Lily can feel the weight of it in her pocket. It's heavier than it should be, and warm even through layers of fabric. It's all she can think about as she returns to her charge abandoned in the white silk parlor.
The girl is still sleeping. That's good. At least asleep she cannot be an obstacle-and no matter how appalling it is to think of her that way, that is what she would be awake. She shakes her head. She can't help the girl either. She made a scene. Who knows what the consequence for that will be. She draws her wand. "Obliviate," she whispers, knowing full well the irony of this. But it's only a small change, she tells herself, and a small change that will help them both. Instead of being hit with a spell, Lily had sat there, held her hand in silence, and calmed her down. A nicer story than the real one, and her sleeping mind accepts it easily. The guilt is tucked down inside her, below everything else. It is war and she has done worse. She knows she has done worse than this.
And as she crouches next to her, she has to wonder-is this how it went for Severus? One small bad thing, one minor manipulation, cascading down and down until-
Lily shakes her awake then, and the French girl looks up sleepily, confused. "You cried yourself to sleep. Now back to work, come on."
The girl shakes her head. "No," she says. "'Ee would want me to go to zee stables. To wait for him. I made a fool of myself." She sniffles, wiping her nose. "Was 'ee… angry? Did 'ee seem—"
"I don't know. I'm sorry if I got you in worse trouble. Blame Master Snape, he told me to take you. He signaled me." It was the truth, and she deserved that sliver of defense from Lily. "Will yours be mad?"
She laughs, a low throaty sound under her breath as she rises from the couch. "You know zee way of it. Thank you for 'elping me. It would be worse if you 'ad not."
The thanks are bitter, but Lily smiles anyway. "Of course." She entertains the thought of following her as she slips out to the stables, stealing the carriage, running free and wild and gone. She lets snow fall on the fantasy as she turns her back on the hall that leads to the servant's exit to the stables.
The dining room has dissolved into conversations and cleared plates. Another young man, the same age as the youngest Rosier boy, has taken her place; with her return, he smoothly exits past her, not even looking at her face. He must have been a first year when the war began, she realizes. A child. A captive. He should be in his third year. He should be learning charms and potions. He should be riding a broomstick, dreaming of catching a snitch to win a game, making mischief for Minerva—
She holds onto the grief for this boy's stolen education and childhood and uses it to smooth her mind. Severus wasn't wrong. She didn't know how much things had changed. Destroying the Dark Lord is an errand in the face of this staggering loss, and she can't feel it now, she can't afford to let it show on her face. So she freezes it all in ice and goes blank once more. Except now, there is something warm and—is it throbbing? Like an infected wound?—in her pocket.
The guests begin to retire to a massive lounge full of elegant and plush velvet furniture before a roaring hearth. This party of monsters picks at tiny high-frosted cakes with white sugared rose petals, nibbles at cheese, swills madiera and discuss the weather and their murders and the love of their wives. It isn't long-Severus nurses his glass, but she only refills it once, and he makes a motion to cut her off before it's even halfway full. Macnair, his current companion, protests, but Severus says he, more than anyone else, knows there is work to be done and his wits must be about him. The smile that brings to the Death Eater's face makes her want to scream. The book in her pocket seems to twitch again, as if there's a rat inside of it moving it to and fro with a furious burrowing.
Mercifully, finally, Severus rises and she takes a step forward from the wall. He glances to her feet, and she follows him out of the room. A servant brings the thestrals to the front. Escape is so near that Lily can almost taste it, and she is so ready to leave this place of suffering and strangeness that she almost misses Narcissa's approach as they near the grand front door. She's holding something large—no, not something, someone. A child, about four, a powder blue blanket draped around his shoulders, leaning sleepily on his mother's shoulder, feet dangling loosely. A blonde-haired child with large, soft, curious eyes and a finger in his mouth, watching them come to a halt before himself and his mother. His eyes do not slide past her the same way Narcissa's do.
"Be well, Severus," Narcissa says warmly. Her face is transformed when she speaks to someone she considers an equal. Another fact to file away. Severus inclines his head and murmurs a polite farewell, but Narcissa isn't listening. She takes a step toward Lily. Another. She smells of milk and powder.
Lily focuses on breathing smoothly. A sickening fear is building in her stomach, and the heat in her pocket is burning.
"What an interesting creature you've got here," she says over her shoulder. She reaches out, lifts a piece of hair from the side of Lily's head, runs her fingernails through it the way she would a piece of fine silk. And the child's eyes are still watching. She can't help but do the math and think this child would be the same age as— no. No. Not here. Not now. But the book is so warm on her leg, melting the ice, and the child could have been friends with her own, classmates with the one she can't remember—
Narcissa drops the lock of her hair and turns away. "Let us know if she doesn't keep you happy," Narcissa says breezily. "We'd love more pretty ones like this. You could take your pick of ours. I bet she'd do well with Draco." And she floats past Lily, arm almost brushing her own in all its gooseflesh. She can feel the child's gaze on her as his mother carries him away down the hall.
Severus is pale and blank, mouth thin and tilted into a tiny puzzled frown. They wait for one heartbeat longer, and then he jerks his head and she follows.
In the carriage, the door is barely shut when she opens her mouth, ready to pour it all outto him. But he makes a sharp slicing movement, and then reaches for her face, gently, carefully-
For a moment, it seems almost as if he is going to kiss her, and she is paralyzed by this more than anything else that has happened tonight. His cold fingertips graze her ear, and then—
He is lifting her hair away from her head, wand in his other hand, and something strange and wriggling is suddenly visible and writhing at the end of the lock of hair, like a maggot.
"Amateurs," he spits, and cuts the lock of hair from her head. The wriggling thing is beneath the heel of his shoe in a moment, and a brilliant smear on the floor in another.
"What was that?"
"A rare creature, obtained at some expense. The loquotor moth." He's sneering, now, superior and smug. "A magical caterpillar that is invisible until it transforms into a moth. Its wings show moving images it saw when it was a caterpillar. From a rainforest somewhere. Very expensive. Very difficult to raise. Unreliable for spying for specific detail, but very useful for discovering other things. Abuse, affairs, organized crime or insurgency-patterns in the observed surroundings. Useful for a few obscure memory potions. Most likely enchanted to return after its transformation. It was a child's ploy to try it."
"What could they possibly suspect?" She resists the urge to pull out the book from where it scorches in her pocket, to open the door and throw it into the frozen moat where, she is certain, it would melt through the ice and boil it all away.
"Rumors," he snaps, angry at her now, glancing out the window at the accelerating landscape. "There are always rumors. This is just pointless game-playing. It doesn't matter."
It was on her, she realizes. So someone must suspect that their relationship wasn't exactly the frosty servile one it was supposed to be. Or perhaps— "And when it doesn't return?"
He scoffs. "They are fragile creatures. She will assume it died. One way or another."
"And what if this wasn't an attempt to spy?"
This thought freezes him. He narrows his eyes. "Is that what you think? That she was smuggling you magical ingredients to craft a memory potion?"
"Do they know about what you did to me?"
His lips curl in disgust. He doesn't like the way she said it, but it's the way it happened, so she doesn't apologize. Finally, he says, "Explanations were made. To more people than just the Dark Lord."
She looks down at the smear on the floor, and then back up to him. He looks uncomfortable. His jaw works.
"Interesting," is all she says. Let this consume him, she thinks with a sudden flare of anger. Let him think about how far gone he must be that the wife of a Death Eater might be trying to save her, or at least learn the truth of her life-her small, small life, full of cooking and cleaning like a Muggle housewife for a man who took everything from her. Let that silence stretch and let him live inside of it, she thinks, the book throbbing in her pocket to the beat of her furious heart.
On their return, she recognizes the outskirts of Cokeworth this time from a distance, the same approach her father took on their way home from childhood trips. Her childhood home. The place where her parents raised her. Where Severus showed her magic. Where she lost Petunia, and where her father died, and where Severus keeps her in a gilded cage. Where he brought the plunder of war to the house his father beat him in. Where he was gifted a new and vast home befitting his station. The home they come to, finally, after miles upon miles of silence. The thestrals and the carriage know how to put themselves away, so she follows him up the steps to the door. She wonders if her mother is still alive, here in Cokeworth or anywhere on the planet, or if she has been lost along with everyone else. The wards come up around them both and Severus shuts the door. What else has he taken from her? The question is a bottomless hole. How much has he stolen? Everything comes back to him. Everything. How? Why? The book's fervent twitching has given way to a persistent tremble, and she is suddenly furious, mad with irritation at the book, at Severus, at the howling pit of empty that is her memory. She scrabbles in her pocket, trying to remove the book, wanting to tear it to shreds, sending her wand rolling across the floor in the process. The handkerchief tears, but she claws the book free and flings it across the hall, blind with a sudden fury. It hits a tapestry and slides to the floor—impotent. Lifeless. It's as if light suddenly has cut through a fog, or the end of a pernicious toothache.
"Oh god," she gasps, suddenly realizing that the only possible culprit is the book. "Sev, that thing—it's evil."
Hearing her frustration, the struggle with the book and the violence, he had turned with his wand raised. But it's clear he doesn't understand—and how could he?
"I think I found the horcrux," she explains. "I took it."
He turns slowly toward where it lays across the room, wand still up, face aghast. "You took it."
The story comes out of her in a garbled rush—finding the study, watching Bellatrix and then Narcissa and then the falsified copy of the book she left in its stead. His face goes increasingly crimson with what she suspects is rage as she speaks.
Once she is done, he finally opens his mouth, voice shaking with fury. "You took a powerful Dark artifact from the home of someone who trusts me, someone whose trust I need to keep in order for either of us to stay alive, when you knew our only goal was to take the measure of things. You brought this artifact into my home without informing me, without knowing what it could do. You did all of this alone, without my help, because you think—you think!—you found something valuable and opportunity presented itself."
"It wasn't me, it was Felix, and besides—"
"Enough." His hand slashes through the air, and his wand is trembling in his hand. "I have heard enough." Crossing the room in a few quick strides, he lifts the book steadily with his want, not daring to touch it. "I will put this somewhere safe. Regulus will be prepared to destroy it soon."
Anger flares again, without the fevered intensity the book gave her, but anger all the same. "Severus, you can't punish me like this, what am I supposed to do?"
His face twists, then, still flushed with anger. "You have done enough."