No one quite understands how the three of them have become friends. At times, they can't either. For how can Marlene McKinnon, rebellious Beater and notorious flirt be best friends with Dorcas Meadowes, ambitious Prefect and know-it-all as well as Hestia Jones, all around good-girl?

They are opposites and they are together.

But in the end, Hestia is the only one left.

Marlene- with her pitch-black hair and wine-dark lips- Marlene fell at the height of her power. She- died (and Merlin, it hurts. It hurts so very much)- to a young recruit and a new Death Eater no one knew. (Even by accident Severus Snape knows how to get revenge on the Marauders.) When she heard the news, Hestia mourned with the quiet she knows Marlene with.

Because their relationship isn't measured in the conversations but the silences, and it is with that that Hestia grieves.

A young girl (woman) is slumped over the windowsill in the second-year girl's dorm room. She has thick blond hair and a perfect body, and even in tears her face is poised. But the news that her father is dead- and that she won't be released in time for the funeral- is bitter and so very, very sad.

Another girl enters the room, and she is the polar opposite of the one on the windowsill. She is dressed in black and red and harshness, and in another world she might have been called a Goth. When she sees the other girl, she frowns deeply, creasing an otherwise unlined face in lines that seem far too worn for a twelve year old.

"Are you alright?" The question is phrased almost disinterestedly, but the slight gleam of worry and surprise is visible.

"No!" The other girl whips around, almost losing her balance on the window before catching herself. "No! I can't- I- I have to leave for my father's funeral and my mother wants me to finish fucking exams!" Hestia has never sworn in her life, and it is perhaps this that causes Marlene to realize the importance of the moment. "Exams! As if they even matter!" Her voice is getting higher and higher, and it doesn't look like she'll stop anytime soon. "My father is fucking dead! How can I be fucking alright?! What kind of a dumb-ass question is that!"

Suddenly her fury breaks, and is replaced by a broken, yawing grief that makes Marlene wish for the anger. Anger she can deal with. Grief? No clue. "Exams. As if- as if they even matter. Exams, Marlene. Exams."

Marlene steps forward, embracing Hestia closely. Neither speaks- there aren't really words for hurt this big. Later, there will be false reassurances and pretty lies and cold, cold emptiness. But for now, it is enough. Enough that Marlene is there and that Hestia needs her. It is silent and enough.

Dorcas deals with her grief differently; she drowns herself in work. When Hestia doesn't see her for three days straight, she calls Fabian Prewett. He tells her that Dorcas hasn't left her office in two.

She lets it go.

But Sirius is the one people pay attention to- Sirius with his loud mouth and foul language and ever-lasting friends. He curses and weeps tears (Hestia is sure they are only done out of duty) and within a month he forgets. But there is still pity in others' eyes (not for her, but for him.) and she doesn't know if she can handle it.

Marlene would have cursed them all by now.

But she isn't Marlene, and she isn't Sirius. Instead, she mourns privately and makes sure that when she steps outside, her head is high and there isn't a trace of tears on her face.

Dorcas speaks quietly to her before an Order meeting. When they walk into the conference room, Hestia is trembling and Dorcas is grim. But at the end, she follows Dorcas out of the door and into the Ministry. An innocuous piece of wood lies in a carefully preserved box, and Hestia takes it out. She holds the last relic left of her best friend (there weren't any pieces left when the Death Eaters were done with her) and weeps for a brilliant light shuttered out.

Marlene's wand is long and thin, but rigid. It doesn't bend, and it's so darkly burnished it might as well be black. It is only in the harsh fluorescent lighting that she can see the streaks of rosewood and lovingly polished warmth, like the carefully-cultivated love Marlene gave Hestia and Dorcas and Sirius but hid beneath an exterior of uncaringness.

"I love him." Marlene floats- there really isn't another word- into the room. "I'm in love, people!"

Dorcas rolls her eyes. "You're sixteen, Princess. And he's seventeen." Hestia, like the careful moderator she always is, refrains from speaking. But her agreement must show in her eyes, because Marlene stops floating and sinks onto her bed instead.

"He's so dreamy, though!" As if that was an actual argument.

"Mar." Dorcas leaned forward, earnest. "You know how he treats people- especially girls. You're just a conquest to him. He'll never settle down, and when he gets tired of you he'll move on to someone else. You know that."

Hestia sees Marlene's eyes flick toward her. She wants to know what Hestia thinks. But Hestia refuses, and instead turns her face away. She agrees with everything Dorcas says, but she knows better than to say so. They are close friends, but it is Dorcas's and Marlene's job to fight and assert, and it is Hestia's to keep them together in the end.

She doesn't speak.

She doesn't speak when she sees Marlene crying in the common room, broken-hearted over her first love's abandonment. She doesn't speak when they get back together and break up again. She doesn't speak when Dorcas tells Marlene to drop him- that he isn't good enough. She doesn't speak when Marlene retorts with hurtful exclamations ("That's why you'll never find someone, Dorcas!"). And she doesn't speak when Marlene says she will give everything to this- this Order.

Marlene has always been the strong one, and that is why it is so surprising that she has latched on to one man and taken him back when he doesn't deserve it. But when Hestia hears some of the older members of the Order murmuring disapprovingly, she pauses. For the first time in her life, Hestia straightens her back and speaks fiercely, "Marlene is not gossip, and I am sure that when the tale of your past is revealed there will be more than enough for others. But Marlene would never gossip about any of you. Show her the courtesy she showed you!"

The Order mutters furiously, but no one says anything about Marlene anymore.

When the start talking about Hestia instead, she only straightens her spine and walks past. (She's always taken insults to others better than to herself.)

"No." She whispers, knowing somehow the burden is too much. Hestia was never the strong one. It was Dorcas, who took on everything she could, and Marlene, who pushed everything away but got it in the end. She is not ready for this yet. "You keep it."

Dorcas nods and they continue on their way silently. Somehow their trio has become a duo and now, it seems, that too is split apart. They barely see each other, and Hestia feels like where they were once three parts of a triangle, pushing and pulling and tugging but always, always, joined, they are now lines that are joined together at one point and that point is being frayed and broken.

Hestia and Dorcas are quick, immediate friends, just like Dorcas and Marlene.

But where Hestia and Dorcas are companions and sit together in classes and gossip sometimes, Dorcas and Marlene are flashy. With Marlene Dorcas becomes something different, something fiercely bright. It almost hurts Hestia's eyes to see them sometimes.

Their laughter and love is as deep as their screaming and hatred, and it is only when Marlene falls in with Hestia as well that they even out. Hestia balances the two in a way that no one else can manage, and that is why they need each other.

Without Marlene, the furious, rebelliously beautiful side to their triangle isn't there. There isn't a flash-point when Hestia feels snubbed by Dorcas- there isn't a point where they can reconcile. Where once there was HestiaDorcasMarlene, there is now Hestia, and Dorcas.

The warmth and tug and pull isn't there anymore, and the two facets of the triangle can't meet in a place without the third side.

Marlene is gone, but it feels like it's Hestia and Dorcas who are dead.

It is hours (days, months, years) later that Dorcas tells Hestia the news. They are seated in a pub, curled around mugs of cocoa and whiskey (a combination that should never work but somehow does in the pub) and the stink of hot meat and stale sweat hangs heavily in the air.

There are men, watching the TV to see the soccer championship, but Hestia doesn't notice them as she sinks, pale-faced into the battered wooden chair. She's too tired, too drained to pay attention to something so trivial. What she wants is to scream her name, to shout that she can't do this anymore. What she wants is to let go of her responsibilities and jobs. What she wants is to be a shadow of her previous self.

(Marlene, the person who held her up and supported her, is gone.)

Dorcas isn't taking this as badly as Hestia, or at least that's how she looks. Her face isn't ash-grey pallor or broken-down weariness. Her outfit is just as well put-together as it was before Marlene's death, and her hair is still a glossy blond edging on brown.

But there are hints to those who know her well enough- shoulders held a fraction too high, muscles strained from being tensed for so long, eyes flickering around the room too often. (And Merlin, Hestia can barely hold herself together long enough to drink the bloody cocoa.)

"I've been seeing Benjy Fenwick- he's the one who lost his sister in an attack a couple months ago, you know, from the Order meetings. The one with red hair," Dorcas is saying, "I think we might marry."

The words are heard but not understood. Hestia wants to choke on her outrage- Marlene's been dead for barely a month. And Dorcas is thinking about herself, her goddamn happiness? She doesn't deserve happiness. How dare she? How dare she?

But she doesn't say anything like that. Instead, she protests weakly, "You've barely known each other for six months, Dorcas. Don't you think you should wait? I mean. Mar- Marlene's been dead for only a month. Waiting sounds really good. Like, I don't even know him! What abo-"

Dorcas frowns, then reaches across the table gently. Her voice is soft when she speaks. "Oh, Hestia. We're in a war. You can't expect normal time limits for anything, love. There really isn't anything to do other than move on. And I did mourn for Mar." The word- the nickname- feels like a shot of pain right through her heart. She's avoided it for so long, and now Dorcas just tears down her barriers without any thought as to her feelings. "But as I said, we're in a war. One can't expect to mourn forever, not when love and life is so very short."

"Is that what you say to yourself, Dorcas?" Hestia's voice is unexpectedly ugly and venomous. "Is that what you say to let yourself sleep at night? Marlene's been dead for a month! Not a year! You can't be serious about this. You don't know Benjy. You don't know him, I don't know him, and I've never so much as heard of him! You want to know what I think? I think you're trying to tell yourself that you love him so that you can pretend that you actually feel anything instead of just fucking nothing for Marlene!"

Dorcas goes completely still, face bleaching of all color. For the briefest of moments there is a bone-deep, millennia-old terror written across her face, and Hestia wonders at her once-sister's refusal to acknowledge her own failings. (Once upon a time, that had been endearing.) But there has been too much pain and hurt for both of them. They don't have the luxury of ignorance, not when their world is being systematically broken into pieces too small to put together once more. (Even if they could, the world wouldn't be the same.)

"What did you say?!" Dorcas has recovered from her fear- outrage has taken its place. Before Marlene's death, Hestia would have mumbled some apologies and kept quiet (she knew Marlene would take care of this). The new Hestia narrowed her eyes and bared her teeth.

"You heard me."

Dorcas is sputtering in incoherent fury, and Hestia seizes the chance to leave. She has no intention of trying to repair this relationship- it is up to Dorcas, now, to make the first move. Hestia isn't sorry, and she respects Marlene's memory enough to stand up for what she believes in.

She will walk through the gates of fucking hell before she apologizes.

The next day, Hestia gets out of bed, and for the first time in a month, doesn't cry when she doesn't smell Marlene's pungent cigarettes. (Marlene, Hestia, and Dorcas shared a flat for only two weeks before Dorcas moved out. But both Marlene and Hestia are too lazy to look for their own home.)

It's still achingly empty, and it still feels like a part is missing, but it's no longer a debilitating injury.

She makes breakfast for herself (porridge with grapes) and takes a quick shower. She's running late to St. Mungo's, but there really isn't anything to worry about. She's only a trainee, and while in peacetime no one would have been given that freedom, in wartime even Squibs are coopted into either the Auror or Healer force.

Healer's Robes are a dark, dark red- they remind her even today of wine and Marlene and dried, crusted blood. The only difference between them and an Auror's Robes, though, is the silver sash that runs through an Auror's Robes, and the black one that runs from right hip to left shoulder on a Healer's. Hestia is a Healer, but Marlene was an Auror trainee, and they had often worn the others before realizing their mistake. (When Hestia wears Marlene's clothes, they are stiff with disuse and smoky sweet with her unique scent.)

And that is when she hears the doorbell ring. Instantly, she is up on her feet, wand in hand. Sparing a moment to her thoughts of getting as paranoid as Alastor, old girl, Hestia flicked her wand, lowering a few wards and letting some others rise instead. Few knew of the flat, and the few that did would never come without an owl or a message. Either something has happened or it is Death Eaters.

For a brief moment, all she wants to do is pretend she isn't home.

But she opens the door soon after, revealing a pale, drawn Remus Lupin. Hestia is sure this is because the full moon is in only a few days, but the haunting cry of painlossagony in his eyes causes her to falter.

"I- I'm so s-sorry, He-Hestia."

The world spins around her, a dizzying moment that spirals out from under her. Her voice is breathless to her own ears when she asks, voice slightly confused, "Sorry about what, Remus?"

He shakes his head. "She was a brilliant woman, she'd have gone far- the entire mission was botched up, I mea-"

"Sorry about what Remus!" Her voice has grown shrill with the worry; there is only one person she can think of for this. But that thought is too painful for even her mind, and so she leans forward, bracing her hands on Remus's shoulders. The words are different now, the urgency still present, but the shrieking gone. They are low, dangerous, and vicious. "Sorry about what?"

He finally raises his head, painful regret gleaming in his eyes. "Dorcas died yesterday night."

Hestia remains silent for a moment, the words not registering. Then she releases him, pushing him away at the same time she stumbles back. "No!"

The world feels like it's shattered at her feet, and Hestia doesn't know how to help herself. Her family has been dead for years, Marlene's was killed along with her, and Dorcas sent hers away. The Order has never been as close to her as it has been for some, and no one there will want to take her in. There's a war raging on her doorstep, and it's swept her two best friend's (family) into the midst.

All she wants to do is crumble on the ground.

A day later, Hestia travels to the Ministry and takes Dorcas's wand. It's light, especially compared to Marlene's darkness, but scrolled over with flowers and vines. The handle is worn smooth with use, and the pale wood is speckled with drops of blood.

She is told that she died bravely, wand in hand. Dorcas Meadowes, the quietly awkward Healer-trainee who told her family to leave for America or she would force them to, the fiercely protective friend who had never, not once, left for work without leaving a hangover potion for Marlene, the ambitious Prefect who had once proclaimed, after seeing the statistics between the Ministry and the Aurors, to become Minister just to fix everything, was dead. Dorcas, her last, first, only, best, perfect friend was dead.

And Hestia didn't know how to go on.

(Until the day she dies, Hestia carries her two best friends' wands in her purse.)

Hestia throws herself into work, and marries a young man a few years later- he's a refugee from Egypt, he says, and he doesn't know if he wants to fight in another war now that he's just survived one.

Hestia smiles (not brightly, like Dorcas, or sultry, like Marlene, but small, and quiet, and calm, like Hestia) and only nods her head. She doesn't want to fight, and she doesn't know if she can survive losing another.

But she doesn't count on her daughter, Sara, becoming a Gryffindor. And she really doesn't count on her insisting on fighting. It's the last battle, and Sara fights, and Hestia doesn't know because she's a continent, an ocean, and thousands of miles away, with her husband in Australia. And a small owl reaches them three days later (it's not even a person, anymore, to help lessen the loss) and between stark black letters and cream parchment and blue seal, Hestia's daughter is dead, a fourteen year old girl who could have done so much more than them all, a fourteen year old girl who is broken down before she could make the difference she'd so very much wanted to.

Hestia breaks, a little bit more, too, and wonders in the small part of her that isn't howling in agony how many times the human body (but really, she's talking about the heart) can bear the loss.

Ahmed and Hestia part ways a year later (it's too painful to wake up and see her in him, or for him to see Sara in her) amicably. Hestia's the one who moves out, out of the small flat she and Marlene and Dorcas chose when they were seventeen and whole. She doesn't want to stay among decades-old pain when there's a fresher one to deal with.

She sells all her investments and buys a small property in Wales (some part of her remembers a quiet Caradoc Dearborn laughing as he told the Order about the natural beauty in Wales) and moves into a homely cottage close to Carnedd Llewelyn. She hates the silence some days, hates the fact that when she wakes up at four in the morning no one is there to complain.

She hates the greenery, too, because it's just this side of too much, and she's moved in in the rainy season, and it's all grey-green-blue-black. There's little gold, like Sara's eyes, and less red, like her hair, and almost no life in this monotonous landscape that doesn't change for a good distance in any direction.

But when she wakes up, one day, it all feels lighter, watching the rain run down in sheets of heaven's tears, and when the sun peeks through the clouds after that, she runs outside in just her nightgown and twirls around and around before falling on the damp grass.

Hestia finds it hard to forgive, and even harder to forget her past, the pain and loss and regret that mars almost every action, so many words.

But time, while it doesn't heal all wounds, does make it easier to move past them. So when she hears a young girl shriek "Mar!" Hestia doesn't break down crying, but smiles and moves on. When a professional woman advises her with stiff formality, Hestia doesn't blank out. When a young woman with bright red hair and tanned skin and gold eyes cocks her head behind the counter, Hestia just keeps walking.

It's painful, it's tiring, but it's also good, like draining the pus from a patient. It feels good, and that's the only reason why she does it.

She's selfishly tired of loving and losing, but she can't help herself when she falls in love with him, a quiet farmer with a house not a few minutes' walk away. He has red hair, like Sara, but blue eyes, like Hestia, so it doesn't hurt too much.

Years later, Hestia lies on her death bed, wasting away with the Black blood in her veins (her mother was a Black). She's still beautiful, still elegant, still magical. But her skin is the color of porcelain and as translucent as paper, and looks worn.

She holds her husband's hand in hers, and wonders that she's the one telling her goodbyes, finally, after a lifetime of weeping at graves. But at least, she thinks, she can tell him her feelings, tell him her last words (thirty-fifty years and she still doesn't know Marlene's, Dorcas's, or Sara's last words) and leave him courageously.

She won't go out like her family, wand in hand, blazing down Death Eaters. Hestia has always been more graceful than that- she will give in to Death as easily as her family refused to bow to it.

But before that, she has to say her goodbyes. And there are many- more than she expected, in truth. Ahmed is there, and so is her husband, and half the little village she's lived in for thirty years visits at some time or another. She has friends and she doesn't know how to handle this unexpected outpouring of love and care, but her husband is there to calm her down and hold her safe when it all becomes too much.

When that, too, is over, though, Hestia doesn't know what to say. It's when she sees the lock of red hair (despite his age, her husband's hair has never greyed. It is jeweled perfection, and Hestia loves it) hanging against his pale collarbone that it comes to her.

"Don't- don't mourn for me." He looks up, blue eyes darkened with grief and already-present despair. "I'm not lost, love. We'll see each other soon." Her own eyes close against that knowledge, but its weight won't go away. Her husband is dying, and Hestia had been prepared to say another goodbye. It's only this sudden illness (bad blood) that lets her leave before him. "I promise."

He looks at her, this witch he'd loved and cared for, this woman who never told him who she was. In another world she has borne a child whose blood has grouted millennia-old floors with a millennia-old war, and healed those who have done the same. She's fought and protected and breathed through a war, and all he knows is that she is a capable doctor who can (sometimes) predict the future.

"Very well."

Their lips meet in a kiss that is achingly innocent, and perhaps because of that, her last breath is a puff against his lips, inside his mouth. She dies in the arms of her lover, entwined and kissing him. She loves him, and in the last moment, before she slumps over, body drained of both life and soul, she presses her mouth to his, smears lip gloss and lipstick (even on her deathbed Hestia will be beautiful), and shows a flash of fire that he will dream of every night until he, too, dies of a heart attack.

And so, ended the first (and last) of three girls sworn to be together until death.