It is two in the morning, technically the sixth day and next-to-last day of Bellatrix's stay, and Lily would give her wand arm for a full 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep. But after an hour of fitful dreaming, the bell pull above her bed begins to sound, and she is roused to Bellatrix's side again. A glass of water, a new blanket, a basin to wash her face in, sometimes nothing but a moody and unsure glare for long and horrible minutes before being dismissed with a flick of her fingers; something new is happening inside of Bellatrix and it isn't making anything easier.
The part of the previous afternoon's ingenious little spur-of-the-moment idea executed on the kitchen table, the idea that has Severus unable to even so much as look at her, the idea that was supposed to make the beast sleep through the night so they can as well-it hasn't worked. That much is clear. She seems truly, dreadfully present, untroubled by nightmares or visions-Lily's potion, she hopes-but it isn't making her pleasant. If anything, she's more demanding on them both. She has sped through all their stores of pain relief potion and drinks it fast as Severus can brew. At the bottom of every curtsy, Lily has to will herself back up from collapsing to the floor.
Lily isn't even sure she can account for her hours anymore. By dawn, she is a shambling thing, half-dead with effort and anger and anxiety. Tomorrow morning Bellatrix will be gone with the cup. In the kitchen, she is burning her third attempt at a perfectly turned omelette for Bellatrix's repast when the pull chimes yet again. She doesn't have the energy to do much more than turn off the hob and go to Bellatrix's bedside.
Lily never makes it to the bedroom. She is too blind drunk with exhaustion to see it until she has been hit, and she is already on her way to the floor. Her mind is only surprised-oh, I'm falling.
Impact with the floor fires adrenaline into her blood. From the floor, she assesses like the soldier she is: head ringing, elbow bruised, a foot pressing on her back that could snap ribs if Bellatrix didn't weigh less than a child. But the spell hits, and Lily is reminded of the real power. The pain sears through her lightning-quick, a fire that licks at all her nerves and burns away her exhaustion in an instant in favor of a boneless sensation, like she has just run an incredible distance. All her instincts, ingrained from muscle memory of battle, have her reaching for a wand that isn't there.
There is something else, though. A cup, perched invisible just above her her head. She pushes herself onto her hands, reaches for the top of the long credenza, feels the cup there between her fingertips-
Agony. Lily can't help but cry out.
(Some distant part of her imagines Severus, likely in his laboratory, stirring away at something vile. Does the sound slither in beneath the heavy wooden door? Will a scream?)
Bellatrix leans close. "Filth," she says fondly, lifting Lily's body into the air with her wand and rotating her face to the ceiling. "At first I wasn't sure it was in you. I had to keep calling you back to see again and again, but now I'm sure of it. There's a light inside of you."
Lily floats, limp, eyes slitted to appear closed, into the bedroom. Her hands drag on the floor, the right one curled upward to the ceiling, carrying an invisible passenger. The door doesn't click shut behind them; good. Help is an option. Rescue is an option. She has to believe he will hear if she screams. Above her, Bellatrix's face comes into sudden focus, and Lily is dropped three feet to the floor. All the air comes out of her, and she gasps, eyes rushing back open. The invisible thing rocks in her palm, and rolls-no-away from her body, toward Bellatrix's foot.
Bellatrix's hair is wild, cascading down to shroud her face, tendrils brushing like insect antennae across Lily's cheeks as she inspects her prize.
"We're not allowed to touch you," Bellatrix says. "Oh, we could take off something-arms, legs, tongue, you could live on without them-but we're not allowed to touch your heart." Bellatrix's knees fold beneath her and she crouches to her side, leaning across her body. "But you will do fine without this, you don't need this-"
Bellatrix's wand skates along the fabric covering Lily's left shoulder and it parts along with the skin beneath, blossoming open like a flower. She bites her lip at first, but the second stroke cuts deeper and Lily lets out a low, tremulous sound from deep in her gut. She's going to take off my arm, I don't know if even Severus and I can regrow a whole arm-
But the arm doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the cup. And she's ready for this, she has trained for this, they have both worked toward this. Lily builds the box, mind vibrating, as Bellatrix touches her wand-tip to her left hip, splitting it open as well. The pain is distant, meaningless, unstoppable but unimportant, it burns but the burning is somewhere else, happening to a body that Lily has nothing to do with, a body that perhaps is screaming, perhaps sobbing, somewhere in another room of the house. Her right arm spasms in pain as the other is held, almost involuntary but not undirected, sweeping across the floor once, twice, striking something, grasping it-
"You stink like him," Bellatrix whispers into Lily's ear, digging the wand into the pit of her left elbow. Lily faintly imagines she can hear it click against bone. "You stink like traitor." Her eyes are rolling wildly, almost all white, then beetle-dark and piercing again, then white. "Three deaths he gave you, the marriage bed, the bassinet-but oh, you know about that! But not the third, not the third!"
Lily's breath is fast and faster and then still, completely still, held. Her toes curl.
Bellatrix makes a sound that is not quite a laugh in her ear, harsh and mirthless. "The third death is yet to come. I can see it written in the air between you in lightning. He will give it to you. You will betray yourself. You already have."
The wand disappears from the crook of her elbow. She tries not to close her eyes, tries not to cringe as she finds a new spot in the left shoulder again, searing, but she cannot help but squirm. And then, glittering gold as hope, Bellatrix leans forward to touch at her hip once more, and the cup shines inside of her robes, dangling on a thin gold chain.
Lily can't help but stare at the thing. And Bellatrix, of course, follows the stare-and she slowly reaches in, pulling it away from her chest, snapping the chain with almost casual lack of concern. With a speed that such a frail creature shouldn't be able to muster, Bellatrix crushes it to the side of Lily's face. Her teeth bite into her right cheek as Bellatrix grinds it there. Lily tastes blood.
"The light," Bellatrix whispers, perplexed.
Something warm and thick and wet is dripping down Lily's side. She doesn't think about it. The hum of the cup so close to her face feels like its own scream.
Bellatrix rises to her feet and begins to move around Lily's body, and next to Lily's ear, the cup, the real cup, hits the floor and begins to roll, revolving once before stopping on its handle.
"How-" The wand prods again, more frantic this time, as if searching for something embedded beneath her skin. A new slice, almost an accident, more haphazard than the butcher's precision of earlier, opens along her collarbone, skimming her flesh. Lily thrashes as best she can. Her right arm spasms, and she leaves it next to her face, next to the cup, fingers still curled. If Bellatrix will just turn away-
"Bellatrix," a soft and deadly voice murmurs from the door. "I'll ask you to leave my servant alive." Severus entered the room slowly, almost lazily, glancing at the body on the floor with distaste under an unconcerned brow. He doesn't even have his wand out.
He can do this, she thinks, and a strange thrill of joy shoots through her despite the blood in her mouth. He can do it. Her fingertips twitch, careful, so careful-
Bellatrix's face is pointed at Severus, focused down to the flat and impassive plane of his mouth as it speaks to her again, but from beneath Bellatrix's chin Lily can see her lips twist, and so does her wand, digging into Lily's shoulder once more to prove her point. She spasms again, right arm flinging back to her side, to her skirt, the pocket. "We're just having fun, aren't we, girl?"
"All the same," Severus says, folding his arms across his chest. Only Lily would notice the half-moment where his knuckles flash white.
Bellatrix narrows her eyes, and for a moment seems as though she plans to argue. "No one ever told me," she pouts. She lunges, clawed hand flashing past Lily's face again, and Lily can't stop herself cringing, but Bellatrix doesn't even bother ripping at her once more-she just snatches up the cup from where it lays next to Lily's face. It disappears into her robes. Then she takes one shuffling step backward. Another. A third. There's the sound of a body collapsing a velvet armchair next to the bed.
Lily lies there and breathes, for a moment. Severus' soft footfalls come to her side but he doesn't bend or move. The part must, still, be played. The audience is still watching. Very well; to the part, then. Lily levers herself up carefully on her right hand, feeling all the wounds she has sustained shift, all the lines along which she could split further. The first leg she tries isn't steady, but the second goes under her well enough and she comes to her feet next to Severus under her own power. Barely.
He wraps a hand around the back of her neck, fingertips feather-light beneath her collar to drag her round. "I will escort you to the kitchen," he says coldly, in a tone that says, I hope this is what you wanted.
Bellatrix watches them leave, knees drawn up to her teeth.
Silent, moving to the kitchens, Lily tries not to grab to the walls to steady herself. She's still bleeding. There seems to be rather a lot of red in the trail they leave. Severus puts a ungentle hand on her right shoulder when she sags dangerously on the stair. His fingertips squeeze too hard for it to be called kindness, but it is comfort, the only kind he knows how to give-too fierce by half, but she understands it. She resists the urge to comfort him in return, to put her hand atop his. There are a million reasons why she can't. And worse, it would make his guilt fester into something darker.
The kitchen is still full of steam, and Lily sways like a prizefighter once Severus releases her to close the wards around them. She manages to climb atop the table and sit there, the room moving sluggishly around her and full of heat. Blood crawls down her leg beneath her skirt.
When he comes to her, his face is less guarded, but no less frightening. He doesn't speak-if she had to hazard a guess, it's because he doesn't trust himself to. His wand skates over her hip, beginning to close the wounds she has suffered, and then up to her shoulder, though the instant his wand drifts the cuts open once more and begin to weep. It hurts, the knitting-back-together, tearing-back-apart. She catches his wrist, mid-pass and looks up at him from under her lashes, and-drunk on power, drunk on her own audacity-presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist where the veins show blue beneath his skin. It leaves a bloody imprint entirely unlike lipstick, in the shape of the parting of her lips. Her mouth stretches into what she is sure is a ghastly, blood-soaked grin, full of the pleasure of finally doing something. Its an echo of previous defiance, of a kind of pain and victory she has known before coming back to her from a past that was stolen. A hoarse sound, half-laugh, half-cough, emerges unbidden from her throat.
"It's done."
From her skirt, she lifts her prize from a pocket-the cup, dangling from a fingertip, like a Christmas ornament, brilliant and golden and evil and real and theirs.