The alley outside of Grimmauld Place that evening doesn't smell any better than it did before, but Lily is at least prepared for it this time, under James' cloak. Regulus opens the door himself.
"It's me. I need to talk to Sirius."
Regulus' face makes a comical little o but he looks up the street and down, fretfully, before moving aside to let her in. He shows her upstairs and she follows while he natters about what could have possibly and most irregular and does Severus know and Lily ignores him.
She's spent all day locked up in the kitchen, alternately crying and breaking crockery and fixing crockery so she could break it again. She couldn't stand to even take the chance of looking Severus in the face after leaving his bedroom so, when she finally braved the rest of the house at dusk, she'd fled here. To see her old friend, and the best man at her wedding.
Sirius is upstairs, dogshaped, sleeping in front of a fire. Lily pushes past Regulus, taking off her cloak and letting it drop to the floor behind her, and then sits crosslegged next to the dog. She buries her face in the shaggy fur at the back of his neck. He raises his head and whines-a question-and, muffled, Lily says, "In a minute. I just want to pet a dog right now."
"Is that why you're here?" Regulus asks. "Or is there-are we in danger?"
Sirius knows better; he lifts his head to glare at Regulus until he wilts, and then pushes his nose back under Lily's hands and waits.
When her face comes up her eyes are red, a little swollen-have been all day-but her face is dry. "Remember that time when I got so sick and James couldn't get Harry to stop crying and the only thing that worked was putting you as a dog in his crib?"
Regulus gasps. He's cottoned on.
The dog starts beneath her hand, and the shifts, sliding back to the man who can respond. "Yes," he says slowly. "Do you?"
"It happened this morning." Or some time last night, but that's too terrible to contemplate. "It's-everything. I've got everything now."
"You can't be serious," Regulus says, his voice pitching up.
"Are you all right? What happened?"
She shakes her head. It doesn't bear inspection. A version of the truth will have to serve. "I woke up. I just woke up."
Regulus' hands fret. "Has Severus inspected you to ensure there are no lasting effects?"
She ignores him again and Sirius looks over balefully, stopping barely short of a verbal scolding.
Regulus doesn't relent. "He should. Severus is an able healer and there is no telling what this could mean. Have you even told him? Does he know?"
Lily says acidly, "I'd say he knows."
And Sirius, bless him, laughs and folds her into his arms like the old friend he is. "It's good to have you back, Lily," he says, smiling into her hair. "I hope you gave old Snivellus what-for."
"Don't call him that," she says reflexively, the habit of years.
"I'll call him anything you like if you come stay with us," Sirius says. "Being around him can't be good for the head, not with all the new stuff swimming around in it."
Regulus has gone from offended to horrified. "Absolutely not."
"My house, Reggie, I'm the heir."
"You were completely disowned eight years ago and you are legally deceased."
"I'm the heir when it suits me. Kreacher!" The muttering, ancient little elf appears, grumbling loudly about the call, and Sirius cuts across him. "Two pours of the twenty year for us, yeah? And keep our glasses full. We're hosting a wake."
And so it comes to pass the Lily and Sirius sip a truly superlative spirit before a fire while a sober and visibly twitchy Regulus sulks with a book in the shadows of an armchair, waiting for signs of instability in their guest. The only thing he catches are the occasional verbal barb from Sirius or, increasingly, Lily, who is meaner at Regulus' periodic interruptions. And stories, of course, all the stories about James they can come up with, even the boring banal ones.
"Do you remember that little broom you got Harry," Lily says, head on Sirius' leg. "It horrified the cat. Whatever happened to my cat?"
"Probably ran off. He was always smart, little ginger thing."
"Little? He never sat on your chest. He was twenty pounds if he was an ounce, and none of it fluff." She swirls the glass in her hand absently. "He's probably still out there, terrorizing rats and squirrels. He ate rats, Sirius, not mice, full grown big nasty sewer rats, and he would take them by the nape of the neck to the bathtub so there was no mess, just-blood and a head and a tidy little pile of feet. The most considerate murderer I've ever met."
Sirius makes a laughing noise of disgust. "That's disgusting, is what that is. Didn't he try to eat Peter?"
"Wish he'd finished the job." The image of Peter's human head and feet in the bathtub is horrible but strangely satisfying. She dispels it with a wave. "James and he never got on until he saw him turn into the stag, you know. And then he just-" Lily pantomimes a hop with her hand. "Rode him around the kitchen for a few minutes. Told me about it like he was ashamed to admit they'd come to a détente."
"Told me it was the most undignified thing he'd ever done."
"This, from a man who willingly eats grass when he doesn't need to!" Lily slaps the knee under her head.
"Didn't say it made sense. Apparently it was worth it to get the damn cat on his side."
"Why?"
"Because they both love you. So they had to get along, because they had to share." Sirius shrugs. "But you're distracting from the point. That broom was the best gift Harry ever got. Cat terror or no."
"God, that broom really set James off on some kind of Quiddich craze. Started trying to run Harry through drills in the house, which broke all sorts of things, of course, but Harry would make a left turn and James would say he'll be a Chaser for certain! If I never had to hear that ever again it'll be-" Lily brings herself up short, clapping her hand over her mouth.
Which leaves a ringing kind of silence. Because, of course, she never will hear it again. James will never say anything to her ever again. James does not love her, he loved. Harry will never take a left turn on a broom or be a Chaser or be anything at all.
Harry isn't, anymore.
"I'm sorry," she whispers finally, pulling her head off his leg and sitting up.
Sirius says nothing, just stares into the fire, a complicated and raw kind of sadness in his face.
"I wish Remus here," she says, looking away from him.
"I do too," Sirius says quietly.
Lily stares into her glass and drains it, pitching her voice low enough that Regulus won't be able to hear it. "I knew about you two, you know. Before we even left Hogwarts."
Sirius' eyes are sharp. "Did you now."
"You weren't very subtle." The house-elf fills her glass again for the fourth time, two fingers deep. She really shouldn't, it's going straight to her head, but she doesn't want to feel the things this conversation is bringing up-or she wants to feel only half of them, only the joy, not the pain.
"What are you muttering about," Regulus calls from his seat, sounding petulant.
"How you can't mind your own business," Lily snaps.
"Oh, Reg knows." Sirius waits until his glass is full, too. "Never done anything subtly in my life."
"Never," she agrees. "Why didn't Remus come back with us? I let you handle it but I wondered."
Sirius' face twists into a childish scowl. "Duty, of course. Moony's been like that. Loyalty, duty. Dumbledore gift-wrapped him for Flamel."
"I've got something for you, actually. A sheet, to let you talk to him." Has it really only been two days since she returned from Albania? It feels like a lifetime. "I suppose we should all debrief about all that soon, and the other thing-we got the diadem, in Hogwarts-"
"You what," Regulus squawks, and that's the end of thoughtful recollection.
The next hour is a woozy and ranging debrief ("a month, Lily, that's not enough time"-"a basilisk? and you can talk to it? there are only three other recorded parselmouths this century and at least one is likely a fraud"-"what else can you remember from the room?"-"it ate him?") and Lily doesn't stop drinking from the constantly-refilled glass throughout.
They're horrified, of course, that she hasn't led with the debrief, and they want to know why, and she manages to play it off-the memories are overwhelming. And they are. But the other thing, the thing she can't even think of and certainly can't talk about, the memory that both fills her with revulsion and self loathing but also sends a tingling heat through her body-that has been at the fore, overshadowing all. She isn't here about the damn war; she's here so she doesn't have to look at Severus' face.
Her story ends at the door of the house and no one asks where she spent the night or if Severus had healed her, as he plainly had. Small blessings. Regulus just says, "And then your memories returned."
"I had got most of them back already. This was the last of it, the focus of the spell."
He's pacing, chewing on a fingernail furiously. Finally he removes the fingertip from his mouth and says, "Are you sure you're muggle-born?"
Lily glares from beneath her lashes, and suggests an embarrassing place to stuff that idea and an exceeding painful way to do it.
Regulus flushes but brushes away the suggestion with a flick of his fingertips. "Being a parselmouth a hereditary trait! What do you think blood supremacy is about?"
"Murdering people like me and my parents and my husband and my son, in my experience," she snarls, face flushing to match his.
"And can your filthy muggle parents speak to snakes, then? Can your sister?" Regulus snaps, growing shrill with offense. "You've no idea-"
She's drunk, swaying on her feet, hefting her heavy glass tumbler in her hand like she might throw it at his head, but angry enough to be precise with her words. "Why are you even here if that's what you honestly believe?" Sirius is on his feet, hand over hers, saying her name, but she shakes him off. "Why put up with me, why work with Sirius, why not turn us over to him and take your heaps of reward for taking our heads?"
Regulus opens and shuts his mouth, and then says, "Sirius saved my life."
"So what?"
"Excuse me?"
She rounds the table, stumbling closer, less sure on her feet than she had been. "You heard me. Who cares? If you don't think I'm really a person, why would I matter? I'm not Sirius. Obliviate me again, Imperio me, kill me and turn me over."
"Lily," Sirius says, cajoling. "Don't go at him like this."
"How dare you even imply," Regulus is muttering.
Lily wrenches her arm free of Sirius' grasp and flings the glass. It goes wide, goes to shatter on the wall, but it silences both of them.
"Tell me why, Regulus."
Regulus looks at the ceiling, then at the floor, then at her hands. "He lied to us," he says thinly. "He hurt Kreacher."
Lily's out of patience. "You're weak," she spits. "You're a child, and you're weak, and you stumbled into a war you don't really want to fight that you're stuck in, and I don't want to hear another god-damn word out of you about my blood or who I am or what I can and can't do, or I swear I won't miss next time." And then she snatches up the bottle, takes a slug straight from the neck of it, and sits heavily back on the carpet before the fire.
Regulus stands there as if the glass really had struck him.
"Go on, Reg," Sirius says gently. "I'll talk her down."
When he's gone, Lily turns one glassy eye on Sirius. "I'll throw this bottle through your head too. Don't think I won't."
"Didn't think I'd see the day I was talking you down," Sirius says jovially, plucking the bottle from her grip so he can refill his own glass. "There's two horcruxes left, Lily. Just two. We can do this."
"In a month," she says, voice wobbling. It's not a question but for the uncertainty around the edges. She takes the bottle back and shoots back more.
And isn't this what Sirius is best at: this brash, bragging, reassuring confidence. "Easy. You did another without even telling us, and Reg-well, once you and I sober up he'll tell you himself, but he's got enough to move on another. Which only leaves the last a mystery."
"The last one, is it- did make with Harry's death?" Lily mumbles. "I don't remember. It was just Severus at the door and then waking up and then- that was all. I never even saw him that night."
Sirius shrugs, even though the twinge of this bald recounting hurts them both. "Snape told Reg as much, when he asked. His Lordliness didn't bring anything in with him, so it must have fit in a pocket."
"Which could mean anything. Could be anything."
"It has to be something, Lily." He puts a hand over hers. "We'll find it. I promise."
"And then what?" she says miserably. She's been drooping since she sat back down, and she finally gives into melting into the floor, shifting to lay on her side. "Then we've got chaos. Kids who are years behind in magical education and will need counseling to help parse their-bloody experiences-bunch of former Death Eaters to capture and prosecute-I don't even know what the laws look like anymore."
"We'll make you Minister for Magic," he says gently.
Lily lets out a helpless little sound that could be a laugh or a sob; she's not sure. "Have to take care of him first."
Sirius lifts his glass. "To taking care of you-know-who."
Before, Lily might have toasted to the end of a violent regime, or to freedom. But she isn't that kind of woman anymore. "To murdering the man who killed Harry and James," Lily slurs, lifting the bottle to clink the lip of it against his glass. "May his bones rot in an unmarked grave."
The rest of the night disappears down the throat of the bottle.