It was a night of feverish work, Lily reflects sleepily. With the assistance of Severus's speeding enchantment that left him limping and in pain, that first night they tried five times, in total, to create a construct. Each was a different failure: the first cauldron-ruining attempt; another that stubbornly remained sludge no matter what they threw at it; one that successfully catalyzed into a sickening shade that precisely matched her skin and sprouted disgusting red hair on one side but never achieved form; and one which exploded in steam that screamed in her own voice and scalded both of their palms when they tried to clap a lid on the thing. She found the burn salve first, and the jar took of strips of skin when she opened it. She smoothed it on his hands before her own anyway, and they bickered amiably enough about temperature in the catalyst while he spun new skin out of thin air for her palm. And after that, they had produced the dubious success: the thing that had tried to throttle Severus.
She still wasn't sure if that could be called a success if it raised more dangerous questions than it could possibly answer.
Integrating additional spells to the thing compounded the difficulty exponentially and had brought active experimentation to a halt. A memory charm could work, but would require a formed mind with memories to truly take hold, making the timing of the addition awkward at best; other options were volleyed over a breakfast of stale bread and cheese summoned along with tea from the kitchen. And then it was ten in the morning and neither of them had slept decently in a week, or at all in the past 24 hours, but neither wanted to stop, either. There were breadcrumbs all over the open books that Severus wanted to clear up. Lily went gone back across the hall to the library to find one of her previously-discarded tomes to prove him wrong with, gotten caught up in the text with the words swimming in front of her face-the point she had been trying to make about the potential for calming draught integrated into the substrate was rather more complicated than she had remembered-and then Lily wakes up in the armchair with the last of the afternoon sunlight trickling in through the window beneath the red flame of a setting spring sun.
The book she fell asleep on is gone. The inside of her mouth feels like wallpaper paste. Lily conjures a glass and water and downs it in one go. There is also a blanket tucked around her shoulders and spread across her legs, soft and warm and dark green, one she recognizes but has never slept beneath before. The blanket smells of a body the way a bed does, of skin and of the person: in his case, of turpentine, sour sweat, sulphur, the sharp and animal musk of unwashed hair.
She can put it together easy enough, can imagine the physical mechanics of it: him finding her asleep on the chair, going to his bedroom, taking the blanket off his own bed to drape across her, pulling the book from beneath her fingertips and continuing on in their work alone.
It's all very loving, this little gesture done under the cover of her own sleep, and it all makes her a bit ill to think of it in that light. All the tiny, considerate motions in the world will not save anyone, cannot bring anyone back to life. She hates this vision of him, romantic, doting, kind as a husband. It's repulsive.
But it's not the whole of him. There's quite a lot of him she likes. It's what she'd gone to sleep worrying at, underneath the research; she couldn't put her finger on what it was, that thorn under her skin, on what exactly it was that had moved so powerfully when she had kissed him.
Sleep has made it clear. Her thoughts are orderly in the last night of the day. She should hate him as much as the construct did-she does, somewhere inside of herself, and she will likely hate him like that again-but that doesn't cancel anything else out. She does care for him; she even likes him, in pieces.
She summons tea, sugar, more bread to chew on. If Severus is in the halls he will follow it, but she is willing to bet he is still shut up in the lab.
And isn't that the crux of it. The Severus she likes is the one she was working with; the one with a mad kind of light in his eyes, the one she had been humming alongside, aside from that near-hallucination of him confessing his undying love-its own demand in response to hers. And she likes that, too, that he won't let himself be swindled or cheated, not even by her; it makes her manipulations of him feel less cruel. Lily likes his efficiency even when it borders on brutality, likes his intelligence and how he trusts hers to match it, and-she is willing to admit it to herself, at least-likes the roaring fire of his care for her, if not for her vision. Even when it threatens her goals, even as she rails against it, it warms her all the same.
And she must acknowledge the cold fact that even a kicked dog will worship the master who deigns to feed it; Severus is the only person she's had the pleasure of company in three years who has treated her as a human being and not a sack of meat, not a house-elf, not an idiot, not a tool, and in the case or Sirius, not as a ghost. Severus sees her for what she is, whatever she is, whatever he's made of her. What she's made of herself, in the wreckage. They are two plants grown from the same earth and shut in a closet; they have grown intertwined and strange together.
So, a blanket. A new touch of kindness, of humanity. Very well. For a fleeting second, she wonders if this is how the mystery of the man with the dark messy hair and glasses who leaps to the surface of her memories like a bright and elusive fish had loved her. If he would drape a blanket over her sleeping body. If she were capable, once, of accepting that sort of kindness when another man's hands were tucking it around her shoulders.
She folds the blanket into a soft square and drapes it over the back of the chair she'd fallen asleep in and freezes that thought over as soon as it begins to make smoke. Lily indulges in a long stretch, and then a handful of freshening charms, which are not a shower but will have to do. She's wasted enough time pondering the cosmic significance of a blanket as it is. The last of the sun is has dripped from the high windows above the bookshelves and a dark blue has infected it from above and is now pressing the last of the light from the air. She pads silently across the hall, her mind quiet, everything frozen beneath Occlumency as far as it will go. The door swings open silently at her touch.
There is a dead doe hanging in the laboratory.
Her wand is in her hand before she can even completely register the poor thing, hanging by her feet, trussed to a pole that spins slowly in midair. Her throat has been slit but she still moves, still takes labored but slow, regular breath; something is keeping her alive to suffer.
-Magic, of course. Magic is keeping her alive. Suddenly the idea of purging it from the earth doesn't seem so terrible.
"What are you doing?" She already suspects the answer, but if he hasn't heard her enter it's better to give him a bland question than to sneak around and risk spoiling the work.
He's hunched over a cauldron. Hasn't lit the lamps yet, so he's working near-darkness, shoulders moving beneath his robes as he stirs. "A moment." An arm snakes out, lifts one of the squares cut from her bloody shift, and it disappears into the cauldron.
Closing the door behind her, she twirls her wand nervously in two fingers, then prods the air and rolls her wand slowly in her fingertips, lighting the lamps and bringing their illumination up slowly so as not to shock his eyes.
A few long moments of silence, then: "Come."
"Is it stable?" She moves closer.
"Yes, but I have to finish incorporating the powdered starthistle."
"Ah. Close, then." His head is still bent over the cauldron as one hand stirs and the other shakes in the powdered bone bit by bit from a spoon. When he swings his head up to look at her, she blanches. "Good lord. You look worse than usual."
He scowls at her, which does nothing to improve his looks, and ducks back down to the work at hand. His eyes are red, face drawn and grimy, hair flat and clumped messily together with grease. There's a streak of dried blood only half rubbed away marking his cheekbone, and a spray of something sickly green speckles his face and throat, as if he crushed something vile-probably the fermented gloriana root-with too much force. And the smell-it's better not even to think of the smell of the unwashed body of a potioneer who has worked more than 24 hours straight over a hot flame with such unsavory ingredients.
He'd be hideous to even the most charitable descriptions, and as if bidden by taking him in fully, there's that surge of bizarre corresponding affection again, the one she has no idea where to put or what to do with. Because, of course, it's all the evidence of stubborn, furious hard work. And it's not as if she's much better, really-under the lingering ozone of freshening charms, it's clear she's been hard at work as well.
"The doe's blood as the basis for the substrate," she says, glancing into the cauldron. The contents is darker than it has been with her own blood. "For my patronus?"
He nods, still focused. "You were correct about blood being best, I think, but we need the product to be more biddable. You have a connection to the animal."
"Where the hell did you even find a deer in Cokeworth, Severus?"
"I didn't. I had to go further." He shrugs, still stirring, stretching his neck to one side and then the other. One lock of greasy hair frees itself from the rest and dangles in front of his face, swaying with his movement.
Lily decides she doesn't want to know how far, and that it doesn't matter. If there's one, there's more. "What if it comes out with deer ears? Or a tail?" She mimes the ears on her own head, a pale parody of the half-dead thing behind her.
He fixes her with a withering glance before returning to the starthistle.
She tries another tack. "You have to keep it alive?"
"You would rather I kill it?" He shakes his head once, sharply. "It has to stay alive if the construct is to retain its integrity. It becomes the resonant object instead of you."
"Are you going to keep it here?"
His motion jerks to a stop for a second, then resumes.
"You hadn't thought of what to do with the animal, did you? If you take it back to the woods and it gets hit by a lorry you'll have to explain muggleborn soup on your floor to all your worst friends."
He taps in the last of the starthistle and gives the substrate one last, sharp turn around the cauldron. "That is irrelevant if this is a failure." He doesn't seem to want to turn his attention to her.
"It won't be if this is a success, and I think it might be. I think it's brilliant." She puts a hand on his arm, even though his sleeve is sticky with something revoltingly half-dried. "You need to rest. I did, and I feel loads better. The substrate's stable now, it'll keep."
He draws his spine straight, though it clearly pains him. He's been hunched over the cauldron so long-she knows the feeling. "I'm fine."
"You're just being contrary. Don't make me hex you to sleep, I don't want to drag you, it won't do anything for that kink in your neck."
Severus bridles. "Don't mother me."
Lily snatches back her hand from his shoulder even as she bites back her instinctive response-I won't be mothering anyone, will I?-and pinches the bridge of her nose. She counts to ten, and reaches for a less barbed lead to put him on. "You are a mule. You look like hell and I can't imagine you feel better. Your hair alone-tired wizards make mistakes, and if you pass out and drown in substrate then we're all done for."
When he doesn't respond, she stretches her wand-arm past him and sets a sealing charm over the cauldron to protect the contents from contamination, then flicks the wand below the cauldron to extinguish the fire there. Her other hand reaches for his hand and tugs on it. He digs in his heels for a moment, and she changes her grip from his fingertips to his wrist, tugs again. "For the love of-come on."
Something stubborn comes up in the set of his jaw, staring at her fingers wrapped around his wrist, but it crumbles before her eyes, and he follows, finally.
On the threshold of his bedroom, he halts again, as if he doesn't want her to enter, but she draws him past the threshold all the same, to his bed, and with a little shove he sits heavily on the edge. When she drops his wrist, he leans forward, putting his elbows onto his knees, his head in his hands.
"When was your last stimulant? Pepper-Up, Dredge Drink, anything with dragon claw?"
He looks over his fingers toward the window above the bed, but the darkened sky outside reveals little. His neck droops again and he shakes his head. "I don't know."
"Before or after I fell asleep?"
He rubs his forehead with a thumb, absently picking at the dried speckles of splattered ingredient. "After."
"Hm." She crouches before him, takes his chin between her thumb and forefinger, makes him look at her. "Your pupils are still dilated, too. Dreamless Sleep wouldn't be safe, then, at least not for a while."
He wrenches his chin from her grip and glares up at him from beneath his brow. He wouldn't take it even if it were, clearly.
"Guess I'll have to sit with you, then. Accio." A bright and singing thought is blossoming in her, and she can satisfy both goals at once. It takes a moment for the book to come zooming in from the library, and she snatches it out of the air fast enough that, she hopes, Severus can't see the title. The bed is easily broad enough for two, and Lily stuffs a few pillows against the headboard to make a comfortable enough seat to prop herself up against, tucking her knees up to her face and propping the book against it as she cracks it open.
"Are you really."
She looks over the edge of the book at him, face marshaled into seriousness and voice accusatory. "You threw a blanket on me and kept going. I will smother you with kindness or I will smother you the other way."
They glare at each other for a moment, him over his shoulder, her over her book. The stretch of warring silence broken only by him scratching absently at the patchy stubble on his jaw, picking at the caked-on grime. Lily is still skimming the index and tapping entries with her wand to make their pages glow when she feels his weight lift off the bed. In her periphery she sees him move to the closet and draw forth something, and then move to bathroom. The door clicks shut, and water begins to run.
She's just eliminated her fifth choice form the index when he emerges, damp and still drawn but wearing a fresh nightshirt under a dressing gown, and neither looking nor smelling like the sweepings from the laboratory floor. His weight sinks heavily into the bed and the covers beneath her tug.
Lily glances over. He's settled on his back, one hand over his face. She lifts the hand by the thumb and he blinks at her, then goes to staring at the ceiling. His pupils are going back to normal. Drawing her wand from above her ear and closing the book, she says lightly, "Better?"
His face tightens up, twisting like a spring. "No. I'd rather be working."
Flicking her wand cuts the light from the room, leaving them both in the faint light of the waxing gibbous moon washing in from the window to the wall opposite. "Your patronus has got to be a mule."
He snaps back so quickly, so bitterly, that it exposes much more than he means it to, and it's got to be the truth. "It isn't."
Oh. Well, that rather takes the guessing out of it.
Lily presses the back of her head to the headboard, staring at the same spot in the ceiling he's staring at, and finds his hand with her own. It's not pity that she's feeling, but there's a fist around her heart, as if it was her confession and not his. She thinks of the doe in the laboratory, kept alive. Their fingers twine together almost by accident, almost as if by not looking at it they don't have to acknowledge it. His fingers are warm from the water, for once, and curve around her own.
It takes a while for his breathing to even out, for his hand to loosen around her own in sleep. She waits longer to ensure he is well and truly under, and plans exactly how she'll extract her hand, finger by finger, so as not to disturb him. She may have slept a few hours in an arm chair but even this spell of wakefulness has her feeling all the aches and exhaustion of the week. All she wants is her own bath and, finally, to spend a full night of sleep in her own bed without anyone to wake her.
When she closes her eyes, she does, truly, intend to only rest them for a moment.