Lily is tied to an anchor. The anchor is the full knowledge and understanding of what she has lost. Every thought is towed under by it: I should eat something, but Harry and James are dead. This potion recipe isn't quite right, Harry and James are dead, I will need to add more beetle wing next time. Harry and James are dead and I wonder when they will come to kill me too for what I've stolen, for what I've tried to do. I wonder if it will even hurt with them dead.

This is the shape of the anchor she is tied to. Guilt is the ocean drowning her.

Sleep no longer comes easy, even with Dreamless Sleep, and the day is too long spent dozing in bed. Nightmares chase her-horrible violent images full of strange faces and fury and death, and that green light that stole her family. By the time the sun dips below the horizon, Lily can't stand lying in bed anymore. She tries to drink her tea the way she used to take it-heavily sugared-and retches. It tastes too much like home, how James used to fix it for her. How much of it she drank when she was pregnant, and how morning sickness stole that pleasure from her.

And after they were gone, cup after cup of tea the way she used to like it as a child, the only way Severus knew how to make it, still repulsive with the sickness born of loss. Until she couldn't get out of bed. Until he came to her pleading. Until he said, I can help you. Let me help you. I'll do anything.

I can take it, Lily. Let me take this. Not from you. For you.

And she let him. She let him take them. He had stupefied her the first time, when he came to steal her before the Dark Lord came, knocked her out of the fight before she even knew what was happening, but this was different. This she allowed to happen. She let them be taken from her, locked away. She had consented to all of it, and then consented to let him touch her.

He had sat at her bedside looking so scared, so desperate, and she had taken his hand and said do it before I lose my nerve or my mind. He had held her hand so tightly it hurt, so tightly her wedding band had dug into her fingers, and then he had done as she asked. And then he had slipped the rings from her finger to complete the trick.

A memory charm removing anything as significant as a husband and child is bound to leave marks. If he had replaced it with something else-turned her into another person, given her an entirely new past-it might have been easier on her body, on her mind, easier in every way.

But Severus is selfish. He always has been. He couldn't remake her into a new woman and set her free to be subject to the world he had helped to make. As it was, it took more than two years of sleep-hazed time to recover. She would be talking to him, and then the floor would open up beneath her and her vision would go fuzzy and wreathed with darkness, and she would come to with a cup of cold tea before her, a concerned Severus across table. Helping.

Yes, of course. Helping. That's what he had done. And they had fallen into the routine; him, bringing her things from the outside world, gifts, books, amusements as you might bring to a child convalescing from a long and terrible fever. Company as one might give a true friend or a treasured lover. She could almost see it through his eyes: the extraordinary care he must have lavished upon his sickly ward, his poor little maid-a man of such impatience waiting across the table for her to come back to him. The loaned house-elf who had cooked their meals for the first year until she could manage it. What a victory that had become; cooking their meals, replacing the little creature, expanding her domain to the whole house instead of the spare little sickroom at the end of the long hallway tucked away on the third floor.

The service he asked for then, when it was unavoidable; the service he explained so carefully it almost didn't seem like she was a prisoner or a slave. It had taken her dazed and sick months to even notice the absence of her wand; further months to suspect he wasn't going to give it back to her; this revelation only sealed it.

More than anything else, Lily hated how easy it was to give up her wand when she had the promise of his protection during the intervening years-years she spent sitting at a window, watching seasons move across the landscape like massaging fingers, waiting for the return of the thing that filled the empty space she could see but never touch.

Lily picks through all the memories she has now, and can't find a single thing that forgives Severus.

Lily can't find a single thing to forgive herself, either. But she doesn't particularly want to. When the sun is down, she gives up on rest, gives up on ever feeling better, and decides to set to work.

That's how Severus finds her in the library. Lily flicks a page to the book, refusing to look up. It struggles, trembling in her grip. The door clicks shut, and the sharp noise of his bootheels approaches her table.

She lays the spine of the book to the desk. "What do you want."

His jaw works. "You are in my library."

"So I am." She goes back to the book. He just keeps standing there with that hangdog expression on his long and sallow face, as if he just waits long enough she'll give in. Well, she thinks bitterly, it's worked before. All he had to do was wait long enough and she did give in, like some sort of stupid teenager, as if it were the only logical way to express gratitude or companionship or-

Lily will not even think the next thing it could be.

"I am sorry," he says stiffly, "if what happened-"

"Shut it," she snaps. "I don't have the time for your rehearsed apologies and I don't care to hear them."

Severus looks taken entirely aback. He fumbles for words. "I wished-"

"You wanted to see if I'm ready to be Obliviated again?" She shakes her head. The notes at her side catch her vengeance as she jots a line, and then another, carving the parchment with the end of the quill. The satisfaction of the violence is enough to keep her going.

"No."

"Then why are you here?"

It comes out in a tumble. "I wanted to be sure you were still alive."

"Still?"

"A lesson from the last time you had these memories."

But Lily knows it already, has picked it over: the desire to leave, to go through the door and disappear, to follow James and Harry where they had gone. If she had done it then, she thinks, if she had succeeded, she could have caught up with them. She could have followed the same path, if not by Voldemort's hand, then her own.

But she is different now. She knows that. If she went down that path, she would end up lost, completely lost and alone. And it would serve no purpose, move the war no closer to won, bring no one back, keep no one from harm. At least here there is comfort, the cold, hard hatred and fury driving her forward with Severus bobbing along like towed boat with a lost rudder. "Then let me assure you that there won't be any of that. There's no point in it."

"I wish to-"

"Don't."

He stands there for a moment, swaying. "If there is anything I can do for you, I will do it."

She lifts the book in her hands. "Bindings."

He opens his mouth, and then shuts it. "What?"

It'd be funny if she liked him, just now. As it stands, she wants to hit him for failing to keep up. She takes care to enunciate the repetition clearly. "Bindings. What, you expected me to ask about Inferi? More constructs, this time made of the blood of my child and husband?"

He swallows. He had, of course, so he spits out the prepared response. "You would not want whatever those methods produce. Your child would rot apart in your hands."

Her calm is paper-thin, but it holds. "I'm not stupid. I've read enough about the requirements. I know better than to ask for that."

Face going paler even than its usual color, he asks, "Whom are you looking to bind?"

She stabs another note into the parchment before replying. "How many Marked Death Eaters are there?"

Severus blinks once. She can still surprise him. Eventually he sinks into a chair across from her. Never could resist a puzzle. His voice, when it finally comes, is soft, silky, clean of inflection, utterly Occluded. "At least thirty I know the names of. More whom I do not. Many more. The army has grown."

"You remember what I said? Destroy all magic? That doesn't look possible. But I have another." She looks at his hands, folded before him, and reaches the feathered end of the quill across to stroke, oh-so-gently, against the sleeve covering his left forearm. "If I can, I'm going to burn the magic-maybe even the life-right out of everyone connected to that. Gut his army and give him a bunch of squibs. Give a consequence for taking the thing."

He doesn't gasp, doesn't faint, doesn't do anything but go so still that he can't be breathing. And then he blinks, and his shoulders move, but he doesn't draw away or scream. He's stuffed it all down beneath the ocean, under the impenetrable ice of Occlumency. All that's left in his eyes is calculation as they flicker back and forth on invisible figures on the desk between them.

"It could be done," he says finally. "The connection is a binding in itself, tied directly into each Death Eater. It will be easier to manipulate an extant binding than to create a new one." He looks up at her, eyes flat and opaque. "It will take my own magic with it, I imagine. Perhaps my life, if you are successful."

"And Regulus' as well." Acceptable sacrifices.

"He will never agree to it."

"Will you?"

He goes perfectly still again, and his pale lips barely move. "Do not insult me."

"It could kill you. It could kill all of them. Could pull your very souls out with the magic."

"Unlikely."

"That wouldn't be worse?"

He hasn't broken her gaze for an instant and he does not now. It's brave, it's him showing her that he can be brave. "I presume there is no way to convince you of another path."

"None."

"Then you give me no choice at all."

She puts down the quill, shuts the book. "Don't be stupid. I want you to-how did you put it? Live with it."

And how strange that this demand-out of all of them-makes him stand, pulls at his mouth. It's all frozen beneath a glacier but something is burning at the core, something unpleasant wriggling its way out.

"Who would have thought," he says, with deliberate and slow cruelty. "Precious, beautiful, beloved Lily Potter-mother, wife, member of the Order of the Phoenix, unfortunate subject of the Dark Lord's empire-now trying to rival the Dark Lord himself?" He lets out a sound that could have passed for a mocking laugh in another life; here, it is robbed utterly of meaning as a laugh at all. It is merely a sound, violent and brittle.

She can feel her cool shredding like so much parchment in his hands. "Don't you dare-"

He cuts across her, rising to pace. "The request that I preserve my own life is a particularly eloquent touch. Worthy of the Dark Lord himself. Make no mistake, your plans are as Dark as they come, just as Dark as his." He places both hands on the desk, knuckles white. "You will need power to accomplish this-resources that are vanishingly rare-training in the Dark Arts and the Dark Lord's own specialized spells that you do not possess-in short, me."

"I could do it alone," she snarls, coming to her feet as well.

"You could not," he says, a grim finality in his tone. "Even Regulus wouldn't be able to do it, and you know the other Black brother would never approve. The books you have read are nothing but a shadow of real-life practice. Without guidance from an experienced caster, you would come to a messy end within the week."

"You just want me to need you. I don't."

"Despite your insistence on running headlong at the most dangerous thing in your sight, Lily, I intend to work toward your survival of this war."

It could be a romantic sentiment; instead it comes out grim, fierce, and full of that wretched, unworthy love-

The cup shatters against the wall. The doorframe steams with tea. She doesn't even remember flinging it, but it's second best to attacking him. He still has a use, a cold voice from deep in her gut says. "If I think you're going to betray me, I will kill you without hesitation."

He opens his mouth as if about to give voice to a condescending retort, about her weakness, about the precise volume and nature of the nothing she is, but nothing comes out. He shuts it again. His face is hard, jaw set.

He believes her. Good.

"You want to be my team of apprentices again, like with the construct? Fine. You're my team of apprentices. Is that what you want?"

"No," he snarls. "It isn't."

And isn't that just the thing, just the clarity she was looking for. The rage grows in her, like cold fire. She splays both hands on the table before her, bracing herself, as if she is ready to vault across it and attack him physically. "Then what do you want?"

For a long minute, he stares at her, his face an ashen mask, his mouth twisted and frozen with anger and something deeper, worse. Severus doesn't need to say it; that bottomless hunger is written across his features, the desire for that which once was between them, unfettered by the weight of the past.

He looks away first instead of trying to put the raw and pulsing wound of his heartbreak into words. A pity; she'd love to turn it on him, to shred him with it. Still, Lily understands capitulation for the victory it is.

But victory alone is not enough. She wants vengeance. She wants to hold a knife and gut him the same way she's been gutted. And she knows the knife so well.

"You said you loved me," she says.

He does a very good job of it, she thinks. If she did not know him so well-if they had not spent years and years looking into each other's faces, years and years being able to read each twitch and subtle movement, every involuntary breath that blows each of their bodies full of life-she might have missed it. But his shoulder hitches along with his breath in his throat, his adam's apple bobs, and she knows that he is very nearly on the edge of screaming at her or hexing her. Years ago, when they were both children, perhaps, he might have. Had everything gone differently, perhaps-if he were truly alone, if he had let her die-he might be an angry enough creature to lash out.

But he does neither. He is enough of a selfish coward that he saved her rather than leave her fate in the hands of others. So he stands there and takes it, like the bastard he is.

She looks up and meets his burning gaze. In his eyes there is a sublimated hatred, loathing as she has never seen in him before. Good. They understand each other, then. The twist of the knife, then, just to make the lesson stick. "Did you mean it?"

"It does not matter." He has shut himself away, shrouded himself in layers upon layers of anger and magic, but the answer is there anyway, in his face, his eyes, the thread that stitches together all his impotent rage: yes, yes, yes, of course, yes. He can try to draw it over himself but she can see the seams, now. She knows the string that holds him together. She knows how to tie a noose from it.

"It does matter, Severus." She skims a hand over the papers before her, pressing her fingertips down until her knuckles blanch white, trying to fix it all in space, to pin it to the desk. Yes, Regulus, she thinks. I can do it. He can be controlled. "It means you will do as I say."