written for: CUtopia's Duelling Club Competition on HPFC, for pairing round one: marcuskatie; pairing dominoes, level i: a non-canon pairing involving two canonically unpaired characters
notes: eh. okay so i've never written these two or thought about them too intently because it's always been a bit of a background thing and so this has forced me to actually try develop a legit headcanon and history for them and just yeah. just a fyi, because i feel like y'all deserve to be warned about this lack of experience on my part. okay and logistically, marcus notes he is four years older than katie, but also that the battle of hogwarts was four years after he graduated, whereas katie had already been graduated for one year by that point. jsyk: jkr said that he repeated a year, so i'm going off that.
warnings: swearing. oh and word count is off—it's only 2807 words, including my separations "x"s so it's definitely not over 3k!
disclaimer: disclaimed.
marcus/katie-—slay your demons, lionheart
there is more gold in her broken roar than there could ever be in his heart
Marcus Flint knows he is not a good person.
In fact, for most of his life, being horrific to others has been a defining trait of his. It doesn't matter that at some point in his adolescence, he started to mean his words with less fervour than before; it doesn't matter that some time around the age of twenty-three, after surviving a war and bearing the sort of scars everyone is too young to earn, he began to question his beliefs: none of that matters, because he knows what a good person looks like and he knows it's not himself.
A good person looks like a slender brunette with fierce eyes and a fair heart. A good person looks like a Gryffindor tie and darting through the skies and left behind by all her best friends. A good person looks like Katie Bell, and nothing like Marcus Flint.
And he kind of hates himself for it.
x
He has known Katie Bell for nearly as long as he can remember.
That's the thing about purebloods; they're all inextricably linked, even those that one wouldn't think to connect.
Marcus Flint and Katie Bell go way back. Her father, Edward Bell, is famed for his shrewd negotiation tactics and and economic advice, and also doubles as his father's old classmate and occasional dinner guest. Her mother, Alys Pucey, dormed with his own mother, and stories are still whispered reverently throughout Slytherin about the power duo that Alys Pucey and Arianne Rickett had been in their time. Marcus Flint is Slytherin through and through, both the product of his own truths and his familial legacy, but Katie was never quite her parents. Following a Slytherin and an almost-Slytherin Ravenclaw, her Gryffindor placement was certainly an interesting outcome.
Marcus hadn't been surprised, though. Growing up, he had met Katie at all the pureblood galas and social events—which her father attended, he always felt, more out of business acumen than societal leanings—and if there was anything he could tell about the girl, it was that she was daring and impetuous to the point of concern. She was always the one to take the game a step further; if Marcus could use emotions and weaknesses against others, she was the one to provide the physical challenge and the sharp-tongued defiance, even at a foot shorter and four years younger than he was.
The girl was pegged to be a lionheart right from the start, he thinks to himself, and it is no surprise that there is more gold in her broken roar than there ever could be in his heart.
x
At Hogwarts, Katie disappeared into a blur of red and gold and too young and don't care. She found a niche with the Lion bints that were always with the Weasley twins—not now, though; nobody is with one of those twins now, except for all the other ghosts they created that night, and he feels sick to think about it—and she found her spirit and most of all, she fell in with Oliver fucking Wood.
Oliver Wood has always been Marcus' biggest rival, and even though Katie was really just a blip on his radar, it still rankled that her allegiances lay with him. It felt—absurdly—like betrayal, like another casualty or comrade-in-arms lost to the war he waged against the Gryffindor.
Looking back, he feels hollow when he thinks about this, and impossibly young. His feud—his petty rivalry—with Oliver Wood is nothing compared to war, to seeing those standing with you fall.
There is no remedy for survivor's guilt, except for the most permanent one.
x
The war. The battle. He fell in with the Death Eaters in a big way, and in a bad way.
He wasn't quite a Death Eater himself, but he was an acolyte, one of their chosen few who were often brought in to aid the Dark Lord's cause in some way and oh merlin he feels so sick when he thinks about it now.
The closer they got to the true battle, the more he doubted it.
Once, he was called in to Hogwarts by Carrow, during the Year of Terror, to help with some disciplinary issue or something. He can't quite remember; what he does remember are the looks on the faces of the kids who could have been his peers, four years previously. Some looked terrified, some looked unquenchably brave. Some gave him curious looks, whilst others hid. Some even mused upon him, both askance and judgement adorning their faces. All of them looked cracked, even broken.
He floos back to his apartment after whatever he had to do, but not before dropping by the Slytherin common room and seeing an unlikely quintet: Theodore Nott, who had always been the guy with the quiet snark and perceptive eyes; Millicent Bulstrode, who hated herself more than any Gryffindor ever could; Blaise Zabini, king of lounging about and the only Slytherin Marcus could ever recall having expressed desire to be a Healer; Daphne Greengrass, ice queen of Slytherin and woman who tore down empires; and Draco Malfoy, the sole legitimate Death Eater amongst the Hogwarts students, seated amongst the Slytherins who didn't want to fight for the Dark Lord.
The five of them sear their faces into his mind and they are what he sees every night until the battle, slowly chipping away at his heart.
x
There are shouted curses and rumbles of explosion and jets of light everywhere but most of all, there is blood, which Marcus cannot abide. They are wizards, for fuck's sake, and the presence of blood is indicative more of the cruelty of wand-wielders than the carnage of their curses.
He finds himself facing a blonde boy who can't be more than sixteen, all trembling and young but with resolution in his eyes, and he sighs. "Aw, hell no," he mutters to himself. He is twenty-three years old and he is not a good person, but he is not a child-murderer either.
He stuns the boy and heaves him to the side. He's about to deposit him in the corner when a cold, unbearably familiar voice says, "drop him."
Having planned to anyhow, he carefully places him in a propped up position and turns to face Katie Bell, hands up in the air. "Hey, Bell," he says conversationally. "Your hair looks nice." Well, it actually looks pretty shitty, but she still looks nice and fucking merlin is he seriously flirting with a Gryffindor in the middle of a battle?
Her thoughts seem to be following the same vein as his, because her eyes narrow. "What did you do to him?" she demands roughly, jerking her head towards the boy.
He almost feels insulted, but then he remembers that he is not a good person and he forgives her instantly. "I stunned him," he says blankly, studying the darkness of his fingernails. He avoids her gaze for a second, but loses his internal battle and snaps his eyes back to meet hers. "Aw, come on, Katie—I wouldn't hurt a fucking kid," he's saying, and he's almost surprised by the way he's actually striving to get her to believe him when he hasn't tried to explain himself to anyone for years.
Her grey eyes look suspicious, but they soften slightly and he really shouldn't be this relieved what the fuck Marcus pull yourself together. He waits, holding her gaze; his arms are still up and she still has a wand pointed at him and there is still a boy too young for death in the corner. Nothing has changed, but at the same time, everything has: her grey eyes have softened a fraction and the burden of guilt on his heart has eased slightly and he does not feel endangered. The truth lies in the smallest of details, he finds, and the change between them is both infinitesimal and infinitely important to him for a reason he doesn't quite understand.
"Go," she sighs. "I'm not a murderer."
He turns his back on her, which he supposes is stupid, but he does trust her, though Merlin knows why. It doesn't escape his notice that she didn't exclude him from the capabilities of murder, either.
x
He sits in the pub, nursing a pint of some shitty Durmstrang lager. His days are haunted by muscle memory, by the physical recollections of the crimes and reactions of the war, but his nights are inescapably worse, painting pictures of the fallen and branding them on his eyelids.
The seat next to him scrapes the floor and someone sinks into the barstool beside him, their head dropping onto the counter. He glances slightly out of the corner of his eye and is greeted with the sight of a tangled mess of brown hair and bleary eyes, lifting from the bench top to make an order.
"One firewhiskey double," she says raspily and Marcus isn't sure whether he wants to laugh or cry because it just figures that of all the joints in the world, Katie Bell would walk into the one he's avoiding himself in.
The bartender slides it down to her and she downs it in one shot, and it clearly burns her throat awfully and Marcus does not miss her grimace nor her flinch, but she squeezes her eyes shut and demands another.
"Merlin, Bell," he mutters, and her eyes snap to his form.
"Marcus Flint," she says in recognition. She laughs darkly. "What a pleasant surprise."
"Hey, you joined me," he points out brusquely.
"That's me," she says in a hollow voice. "Always joining you. Always helping you. Always fucking things up and helping the bad guys," and it takes everything he has not to flinch.
"I let you go," she whispers, not really looking at him. "I let you go and now—" she breaks off, angry tears making their way down her cheeks. "Do you feel guilty?" she demands.
He blinks at her. Clearly, this is not the correct response.
"You fucking asshole," she's saying, clambering off her stool in her rage. "You fucking useless piece of shit murdering scum how could you—" and she's actually getting hysterical and Marcus can't say anything because he's frozen to the spot and he can't even breathe and he feels kind of like he's dead.
"All right, lady," the bartender intervenes. "You need to chill, or leave," he says firmly but Katie is still staring at Marcus like he's the scum of the Earth and every word she says feels like a knife stabbing into him, fragmenting him and reforming him as a new creature that probably reflects him better than his body.
He's a monster; he does not deserve to wear human guise any longer.
He abruptly pushes his stool backwards and stands. "Don't worry about it, mate," he says to the bartender. "I'll leave."
He walks off, trying not to let himself shatter as Katie yells, "yeah, you walk away, like the coward you are."
x
He sees her again half a month later and this time he's the one that's drunk.
"I see him every night," he says as an opening when she sits down beside him cautiously, and his words are slurred but to her credit, she doesn't look like she's going to yell at him too.
She gives him a measured look. "The fucking kid," he explains irritably, waving around his flagon. "That dumbass idiot blonde who was way too young to be there and what the shitting fuck was he thinking, trying to take on Travers?" he spits out, unbelievably angry about the existence—or really, current lack thereof—and life choices of Colin Creevey, who was Gryffindor in his recklessness and penchant for dying.
Katie's mouth pops open. He looks at her in surprise. "Wait—" he says, but she cuts him off.
"Oh my Godric," she's repeating under her breath like a mantra, "oh my godric oh my godric oh my godric."
"You thought it was me." His voice sounds dead and it's a statement, not a question. She can't even look at him. Somehow he feels worse.
"Stop feeling bad," he says irritably. "I am a shit person, so cut the guilt trip you're giving yourself."
"I accused you of being a murderer," she says in horror.
There is a beat. A pause in which Marcus weighs his options and deciphers the value of truth, explores the infinite paths that could follow this moment, this crucial decision.
"Who said I wasn't?"
x
"You have got to stop running into me like this," he says, catching her before she can fall onto the floor, post-collision with a burly pub patron.
She simply looks at him blankly and he curses to himself. "Fuck," he curses, before looking at her swaying form and making a decision. He leads her outside and they flop onto the grass of the park across the road.
The world is quiet. Then—
"'m sorry," she mumbles. He feels like his heart has stopped still.
"What?" he manages.
"I was shitty," she says. "And you—you fucking told me, right, that you weren't a child-murderer, and then I go and—I just, I'm sorry."
He doesn't know how to respond. For the first time in forever, he isn't as bad as someone expected. He's not sure if this should make him feel better or worse.
"Bell, you know you weren't wrong," he says, not unkindly. "I mean, yeah, you were wrong about the kid, but... for fuck's sake, I was on the wrong side of the fight. All right? I know that. We know that. And I'm not a good person. So you can just—" he waves his hands desperately at her, trying to convey a message with his hands that isn't really working—"it just doesn't matter, okay, because you're not wrong and I don't deserve any apologies."
"Why not?" she challenges, and it's both refreshing and a blast to the past, because he hasn't heard a tone like that since she was nine years old.
He stares at her in bewilderment. "Aren't you listening to me, Katie?" a voice demands and it takes him a second to realise it's his. He notes that this is the first time he's called her Katie since it accidentally slipped out during that run-in at the battle and—stop thinking about that—before that, probably not since before she started Hogwarts. "I. Am. A. Monster," he insists, pronouncing each word carefully. "I fought for the liars and the killers and the cowards and I don't even think I believed in it by the end. Blind following of a psychopathic mass murderer," he remarks bitterly. "The legacy of Slytherin."
"Oh, no," she says softly. "If you believed in that cause, you would have taken more note of Creevey's blood status than his youth." He stills as she continues. "After all, Travers did."
He looks at her hopelessly, but some part of him is singing because it looks like—maybe—someone doesn't think he's as awful as he thinks he is. His own personal definition of a good person seems to find a part of him worthy of her time, but then, well—there's a reason she's the good person, right?
"Stop it," she insists, as if she can read his mind. He wouldn't be surprised. She was always very determined, and he can't say he'd be shocked if she'd managed to make her determination transcend the boundaries of logic. "You are not a Death Eater."
"But I am a murderer," he throws back at her, closing his eyes as a flash of green hits a dark-haired woman, her lips falling open in surprise. The scene is on permanent repeat, playing in the back of his head, her gasp acting as a soundtrack to his own personal demons.
Katie Bell looks at him, and sighs, and the look in her eyes is absolutely heartbreaking and broken and hopelessly familiar for a reason he doesn't understand.
"Yeah?" she says. "Well, so am I."
He recognises the expression now: inescapable guilt, the kind of which overwhelms you and incorporates itself into your life. It's the same look he sees in his eyes when he looks into a mirror.
x
The purest of blood and the most broken of souls, Marcus muses. Purity of blood never did anything for him, except entangle him in a war.
He's still not a good person and she's still reckless but he's not a bad person either and she's helping him understand that; they are locked in their own living nightmares, haunted by the ghosts of the damned, because this is a story about two murderers, but there is also hope, because this is a story about a boy and a girl that could almost be a love story.
a/n. omg. okay. so, if you've made it this far, i'd really appreciate a review, and also please don't favourite without a review! xx