Severus recoils, his focus on her wounds momentarily abandoned. "Is that-"
"It's the real thing."
"How?"
"She's an idiot."
His confusion and horror float in and out of focus. She feels drunk on pain.
"She showed it off. Said something about the light. I grabbed the fake from the credenza in the hall before she dragged me into the room. When you came in, you distracted her. I swapped them." Something thick and hot drips slides down her collarbone, streaks her dress, threatens to drip from her lip, but she can't stop smiling. She swipes at her mouth with her wrist. The fabric comes away red. "I might faint in a minute. That was less fun than I imagined. Will my arm be falling off?"
For an instant it looks as if he might strike her, and the idea is so preposterous that she laughs in his face.
"It can't be so bad as all-oh-" She cranes her neck, looking to her left shoulder, and the mangled flesh comes into nauseating focus. She doesn't want to keep looking but it's mesmerizing, the blood soaking into her sleeve, a white fleck of bone pushing through, skin peeled back like gift wrap. It moves in and out of her vision, like something she's seen in a book, not something on her own body. The edges of her vision waver, like all the light is being sucked from the room. Her breath is coming long and slow and loud in her ears.
"Stop moving," he snarls from somewhere in the dark. The bone disappears as muscle and tendon cover it, and her skin unwrinkles from where it has been peeled like pulling up a shirt.
"It was worth it," Lily says, voice echoing up from the bottom of a well. She turns her head to look at him, and her body moves slow as tar. He lifts his hand to her uninjured shoulder in slow-motion, the bloody kiss still there. His face seems to be very far away, and the set of his mouth is murderous, but there's something more in his eyes, which is the the last thing that seems to be disappearing under the the blanket of darkness that is closing in. "I'm going to faint now, I think."
Severus opens his mouth to speak, panic in his eyes now, and Lily can just barely make out the shape of her name on his lips, but before the sound can make it to her the last of the light winks out and her body tumbles into a whirling darkness.
Time passes, she's sure; she can feel it moving over her body from beneath a smothering blanket of unconsciousness, entirely unlike sleep. She can remember it now, from before. From St Mungos, at first, and when the hospital had been infiltrated and the Ministry controlled more closely by Death Eaters, in little hideouts, flats, sometimes even in an alleyway if things went particularly bad. This time, there is only one voice, the healing unfamiliar, almost melodic in Severus' quavering tones, but the poultices smell the same. The pain is the same. The feeling of cursed wounds, of Dark magic writhing on her skin is the same.
When she finally surfaces from the oily darkness, everything hurts. She tries to roll over and there's a rustle, behind her, someone leaning forward, a hand extended-she flinches away until she recognizes it, the long fingers, the scar arcing across the palm.
"Not that side," Severus says sharply. His hand hovers over her arm, as if scared to touch her in this state but will if he must. "You'll open them again."
She wriggles the other way beneath the coverlet to turn toward him. She's still at least partially dressed, in the same she was wearing before; the apron is gone, as is the heavy dress she wore over it for winter, leaving only the light shift behind, some parts still sticky and going stiff with dried blood and rubbed-off ointment. But the bandages beneath hold. Lily pushes herself onto her side, her right shoulder, at least, sturdy beneath her.
"How long?" Her voice is rough with disuse after screaming.
He sits in a chair across from her bed, legs crossed, hand supporting his head supported in turn by the arm of the conjured armchair, lank and unwashed hair hiding half his face. Exhaustion is warring with anger on his face and, for the moment, exhaustion is winning. "A few hours. Take this." From the table beside him, littered with debris, he lifts one full phial of potion.
From its hue and scent, she knows it to be blood-replentisher. She wrinkles her nose at it as she brings it to her lips. "That bad?"
He watches her down it before answering, fingertip tapping faster than a sparrow's wing at his cheek, a fretful and vulnerable motion in all his stillness. "Your wounds fought my efforts."
She makes a face as the blood-replensisher slides oil-slick down her throat. "The cup?"
He hands her another-this one, pain relief, double strength. "Safe."
She pauses, on her way to her lips. "Volume four?"
His expression flickers; a tiny bit of acknowledgement at her guessing right underneath the roiling boil of frustration. He holds up another potion impatiently, glowing faintly gold-a fortifier of his own design to help encouraged particularly cursed wounds to knit back together. A supply straight from Voldemort's storeroom, from the war front.
Lily knocks back the potion in her hand, and the next, and then a glass of water to wash the taste of fermented scalebark sap and screaming out of her mouth and lets herself collapse backward onto the bed. "All of that was less fun than I imagined espionage to be," she sighs, staring at the ceiling. "Should have known. Didn't remember until just now. I'd much rather a fair fight. How is she holding up?"
"Taking her medicine on schedule." Something seems to be kicking about in his mouth, as if he doesn't want to say it but feels he must. Lily is patient; she will talk around him, then.
"I think she meant to take my arms and legs off."
"I'm certain of it. She meant to cauterize the wounds to stave off death. She began to, on your side."
"Lovely. Perfect. How considerate. Thank her for me." She shifts her head, punches the pillow into a shape to better to support it and slides her eyes to his face. "She said she wasn't allowed to touch my heart. Your doing?"
He closes his eyes a fraction of a second too long for a blink. "Yes."
The thing he isn't telling her is still kicking. "There's quite a lot of me that isn't my heart. Could have bled to death. Wouldn't have done my heart good to bleed to death."
"I know." Guilt mutilates his features for a breath. "She was using my curse. I am well aware of its dangers."
She files this away; perhaps it's the truth he's been hiding, but it tastes like continued evasion. "Which curse?"
He's scowling, like he regrets speaking up already. "You know the one. Sectumsempra."
"Ah." She bites back an admonition about teaching people spells that you don't want used against you, that she believed he had learned that lesson a long time ago. "At least you knew the counter." She goes to stretch, and winces, the new flesh still tender beneath the bandage. "I imagine the kitchen is a mess of gore. How'd you get me past her?"
"Locked her in the room."
"Severus!"
A defiant look moves across his jaw like he is chewing his response rather than spitting it out. Finally, he says, "It was the best option."
"Well, it's not poisoning her," Lily sighs. She flings her right arm over her face. "Though I'm up for a poisoning just now. How careful should I be, and for how long?"
"Your flesh should heal well enough in a day, if you are careful."
"And her?" And everyone else, and the world around them, and and and?
"You will not be interacting with her again."
"What are you going to do, leave her locked up?"
His eyebrow says, obviously. The set of his mouth says, would you like to fight about it?
She would. "Because that isn't suspicious at all."
His mouth goes thinner.
"You're going at it wrong. I'm property, not your friend, remember?"
"You'd like to be locked in a cupboard like the good china, then?" he snarls, finally showing his teeth.
She sits up and flings the pillow next to her at him, using the wrong arm of course, and he knocks it out of the air with a sharp crackling wandless magic. She means to say you are being deliberately obtuse but fresh pain interrupts her. Her fingers reach through the slice in her shift to find a brittle sort of pain. "Think I tore it," she says through gritted teeth.
He's at her side in an instant, glaring so hard it could shatter glass, but he is gentle. The bandage peeled away reveals the new skin is shredded like an overused tissue. Her hair is a wild mess from sleep and torture and she reaches with her good arm to sweep it out of the way. It brushes across his fingertips as he sets to work. The spell is beautiful, even melodic in his off-key quaver; his touch is gentle, even though he's so clearly furious with the wound. And her.
"You'll have to teach me that wandless shield sometime," she says as he works, making genial conversation with her lap. "I never got the hang of it. I can summon, of course, and a few other things, but a shield seems lovely. For occasions."
He doesn't respond, dabbing on more ointment.
They can't avoid this fight, the one he has been so considerately stepping over since she woke. It makes things simpler, in a way. "Would it make you feel better if I say I learned my lesson? I learned my lesson. This plan was a bad idea. I've been reckless and dragging you along with me. I won't ask something like this of you again."
His voice is cold, his attention focused on applying a layer of bandages that will protect the poultices and new flesh. "And the rest of your little war?"
Her head swivels so fast it makes her dizzy as she peers up at him. "What about our war, Severus?"
"It was over before it began. We possess two objects of leverage. The Dark Lord possesses the world." He looks cruel, in this light. Cruel and cold and terrible to behold, every inch the Death Eater Sirius tells her about when he's out of earshot, all things Lily pretends he isn't. But this is the man he is, too. "You must understand, now, that the power of the Dark Lord is not to be trifled with."
She doesn't know when her hands made fists in the sheets. "What I understand is that he needs to be destroyed."
"Then you understand nothing. Defeating the Dark Lord alone will never be enough."
She knocks his hands away, pressing the edges of the fresh bandage down herself. "Do you you want me on my knees pleading for your help, then? What do you want in exchange for our war?" Swinging her legs around, Lily pushes herself to her feet despite the way her body protests, the streaks of dulled pain inking her body anew. She swallows, and the hurt and anger rise up inside her like bile as she grasps Bellatrix's words. "You want me to beg you for it?"
"You've never understood the nature of power. There is no winning this. There will always be a faction that believes you are a thief of power or a mistake, a blight on the face of magic."
"You don't believe that."
"It does not matter what I believe. It is enough that they believe it."
She despises the evasion, despises herself for feeling comforted by his healing and his presence, despises this room in this house. "What do you believe, then?"
He looks as though he's just barely hanging onto his temper. "You take too many risks."
"So you'd have me grow old here with you, then? Never leave this house but to wait on you in public? Die a slave? That's not a life."
"You wish to speak of your life?" His teeth are bared, inches from her. "Every morning you wake up, you should be on bended knee thanking me for that life."
She's shouting now, and so is he. "From a death you brought to my doorstep?"
"From a death your defiance brought to your doorstep!"
"There is no peace between me and this. There never was and there never will be. That is my defiance." She's shaking, and so does her voice, in the low harsh whisper it's become as she reaches for the cruelest weapon she can find. "You may have a house and pet mudblood and the ear of a warlord but I know you, Severus Snape, and you're just a scared little boy who read some books and sanded the burr of the mill off his words to fit in with his mates, and you're still doing it. I might be just a bit of skirt you stole, but at least I'm not a coward."
The emptied phial on the table behind him bursts-first one, and then the rest, and then the water glass, tinkling to the floor in a rain of shards. And then the door slams behind him and she can hear the bolt slide home, she knows he's probably cast a handful of the nastiest sort of wards, and that is fine with Lily. That is nothing at all to sit down hard on the edge of the bed over, no reason to put her head in her hands, and if she weeps, it is not tears of anger or frustration or a new understanding of Severus' oldest betrayal. It must be the leftover pain from the attack, nothing more.