February 2nd, 1982: Lily Potter

Caradoc Dearborn has been missing for four days.

After the slur of deaths that started with Marlene's, after Peter came clean about being the spy and vanished without a trace, the deaths seemed to stop for a while, probably because the Death Eaters lost their source of information when Peter came clean and disappeared. Since maybe October, the Order hasn't lost anyone, and Lily's been so grateful for it—for the chance to process all their losses without new ones firing all the time. It's enough, every time she tries to turn to Marlene and exchange a knowing smile, just to remember that she can't and try to understand how life goes on.

But the respite is over, and Doc has been missing for four days.

In some ways, Lily is glad that Marlene isn't here to see it: she'd have been devastated, maybe even as much as Doc was when she died. The only reprieve—and also the worst part—is that presumed dead doesn't mean dead. There's still a chance that they'll find him, and that hope forces them all to cling to a possibility that dwindles with each day Doc is missing, so that they can't let go, and there's no moving on, and they're perpetually stuck in a moment that mocks them, cackles in their faces.

Oh, they've looked. They've been looking for him since day two, when Lily waited outside (and eventually inside) his flat for hours after he was supposed to meet her for tea, when they first started to worry and contact the old crowd and compare notes on who had seen him last. But where do you look for a vanished freedom fighter? If the Death Eaters at work or in the Order really got him, where would they stash the body? Are they torturing him in a stuffy pureblood manor somewhere? Or did he—god forbid—pull a Peter and hand over to them everything he has?

Lily feels like she should be comforting Marlene, reassuring her that he's safe, promising her that they'll find him, even in this world where no one can promise anything. But Marlene is gone, and Lily is just—here, in her living room with James, still wearing her Healer robes and wondering when it's going to end.

She's starting to think that it's never going to end. This war is going to get them all—probably starting with James, now that Dumbledore's offered him some suicide mission—and all that will be left will be the pureblood nutters who are going to kill all the Muggles, inbreed, and then die out.

In the corner of the room, the orb sits dully, not glowing yet, though Lily is sure it will light up at some point this evening. The Potters' house has basically become Order headquarters when it's nighttime in Britain (so in the afternoons and evenings here), just like the house James inherited from his parents was before that damned prophecy that ruined Lily's and James's lives, except this time there's a toddler playing in the other room and James himself can't leave the house if there's a disturbance in Britain that needs to be checked out. Instead, it's James's job (and Lily's, too, when she gets home from work) to coordinate the orb schedule, dispatch people to Unforgivable sites, monitor raids via the orb, and call in reinforcements whenever it looks like they're needed.

She's a little jealous of James, who's doing the stay-at-home dad thing, but then she'll always remind herself that staying at home full-time with Harry is no picnic, either. She still remembers what it was like being trapped in Godric's Hollow for a year and a half, the latter year of it with a baby in the house with them, and in some ways, being a Healer again is less exhausting than that was. But it's kind of like Lily has gone from being stuck inside the cottage to being stuck between her new house and the hospital. She feels like she's living for the weekends, when she and James and Harry all get out and actually go places.

Harry comes toddling into the room then, his feet skimming the ground as he zooms around on his toy broomstick, and Lily laughs and scoops him up off of it and lifts him into the air. "I missed you, baby boy!" she says. Harry giggles and starts blowing her kisses.

"McGonagall and Alice are catching some sleep in the bedroom since the orb has been quiet so far," James tells her, smiling at them. "Neville's here, too—Alice has him tonight, and she wanted him to get to see Harry again. She's taking him to Frank's mum's for the British day when her shift is over, and then he's going back to Frank."

"Of course," sighs Lily.

"He wants custody of Neville, right?"

"I'm sure he does. That's half the reason they're getting divorced, isn't it?—because Alice, well, got cold feet."

"It's not entirely surprising," James says with regret. "Alice has never been—er—the warmest. You know? She loves her kid, but she also loves her privacy."

Lily shakes her head. "I think it's more than that. I think she's been in trouble ever since the pregnancy was an accident."

"Alice never did well with surprises," James agrees, "and she never said anything about wanting to be a parent."

Their eyes meet, and Lily feels a rush of mingled relief and frustration. Lily was the one who wanted to get married and wanted to have a child, and she got what she signed up for, and she's immensely grateful that she isn't in Alice's position. But—this isn't exactly what she signed up for, is it? Not when she's been exiled to Canada, and Voldemort could come after her child as soon as Sirius inevitably dies and another spy inevitably comes forward, and James could sneak off to Britain on Dumbledore's orders and get himself killed at any moment.

They haven't talked about it since James first told her about his conversation with Dumbledore. He hasn't actually done anything harebrained yet—Lily would know if he had—and the longer she waits for it to start, the more part of her wishes that it might just go away. She knows it's coming, but she doesn't think there's a thing she can say to convince James not to, and when she thinks about the responsibility James has to this family that he's apparently just ignoring—

This is how he was with Remus on full moons, too, she reminds herself. This is just how James is. He throws himself into danger because he thinks he owes it to people, because he thinks he's invincible, and it doesn't mean that he doesn't love her and Harry.

Still, she just wants to shake him until he snaps out of it. Lily can't be a single mum mourning a dead husband, not when it took her so long to admit her feelings for James in the first place. When she thinks about all the time she could have had with him that she lost… nothing was going to happen between her and James for as long as she was still friends with Severus, but she should have realized sooner that Severus was never going to stop hating Muggles and Muggle-borns besides her.

It's now been almost two years since Severus started spying for the Order, and Lily still hasn't spoken to him, despite his repeated attempts to ask her through Dumbledore to meet him. Severus didn't attend the few meetings hosted at Lily and James's house, not being in on the secret of their location, and they didn't attend the ones held elsewhere. It's not even that she's angry anymore—she just has nothing to say.

But she's starting to reconsider, now that it's been all this time and her righteous indignation has cooled. She doesn't need to see Severus for herself, but would it really hurt her to see Severus for his sake? She wouldn't even need to loop him into the Fidelius Charm to do it: she could pick someplace neutral, maybe somewhere in France, without disclosing where she really lives now. It wouldn't have to be a long visit, and she could bail anytime—just claim that she shouldn't stay in Europe for very long, just in case.

And she's been thinking about it a lot lately, that's true. Something about Peter probably coming close to turning her and James in has Lily dwelling a lot on regrets she'd have if she died today, right now, with no warning, and she thinks one of those regrets would be not coming face to face with Severus at least one more time, if only to tell him that she doesn't need him, not anymore.

So she dashes off a short letter with a time and date and place and Severus's name on the back, and she gives it to their owl, Walsh, who hoots happily. "Don't tell James, okay?" she says ruefully.

She meets Severus quickly, just two days later, so that James doesn't have time to figure out what's going on. She tells him she's got plans with Mary (dinner for her, breakfast for Lily), and Mary reluctantly agrees to cover for her. Lily should probably just tell James whom she's about to see, but Severus has always been a sore subject, and she doesn't really want to deal with the fallout if he finds out.

"You look good," is the first, quiet thing that Severus says when he finds Lily in the park and sits down on the bench next to her. "I'm glad you look good."

"Right," says Lily, feeling like she ought to thank him but really not wanting to. "Listen—"

"Can I go first?" Severus interrupts. "There's a whole speech. I worked on it all last night."

"…Yeah. Yeah, okay," Lily concedes.

She's expecting him to launch into an apology, an admission that he screwed up by joining the Death Eaters, and a plea to do anything it takes to win her forgiveness. She's not expecting him to say what he actually says.

"I like Dark Magic," he begins, his voice quite steady. "I like the way it feels in my hands when the light shoots out of my wand. I like seeing people bleed and writhe and die and knowing that I did that to them. And I'm not ashamed of it. I used Dark Magic on James Potter and his friends, but they were foul, cruel, calculating bullies who deserved to bleed. I've used Dark Magic on Muggles—the Muggles who are in the world now may not know about magic, but if they did, they'd be just like their ancestors who tried to beat it out of us, to lock us up and burn us down. People aren't good at heart, Lily. I'm not either. I know that about myself. The only thing that makes me sick about you freedom fighters who try to take down my allies is that you think you're working for the greater good when there is no greater good. There's just a bunch of monsters who hurt one another in a cycle that never ends.

"I suppressed that part of myself when we were friends because I knew you wouldn't approve, because I didn't want to disappoint you. When we weren't friends anymore—when I called you the thing I should never have called you—I didn't have a reason to hide from myself anymore. So I did what I wanted. I did what I wanted because I had no reason not to.

"But then the Dark Lord decided it was his destiny to kill you—you and your family—and that's the thing: people aren't good at heart, but you are, Lily. My other friends at Hogwarts, the ones from Slytherin—they stuck by me because I was as twisted as they were, because I could teach them things about Dark Magic that they could use on others at their pleasure. The people who tormented me did it because they could get away with it—perhaps because they thought they had to get away with it to keep their rank in the social order. But you? I was a mess around you. I never said things the right way, and I never did things in the right order, and I never respected the values that you respected, but you loved me anyway. You were good at heart, Lily. You were my greater good.

"I'm not saying you were right about everything. I think there isn't any good reason to show kindness to almost anyone—to myself included. I think your efforts in this war are pointless, and the only reason I've been working on your side is to protect you. I don't care about people, Lily. I just care about you.

"I don't expect you to come back into my life. You abhor everything that fascinates me, and we made our separate choices a long time ago. I just—wanted to see you one more time. I've had nothing good in my life since you left it, Lily. You were my one good thing, and all those years we had… if I can't spend the rest of my life with the woman I love, I just needed to see you one last time. That's all."

He's speaking quickly, and he stops talking just as abruptly, leaving Lily stunned and totally unable to formulate whatever it is that she wants to say to him. The thing is, he'd never really laid out his love of the Dark Arts for her like that before now. Sure, she suspected it for a long time—feared it, even—denied it to herself until she was blue in the face. Besides, people don't just up and join Voldemort's inner circle without having some kind of sick love for the stuff. But he'd never confirmed it.

"You would have had my husband and son murdered," she says finally. "You only started working for Dumbledore because Voldemort would have killed me, too."

"Yes," says Severus unabashedly.

"When you love someone," says Lily, and her voice is shaking with rage, "really love someone, you respect their choices. You don't try to get their family killed. The truth is, Sev—" the nickname slips out without her permission "—you don't love me any more than I love you. Maybe you want me, or you want something from me, but you don't love me."

"And you don't love me, either? Not anywhere in there? You've fully become one of the people you used to claim to hate?"

He's hit a nerve: Lily did used to hate these people she now calls her own. She can still remember every damn day before sixth year feeling like an outcast in her own dormitory and common room, sitting alone in every class except Potions, withstanding James's torment after the school first found out about his crush on her and he was trying to save face. Sometimes, she looks at her husband and just wonders—how did she marry him? How did she forgive him—forgive all of them—enough to become one of them?

But they're not the arrogant toerags she thought they were, just like she's not the self-righteous bitch they probably all thought she was. If circumstances had been different—if she hadn't adopted all of Severus's enemies as her own enemies, too—they might have seen each other for who they really were five years before they did. If she hadn't wasted so many years of her life defending someone who would become a murderer, who would just as soon have seen Lily's child killed—

Her gaze is steely. "Those people are more my family than you ever were."

Severus doesn't reply for a long moment. Lily is about to up and leave when he says, "I'm surprised at you, Lily. I would have thought that you, of all people, would have loyalty."

"Don't call me that," she says sourly. "My name is Potter. And I think we're done here."

It's only really been a few minutes, so she doesn't go home, so as not to arouse James's suspicions. Lily shouldn't be going back to Britain, not for anything—she knows that—but she can't help it. When Mary answers the door, her face crumples. "I hate him, Mare," she says. "I hate him."

Mary doesn't say much for a while; ten, twenty, thirty minutes pass as Lily raises her voice and stabs at the steak Cattermole fixes for her with undisguised rage. When Lily finally gets all the words out of herself, when her eyes are wet and her throat is raw, Mary says, "You don't hate him. If you hated him, you wouldn't be here, and it wouldn't hurt."

"He's not a good person, Mary. He's an awful, sick, disgusting person, and I allowed myself to care about him."

"It's okay, Lily. Sometimes, we love the wrong people, that's all."

But Mary can't possibly understand: she's never fallen for anybody evil before. Severus—no, Snape—is evil, and Lily doesn't know how to live with the part of her soul that's screaming at her to save him.

xx

By now, it's not unusual for the orb to go off at least once, if not two or three times, in a day, so it feels like business as usual at first when the thing starts sounding off. Lily sends Remus, Sturgis, and Moody on their way, only hesitating long enough for them to get the visual and the coordinates. Their numbers are depleted—too depleted—ever since the Death Eaters' killing spree starting with Marlene last year, which increasingly means that they're shorthanded on raids and Lily and James end up having to summon backup with Patronuses.

Through the foggy glass of the orb, Lily watches the three of them materialize in the kitchen of a man and a woman who are limp on the ground. Moody has already got a Shield Charm up and covering all three of them, but that, of course, doesn't allow spells to get out from behind the charm, either. "I'm okay, but I can't hold it," grunts Moody, his voice faint and echoey in Lily's living room. "Somebody get the two of them to safety—"

Jets of red, blue, and green light are already flying, and Lily prays, prays, prays that everyone is going to make it out alive today. Sturgis rushes over to the couple on the ground to Disapparate them out of here, while Remus puts up another Shield Charm in front of them. With no one left to protect, Moody lets his shield lapse and fires beams of light at the Death Eaters—there are four of them, their masks grinning like Cheshire cats—but something hits Moody square in the chest before he can take any of the Death Eaters out.

Sturgis reappears a moment later as Remus crouches down to check Moody's breathing. "He's alive, but barely," Remus yells over the Death Eaters' shouted spells. "I think we need to get out of here and stop trying to make captures—"

"ORGANUM SANGUINEM!"

A jet of light sparks from one of the Death Eaters' wands squarely into Remus's chest. All Lily can think is, not again. They haven't even recovered from Marlene's death properly yet, and if another person on their side, if Remus, is taken from them so soon after—

Sturgis throws up another Shield Charm. The Death Eaters are still firing at them, and it's not until Lily sees another jet of green light that Sturgis gets up the nerve to lower his wand, seize Remus's and Moody's hands, and step forward with destination, determination, and deliberation.

Back at the house, Lily hurries to Remus's side, while James immediately fusses over Moody. Lily's the best Healer they've got, but she's passed along what spells she can to James in case of situations like this, where her attention might be torn between multiple victims. "It's the new curse," says Lily with determination and calm that she doesn't really feel. "I managed to patch Frank up last time, but if I can just keep him alive long enough to study the effects—James, how's Moody?"

"He's going to be okay. Focus on Remus—"

That's when Lily notices Harry's head peeking into the living room from around the corner in the hall. "Harry, sweetie, I need you to go back into your room and stay there until Mummy or Daddy comes to get you, okay?"

"Why?"

And Lily doesn't have time for this—every second she spends talking to Harry is one less second to study the curse and save Remus. "Sturgis, can you—?"

"Yep," says Sturgis. He leaves her side to usher Harry back up to the nursery.

Remus stirs, but only just. "Sirius," he croaks. "Get Sirius."