"Get out of my laboratory."
"No," she replies waspishly, not looking up. The root must be diced very fine to have its intended effect, and Lily isn't going to slice off a finger to appease Severus' snit. After an hour pulling herself together in her room after fleeing his chambers, she had made a decision: she got dressed, took her wand, and began to brew in his laboratory. Early morning light now streams through the window. A cold cup of tea sits on the side table on top of a stack of parchment. The topmost parchment is covered with her own handwriting, stained with previous attempts and tests done through the night. But this attempt is going to work, and it is not going to be ruined or abandoned simply to appease him.
"It is not a request."
"I'm not accustomed to taking orders from you." She prods the fire beneath the cauldron. He's nothing but a black speck in her peripheral vision. "You don't want me to leave just now anyway, the potion is at a particularly volatile stage. If you insist on sulking here alone, I'm more than happy to leave you to it in quarter hour, but I won't blow off the back half of the house just because you're moody."
He doesn't say anything, which probably means he's standing there and glaring at her-as if that would change anything-or perhaps even shaking with rage or some equally impotent emotion, and Lily doesn't care. She feels reckless. She is free. The knife neatly swipes all the diced root off her cutting board and into her hand, and from her hand into the cauldron, and she whips the wooden spoon through three swift clockwise revolutions before striking it twice on the cauldron's edge as it turns from a light, transparent blue to deep brown. Approximately the color of Severus' eyes, really.
She looks up at him.
He looks awful. Miserable. He looks like a fifteen year old who has just called his best friend a mudblood, really. It's a look she remembers quite well. She didn't soften then, and she won't now.
"If you wish me to get accustomed to taking orders from you, by all means, give the order again. Maybe pull out your wand and wave it threateningly or something. At least I'm no longer under the illusion that you won't hurt me to get your way. Maybe that new fear in me will render you more effective."
He flinches from this truth. "I did not intend-"
"What you intended," she interrupts, slapping the spoon down to the cutting board with a sharp clatter, "does not matter. What you intended has never mattered, Severus."
They glare at each other across the table, through the cauldron's steam. He's so still and pale he might be a statue. In contrast, the heat of her angry flush and her billowing breaths make her feel like living furnace.
She looks away first. She picks up the knife, testing it with her thumb. It is dulled with use. The long sharpener points to Severus like a threat, and she rasps the edge of the knife along it slowly-not quite a threat, but a warning.
"You should have paid more attention in herbololgy," she says finally, her tone measured. "You'd know that there's a way to make this poison nonlethal. Easy."
"He will test it," he snaps. "If it does not work-"
"Tell him your pet mudblood tampered with it, then."
"Your life would be forfeit."
"You say that as if it mattered."
"It does." His anger is bringing him to life again. His shoulder twitches, as if to draw his wand. This, she knows-this is what she wants. This is so much better than his unreachable, untouchable stillness.
"Prove it," she challenges. "Living here, unable to leave this home, knowing the world outside despises me-as if that were such a life."
His jaw works. He is chewing on it now, the truth. He's not stupid. He has been a lot of things, but outright stupidity has never been among them.
"I'm going to do with with or without you." Maybe he doesn't know it now, but it's an offering. If she didn't care at all, she wouldn't tell him anything. She would just do it. Consequences be damned.
His quiet movement lasts so long, he almost goes still again, but he makes a nasal sound and says, like it's an insult, "Gryffindor."
"Git."
His arms cross before him, but his shoulders are lower, almost relaxed. "Are you going to blow off the back half of my home now, or later?"
"Not at all, if I can help it. Could you fetch me the bottles of nightshade tincture over there? I want to keep an eye on this in case it gets cranky."
It's like a wall has come down. He brings her the bottles-still slightly glowing with faintly violet light-and holds one up to his face to inspect it. "You've done something to them. A charm?"
"Sort of." She opens a bottle and dumps the contents through a cloth, straining out nightshade pieces. "I made this tincture last night. Enchanted the roots themselves. If I'm right, the tincture should take on the enchantment and pass its properties on to the poison itself." She extends her hand, and he drops the bottle into it. She opens it, gives it a sniff, and pours it with its companion into a small bowl. "If you'd have paid attention in herbology, you'd know that nightshade takes on charms rather well."
"It will still be a poison?"
"Yes." The third bottle is strained, and-slipping on Severus' too-large dragonhide gloves, because nightshade can have interesting reactions with flesh-she squeezes the last of the liquid from the cloth.
He raises an eyebrow.
She can't help a smile of self-satisfaction. "It's brilliant, really," she says. "It'll test precisely like it should. If I'm as good as I think I am-and you know that I am-he won't know a thing."
He watches her work, adding the strained tincture and stirring vigorously again, counting seconds under her breath. The potion clears suddenly, giving off blue sparks. She skims off a brilliant blue foam from the top. His focus on her movements-her hands-makes her feel warm around her cheeks and ears.
She extinguishes the fire beneath the cauldron and twirls her wand between two fingers, meeting his gaze again.
"It's done. It could probably use some filtration, but it's done. Would you like to test it?"
His eyebrows move upward ever so slightly. "On what?"
She taps her wand against her mouth twice, pensively, and then points it at the spoon. Slowly-she has not done this in a while and she has never been very good at transfiguration-ever so slowly, it becomes a mouse. A wood-patterned mouse, but a mouse nonetheless. With an eyedropper, she siphons off a bit of the clear poison, and holds the mouse steady against her chest. It struggles against her grasp, refusing to open its mouth.
With a snort of frustration, she says, "Sev-can you-"
"Imperio." The mouse falls still as death. There's still fear in its tiny, dark eyes, but it's at the bottom now, like a stone at the beneath the surface of a creek. It opens its mouth.
It's just a spoon, she reminds herself, and she places a drop in its mouth. It swallows with only a slight tremble.
"It'll take a while," she says, stroking the mouse's head with her thumb. "Of course, you'd want it to take a while. I estimate about two days with only minor symptoms."
"And then?"
"Oh, the mouse will die." She conjures a tiny, delicate cage. The mouse steps calmly inside and, when she shuts the door to the cage, Severus lifts the curse. It scurries to and fro, an image of silent panic. The smile born of magic and potion-making after so many empty years fades from her mouth. She knows exactly how it feels.
"I assume you'll like to know how it works," she says, lifting the cage and setting it on a side-table, away from the fumes of the bench.
"I have a few ideas. None of them will fool the Dark Lord." His voice is cool, but there was no disguising the interest there.
"It's a handful of charms. An identifying charm, and mental projection. When you know what it is-you know what it is, and that's that. When you don't know-you still know." She turns from Severus and empties the remainder of the poison in the eyedropper into a glass jar from the cabinet and, rummaging, brings down its identical mate. With her wand, she fills both with water and turns back to him, holding the identical jars, each full of clear liquid. "Here. Tell me which has the poison."
He inspects at the jars, and then, without moving, says, "The one in your right hand."
"You see?" She sips from the one in her left. "The rest of it's your recipe. The addition of St John's Wort is rather elegant, I wouldn't have thought of it but it should stave off the worst of the effects til it's too late to be treated. I took the liberty of looking at your notes-you should have better security, by the way, if you actually intend to keep anyone with a wand out of them."
"I did not intend to keep anyone with a wand out of them. Just those-without."
She raised an eyebrow. "Me?"
He doesn't say anything, but his mouth thins and eyebrows twitch, as if to say, who else is there?
The disgust twists across her face only briefly, but she decides to take a page out of his book. "I've decided things are different now," she said coolly, regarding him through lowered eyelashes. "You know what I want to accomplish."
"And if I wish to stop you?" His stillness holds only the smallest menace, but she knows how fast he is, how he can change immediately to someone else. He's always been swift, despite his other faults as a duelist and a man.
She watches him, her grip on her wand suddenly tight. Her voice is low. "I'm not the empty-headed girl you ask me to be when your colleagues come by. I can defend myself."
The silence between them is no longer jovial. It is thick, electric, neither looking away.
Her voice is low, almost begging when she speaks. "I don't want to fight you. I want you to do the right thing." She swallows. "I hope doesn't come to violence between us," she says finally.
He inclines his head. It is the first time he has moved in what feels like a century. "As do I."
"And the rest?"
He purses his lips, but nods slowly.
"I want to hear you say it."
It looks as if he is about to say something else, but he nods. "I will help you."