Lily wakes up cold and wet, lungs sucking for air. Something cold and slimy is all around her and she reaches blindly, finding the edges of something she's been stuffed into, pulls herself up on wobbling knees and gasps for air, clinging to the edge she's found.

Her head slowly clears as the air fills her lungs her lungs. She's naked, she realizes, no idea where she is, no idea what has happened, memory a jumbled mess with no sense to it, but what happened? Memories of kissing James are at war with memories of kissing Severus are at war with memories of the war, her war. Has she been captured? Have they won?

She scrubs at her eyes, but it does nothing. There are muffled voices, and then a towel is on her face, roughly wiping away the slime coating all of her skin. She seizes it from the hands who have pressed it to her skin and scrubs it across her face messily. The slime catches again in her throat and she retches, legs failing beneath her like a foal's.

A warm hand scoops beneath her elbow, pulling her up. The hand isn't gentle but it is warm and the shapes before her are indistinct, fuzzy in the dark before her open eyes. The hand puts one elbow on the side of the thing she's climbing out of, and then finds the other and places it there, lending stability.

When breath finds her, she uses it to curse, at length, colorfully. One of the shadows in front of her laughs; the other makes a disapproving sound.

Lily turns the towel in her hand to find a clean face of it to wipe again at her eyes and clear her ears. The towel comes away bright with blood. She must be injured, but there is no pain, or not yet. The outlines in front of her become more distinct.

"Where am I?"

The one who laughed, now serious, says, "In your home."

"This isn't my home," she whispers. It's nothing she can put her finger on; something in the air is wrong. The draft isn't the draft creeping through the windows she knows, not even in winter-is it winter? It's so cold, her heart is racing and a violent shiver overtakes her.

"It is now," the voice says. It sounds familiar, like someone she knew once, but twisted, wrong. Almost like Petunia, but that's madness. Petunia isn't in the war. Petunia wouldn't be so deadly calm in the face of her blood-covered sister climbing out of-whatever this thing is, that she's been stuffed in. Lily scrubs at her face again and pulls herself upright, closer to them.

The womanshaped shadow on the left resolves itself into a pale streak framed in red-not Petunia-no, a mirror. That's all she can be, though the woman before her is not covered in gore and slime. Her hair is parted on the wrong side and her arms are crossed. The left hand has no ring and Lily feels, immediately, for the ring on her own finger. They've taken her wedding ring. The woman before her looks dispassionate, colder, more distant than she has ever looked to herself in a mirror. If Lily has been an arrow in the war, the woman before her has been an axe.

"Where are Harry and James?" she hisses to the vile reflection. "Don't tell me they're dead, I know they can't really-"

The mirror-woman looks to her left, to the dark figure standing there, and Lily follows her gaze and starts once recognition settles in.

"You!"

Severus Snape, the Death Eater-the traitor-her old friend-the monster who took her from them, who let them die-

His presence seals it. They really are gone. James and Harry both. Lily lunges forward with a raw scream, bare feet slipping on the bottom of the cauldron, seizing the front of his robes. He's too startled to dodge. His face is close, pale, horrified, dark eyes gone wide with surprise.

"How dare you show your face to me after what you've done? How dare you? How-"

A tearing sound-the shoulder of his robe rips, and she slips back again, elbow singing loud with agony as it slams into the cauldron. Her legs still shake but she muscles her way out of the thing, staggering toward him like a wraith from a lake as he backs away. The viscous slime and gore drips from her limbs as she approaches him on unsteady legs, and he runs out of room to back away once his shoulders meet the wall. His wand is in his hand but he clearly has no idea what to do with it.

Behind her, the mirror-woman lets out a bark of laughter with no mirth in it, and flicks a curse to freeze her just as she has wound her fingers into his robe again, fingers scrabbling for his throat. He tries to tug away, to slide himself out from her grip, but can't. There's no moving but she can bore hate into his face with her eyes, so she does.

"Well," the woman says, moving closer on bare feet. "That's interesting. Am I right in thinking we did it too well?"

Severus' eyes shear from hers to move to the other woman's. "Possibly. No enchantments or charms would be carried over."

"And it has all of it." The woman comes into view, sidling up to Severus to scrutinize Lily's face. "All the memories I'm missing, under that charm of yours, this thing has. And it does that."

From behind her locked jaw and teeth, a guttural sound comes, another string of curses muted by the body-bind.

The mirror-woman's gaze cuts sideways to pin Severus as effectively as Lily's own grip. "What do you think?"

"I think you should remove her from my robes."

"Don't be dense. Do we try to charm it to block the memories same as they are on me, or start over with something else?"

They both ignore the furious sounds she makes again.

Severus turns his gaze back to her, eyes flat and calculating now that the surprise has worn off. After a moment, he says, "It will be easier to change before this stage in the process. The substrate, perhaps."

Lily can't follow this conversation and doesn't care to, but she can take in the gist. The mirror-woman lifts the body-bind and Lily sags against Severus before propelling herself away from him in hate-straight into the mirror-woman's grip. She's caught by the wrist, a wrist that the mirror-woman pulls sharply up, and then dragged by her arm twisted behind her, screaming, squirming, kicking out, but inexorably back to the cauldron.

"In you get," the mirror-woman says, in a singsong voice she might reserve for a child.

Lily kicks, shrieking for help, for James, for Dumbledore, for anyone, but the other woman is strong and has a wand to send her feet shooting out from underneath her. Lily overbalances, crashing back into the cauldron once more.

The mirror woman speaks a spell she doesn't recognize, and drips something clear onto her legs even as they kick and pinwheel in the air, and then everything goes soft and dark and liquid, her skin is sloughing off her bones without pain, but there are no bones inside of her, only blood, a cascade of blood filling up the cauldron, flowing from somewhere-it seemed inside of her- and her vision goes dark-

Leaving only the other Lily, standing over the cauldron into the slow dissolving soup of their latest attempt at a construct.

Once they are well and completely alone again-once even the accusing eyes have melted back to nothingness-Lily turns to him.

"That was horrible," she says. "Let's do it again."