Written for Hogwarts' Women's History Assignment, Task Six: Write about a Healer (canon or otherwise).
Also for the Writing Club: Character Appreciation - 28. [Plot point] Hoping someone remembers, Disney Challenge, C6 - King Louis - Write about someone who wants the impossible, Dark Lady's Diabolical Lair 16 - Write about someone gaining power unexpectedly, Showtime 6: Prima Donna - (dialogue) "We need you too.", Amber's Attic: 3. "I'm just sorry she had to be your fortune cookie. Broken, so you could learn something you already should have known.", Count Your Buttons: S3 - Young and Menace - Fall Out Boy, C2 - Marlene McKinnon, Lyric Alley 14: I do not deserve, Ami's Audio Admirations: 9 - The Murders that Follow — (theme) multiple people dying, Angel's Arcade: Cream the Rabbit & Cheese: (character) Marlene Mckinnon, (word) soft, (action) laughing, (weather) gentle winds.
Also Sewing 101, Step 3: "I'm so sorry.", Voldemort wins!AU, Marlene McKinnon, Feline Fair 11 - Manx: Write about guarding something/someone, Supernatural Day: Valkyrie- Write about a powerful woman, August Auction: AU: Voldemort wins, Pinata: Hard - Order.
Also for Sapphic September, Day 6: Fanon Pairing and the Hunger Games, Day 3: Word: Haven, Emotion: Guilt, Dialogue: "It's the end of the world as we know it.", AU: Voldemort Wins, Weapon: Fire.
Happy (belated) birthday Em! Sorry about the angst, but you did egg me on :p
Word count: 2215
will the muses sing our names?
Dorcas finds her in an abandoned Muggle park. It's late, so the park is closed, but well, locks mean nothing when magic gets involved, and there's a nice view of the sunset from this bench.
Marlene sorely needs something nice after today.
A gentle wind blows around them, carrying dead leaves, and Marlene loses track of time for a while as she tracks their movements.
It's unexpected, the way Dorcas arrives carrying a case filled with bottles of Butterbeer, and Marlene laughs when Dorcas sits down and offers her one.
"What are we celebrating?" Marlene asks as she accepts.
Dorcas nudges her shoulder and grins grimly. "Don't you know? It's the end of the world as we know it. The Dark Lord won, and we're all doomed."
Marlene snorts. Dorcas is basically paraphrasing Alastor's latest speech — the same one Marlene had just run from. "Yeah, I'll drink to that."
"To going out with a bang?"
"To going down fighting," Marlene corrects, slightly mocking. Hearing Alastor, it's the best they can hope for.
"To going down fighting," Dorcas agrees, and they share a mocking grin before drinking.
They stay there until well after that sunset, but Marlene barely notices.
She always has a hard time keeping track of things when Dorcas is around.
When Dorcas is around, Marlene has this bad habit of thinking about a future.
.
They're fighting a losing battle, though. Not just this one, with five Death Eaters for every Order member, but the whole war, too.
It's been that way for the last two years — since the Potters died, and, less than a week later, the Longbottoms were attacked too.
They had survived — if madness could even be called surviving.
(Albus had looked so old when the news of these attacks had reached him.
Marlene had never seen him like that before, and it had scared her more than any Death Eater attack ever had.)
Maybe it's been a losing battle all along, then. Maybe they had only been fooling themselves in trying to resist — but no. Marlene doesn't believe that.
She can't believe that.
For everyone and everything that's left, for Hogwarts and its students, for the handful of Order members still left alive to fight… She has to believe that their resistance is worth at least something.
A Cutting curse clips her shoulders, stopping her musings in their tracks, and Marlene dives down, sending out a Bombarda over her shoulder. She doesn't look back — she can't afford to.
Battle has always been an easy mindset for her to fall into. "It's the Gryffindor in you," her best friend, Dorcas, has always told her, and as if on cue, her eyes drift in the direction where she saw Dorcas last.
The dark-haired witch is still there, fighting. Spells flash left and right, and destruction surrounds her, but still, Death Eaters don't stop coming.
Marlene's heart goes out to her. Dorcas is skilled at battle magic — one of the Order's best, even — but she hates it. Every time she has to go out — which is more often than not, these days — Marlene can see that Dorcas loses a little bit of herself, a small sliver of that light Marlene loves so much.
Dorcas wants to be a Healer, had been studying for it before Voldemort forced them on the run, but this war has forced her to become a fighter.
Marlene lives for the day where Dorcas will be able to return to those classes.
It all happens so very fast, in the end.
Funny, how all the worst things do.
Marlene has just ducked under a nasty purple curse, rolling and springing up with another Bombarda on her lips, when the battlefield seems to stand still.
"RUN!" She hears someone yell — herself, maybe.
For a battlefield to stand so still can mean only one thing, after all — the Dark Lord himself is coming out to play.
And there he appears — standing right in front of Dorcas, who stands there defiantly and tries to fight.
She's good, so good that for a moment Marlene even believes that Dorcas will escape — not win, because Marlene doesn't know anybody besides Dumbledore who could win against that monster, but survival would be enough of a victory to her.
Marlene sees it before it happens, the event unrolling in her mind like those Muggle movies Lily used to take them out to see.
Dorcas trips. It's nothing, just half a second really, but it's enough. The spell hits her chest dead on, and she collapses.
Her screams resonate in Marlene's ears. She's moving before the thought to can register, shrugging past helping hands trying to hold her back, Sirius' voice just so much dead noise against the sound of Dorcas' pain.
She doesn't know how she manages to bring Dorcas back. She doesn't remember it — all she knows is that when she comes back to herself, she's kneeling on the floor of the Order's latest base, Dorcas half pulled into her lap as she begs her friend to wake up.
Dorcas doesn't.
Not really, anyway.
.
They all know what happened to the Longbottoms. Rumor has it they're still in St Mungo's, driven mad by pain, though none of them has really been able to check.
Still, that doesn't prepare them for the reality of it, for the horror of it.
Physically, Dorcas is fine. She looks to be in perfect health; she even smiles. Her eyes are vacant, though, and she doesn't speak.
There's nobody there. Dorcas is gone. She isn't dead, but she's still gone somewhere Marlene can't follow, and she doesn't know what to do about that, except stay by her side and hope and pray that this will change.
That somehow, Dorcas' mind will heal.
It's not enough.
It's not nearly enough — but it's something.
.
"I'm so sorry," Marlene tells Dorcas every day, her voice raw and pained. "I should have been able to help you — I should have been able to keep you safe."
Dorcas only stares back, a blank but soft smile on her face as Marlene chokes on her sobs.
.
Sirius reluctantly offers his family's house for them to stay in when he hears his mother died. With his brother's fate still unclear — death, probably, and they all silently agree to pretend they never noticed the helpless rage in Sirius when he learned that bit of news — the ownership of Grimmauld Place falls back to him.
It's not much, but it's safe, and safe is a very scarce thing these days.
Marlene puts Dorcas in the best bedroom she can find — Sirius's mother's, she later learns — and after some vigorous redecoration, the room looks almost nice.
It's awkward. They can't just bring her to St. Mungo's when there's no guarantee she wouldn't just be killed there — and that's if they even could get to St. Mungo's.
Dorcas had been their last Healer. Or rather, their only Healer, for all that her training had never officially finished. Madam Pomfrey remained at Hogwarts even though it had fallen, and they haven't heard from her since, after all.
Marlene does know some first aid. They all do — Episkey, Ferula and the such are practically a necessity for the Order — but it's no replacement for the knowledge of someone trained to heal.
There is no replacing Dorcas, anyway.
But this was Dorcas' dream. Somehow, it feels right for Marlene to carry it on.
.
The worst part is that sometimes it feels like Dorcas might be there. Marlene will be reading, studying up on the Healing Dorcas can no longer do, and Dorcas ' hand will crawl over hers, her touch as light as a bird's.
She'll be saying something, and light will spark into Dorcas' dark eyes, there and gone in an instant — there but always, always gone.
Sometimes, she will even speak — but never, sadly, in words anyone can understand.
Those days are always the worst.
.
Sometimes, when she can't sleep, Marlene tries to track back the start of the war, tries to figure out when they lost.
People say it's when Voldemort went after the Potters himself, but to Marlene, it feels like they had been losing way before that.
So when did everything just go so wrong?
Was it when the Prewett brothers had been killed? (Edgar had gone mad after that, and Molly probably would have too, if not for her sons. He had taken many of the Dark Lord's soldiers with him on his way out — many, yes, but not enough to justify his life. Never enough.)
Was it the deaths of Marlene's own family, burned alive in a fire she had only escaped through sheer luck? (If Dorcas hadn't insisted they spend the day together, Marlene would have burned right along with them.)
Was it when Mary died, or perhaps Benjy? Earlier? Later?
Marlene doesn't know.
All she knows is that she had still had hope, then. Even after the Potters, even after the Longbottoms, and all of the long, terrible one-sided battles they'd known afterward, Marlene had still had hope.
But then again, she had also had Dorcas then.
It's almost funny, really, how Marlene only realizes how much Dorcas means to her now.
Almost.
.
Grimmauld Place is a haven of peace, Sirius's mother's portrait aside, but Marlene can't forget the war going on outside its walls.
It won't let her forget — as though taking Dorcas away from her hasn't already been enough.
She heals those she can, and she manages it a little better every time, but it's never enough.
Until one day she's cornered by Sirius, Remus, and Hestia, coming back from a squirmish she knew nothing about. They're unharmed, but their grim faces tell her it was a very, very close thing.
"We need you, Marlene," Hestia says. She's practically begging, and Marlene's stomach rolls over because this is the one thing she can't do.
"Dorcas needs me," Marlene replies, averting her eyes. She knows they won't understand — she barely understands it herself, but it still hurts to see betrayal and disdain flash over those faces.
"Please." Sirius snorts. "She hardly needs you to stand by her side every single hour of every single day — it's not like she can even tell the difference," he adds nastily, and something in Marlene grows cold, even as both Remus and Hestia glare at their friend.
"Sirius…" Remus says, but Sirius brushes him off.
"I'm sorry, Marlene, but it's true. We all know it's true. You're wasting your time with her, trying to what, fix her? It's hopeless."
Her slap echoes loudly in the corridor. "How dare you?" Marlene's words come out as a hiss, her chest heaving. "How dare you?" She's so mad she feels cold.
"Sirius, I think we should leave," Remus mutters, eyes flickering worriedly between Sirius and Marlene.
"Leave? But this is my —"
"Now," Remus adds, and he drags Sirius with him further into the house, leaving Marlene alone with Hestia.
"I'm sorry about Sirius," she starts, but Marlene interrupts her with a bitter snort. "He shouldn't have said that."
"Save it. If he's sorry, he can tell me so himself — besides, I know you agree with him."
Hestia winces but she doesn't deny it, and that ugly monster in Marlene's chest rears its head again.
"I'm sorry," Hestia repeats. "I swear I am — but we've all lost someone we love. And Sirius… Well, you know. He changed after the Potters. Not that I'm excusing him," she hastens to add. "But he was right about one thing — we need you too, Marlene."
"I — I can't." Marlene has to pause to blink back tears. "I'm already healing you, I can't do more. I can't risk leaving Dorcas alone."
Hestia's eyes are sad but determined. She nods. "I understand." She sighs. "We all do what we feel we must — but there's one last thing I want to tell you before I leave."
Marlene frowns. "What is it?"
"Ask yourself, would Dorcas really want you to stop fighting like this?"
Hestia leaves, but that question rings around in Marlene's head.
Marlene knew the answer instantly, for all that she stood speechless then.
No, of course not. Dorcas would have wanted her to fight — Dorcas, who sacrificed her ideals for the future she believed in, would have wanted Marlene to fight.
.
It hits her one day as she's staring into her mirror. That last battle went well enough — they won, surprisingly enough, or rather they accomplished their objective — and Marlene was the only one hurt.
She'll have another scar, but she'll live. It's on her cheek, however, and she can't help but wonder what Dorcas would have said about it.
Something witty, undoubtedly, and Marlene's heart flutters at the thought.
"I love her," she says aloud, and the only surprise is that it took her so long to realize this.
"I love her," she repeats, but there is nobody around to hear her.
"I love you," she whispers.
With her eyes closed, she can almost pretend that Dorcas says it back.