Until You're Home Again
By UndeniablyMe
Summery: There's so much she wishes that she had done, so many words she regrets she never said. Marlene? If you can hear me, and this is a dream, wake up. Please. Wake up now.
A/n: I'm not going to lie and say that I'm not the teensiest bit apprehensive about starting into the writing world again, but when the muse demands you write… you write.
Which, obviously, is the only explanation I can give for this. That and the fact that, after so many years, the HP world has finally found its ending in both the books and the movies.
Marlene McKinnon has always been a character that fascinated me, if only for the lack of information we've been given on her. What was her life like? Who were her family members? What were her dreams, her aspirations? Where did she see herself in twenty years…? What was she thinking on the night she died?
And, most importantly, if she had the chance to do it all over again, what would she do?
So, when an angry witch walks into your mind, waving her wand around, and demands that you give her one final last say… You give it to her.
When violet eyes get brighter and heavy wings grow lighter,
I'll taste the sky and feel alive again; and I'll forget the world that I knew,
But I swear that I won't forget you; oh if my voice could reach back through the past
I'd whisper in your ear: "Oh darling, I wish you were here."
-Vanilla Twilight, Owl City-
- . L U M O S . -
My greatest fear has always been my name on a headstone, fading and weathered with time, to a point where no one remembers me. It's not being dead that bothers me so much, and it's not even the whole idea of me being in a hole and six feet under. It's always been that I'd be forgotten.
But before we get any further though, there are a few things you need to know about me, Marlene McKinnon.
Growing up I had four brothers. All of them were older than me, had a shock of brilliant flaming hair, and maddening personalities to boot. You would have thought that we were the Weasleys for Merlin's sake, what with all that hair.
Actually, I think we're related to the Weasleys somehow. All the pure-bloods are inter-related, after all. But that's not my point.
My point is that it's easy to see that growing up with four brothers had naturally shaped me into a slightly tom-boyish, prank-loving, Quidditch-playing, brute of a girl who thought tears and dolls were for pansies.
It's understandable if you know anything about my family. If you didn't learn how to suck up your tears quick in the McKinnon household you often found yourself as the butt of many, manyfamily jokes that tended to show their ugly mugs years later at family parties. Also, dolls never would have lasted at home, what with all my brothers and their ill-conceived pranks, even if my father had let them into the house in the first place.
Being the only girl, I was subjugated to a lot more teasing, hair pulling and merciless jokes than all my other brothers combined. I guess you could say that, through my brothers' loving tender care, I became one tough little ginger snap.
Er... Except for the fact that I don't have the ginger hair, so there goes that analogy.
In fact, I look nothing like the rest of my family. The jokes that I'd been nicked off the back of a cart driven by a one-eyed warlock selling frogspawn started early in my life, as it became quite apparent that I didn't possess the trademark McKinnon hair of most fiery red. (What can we say? We're Scottish!) My hair, when I was born, was a sandy blonde that my parents had been convinced would end up a shocking red like the rest of their brood.
Needless to say, it never happened.
My hair bypassed red completely,and went all the way to the darkest shade of brown manageable without actually being black. My father even went as far as, jokingly, accusing my mother of taking up with another man behind his back to explain it.
He got a week on the couch for that crack, not to mention a good jinxing. Let this be a lesson to anyone reading: you don'tquestion a MacFadden-McKinnon woman's loyalty. Ever.
The only thing that tips me off as a McKinnon are my eyes.
We McKinnons are notoriously well known for the startling electric blue of our eyes and it is the one trait—besides the pale, pasty skin that burns too easily, for Merlin's sake—that you can trace through all of the pure-blood families and attest back to us. It crops up in the strangest of places too.
Take Albus Dumbledore, for instance. Those twinkling blue eyes behind half-moon specs? Yeah, a McKinnon trait. He's something like my great uncle's cousin three times removed, and don't ask me to interpret what any of that means in relationship to me.
If you know anything about wizarding ancestry then you'll know that eye color is one of the most traceable traits in the wizarding world. Eyes are said to be the windows to a person's soul, but it is also one of the simplest ways to trace your magical heritage. It's also one of the only ways I've ever been able to prove that I belong to the McKinnon clan.
My brothers and I, unfailingly, have the same eyes. It's comforting, to tell you the truth. Ice blue, darkening just around the irises, like my dad. But mine don't twinkle like Dumbledore's or Dad's do. I wonder if that certain trait, the sparkly eyes, comes with age.
Not that I'll ever know myself. But I digress.
When I was little and I would play games with my brothers—named Blane, Coll, Greer and Ewan, respectively—I used to lose quite badly. So badly, in fact, that I'd demand a do-over. My brothers, in true brotherly fashion, never awarded me a single one.
Do-overs.They used to scoff at the word. Because in life, in the realworld, you don't get do-overs.I suppose that I should thank my brothers for teaching me that one, simple thing.
But, Founders, what I wouldn't give for a do-over at this moment right now. I guess that some things never change.
"Any last words, beautiful?" Travers rasps out. With him talking to me, his beady little eyes taking in every inch of me, the last thing I feel is beautiful.
His wand is pointed at my throat and he has me pinned quite effectively against the wall in my kitchen. My cheek is pressed against one of those insanely cheery sunflowers that Lily had insisted go up on my wall.
That memory, of Lily dancing happily in the kitchen with her son on her hip many months before, sticks to my mind like the peeling paper flower does to my cheek. I want to laugh, but somehow that doesn't seem right, so I don't.
Because right now all I want is a do-over. I'm wishing I said all of those things that I should have said, and I'm praying to anyone that might be able to hear my pleas, that this isn't the end. I'm not afraid to die, per se. You see, death has been shadowing my footsteps for three years now. It's become a familiar possibility. Depressing, but everyone has to die sometime.
No, I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid all the things I never said, the things I left undone. I'm afraid of fading into the background, of my weathered name on a gravestone that eventually just fades away.
In my mind I can see the faces of my dearest friends, the ones that I'll never see again and who will cry because I was stupid enough to get myself caught. I played the game andI lost,and now my friends were going to pay the price. Me dying? Now that's easy. I doubt it'll even take longer than a second. But my friends living a lifetime without me? That's hard. I don't want to do that to them. I wouldn't want them to do that to me.
Regret tastes horrible when you're about to die. If you can manage one thing it should be this: don't die with regrets.
So I won't regret telling Travers this. "Yeah. Go to hell."
He just laughs and presses my face harder against the cheery wallpaper. I mentally make a note to let Lily know that I was right about the papers. Yellow with sunflowers was the worst choice of papers for my kitchen imaginable. Nothing says hello end! quite like a sunflower.
Especially now, because I'm going to die in this kitchen at the hands of a Death Eater who has already wiped out my entire family. I haven't allowed myself to think of my mother's broken form in herkitchen, or my father's and brothers' blank faces in the place that once was our home. It hurts too much. I'll be with them soon anyways. No need to mourn, Marley. You'll be with them in a matter of moments.
I know, because Travers's eyes are telling me so, but I can't find it in myself to feel anything but regret. It eclipses everything else and blocks out all other feelings of grief or numbness. It burns me and scalds my skin, sinking my heart.
There's just so much I didn't do.
I hoped the end might be peaceful. I was a fool.
Travers could never just let me die. No, he had to rub it in my face, as if he knew exactly what was running through my mind. My mother—and I try not to choke on the connotation that that title now bears—always told me that my face was like an open book. Funny that I'd regret, now, not being more open with the people I loved.
"Rest easy, McKinnon," he says, his voice caressing every syllable of the words spewing from his mouth. "You won't be lonely. The world will be better, after all, without blood-traitors like your family."
I don't know what's worse, the fact that he has the gall to force those words between his lips, or the fact that he believes them. The fury rises up inside me, pushing aside the regret. I can't forget the fact that I am now the last McKinnon standing, that our family name will forever be lost to in memoriam, and that I will not be standing for much longer.
Pity. I always told Blane he needed to hurry up and just get married so they could pop some kids out. Maybe if he had our name wouldn't be facing its end. But thinking about Blane makes me hurt, and I push his smiling face out of my mind.
I'll be seeing him soon, anyways, if there's anything like heaven left for me. I can't help but hope.
"I'll let you in on a little secret, pet," Travers adds, pressing his face closer to mine. I can smell the firewhiskey on his breath and my toes curl. I hatethe smell of alcohol—which, I know, is strange for a woman of Scottish, and some Irish, descent. "You'll be joining a fair few of your friends soon as well. And, with any luck, in a few months another blood-traitor family will be wiped off the map. One that you're… quite familiar with."
My heart pounds. I know quite a few blood-traitors, and he knows it. I glare at him as furiously as I can, praying that he doesn't tell me the name of the next target, because it'll be just one more thing added to my list of regrets, of things I'll never be able to set right.
He looks at me like a cat looks at a mouse and the words from his mouth ring in the silence of my little flat, hitting me in the place where I'm most vulnerable.
"The Potters." He says the words and my entire world collapses around me. "They're next, pretty little McKinnon. And you won't be there to save them. They'll be betrayed by their own friends."
The words curl my stomach. I might just be sick all over Travers and those horrible papers. If I ever get a do-over, one thing is for sure: Lily is notchoosing my wallpaper.
Lily.Merlin. My best friend and her husband. Her little boy. This isn't happening.
Suddenly, I can't imagine the idea of dying. It was a comfort not two seconds ago, but that was before I knew. Lily and James. I have to warn them!
His wand is lifted up into the air and brought down like a sword, flashing towards me. This isn't happening.Please, Merlin, let this be a dream. Please, I'm not ready to die. I have to warn them! Lily—James—Sirius—
Marlene? Marlene! If you can hear me, and this isa dream—a nightmare—wake up. Wake up. Wake. Up. NOW!
There's a flash of green and the sound of screaming in my ear, and then… nothing.
Will anyone remember me?
Wake up, Marlene. Wake. Up.
When I first started writing this it was going to be an enormously epic story all about Marlene and what she would do differently if she got to live her life over again. I started it nearly a year ago, but then I hit a certain point where the words were no longer coming and the story no longer flowed.
So, what does that mean? For now, it's a one-shot. If enough interest is garnered from this… it's possible I would post the rest. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
A big shout out to BittersweetSummer, who was the Beta for this piece. The important thing, BS, is not how long it took you to get it back to me, but the fact that you still remembered after everything. This one is for you, our friendship and for summer :)
Well… That's it for now. Gotta be heading back into my cave. Who knows what I'll churn out next?
Cheers all.
- . K N O X . -