission that I'm as weak and useless as he says I am.

You wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled inside her skull whenever she said that. It wasn't about strength or weakness or being good enough, and it drove you mad that for all her intelligence, she couldn't see it. The only one who'd ever questioned her worth was her; the Slytherins, too, but sod the lot of them. When she turned her eyes outward and away from the fractured internal mirror that captured so much of her attention, she was as fine a Gryffindor as ever put on the robes. But those moments were rare. For the most part, she was content to look into the mirror and see her self-doubt reflected and magnified.

Letting Snape near her was a bloody disaster, and the Headmaster should've known better. He took the hairline fractures in her spirit and prised them until they were bleeding, bottomless gashes and exploited her need to prove herself for his own ends. She was his pet project, his opportunity to play God and mold a soul in his image, and damned if he didn't try.

He didn't entirely succeed, though. She was stronger than even she thought, and she wouldn't surrender to his whims. She believed what she believed and wouldn't be swayed, and despite her jeering cynicism of Gryffindor vainglory, she went to the trenches with you without hesitation.

He tempered her with his fury and venom, but the price was high. Too high. You knew it, and so did she. You realized that on the night you held her in the Hogwarts infirmary and listened to her scream her rage and betrayal to the cracking ceiling. She vibrated with it, hands fisted in the dirty, dusty sheets and hair snarled and flecked with mud and blood and bits of bone. She looked most like the girl she was that night, lost and tired and impossibly young, shocked out of her hard rime by the bitter understanding that Snape had wearied of his game.

It might've been too high, but there was no question of paying it. She had been doing so every night for three years, doling it out hour by hour as the sand trickled through the hourglass and her spirit grew as callused as her fingers. She's still paying, if her face is any indication. She's been blooded to the point of exhaustion and well beyond, and all that's left are hard angles and open holes. A Bone Queen, fleshless and hopeless and breathing because to stop would be an admission of weakness.

He rose from the steps and scuttled forward in a crouch until they were inches apart. He cautiously rested his free hand on her knee and was unsurprised to find that it was hard and cold.

"Rebecca," he said gently.

"They taught me how to hurt, Seamus, but nobody ever taught me how to heal. He was lying there in bed, and the morphine was doing sod-all, and he'd look at me, and I couldn't help him. All I could do was mutter a low-level Healing Charm that Madam Pomfrey used for firsties with scraped knees and elbows. Like that did a fucking thing except illustrate how useless I was, how useless magic was."

His lips thinned, and he tightened his grip until the thin, cold flesh bulged between his fingers. "Did you stay with him? Tell him you loved him?"

"Of course I did," she snapped. "Every chance I got."

"Then you did enough."

A snort and a wry smile. "How do you know?"

"This." He grabbed her hand and held it up until her wedding band twinkled in the moonlight. He shook it at her. "In case you've not noticed, you're a right prickly bitch when you want to be. I don't know your bloke from Adam, but he must've been a determined bastard to chase you through your barriers and peel away that mask you wear."

"And because I'm looking at you," he said. "You're a right prickly bitch, but you love as hard as you hate. You don't love easily, but you love well and forever. If you love him, you'd crawl through the pits of Hell to do right by him. And if he was bright enough to see through all the piss and vinegar you spew, then he damn well knows that. Did he ever tell you it wasn't enough?"

She shook her head. "Never. He tells me that he got through it because of me, but-,"

"Then it was enough," he interrupted. "Unless you're telling me you've yoked yourself to a liar and a fool."

She gazed at him with anguished longing. She wanted to believe, to believe that she had not shortchanged her husband with her trembling fingers and inadequate magic, but the venom Snape had injected into her veins so long ago had lost none of its potency. He watched the poison seep into the balm he had offered and saw the flickering shadows of doubt steal into her eyes. He could see her thoughts as clearly as if she'd spoken them.

Is it really, Seamus? Is it? How can it be when I still can't find all the pieces I left behind on the moors just up the narrow footpath?

Her face crumpled. "It didn't feel like enough."

He could not answer her because it was true. He had spent his life since the War picking up his own pieces and soothing his own wounds by avenging the wrongs of others. But no matter how many Dark wizards he found and executed or led away in handbills to the dead womb of Azkaban, it was never enough to quash the need for a draught of ale in the evenings or banish the memory of Dean Thomas' skull splintering like china under a troll's club and letting his brains sluice down his back in grey gobbets. None of the arrests had ever raised the dead.

He was as furious now at all the wasted lives and lost futures as he had been as he stood on the smoking, sloshing battlefield and watched the Hogwarts lake run red. Catching Fred Weasley's killer three years after the War hadn't made Fred any less dead or George any less mad, and when he walked through Diagon Alley, Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes was just as shuttered and derelict as it had been since Molly Weasley had closed its doors for the last time the day after Fred's funeral. Nothing had changed. All it had created was another hole in the world.

"Where is he?"

"Inside," she said. "No wards, no traps. I guess I'm not immune to Gryffindor arrogance, after all."

He went inside with his wand drawn. Thirty seconds later, he was sprinting for the hedgerow beside the shack, bile tart and sweet in his mouth. He doubled over and vomited onto the wet earth, hands clamped around his unsteady knees to keep him from toppling headlong into the sick.

We're all werewolves under the skin, he thought as he retched. Then, The outside to match the inside. That's what she always said. Good fucking God. He found himself trying to laugh and vomit at the same time, and his nose burned with displaced vomit.

"That was almost enough," she said from behind him. "Almost."

He straightened and reeled from the mess, the aftertaste of vomit sour on his tongue. "Are you mad?" he asked, and wiped his slick lips with the back of his hand. It would be easier if she were, kinder.

"No," she said, and he knew it was true. "I told you, I'm tired. If you're going to kill me, get on with it. But tell my love what happened, would you? I don't want him to think I deserted him." She sat calmly in her chair with her wand in her lap and waited for him to carry out his Ministry-sworn duty. "But don't destroy the Horcrux. Let the bastard suffer." She was crying again.

Lucifer's whore had been broken at last, broken not by her all-consuming hatred, but by the tender poison of love, and that realization shifted the fulcrum of his world and sent his heart into his knees. It was not supposed to be this way, to end this way for either of them. She was supposed to stand astride the world and piss on the graves of those she had outlasted and outlived, and he was supposed to play football for the West Ham team and live in Cork with his wife and children. They were not supposed to be chasing ghosts and making them of each other.

"The hell I will," he said finally. "God in his heaven, Rebecca, I love you, but you'll not use me to slip your tethers. You're going to go home to your bloke, and we're never going to speak of this again."

She gaped at him. "Seamus-,"

"Not ever," he repeated stubbornly. "I'll have no more blood on my hands. Go home and forget you ever set foot on this accursed place. And if you've a brain in that thick skull of yours, you'll destroy that Horcrux before it throttles you."

She did not thank him. She simply inclined her head in acknowledgement and was gone with an echoing pop. When it had stilled into silence, he turned and went inside to clean up the mess.

I loved you then, and I love you now, the wind whispered as he closed the warped door behind him, and the tender poison settled into his veins.