"Why isn't there more protection around this? The locket had elaborate protections, by the sound of it; the book and the cup had watchdogs; the diadem had Hogwarts itself. But there's nothing here but a few standard charms to protect the area from tampering. Kid stuff." She cuts her gaze sideways. "Why?"

He's standing there, she knows, but invisible, camouflaged into the background. There's nothing to look at but there is, still, the palpable warm weight of a body beside her.

"Perhaps Regulus is wrong." He lets out a breath and it mists, barely, in the cold afternoon air. "Or perhaps the Dark Lord knew that powerful wards could attract the attention of the powerful."

"Together, then? Dispel them and see if my Dark Detector picks anything up?" The black stone they attuned to Horcruxes-so useful in Hogwarts, now hoping to prove its utility once more-is in her palm but the only heat it's given off thus far is the heat picked up from her own palm.

"Together," he says, and with a faint crackle of magic he begins to unlace the wards. She follows suit.

It only takes a minute with both of them working. "This should be the last. Be ready, if it's not what it seems," he says, and she assumes a dueling stance, wand in one hand, Dark Detector in the other.

When the last ward comes down, Lily gasps. The Detector goes hot-shockingly hot, shockingly fast.

"Nothing's wrong," she says quickly, feeling the rush of air as Severus turns toward her. "Just-the Detector's picking something up."

"It's here, then," he says grimly.

"Something is, at any rate."

The shack is the same as it was when it was wrapped in wards, though: nothing to look at. It lies in state as it must have been left, in disrepair. The packet of papers had a lot of research-way too much research, Lily thought, wondering if Regulus had delayed them deliberately-but the main bit was a map. Tom Riddle was a Junior to a Senior: a young man who used to live in the manor house up the hill. A man who had died young, with his family, in that manor house in a locked room with no marks on his body. The deaths had baffled the Muggle justice system, of course, but any Wizard would see it and feel a chill run down their spine.

It had apparently taken some amount of doing to get even the muggle police report; the papers themselves had a crescent of punctures that Lily immediately understood to be dog teeth. Other documentation about the long and storied House of Slytherin, the house of Peverell, a thousand other noble and extinct lines between, turned to the house of Gaunt. This part was copied out longhand in Regulus' flowing script gone mad in some kind of unmentioned but visible hurry, the o's turning to lines and the crosses to t's spanning half the sheet. The House of Gaunt had dwindled, had diminished, had died here in the hands of its final heir with that muggle name, reborn anew as a Dark Lord of no House at all.

The stairs creak as she ascends but there's no one to hear it. There's is sometime white nailed to the door of the shack, something that resolves itself into a bone-a piece of spine ringed with rib. On the porch below the door, there is more of them, and finally, the last: a skull. No limb-bones to be found in the scatter. Of course. The skeleton of a snake.

"Nothing on the house itself," Lily says, lifting the skull to her face. The hollow sockets stare back. "Maybe it knows I'm a parselmouth?"

He halts, halfway up beside her. "You're a what."

"The wards, I mean, maybe they can tell."

His tone is icy, dangerous. "How?"

Which means all the meanings of the word: how did it happen, how did you find out, how is this possible? All valid, of course. "The construct and I, we-well, really, he-figured it out. Slytherin's monster is a basilisk, I could talk to it. Must be recent enough, you know as well as I do that I didn't grow up talking to snakes."

"Why didn't you tell me this?" he spits, plainly furious.

"I meant to. We-" She shakes her head, clearing it, the reason plain but hating that she has to speak it like he doesn't remember. "We didn't debrief, after."

The silence beside her is a solid and breathing thing. She plows on, doggedly.

"And the next morning, there were a lot of new things to think about. It didn't seem nearly as important." She puts the skull back down, brushes her hands off on her trousers. "I can't tell if there's anything here. Can you?"

"No," he says slowly from far closer to her than he had been; she almost jumps. The door creaks open slowly at the prodding of his wand.

There's only darkness inside. They creep in, expecting ambush, but there's nothing. Only darkness and dust.

The shack has clearly not been even entered by anyone other than small animals in years. Every shelf on the pantry is askew, exposing dust-covered dishes with their shattered mates poured across the counter and floor below, empty and chewed-through packaging for food purchased sometime when both Lily and Severus were babes in arms, so old that even the rot doesn't smell anymore. They take down every package, methodical, careful, finding nothing but animal droppings and an old rat nest. The horcrux detector in her hand stays hot, throbbing, but giving nothing more. The pulse feels strongest in the center of the room but there's nothing there but an overturned chair and a table, which Lily disassembles into its component parts and then, in frustration as the hours grow long, begins to carve into long ribbons of wood, hoping to find something placed inside the grain while Severus scans the inside of the walls inch by painstaking inch. But there's nothing.

The search of is done slowly, methodically, and turns up precisely nothing. Lily stands turning in the center of the room, and Severus moves outside to check the roof and the steps and the ground surrounding the foundation.

Something-the Dark Detector, or perhaps something else-tells Lily he won't find anything. She looks up at the ceiling and considers blasting a hole in it just to see if there's anything in the rafters. Her wand is up, ready to shoot a blasting hex upward, when the toe of her boot catches on a floorboard.

Something in the creak the floorboard gives doesn't sound like the rest of the aged wood creaking of the rest of this place. It sounds wrong. Different. She runs the toe of her boot along it again and finds the floorboard next to it also creaking, also loose. She kicks at it, then lifts, and with shocking ease a whole segment of floor comes loose.

"Severus, I've found something-" Lily calls. She crouches, lifts the apparent trapdoor, and finds nothing but loose dirt. But the Dark Detector is thrumming louder, now, beating a bloody tattoo in her fist, and she thrusts her free hand unerringly into the earth and lifts free a small wooden box. "Severus-"

He's come to the door, asking some kind of question, but Lily has already lifted the lid off of the small wooden box, and all sound has fallen away. All she can hear is her own heartbeat, drumming wildly in her chest and in her hand.

The ring is beautiful, the black stone glinting back the last of the afternoon sun streaming through the window, and Lily knows what it is. It's the Resurrection Stone. A Deathly Hallow. And the shadows in the corners of the shack are no longer so grim, but welcoming, full of ghosts waiting to be brought back, every empty space inside of her a door waiting to be opened to pour out all those she has loved and lost, the long and howling emptiness that has consumed her waiting to be full of voices and names and faces. Not just James and Harry but everyone-her friends gone in the war, her father gone before it began-the people she doesn't even know if she has lost-that loving and hopeful girl in the mirror who wanted to fight without truly understanding the terrible cost of war, that it could devour her whole self and still leave the suffering beast of her body alive to bear it.

All she has to do is put on the ring.

As if moving through water, she reaches towards it, towards them, towards love. She can hear someone calling her name-James? No, not James, someone else. But he doesn't matter. He is no one. He is alive while James and Harry are waiting. They have both been waiting so long. A scarred and pale hand closes around her arm with inhuman strength, holding tight, bruising her, trying to wrench her bodily away from the ring, but the it's in her hand and they are so close-

It slides onto her finger where her wedding ring would have gone, and for a brief and shining moment she thinks-yes, I am married to a dead man, but that doesn't mean he is dead forever, there is magic in this world and I can have him back, I can have all of them back-and there is an outline of a man holding a child, a silhouette with messy dark hair and round glasses that she has wanted to see so badly, god, her heart is breaking to see them again, to speak with him, to tell him how sorry she is about everything, she feels as though she is overflowing with a sudden fullness, knowing they are coming for her.

There is a scent of flesh burning, and someone is screaming, but it can't be her, though her mouth is open and her face is wet with tears, but they are tears of joy, they must be, the feeling in her chest must be joy. If there is the price to see them she is prepared to pay it, to pay anything. Her vision is narrowing to a point just as her son's face emerges from the shadows, and someone is gripping her left arm and shouting over a violent crackle of magic-

It all snaps back into focus, horribly, dizzyingly. The shadows are empty again and she is alone, again, even as Severus has her left hand in his right, wand stretched toward it, muttering incantation after incantation. Her hand is numb for a moment and then in agony, and she gasps. In his hands there is a ruined thing, blackened as if it has been in a fire.

It's her hand, she realizes with horror. Her hand is black and blistered and she can feel the fire crawling up her arm. But even as she realizes it, the pain is numbed-not gone, it prickles across her skin and through her bones, but it is deadened. Just like the other pain. Her face feels impossibly distant from her body; her knees weak; her hammering heart, gone cold. Lily tries to flex her fingers.

"Don't," Severus says, hoarse. "You'll make it worse."

"It's not a Horcrux, Sev," she hears herself whimper. "We were wrong, it's the Resurrection Stone, it's going to bring them back, it's going to bring all of them back-"

"It's a horcrux," he snarls, "and heavily cursed besides. Why would you-" His face is flushed with something like rage. Rage would be fine. Rage is familiar. Rage she understands. This collapsing look is worse. He rummages in his belt, but his hands are shaking too badly to remove anything with accuracy. He curses once, twice, and then points his wand in for a searing second of agony to summon the golden potion-the cursebreaker-and thrusts into her hands. "Drink," he commands.

She drinks. The pain ebbs, then begins to turn in on itself where it once had surged forward up her arm like an inexorable tide.

He works, cursing under his breath, fighting with the curse until the agony has seared through everything, through her confusion, through the disappointment, through her rage, leaving her weak and clammy with sweat. When Severus finally sinks back against the wall, pressing his pale and sweat-streaked face between his hands, she can only assume he's done all he can.

He's done all he can, and the ring will not come off her finger. He's done all he can, and her hand is a blackened, burned thing. He's done all he can and the curse holds.

Her voice is hoarse from screaming, the steadiness artificial from locking all the pain away. "What curse is it?"

He shakes his head slowly. His breath is still ragged. "It doesn't have a name. It's the Dark Lord's own invention. I could barely stop it before it consumed your entire arm. It would have taken the rest of your body with it. You'd be ashes."

It comes out robotic, slow. "Can it be reversed?"

He moves his hands and finally meets her eyes. His own are dark and full of a barely contained grief. If she asked again, she knows he'd tell her perhaps. She knows he would lie.

She's too numb to feel it, too deadened. "Can it be contained?"

He looks away, finally, head dipping with exhaustion, hair swinging before his face. "For a time."

"And then?"

Behind his hair, a glint of fire, that familiar impotent rage. "It will consume you."