Author's Note: Being rude to me online will not make me want to write. You are not entitled to anyone's labor.

Disclaimer: Nope, don't own this. But plagiarize me and I will make your life difficult. All the weird shit about angels and hours come from an internet magic hour table of King Solomon's and Wikipedia.

Content Warning: Death Eaters, so killing of innocent animals, rape jokes, discussion of sexual assault by a self-proclaimed regretful ghost of a rapist, gore, violent dark magic ritual and animal sacrifice. Mentions of police brutality. The Latin is supposed to be bad. Jokes about racism and white guilt.

They Call This Closure?

Chapter Twelve: Death, Doom, Destruction

He woke up to a dull rain hitting the window wall of the Slytherin six years' dormitory, gray light and low breathing. Severus stirred, moved to his side, sighed. He still held Lily's letter in his hand. He had a nightmare, hadn't he, one of those unpleasantly psychologically revealing ones, a by-product of Occlumency. Know thyself: he had been looming over a very satisfied, very old-looking Albus, who had been leering at him over his half-moon spectacles, legs akimbo under his purple robe (with dancing crimson arabesques, the flash of detail made him roll his eyes). Oddly sexual, he was half-hard. He sneered and strode quickly to the shower, waving a studying Evan good-morning. Contrary to popular belief, he had never been into power imbalances; he'd never slept with Lucius Malfoy, to his mild regret, or Narcissa either, who was more obvious and less humiliating in her flirtation. Now, the both of them, at the same time, that had been a wank fantasy in his late teens, hadn't it? When did they start dating? Early 1977, it was November now, soon enough. Under the cool water, he rolled his neck, feeling lively. He hadn't mourned this Halloween, had spent it drunk with the Slytherin lads and ignoring Lily Evans-not that much of a change from the first go-around, to be honest.

Evan and Avery were waiting for him when he got out of the shower, towelling himself dry. Naked, he sneered at them. "I do not have delusions over the potency of my pheromones, Avery, why are you here? I know you'd jump anything that moves, but, truly, you ought to ask first." Avery raised an apologetic hand, Evan was stifling giggles. Severus shook his heavy wet hair at them. "Regardless of whatever inanity you want-can't it wait until I'm fucking dressed?" He snapped his towel at them, baring his body. The boys jumped back, Avery looking a little embarrassed, Evan laughing. "Get out!" he hissed, and the boys retreated to the sinks. Severus wrapped the towel around his waist, exasperated and already irritated. Purebloods had no sense of privacy. They were all growing too comfortable with each other's bodies. He would not let this lead to the indignity of an invitation to one of Mulciber's orgies, not again, never again.

He lotioned quickly and lathered his face, preparing to shave. He had shaved the beard, let it grow back, it was time to shave again, feel the slap of November wind (and rain) wake him up to the greater game again. He stared at himself in the mirror, bruises from bad dreams under his eyes. The monochrome lighting of the bathroom always made him look yellow-green. He sneered again, and shaved. He used his grandfather Snape's razor, stowed away for him by his father-the one nice thing Tobias ever did. The sensation of a blade on bare skin calmed him in the morning. It established the stakes. He only self-harmed emotionally anyway, so Lucie Rosier once told him, when it was becoming more and more clear she was going to break off the engagement. Funny: he washed off the razor and checked his face for missing bits. He hadn't thought of Lucie in a long time, Charity and then Sturgis had long overshadowed her. How old would she be now, like what, twelve? Merlin, the woman he nearly married-as he told Tom Riddle, he found a "better, purer" woman-was only twelve years old, mastering Mandrakes at a Beauxbatons lycee. He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it out of his face. The morning routine was establishing who he was-scattered across time, inappropriately old, inappropriately young.

When he walked back into the room, still towel-clad, Evan and Avery were sitting very innocently at the foot of their beds, dressed in outdoorsmen's robes-oil cloth outer robes, and a leather jerkin and deerskin hose with dragonhide boots. For once Avery was without his new simare, trimmed in polarbear fur, which his mother had procured for him, for the winter season. Instead, he wore an archer's half cloak, bow and arrows with him. Evan had a wicked iron sickle with a pewter handle at his side. On his bed, though, they had stretched out clothes, new ones, his size: a nice oilcloth simare with pockets, that might just pass in the Muggle world, a beautiful red linen shirt with silver embroidery, a plain leather jerkin, and new hose. They had not bothered to replace his boots; he was planning on wearing his Doc Martins to tatters, and actually had.

"A bribe," he said neutrally. "You want me to harvest potions ingredients for you." It goes without saying, that something would be illegal and carry a prison sentence.

Avery crossed his legs. "And you look good in red. Now, hurry up and get dressed, your hair's dripping, you'll catch a cold that way."

Severus snorted and cast a quick drying charm, which left his hair oily as always. He ignored Evan's sigh and dressed quickly, enjoying the feel of new linen on his skin. "I like the embroidery. Fleur-de-lis, Evan, was this your elf's work?"

"Yes, she likes your taste. I kept her from enchanting anything, I know you like to do that yourself. Anyway, Snape, can you hurry up? It's most effective if we can hunt it before the Neron hour."

Severus adjusted his jerkin and stepped into his boots. "Ah, Qaphsiel's hour. Before the ruler of heaven returns. He who presides over the death of kings. Avoiding ill-fortune for men in power. What are we hunting, then, in Haniel's hour? Joy and pleasure, that could result in the death of kings…" He grabbed his leather roll of knives and tucked it into his simarre's inside pocket.

Avery stood up. "We'll tell you when we're in the Forest." Severus swept out of the room, robes billowing, Evan and Avery at his footsteps. They took the blood exit, accessible across an invisible suspended platform behind a mossy wall by the Slytherin common room, which demanded a drop of kneazle blood for egress. Carefully stepping through the darkness, they entered the glass tunnel under the Lake, and followed it into an ephemeral pond in the Forbidden Forest. The exit was only accessible between Samhain and Yule. In 1987, a group of interhouse explorers accidentally destroyed it. They were attempting to reconstruct the charms Slytherin used to build the tunnel in the first place, particularly the one to detect and neutralize ill-will, and ended up breaking half of them, thinking the blood-based seals were dark magic and had to be erased. The runes for sanctity and security pulsed along with the tide, illuminated the purple-turquoise patina of the ancient, thinning glass.

The forest was still and cold when they came up out of the pond, perfectly dry. Evan whispered a warming charm. Avery handed him a leather string, embossed green runes for stillness and quiet shifting, and he quickly tied his hair back.

"What are we hunting?" Severus said quietly, wand in one hand.

Evan took a plain sheathed knife from his robe pocket and handed it to Severus. Severus drew it-obsidian. Startled, he caught Evan's serious face on the blade. "Unicorn foal," Evan said quietly. "As a favor to Avery's father."

Racing thoughts, nausea rising up burning acid in the throat: he remembered Draco Malfoy shaken and green in his office, curled in on himself, stammering about an inky shadow drinking from the very neck of the animal, silver down cracked lips and sunken corpse-skin, flayed skin peeling and disintegrating blackened onto the mercury beast, mad red eyes roiling in overlarge sockets. He gleaned the rest from the boy's eyes. Unicorn blood prolonged the beat of the heart, the respiration of the lungs, oxygen cycled up to the brain, but at the cost of deadening feeling, physical and physiological. The eyes, carefully pickled, gave the eater the ability to see malcontent, at the cost of color vision. Looking through the lens let one see the imprint magic had on the body. Unicorn flesh, particularly foal flesh, properly filleted, remolded the body and added muscle, recushioning cartilage and reducing arthritis. The bones, ground down, deaged the flesh temporarily but worsened intestinal decay. Severus rubbed his hands, thumb against his fingers, checking their motion, their pliability. Dark magic melted the body down, reducing the outline between "I" and "Thou," the world and its simmering pools of curiosity, of shadow, of unpredictability. Dark wizards always looked blunted, like the edge of a wax taper melted and solid against the grain of a hard table.

"If he's having problems with inflammation in his joints," Severus said steadily, sliding the given knife into his belt, "I could brew him something less...controversial than flesh. An analgesic, with feverfew and thestrel sinew-"

"It's not for him," Evan interrupted, but was quelled by a warning look from Avery.

"It's a favor for my father," Avery said steadily. "Snape, you've been talking for ages how you've been wanting to explore more difficult butcheries. And unicorns are what, a quadruple-X non-tradeable good? You wouldn't get this opportunity until you're three years into your apprenticeship, if you can get an apprenticeship."

Severus brushed his thumb over his lip, holding back a reckless word: arrange your face, arraign your fate, follow your fate. For the Dark Lord, he thought, for Lily and spying and Horcrux-hunting. "If we're caught, it means Azkaban."

Evan laughed. "That's why we brought you. We'll never get caught."

When Severus had been in auror custody, pending trial, for a crime so little as being a queer working-class Slytherin, Avery had bailed him out, tracked him down with Lucius Malfoy from Mulciber's reports and Slughorn's last sighting, behind the counter at Slug & Jigger's Apothecary. He had been at work one day, a job he got on Lucius Malfoy's gentle suggestion to Slughorn, and stayed late, to talk politics with the other apprentices. Mulciber had picked him up, and they had gone to a house party at Knockturn Alley. He had woken up hungover in his Diurn Alley flat, to the aurors slamming his door down. His father had been killed during the night, with one of his recently-patented spells: sectumsempra, sever forever Severus, sever us. An associate of the Order of the Phoenix had recognized it, made the link-Lily, he guessed. The aurors could interrogate him for up to 24 hours, before releasing him to trial. Alice Longbottom worked him over for 4 hours, then John Dawlish, playing nice auror. Then Savage, then Proudfoot, and back to Longbottom again. It wasn't worse than being beaten up by the Marauders, no, just as humiliating as that, but it was worse than being beaten by his father, and he had promised himself no one would grind his face into a toilet ever again, he had promised no one would kick him so hard he'd vomit, he had promised he would never, ever spit out a tooth and blood in his attacker's face, snarling, "I don't have the information you want, I was at fucking Mulciber's in fucking Knockturn Alley, trying to fuck Mulciber if you really must know, no I'm not a fucking murderer no I'm not a fucking Death Eater, not yet at least-fuck-"

Dawlish, with a flick of his wand, slammed his face into the desk, crack, made him apologize for his filthy language in front of the lady, being a filthy Death Eater wannabe. Well, it certainly made him want to be. Twelve hours: Slughorn had dropped by the shop for his lunch hour, to ask him about a master's program in New York, saw he wasn't there, heard that no one knew where he was, contacted Lucius, who contacted Mulciber, who contacted Avery. Lucius gave Avery the money, but Avery bailed him out. And Evan Rosier cleaned him up. They let him arrange the funeral by himself, which was a mistake, because then Lily Evans showed up to apologize, and that was all a mistake.

"No," Severus said. "I wouldn't've let that happen." Avery touched his arm, pointed to the gentlest of tracks in the forest mud, the glimmer of a strand of spider-webbed hair in a pine. He picked it up and held it before Snape's eyes.

Steathily the boys padded across the forest floor; Professor Kettleburn had brought the Creature Care NEWT students into the forest to see the unicorns, and Evan's friend Walden (later the great Executioner, that arsehole) had been tracking the offseason litter of foals for two weeks now. They were following the trail of the weaker one. Severus removed the hair from bushes and branches and dead forest leaves and placed them in a test tube; not as potent as a full-grown horse, still the foal's hair would provide a certain drunkenness for a weaker Felix Felicis, that relied less on circumstance and more on native gumption.

The boys followed the prints through the muck of the forest. The sun throbbed dully above them, veiled by a thin blanket of cloud. The occasional augurey cried; it would rain, yet again, later today. Who would've thought it would rain in Scotland? Severus fervently hoped they would find the foal before the rain set in, but during Neron's hour-or 9 am, the hour that defeated kings and would hopefully bring out the worst of the dark aftershocks of the slaughter unto the consumer. Avery suddenly stopped and motioned for them to hide; they dodged behind trees. Avery notched an arrow into his bow.

A mist crept behind them, rolling off the Lake, gradually supplanting the trees and shaping around their clothing. Avery stayed upright, bow ready.

Evan shivered violently. "I can barely see a thing," he murmured. "I hope-"

Avery hushed him. Evan attempted to catch Severus' eye, but Severus stayed looking straight ahead as the mist overtook them. When they could hardly see five feet ahead of them, Avery relaxed.

"To the cairn," he whispered, and again they crept forward, sloping downhill now, through thicker layers of leaf litter, less sticky and older now, but slippery. Severus had to catch Evan twice, but Avery stayed surefooted-his boots must have been charmed, a gift from his father, as surely as all their outfits and tools were. The woods smelled hungry and sharp. Severus was glad of his knife, no matter its Death Eater source.

Carefully they sloped downhill, digging their heels into the turf, down into the little valley of the Baron's cairn. When they reached the bottom, Avery held a hand out, to stop them from going closer. Again, Severus had to grab Evan before he fell over, and slapped a Silencio over him. They stepped closer, one silent creep across the leaves, another. An augury shrieked-rain was coming, no shit, Severus thought, with this humidity. The cairn morphed into view, a spindly tower of shale, from a distant coast, topped with a dull marble carving of a blank-eyed barbarian knight. Avery withdrew an arrow and notched his bow, and Evan put a hand on his sickle. Severus withdrew, standing behind the cairn.

The mist thickened suddenly, going from gray to a warm gold. Severus closed his eyes, heart pained, and kneeled, gripping his chest. The foal was approaching. He stayed down, resting his head against the cool crumbling stone of the tomb, as a quick arrow whistled past, then another one, and another, the unmistakable crack of skull being smashed, of a sickle opening the flesh.

"Snape, hurry!" Rosier snapped. "To me! A vial!"

They bled the foal quickly and shaved her fur, skinned her and gutted her, and finally carved her flesh and stuffed her into Evan's and Avery's moleskin packs. Severus would help them process the ingredients further, in the bathroom most likely. The boys loped off, victorious, but Severus said he would stay behind, to cover their tracks. Entitled as they were, they saw nothing wrong with this; of course he would risk being found at the scene of the crime, to cover for them. Evan and Avery could say they had just found him with the stuff, they were taking it off to report to Slughorn, and for a percent of all his future earnings Slughorn would keep him from Azkaban and pack him off to Durmstrang. To them, it made perfect sense. They had bought his clothes, after all.

"Tergeo," Severus snapped. The bits of blood and gristle on his clothes and decorating the cairn disappeared. He blinked rapidly, clutching his knife in his other hand, and finally expelled a long, tugging breath. His shoulders relaxed. He sheathed his knife. The mist crept on, and a chill rose up. His eyes narrowed: nothing physical, probably a ghost, but there was a risk of a demiguise or a lethifold. He said, "Expecto patronam."

The doe shivered out of his wand and padded about the rock pillar tomb, craning her neck to flick her ears back at him. He almost laughed; no lethifold then, and definitely no dementors. His doe sniffed around, snuffled, squinted back at him, ears flat back, shook her head, and stepped back to him. Around the tomb it was growing darker, with a phosphorescence emerging from the top. It pooled gooily down the rocks into a human shape. The doe snuffled. Severus put his hand instinctively towards her back, but remembered she wasn't solid. Her aura curled around his hand regardless. The humanoid flowed into a recognizable visage.

"Salve, dux," Severus tried to remember his Latin. "Discupulus sum Hogwartium." Lucie Rosier had told him the Catholic formula for exorcism, how had it gone? I reject the dragon. And in Arabic, hadn't his mother told him it was the Ayatul Kursi to say? But that was explicitly praise for Allah, why hadn't he ever bothered to look up how to banish a ghost? Besides, it had been a year and also twenty-one years since he had flipped through a Qu'ran: Merlin. He retreated to Latin."Culpa non a me, er, hac culpa te vi-videre non mea sunt."

"I know your English," the Bloody Baron said drily. "But a noble effort."

So much for showing off. He blinked. He had known for years that the Baron spoke English with a strange Received Pronunciation. He was acclimatizing. This was ridiculous.

The Baron swept over his cairn and loomed over Severus. "More blood has been spilled over my tomb," he boomed, rattling his chains, "innocent blood stains the grass where innocent blood had stained! Speak, student, and answer: what have you killed?"

Severus stared back steadily. After wandering through the space between streams of time, ectoplasm didn't frighten him. "My mates and I went hunting. Our quest was successful."

The Baron floated to face him, leaned in to stare into his eyes. Severus flinched back. Whoever the Baron had been, he had been stocky, with a face like a hatchet, and thick dark hair-rather like his father, actually. Snape glared back. Voldemort had long since tortured out that Pavlovian response, having Rowle and Macnair sneak up on him, and after two years working with Moody, he thought he had ironed it out. But the mind couldn't entirely conquer matter; sometimes the body controlled the mind.

"What do you seek, by your sacrifice?" The Baron gesticulated. "Blood has been spilled at my tomb, the tomb of Helena Ravenclaw-unmarred blood of uniform virginity, witch and unicorn. What questions do you seek answered?"

Severus was confused, and it came out as frustrated. He scowled. "Our quest was successful. We left with what we sought."

"But you remain." The Baron leaned into him, dousing him with the chill of death. Severus began shivering; he felt like the Baron had grabbed his heart. "What do you seek?"

Severus was shaking. "You-you say Helena Ravenclaw was killed here?"

"Yes," the Baron leaned back, folding his arms. Warmth came rushing back, leaving only a hollow sense behind. "I killed her!" The Baron threw back his head. "I, she refused me and I pursued, I took her and I killed her for the insult-the insult to my honor and to her mother's honor, and in her dying breath she cursed me, she cursed this place, she cursed the diadem that had brought me there-and I took her body and killed her spirit here, upon the rocks, and buried her. But the diadem that was lost, you seek it?"

He really didn't have much interest in Founders' lore. That was more the Dark Lord's hobby, and he did not suffer rivals-so now he was interested. "For what blood has been spilled blood will answer." Snape folded his arms.

"Did Helena send you?" The Baron leaned forward. "Has she repented of her foolishness?"

Snape raised an eyebrow. The Baron was beginning to remind him of Mulciber after Alecto broke him with him in fourth year. Similar to the Baron, Mulciber had lashed out violently at her-blasted her off the Quidditch pitch, temporarily paralyzing her, so Amycus cursed his eyes out and set him on fire. Slytherin feuds were intense, but Severus had managed to keep possession of most of his body parts, except for his toenails, and his right leg that first time he'd walked into a mirror, and Evan Rosier had jinxed his nose off in second year-he wondered, briefly, how this had become normal, and had a sudden flash of sympathy for his fellows, muggle-raised wizardry.

"She's tricking you," the Baron declared. "The boy returned the diadem to the castle. He changed it here. You can find it in the Room of Hidden Things. I give you blood for blood: his blood is in the Room of Hidden Things." With that, the Baron rattled his chains, rose into the air, and melted away. Severus regarded the tomb, the now-vanished remnants of unicorn blood, and filed the realization of blood sacrifice to the dead as something to research later. Sluggy might know something about it, he'd ask him later. For now, he had to meet Lily.

The rain was breaking by the time he slunk into the castle, disturb, mind stammering over blood for blood, the Baron's proud confession-he started visibly when he saw the Grey Lady gliding down the Grand Staircase. Filch snickered at him, holding Mrs. Norris as usual.

"Watch your step, boy," Filch said, "else you'll trip over your own feet." Snape scowled back. His feet had grown before his legs had quite made it; if he remembered correctly, he still had a few more inches to go, and maybe even more if he took supplemental nutritional potions, as Slughorn suggested, all those years ago. He quickly cast a cleaning charm, a wandless, wordless finger contortion, and swept away. Filch stared at him. Mrs. Norris meowed.

Most of the younger students were still in class, and the OWL and NEWT students were sequestered in their common rooms, the study halls, or the library. Severus kept a wary eye and wand out for marauding Gryffindors. He hadn't tangled with Sirius Black since the initial incident by the lake; James Potter was keeping his word. Pettigrew never dared walk the halls by himself. Mulciber liked to hear him squeal too much. He stalked up the staircases, the stone murmuring at his feet, creaking as they moved him to different sections of the castle. Seven storeys in this old, sprawling castle: it was odd how empty it felt. Severus supposed the Founders thought there would be more children. Inbreeding, though, limited fertility, and he entertained thoughts of moving the entirety of the Wizarding UK within Hogwarts' walls. He rounded the corner. Perhaps that was the plan, and what Slytherin meant: to move the entirety of British wizardry into one safe fortress. Of course that was not a very good idea, since this was Scotland-apocrypha had long distorted the facts. He was so lost in thought he missed the corridor and nearly walked right into Remus Lupin of all people, squinting at an old piece of parchment.

"Out," he thundered, "of my way."

"Well, excuse me, Snape," Lupin said, hastily folding away the paper. Severus' eyes narrowed: he had glimpsed sprawling lines, was that the paper he had attempted to confiscate all those years ago, from the Potter brat? No, there was such a thing as too much coincidence. He didn't live in the strictures of a Chekhov play-it was almost definitely a red herring. "Uh-you wouldn't happened to have seen Lily anywhere, would you?"

Severus raised a single eyebrow. A flash of deep, deep dislike shone in Lupin's amber-wolf eyes. They stayed cold but his lips moved into a smile, slightly baring his teeth, which were oddly longer and sharper than one would assume. He walked away. Severus turned around to watch him leave, and did not blink until he saw him disappear down the stairs. Prolonged exposure had blunted his nerves, but he would never leave his back exposed to him. He rubbed his side, where an ugly scar lay, a remnant to that hand going clawed and grabbing him, sinking into his flesh before Potter's Blasting Curse threw the half-morphed wolf back, grabbing him and running. It hadn't been a deep cut, but still, it scarred. He realized his heart was beating very, very fast.

Wand out, on high alert, Severus turned into the corner. He obeyed Lily's instructions, pacing in front of the that ridiculous tapestry, thinking, "I need a place to get away, I need a place to get away." On his third round, the stone next to the tapestry melted away, revealing a simple wooden door. His nose twitched: cedar. He taped the doorknob suspiciously. It was lead, the magic-killer, odd. He twisted it, the lead tingling against his hand-there were wizards with lead allergies, made Potions brewing on the elementary level difficult- and opened the door, stepping into the room and letting it shut behind him.

Lily was sitting, in a simple green sweater and jeans, on a bench of a cloister, in the center by the fountain. It was not one of Hogwarts' many little cloisters, but modeled after one he recognized, he had seen it traveling with Lucie and the Malfoys one delirious summer, 1983, Certosa di San Martino, too much wine and the Mediterraneum on his tongue, Lucie shimmering in the Naples sun, no one could stay solemn, not even when they found the garden of skulls. This one did not have the skulls. Luna marble, serpentine, and even some red Aswan lay in the floor, spiralling stars. He walked through the arches and into the cloister proper. The garden was only an herb garden: rosemary, sage, thyme, he paused at some basil and rubbed its leaves. Lily continued to sit, looking at him nervously, playing with a book in her lap. The sun was strong but not dizzying.

"This is…" he trailed off. "Where is this?"

Lily shrugged. "Wizard space."

"Clearly."

"There might be something in the castle's magic," Lily said, her hands twisting over the book, "to keeps its residents from going insane. They let us out so rarely, they have to have enough little rooms and treasures to keep us from killing each other."

Awkwardly Severus settled on the bench next to her. The marble wasn't hot, despite the sun, and the water splashing from the fountain behind them was refreshing. "What are you reading?" There was a careful distance of two inches between them. It didn't feel right. Lily smiled uncertainly and shrugged.

"On the Corporeality of the Soul," she read, "and its Intermixture and Very Interchangeability of More Viscous Animate Matter. By Aquila Black. Just chasing a pet project."

Severus made an interested sound; well, he was interested, beyond smoothing over the awkwardness. "So she's refuting mind-body dualism?"

"No, she tries to set it up as a reductio ad absurdum but doesn't quite hit the mark, you know wizards-she presupposes the duality in order to argue that their purpose and make is the same, but fails to release the assumption. She might've been more successful if she had ever learned first order logic."

"We can't have wizards being logical," Severus said, "else magic would cease to work. How much of this," he waved a hand at the cloister, "is held up by pure wilful belief?"

Lily snorted. "I can't tell if you're joking." She nudged him. The world felt right again.

"I'm not, I'm not, I had...someone," his face faded, "tell me that once, I can't remember when." He pressed his lips together anxiously, ran a thumb over them. "Things are getting-hazier." Abruptly he occluded, withdrew into himself, and gathered the strands that made him: regret, bitterness, devotion. To whom, why, how? He needed to find his purpose. He closed his eyes and remembered that shade of Avada Kedavra green. He knew himself.

"Sev? I think you're dissociating. You changed the room."

Severus opened his eyes. "Occluding," he corrected. They were now sitting in a leather loveseat, surrounded by massive towers of books and statues, stuffed dragons, the skeleton of a demiguise-all sorts of detritus. He looked at her. "Why am I here?"

Lily bit her lip. "A secret for a secret?" she offered. Severus resisted the impulse to bark are you asking me or telling me, Miss Evans? "Since I told yours, I thought I'd give you one of mine." She leaned back. "So here we are. The Come and Go Room. I like to call it the Room of Hidden Things."

"What?" His attention sharpened.

Lily shrugged, spread her hands out. "It hides things. Hides you, if you ask right. It does its best to give you what you want, though sometimes it'll give you what you need instead. I come here and paint sometimes. Listen to muggle music. Wear muggle clothes without gettings points taken off for uniform infraction. It changes the layout too, depending on what you want. So if it's snowing outside and dismal, I can step into sunny Naples, or Venice, and wander around and explore. I really do think it's meant to keep people from going stir-crazy. At least, it does for me."

Severus looked around, at the high bookshelves that towered before them. There must be fifteen hundred years' worth of knowledge, hidden and obscured by the dust-and, the Baron said, one of the Dark Lord's Horcruxes. He needed to report to Dumbledore.

"Sev?" Lily's voice was tentative. He turned back. "So, what? Now what?" She bit her lip.

Severus regarded her silently, and sighed. "I can't believe you managed to sneak into my dormitory. With Potter. And I didn't get my head shoved into a toilet in the meantime."

Lily's eyes lit up. "Well, there was one moment I thought you'd catch me. But your friend Yatin's very smooth, he's good at sucking people in."

"Yes." He stood awkwardly in front of her.

Lily's smile faded. "You know, there are other things I want to talk about." Severus' brow furrowed, but before he could snap at her defensively she held up a hand and continued, "more on what you were saying earlier. How everything's confused. The timelines, I mean. Because I think they're leaking."

Severus stared at her. "What," he said.

"It's not just you and Dumbledore who are starting to remember things," she said. "You said I died, and Potter? And Marlene and Benjy too?"

"And almost everyone we went to school with," Snape said, "but what the hell do you mean? I haven't seen any evidence of that amongst the Slytherins, you're being ridiculous. There is absolutely no way these two dimensions can be so porous, the Veil's the only way through-" he stopped dead. How many times had he walked between dimensions, just with some blood, a couple roots, and a mirror and a candle? He closed his eyes. Had he managed to undermine the net between the worlds so badly? "Fuck."

"I caught Marlene singing the Beatles in the shower, but Mary and I have never played them around her, and we're the only muggleborns she talks to. There's no way she could've known, but then when I asked her, she told me I'd played them for her at my house, last summer. Except that never happened. But she said it was after you and I had fought, and then got confused, and then changed the subject. And Benjy's been getting panicky every time he sees Avery, did you notice? Potter's been distant towards Remus, even more than usual. And I-well, I've been having these dreams." She paused. "How'd you think I could draw the-the baby?"

"You've always had a fertile imagination," Severus said, and regretted the pun.

"Not to mention the nightmares about green light. And-are you really quite sure I had sex with Potter?"

Severus got huffy. He folded his arms. "Black likes to paint me as some obsessed stalker, but believe me, I moved the hell on and didn't see you again except at my dad's funeral, Merlin, it's not like I had the will or sick curiosity to peep on your wedding night."

"Kinky," Lily giggled. "But really-what happened at your dad's funeral?"

"We fought." Severus looked away. "Rather violently."

Lily touched her hair. "Was that it?"

"Yes," Severus lied. "Why? You know you've always had weird dreams." She didn't need to know she'd punched him so hard she fractured his cheekbone when she saw the Dark Mark, or that he'd then shoved her off the couch, both their pants still down, and cut her hair-he didn't want to hurt her, just to shame her-so she'd kicked him in the balls and he'd thrown a lamp at her. The last exchange they'd had went along the lines of: "Well, you were a shitty lay anyway, you frigid bitch!" "Fuck you, you limp-dicked Nazi!" And then she had slammed the door shut, and he had picked his trousers up. Oh, to be nineteen again-shit, he was going to be nineteen again.

Lily regarded him suspiciously. "I have a distinct memory of being furious with you for shaving my head."

"You've always had weird dreams," Severus said firmly. He raised an eyebrow. "Do you really think I'd be capable of such violence?"

"Uh, no fucking shit Sev, you joined the Death Eaters, you prick." Lily shook her head. "You're terrible at protesting innocence, you know? Even when you're innocent."

"It's because I'm ambiguously ethnic," Severus deadpanned. "Racist."

"Oy, I am not being racist!" Lily protested. "You're being an ass."

Severus stared her down. "Racist." This was such a great diversion, he should use this on her more often-but not often enough, he had to actually hold her accountable, she was never very good at being called in.

She got up. "Fine, fine." She shrugged. "So what do you want to say?"

A tinge of hysteria seized him suddenly. The room changed, shifted into something like his old quarters, warm and wooden on the ground floor bordering the Lake. Lily started up as the bench she was sitting on abruptly contorted into a chaise longue. The room contracted, narrowed, the shelves disappeared and became his cabinets of books and notes, and Severus was standing before a familiar fireplace, the fire crackling merrily. He started to laugh. "This is all so fucking bizarre, an absolute nightmare, I never had any desire to relive any of this, I just wanted to atone for my mistake, I don't want a second chance-"

"Uh," Lily said. She looked up to the ceiling. "I need something that will help me calm him down." Between them, a table with a full tea platter popped into existence. A battered copy of Sense & Sensibility lay on the table. They exchanged a glance. "Jane Austen?"

"She's very interesting from a Marxist lens," Sev said defensively. Then Lily snorted, and he found himself smiling, and finally he settled for the tea, companionably ordering her to move over.

Severus was about three chapters into his book, and Lily reclining against him-it was perfectly fine for friends to be this close, they had always been like this-with her weighty philosophical text, when suddenly she stretched herself up and said, "So I think we should try to take down Voldemort now, rather than wait for him to kill us. Because I would rather not die."

"It's more complicated than that," Severus said.

"What, have you tried shooting him?"

Severus briefly imagined Lily holding an AK47 and AK'ing Death Eaters-death, doom, destruction, now that was a good pun. Pity she was the only one who would get it. "No, but…" he hesitated.

"What?"

"Dumbledore says-"

"No offense, Sev, but Dumbledore's a bit slow on the uptake," Lily said skeptically. "Remember Grindelwald? He's always overcautious, he could challenge Voldemort to a duel right now and we know he'd win-"

"Do not patronize Albus Dumbledore," Severus said harshly. "You have no conception what he sacrificed in this war and how many lives he is saving, in his 'apparent inaction'. Albus is still answerable to the Wizengamot, and the International Confederacy of Wizardry-he is preventing an outright civil war. By treating the Death Eaters as an extremist movement, he's denying them the right to an open field of battle-which would inevitably take place at Hogwarts, this is the most important magical edifice in the Wizarding United Kingdom-"

"Fine," Lily snapped. "I stand corrected. But meanwhile, people are dying, I'm going to die if we keep on like this, Marlene too and Benjy and how many others, Sev, you said almost everyone we went to Hogwarts with. It's not like he's immortal-" Severus looked away, looked for the teapot. "Oh Christ, he is immortal, isn't he? How the fuck did he manage that? Steal a Philosopher's Stone?"

"Ah," Severus said. "Well, currently that is what Albus and I are attempting to figure out, and if we knew the answer, Lily, believe me, we'd be acting on it, you think I like knowing everyone I grew up with is doomed to die? Every time I fucking wake up, I see Evan-I saw him die, you know, the aurors ripped him to pieces, but he'd walked into the Leaky and started shooting curses, he must've wanted it to happen-it was only me and Avery left, and I know how Wilkes turned out, I used to visit him in Azkaban-you think I like knowing what kind of monsters they are, they're turning into?"

"Then let's fucking stop it!" Lily shouted "We need to figure out a way to stop it!"

Suddenly the room shifted again, and both of them were thrown to the floor as the walls suddenly rushed in, shooting upward. The light turned harsh, the floors blanked. Severus grabbed at his wand, rapidly going through spells, what would be applicable, contorto only worked on organic material, a blasting curse might work, and finally he shouted, "Locomotor mortis!" Everything stilled. He peeled himself off the floor. He had knocked his knee falling, but his new leggings were still pristine. Lily said slowly, "Sometimes I hate magic."

He glanced over to her. She was carefully picking herself up, a bruise forming along her chin. He helped her up gently. "Be careful what you wish for," he said. He scrutinized the bruise. "I can heal that for you."

Lily waved a hand. "Go ahead."

He traced around the bruise with his thumb, chanting, "Cicatrem sanem." She shivered as the bruise faded, capillaries healing, blood retreated. Abruptly he dropped his hand. Both of them drew their wands. At the end of the new narrow corridor was a small marble plinth, and atop it was a tarnished silver circlet, inlaid with sapphires. He drew in a quick, short breath. "Ravenclaw's lost diadem," he whispered, and quickly he walked towards it.

"Sev, wait!" Lily rushed after him. She grabbed his sleeve before he could touch it. "You have your gloves, right?" He stared at her, confused, and then swore suddenly. He stepped back and occluded so hard his knees almost buckled, withdrawing so swiftly into his mind he left his body behind.

"It's cursed," he murmured, "it's got a cursed aura." He lifted his wand, levitated the diadem carefully. It was making his nose itch. He willed himself not to sneeze. He examined the spell patina carefully: the rose of an Entrapment Charm, the laundry-water gray of a Confundus, the more insidious black grain of suggestibility, blue watermarks to open the mind, and underneath all that, something slithering below the surface, but concentrated in the gem. He narrowed his eyes. "Reveal your secrets!" Light erupted from the sapphire, hissing heat, and Severus dropped the levitation while Lily threw up a shield. He screamed, unable to see.

Whiteness faded into greyish forms; from a shelf a humanoid blob wrested a shining stick-a sword-and rapidly Lily struck at the blinding diadem. Severus blinked rapidly, rubbed his eyes, but could only distinguish the vaguest of forms. He could hear the Horcrux screech, in its death throws, as Lily whacked at it again and again. As the silver wrent and tore, Severus' vision returned. Eventually the metal just crumbled into itself and ashed. Lily cast aguamenti and washed the gray smear away. The sapphire remained.

"Don't touch that," Lily said tersely, breathing hard, sword at her side.

"Do I look like I have a death wish?" he said, rubbing at his light-spotted eyes.

"Do you want me to answer that?" Breathing heavily, Lily sat down, sword clattering. It was dripping a thick, mucous liquid between mud and blood. "Fuck." Severus came closer, and still squinting, examined the sword. The pommel ended in a boldly real lion roaring with a ruby in its mouth, rubies for its eyes, goblin-wrought. It thrummed with magic, and upon closer inspection runes swarmed upon and within the hilt: Odin's sign, for resurrection, healing, coming when needed. His lips thinned into a sneer. It was Gryffindor's sword, he remembered it from its place of honor at the Headmaster's Office. Like mother, like son. He could've told anyone the boy got everything good about himself from Lily. A quarter of dragonskin suddenly appeared by his hand. He took it and wiped the blade: scratches blazoned into a Times New Roman GODRIC GRYFFINDOR on the steel.

"We need to tell Albus," he said.

Lily had her eyes closed, and was breathing heavily, leaning against a shelf that helpfully became cushioned. Paisley, Severus observed, purple paisley: it clashed horribly with her hair. It flashed into a more pleasing green. Lily panted, "Can't-I have-my heart attack first?"

"No."