yes I loved the possibility of marlene, and i won't stop writing about her
Remus is the one who remembers, who takes a pause in his so fast-moving life and just remembers.
He finds Sirius in his old bedroom, lying on his side on the bed. The red and golden bedspread lying in a crumpled pile on the floor, Remus sees an empty bottle lying beneath the fabric. He doesn't ask himself what kind of liquid Sirius' been drinking, the stench of fire whiskey has already spread trough the house.
At first glance it looks as if Sirius is sleeping, but when Remus steps closer he notices his friend's irregular breathing. On his way to the bed Remus almost trips over one of Sirius' boots, as he looks around the room he notices that Sirius is still wearing the other one. Remus looks at the dirty tracks that the shoe is leaving on the pristine sheets and remembers the countless times during school that they shouted at each other when Sirius brought dirt into the dormitory.
"I don't think Marlene would have been happy if she saw you moping on her birthday" Remus is the one to break the silence as he sits down on the other side of the bed, speaking softly in case Sirius isn't in the mood for talking.
The crippling silence continues, Remus starts to silently count inside his head.
One, two—
"She would have been way to drunk to even recognize it was her birthday" Sirius snorts into his pillow, the words come out all jumbled. But Remus understands, he reaches out one of his hands to touch Sirius. He wants to comfort his friend so fucking much.
He takes back his hand before it touches Sirius, it's not his comfort that Sirius is yearning for, after all. "She wasn't drunk all the time" He says, trying to lighten up the mood, but Sirius just snorts again.
"Yeah you're right, sometimes she was hungover"
X
"Did I ever tell you about how I met her?" Sirius asks after a while, Remus nods before he realizes that Sirius can't see him from his angle. "No"
In truth, Remus has heard the story many times, it was the go-to secret that Sirius would tell him every time he got drunk during the war. It served as one of the reasons as to why Marlene was the biggest bitch of all time yet the person that Sirius would spend his life missing.
"Well," Sirius starts and Remus looks out the window, it's sometime before noon but outside the world's dark. Remus wonders if it's going to rain, he hopes it will.
"Remember that time when James fell of his broom and didn't wake up for a few days? I once fell asleep during visiting hours, and then when I wake up there's some kind of troll leaning over James—" Remus lets out a short laugh
"Marlene was no troll, Padfoot" He grins as Sirius turns over to face Remus in the bed.
"But she was, she was covered in mud and her hair was all messy, and my first thought was that she would like, kiss James or something—"
"So you panicked" Remus is straight-out laughing now, no matter how many times he's heard the story it always makes him laugh. Sirius snickers too, just a low sound coming from his throat, and Remus basks in it. It feels like an eternity since he heard Sirius laugh.
"So I panicked, pushed her to the floor and screamed for help" Sirius snickers, he pauses for a while to take a chug of some bottle that he seemingly pulled out of nowhere. He offers the dark liquid to Remus who declines. Instead Remus ruffles his friend's hair and exclaims; "Sirius Black, the world's finest gentleman!"
X
"Did you ever figure it out why she turned into an alcoholic?"
It's Remus who asks, not really expecting an answer. Sirius may be the one who knew Marlene best between the two of them, but he never really figured her out. She was always more of a riddle than a solution in Sirius' eyes, they both know that.
"I think—" Sirius pauses, chugs, smacks his lips. The world stops and Remus wonders if maybe McKinnon's going to appear, just to spite the two of them, to make sure that they never actually sort her out.
She doesn't
"I think that she got addicted by the idea of dying young" Sirius says calmly, as if he didn't just speak out about the peculiar subject that was Marlene and alcohol, the subject they all talked around during these sixteen years that's passed after her death.
"What do you mean?" Remus splutters, because how come Sirius, the blunt boy from Gryffindor, was the one to after all figure out Marlene McKinnon. "Wasn't she the most desperate about killing death eaters?"
"Marlene wanted to die like a hero," Sirius muses "you know, mid-action and in glory, but she was also scared"
"Scared." Remus echoes back, because for all the years that Remus ever knew Marlene he never saw her scared, only angry. And drunk.
X
It's almost dinner time, outside it's raining. Remus is half asleep, it's soothing, hearing Sirius regular breathing beside him and the raindrops hitting the pavement down on the street.
He's almost fully asleep, eyes closed and his mind wandering off to things (of course not anything about pink hair and bubblegum smiles) when Sirius opens his mouth for the first time in an hour;
"Moony," Sirius' voice seems to be coming from a continent away, he suddenly sounds so tired, so fucking tired "did you see her, Marlene I mean, die?"
As a matter of fact, Remus did, he saw Marlene getting caught by a bright purple curse, how her skin slowly started turning blue as she fell to the ground. He remember seeing her lips lose their color and her fingers desperately trying to get a grip on her wand. (He can still hear her screams, he can still see the panic in her eyes)
He remember seeing Dolohov stomping on her hand, her wand rolling away from her; her last chance of survival. Her life ended with a bright flash of green, the last of her screams echoing through the night.
"yeah, I did" Remus answers the question, trying to sound neutral on the matter, as if he didn't wake up with her screams echoing through his head years after the war ended "she died quickly, probably never realized what happened"
They both know he's lying
X
Marlene and Sirius were never a 'thing', Remus knows that. But, that doesn't change the fact that the day Marlene died, she took Sirius with her.
Remus knows that, all to well.