Lily wakes on the couch to a gray dawn and immediately rushes to the kitchen to vomit into the sink. It's like being turned inside-out. It goes on for a very long time.
When it's finally over and she can catch her breath, a voice speaks from behind her.
"You're a mean drunk," Regulus says peevishly.
Lily spits into the sink and turns on the tap to wash the worst of it down. "I'm mean sober, too," she says, sounding hoarse. She coughs a few times, ready for another salvo, but nothing comes.
He's clearly been stewing in something, preparing lines to fling at her, and what follows is the opening volley. "You can't just do that do him."
To hell with the sober and the early risers. "Do what, exactly?"
"Bring up-you know! Him!"
Lily does not want to be having this conversation at all, ever, and she definitely does not want to be having this conversation with Regulus while still hovering over a sink in case she's not done vomiting. But that doesn't mean she'll give him what he wants; she'll go down fighting. "We didn't talk about Tom Riddle even once."
"You know who I mean," Regulus scoffs, coming halfway across the kitchen to her.
"I'm sure I don't," she says, spitting again.
Regulus moves closer and stage-whispers through his teeth like some kind of amateur. "You know. James Potter."
She replies loudly, louder even than her head can tolerate without pain, but it's worth making a point and ending the conversation. "James? James Potter? My husband and Sirius' best friend?"
"I'm his best friend," he says in a furious whisper.
"Like it matters." She scoops some of the running water into her mouth and spits it back out.
"You don't know how bad it was after Potter died." Regulus' footsteps come one, two closer. His voice goes soft, almost pleading. "He was a wreck for months. I could barely get him to turn back from a dog. He wasn't well. If you take him back to that place he'll be useless-worse than useless."
She scoops water from the tap and splashes her face to stop herself, but the leash is short and growing frayed. As if he has any right to any of it-to tell her what to do with the loss of James, to tell her what she's allowed to say to Sirius. As if the suffering of Sirius were even visible from where Lily is standing. "I don't care."
"Don't you understand? Smuggling muggleborns only works if Sirius can help me." He's wringing his hands like an old woman, and god, he's pathetic. How have these children playing politics managed to gain so much power when they are all so pathetic? She wonders if she could strangle him and Severus both at the same time, one in each hand. "He is the only reason we haven't been caught, I'm not-I can't do it by myself. Let alone your mad hunt for the horcruxes. We need Sirius and you can't drag him back to that dark place. You can't remind him about-him."
Sipping from her palm and finally swallowing-hoping she can keep it down-she turns to face him but leaves the tap running. "I don't care what you need or how Sirius feels. He should feel horrible." Lily certainly does. She feels like it happened yesterday. Like it's still happening, right now, and will go on happening for the rest of her life.
Regulus spreads his hands helplessly. "James Potter isn't the most important person here! Sirius and I are still alive and in danger, as are you and Severus-"
She doesn't even want to hear his name. Lily surges forward and grabs him by the collar of his starched shirt, shoving him bodily into the opposite wall despite a wave of nausea. "Shut up."
Regulus looks wild, confused, terrified, clutching at her wrist but not pulling away-and then his hands drop to his sides, and he draws himself up and hisses, "It's hardly my fault that you are unable to face the truth, and the truth is that James Potter and your son are dead and have been dead for years while you have lived in comfort and luxury in Severus' lap."
"Yes," she whispers in his face, aware of exactly how vile her breath must be inches from his face, trembling grip shaking him. "James is dead, my son is dead, and I'm alive." And it's unforgivable, going on living.
He swallows, adam's apple bobbing as he searches her face. "I love my brother," he hisses, looking distraught. "We help each other. You don't know what it's like, serving the Dark Lord."
Her voice doesn't come out quite as scathing as she means it, weak as it is. "Poor you."
"I had no choice. You think I enjoy being party to this war?"
This time it comes out a bit better, with the malice she means. "Poor you. Have you suffered terribly?"
"Why are you like this," he hisses between his teeth. "Can't you see that I'm trying to help you?"
Lily spits, pointedly, this time onto the floor and close to his shoes, if only to keep herself from vomiting again.
The horror on his face is, at least, worth it. "I'm trying to help all of us, and you've been the only thing holding all of this together, I know you have, and I know you- I know you care for Severus, more than Sirius ever will, more than even I-"
She pulls him up by the collar, dragging him closer to her face and baring her teeth. "Don't you dare tell me who I care for."
"Fine, then." He shakes his head, looking frantic. "Fine, if not for him, then for yourself, or for revenge-but you are the only thing holding this alliance together. You must know that. Sirius and Severus hate each other even as they work together toward the same goals-they each do it for you. I can't do it, I can't hold it together, neither of them listen to me. But you-" Regulus looks up into her face and must find something so terrible there that he looks away. "If this falls apart, he'll find us out and kill us all," he whimpers.
Lily releases him. "I hope he does. I hope he burns this whole country down with everyone trapped inside."
Regulus looks as if she's struck him. "You can't mean that. You'd die with us. You can't possibly think you'd be able to escape."
Lily hasn't given a single thought to escape. That thought is the sun and she is buried under six feet of clay.
Regulus watches the idea of escape work its way across her face and be discarded and he narrows his eyes, some measure of concern there-finally, but too late. "What did Severus do to you?"
Everything. "Nothing."
Regulus looks horrified, his mouth open, some kind of realization sketching its path across him. "Did he- We wouldn't have left you there if we thought-"
"I said it's nothing. I can keep him in line." Her hands go to fists and she struggles to keep her breathing slow and deep to keep the nausea at bay, to keep her anger in check. "That's what you want, isn't it? Both Sirius and Severus kept in line and marching forward instead of tearing each other to shreds?"
"If he's done what I think he's done, you're not safe-"
"Stop trying to be noble. It doesn't suit you," she sneers. "I don't need to be rescued."
"Lily, if you need to escape, you could-" he swallows, the idea galls him, but he manages to eke it out. "You could stay. Sirius would want-"
"Stop." Lily struggles to fight the rising nausea of what Regulus clearly thinks has happened, both dangerously close and impossibly distant from what has actually transpired. She's out of patience, and sympathy galls her more than his anger and frustration and fear ever could. "Stop assuming what I want. Stop assuming what's happened. All I want is to destroy this Dark Lord of yours. To be done with all of this, with all of you."
He's wringing his hands again. "It's plain as day that isn't-"
"Shut up." She cuts across him. "Give me what you've got on the next horcrux. I know you have it."
"Lily-"
"Give it to me before I break your nose."
It takes a moment of hangdog silence broken only but the soft rush of water as it flows down the sink for Regulus' visible concern to melt back to fear. The door swings before him, and Lily is left in peace to clear her mind as best she can. To stuff it all down underneath ice, to try to master herself, to banish all the ghosts. Falling apart serves nothing; that is the only thing she's sure of.
When Regulus returns, there's a sound of papers on the counter next to her. "There," he says bitterly. He glances up at her, and then back to the papers. "I still don't have the faintest idea about the last."
"Better get cracking, then." She spits one last time into the sink.
He goes to move away from her and then hesitates. "It wasn't a matter of-force? Between you two?"
He's figured it out. Of course he has. He isn't stupid. Lily's head gives another miserable throb and Lily doesn't have the wherewithal to conjure up a lie fast enough; even this prolonged silence staring down the sink drain is an admission. She lets it hang there and then mutters, "If you tell Sirius I'll kill you and make it look like a mistake."
Regulus opens his mouth, and then closes it again. "Promise me you will keep things under control," Regulus pleads. "They both- this doesn't work at all if you can't control both of them. If your relationship with Severus has changed-"
"Stop."
He does, but then one white fist clenched in fear enters her field of vision, atop the packet of papers. "Promise me," he begs. "That you can still fight this war. Promise me you can end this and keep them from each other's throats."
Fighting this war is the only thing Lily can still do, but she doesn't want to give him the satisfaction. Let him suffer in ignorance. "I'm not promising anything to anyone."
But she does leave. She does, at least, give him that, taking the papers and walking out the door under the invisibility cloak into the gray and cool dawn that heralds spring.
Apparition is uncomfortable even when she is hale and Lily is decidedly not. She wobbles her way up the front steps of the home she has shared with Severus retching.
The lab is where the pain-relieving draught is and of course Severus is there, working away. She relegates him to the periphery of her eyesight, to the edges, where he is nothing but a black smudge-how she prefers him right now, as a nothingness, an absence, the way he was when she was married to James. It's a polite fiction she can continue, if she wants it, and she does. The dose goes down while she gives him just her palm to forestall anything he has to say.
But he can't be put off forever and the black smudge of him has turned, likely crossing its arms, and is facing her, waiting. She moves to the sink, nearer to him, and sips water from the faucet, glancing past him.
The way Severus wrinkles his nose at her tells her that she smells like the floor of a particularly disreputable bar, which makes sense as it's precisely how she feels. Her stomach gives a heave and she puts both hands on the bench top to stabilize herself, but there's nothing that could possibly come up other than maybe the ghosts of a dozen cigarettes.
Cigarettes. Christ. Why did Sirius even have them, let alone give them to her? An occasional treat? They were French and they were horrible and she'd still smoked more than half a pack of them.
When her stomach is stable enough to speak, she says, "My body's already putting me through enough hell, so save whatever you were going to say."
He looks disdainful from under his brows. "It'd be faster to poison yourself. I have a selection."
"Ethanol is a poison, so technically I did."
He's ignoring her, gone back to work. "I hope you don't intend to make a habit of this."
"Why do you care?" she snaps. "I'll do as I please."
Disdain solidifies. "I'm glad to see you're finished playing at chessmaster."
She doesn't have the wherewithal to tell him where to stuff that idea. "I'm not. I'm just suffering." She drops the packet Regulus handed over onto the bench next to her. "The next horcrux. Little Hangleton."
He glances, then goes back to work, impassive. Not particularly inclined to take orders, then.
Now that she's glanced past his face she can't seem to stop watching him. Nothing's changed except where she's standing, what light she's seeing him in now, the orientation of her heart. Nothing's changed except everything. And he knew, he knew the whole time, all of it-knew what she would feel, knew this would happen if her memories returned in full.
But of course, which of them had said Harry and James were gone for good-had stood there, had touched him, had said please like an obedient pet.
And then she had gotten exactly what she had asked for. Nothing more or less.
There's a slip of skin, below his jaw, showing between the lock of hair tucked behind his ear and the hair dangling in his face, and there's half of a reddened crescent there, a shape made by her own teeth.
It's not nothing to her-he isn't nothing to her-and Lily wants to scream.
There's no room for it, for-whatever this is, whatever this feeling is, still. She wants to bite him again, harder, wants to rip his throat out, wants to flay the flesh from his bones for the audacity of still meaning something to her in the face of all this overwhelming grief and guilt. She grits her teeth against it, hands making fists in her cloak.
His gaze flicks over, and she can feel his eyes watching her, calculating, measuring.
"You'd love that, wouldn't you. For me to drink poison. To be rid of me," she says. "Easier that way."
He scowls but the heat of his gaze finally turns from her, back to his work, and his voice is bitter and flat. "I do not wish to get rid of you."
It's downright romantic, coming from him, and disgusting for it. "I don't care what you want," she spits, with more vitriol than she ever had for Regulus. She tears the Dreamless Sleep from the cabinet and storms out, muttering it over and over: I don't care I don't care I don't care. As if by repetition she could make it true.