A/N: Hi everyone! This is somewhat angsty and melancholy (and lots of it doesn't make much sense) but the first wizarding war was real bloody sad.
(No one is under any delusions that I own any of this)
Reviews = love
Enjoy :)
Marlene McKinnon had never needed a protector. But there, on the balmy summer's eve, the faintest hint of July sun still swirling through her curtains, a warm trickle down her right temple, amidst blank masks and empty eyes and the flashing green light, she dared to dream.
It was September, 1971. Gideon Prewett caught her eye and winked when she was sorted into Gryffindor house. Later, Fabian Prewett helped her through the portrait hole when she just couldn't stop tripping over those thrice-damned robes, and she was half in love with a Prewett boy before she could properly figure out which was which.
"Oi, McKinnon!" The taunt seemed to reverberate off that sodden quidditch pitch and through the years. "Do you throw a quaffle better than you shag behind the greenhouses?" 1975. She was a chaser and it was the deciding game of the season. Perhaps she wasn't the future player for England James Potter was destined to become (if he spent less time Lily-hunting and more on the field), but her shot at the centre goalposts from the far right past Avery was the score of the season. And when she pulled back from her hairpin swerve, hair clinging to her cheeks, Marlene McKinnon lifted her right hand and flipped him the bird. "From what Bellatrix Black was saying, it appears I can do both a damn sight better than you, Sweaty McLimpface!"
She could still hear Gideon's approving holler of glee, Fabian's choked laugh as he lowered his beater's batt, and she could see now Avery's distinctive grey eyes, slitted behind the mask.
She squared her stance, head held high, wand grasped firmly in her left hand. She had threaded the same hand through russet curls that night, butterbeer tilting dangerously in her other as Gideon's arm wrapped around her waist. She closed her eyes, and had her first taste of firewhiskey on his lips.
It was different with Fabian, she knew. Fay was whip strong, hair the colour of flickering embers, intelligent to the point of cynicism, but he always managed a smile for Marls, who had failed Potions for four years and nearly dropped out after her OWLS. (Fabian had tutored her, and that had definitely made it worse).
She would laugh with her friends, Lily who asked too many questions, Alice who listened, and Hestia who was jealous but could never figure out which one she liked better. (Fay told her he liked her haircut after Christmas break of '75, so she was leaning that way). Marlene would smirk and pretend and gloat that they were her boys, but they were always Molly's first and when they graduated, Marlene didn't feel much of anything at all.
(She needed 7 O's to become an auror.)
"Filthy blood traitor."
Blood traitor. She was a pure blood, and in the summer of 1976, she had attended a ball. She danced with Potter, first, and then Black, or maybe it was the other way around? The memories had a certain glow to them, the haze which came with too much firewhiskey. There might have been diamonds. Marlene always saw the diamonds.
"You dyed your hair."
"You like it?"
"I like you."
Gideon was fire; Fabian ash; but in Sirius Black she saw only shadow.
(The firewhiskey glinted off the diamonds.)
(Marlene was well acquainted with addiction.)
They played each other as those they knew and those they didn't died. Sirius strung her like a violin, Marlene plucked him like a harp, and they took turns glancing back at each other through the despair.
In 1979, James Potter and Lily Evans were married under an arch of lavender and chamomile, Sirius leaning over and whispering some joke or another about bouquets and tea. James and Lily completed one another, and Marlene and Sirius mirrored them in destruction.
Present. The metallic stench of blood filtered up the stairs, and she felt the back of her throat closing; the overwhelming urge to retch. She did not, could not, think. She wanted nothing more than to close her eyes. She could already see the snake, twisted above the chimney of her childhood home, slithering out of the skull's gaping maw.
Gideon brought down 5 in his wrath, Fabian another 5 in grief and fury, and she knew, she knew they hadn't wanted to be heroes, no one had wanted them to be heroes because heroes fought but they died, but they were Gryffindors, god damn them, and they would never have children and neither would Marlene but others would, and hell, that had to be enough.
(Lily was pregnant. Marlene had never had the best timing.)
Sirius would die for James and Sirius would die for Lily but Marlene knew she was insubstantial as firelight glinting off diamonds.
She was 19 years old, going on 20 when she died. She saw in the green light (the same shade of emerald as Lily's eyes) a blur of red hair, laughing eyes, and a smirk which could cut glass. They spun past her like heat off the pavement at noon, only a mirage now. She could smell cigarettes and firewhiskey. She felt pain and anger and regret, and she could feel the brush of fingers against her cheek.
Marlene McKinnon had never needed a protector. But there, on the balmy summer's eve, the faintest hint of July sun still swirling through her curtains, a warm trickle down her right temple, amidst blank masks and empty eyes and the flashing green light, she dared to dream.