The next morning, Lily wakes two hours before Sirius and makes a few secretive preparations based on a number of decent half-guesses and suspicions.

When Sirius wakes, she's done and breakfast is ready. The tent comes down before the sun is fully up.

"Will Remus be joining us?" Lily asks as the last of the tent packs itself away.

Sirius' mouth goes flat and sour. "No," he says, and that's the end of it. Maybe it's cowardice or maybe it's prudence, but she lets it alone. It doesn't matter, anyway; back in the encampment, in an hour, Remus will find a particularly trusting songbird compelled to lead him to a parcel left under a fallen branch: two sheets of parchment and a snuffbox full of Floo powder that Severus had thrust into her hands before she left. One sheet explains the other, and she has the twin to the second wrapped tight in her bag.

If either of them honestly thought she'd consent to depart without some way to communicate and some way to transport each other, they're both mad, but she wasn't about to give either of them an opportunity to sabotage her. Remus is, unlike Sirius, smart enough to hold onto a thing like that on the off chance it might come in useful. Sirius would just send the whole lot up in smoke if he were angry. Best not to give him the opportunity.

The journey back is easy enough. They take a different route along the coast, wear different faces, wind along the edge of Italy and then through Austria. They spend three whole days pretending to be an elderly man and his daughter in Zurich to shake a potential tail that turned out to be a very persistent Muggle group of pickpockets who, once sussed, was susceptible to being Confunded.

The map is rolled out on the table-they are encamped in another forest just over the border-and Sirius is checking distances to towns when Lily puts one finger down on Paris.

"We're so close," Lily says. "We could try to find Flamel's wife."

"With what? We don't even have a name."

"We could go to a library."

Sirius groans. "I thought I'd never hear that sentence again after we graduated, Lily."

"We're close to Beauxbatons, their library would have much of the same-"

Sirius' expression grows dark. "Hearing them crow about they did do that place was more than enough."

Lily doesn't want to see it any more than he does. "I hate coming back empty-handed."

"Not empty-handed. We know it's at Hogwarts."

Lily snorts. "We know Flamel thinks it's at Hogwarts."

"Albus did, too."

"Based on timing alone. I don't know." Lily shakes her head. "Still feels empty-handed to me."

Sirius cocks his head. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you didn't want to go back."

Flamel's calm, sure tone echoes in her mind: you'll have to tell him. No, she bloody well doesn't have to tell anyone anything, and she isn't even sure what there is to tell. She waves the thought away with a hand. "I'm just frustrated. And the pastry on that last train was rubbish."

The miles of France pass beneath them without detour, and before she knows it she is Disillusioned on the doorstep of the familiar house in Cokeworth. The door opens to her touch; the wards must still be keyed.

She doesn't know why she expected Severus to greet her there in the entry hall, but she did. The last she had written to him was I expect I'll see you tomorrow, and she had got back nothing at all. Lily wanders the halls, calling his name, until she reaches her own room-the bare cell from the hallway, blooming into beauty when she steps over the threshold, and the construct laying there quietly in the bed.

"Hello," Lily says to the eerie familiar face. "Do you know where Severus is?"

It opens and closes its mouth a few times, caressing the air in front of its face. "Away," it finally says.

"Where?" Lily presses.

"Gone," the construct croaks. "Lonely."

"I don't care how you feel. Where is he?"

"Lonely," it says again.

"You're useless," Lily grumbles.

"Not entirely," a familiar voice says behind her, amused.

Lily whirls, and there's a smile on her face she can't quite exactly help because her heart is leaping into her throat, and she throws her arms around his neck. Into the shoulder of his shirt-a shirt, where the hell has he been keeping a muggle knit thermal shirt-she starts her tirade: "You have no idea, Severus, I hate everything: I hate camping, I hate the woods, I hate Albania, I am pretty sure I hate Sirius at least a little bit, and I definitely hate Nicolas Flamel."

There's something happening in his chest underneath her cheek-his shoulders are shaking and it's because he's laughing. He's trying to hold it back but he's laughing and it's ridiculous, and she can feel the warmth of his skin beneath the shit which is producing an entirely different kind of heat inside of her body, and as she pulls her head up she wonders if she could kiss him right now and not be trying to get anything but a kiss out of him.

Stamp that out. Damn it all, stamp it out.

-She doesn't. She wants to. Not because she needs something, not because she is helpless, not because the power between them is seesawing away from her, but because she wants to.

In direct defiance of all good sense, she goes up onto her tiptoes and presses her lips to his.

It's not a burning or cursed thing, this kiss, not like the others where she has used them as a tool to prise something forth from him. His mouth shifts beneath hers and it is sweet and gentle and so sudden there is no room for despair or desperation or the claustrophobia of their shared life to intrude. His hand moves to the center of her back and presses her close, and hers is on the back of his neck, and when they break apart it's natural and easy and mostly due to the fact that the construct behind them is making some sort of very irritating noise. Lily had forgotten it was there.

(Something mutinous inside of her says it's not the only thing she's forgotten. That she locks under ice.)

Lily pulls away to look over her shoulder and the construct has both of its hands over its face. The high-pitched keening continues.

"How has that thing been?"

When she looks back at him, he's almost serious again, the astonishment and the laughter both erased. There's only a slight flush crawling up his throat to give it away. "Serviceable. It has only been glimpsed on two occasions by messengers taking my work to the war effort. Beyond that, I haven't had the need."

No asking after the kiss, then, which is interesting. It says this could be normal, this could be who they are to each other, which is a chasm Lily can't afford to fall into right now. But her hand is still draped around his neck, his hand a gentle pressure on her back through her cloak, and neither of them move. "No one of importance?"

"We're a distance from most relevant places. No reason to come if an owl will do."

"So you're getting owls. You'll have to tell me what you're working on." Lily turns, pulling her hand down to his chest, not wanting to break the contact. "That sound the thing is making is awful. Come on, I'll put on tea. There's a lot I couldn't tell you through the note. Have we got anything to eat?"

"Not really."

She pulls away, finally, moving to the door. "Let me guess. You've subsisted on beans on toast for the past two weeks. How can you be so brilliant at potions and so rubbish at cooking?"

He scowls, mostly for show. "Potions are useful."

"Failing to contract scurvy is also useful, you ninny."

The story in its entirety takes one full pot of tea. She leaves out only a few things: first, Sirius and Remus being more than friends isn't hers to tell, even if pureblood attitudes on homosexuality were at least more relaxed-if not also more complicated-than Muggle ones. Second, she keeps the specific location of the werewolf settlement secret. He doesn't need to know, and it's a sign of trust to give back to Remus and Flamel if need be. But everything else-Flamel and his mind-games, Remus and the balance of his suspicion and his trust, the flames and their memory of young Tom Riddle, the diadem and its suspected location-she gives it all up.

"Hogwarts," Severus muses across the table, tracing his lower lip with a fingertip. Even dressed so casually he can look intimidating. "It will be a challenge to go there. Its wardings were always quite strong, even when it was under Dumbledore's protection. They have not lessened for the Dark Lord."

"Could we go openly?"

He inclines his head. "I could make an excuse."

There's something wrong with that sentence, something wrong with his tone-something reckless she hasn't seen before. "Something that doesn't blow your cover, I mean."

"Perhaps." Which sounds like I don't care.

"Severus, are you-safe?" Lily asks. Her voice goes up in pitch with nerves and she clears her throat to bring it back to steadiness. "Your status in the Death Eaters, I mean. What Sirius said makes me nervous. I don't want to endanger you."

He looks away, across to the stove where the kettle has just started whistling again. He stands and she watches him move, watches the practiced ease, the carelessness of his limbs. It's as if a great weight has been lifted off him. It's almost like he's happy. Which is more sad than strange, really. The old shirt-a heathered dark gray, with sagging cuffs he has to keep pulling back from his wrists, soft from washing and wear-is stretched at the neck and reveals half a collarbone, half of the line of his shoulder, and his lank and long hair licks at the skin exposed when he tucks it back behind his ear. There's something disturbing, something wrong, there, the shirt: it's ancient, the way it's worn, the hem is threadbare and when he reaches up for more tea from the cabinet it rides up over his hip to expose a slice of skin-

Stop stop stop. This kind of distraction is idiotic and bizarre and no one has ever swooned over Severus. For a mad half-second she wonders if he's dosed her with a love potion-a vile gambit, beneath him, but not totally out of the question, neither of them are terribly trusting people-but she is an experienced potioneer and would have tasted it, would have smelled it, and they poured from the same teapot.

Not as if he needed to be fed a love potion, though.

Lily sniffs the dregs of her tea while his back is turned: nothing but tea, as far as she can tell, and three cubes of sugar. She swirls it and says, "Privately, Flamel told me he could break the memory charm." The rest of the tea goes down like a shot of liquor, and to hell with suspicion.

He freezes for half a second, then goes on, a weight settling back onto his shoulders as he scoops tea into the pot to steep. "And."

Her finger traces the rim of her empty cup. "I told him no."

"Why would you do that?" he asks. His voice isn't the sharp, teacher's tone he's used to discuss the rest; it's low and intimate. If her ear were pressed to his shoulder she'd feel it more than hear it.

"I don't know. He told me I'd have to tell you someday, but that sounded like nonsense to me." Out the window, spring is blossoming, a riot of flowerbuds. Counting them is better than watching Severus move and wondering-anything, really. "Why, do you think you know?"

The teapot comes back to the table to steep and he sinks back into the chair across from her. "I have my suspicions."

She plucks sugar cubes out of the bowl with her fingers, letting them fall with a tiny porcelain sound into the cup. "Tell me what you suspect of me, then."

He pours for both of them and leans on one arm, the other swirling his tea in the cup. "Not until I am sure. It would only upset you."

She bristles. "You're upsetting me now."

He looks away, tugging at the cuffs again, pulling them away from his slender wrists and the delicate bones and the tendons that stand out there, and the blue veins, and-

She snatches his left wrist in a vicegrip and pulls the sleeve up, all the way to the elbow.

There's nothing there. The Dark Mark is gone. Which means-

"Who the are you?" she whispers.

"I can explain-" he starts, but she comes to her feet fast, slamming the imposter's wrist down on the table with her left hand and and with the right draws her wand to dig it into his jugular.

The face is too familiar, the cry of pain hurts her, and she hates it. "Where's Severus?" she snarls.

The dark eyes search hers the same way his might. The mouth twists to bare his teeth, biting back a retort even with his arm twisted and pinned beneath her grasp. It looks so much like him she wants to retreat, wants to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the emptiness on his forearm doesn't lie.

"I'm Severus," he says, swallowing heavily. The point of her wand bobs with the movement. "It's not what you think."

"Liar," she snaps. "Is it polyjuice? Transfiguration? What have you done with him?"

That sets his lip twisting in condemnation. He's shutting her out, the same way Severus does and it makes her want to weep with frustration. "Why don't you figure it out?" he sneers.

She's out of patience. Worse, she's scared. He's exactly, exactly like him, all his snide confidence, all his cleverness, all his stubbornness, and he never could make anything easy even if he was telling the whole truth, which happened mostly never.

"I'm done playing games," she hisses, and the wand flicks away from his throat to cast the spell wordlessly, binding him in rope. He struggles, opens his mouth to speak, but a knot of rope lodges between his teeth before it comes out. She snaps out another spell to put him to sleep, too, for good measure, same as the doe in the cellar.

Lily stands there, panting with frustration, before scrubbing her hand across her face and cursing at the light fixture feet above her. "This is bad," she mutters to the frosted glass. It doesn't have any answers.

Lily wonders, briefly, about a life where all of this is a bad dream. A life where magic is a fiction for little girls, where the Dark Lord is a story to keep little boys frightened of the dark and chivvy them in the house by dusk. A life where she and Severus had usual school dramas over math and chemistry and then went to university and-

(And what, Evans?-)

A whimper at the door of the kitchen, and Lily's gaze and wand come back from the half-fantasy before she can really register it fully. But it's nothing dangerous, just the creature-the mirror, the beast with her face, looking down at the bound and unconscious imposter.

"So," Lily says, stretching her neck to one side and then the other in a failing effort to relieve tension. "How long has he been here, pretending?"

It shakes its head, looking nervous. It keeps picking up its feet and placing them back down, as if pawing at some forest floor that isn't there.

"That's what you meant by away, isn't it? So where is the real Severus?"

"Gone," it whispers.

"If he's dead, I'll kill you out of sheer spite," Lily says.

It shakes its head. "Not dead. Not-" she gestures with both hands.

It takes a moment for Lily to parse the movement, but when she is, she swears aloud. It's a pantomime: a wedding ring on a finger. Of course, what little the pet has, it would have free of the encumbrance of the memory charm. It doesn't bear inspection, how an animal might take on human grief. "Don't test me. If you don't have answers, I'll throw both of you in the cellar."

It sets its jaw. "Gone," it says insistently.

"Gone where?"

"Gone!" it cries, hands fisting with what it can't convey. "Gone, gone, gone, lonely!"

There's a sudden sickening sense that the thing isn't just talking about Severus. It's making excuses for what it saw, for that idiot kiss, for whatever foolish and childish part of her spurred her on to that sterling impulse.

"Get out," Lily snarls. "Get out! I'll find him myself."

It flees. She doesn't care where to.

The body of the imposter goes in the cellar next to the doe. She searches him for a wand but finds none; it's odd and it makes her worry so much she wants to wake him and ask about it, but instead she makes sure the ropes are snug and takes a few breaths to expel the feeling. Finite over his face reveals nothing new of Severus-not-Severus, whose eyes are closed in sleep, looking peaceful, vulnerable, lips parted and dammit Evans stop getting distracted.

Lily has had many minor talents held over from being a member of the Order of the Phoenix, many of them discovered in deeply horrible circumstances. She can remember it all, at this point, except the man would would have been at her side during it. But she has searched half-destroyed homes for survivors, looked through crime scenes for clues Aurors may have missed. She's had the slapdash secondhand Auror training Moody and Alice tried to run, and she has a leg up: she knows this house. She can infer all sorts of things that an outsider might miss. So: she begins with the cellar.

The doe is still there, still asleep, which means Severus is alive. The idea that he might be dead had gripped her heart, building a cairn of tension on her shoulders, and now it comes tumbling off her stone by wretched stone. It lets her look at the rest of the cellar more clinically. Bringing the imposter down obliterated any footprints that might be there, more's the pity. If it's Polyjuice the imposter is using, she will have to wait for it to revert; a timekeeping spell will sound the alarm once an hour for her to check on the thing, but if it's Polyjuice from Severus' own reserves then it will likely last the full 12 hours.

Up the stairs, the entry hall looks as it always does: empty, echoing, marble floors clean. No tracked grime or telltale shoeprints, and the walls are so pristinely white that any blood or mark would show. The stairs that sweep off to the left and right to meet above the French doors that lead to the dining room are hardwood and are equally polished. The coat closet has a few older cloaks in it, but Severus' current traveling cloak is missing. So he's alive, and he took his cloak-which suggests he left willingly, and likely with his wand, which explains the lack on the imposter. Not having any wand on him seems insane, but who knows what his goals are. He hadn't seem surprised by her arrival, her having a wand, by any of it, which is another clue that doesn't fit with anything yet.

Through to the dining room, Lily paws through the hearth. The fire is out and the hearth is clean of soot with a woof laid for a fresh fire; they must not be expecting anyone today but may soon. Floo is far too tracable anyway, there's a reason they only use it for activity they can excuse as official; the hearth being dark doesn't say as much as it might.

The kitchen is a mess of signs of her struggle with the imposter and little else, and as she searches she sets it to right as well; the overturned chair righted, the mugs and teapot cleaned and put away, the teaspoons polished. The store of sugar cubes is a bit less than it was when she left, but that could easily be the construct version of herself taking her tea the way Lily herself does. Or eating them like a horse, she supposes.

At the top of the stairs, the laboratory has clearly been used. There are ingredients in various stages of preparation; an apprentice's kind of work, one even a child or a squib could do to assist a potioneer. Maybe the construct is helping. The cupboard where the ingredients are stored has been restocked since she left, and in the stocking cupboard next to it, blood-replentisher is low. Lower than she left it, at least. It's worrying, but maybe that was part of Severus' plan to repair any damage to the construct; she didn't catch his methodology. Or it might be something more sinister. Maybe he's been hurt. Maybe he's being kept alive, somewhere.

The blue bedroom Bellatrix stayed in is exactly the state Lily left it in, and there's a thin layer of dust. The library across the hall has been dusted, and a few volumes might be switched round-she swore she put that growling book about constructs back closer to the edge of the case-but it's not enough to go on. The Potion-Master's Compendium is precisely where they left it, and the horcruxes are still there, intact.

Upstairs from that, the construct is huddled in her cell, ripping petals off a flower next to a small stack of stems. Nothing changed there; being unable to read must be terribly dull. Lily shuts the door on it.

Severus' room, the grand master suite that it is, is as spare as it ever has been. The covers are rumpled, which isn't surprising-he's never been a tidy sort-but something's off. They're rumpled on the wrong side, she realizes. When she slept here-fell asleep here, which was an accident-it was the side she had slept on. She taps her wand against her lower lip, thinking.

"Hominem revelio," she whispers. Her sense of the house expands with the spell; it doesn't reveal the construct in her cell, which is interesting, and-there's someone in the entryway and no one in the basement.

It is not quite exactly possible to fly without a spell or a tool of some kind, but Lily very nearly manages it, half-sprinting, half-falling down two flights of stairs and galloping out to the top of the banister above the entryway. He must have got free somehow, she's an idiot, how-

There's an unfamiliar figure standing in the doorway, and for a moment she wants to crow with triumph, but it can't be the imposter; this person looks tired and wet from outside and has been caught in the act of pulling off Severus' cloak. Her wand is in her hand and his is pointing straight back half a breath later. From a distance it's impossible to tell if it's Severus' wand, but it is ebony. There's a fist in her throat and she wants to fight.

The man's voice is gruff from beneath a gray beard and a jaw like an anvil. "Lily?"

"What have you done with Severus?" she says. Her voice quavers and in a flare of anger at herself as much as him, she flings a hex at his feet. He jumps back nimbly enough and doesn't shoot anything back.

"Lily, stop," he says again, with more force this time.

Lily ignores him, vaulting over the banister and using a cushioning charm to let her land lightly on the marble floor. "Who are you?"

"I met you on a playground," he says, both hands in the air. "You flew."

Something funny happens in her gut, and it makes her falter in her march towards him. "Severus?"

That smirk is unmistakable, even beneath the gray beard, even on a stranger's face.

She lowers her wand. "I could still be someone else. You should come up with something to ask me."

He tilts his head, considering, as he hangs his cloak, removing the charm used to enlarge the shoulders to accommodate the bulkier body. "If your trip was successful, what book would I take down first?"

She smiles. "The Potion Master's Companion. Volume Five." She shakes her head. "But I wasn't, I've only brought back information, which I have to explain again because someone is pretending to be you when I explained it the first time. Do we need to kill him?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Only if you'd like to dispose of a large amount of work and blood that came out of the cauldron several days ago."

Oh.

Lily lets out a protracted string of vulgarities; it's been staring her in the face the whole time, literally following her around the house, and of course if he made it with his own blood it would be him, exactly him, without any enchantments-which includes the Dark Mark. "I assumed- well, it doesn't matter now. He's tied up in the basement because your paranoia is rubbing off on me. When does that face wear off?"

His lips quirk in what could almost be considered a smile. "An hour."

"Good, because I much prefer your face on your head instead of plastered across some misbegotten experiment." She sighs, pinching her brow. "I'll tell you everything I told him over again, then we'll wake it up and start plotting. I think I know what our next move has to be and you're not going to like it."

"There was no chance of that," he says, a ghost of his usual biting tone nested inside of the stranger's voice.

"There wasn't," she agrees, turning to lead him into the sitting room. "You know, it was the strangest thing. You want to know how I found him out?"

He follows, boots ringing against marble. It's heavier than his usual stride, all wrong, but listening to the swish of his robes and the sound of those footfalls is almost comforting, knowing it's really him. "How?"

She glances over her shoulder-not to the borrowed face, but to the hands, steady, swinging at his sides, to the left forearm where the mark lies under his sleeve. "He seemed happy."