What do you get when you mix a kangaroo and an elephant? No, it's not bloody big holes all over Australia, it's a freakishly weird hybrid to be no doubt poked and experimented on upon mad scientists; the same logic can be applied to 'What do you get when you mix a teenaged insomniac and a huge pile of homework?' The answer, unfortunately, is not bloody big holes in the homework pile, but this:
m e l o d r a m a
"Darling, what would you say if I told you, right here, right now, that I love you, and I need you, and I want to take you out to dinner? Now. And I got you some chocolates…"
The girl lay in the bed before him stared blankly up at his hopeful face, quite possibly wondering if the man was off his rocker; he gazed back, a rather luridly coloured box of chocolates clutched loosely in one hand. Having abandoned all hope of extracting help from this seemingly raving madman, her eyes swept the room nervously, flickering bemusedly between the stark white sheets and sickly yellow walls as she attempted to assess her situation.
Her situation was this:
Marlene McKinnon had been Sirius's first girlfriend. They had held hands for the first time and wandered happily around Hogwarts together at the tender age of eleven, a sweet little blonde thing and the elusive Mr Black. It didn't last long, to say the least ("Sirius Black, you are DUMPED!" and off she walked, shaking with rage and stung by the injustice of it all; a lipstick-smeared Sirius had ran after her, leaving an equally ruffled looking Lucy Abbot bewildered in the broom closet), but affections lingered, awkward hellos were shared in passing and electricity still crackled when one hand brushed against another, a split second of a magic well beyond their creating.
They'd have been fools to believe to it be anything more or less than memories of a slightly more innocent time, but believe it he did. He still wanted her. Fool he may've been, but naïve he wasn't; the term 'he wanted her more than anything he could ever dream of' was never applicable, never mind the sapphires burning in her eyes (oh, such a painful reminder of such a cold cousin), the cheeky smile and cute dimples. It was a reasonable thing all along.
Some may say they knew where it was going; a classic love story of rejection and redemption, the guy gets the girl, and all is well. Not so. On the eve of her nineteenth birthday, Marlene McKinnon popped across the road to buy some milk. Fancied a cup of tea. Nothing unusual there. She was still wearing her slippers, pink fluff in all its glory encasing her feet and rubber soles slapping wetly against the damp tarmac.
The cat followed her, mewing pathetically and rubbing against her legs in the light drizzle. Perhaps she whispered a few words to the little tabby; "good girl, kitty," maybe, or, "don't you go putting those dirty paws on my sofa when we get back, you mucky thing, you…" Who knows? But one thing's for certain; she never made it 'back'. She hurried across to the convenience store, grabbed two litres of semi-skimmed milk in a plastic carton, set it down on the counter while she fished out her purse, and paid. She then proceeded to step back out into the cool January air, stuffing her purse back into her jeans pocket and tucking the milk under her arm as she bent down to scratch the waiting cat behind the ear.
"Come on, puss. Time for a quick cuppa for before Anthony comes round… I'll fix you up some dinner, too. Must be hungry by now, huh?" Had she made it back to her apartment that fateful afternoon, she would have discovered a rather delightful present of dead spider left on her doorstep, courtesy of Puss, but Marlene McKinnon was hit, most unfortunately, by a bus. Silly girl.
She wasn't watching where she was going. The bus couldn't stop in time. No doubt the driver tried to swerve, maybe covered his eyes with one hand at the sight of the girl lying limp in the middle of the road, surrounded by a pool of milk, with a tabby cat yowling and gently licking the cold, white stuff from her face and hands; rang for an ambulance; recounted the day's misadventures with a fascinated horror to his wife and two children that evening. That, however, is immaterial.
She was stretchered, comatose, away from the scene and rushed to the nearest hospital, a huge, blindingly clean (yet stunningly ugly) concrete city job that Sirius would later be delayed by five hours in finding due to Remus's apparently inadequate knowledge of northeast Manchester and supremely unclear giving of directions (he couldn't exactly say that James's shouting "give 'er the kiss of life, mate! Get in there!" down the phone had been exactly helpful either though).
-x-
Precisely three weeks later, Sirius just so happened to have been making his daily visit, and he just so happened to see her eyelids flickering, just ever so slightly, like butterfly kisses on his memory. He promptly ran to the hospital shop, bought the biggest, pinkest Valentine's Day card he could find, the brightest coloured box of chocolates in stock and attempted to short change the shop keeper by just as much as humanly possible.
He had a plan.
Sirius Black was a man on a mission.
A failed mission, it seemed at first, for this is where the pair's bleak history leaves off and the present comes into play.
"Marlene?" The blonde hair was now limp and frizzy, the eyes confused and mistrusting. Who could blame the girl?
Her throat was dry and sore, protesting painfully at her attempts to ask the man exactly who he was and why he was professing his undying love for her in the middle of a hospital ward, complete with chocolates and a Valentine's Day card the size of a house elf. She managed a hoarse grunt, looking pointedly at Sirius and to the tap, then back again.
"Oh! Sorry." He hurried to the sink and returned with half a glass of water, the other half decorating the floor with gleaming blobs of reflected light. She quietly observed his violently shaking hands, wondering what in the tiny, cramped room could possibly making him so nervous. She was, as it happened, but she wasn't to know at the time.
"Wh--ho--why--who are you?"
His face fell.
"What? Marlene, I'm… it's Sirius. Don't you remember me?"
She shook her head slowly. A sort of abject horror began to descend upon her, seeping beneath the starched hospital sheets and grabbing hold of her fingertips like vices, tightening by the second and refusing to be shaken off.
"Excuse me, but… who am I?" The scene might've seemed comical to anyone but the two of them alone in the room. It smelt of cheap disinfectant that was meant to smell of lemons, but didn't. It smelt of despair.
"You really don't remember?" Living with a prankster for the best part of three years had take its toll on his gullibility.
A whispered 'no' rocketed through the space between them.
"Shit."
-x-
"… and, well, sometimes I used to think that I'd prefer it if you never spoke at all, because you never spoke to me. God… I feel like an idiot. You don't even know who I am anymore. You don't even know who you are anymore! God… This is a situation I never thought I'd be in: giving an amnesiac who's been hit by a bus her full life story – and mine," he half-laughed, unable to quite get his mouth around the sound in this place, this circumstance.
A curiously comfortable semi-darkness had fallen over the room, and she flattered herself that they shared a sense of vague familiarity. She felt strangely compelled to comfort him and try to make things better for the boy with the beautiful eyes, as she'd come to call him inside her head.
"I don't suppose you remember the time you dumped me in our fist year?" he asked, looking only mildly interested in an answer as he lounged against the empty locker beside her bed, a pair of reading glasses and a bottle of peach squash left abandoned on top.
"I don't suppose I do."
-x-
It had begun to rain. Light drizzle fell through the open window, making eerily musical sounds on the glass, a symphony of moonlit teardrops under the midnight sun. An abandoned spider's web hung from the outside wall, aglow with a fine mist of black crystals. Sirius let out a sigh. The room was now completely dark, and filled with an indescribable atmosphere. One couldn't have cut it so much as with a knife than a cleaver, though it was not tension crushing the walls together with its might so much as magic on that longest of nights.
The phrase, 'a comfortable silence' had never been so appropriate; when there are no gaps perceivable to the mind's eye, they need not be filled, unless maybe with a little moonlight to illuminate the invisible happenings in a seemingly empty room – for it was the ghost of a memory that flew around the ignorantly tranquil hospital ward that night, angel wings fluttering in the winter breeze as its fleeting touch was brushed away and blamed subconsciously on nothing more than a stray eyelash.
Sirius found himself quietly humming snatches of an old favourite song out loud, imagining wild scenes of diving through the window and dancing the ragged cobweb around the courtyard to the tune of icy raindrops. He wondered momentarily if the shopkeeper had slipped hallucinogens into the cup of coffee he'd bought earlier to pass the time. Incidentally, the cup of coffee was actually residing in a rather dead looking potted plant in the corner of the room; Sirius had never liked coffee. He also wondered whether or not the plant was having such odd visions. He decided that it was not. Eventually. After a series of not-very-scientific deductions that included theories of alien spacecrafts having abducted the coffee and channelled the caffeine-induced hallucinations through laser beams and melted Io with their freakishness. He also deduced that Remus would've most probably fainted had he heard these crazed reasonings.
He felt that he would quite like to go dancing in the rain. One day before he died, at least.
Looking back, he figures out this is probably about where the epiphanical thoughts began to steal into his mind, one by one, miniscule footprints burnt into his retinas as he began to realise.
She wasn't the same person anymore.
His Marlene wouldn't be sat silently in a hospital bed when there things to be done – good times to be had, rain to be danced in, memories to remake…
She didn't remember him. That hurt. Surely if he meant anything to her, she'd remember him? Or so his tired mind interpreted it.
And so, Marlene McKinnon woke up the next morning, refreshed and invigorated, to find a single black rose at the foot of her bed, a message attached reading, 'I loved you once,' and she wept.
-x-
She had not thought his actions melodramatic at the time, but perhaps would have if she'd any time to ponder – not even a week had passed before she was unmoving and unresponsive once again, but no handsome prince with his cursed ebony roses could awaken her now.
-yawn- Review? -snore-