On a grassy hilltop somewhere else in Scotland, a young man is standing over his sleeping brother and his bound friend and fretting over the bone-deep ache of his magic being siphoned away. He tugs at a loose thread in his sleeve and watches it unravel. It takes only a minute to completely loosen the hem at his wrist.
He is halfway through repeating the process on his other sleeve when slithering fingers of cold and wet brush his chest, making him jump. He reaches into his breast pocket to the first vial the woman had given him, the one that was only sealed with her charm-
It's empty. The water's soaking his robes.
And then, several things happen at once.
His brother blinks his eyes open, still groggy. The formerly bound body comes to its feet looking both furious and scared, and they both know what it must mean for all three of these spells to be broken. Before he can speak or move or cast a spell, a horrible, twisting, wrenching gasp of pain cripples both Death Eaters. Each gasps, clutching his forearm.
"Severus-"
The man named Severus does not stop, does not hesitate; the fear on his face has won over the fury. He lifts his wand and turns on the spot, disappearing into the morning air.
The astonishment at the easy magic is plain on the remaining man's face. It lasts only a moment. He crouches, shakes his brother awake, pulling him up by his upper arm. "Sirius, come on, he's gone back-"
Sirius struggles to his feet, still groggy, fumbling for his wand. "What did you do, Regulus? Did you knock me out?"
Regulus is wringing his hands again, ready for an accusation that hasn't quite come. "Lily-she-I'm sorry! She had a plan."
"Had?" Sirius asks, uncomprehending.
"She only shared it with me, she knew both of you would-you would not make it through, that you would want to fight. She went alone. She knew what she was doing." Regulus swallows. "She said she wanted a choice."
Sirius looks his brother over, and then shakes his head. "That sounds like her all right. Well, come on, then. Let's see if she's left any fight for us."
"She's dead," Regulus blurts out. "Both of them are. She put you to sleep, she paralyzed Severus-she gave me a vial she sealed with a charm, look-" He extends the empty vial as if it is some kind of proof. "And the Mark, something went wrong in it. Something I haven't felt since I took it in the first place."
Sirius looks down at his brother's left arm, and then back up to his face. "And?
Regulus' adam's apple bobs. "I think it might be over, Sirius. She said she had a plan, that she'd burn straight through him."
Sirius curses again, tipping his head back. "That's not an explanation, Lily," Sirius says to a passing cloud.
"She said we had to go to the Potter Estate. Find a man named Frank Longbottom who lives-"
"Frank's alive?"
"She said he was. Said Severus had done it and just-not told. Longbottom has the rest of the plan, he's ready to move on Hogwarts, Azkaban, the Ministry, the Floo." Regulus begins pacing again. "But we have to confirm, we have to be sure that it really is-that he's-"
Sirius can infer the meaning. "Yeah, right. Right." Sirius pushes his hand through his hair, cursing once more. "Maybe bring proof, even. Could be useful, even-more useful than she might have thought."
Regulus looks at the ground and can't bring himself to say anything about his suspicions, about himself, about how much magic he has left. "I-I think if I try to go on my own I'll splinch myself. You'll have to side-along me."
When they appear, the clearing is much as they left it, with the exception of the body. It still gives off vile plumes of vapor that smell of rot and decay.
Tom Riddle's chest is entirely eradicated, the ribs and last remnants of spine leaving a lighter impression on the ground beneath than the rest of the dissolved flesh; his left hand must have touched whatever contagion did this as well, as it's nothing more than a shadow burned on grass. The right is splayed wide at the end of a gleaming length of slowly-disintegrating collarbone, and the wand lies in the grass just beyond the fingertips. The hip and leg are ragged, burned through. The handsome face is half burned away, but it is still recognizable as what it once was-and who.
Regulus' eyes are wide, and after a moment's hesitation, he nudges the thing with the toe of his boot. It rolls to the side and Regulus twitches, as if he expects words or punishment-but it's mere gravity.
Regulus wrinkles his nose. "Sirius, can you-whatever she used will have to be rinsed or it'll ruin it."
"Why don't you? You've got a wand-"
Away in the brush, something dark in the brush gives a twitch at the sound of their voices. Regulus seizes his brother's arm, and then, in a voice that quavers, calls, "Severus?"
The twitch occurs once again, more pronounced, but there is no reply, just a dark shape sliced to ribbons by the brush. And, just beyond it, a starburst of red hair.
"Is that-" Sirius says, voice gone halting and tight. "We should … we have to take her body. We can't just leave her-"
"No," Regulus says, seizing his arm before Sirius can step outside his grasp. "Let me speak with him. He won't listen to you. You know what he's like, you'll only make it worse." Sirius looks ready to argue, but Regulus pleads in a near-whisper, "She cared for him, too. You know she did. She asked for this, she told me-she told me about it. Just let me talk to him. Please."
Sirius blows air through his nose, but nods. "Fine. I'll do this bit, then. Shout if you need me. But we have to move fast."
Regulus makes enough noise on his approach that Severus must know he's coming, but there's no reaction, not even a twitch. He can't be weeping, or if he is, he's gone strangely still with the grief of it. His dark hair hangs round his face like curtains, like the world is shut out. One pale palm is wound around the smaller one splayed on the ground.
When he's within a few steps, Regulus can make out an audible whisper, almost melodic. "Severus," Regulus says once more, wishing his voice weren't so trembling.
Severus doesn't move.
"Severus," Regulus says again, voice less tremulous this time. "What are you-"
"Trying to heal her," he replies. His voice is empty, flat, devoid of emotion. And then he goes on muttering.
Regulus flexes his hands as if to bring feeling back into them, and watches him work for a moment.
The dead woman's cheek is pressed to the earth and her hair is caught in the brush; it must have caught as she fell, and it covers half her face. It could, to one who didn't know better, appear as if she is still moving, as if all the things she has set in motion have yet to fall. Her cheeks are still flushed and she could just be asleep.
Her wrist is at an odd angle, though, and the dead leaves in front of her parted lips don't stir with breath.
"Severus," Regulus tries again. "She can't be healed. She's gone."
That stops the muttering, at least, and there's a sound of breath being sucked between his teeth. "There's still a chance-"
"There isn't. She told me the plan. This was it, this was where it ended. The vial-she broke it and remade it. When she died, the magic would-"
Severus comes to his feet and whirls on Regulus, face gone ugly with rage. "She is not-"
"Her hand," Regulus says weakly.
The toe of Severus' boot has come to press on the ring and pinkie finger of Lily's outstretched hand. Had she been awake, she would have cried out in pain. Had she been merely unconscious, she might have at least twitched in reflex.
But none of this has happened, because she is dead; the thing at his feet his no longer the woman he has loved. It is a corpse, and for the first time, Severus appears to realize it. An ocean of denial evaporates in an instant, leaving nothing but salted earth and a barren truth.
Severus sinks back down beside her with a grace borne of the very beginning of grief. Something is happening on his face that makes Regulus close his eyes and turn away. Regulus turns his face to the trees, to the castle beyond, to the morning sun. There is only the sound of the breeze in the branches, and an audible effort for the man kneeling before him to control his breathing.
When Severus masters himself, Regulus turns back to the woman on the ground. Severus has lifted the hair back from her face and is carefully, so carefully, disentangling her locks of hair from the brush and smoothing it back from her forehead as it falls. It's the kind of gentleness no one would ever give a man like Severus credit for, but here it is, plain to be seen.
"Are you ready to take her?" Regulus asks quietly. "We have to move. We can't stay here. Every Death Eater will have felt it. Some of them will try to come. They knew he was here, they are likely already searching the grounds." He swallows. "You may still have the strength to fight, but I don't think I do."
(Regulus does not say I do not think I ever will again because this realization from the hilltop-the way his wand feels like nothing more than a stick in his fingers-is locked tight away for now in favor of a greater plan. It will be dealt with later, probably with tears, but not now.
Severus could perceive this if he chose to. He does not choose to.)
"Where," Severus asks, and then coughs-he sounds as though he's walked across a desert since he last spoke. "Where are we going?"
"She said you made a plan together. Frank Longbottom at the Potter Estate would be expecting Septimus and Mariposa." He pauses. "She said you'd know what it meant."
Severus conjures something like a stretcher beneath the body. Something on Regulus' face registers surprise again, perhaps even jealousy, but Severus can't notice it. The stretcher nudges beneath her, turning her shoulders the way a lover would in sleep, letting her neatened hair cascade over the side in a brilliant waterfall. He takes each of her wrists in his hands and folds one perfect palm over the other blackened one on top of her chest. It is the repose of a carved queen in marble. Then he brushes the last of the earth from her cheek.
When Severus rises to his feet, the stretcher rises with him. As it does, he conjures a sheet that settles gently over her face and body. A shroud.
"Yes," Severus says finally, as if the words are being pressed from his body by a great weight settling upon his chest. "I know what it means."
When they emerge from the brush, trailed by the body, there's hope on Sirius' face-hope that his dear friend might still live, that something might be done.
Regulus shakes his head, subtly, and extinguishes that hope.
Severus carries the body. Regulus side-alongs with Sirius and the head of Tom Riddle, placed in a crude cloth sack Sirius conjured. Severus unwraps the wards around the Potter Estate; there is some confusion with Longbottom, but Sirius' presence forestalls open attack until Severus can offer further explanation, expressed in that flat and affectless tone that, it is clear, arrests their attention and unnerves everyone who hears it.
But there is work to be done, and Severus knows it-can hear her saying it in his memory, if he is not careful-and if his tone disturbs them, let them stop asking questions. The shrouded body is placed on one end of the table, and Sirius and Regulus and the head in a sack at the other. Longbottom rounds the end and peers beneath the shroud, expecting another face, and something very visible happens to his eyes for a few moments before Severus snatches the shroud back over her and takes his own seat.
"Septimus," Longbottom says from beyond the body, putting it together. "And his wife with the dead husband and the dead son. Mariposa is a kind of lily-flower. Am I right?"
"Yes," he says.
And then Sirius pulls the head from the sack and the discussion of who they really are is ended.
Frank Longbottom is an Auror, and once the events have been explained adequately, he is willing to adapt. Severus must push words past his jaw, must rummage somewhere past the fog and pull apart the memory of their plan from her presence at his side for the answers people are asking: what did you arrange with her, what did you two plan, what is left to be done, what did she do-
What she has done is die, and the fact of it is so destabilizing when Severus brushes up against it that he must reorient himself by the oldest methods: digging fingernails into his palm, a thumb pressed to a pressure point in the wrist, a pinch on the inside of his arm when he crosses them. But the plan unfurls, and Longbottom takes charge when it becomes clear Severus will not. Longbottom delegates, begins to move the pieces, begins to set the machinery in motion, neither needs nor relies upon Severus, and whether it is a lack of trust for a Death Eater or understanding is immaterial. The work will be completed all the same.
Severus had diverted a crate of wands to the Potter Estate, as Lily had insisted not two days prior. A prepared message is sent to Nicolas. A small squadron of former Ministry workers led by Longbottom take the Ministry by surprise at noon, taking advantage of the the movement of the lunch hour underscored by the chaos of the death of the Dark Lord to seize the Floo network. The Potter Estate is then connected to the network; a bonfire in Albania is established and joins it. The children hiding at the Potter Estate are sent to be minded by the old man in Albania, and those trained are brought through from Albania and given wands to fight. The werewolf Lupin is among them and the embrace he shares with Sirius Black makes Severus' hands into cold, unfeeling fists that he expends great effort to unclench.
Severus has only to heal three of the ten fighters when they return from the Ministry, and they do not ask him questions, not even when he must roll his sleeve past the mangled Mark on his arm in order to keep his cuffs out of the blood. They do not ask about the shrouded body on the table. They take great pains to route other uninjured guests around it and him. They do not ask him to leave its side. All this care betrays a dangerous knowledge, and would concern Severus if there was room for it inside his head. Somewhere, faintly, Severus knows Regulus is shielding him to the best of his ability, and forcing his brother and the werewolf and everyone else to do the same. Perhaps Longbottom, as well. He cannot muster gratitude for it.
Someone places food and water before him, their face indistinct. They say something that is likely intended to be kind but goes unheard. He consumes the offered sustenance with mechanical efficiency.
The war council is moved to the ballroom. Severus stays where he is, watching the wall clock wheel its long hand around once, and then takes the body with him into the relentless sunshine of the day.
No one notices him go. He does not return.
The second attack is executed at nightfall, and does not last longer than the targeted sting on the Ministry. Azkaban is taken in hour, the guards led by Death Eaters whose strength-like Regulus' own-having been sapped or stolen entirely. The draw of power was uneven; some are left bereft of magical ability entirely, some are untouched. Some have died where they stood, when the draw grew too great. Many survived but, defenseless without magic, were Kissed by the Dementors. The guards who were unMarked surrendered easily once they were overpowered. With the powerful witches and wizards who had been imprisoned now freed-led by Minerva McGonagall-the captured Death Eaters, identified by the Marks still inked on their arms, are fed steadily into the recently-emptied cells of Azkaban.
Hogwarts is retaken by midnight and with ease; when word of the assault spread, many fled to their homes or beyond. McGonagall, the Black brothers, Lupin, Longbottom-and Perenelle Flamel, recently Portkeyed in from Paris-decide to move their headquarters to the castle as a more defensible location.
Severus does not know any of this until much later; Lupin relates it in the weeks to come, in hopes it may interest him. It does not.
The Potter crypt is on the outskirts of the estate, set atop a rolling field near a forest. Inside, there are miles of Potters, stretching back as far as memory, but the latest generation is always at the fore. And there is a new casket for the wife of James Potter-the crypt knew of it the moment she died. The grave reclaims her body as if it is where she has always belonged.
And in the corner, something that once might have been called a man but is now more a shadow. Without any reference point-lost, and with no sense of time, no plan moving him forward, no greater need to occupy his mind-Severus tries to focus on what he knows to be true.
It has been not even a week since Lily returned from Albania, since the Dark Lord demanded to inspect her-his horcrux, though Severus had been too fool to see it-to his satisfaction. Five days since the night she came to his bed and-
No. No, that does not fit at all with the truth he knows.
Four days since the memory charm broke and she hated him. Two since he brought her here, to this cursed and closed estate, and shown what he had done, how he protected them for her, and she attacked him for it, and then-
He shakes his head as if to rattle loose a hallucination. Something must have happened to his memory or, worse, his mind. Perhaps she will walk in and laugh at him and tell him to sleep it off. Perhaps he is in Azkaban. Perhaps he is the one who is dead. It is difficult to tell, like this. His throat is dry; he may feel hunger, or exhaustion that claims his consciousness for an instant or an hour, but bodily needs are swallowed up the instant he observes them.
What he knows to be true, then, is this: Potter's corpse is in the crypt next to hers. It is what she wanted, it was clear in the way she reached for the ghost the ring brought her, in the stag her patronus had become. He could not be so stupid as to miss that. He has missed so much, been so slow, too late, too weak-but no, he could not have missed not that. She had made her choice, and it was this. Anything else is irrelevant.
It is the middle of the night when he is discovered. It is Regulus, though it makes no difference.
"Severus," Regulus says once more, in the same gentle tone he had in the forest. "It's time to go. We are moving. The war's being won."
Severus tosses his head from where it is pressed to his knees, like a beast of burden troubled by the concerns of a fly. "No," he says.
"What do you mean, no?"
His head settles back to his knees. Were Lily Potter alive to see it, she might think he had given all the answers he might, that he is too stubborn, that the machinery of him has run its course on the last of the fuel he had; he is done, has not slept in days or perhaps has been sleepwalking since he found her body; that there is no future but a flat wall, the featureless stone of the tomb.
Lily would see all of this in the curve of his spine, the way his knuckles go white around his knees. But she is dead, her body interred in the stone before them, and so it goes unthought, unsaid, and none of it is understood. Regulus just stands there in tight-jawed silence, waiting.
Severus finally speaks, if only to get him to leave him alone in the dark once more. "She gave you something, before. Intended for me." It's barely a question.
Regulus offers it wordlessly, the soft illumination of the vial casting shifting shadows across them both.
A vial, full of memories, labelled in her beautiful flowing script: an antidote. Naturally, it was poison that she used to execute her plan, a poison he had brewed. The effects were apparent. His attempts to counteract it failed. And she knew they would, therefore: she has provided her own antidote for him, one that can cure nothing at all. And of course, she'd made sure he had the pensieve. It is all a terribly clever trap, closing around him with its steel teeth; a single thread of light, a hand extended from the past to draw him on, a thing that can be neither resisted nor borne.
Severus' hand closes around the vial. Her damnable worry. Her useless concern. Her final words, will and testament, if he will listen. But she is not here to make him listen, she has left him behind, she has gone. She has made her choice and left him with his own, with this distillate of her self intended to alleviate it-as if such a thing were possible.
He wants to smash the vial in blind fury and let the grave-dirt drink the last of her. It already has the rest.
He doesn't.
I'm not much one for author's notes in the middle, but some folks have asked, which is understandable. There is one more chapter coming, and then, yes, the end. Thank you so much for coming with me on this story-while it is a tragedy, it is not one that has no hope left in it.