Bellatrix is smaller than Lily thought she would be.
Lily watches from beneath her lashes as Bellatrix sidles into the front hall after a push over the threshold from Fenrir, tip of her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth. She's slight, light-boned, swallowed up in an overlarge cloak and crested with a dark and wild mass of hair that reminds her uncomfortably of Sirius'-and pretty in the same way as he, with that same fine pureblood nose and sallow complexion given to dark purple rings below the eyes. She scans the room, Severus, Lily standing behind him, the banister, the ceiling, the doors, the windows, weighing each equally-seeing, if Lily understands the principles of this woman at all, escape routes and weapons in service violence just waiting to burst free of her limbs.
Lily suddenly wonders what she will see in the library-if Bellatrix, too, would climb to the ceiling for the high ground. The thought makes her skin crawl.
Severus steps forward, gives Bellatrix a curt nod that she doesn't acknowledge, and then moves past her to have a brief murmured conversation with Fenrir. Bellatrix, with her off sloping and indirect limp, is creeping steadily closer to Lily. A light valise-blue patterned in white flowers-is set inside the door, and then it closes. It's for Lily to take the valise but with Bellatrix focused on her and prowling ever-closer she knows better than to move. The distance is quite short now, and Lily hopes Bellatrix can't hear her heart hammering. She hears, more than sees, Severus turn with a swish of robes.
"There's something here," Bellatrix mutters. Then she darts forward, inches from Lily's face, rank breath in Lily's nose, hands clawed and ready to tear at her-
Behind Bellatrix's back, Severus looses his wand in his hand, ready to strike, and Lily holds her breath and thinks as loudly as she can, no no no it can't go wrong this quickly-
Bellatrix licks her thumb and tries to scrub a freckle from her cheek with spit. "Filthy," she murmurs, almost tenderly. "Absolutely filthy."
Lily has been a fighter, never a spy, and she feels the gulf between these roles acutely now. Lily keeps her eyes down and marshals her breath, counting slowly up to seven and then back down to keep the surge of panic under control-a battle tactic, and isn't this a battle?
There's half a breath of consideration, and then the wand disappears up Severus' sleeve once more. "Bellatrix," he says steadily, tone bland but clear. "Would you like to come upstairs with me to begin your treatment."
She ignores him, still hovering close to Lily's face, thumb still scrubbing. "There's something here."
"That is my servant." No names. Names are for people. No need to draw attention to the past of their relationship with anything so trivial as a name.
Bellatrix finally spares a glance over her shoulder. "There's something here," she whispers again. "Something." Her thumb pushes harder and her nails dig into Lily's cheek. The rub becomes a pinch, a shake of her head that is less affectionate grandmother and more rat terrier snapping the neck of its prey, and then she's free. Bellatrix points at Severus, and then at Lily. Her voice is singsong. "Something nobody knows about. How many babies have you given her, Severus? How many have you taken from her breast?"
Lily doesn't dare let her breath catch. She is counting: one-two-Harry-
As if she's heard Lily trip inside her own mind, Bellatrix's sudden laughter spirals up out of her, wild and free, like a swarm of bats startled from the cave of her mouth. "Just the one?"
All the air has gone from the room. Lily is trying to breathe to the count of seven but can't bring air into her lungs. A hand of loss is strangling her, a thing she has never felt so dearly as now. It is terrifying to see the blazing thing between them, the light and the dark of it, so clearly rendered in the enemy's eyes.
Severus comes to her side, then, eyes flicking over her cheek the same way he would inspect the carpet after Sirius shook soot over it from the Floo. It's the right thing, it's even the thing she asked him for, but her stomach clenches with the lack of care in his eyes as he turns them back to Bellatrix. "Are you entirely finished?"
Her tongue lolls out of her mouth grotesquely, and she sags away from Lily. Severus seizes Bellatrix's arm as much to keep her from coming closer to him as to pilot her up the stairs. She becomes almost pliant with his hand guiding her, though, and he doesn't spare a backward look.
Upstairs, Lily knows everything is prepared; a bedroom done up in soothing blues, sheets ironed crisp and pulled tight into hospital corners, an orderly row of potions ready for consumption that should knock her down within a half-hour. And as far as first meetings go, this has been less than disastrous. But Bellatrix is looking for something-seeing something-and it's a problem Lily has to tease apart alone while Severus does the work of managing her upstairs.
She and Severus have warded the kitchen together, her with everything she can remember from protecting people for the Order and he, with darker things-one even that required a vial of blood from each of them, if that tells her anything about its nature. But she can't argue with the results, and it's not the mad conpatior lux he had tried to persuade her of before. The door will be locked to any touch but her own or Severus', and all sound will be muffled. It's a safe place, one she won't likely think to go, and her wand is tucked into a drawer with the spatulas.
They have falsified cups, made from Severus' and Regulus' memories of the thing teased out in Lily's pensieve from remembered glances. Sometimes it is drawn from a pocket, sometimes it dangles from a thin gold chain, but it is always there, and on close inspection it is leafed in gold that will take enchantment where the horcrux will not, and this is the thing they have made, carefully crafted and then duplicated dozens of times. The false cups are hidden everywhere, spelled invisible until the center of the base is tapped with a finger. Even without her wand, given a free hand, a fingertip, Lilly can activate them-and find them blindfolded, which she did for Severus if only to get him to shut it.
Her cheek is stinging where Bellatrix has roughed it, and the reflection in the bottom of a plate tells her that there's small red welts where her fingernails dug in. She doesn't bother with it. Lily busies herself with dinner, with cleaning, the washing-all her usual duties from before, done the long way around. It's almost comforting to let her mind go blank and polish silver.
The clock on the wall ticks away an hour, and then two before Severus comes to the kitchen. He looks ready to break something-she considers offering him a plate to throw against the wall, no one will hear it-but instead he merely shuts the door behind him and grinds his teeth. "This plan was idiotic from the start."
"She's fun," Lily says brightly.
He scowls, reknitting the wards behind him.
"I mean it. She's shaking things up. It's good practice for what's to come, if we're to stay under cover. It won't get easier from here, you know. Do you hate me a little for dreaming this up?"
"Have you always been so rash?"
"Probably. Will you heal this or shall I sport it?" she asks, gesturing to the crescents on her cheek, using them as an olive branch-letting him decide, for once. "I don't dare take out my wand for something so small and she might want to see her handiwork."
"She would," he says, contempt staining his voice. "I do not intend to give her the satisfaction." His wand-tip presses to her cheek and the half-moons seal back into her own skin.
Neither of them sight the cup that first day. Despite a regimen of potions that would knock a normal witch off her block and into a deep and dreamless sleep for 23 hours of the day, Bellatrix is a restless soul who fights everything they give her. Severus has always been a bad sleeper who seemed to subsist entirely on air and resentment in their youth and hasn't changed his habits, but Lily is not so resilient and by the third day is worn to a nub.
They meet in the kitchen whenever they can, when Bellatrix finally beds down or goes slack and silent curled in a chair in the library below the quiet threat of the horcrux she can't hear above. Severus bears the brunt of dealing with the monster, and Lily knows he hates her a little for forcing him into contact with the beast. Lily, in turn, tries to be kind, to give the sort of kindness he will accept without being galled by it. He cannot stand charity, but he can stand kindness, properly served. When Bellatrix chases shadows like a mad dog at three in the morning, shoving her sharply into wall, she goes to him in his laboratory and lets him look her over and heal the inconsequential bruises. When she serves meals, she only serves Bellatrix the perfectly turned omelettes; she doesn't press food onto him. When he comes to the kitchen later, the biscuits and half a sandwich on the counter are haphazard, an afterthought, something he can snatch while her back is turned to help him feel as if he doesn't need her help, as if she is an accident.
The days start to blur. She falls asleep in the kitchen folding napkins and Severus wakes her with an ungentle shake. Every time Bellatrix passes her in a hall, every time she enters the room, Lily targets the nearest invisible false cup, and every time she doesn't sight the real thing.
In the kitchen, on the afternoon of the fourth day, Lily is almost at her breaking point. When Severus enters, there's nothing kind in her left to give, just a panic gone dull with days of use, gray as her polishing cloth. "We are running out of time."
"I know," he says, voice tight.
"I'm getting clumsy. I almost let this roll in the hall because I dropped it. It slipped right out of my fingers. I thought-" Her extended hand looks empty, but Severus lets his hand fall over hers and his fingertips curl around the invisible figure of a cup, brushing her palm as it does so. She sighs, scrubbing her face. "This idea is rubbish and we're no closer."
He doesn't say I told you so. He never says anything aloud he could convey with a look.
Lily isn't done chewing on the problem. "She's too defensive. She knows how valuable-"
A knock comes. For a wild moment, neither she nor Severus know how to answer the intrusion in their closest space. Then Lily looses her braid. "Come here," she says, shimmying onto the table.
"What-"
She musses her hair and shoves her skirts up around her hips. "She already thinks you-you know."
He at least has the decency to color slightly. "You can't mean-"
Lily repositions, pulling her skirts higher, and grabs the front of his robes to drag him closer. "She's suspicious. The implication will help, I think. It will seem like the secret she's looking for. Exposing you in a vulnerable moment might help her feel like she has the power, might make her relax enough to let us even see the thing. Maybe she'll even start sleeping at night, god willing. Spying fundamentals, you have to give something that seems useful to get anything that can be useful." She lets her knees go wide to accommodate his still-clothed body between them, starts to push at his shirt, to undo a few buttons and rumple his robes suggestively. She keeps whispering, the fear and exhaustion making her giddy, "And you know, if you've never shagged on a kitchen table, let me tell you, you've absolutely got to try it. If the table's just the right height, you can really-" She stops, catching his eyes, catching her hands on his chest. More than all of Bellatrix's implied violence, all of her skittering paranoia, all of the tenuous plans they intend to execute, nothing thrills and scares her as much as the vicious hunger that passes through his eyes as she touches him, playing at being caught in the act. Then he blinks, and it's gone, swallowed up in the dark.
His hands encircle her wrists, pulling them away from his chest. "That's enough," he says, and if there's a roughness to it, it's not for her to ask after. He peels back the wards and she smooths her hands down her bare thighs, eyes to her knees, as if she has been caught in the midst of something shameful and intimate.
Hasn't she?
"Bellatrix," he says at the door, voice all silk and smoothness. "You should be convalescing in bed."
She peers in from the doorway, leering. "Shouldn't you as well?" she asks, voice so quiet there is no inflection there to read.
"That is none of your concern."
Bellatrix leans close to him, to where she has unbuttoned his shirt just past the collarbone. Her fingers go white where they clutch the doorframe to hang her body through it, and her eyes roll up so she can keep her gaze on his face. She whispers conspiratorially, "Do you make her beg for it?"
In their youth, of course, there had been all sorts of vile implications about the nature of their relationship. But they were children, and the idea had been laughed off or hexed away, and then it was gone once they were old enough for it to carry water. Now the figure filling the doorframe is a fully grown man with power, with respect, with the Dark Lord's mark on his arm, and she, a widow, a mother, has been relegated to only liminal humanity. The suggestion fills the room with concrete. Because he could, and Lily has only just understood the weight of it on the lips of an enemy.
At the door, Severus doesn't move-probably fixing her with that abyssal glare Lily herself is familiar with. Bellatrix stares back, but her eyes won't stop flickering to Lily, who can feel a flush crawling like an insect up her throat.
"I am making an effort to heal you," he says finally, voice quiet and low and cold enough to frost the windowpanes. "For the Dark Lord. For some reason, he continues to value your presence in his army."
"It's not as if nobody knows-" Bellatrix starts, as if stung.
"Do not concern yourself with things that are not yours, Bellatrix, lest my desire to heal you wane." He doesn't slam the door so much as shut it with an inexorable force. Bellatrix moves her fingertips out of the way at the last moment.
He stands, facing the closed door and away from her for long breaths, rebuttoning his shirt, smoothing his robes, undoing her work upon him. Lily watches the hunch of his shoulders, and is surprised that a glass hasn't shattered its cupboard by all his repressed loathing at what has just transpired.
She clears her throat. "It also serves to explain why the kitchen is so heavily-"
"Don't." His voice is a plume of smoke over a slow-burning fury, a coal mine that has caught and won't stop smoldering deep in the cracks of the earth.
"You saw her looking. She thinks she's won something."
He says nothing. He won't even turn to look at her.
"It cost us nothing." But even as it comes out of her mouth, she knows it for a lie.