So I lied. Another update before Christmas. I ended up spending a lot of time in New York City, in both the JFK and LaGuardia airports. It was a lot of downtime between flights I was never going to get on and so I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor with my laptop.

And so, prompt 10: Phoenix.


Red-Black-Beautiful

Marlene McKinnon is the smooth, dangerous kind of red-black-beautiful that Sirius has always hated in women. He doesn't know why he likes her; sometimes, in flashes of terror, he sees his mother in her face (he's always reveled in self-destruction).

She's the real Phoenix in the Order, he thinks, a dark, daring woman who is going to burn herself into ashes in the fight, just to rise again in greater glory. She's a darker Gryffindor than James and his golden, brash bravery; she fights because she's in love with it. She'll hold to the ideals, preach wizarding equality for all blood-status, but that's not why she laughs as she duels, tosses her lovely wild waves of dark hair over her shoulder and looks at death and laughs.

He bums a cigarette off her during the Order's Christmas party; mostly he just wants a reason to speak to her and she looks perfectly beautiful in the winter evening, smoke blown smoothly across glossy burgundy lips.

A cigarette turns into a pack (and later an addiction), a few drinks at the Muggle pub Marlene likes in Liverpool, a joint in the kitchen of her flat, and all their clothes littering her bedroom floor.

The way James talked about losing his virginity with Lily on their wedding night (all romance and candlelight) could not be farther from the night with Marlene; twenty-seven to his twenty, drunk, high, and no blushing virgin. Sirius might've thought she stole his virginity if he hadn't liked it so much, liked tangling his hands in her red-black hair and pulling down and owningthis beautiful monster just for a moment before she takes herself back (and, piece by piece, steals him back with her).

There's a phoenix tattoo on her lower back, on the right side as her waist flared into her hip, a rising phoenix in black and red etched into the soft, elegant curve. He likes to trace his hand over it while they talk in bed.

It's all something of a secret; Marlene isn't exactly running about giggling to her girlfriends (if she has any) and Remus, Peter and James have all been brought up with a saccharine idea of love and women and he'd rather not know what they have to say about the whole affair.

They'd probably think he was just being dangerous, rebellious, motor-bike owning Sirius, shagging some similarly dangerous, rebellious older woman to complete the image. He knows they wouldn't understand what he saw in her, what she saw in him, and he's glad they wouldn't.

He almost thinks he loves her (he knows it's stopped being just about sex and shared addictions, although what it's started being about isn't something he's quite figured out) but if he does, it's not anything worth pursuing. They're both proud, angry, selfish children.

When Marlene falls in a flare of verdant light, Sirius expects her to rise again. He expects her to spring out of her shell in a blaze of black and red and make herself anew, because surely that green isn't enough to extinguish the black fire burning in her eyes.

She's a Phoenix, and that's what they do, isn't it?