Hello Everyone! I'm back- from my month-long vacation, too. This one was written up on the flight to London, and it was something I've had in mind for quite some time. Why I chose Marlene for this was, again, inspiration from Lady Altair's drabbles in the first Order of the Phoenix, but my Marlene is very different from hers as well. This Marlene is desperate; her family is the height if society but the kind of family that conforms, not the kind that sets the standard- unlike the Blacks. My Marlene wants to be known for something more than that, and she is- but in the end, she becomes just another sacrifice. This is her journey.
- Dialux
Marlene is color.
From a colorless family, she travels to Hogwarts, desperately fighting for a chance to be something other than washed-out grey.
She is Sorted into a House of red and gold, and for the entirety of her first year- despite the detentions she is forced to serve- she refuses to wear the drugged-down black of her robes.
She is twelve when she slips into a tattoo parlor, wears down the man behind the counter with every bit of her child-like innocence and pureblood-trained viciousness over the course of a summer. The tattoo he finally paints on her pale, pale skin is a single rose, a bud with petals almost unfurled, the color of dried blood and morning blush dawn and spring green.
She is fourteen when she gains her first boyfriend, a faceless boy who she only remembers as a sort of nice dullness, a pastel rainbow of quiet naivety. (and she can't quite find it in herself to care that she broke his heart, not if he is watercolor shades.)
She is fifteen when she first paints her face, paints it up in bloodroseangerpassion red and skywatergriefloss blue and treesmosscalm green and richbrilliantfuryjewels gold and sharpfierceglitter orange.
She is sixteen when she has her first smoke, and she hates the puff because it's a dull gray. A day later, she tries her first drink. It's deep, deep amber, and she loves it just for that.
She is eighteen when she breaks her heart in two, and she lets her rage out at fucking Fabian Prewett in scarlet tears running down her wrist, not in the screams in her throat.
She is nineteen when her heart turns to glass, and she refuses to leave Fabian's grave until Dorcas Meadowes drags her from the cemetery with a quietly sobbed Petrificus Totalus and Silencio.
She is nineteen-and-seven-months when her heart freezes into ice, and she doesn't weep at the graves of her eleven family members, dead and cold and hollow in the ground, a quiet blandness even in death.
She is twenty when the ice thaws into diamond, and she fights into the desperation of a broken, breaking world around her. She is broken herself, but she is one of the few stitches holding the world together, and if she too rips how can the darkness be held at bay? She screams all her fury and loss and pain and hurt into the battles around her, a black hole to rival Bellatrix Lestrange (once Black) despite her need for color.
She is twenty-and-five-months when the diamond shatters into pieces around her, a final rejection the last thing she hears before she storms out of Sirius's flat.
She is twenty-and-a-half when she falls, when a hissed Avada Kedavra green wipes out the brilliant light of her life.
She is twenty-and seven-months when her body is laid into the grave, and Sirius Black stands at her funeral, railing at Albus Dumbledore because her face is a peacefully pearlescent grey, not the harsh, vibrant color she'd painted herself as.
She is dead for a year and a month when Sirius Black and Remus Lupin and James Potter steal into the cemetery and decorate her graywhiteblack headstone with jewel colors- fiery red and forest green and royal blue and amethyst purple and glittering sun yellow. The paint doesn't come off for years- when Harry Potter visits for the first time twenty years later -he wants to visit the graves of all the people who gave their lives for a cause they never had reason to- the grave is still decorated with peeling, faded brilliance.
She is dead for two decades when the young woman who so desperately, furiously fought for some color on not only her body, but in her world, is forgotten- the depth dimmed to pastel, the jewels to watercolor. Her vicious sacrifices, given because she felt she could burn the world to a monument to herself, become just another nameless tragedy in a string of them. Her careless elegance and ashen addiction become pale compensation for a horrible world. Her self-made scars and self-mutilated burns and old-before-young looks become war scars and accidents and beauty.
And then, truly, Marlene McKinnon became what she feared most- forgotten, lost, identical.
(Colorless)