The heavens could have opened and expelled a procession of devils past them both and Lily would not have noticed or cared. Which means it's Severus who pulls away, saying her name under his breath once, twice, stroking his knuckles past her cheek.
They are still kneeling there on the floor, in a kind of lover's embrace-her cursed fingertips curled against his cursed Mark, so well matched now they might have been made for each other.
Or perhaps remade. They are a thousand miles from the innocent children who met on a playground so long ago, or even the people they were a few years ago. He is no Death Eater. She is no wife.
"Lily," he says a third time, and she comes back to herself.
She takes a shuddering breath and shuts her eyes tight for a moment to stave off the feeling that is even now clawing its way up her throat. "You know what we have to do now."
"No-"
"You know. We don't have a choice." Lily traces an absent fingertip down the jagged scar through the Mark. She could fall asleep in his arms right now, but there is no time for it. "This will hurt. Terribly. It may kill you, even without meaning to."
His voice is icy, shocking in comparison to the whispered tenderness before, and his hand around hers goes stiff, almost clenching into a fist. "I am aware."
"Are you?"
"I am not a coward."
"I know." Her brain feels thick, buzzing, half-dead, but she considers what he's saying, why it can still surprise her so. "I just thought you had more self-preservation than this. More-that you valued your magic. That you valued your life."
"I do." A shadow of confusion moves across his mouth. "You know I do."
It still doesn't track. "I would have thought if you did, you'd put up a fight."
His voice is cold, utterly, shifting back towards insult. "I'm not afraid to die."
"I am." It slips out so easily for a feeling Lily hadn't even let herself consider, and it all slips into place; the weight of her private plan for the end, a weight she must bear alone. It's strangling her. "I'm terrified." She slips her hand from his and covers her eyes in shame, and then moves it to her mouth as if to hold back anything further, anything that would let him stop her. "I'm so scared, Severus, I can barely breathe."
"You won't-" He can't even say it. His voice is on the edge as much as hers is, and he grasps her shoulders. "Not alone," he says, with a fierce willingness that breaks her heart.
He'd give everything if she only let him.
They are both wishing. One might as well wish differently. Wish better. Wish another world entirely. She doesn't know how to answer, doesn't have it in herself to lie, so instead she presses her face back into his throat. He bows his head to press to her shoulder, and his hand tangles in her hair again. His thumb rubs little circles on the back of her neck beneath the collar of her shirt, and it's no seduction-it's comfort, and it makes something in her chest ache like a sucking wound, love like a knife sunk deep. In this moment of weakness, Lily wonders if she could have stayed here. If she could have fallen in love with him here, locked away from the violent world, could have let everyone else burn and been loved like this forever.
No. She couldn't. But it's a pleasant dream to indulge, all the same.
The owls have all gone silent in the trees outside the windows, which means soon enough the morning birds will begin their chorus. Dawn is no more than an hour away. She has stolen enough moments, and they will have to last. "I'm ready," she murmurs, lips moving against his skin.
Pulling away from him now is like pulling a knife from her own chest. He rises with her, his hands trailing her motion like he doesn't know what to do with them without her to guide them.
The cabinet behind them still holds all the destroyed horcruxes, in the jumble where Sirius shoved ring is among them: the Resurrection Stone, set in a melted slag of gold. But it still fits on her ring finger. It's selfish, but she slips it onto her finger anyway. "Is there anything else to keep?" she murmurs over her shoulder.
He cast his eyes around himself, as if suddenly realizing for the first time that everything-this house, his allegiances, all the power and secrecy he's gathered around himself-is so flammable. "No," he says. "There's nothing."
This is the man she loves, and it shows on her face. "The pensieve," she prompts carefully, setting one portion of her plan in motion. "If you can carry it."
He nods brusquely and moves to the door. Exactly as she'd hoped.
When she hears him go up the stair, she thinks of the way he'd looked at her not moments ago, like she was an untouched thing in a sea of oncoming flame. The patronus comes to her wand antlered but easy. "For Regulus. Only when he's alone," she says to the starlit stag before her.
She explains her plan carefully, fast, under her breath-he'll only be gone a minute, but it doesn't take so long. The stag's solemn eyes close once, and then it leaps away, beyond where she can see. Lily takes a steadying breath, and then another. She checks the four necessary vials in her pockets: one with water, spelled closed and without a cork; one she filled last night when she crept away while Severus worked; one shattered and repaired a dozen times until the glass appears nearly opaque with refracted light; and the final one, a simple and instant poison from Severus' store.
When Severus comes back into the room moments later-the pensieve must already be shrunk in his pocket, which saves her asking him to do it-Lily is ready. She offers her ruined hand, the one wearing the Resurrection Stone. "Together?"
He doesn't hesitate. He laces his fingers tight through her own, so tight it would hurt if she could feel it properly. "Together."
On the front steps they stand hand in hand. There is no need for invisibility. They feel more than see Sirius and Regulus at their sides on the front steps, precisely when they arranged, just as the sun barely begins to crest the horizon.
It all feels like it's going too fast, like the moments are slipping through her fingers. But there is nothing she can do to slow down time, no way to reverse it. Lily holds Severus' hand as tight as she can, weakened as it is, and lifts her wand. It is the exact opposite of casting a Patronus. She musters all her rage, all her despair, the entirety of the fight that she intends to finish, and speaks the first part of the end into being.
Pulling from the Mark is entirely unlike using her own magic. It's like seeing the ocean for the first time, or being swept away in a river. And she is the waterfall the river leads to.
A rope of fire lashes out from her wand. At first it is merely fire, licking at the door, bursting through a window and catching the curtains. But it doesn't remain mere fire. She pulls again at the connection, and more flows, a dam crumbling, a rushing sense of speed and intoxicating power. The fire rises, gains strength, movement, darkness. Half-formed animalian shapes begin to emerge from the flames as they grow to an unnatural height. She hears Severus' intake of breath next to her.
She looks at him. Plucked from the foremost part of his mind, she sees herself as he sees her: lit by fire, face harsh and carven in transparent rage and despair, hair buoyed by magic, eyes bright and alive with vengeance. The word arrives unbidden, as if placed there at the fore of his mind for her to read-
Beautiful.
Lily turns to Sirius, and his face is grim, set, but his gray eyes are unsure. His wand is up but she knows him well enough to know that he's looking at the biggest threat in his line of sight, and he's looking directly at her. Lily doesn't have to take anything from his mind at all; his face says it: Terrifying.
Good.
She does not look to Regulus. She knows what he is thinking. She knows what he knows, what he will do.
Lily lifts her wand higher, coaxing the Fiendfyre up and summoning it closer, pushing it before her, and it forms a stag, tossing its sharpened horns before her. And then she releases it, and it leaps, the scream of unleashed fire terrible to hear. It races through the walls and the roof collapses. Nearby homes catch blaze, and it wheels for another pass.
It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. This is how people die of Fiendfyre, she realizes. It doesn't give chase. It seduces. She could walk into it and end it, right here and now, let the rest of them clean up the mess, let the Dark Lord fall some other way-let the world left behind manage or burn on its own as she steps into a flaming oblivion.
Only a little longer, she promises herself.
There is another hand twined in her own, fingers coiled tight, anchoring her here. And then she warns herself with the same words, running her thumb along the length of Severus' finger clasped against her own. Only a little longer.
They Apparate as a group to the designated spot, the last of spring frost crunching beneath their boots. The dawn illuminates the castle like a promised place, pouring gold and pink across the stone parapets, glittering across the lake like gemstones cast from the hand of a careless god.
But beautiful does not mean good. It is the Dark Lord's ancestral seat, after all, Chamber of Secrets and basilisk and, greater than both, true emblem of his supremacy. As his seat, it protected him as it had all the children who has come through its doors without bias, without prejudice, without protecting any of them enough.
Lily finds herself watching the way the light moves across Severus' face, and is caught out staring. And the dawn glitters there, too, in his dark eyes.
She looks away before he can read what's next, and expels a breath. "All right. It's time."
Lily turns to Regulus and, as she does, the spell spirals out of her wand easy and silent. Severus goes rigid and starts to fall, bound as he is in invisible rope. "Take him," she orders, and Regulus catches Severus' upper arm before he can topple.
Regulus, for his part, is just a fraction too slow with his attentions divided between catching Severus and taking Sirius unawares. Sirius twists, deflects, curses loudly-parries another, a third-but Lily catches him and sends him sleeping from behind on the fourth, and she catches him before he can fall.
"Take this," she says lowering Sirius to the ground and drawing the invisibility cloak from hidden satchel in her boot where it has been for weeks. "You need to get to safety. It's an invisibility cloak, used to belong to James. Now it's yours. Keep it safe. And this-" the first of the four vials from her pocket. "It's just water but there's no stopper, just a sealing charm, one I cast. When you can pour it out, you'll know-" She swallows, convulsively. "You know how it works, when someone dies?"
Regulus opens his mouth and then closes it, giving a single jerky nod.
"If the spell doesn't fail within half an hour, go to the Potter Estate as I said, Frank will help you flee. If it does, come and confirm, and then go to Frank. Mariposa and Septimus sent you either way."
Regulus lowers his brother and his friend to the ground. When he looks up at her, there's a pain there. "Lily-"
Lily will not be argued with, not now. "If any of you stay, you'll die. You've seen me this far. No further." She extends the cloak and vial again and gives Regulus a searching look.
Regulus looks to the cloak, to her face, and then extends his hand. The cloak slithers from her hand to his own. "Severus will never forgive me," he says, defeated.
"No," she says. "I don't expect he will. But take this for him anyway."
The second vial is whole, stoppered normally, full of a softly glowing fluid that moves independently of the vial's motion. It is labeled an antidote in Lily's own hand. Regulus holds it to the light, turning it to and fro, and the silvery mist inside glows as it catches the morning light. He glances at her, knowing who it is for, what it appears to be-and putting together that it is a kindness not to be questioned.
Squaring his shoulders with quivering bravery she'd never given him full credit for, Regulus looks her in the eye. "Do whatever you have to do. If it burns the magic out of me, then-that is what is needed."
Lily nods, sharply, once, looking away across the grounds. "Thank you. Now go. He's coming."
Regulus nods once, sharply and crouches to take hold of Sirius' sleeping figure and Severus' paralyzed one. And then they are gone, twisting away into nothing as if they'd never been.
"Goodbye," she says to the empty air. She'd say her heart is breaking but there is nothing left to shatter.
The shadow, she can feel, is moving. It's coming, but it's still a distance away. She has the time for the thing she has wanted.
Lily removes the half-melted ring from her finger. It shines just like Severus' eyes do in the sun. What she is about to do is selfish, but the dying are allowed a last indulgence. She has earned this much, at least. She has paid for it, will pay for it with her life.
Lily closes her eyes, and turns the Resurrection Stone over in her fingertips three times.