"You are in quite a lot of danger," Regulus says.

"What a change of affairs," Sirius scoffs.

"More than before," his brother snaps.

Lily rubs gently at the healing slice on her hip. It's to the stage where it itches, and she can't scratch it properly without rupturing the new flesh-she can't even wear trousers, not yet, but it's easier to scratch when she's just in the shift and dressing gown. Regulus had looked fit to faint when she appeared at the table thus, but it scarcely matters. She is trying to pay attention, but Severus has already given his version of events, close enough to the truth that Lily hasn't felt the need to correct him.

He doesn't mention the argument, of course. They had always argued. It is the nature of their relationship. This was worse. It has tapped into his worst, oldest betrayal, and she into his deepest insecurity. She would be a fool to be blind to it, but she can't think of a single way to fix it that doesn't leave her helpless and back to servitude. If it were simply her pride or his, or even that awful and delicate thing hanging in the air between them like a chandelier by which all things are illuminated, she would smash it all without a second thought. But this is the war. This isn't about either of them. This is about every woman Macnair has mounted on his wall, the open and weeping eye socket of the nameless servant and the child who should be learning magic instead serving at Lucius Malfoy's house. For all the horrors she doesn't know. She cannot give them up so easily.

Severus hasn't so much as spoken a word to her directly. That morning, he had loosed her for Bellatrix's departure without so much as a glance to she if she would follow him to the entry hall, or if she was dressed, or if she was even alive.

There had been no sense of time in a locked room with no windows. So Lily had thought. All through her time alone, she had paced and thought, and removed memories into the pensieve, and rearranged them, and put them back. There is no recovering the two she has lost, no love poisoned by the agony of loss for James and Harry. There are images and sensation but they are cut away from the whole, cut away from her own feelings for them both, and thus almost meaningless. She had relished their faces at first, waiting for the love to return, but the weight of an infant in her arms is nothing when she can't hold onto the idea that the infant is her own. Perhaps that frustration is fueling her anger now. All the way down the stairs, trailing a sullen Bellatrix, delivering her unto Fenrir with more potions and more instructions to continue their halfhearted sham of treatment. Even when Bellatrix muttered to Severus, "Your girl stands at the edge of a precipice. Do push her off for me," he hadn't said anything, he hasn't done anything, he hasn't so much as come within arm's reach if he can help it. It's as if she's a blazing fire and he's trying not to scorch his robe.

"Three of six," she says, interrupting Regulus' list of ways they could die horribly as a direct result of her actions, which she has heard before and has become less amusing each time he enumerates it. "We have three of six. We need to find the other three."

Regulus says, "There is little more I can do into the House of Gaunt, and as for Ravenclaw's artefacts, the staff is a myth, the quill was supposed to have been in a Muggle museum somewhere but the version there is a fraud and little else exists to suggest where the true quill may have gone, and the diadem is rumored to have disappeared after Helena Ravenclaw's death in Albania. There is very little-"

And the piece falls into place that Lily doesn't realize she has been waiting for. "Albania."

"There is little we can affect in Albania without people on the ground," Regulus says with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Of course," she says, holding him back from continuing with a hand. "But if we go. In person."

"We could, perhaps, trace the diadem-but it it is unclear if that is the true artefact, if even the Dark Lord did obtain an artefact from Ravenclaw. The House of Gaunt, however-"

"We can go to the House of Gaunt when you find more about it. Albania's the lead we have now, though. Unless you're holding out on us again?"

Regulus pins her with a sharp look and she meets it, an even and impassive surface of ice behind her green eyes.

Severus' gaze, too, is burning holes in the side of her neck, in her injured shoulder, but she doesn't bother with him.

Sirius is looking at her, intrigued but concerned. "You can't go to Albania, Lily."

"Why not?"

"It'll draw attention," Sirius says, but he sounds unconvinced, like he's following her thought too. "Regulus never goes anywhere without me, and Snape-well, it's known how he keeps you close to the vest. They talk about it." There's no small measure of disgust in his voice, but Lily lets it go. "If anyone were to visit and you weren't here, it'd be suspicious."

"I'm more useful out there," she says evenly.

Regulus splutters helplessly, "This is madness. Infinitely worse than your previous jaunt, no matter how successful. You can't simply disappear from service."

"Of course not. But arrangements could be made."

"Arrangements?" Severus asks, a polished and careful neutral in the repetition.

As far as first words after a long and frigid silence go, it's weak. Weakness she can exploit. She turns a hard look on him. "I'll keep you informed of my progress."

Within an an hour of Sirius and Regulus' departure, she is surrounded by piles of texts in the library. In two, she has returned most of them in favor of the most helpful stack, and transferred her study to the laboratory for the sake of practical experimentation. In three, and four, and five, she has narrowed it down to two spells to start with, alongside a potion or three that Severus certainly has in his stores. None of them are terribly complex alone; combined, they are admittedly a larger undertaking. She will likely need help. No question who that will have to be; he wouldn't let her go to anyone else even if she wanted to. And she doesn't want to. She'd rather his help. The worst of it will be the bit with the blood, but that's all right, there's probably enough in the old shift she shucked off yesterday to be starting with, and if it needs more or fresher there is always blood replentisher and a knife.

When Severus comes to her, melting out of the doorway like a predatory shadow, there is an experiment of dubious success sitting in the cauldron. She has no idea how long it's been at this point, only that she has used up four of the thirty-three doses of polyjuice he has stored in the laboratory, taken two doses of pepper-up and drunk a whole pot of tea, snipped off a lock of hair from the back to pull from when yanking them directly from her scalp became too irritating, shredded her ruined shift into neat squares of brown blood-soaked fabric, squeezed more drops of blood from her fingertip than she cares to count, and this is the only thing she's managed to create that is even close. But she is experimenting, not meaning to achieve the whole of her invention tonight. The first rule of experimenting in magic-a rule Severus taught her, years and years ago, a rule he was taught by his mother, the rule of any wizard who wanted to invent and live to write of his inventions when they failed-is start small.

He watches for long moments from the doorway, his gaze pinned to the back of her neck, and she doesn't turn. "Are you making your arrangements?" he asks again, finally, his tone less polished than it was.

Her wand prods into the cauldron, stroking along the length of the thing and observing the response. "Come and see," she says.

He approaches on silent feet, coming to still himself again a hair's breadth from her arm. When he recoils from what she has made as she knows he would, it's a mere shudder, one that brings his sleeve brushing against her arm.

(Goosebumps. Stupid.)

Lifting the thing from the cauldron, her wand flips it and tests the tendons along the back. The hand, a perfect replica of the one holding it, curls its fingers. She flips it back over, putting the palm up toward the ceiling, testing the tendons once more and the bones beneath. From the center of the life line in its arc across the palm, a single bright green eye blinks up at them both, pupil rolling back and forth between their faces.

"A construct of some kind," he guesses, voice flat.

"Got it in one. The catalyst for the form is polyjuice, and the basis for the substrate is blood."

He looks revolted. "The substrate could be anything. Snow, mud, twigs. You chose blood."

"Blood's best for a human form and human reactions, according to this old thing." She thumps a book before her, which growls at her touch. She relishes his horror, however mild. She hates herself, a little, for relishing it. "The parts of it I understood made me think that, anyway. And since it's my blood, it serves to reinforce the form. It's not as if I haven't enough of it. It's not even Dark."

"Some would say any spell that draws on blood is Dark."

She would have said that, and that's why he's saying it, because it serves him to throw her own logic in her face. It's the argument of a schoolgirl convinced of good and evil as identifiable constants, points on a line, pushing herself and everyone she loves far as she can toward one end of the line. His former position will serve her, then. "How's blood different than hair, then? It's just a bit of the body. That logic would make the polyjuice Dark too." She places the hand back in the cauldron where it continues to blink and watch.

"A weak rebuttal. Dumbledore would surely not accept that from a member of the Order."

"He's not alive to disapprove, and Sirius and I are all that's left of the Order that I know about."

He glances at her face, finally, and then back to the disembodied hand the cauldron. He won't say he's impressed, but she knows he is. "It's not a philosophical distinction, you know. Constructs may come out of a cauldron but they aren't potions. If you put a Dark Detector near the finished object, it could go off, if we went too far with the balance of the substrate."

"And, what, everyone would assume you did some kind of Dark bewitchment on me? It would only make your position more secure, if people are talking behind your back about you holding me too close. And she'll bleed properly, too, if anyone needs to see that." She raps the cauldron three times, speaks a counterspell, and drips a bit of a purification tincture onto the thing. The hand squirms and then dissolves into a sludge half-resembling its component parts. "Might help you to let them see her bleed."

He's staring at the sludge in the cauldron, now. "There is a reason why people do not make constructs often, you understand. They are notoriously unreliable."

"There was something in the book about that, but they purpled up the prose so much I couldn't understand what they were trying to say." She leans her hip against the counter, turning to him. "Must be really awful."

Drawing his wand, he says, "You are resolved, then. To follow the dog to Albania in search of an artefact we cannot even confirm is a horcrux." It isn't a question. He flicks his wand to vanish the contents of the cauldron and then meets her eyes.

"Yes." Better a death somewhere in Albania next week than trapped here, in this house, growing old and afraid with the specter of their closeness between them like a hanged man.

He looks away first, sweeping his gaze across her supplies arrayed haphazardly on the bench, absorbing in the complexity of the undertaking. "You will need my help to create a suitable construct."

That, she can admit. "It sounds like a team of apprentices were more what the book is expecting but you'll do."

He surveys her cooly, critically, measuring her determination with his eyes, and then gives one sharp nod.

And so they work, in a strange sort of truce. They haven't worked like this in years, not really, but the muscle memory returns. He won't watch while she bleeds for the tests afresh each attempt, and she won't watch while he does some other horrible, painful thing-he can't help himself sucking breath between his crooked teeth after it's done, and his body moves as if he's been kicked in the ribs for several minutes after-but it speeds up the process considerably.

He doesn't ask permission to do it and she doesn't ask what it is. In the span it took her to create the single success of the offputting hand, they create a hand with no misplaced eye that flexes and responds, an arm attached to a shoulder with a thin protrusion of the collarbone, a head that is like looking in a mirror that blinks and mouths words at them both. The thing won't come together piecemeal, though-it must be made all at once or not at all.

The first attempt together to scale things up, to create a full body, goes remarkably haywire when the entirety of the basis for the substrate catches fire in the cauldron once the blood is added too quickly. A quick lid and a charm to stifle the thing have no effect for long, tense minutes as it consumes the contents and ruins one of three cauldrons in the laboratory large enough to hold a human body. So intent on their task, he doesn't even bother getting angry; together, they Vanish the cauldron and its contents and hoist a new one above the flame.

As they settle it in the clamp above the fire, they both reach to tighten the thing in place, and his hand brushes against hers. For a flash, a half of a moment, he is someone else-not transformed but a different person overlaid over him like a coat of paint, messy hair and glasses and lips pressed to her neck-and Lily feels a surge of love, a heat of yearning so strong it should rattle the cupboard doors.

She snatches her hand back and inspects it, front and back, as if looking for an injury or waiting for an accusing eye to appear in her palm. Severus is watching, looking for an explanation, hands drifting to his sides from edge of the cauldron. "It's nothing," she mutters. "You were someone else, for a moment. That's all."

His mouth twists. He can guess who well enough. It doesn't matter if he hates it. She should reach for the clamp, should secure it above the fire, but she reaches for his hand instead-the one closest to her, the left. Bringing it to her face, she inspects it on both sides, running a fingertip along his palm, the life line, the heart line, the long scar down the center bisecting each. The fingers twitch, like a great pale spider in her grasp, but his face is perfectly still when she looks up into it.

"For better or worse, Sev, I know exactly who you are."

With his free hand, he reaches in past her and tightens the clamp with more force than necessary. The metal squeals as he drives it home. There is a heat in the air that has nothing to do with the fire at their feet.

Suddenly, Lily wants to see it, the first brick in this wall between them. She wants to know its face. She's still holding his arm, so she undoes the buttons at his cuff, and his hand clenches into a fist as she edges his sleeve up, up until she can see the belly of the snake, its fangs, its eyes, etched in stark black across blue veins.

It writhes on him. It moves with his breath, with the blood in his veins. It draws power from him, and he from it, this mark more indelible than any faith or love they could show one another. This is the old betrayal, the one at the root of everything, the one where he spoke what he really thought of her in his heart all those years ago, a belief he held so tightly he let it scratch its poisoned image into his flesh.

The words spill out of her, unbidden. "Did you ever try to leave? After you found what it was really about? That it could hurt real people that you-"

She cuts herself off, swallowing the word. He won't say it, so neither will she. It will come out like an accusation now, with the flush of heat in her face, with the strange pain of seeing the Mark for the first time lancing through her and something worse, something deeper squirming in her gut. It's the wrong moment.

(When, then, is the right moment-?)

"I hope for the sake of your soul that you looked for a way out once you knew what it was about. But right now, I don't think you did. I think you liked it. I think you liked the power. I think you liked that it could bring you everything and you didn't care what it took from anyone else."

She looks up to him. There is something terribly complicated between them, and terribly sad.

"You're right," he says, voice sharp and bitter as poison, tearing his arm away. "Is that what you wish to hear? You're right."

She steps closer, feeling brave, feeling foolish, needing to press him and knowing how. "And now?"

He doesn't answer, eyes searching her face.

"What do you believe in now?" As if along a tightrope, she moves closer yet, until she is barely a breath away. "What do you want now?"

His breathing slows and then stutters to a stop, face still closed but something in his eyes tells her she can take this fight further.

The arm with the Mark is within her grasp again, and she seizes it, digging her fingernails in through his sleeve, thumbing his still unbuttoned cuff higher to grasp at his bare skin, wanting to hurt. Even as she does, she tilts her face toward him, up and up and up-

There is no wait for his ferocity this time, no moment of delay while she kisses him and he allows it but does not let himself respond. His free arm winds around her, trailing up her spine and drawing her closer even as she seeks to bruise the other, to leave her own mark there as black as the Dark one. His body curves around her own, bending toward her like a flower starved for light. Hand snaking up his chest, up his throat, fingertips skating along his jaw, Lily can almost lose herself in this, in pressing him to her, taking what is hers, in humbling this proud and stubborn mess that calls itself a man. And there is something else, something that she had not anticipated thrumming at the core of her in sympathy with the thing thrumming at the core of him, like a wine glass ready to break at just the right note.

But she doesn't want to cling to him like this, like a drowning thing. She has made her point. With regret, she pulls away, putting her forehead to his shoulder, eyes still closed, the hand curled around the Mark finally relaxing around his forearm.

He lets out one shuddering breath, hand still tangled in her hair. Says nothing.

"I need you to fight," she growls into his chest, "Not because of me. But because it's the right thing to do."

The boy would have promised her anything, would have told her the moon was in his hands if he needed her to believe it. Would have lied.

The man shakes his head. She can feel him do it with her eyes closed.

"There is too much you don't know," he rasps, breath moving her hair. "Too much that I suspect to be true but cannot confirm. Too many ways-"

"Stop. No more excuses, no more evasion. Helping me along, humoring me, it isn't enough anymore. It means you could pull the rug from under me any time you like. You either think me and everyone of my birth are people with a claim to our own magic just as good as yours or anyone else, or you don't. You have to believe he can be defeated." Opening her eyes and finding his, she drags his arm up again, between their bodies, fingernails pressing tight to the Mark once more. "I need you to be better than this."

Toward her hand, he mutters, "We find the remaining two horcruxes and destroy them." He shifts. It's small, but he is pulling his hand out of her hair, trying to disentangle himself from her without touching her more than he has to, more than he already is. "What then?"

"Three. There are three horcruxes left." She pushes her hand through her hair, drawing it away from her face where it's fallen. "We kill him, Severus. We kill him and he stays dead."

"And then what?" He draws his hand free of her grasp to gesture toward the outside world, to himself. "What of his followers? Those who control the Ministry at his command, the Aurors who rounded up all the muggle-borns, the Muggle ministry, the governments of half of Europe-"

"Azkaban." She's growing impatient, mostly because somewhere deep she suspects his points are valid. "They're collaborators at best and Death Eaters at worst."

"There are too many to jail them all. There are too many people who sat still and quiet at the Death Eaters took over, too many who didn't care to get involved or fled, too many half-bloods who took the deal that was offered them to keep their families safe."

"Read all their minds, then. Legillimency. Take the measure of them individually."

It's a bad solution and they both know it. "There are too many. It would take too long. A counterassault would be mounted, and we lose any open war. We have no army."

"Then what do you suggest?" Lily snaps.

"I don't have any solutions," Severus snarls, finally losing his patience. "The world you are fighting for is gone. My solution is to lock the doors and let the rest of the world go on with burning."

"Then let's douse it in kerosene." She feels wild, furious, and something deep opens inside of her, something leaking sick and vile through the dampening screen of the memory charm. "Set the Dementors loose, end all the old bloodlines, even the innocent ones, even Regulus and Sirius. Demolish Hogwarts to the last stone, burn all the books of spells on a bonfire of every wand we can find. Exterminate the last of the dragons, the phoenixes, the unicorns, anything else that can go at the core of a new wand, and cut the hands off all the wandmakers. No more charms, no more potions, no more Ministry, no more pureblood against mudblood against muggle. No more wizarding world."

"No." The wind has kicked out of him, the horror of this apocalypse writ bright across his face. "No. I can't believe you want that."

"You can't? You can't believe it?" She's wild, laughing with someone else's tears in her eyes. She blinks them back, baring her teeth. "You gave me magic when I was a child. Told me what I was. Then you gave me this world. Let me live to see it." She closes the distance between them, leans close so he can't mistake what she has to say. "I don't want it anymore. Not if this is all it is. Not if this is all it can be."

He swallows twice, takes a breath and curses with it, one vile word spoken in the air like a spell. He puts his hand to his face and draws it down, and once it passes over his eyes, he looks at her as if he is meeting her anew for the first time.

"I believe you." Because he hasn't before, of course. He had heard her, but never understood her until now. "I believe in you. And I would help you do it, if it comes to that. I'd do anything."

And then he says it, voice cracking, those dreaded three words that have been on his lips all these years. Invokes the name of the monster and brings it into its full and horrible reality.

"I love you."

And there it was. The price of belief. His love, this knife. It's not some useless lust she can take and use and throw away or hope he'll grow out of, worse than some overgrown boyhood infatuation. And she knew. And she kissed him anyway, to get what she wanted. She wants to shred the words from the air, to erase them, to blot them out, but the stain is indelible as blame. It's precisely the wrong thing, exactly what she hadn't wanted, inside her like a thorn beneath skin.

Her voice is rougher than it has to be. "That isn't a better solution."

But it is, for him. That's precisely why he's said it. She turns from him, away from the terrible vulnerability on his face, away from his revolting desire to be subsumed under her vision for a future the same way he had been willing to be subsumed by the Dark Lord's, away from his clear and awful need to hear her say something equal in return, the weight of the dead she can't remember enough of and the silence in her own heart like a hand over her mouth preventing anything more. She turns to prod the fire beneath the cauldron high once more. "Come on, then. We have to try again." The silver dagger is in her hand again, and she barely feels the edge moving across her palm, parting the skin so she can bleed again.