What makes heroic strife famed afar?
When Fabian Prewett fell in love with Marlene McKinnon- the actual moment, mind, long before he realised, before he even thought about putting the feeling into words- it was summertime. He was seventeen years old and standing right next to her.
She'd ran ahead of him, arms outstretched like she was flying, her fingertips grazing the long grass growing in his family's garden. She'd stopped, maybe fifty metres or so, from the house and spun around once, twice, three times, all the while looking up at the sky. He'd been soaked through- hair plastered to his scalp, drenched socks clinging uncomfortably to his feet- but he hadn't been able to take his eyes off of her. She'd looked like a wreck, was a wreck- physically and mentally exhausted by the events of the previous few weeks. He could see her ribs through her t-shirt, sodden material clinging to every one, and the dark circles under her eyes were as much from lack of sleep as running mascara. There was something about her stance though – the fierce set of her jaw- that had him captivated.
In that moment it was easy to remember that the McKinnon's had been loving and losing and fighting wars for generations. Battling clans, stoking rebellions and following Scottish kings into battle with a sword held in one hand and a wand in the other. That they still tell stories about McKinnon's taming kelpies and riding dragons. That McKinnon's have been flouting the statute of secrecy for almost as long as it's existed. That they've hung for sedition in muggle gallows and stood chained in wizarding courtrooms. It is easy to remember that the Highlands still talk about McKinnon Lairds that made entire villages unplottable to hide so called traitors from the crown's revenge. That it was McKinnon lads who ignored the law and died with the highlanders at Ypres and Flanders (buried under white crosses, in foreign fields) and took to the skies to defend Scottish Cities from the Luftwaffe's bombs.
And in that moment, the moment Fabian Prewett fell in love with her, Marlene could have been any one of them. She was the eye of the storm. The single most important moment of his life, standing there and glaring up at the sky as if daring it to rain harder. A warrior of old, a scot right down to her backbone of steel. Atlas, with the weight of generations upon her shoulders.
When Fabian Prewett lost Marlene McKinnon- the actual moment, mind, when the tenuous strings that held her to life had been cut and she'd crashed to the ground, like a puppet at the end of the show- it was winter. He was twenty-four years old and a hundred miles away, standing in a puddle and thinking of her.
They'll be a footnote in history, Marlene and Fabian- their war no more noble than the hundreds that came before, their deaths no more meaningful. A hundred years from now, no-one will remember the boy watching the girl in the rain.
They'll remember the McKinnons, of course. Not killed, they'll say, shaking their heads, but annihilated. Six hundred years of them- brave, outspoken, cynical, fierce and bloodtraitors to a man- gone in a flash of green. The dark mark like a mobile over a child's crib.
