Waking up in Severus' bed is not what Lily had planned for the day.
She's managed to curl onto her side, half-laying atop the few pillows she had reclined against. Severus is a snoring knot of limbs and hair in the corner of the bed. He's rolled toward her in the night, and the blanket is rucked up around his shoulders. She isn't touching him and he isn't touching her except at their fingertips. She could blame the work they've done the past day for all of it easily enough it it weren't for that. Even so, she wants to steal this moment for herself, his face unlined and almost soft in sleep.
Well, now who's repulsive, Lily thinks, running a fingertip along his knuckles.
And then the anti-intruder jinx shoots its head off.
Waking up in Severus' bed with an intruder jinx shrieking at her was definitely not what she had planned for the day.
She sits bolt upright, tearing her hand from his. Severus flails for a moment and then comes up on his elbows, cursing. They don't have to look at each other in fear; it's already dancing in the air before them as they both scrabble to their feet, for their wands-Lily snatches up the book from where it fell, open, onto the floor while she slept. A few pages are crinkled from the floor and he'd want her to straighten them, but there isn't time, she snaps the book shut by the spine and seals the creases in for good. There is a whole host of new feelings going on inside of her-shame, guilt, terror, a pernicious warmth, curse it-all of which are completely inconvenient and useless and she shoves them away with the same decisive motion that rakes her hair out of her face.
She makes it to the door first only because she is unencumbered with blankets. She presses her ear to it but the blaring alarm-like a cat in heat-drowns out everything else. "Shut the thing off!" she throws over her shoulder in a furious whisper.
There's a fumbling of blankets and wand and the sound of the alarm gets sucked up a tube, increasing in pitch, and then dies.
Beneath, silence. Then, a voice calling her name. A voice she knows. Her stomach almost turns itself inside-out.
It would be fine if it were Death Eaters, but him-
Lily throws open the door. She needs to get out of this room. Right now.
"Wait," Severus hisses behind her, fumbling his way onto his feet, "Who-"
There's no time. She banishes the book back to the library with a slam, and the instant it leaves her hand she is in a dead sprint, down the hall, round the corner, taking the stairs two at a time.
At the bottom of the staircase in the entry hall, the intruder is waiting, shaking soot from his hair with a smile. "Sorry to barge in. We didn't hear from you. Thought Bella might have come back and finished the job. Regulus didn't feel the need but I did, so I came."
"Sirius," Lily pants, trying to sound delighted. It doesn't come off in the least. "How nice to see you. Feels like you were here yesterday."
"It was the day before yesterday," he says, eyeing her rumpled clothes and bleary eyes. "Did I wake you? We sent ahead in the vanishing box. More than once. Wanted to figure out transport to Albania, and we've had some news and some rumors you might need to hear in person."
"We've been busy." She scrubs her hand over her face, trying to be awake enough for this conversation to not go completely haywire.
"Busy?"
"My arrangements. For our trip." She's catching her breath back, finally, and managed half a smile. "It's coming along. Should have something to show today, actually."
"Already?"
He looks surprised, and it annoys her. "Yes, already. You expected us to wait til Easter?"
He holds up both hands. "Thought it was complicated."
"It is."
He looks incredulous. "And you managed to solve it in a day and a half?"
"Not yet, but we're close. It's not as if it's never been done before, constructs are dead useful, they're just tricky and not always as obedient as a house-elf so it's a bit arcane, most of the literature is from before the last of the goblin wars. The substrate is simple enough for a child, it's just-"
Sirius holds up his hands. "I don't need to know all the details."
She crosses her arms. "Then why did you ask?"
He's exasperated with her now. "Merlin, Lily, I don't know what that git lets you get into."
Behind her, another voice, cold and familiar all in one breath: "I let her do very little. What she does is entirely of her own accord."
Over her shoulder, she watches Severus descends the stair, sweeping in like a vampire in his day robes and looking just as poised and composed as she isn't. The way Sirius' face twists up says he could hex him just for breathing. She lets out one sharp breath that could almost be a laugh, if she let it. Appearances. She's sure she looks like a vagrant and smells worse.
When Severus reaches her side, he turns to her and asks, "Why is the dog here alone?"
"I'm here as a courtesy," Sirius objects. "Not that you would appreciate-"
Lily ignores him. "Apparently we missed some notes in the box while we were working. Arrangements for Albania. And other things."
"Ah." He fixes Sirius with a narrowed gaze. "We were occupied."
Lily rolls her eyes. "Do you have to make it sound so sinister?" Sinister's better than the alternative, but still.
"I recall that you bled into the cauldron no less than five times for the substrate."
"Severus!" Lily admonishes, at the same time as Sirius draws himself up and says, "Blood?"
Severus has a bit of an unkind smile around the edges of his mouth. It isn't the kind of smile a nice man would have so ready to display, with a curl of the lip and a threat of teeth. He's using it against her, she knows, the mission, her willingness to compromise her previously-inflexible opinion on borderline Dark magic in the name of the hunt for darker.
"Yes, Sirius, blood," she sighs, putting a hand to her forehead. "My blood to make a duplicate of myself. And before you ask, it was my idea."
Sirius looks as though she's just sprouted a unicorn horn in the middle of her forehead. He looks to Severus, who, despite his initial effect of poise, had not raked a comb through his hair-though it lays relatively flat but does he even own a comb-and then to her hair, which is a tornado rendered in red. A question has clearly just occurred to him, and it pinches his brow. Lily resists the urge to card her fingers through her hair in an attempt to neaten it.
"Well," Sirius says slowly. "We just got worried. You lot typically keep an eye on the Vanishing box. But it seems you both are-are all right."
Hell. The only thing worse than open inquiry is closed suspicion. Lily thinks longingly of a bath that she won't get. "The new substrate needs to get on the heat now if we want to test it out today. You want to hang around while we brew?"
Severus looks down his nose at both of them. "In a kennel, perhaps?"
"As opposed to the belfry you spend your nights in, Snape?"
And that's rather too close to it for Lily's taste. "Do you want to fight about nothing, or do you want to get things done?" She turns to the stair, and then beckons to Sirius over her shoulder. Severus will come or not of his own accord. "Come up and tell me the news you sent. There's a half-dead deer in the lab. Try not to be horrified."
Thus prepared, Sirius only makes a sad little noise in the back of his throat when he follows her into the lab and sees the deer. "It's still alive?" Sirius asks.
"Has to be. Like Polyjuice, if you remember that from Potions. Uses the resonant magic in a part of the body to call back to the original. It's how you replicate scars and whatnot. If the resonant object dies, the connection is broken." Lily sets a fire beneath the large cauldron in the center of the room, and then lifts the sealing charm above the substrate in it. It's cold, and a thin sheen of shimmering oil has coalesced at the top, but there's no congealed film to remove, no sign of contamination or antiquing indicating the magic's gone strange overnight. The color has deepened to a red that is almost black.
"You won't want to get too close, Black," Severus says haughtily as he enters, moving to her side. "This work is not without dangers." He peers at it, delicately hovering the tip of his wand over the surface. It trembles as if touched and then reacts, a point pulling out of the liquid towards the tip of his wand. To Lily, he murmurs, "It still appears to be viable."
"Of course it is, I know how to set a sealing charm," Lily mutters irritably. "So what's the news, Sirius?"
"Right. Well-Snape's poison didn't work at Beauxbatons, but the castle still fell."
Lily stills for a second. Her doing, of course. Her first demand. She looks over her shoulder, and Sirius is leaning against the wall but he doesn't seem at ease as the pose suggests. "What do they suspect?"
"Incompetence. Tampering." Sirius' gray eyes are fixed on her own, narrowed. His shoulders tighten up further. "There's a whisper or two about you, Lily. Not many, but any at all is too much."
Lily turns back away, dropping the olivewood paddle into the cauldron and beginning a slow, deliberate stirring as the cauldron warms. "Has- he said anything?" She can't bring herself to call him the Dark Lord.
"Not yet, but it's coming from enough angles he's heard it more than once. People who were at the front are out for blood, since they were relying on the poison to do the hard work. Suffered more losses taking the castle than they planned, but they took it anyway, eventually." Sirius leans away from the wall, arms crossed, taking a few steps toward them both. "Sent the whole river up in steam, and since it was poisoned, anyone who breathed it-well. It took a while longer but it got the job done. It was nasty stuff. But they seemed to know even where the steam was, not that it saved them in the end. What did you do to it, anyway?"
"Charmed the nightshade." She looks at Severus across the cauldron, trying not to dwell on the horror of those deaths, the deaths she wrought. "We're ready to flee when we have to."
Severus doesn't meet her gaze. "I will manage the Dark Lord's suspicion before that becomes necessary," Severus says, voice flat, eyes fixed on her hands as they stir, watching for the coiling steam.
"You'll manage him?" Sirius said, voice dropping an octave, ending with a humorless laugh. "He reads minds, Snape, I thought you knew that."
"I know a great many things you do not, Black," Severus snarls, eyes flickering towards the man. "We do not all resort to living as beasts for protection."
"You know what he's going to do to you?" Sirius jeers, moving closer. "You have any idea what he does to people who have failed him? Have you ever failed him this badly before?"
Lily can see Severus' jaw working, and she interjects, movements still smooth through the potion. "What, exactly, will he do?"
"Torture," Sirius says simply, looking a far sight too pleased about the thought.
Lily looks sharply at Severus. "Will you be able to keep control? Keep him out of what we can't have him knowing?"
"I have before," he snaps. He waves a few long fingers through the circling mist; it's almost ready, and he reaches for the phial of polyjuice, adding a single long red hair to it with precise movements. "At least I am willing to take risks rather than sit trembling among my books."
The barb lands. "Regulus is braver than you'll ever be," Sirius snarls.
"Sirius-"
The tension is giving her a headache. When they've met in the past, they had been able to at least ignore each other for her own and Regulus' sake. She had hoped the work of the construct, of delivering the news could occupy them, but-
"As if you would know anything about it, spending most of your time as a housepet," Severus drawls.
"Severus-"
Sirius is on his feet, now, coming forward, toward them. "You had to be dragged kicking and screaming by her into this! We were rescuing muggleborns and stealing horcruxes while you were opening the gates and murdering seventeen-year-olds during the Siege of Hogwarts!"
Severus draws himself up, and his wand is out of his sleeve, and this has all gone quite far enough.
Lily's wand is up, out in her free hand, the incantation lands like a profanity and a the shield charm goes up between them. "Enough!" Lily roars. "That is enough out of you. Both of you. I won't- you will not. We are on the same side!"
On opposite sides of her, they keep their glares up, hackles raised, wands drawn, both looking like dogs ready to fight. She glares at Severus, but he stays put, and she thrusts the stirring paddle towards his free hand. Negotiating her way around the shield charm, wand still keeping it firmly up, Lily moves to Sirius. She seizes him by the arm with an unforgiving grip and drags him to the door of the laboratory, past the deer in her silent pain, into the hall.
He looks furious, and he curses at length and colorfully. Severus' mother's honor is well and thoroughly stained by the end of it.
Lily lifts the shield once she's sure Severus isn't following-his rage cannot be trusted, no amount of holdover tenderness could make her that much of a fool-and takes two long, deep breaths. The silencing spell goes up easier than the shield does, and her wand goes back into her sleeve. When she speaks, she's level, not shouting. "We can't go on like this."
"I don't know how you stand him," he mutters.
"I don't know how you hate him so much," she says, exasperated. "This schoolboy nonsense should have burned out by now."
"Schoolboy-!" Sirius looks angry, shocked. "You've no idea how much he's done, what he'd still be doing if you didn't-"
"I don't? I don't?" She prods Sirius in his chest with force to interrupt him. "Are you with me or not? Are you fighting against the one who murdered Harry and James or are you fighting this other provincial little war of yours?"
"And what if he played more of a part in their deaths than you know about?" Sirius demands in a furious whisper, edging close to her so she can hear him clearly. "What if fighting the war is fighting him too?"
"I trust him." And it's true, when it comes out like that.
"Because you have to."
She sighs. "Maybe. But also because I want to. Because it's better than the alternative."
Defiance, cold and calculating, close up his face completely. "And what if you're wrong?"
She thinks, for a split second, of her hand in Severus'. Of what he said. Of love, and how little it solves.
Freeze it. Freeze it all. She cast the silencing spell for a reason.
"If I'm wrong, then I need you more." She glares, hating every word, but true trust is a luxury for those who can afford it, those not holding the balance of a tenuous alliance together with sheer force of personality and will. "I need you to pretend to trust him enough to keep the peace and notice when he slips. I need you to tell me the things you think I'm blind to, like a spy would. If you really think he's pulled one over on me, if you really think he's out to betray us, you need you to bring me proof, Sirius. If that's what you really believe, then that's your duty. Until then, it's a schoolboy spat that is getting in my way."
Sirius glances back to the door, tongue flicking along a canine tooth, predatory toward the prey she's set him toward. In this moment, she hates both of them almost as much as herself.
"I need to talk to him, too," Lily sighs, letting it go as best she can, . "Alone. Can you give me that?" She rubs her forehead, trying to seek and remove the headache forming there. "You did wake me up, and I haven't had any tea. If you wouldn't mind making a pot, that would give me a minute. It's all I need."
His eyes bore into hers for a split second, mistrust evident, but then he nods once, sharply. "All right," he says, like his mouth is dry. "All right. I could use some too."
Lily grips his shoulder with one hand and dispels the silencing charm with the other, not wanting to thank him so much as reassure him, and then marches back into the laboratory without a backwards glance or a second thought.
Severus is still at the cauldron, still stirring, still scowling. This is the part that requires two sets of hands, and he cannot proceed without her, which means he also can't escape her.
Sirius' footsteps die away, down the stairs, from the door. Good. That's enough to work with.
"You need to stop provoking him," Lily mutters without preamble, retrieving the stirrer from his hands and resuming the movement without interruption.
"I see no reason for it." His wand strikes a phial and it glows for an instant as it's warmed. He holds it up to the light.
"You make him suspicious on a good day."
"Good," he says with a fresh bit of savagery, pouring in the warmed phial of catalyst.
Lily picks up her pace and reverses direction, counting passes clockwise in her head, and hisses across the cauldron, "Can you imagine how well he would take it if he knew I waltzed out of your bedroom this morning?"
There's half a sneer for her, and a victorious look in his eye that Lily absolutely loathes, as if he delights in the horror this information could bring Sirius. Or worse, something closer to Sirius' original suspicion of really winning her from James.
She doesn't want to inspect that thought further.
His wand begins a rhythmic tap against the edge of the cauldron, one for each pass of her stirrer now that the catalyst has been added. The pewter glows with each tap. "I'm unconcerned."
"I need you to be concerned," she grits out. "We need Sirius on our side and if he thinks anything-untoward-is happening, we lose him." She has no idea why she goes pink when all that's really happened is a vigorous night of bloody hand-holding and rather a lot more of much-needed sleep. It feels so completely stupid that it only makes the embarrassment worse. On the tenth pass, she stops stirring and he stops tapping the cauldron. "There are things we oughtn't let him know."
His eyes go colder, more dismissive, but the sneer stays as he turns profile to reach for a stem of dark mullien flowers. "There is nothing to know."
"Isn't there?"
She wishes she could snatch the words and clap them back into her mouth the second they're out. She meant it as a threat, as something that could only hurt him and never her, but it doesn't quite come out that way, and he's heard it too. He stills, one flowerbud crushed between his fingers and ready to drop into the potion between them. His eyes are glittering and opaque as polished stone. Her own fierce glare is lit from below by the soft luminescence of the potion.
There's only a breath standing there, staring at each other, until Sirius' loud footfalls make the turn at the top of the stair, and then it's over. Everything goes back under the ice. The flowerbud drops from his fingertips into the cauldron, and she resumes stirring at the same steady, measured pace as before, this time counterclockwise.
"I know you take it sweet, Lily, so I brought a sugar bowl," Sirius says as he enters, holding the tray before him. Two cups, she notes-not the point where he can stand serving tea to the lot of them, but that would be asking for a miracle.
"Thanks, Sirius. We'll just be a minute more."
In silence, more crushed flowerbuds drop in, one for each revolution. After eleven, they pause in sync, drawing back from the cauldron. The smell of damp flowers fills the room-all is going right, so far.
"And now we wait," Lily sighs, taking the stirrer and wiping it clean on a towel before laying it on the bench. "It needs to simmer for a while, to let the catalyst take full effect."
"No," Severus says. "I will accelerate it."
"Don't. I looked up what that spell was and I don't like you doing it. We have the time."
"Is that what you were reading?" Severus says sharply, tiptoeing up to it, leaving unsaid the threat at end of the sentence- in my bed?
"Among other things." She turns, pours herself tea, sweetens it and takes a scalding sip. "It's not worth shaving years off your life for, at any rate."
"Hours, not years."
"The text supports both interpretations."
"The practice does not."
Sirius is watching them over his teacup like a tennis match, a sharp kind of interest on his face. "You're letting him use Dark magic to make this-thing?"
Lily slides her eyes sideways. "I let him do very little. What he does is entirely of his own accord."
The rude bark of laughter Sirius lets out then is almost as surprising as anything that's happened so far.