-She wakes.

Warm, muted sun is trickling in through half-closed curtains. Lily is suspended halfway between wakefulness and sleep, not wanting to break the spell of comfort. She hasn't felt like this in years, it seems. But slowly, steadily, as if borne on a river's current, she is moving toward waking up. There is work to be done. Harry will need to be fed. But James' hand is pressing gently into her stomach, his hair soft and strangely silken where his forehead rests against the nape of her neck. She can feel his breaths moving in and out on her spine, warm and alive. He is curled against her back, around her, ankles tangled her own, one arm holding her and the other sprawled beneath her head. But she will have to get up. Harry will have to be fed. There is work to be done, even though they can't leave the house since the Fidelius charm. Too much danger. Too many already dead or worse. But Sirius will be coming by soon, or perhaps Peter, with news-what day is it, that would tell her who-

With a sigh, she opens her eyes, looking at James' hand curled before her, at the end of the arm snaked beneath her head. Something about it is wrong. James' hands are always soft and clean and smooth, tanned on their broad backs. This hand is more delicate, spidery and pale but marked and crisscrossed with old burns and half-healed scratches and scars. One knuckle is recently bloodied, only barely scabbed over. James is meticulous with his hands-he would always apply dittany ointment to any injury, afraid it might harm his dueling reflexes if he let a cut heal wrong or left something untreated. It is a habit he inherited from his somewhat fragile mother-

Something has happened to James' hand.

Still afloat on sleep, she rolls over to greet the body laying next to her, the hand hanging across her middle skidding along her skin. It flexes-a stretch possesses the body next to hers, revealing the inner forearm where a black tattoo of a snake twined around a skull is inked against pale skin, a symbol that strikes a fear deeper than sleep can touch in her.

It is not James, she realizes slowly, but then who-

She completes her revolution, and he finishes his stretch, pressing his hand against the small of her back. In sleep, his brow is smooth and unhampered in a way it almost never is when he is awake. His hair is a dark, tangled mess spread across the pillow like veins of contagion. His lips are parted beneath his hooked nose-his mother's nose-and his narrow chest rises and falls with slow, deep breaths. And the Mark, of course, the vile lines of ownership she had been so arrogant as to cover with her fingers, as if her touch alone could blot it out. It's there as well, blackened sockets and serpent against to the bare skin just below her breast, as if to press a kiss there with a lipless mouth, as if to transfer its ownership to her, too.

Severus. It's Severus.

She sits up quickly, sheets pooling around her waist, and he doesn't disappear, James does not materialize from the sheets, and the world only becomes sharper and emptier. Harry will not have to be fed. Harry will never waken in the night and demand feeding or comfort again. She has a long life of uninterrupted sleep before her. And it has been like this-it has been like this for years. She has shared her life with this man, this Death Eater, the man who left them to die and took what he wanted.

For a long moment, it as if she has been split in two-as if there are two selves within her, one who has just awoken years after she went to sleep and wants to scream and scream and never stop, and another who wishes to brush a strand of hair from his cheek and simply watch him laid bare like this, as so few see him. But the skull on Severus' arm is not just a symbol of the Dark Lord but of her husband, her child, what they have become over long years in the grave while the man still sleeping next to her stroked her hair and kissed her forehead and grew her wildflowers-

She tries to smother the horror of this moment, but a shrill, whimpering whine escapes her, like a trapped animal, and-of course he is a light sleeper, she knows he is a light sleeper-the sound wakes him.

His eyes ease open and find her, and she can't help herself, she scuttles away on hands and knees off the enormous bed, snatching up his discarded dressing gown in the process and wrapping it around her shoulders. She presses herself to the far wall and feels along it toward the master bath.

In the bed, he sits up and follows her movements as sharply as a predator from behind a tangled curtain of his hair. He opens his mouth as if to speak, as if to defile her name again with his mouth the same way he has defiled her body, but the doorknob to the master bath is beneath her fingertips, and she flings herself through it and slams it shut behind her.

She takes a solid minute to calm her heaving chest. When Lily turns, the mirror reflects her sorry state. Her chest is flushed, and the robe hangs open between her breasts and all the way down, incriminating her. There's a bite mark just above her heart and her hand goes to cover it, fingernails digging in, as if she could tear it off. Her hands scrabble with the sash, pulling it shut and tying a clumsy knot.

Her bones are so old. She has lived so long, outlived her child and her husband, even outlived the wound of their passing. Nothing has healed over these years of distance, merely hung open like something that should have been stitched shut. The scar is that much worse for it.

Cold water on her face helps dispel her panic a little. Only a little. Not enough. But there is nothing to be gained from sitting in the bathroom. There is only one thing her two halves can agree on, and it is that there is nothing to be gained from staring into her own horrible reflection in the bathroom.

She opens the door.

He is getting dressed with his back to her, trousers already on, buttoning his shirt, shaking out and turning up the cuffs, covering the Mark. His own clothes have been put away-this is his bedroom, his house, his world, after all, everything here belongs to him. Even the shaking, cowering thing peering at him from around the doorframe.

She steps out, bare-footed, into the room. The click of the bathroom door shutting brings him around to face her.

Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. There are no words for this, and she blinks rapidly, trying to clear her eyes. "Oh, god-" she chokes out, and shades her face with her hands to shield the ugly contortions of crying.

He comes to her in a flash, cuffs forgotten and trailing, revealing the snake's head and the teeth in the naked jaw on the Mark. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't-I should have-" His hands are on her shoulders, her arms.

"I remember," she gasps, her words muffled by her hands. "I remember everything."

Severus' grip on her arms loosens in shock and dawning horror. He makes an aborted half-movement, as if to draw her into his arms and provide comfort. And then he swallows, straightens, like a man trying to be brave facing the gallows. "That is what you wanted. Isn't it?"

There is no answer for it. But the question lights the fire, burning like a beacon, like a lighthouse to her. She shoves him weakly, once, and fails to dislodge him. "You took me from them," she howls. "You took me from them, and they died-"

He shakes his head, heavy, slow. "There was nothing you could have done."

"You don't know that!"

"You just would have died with them-"

"Why didn't you let me?"

Anger, finally. "There was no point in it! He was going to kill your son and anyone who stood in his way would die."

Anger is something she can fight against. "Then I should have died!" She pulls at his shirt, straining futilely to scratch at his flesh, to tear him to ribbons. "I should have died, or you should have saved all three of us! Why didn't you save all three of us?"

But the answer is obvious. He doesn't have to say it, it's staring back out at her like an unspoken agreement, like a contract she's signed, written as clearly across him just as his desire was the night before. It's always been her, and her alone; no one else merits the risk.

And then there is the most sinister thought: To say he didn't see the glimmering opportunity of her shining there amongst the terror and peril of it all may be to give him more credit than he deserves. It has been terribly tidy for him, binding her to his side, conveniently removing everything that might stand between her running into his arms.

But she had done the running. She hates herself more than she can ever hate him, but she hates him, too.

"You selfish coward-"

Through her tears, her wand is there, protruding from its pocket on her clothes pooled obscenely on the floor. She dives beyond him and snatches it up. When she comes back up his hands go back to her shoulders and she lunges into it, pressing the tip of the wand to his throat. It is like watching herself act from afar; the screeching, sobbing thing inside her, freshly woken, is standing there in her body; the rest of her is three paces behind and trying to take control, but the body's heart is beating too fast, there's nothing to be done but lash out.

"Give me a reason not to," she whispers. Her hands shake. His adam's apple bobs, and she is pressing so hard with her wand that his head tilts back away from her.

He searches her face, and says finally, miserably, hopelessly, hands still warm on her shoulders. "I love you."

She chokes on the words. "Not enough."

He lets her go, then, letting his hands drop his his sides and away from her shoulders and he takes a step back. In instant, the world is colder, and she hates herself even more for noticing it, for even now desiring that warmth, that contact. His voice is flat, cruel, empty. "I'm the only chance you've got to win this war."

He's right. Lily wants so badly to tear at him, to ruin him as she has been, but he's right, and she can't. She catches up with herself, finally, and drops her wand to the floor, sagging against the wall, her face in her hands.

Breath comes back to Lily slowly, in fits and starts, but it does come back. So does the rest of her, the cold, iron self that she has become clamping down onto the frenzied mess of woman from years ago. She isn't going to crumple to the floor. It was a near thing, but she isn't going to fall completely to pieces. It's the only blessing.

He is still standing there before her, just watching. That feels like the worst violation.

"I'm sorry," he breathes.

She spits, "Shut up. Shut up."

"I'm sorry-"

"I don't care."

She levers herself away from the wall and stands, swaying, looking at the man who claims to love her, the man who has ruined her, with loathing suffusing every part of her face. She doesn't bother to hide it. She scrubs at her mouth and nose with her hand, as if to clean them of everything, of his stain that he must have left-everywhere his mouth has been is tainted, foul. For years she has been called mudblood, but for the first time, she feels as if the filth is rising from within her, from her blood. From her traitor heart.

She can't meet his eyes. "There's work to be done."