Lily wakes up alone in his bed in the middle of the night, which makes her want to shred the pillow in her hands for a variety of reasons, none of them good.

Her wedding band and engagement ring are still there, where Severus flung them at her feet. They still feel like an accusation. Before she can stop herself-before she can pick them up and know she'll never put them down or take them off again-she kicks them under the bed.

"Out," she says when she finds him in the laboratory. "I need to brew something and I want privacy."

He's just preparing ingredients so he has no excuse to stay, nothing that must be stirred under cold moonlight or left to crystalize beneath stars. "What are you brewing?"

"What do you think? Or do they not go over that with the boys?"

Which is both true and not the whole truth. It's enough to make him blanch, though. He puts down the knife he's been stripping the marigold stems with. "Lily-"

She hates the way he says her name like he's about to forgive her. Forgiveness is for people who deserve it and Lily knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she doesn't. "Go, unless we're out of tansy pollen. I'll be a half-hour at the outside and I don't want your help."

It's some of the oldest witchcraft there is, more a tea than a potion, and most of it could be done by a muggle: raspberry leaf, angelica root, pennyroyal as bitter as sin and almost as poisonous if not handled with care. Magic makes it entirely effective, ensuring nothing but guilt grows inside of her. It's only luck that nothing has from the last time, and Lily doesn't intend to make relying on luck a habit. She hasn't really intended to make any of this a habit, but she has also given up predicting the future. She drinks it down while it's still warm from the cauldron and tries not to think about the taste.

And then Lily pilfers the last thing she needs, swallows down the last of her pride, the last of her trust, the last of everything, and goes to the library where Severus is at his desk, penning some correspondence.

"Come on," she says from the doorway. "We need to talk."

She doesn't wait for him to follow. He will, eventually; he has for so long that there's no chance he won't now.

In the kitchen, she pours one glass of liquor, and then another-the good stuff, deep and rich and intoxicating even just on the nose. Severus enters the kitchen thirty seconds behind her and the second glass goes onto the table, sliding toward him.

There's a measure of silence, and then the faint bell-like tone of fingers on a glass. It chimes again when he sets it down. Good; he won't make her be patient. She doesn't know if she has it in herself to be patient. She waits, then asks, "What are you hiding from me?"

"Many things," he says immediately in a flat, toneless voice. "Very little of import. A few books, I returned your wedding ring and your engagement ring-" He cuts himself off abruptly. She looks over her shoulder and he's shaking his head weakly, woozily, lifting the glass to inspect it. "What did you put in this?"

"Veritaserum. Just half a drop to loosen your tongue, not enough to totally knock you off your block. And returned is a funny way to say flung in my face to hurt me." She slugs back her own glass and refills it, then takes the seat across from him. "Did you ever dose me?"

"No," he grinds out, starting at the glass as if he could smash it with the power of his anger. "You've drugged me."

"I have. Haven't you drugged me? Amortentia? Complicio?"

"Amortentia smells like blood and a cellar full of books and..." His face twists. He's fighting it, offering up a different truth instead, but he's losing, she can see it. "And that shampoo you used to have, the one that smelled like sugared violets. No. Never. How dare you even ask."

That is not the answer she wants. "Did you ever consider dosing me?"

Honesty is a relentless light, and there is no refuge. "Yes," he answers, through his teeth, because the truth is he's not so much of a better man than all that, and they both know that's why she's asked at all.

"Why didn't you?"

It kicks around his mouth for a moment, that fight in him, and then comes out in a furious torrent. "It wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't be real."

"Is it real now? This?" She gestures to the space between them, to everything that's transpired hanging in the air between them like a noose. "Is this what you wanted?"

"No. You must know that," he spits.

"Didn't, actually. Both of us, we're perverse enough it might have been." She takes another sip. It's quite a good bottle, she can recognize it even without the proper palate for the stuff; shame to use it like this and fail to taste it. "What did you want?"

He's gone rigid and white with effort and rage, but it's dragged from him nonetheless, a growl like it's pulling his very guts out and he's trying not to scream: "More."

And doesn't that ring the church bells in the next town over? Doesn't that paint everything in color?

"And what if I never-if nothing ever happened?"

He grips the edge of the table like he's dangling off the edge of a cliff, white-knuckling through the words. "I was-am-willing to accept it."

She wants to scream liar in his face, but she holds onto her temper. He can't be. This is the truth she wanted, unvarnished, complete. But there's still a shadow of doubt. "Half a thing is better than nothing at all."

He fights it for almost a full minute; it was only the tiniest bit of the potion smudged in the bottom of the glass with her thumb, so she lets him go at it; he'll lose. It's the nature of the drug, but it's the nature of Severus to fight it anyway. Finally he says, "Half of the wrong thing can be worse than nothing. We both know that now, I should think."

"Don't presume to tell me what's worse than nothing." She had been so sure and she wants to press. "But you never dosed me? Never once, not even in a moment of weakness?"

He looks like he could launch himself across the table and kill her with his bare hands for asking twice even with the Veritaserum working its way through him. It's deserved; at this point, anything he wants to fling at her is.

But in once decisive, smooth movement, he lifts the tainted drink to his lips and drains the glass. The empty thing rings when he sets it on the table and his burning black eyes meet hers. "Never."

It's moving, as far as displays of truth and trust go. Unfortunately, it does not go terribly far anymore. "No spells? No-other Obliviation? No charms, curses, artefacts-"

"No." It comes out strangled. "Never. Never once, not when you were recovering from the memory charm, not when you were injured in my care after Bellatrix flayed you alive with my own curse, not when we were children, not when we were in school, not when you were wed and I was truly a Death Eater with no other allegiance. Never." He sways slightly with the effort-it's taking effect, the rest of the dose, and the alcohol on what must be an empty stomach. "The only magic I have ever performed on you against your will was to save your life that night I abducted you from your happy home, a thing I know you have regretted since. A thing I have sought to never replicate." A foul gleam is in his eye, then, a victory. "Everything else-everything-has been with my understanding of your absolute consent."

Lily can hear what is encompassed within everything and she cannot disagree. A sour frustration makes its home at the back of her throat, puncturing all her fury. "Then there's no explanation for it."

"For what?" His voice is slowed slightly after the tirade, thick with the heavier dosage as it enters his bloodstream, quick as witchcraft.

"For-for when I look at you, I still-" She hesitates, reaches behind herself for the bottle again, fills her glass again and his. "I feel things I wish I didn't."

They both know alcohol compounds the effects of Veritaserum. He'll be a puddle of black robes and spite on the floor if he drinks much more, but she doesn't care and it seems like he doesn't, either. That's a bridge to cross when they meet it. He lifts the glass, inspecting it, inspecting her through it with one dark, glassy eye that can't disguise a measure of a feral kind of hope. "Even now?"

"Even now." He deserves this truth, at least, and it's not as if it's a pleasant one. "I hate you. More than I can put into words. But it doesn't-there's the other thing, too, and they don't cancel out. It's just chaos." She looks away from him for the first time, watches the amber liquid in her glass swirl in her palm as she tilts it to and fro. "I had hoped there would be an antidote, a countercurse. Some easy explanation. Some way to rip it out of me."

"You are not alone in that," he says, sounding hollow.

Lily washes the taste of that truth out of her mouth with another long pull on her glass. When she sets it down, she's ready to ask more. "And you? Have you always wanted to-rip it out of you?"

He sways, in his seat, tracing a whorl in the grain of the wood on the table before him with a fingertip, around and around and around. She'd meant the question to hurt him, in a way, but when he replies it's almost gentle. "Not always."

"Most days, though."

"Yes. Most days. It would be easier." His fingertip has stopped at the center of the knot in the wood, and he taps it once, twice. "I could have been great, in the Dark Lord's service, had I not wanted so badly to save you. I was respected. Had power. You ruined it all." His head tilts, as if he's trying to make out something far away. "Or I did, trying to preserve your life." He focuses on her again, eyes blank beneath his lashes, and his voice is free of affect, entirely empty. "You have repaid me by taking advantage of me. My trust. We trusted each other, once."

"I remember trusting you once," she agrees, more defeated than angry. But any mistrust between them now is deserved. "Shall we measure it out, then? Who has wronged who more?"

He sighs and for a flash, she almost likes him like this-sad and honest, for once. "We both know who is guiltier in that accounting. I know what I've robbed you of. You've been quite clear."

"Have I? Tell me." The heat in her voice bleeds away to the cold order of control. "I want to hear you say it."

He meets her eyes with his own, steady and bottomless as the night sky. They catch all the light in the room and hold it still. "I left your family to die. I sacrificed their lives to preserve yours, a thing I wanted more for myself and for the memory of our shared past than for your own sake."

It's said plainly, but not easily. There's no defense, no argument in it, nothing but the bald and horrible truth. It doesn't feel any better, hearing him say it, and it doesn't kill the other thing inside her. Her vision blurs momentarily with tears.

"Yes," she says, her voice less steady than she might have hoped. "If you were trying to protect me you really cocked it up." She swallows, trying to beat it back, but the outpouring can't be denied. "No one in my life has ever hurt me as much as you, Severus. You stole my family, stole my best friend, stole the whole world and I don't understand how I can possibly care for you so much, after everything, and half the time I can't tell if I want to kill you or-" No. No. She hasn't wept in front of him since the charm and she will not start now. She presses her hand to her mouth and shakes her head, blinking rapidly. A few steadying breaths and another pull on the glass and it's gone. It's gone because it has to be. Forward. "That's why I thought you must be dosing me. Because it just doesn't make any sense any other way. Not after everything you've done." She lets out a half of a strangled laugh. "I even- that night you got the doe, when I slept in your bed that first time, do you know what I was reading?"

He measures her, intrigued. "I had wondered."

"It was book on Dark magic and bindings. I figured the Mark was a binding, even then. I wanted-I hoped I could get rid of it. I hoped I could save you from it."

His laugh goes wide and wild, not the stifled sound it usually is, but it's hollow. "Save me. Of course you did." He comes back, inspects her face. "Not anymore, though."

"No. Not anymore."

They sit like that for lord knows how long, unable to look at each other, guilt hanging between them on a thread. They have both been terribly cruel. There is no equivocation for it; their crimes against each other do not zero, they mount, a pile of picked bones that no calculus of guilt can absolve for either of them.

Then she says, "Come on. It's the middle of the night and you need to sleep the rest of it off."

She hoists him onto a shoulder and he sways into her, up the stairs. He's tall but skinny as a rail and it makes him awkward to help up; he tries to hold his head up but it lolls and finally comes to rest against her shoulder. His feet manage to stay under him on the stairs, for the most part; she only has to hold him tight to her side for a single unbalanced second. A lock of his hair snakes its way inside of her blouse, tickling her shoulderblade, and she hates it. She hates that she wants this affection, hates the comfort of his arm draped over her shoulders, hates the pleasure of giving him help and of her arm around his waist where she can feel him breathe next to her, hates him almost as much as herself for doing it to him. But the truth-

The truth is, whatever else she feels is her own, nothing more and nothing less. Which makes her the worst kind of monster. A traitor twice over.

When Lily brings him around to face her, readying him to be dumped into bed, his mouth rests against her collarbone, and he whispers something almost inaudible.

"What was that, then?" Lily asks pulling his robes from his shoulders.

Behind his hair, his lips lift toward the shell of her ear. "I love you."

She starts unbuttoning the frock coat and purses her lips. It's the last thing she wants to hear just now. "You've said."

"Yes," he says, blinking down at her. "But now you know it for the truth."

He's down to his shirtsleeves and trousers and it will have to do. She isn't going further, not with him in this state. The danger of a misunderstanding on both sides is worth him waking up rumpled. "Try to get some sleep. I expect you'll be very cross with me when you're back to your senses."

"Exceedingly," he agrees, sanguine, sitting on the bed and trying to inelegantly hoist his legs up with him. "I don't know if I'll forgive you."

"You shouldn't. It's not as if I'm going to forgive you for any of it." It's almost as if neither of them can help telling the truth, now, the way the Veritaserum is supposed to work. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. I was so sure-" she sighs. The accusation won't help. "I'm sorry for all of it. If you want to throw me out tomorrow, or-anything. I'll do as you say."

"For once."

She snorts. "You wouldn't like me if I always did as you said. If I were some tractible little girl."

"Certainly not." He's finally managed to hoist his long limbs onto the bed, his hair splayed around him. He lifts a lock away from his face and mutters, halfhearted, to the ceiling. "You should stay."

He doesn't mean in the house; he means here, in this room, in his bed. It's a terrible idea, but no less tempting for it. Physical comfort has its attraction despite it all. She chides in a gentle whisper, "Don't be pathetic. It doesn't suit you."

He scrubs his hand over his eyes, and then his hand flutters nervously and then comes to rest on her knee. "I've looked. You must know I have. No way to remove the Mark, no antidote for… the other. I would give it, if I had."

"I know. It's all right."

"Isn't," he says, a sleepy discontent still tugging at the corner of his mouth.

The easy intimacy of this moment has come at such a high price, but it's already paid for. She leans close, brushes hair away from his face. "I know it's not."

It's just the magic and the chemicals working their way through him, but there's almost a ghost of a smile on his face at the touch of her fingertips. And for half a moment, Lily wonders if she hasn't given up more information than he has.

The construct is still weeping in her old room. It seems like it has been for days. She wonders if it's eaten, if it ever sleeps, what it must know and feel.

Lily sleeps in the library.

In the morning, the kitchen sink is full of every bottle of alcohol in the house-all empty-along with every bottle of Veritaserum. She catches him pouring the last of the clear potion down the drain.

She's too tired to argue any more. Lily watches him finish and cast the bottle into the sink atop the rest, and then asks quietly, "Are we going to talk about it?"

He doesn't turn, measuring at the heap. One bottle shifts, clinking against the other. He says to the bottles, "I think not." With an efficient gesture of his wand, he vanishes the lot.

"Fine by me." They had talked enough for several lifetimes. Lily rubs her temple. "Little Hangleton?"

It is truly a question, not an order, and as such it's also an offering. And he hears it, he must, the way he straightens.

He looks up at her then, finally. "Yes. Little Hangleton."