It is made clear from the start that Regulus is unavailable to assist in actually stealing the cup from his terrifying mad cousin, and, moreover, thinks they were all fools for trying. Sirius is downright eager to help but could not do so as a human, and Bellatrix is notorious for murdering any animal she found, no matter how beloved or small for precisely this reason-to ferret out Animagi. Severus will, of course, follow her lead, but neither he nor Lily has any ideas. An inauspicious start, to be sure, but Lily is not about to demoralized by it. Severus insists they plan more, execute cleanly, and even Sirius agrees that more had to be done before they could hope to take the Cup from Bellatrix-there would be no Apparating to her doorstep and sneaking around under an invisibility cloak hoping to stumble upon an opportunity. Further, there is the issue of the book. It must be hidden, and well; an escape plan must be made in case of their discovery; appearances must be maintained throughout.
Weeks slip by this way. She bakes a cake for Severus' birthday-a gooey, lopsided, vanilla-frosted monstrosity-and he reminds her he is capable of smiling. She ships off half of it to Regulus and Sirius using the Vanishing box without saying what it's for. Severus doesn't ask about the invisibility cloak McGonagall mentioned, and Lily doesn't offer. It stays in a mixing bowl under the sink. The horcrux stays in its bell-jar, charmed invisible in midair. The Beauxbatons poison passes from hand to hand, Severus is told, tested on an animal, a man, and then-a child, some nameless muggleborn. It does its work-his work-their shared work. She tries not to think about it more than she has to. Her dreams are strange, sometimes violent. She brews the Draught for it but can't bare to take it, because the curious ciphers of James or Harry are sometimes there, and she is hungry for their faces. Sometimes Severus is in them, too, and that leaves her with an entirely different and infinitely stranger sense of loss. She begins work on another draught, one more cunning and stronger than dreamless sleep to help her if the memories threaten to take her mind. Her birthday comes and Sirius brings the cake himself, calls Severus a dementor to explain why it's chocolate even though he's living his life mostly as dog, and they eat and laugh together despite it all. The book hums in the bell-jar, above. Late that night, all the flowers in her room are completely changed-stargazer lilies in place of all the daisies, delicate bright orchids twisted their way up the bedpost-and when she blows out the candle the entire room is bathed in cold starlight radiating up from a Pensieve in the corner. There is no note, no memories inside waiting for her, but the purpose and giver are clear. The pensieve fills up with her dreams and she manages to sort the memories from the fictions, manages to reconstruct her dead husband's face in the bowl. The draught she has been working on in secret is effective enough to test on herself, and she spends one full day groggy but absolutely present, the memories of her past life locked away. Spells come back to her, over other days when the barrier between herself and her past is thinner; one to wrap a gift in ribbon and one to melt iron, one to grow the eyelashes and one to gag a prisoner, one clever and twisty charm Severus and she developed some late night in the middle of Fifth year to secretly record the goings-on in a room to parchment and another to clean and polish dirty dragonhide she is sure came from the noble house of Potter. She tries, sometimes, to remember loving James, turns over the idea of love in her mind again and again, but it slips away like a handkerchief in a windstorm. And all the while, the horcrux sits in its bell jar, humming its tuneless tone.
The escape plan is made over many late nights with wine as the hard frost finally breaks and the barest breath of spring moves across England. It snows, still, but the snow is lighter, gentler, melting in occasional glimpses of sunlight. The earliest flowers emerge at the window-box. Their plans result in small bags stuffed with disguises, clothing, food, various currencies, everything they might need to run far and fast either alone or together. He doesn't like planning for alone but he can hear the practicality in it. The bags are concealed, one tucked into Lily's boot, one strapped to Severus' belt. They make a Portkey of the wood inside of a twig covered in bark and hide that on their persons, too; if anything went terribly wrong, they could snap the twig and be at King's Cross before a cast spell could strike home.
The book is another matter. Basic hexes and curses, Regulus assures, will bounce right off of it; upon deeper inspection, even disguising its physical characteristics is a feat. It won't even turn red when Lily tries to Transfigure it into an apple, and Lily suspects it would come out of a poison bath smoking but unscathed. After numerous experiments-spread out over days so the thing does not wreak its vengeance on them-it becomes clear that any protections strong enough to hide it completely would inevitably draw attention in their own right. Early one morning, Lily wakes with the realization that changing it is not the goal, and destroying it could be done, but the immediate task is merely hiding it. So she decides to put the book with the rest of the books: she hollows the inside of all the pages pages from a large volume-the third volume of The Potion Master's Companion, due in part to the size and in part to the irony-casts a plain, fifth-year shield charm modified to stick around inside the created chamber to muffle the Dark magic within, uses a Sticking charm to hold the book together, and places it back on the shelf.
"All right. Tell me where the Horcrux is," she challenges Severus that evening, and despite going through every finding spell and Dark detection he can think of, he can't determine its location. He's almost pleased with her.
"You could have picked something less-" his hand gestures to the stack of sheets she has revealed in the bin, cut from the volume. "-useful."
"You barely need that and you know it. You just have it to show off and fill the shelves. Not as if there's any notes in it. I checked."
His displeasure does not change much. He looks as though he's swallowed a swarm of lacewing flies and they are still fighting. "I don't like it being here. It affected you."
"Is that how you are writing off me being cross with you? Like I've never been cross with you except under the influence of Dark artifacts?" Her eyes narrow for a moment, but he isn't a spluttering boy and she isn't a schoolmarm. She shrugs. "Besides, it's not as if we can stow it somewhere too hidden. We need to know where it is. We need to be able to snatch it up in a hurry, if we have to. It's there, on the top shelf, hidden as best we can. Can't Accio the thing itself but we can Accio The Potion Master's Companion, Volume 3 and it'll come along for the ride. I've done a good job and you know it."
Severus purses his lips, but there's a smile hidden in the way the corners of his eyes move. Someone who knew him less would have missed it. "I suppose. It is a good hiding place, after all." His mouth twists. "We can always burn the house down with Fiendfyre if we are pressed. It might take the rest of Cokeworth with it, but that would be no great loss to the Dark Lord's empire."
Lily laughs, and Severus smirks at her laughter, and for the first moment in what feels like forever, things seem almost normal and not so messy and mixed up. She surges ahead, then. "And I've had another thought-we need to spar. I need the practice."
The line between his brows appears just as quickly as it left. "What?"
"The Dark Lord isn't just going to roll over and die without trouble," She twirls her wand between her fingertips. "I'm rusty."
"I'll hurt you."
It's her turn to look displeased. "You will, will you?"
"That's not-" he starts, backtreading.
"You think you can beat me? In a duel?"
"You haven't had your wand for three years-"
She thrusts her wand out to her side and up, scraping the tip along the bookcases and then twirling it around the room. A wave of shimmering purple light spreads from the book case, up the shelves, following her wand across the ceiling and below their feet on the floor, racing across the spines of the books, toppling a chair in its path behind her and slamming shut the door. It ends with her wand pointed straight at Severus. There's a fire in her gut and a grin on her lips. "En garde, you arrogant bastard."
He looks taken aback, but more than a little pleased. His wand appears instantly in his hand from where it was hidden up his sleeve. And they are back at Christmas, fifth year-before it had all gone wrong-when they had absconded to an abandoned classroom lined in empty stone bookshelves and shot hex after hex at each other. The rules are the same, and it doesn't even need to be spoken: no hexes or curses they couldn't lift themselves. Beyond that, no holds barred. "I'll try to go easy on you, Evans," he says archly.
She lets out a shriek, half at the insult, half of a laugh, and final half Expelliarmus, dodging left as she does so to avoid his immediate and wordless retaliatory body-bind curse. He bats her spell away easily and lazily sends back a curse-either jelly-fingers or jelly-legs, she can't be sure-but she has used his lassitude to cast a loose variation on a sticking charm on her feet and hands and is using it, now to scale the bookcase rapidly. Over her shoulder, three quick stupefy to keep him busy, and then she's hanging from the ceiling with the whole room at her disadvantage, red hair swinging like a flag. He dives for cover behind his desk, which she sets rattling with a volley of hexes until he aims a levitation charm to pluck her from her perch. Lily leaps from the ceiling to avoid the strike and is instantly and disconcertingly caught by gravity, landing clumsily on the chandelier with a leg and one arm. It tilts dizzyingly under her weight, but she is protected behind the crystal-any spell could be refracted, shifted, and aim is impossible for both of them. She swings on it while it creaks threateningly, swinging away from him and then toward him.
"I'm faster than you," she taunts, conjuring a flock of birds to pelt him. The crystal of the chandelier tinkles merrily as they dive through it towards their target.
Severus dispels them with a crack of lighting. "More reckless, you mean. Ascendio-" and he rises into the air, level with her, for the easier aim height will give.
Lily cries, "Ventus!" and while the winds buffet him back, she swings recklessly from the chandelier to a ladder. Her footing is off, though, and rather than landing on the ladder that goes to the highest shelves of the library, she falls past it, barely catching herself in time with a feather-fall charm. She whips around in time to see the body-bind curse flying at her from the ladder on the opposite side of the room, where Severus has been blown. Lily barely has time to squeak "Protego!" and it half fails; her right arm is locked to her side and her legs are locked together, but she's still upright-barely-against the ladder. Her left hand frees her wand from her stiff right hand, and casts fire-weak fire, from the wrong hand, but still fire-toward him. She knows he'll block it, and she also knows it will occupy him. The rug starts to smoke despite the ward.
"Cheating," Severus calls out, extinguishing it.
"I'm just using what is available," she replies, freeing herself from the hex, breathing hard. "Other people we fight might value their carpets." A reflecting charm, mirror-bright, unfolds and snaps into perfection in front of her, reflecting his next, and the one after. She trades the wand back to her right hand and begins to shape the spell, concave, to return and aim to return the spells thrown at her.
Severus narrows his eyes from across the room, steps aside to avoid his own reflected stunning spell, and then casts his own reflecting charm-but none appears before him. Lily only has enough time to look around, and finally up, just in time to see the full body bind screaming at her from an angled mirror behind her own reflecting charm.
He looks more than a little smug when he comes to free her, stepping lightly around her wavering reflecting charm. But he helps her up after releasing her. "Again?" she asks, eager.
"I thought you would have had enough."
"I forgot how hard reflecting charms are," she says, rotating her wand wrist and pressing her thumb along the tendon. "They always want to curl in. Got to pull them back around you if you want real defense."
"Harder to shape them to aim and return a spell," Severus replies. "The climbing trick was clever, though. The high ground is not to be underestimated." He looks around the room, eyes narrowed. "It is likely most of our battles will be indoors as well. You rely more on dodging than shielding at any rate, which is … safer."
The implication is clear, of course. No shield deflects the Killing Curse, and no guarantee their eventual opponents would not be trying to kill or permanently maim rather than trap or capture. She hadn't thought of that-or, if she had, it had been tucked deep in her muscle memory more than in her mind. "Hm." She rotates her wrist again, seeking for a stretch or a twinge, and doesn't ask what battles he's imagining. She can imagine them too. "Again?"
They go two more rounds, Severus winning out once more by sending her to sleep while she wrestled to control a conjured snake, and two further victories by Lily using a much improved reflecting charm and a deluge of water as a distraction. Severus is sopping wet and bemused and they are both panting by the end, but he concedes the victory.
"Did we ever-" Lily says, still breathless, freeing him from the chair she brought to life to imprison him. There's a memory that won't leave her and she has to expel it. "Did we ever fight? During the war? That trick, with the swarm of bats pinning me in a corner, that looked familiar. Like my birds, but spookier." She tries to toss it off, but nothing could ever be tossed off, nothing was ever casual, not between them. Every moment with Severus has a jar of foul spirits set aside to pickle in. She doesn't say, I can't be sure if you were trying to kill me or protect me from the other masked murderers. I don't know if you knew, either. I think there was blood on your lips, and I think I put it there-
He rises to his feet, drying himself with a gesture, looking-is that guilt? Only for a moment, but it shines in the dark of his half-lidded eyes all the same, like the reflection of something she can't see. Like he knows something she doesn't. If there's a tension in his shoulders, a rigidness to his back, it's hidden under robes-and she can imagine with a sudden vividness what that would look like, his spine sharp through the skin, the ribs she traced along his sides, the scars she knows about faded with time and others, surely, new ones that have been written on his skin since. Perhaps a few she has written herself. The twinge in her wrist sings again, and she flexes it again, digging into the tendon with a knuckle.
"Perhaps," he allows, closing the meager distance between them, and her memory reaches back to a new moment, to his hands on her waist, and suddenly she is aware of just how close he is and what could be done with that space-or a lack of it-and her breath goes strange, quick as it ever was scaling the wall. "Let me see your wrist."
She presents it, tucking her wand away over an ear. He takes her hand by the palm in both of his fingertips, traces the veins, presses his thumbs to the tendons, then turns the palm over to run both thumbs over the back of her wrist.
"What do you see, fortune-teller?" she says, her voice pitched low to tease. Instead it comes out with husky intimacy.
His fingertips stop, cold and calloused on the inside of her wrist. "You broke your wrist and wouldn't let me heal it." A breath, and then: "Before."
And in an instant, the closeness-that strange excitement-is completely dispelled. She doesn't ask how she broke it. It doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is the why, she supposes, and they both know the answer to that, and she doesn't care to tread that disturbed earth yet again. She folds her free hand over his, taking her fingertips. "It's fine. Just a twinge."
He stops, but she doesn't release his hands from hers. Her wrist still aches. And then it comes to her. "Does Bellatrix still fight?"
His nose wrinkles at her name. "Not anymore."
"But she must have some cursed wounds, right? Something we gave her, in the war?"
"If you mean the Order, they didn't much care for cursing until the end, and the Cruciatus Curse does not leave any physical marks. Those are her great wounds." He chews on it for a moment, fingers loosening on her wrist as he thinks. "She's Fenrir's ward. I suppose she may have picked up some from him in her more spirited moments."
"There's no way that bloody-minded carnivore is half the healer you are. Or I am." She takes her hands back from his and turns to pace.
He tucks his hands away into his pockets, as if startled he has been holding her hand for so long and wishes to hide the evidence. He follows her pacing with his eyes in silence while she worries at the idea.
Lily pauses at the end of a lap, speaking to the far wall of books. "Doesn't he want her back? As a fighter, as part of the army?" She turns to look at his face and make her way back to him.
"I believe he has hopes for that, though they diminish with every year that passes." He stays put, watching her restless progress across the room so he doesn't have to shout. "Bellatrix's connection with the Dark Lord has always been…. uniquely close."
"All right. All right." She passes him, goes to the opposite wall, strokes the spine of a volume absently. "She hasn't fought since she was captured and tortured, then. Has anyone tried to heal her? Put her back in service? I imagine she's just itching to get back on the front lines."
Severus gestures vaguely. "A few tried to heal her, after it happened. A team from St Mungos, then healers of a Darker sort who were…. less worried about the sources and side-effects of their cures. None were truly successful and Bellatrix did not thank them for their efforts. It became clear it was useless, I suppose. I myself tried to brew something, but found it ineffective. But that was before she became Fenrir's ward, when the Dark Lord still had hopes for her recovery."
Lily spins on her heel, continuing her path back across the room and giving Severus a hard look as she passes him again. "And now?"
"Now, she is a burden on anyone foolish enough to invite her into their home. Fenrir is little better."
She pauses in the center of the room, gazing up at the chandelier. "Is she ever away from the werewolf?"
His thoughtful frown twists into momentary disgust. "I believe dealing with the children of Beauxbatons in the near future is his reward for minding Bellatrix. He is slated for France, I think, delivering-supplies. Vanishing cabinets, weapons, spare wands, invisibility cloaks."
"Who's going to mind her, then? The Malfoys?"
He snorts. "Likely. No one else will step forward, though I'm sure Lucius would prefer to have her gone. Without Fenrir to monitor her, she is even less pliant and more destructive than usual. Once France is fully taken, he will likely send her there with Fenrir, to haunt some disused estate."
She turns toward him. The morning light strikes the chandeir, casting scattered rainbows on the far all. "So we have to do it now."
He recoils, clearly fearful he's given her something dangerous. "Do what, precisely?"
"You're going to volunteer to babysit-to try to cure her, make her well enough to travel, to fight in France rather than just be sent to pasture there." She closes the steps between them as she speaks, seizes his shoulders, thrilled and horrified by turns. "That's how we get the cup. We take her in and try to heal her."