"…And since the raid on the Hogwarts Express two weeks ago, we're happy to report that all the rescued muggleborn students have been relocated to Rostock Sanctuary," the host is saying. "Fantastic work they're doing over there, truly. We can't be more thankful. Now, for the less fortunate news, we'll move onto the deathlist for the week…"

"Turn that thing off," Marlene says as she steps out of the trees, tucking her lighter into her pocket. She snorts a bit of ash out of her nose.

Regulus casts a glance at her. "It's not that bad," he says.

"I don't want to hear another deathlist. And it's not really the time."

"You're the one who chose to burn it on Direct Action night," Regulus responds, but he turns the radio off on the top and shoves it into his jacket. He's sitting cross-legged in the dirt. They're about half a mile away from The Mill and Millicent, which is a great fireball as bright and hot as the sun through the trees.

Marlene sits down beside him. "You barely helped this time," she accuses, not meaning it.

"Aside from making sure there was nobody in there?"

"Not my top priority."

"You're a psychopath," Regulus tells her. "There's no heart in there."

"Oh, come off it. It's not yours either."

He shrugs. "I'm more willing to hear the deathlist out than you."

"That's sort of worse."

"Maybe." He digs a hard line with the nail of his index finger down the joint sticking out of the top of his wrist, until it goes red and blood-wrought, dark against the pale expanse of his skin.

Marlene leans back to lie in the dirt. "They'll start searching the trees soon," she says conversationally.

Regulus lies back too. They both stare at the sky through the heavy dark spires of trees, high and thin around them.

"Yeah," he agrees. "We should move."

"Next hit's risky enough that we'll probably have to get past some guards."

"Exciting," Regulus remarks.

Marlene nods. She digs a hand into her pocket and wraps a fist around her knife, squeezing it. "I agree."

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Regulus reach slowly into his own jacket, grabbing his blade very tight. His arm goes taut with tension, the tendon of his wrist sticking out. They both lie there for some time, quiet and uncomfortable, holding their weapons close just in case someone comes through the trees. Or just in case the other lunges for them.

It has been like this for some time. Almost two months. Three more hits since Regulus arrived, and they haven't been caught yet, which Marlene considers on some days to have been dumb luck, and on others to have been divine intervention, and on others still to have been a result of her marvelous brain at work.

"You know," Regulus says after a while, "You can talk about it to me. If you want."

Marlene sits bolt upright. "That's not funny."

He cracks up laughing. "It sort of is."

Huffing out of her nose, Marlene stands up. She pulls her knife out and flips it in her hand twice. "This isn't a fight you can win."

"I could make you bleed a bit. Ruin your clothes, you know," Regulus offers. He stands up. "Sorry if that hit a bit close to home."

"Oh, shut up."

He laughs still. It has become a joke between them, a gallows-humour, we may die here sort of joke. Mary's dead and it's easier to marrionette her corpse around between them than to hold a fucking vigil.

Marlene shoves him hard enough that he almost falls over, stupid skinny knobbly knees knocking together. He shoves her right back.

"Come on," she tells him. "Let's get out of here."

Regulus follows her through the trees, both of them holding their weapons out in front of them, neither speaking. Marlene feels like an exposed wire. Like any touch could set her off. She knows she's got ash on her face and imagines that it makes her look tough. Intimidating. If it doesn't, may the knife do the trick, she supposes, and tightens her grip on it still.

Slovenia is very still. It lies cold and beautiful this autumn, thick with green trees and broad lakes, like no place Marlene has ever seen. There are mountains on every horizon, as far as the eye can see, and it makes the world feel boxy, like if you ran you would always end up running out of road. It's a hotspot for death eater strongholds, and they've got a laundry list of places to hit here, but it was Regulus' idea to start with the Mill and Milicent, a wizarding pub in an English-speaking area, dominated by German wizarding apostates shunted to the south by Grindelwald's defeat. Blood purist scum without the titles or land to call themselves nobility, but not poor by any stretch either. Marlene hopes that as they watch their crappy pub burn, they fear it's only the beginning. Little do they know what's coming to them.

"We're still staying at that hostel you picked out?" Regulus asks her, as they trek through the heavy trees. Far behind them, smoke blackens the empty grey sky.

"Yeah," Marlene confirms. "It's far enough out of the way of wizarding territory that they won't look."

"I know that. I heard you the first time. You know I do listen to the things you say."

"Some of the time."

"I remember the last book you read," Regulus defends. "I remember what you wore yesterday. I pay attention to things."

Marlene hums. "Perhaps you should pay less attention to the things I wear and more to where you're stepping."

"What?"

She trips him up. Regulus goes flying to the ground and almost stabs himself with his own knife, grunting. He pulls the blade from under him and he promptly rolls over and sticks it right into Marlene's shin.

"Shit!" she yells, and pulls it out, spattering blood with the backswing across Regulus' face. "You little cunt."

Regulus grins at her with yellowish teeth. "Watch where you're stepping too."

Marlene wheels back her foot and kicks him once in the shoulder, hard enough to send him rolling through the dust. Then, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a roll of bandages, wrapping them tight and haphazard around her bleeding leg, on the outside of her clothes. It'll probably get infected and she doesn't have the presence to really care.

"Little prick," she snaps. "I'll get you back for that one."

Regulus pulls himself to his feet and spits out a mouthful of dirt. "I think you dislocated my shoulder," he groans. "Pop it back in for me?"

"No. You get to live with your mistakes."

He hacks up another glob of black dust and hoicks it at her. It lands on the front of Marlene's jacket and she wipes it off with her sleeve.

Most days are like this.

"Come on," Marlene says, and tests her weight on her injured leg. "I'll fix it at the motel."

"It's three miles away."

"Better get walking then."

Regulus sighs. "I'll pop it in myself."

Dorcas,

It's getting colder already! It feels like summer left too qui

There's this quote I read in a book the other day, it reminded me of you. It goes, 'What delight! What felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?' What ARE men to rocks and mountains? Nothing to us, anyway. Or they weren't. I don't know what to s

I've been thinking of you a lot latel

I'm trying not to lie.

In the end, Marlene puts his shoulder back in place for him. He whaps her upside the head for her troubles and she hits him right back. They walk all the way to Kamnik in comfortable silence.

Violence is a language familiar to both of them. Regulus told her once, a few weeks ago, that his mother threw him all the way down the stairs when he was eleven and he broke a handful of bones. Marlene laughed and he laughed too.

They sleep well that night, proud of the day's work, tucked into a bunk bed in the hostel. Marlene takes the top bed and Regulus the bottom one, and he only comes awake gasping and heaving twice in the night, not shouting out or making a scene. They can't afford to draw attention and even in sleep he seems to know that, which Marlene appreciates. At least he can do something right.

They eat breakfast bought with stolen money the following morning, standing under the awning of a closed-down bike shop on the corner at the edge of town. Regulus chews on an apple and Marlene tears chunks out of a stale half-loaf of white bread and eats until she is more than full.

"You want me to go scope out our next hit today?" Regulus asks, rolling an apple pip between his fingers like he'd very much like to bury it in one of his little cuts.

Marlene considers that. "It'll be dangerous today."

"It always is."

"That's the spirit. It's a train ride out," she warns.

Regulus takes the pip between his teeth and crunches it. A little taste of cyanide. He is holding death in his hands like Eve.

"I'll jump the turnstile," he says. "What are you doing today?"

"I'm going to buy petrol," Marlene sniffs. "They've got a hardware place somewhere in this town, I asked someone about it on the bus the other day. And I need a new lighter, too."

She feels Regulus watching her. "It'll be dangerous today," he echoes back to her.

Marlene shrugs. "I've almost run out of paper, too. So it'll have to be today."

"No wonder you've run out, for all of it you throw away."

"I'm nothing if not persistent." It's a lie; Marlene is one of the least persistent people she knows. She'll bite once and not again. But it's a decent excuse for someone who doesn't know her very well, and if there's anybody in the world who doesn't understand her, it's Regulus Black.

He nods. "Then go for it. If you die, I'm abandoning our great Bonney-and-Clyde arsonist shtick and taking a flight to Australia to live out my days as a hermit."

Marlene considers that, swallowing the last of the bread. Quick as a whip, she snaps her hands up to the side of Regulus' face and claps, right beside his ear. He flinches so hard he drops his apple. It rolls away down the road.

"Ha," she says. "You wouldn't be able to stick the fugitive life."

"We're already living the fugitive life," Regulus scowls, running a hand through his hair. It's in need of a cut.

"Yes, but we're living it in a different county every week. It's less paralysing that way."

"Speak for yourself. I would take being an national fugitive over being an international one any day," Regulus replies, staring pensively out past the road and to the lake stretching beyond the town. The still, flat surface of it gleams in the rising sun, and it seems to stretch out forever, out and out to distant mountains rising like monoliths, small gods, into the clear heavens.

"That explains why you're still here," Marlene replies smartly.

Regulus kicks her hard, the toe of his boot digging in. "If anyone asks us, you're holding me hostage. You took me against my will and you're forcing me to help you on your wild, criminal escapades. I didn't start the fire."

"Says the one who stabbed me last night."

"An escape attempt. You cracked my shoulder out."

"You almost broke my nose last week."

"The operative word being 'almost'. Last time I checked, they don't lock up 'almost' criminals."

"You should ask someone about what attempted murder is."

"Well, if I go down for it, you're going down with me," he replies, and then wraps his arms tight around himself, shivering even though it's a warm day. "I need a new coat. Steal one for me?"

"You forced my hand," Marlene mocks. "You're taking me against my will to help you on your wild, criminal escapades. I didn't start the fire."

"That's a yes?"

"Do a good job scouting the base out, and I'll consider it," Marlene agrees. "It's not even a cold day. You know we might have to go north at some point, right? There are some real bastards in Denmark, I've heard. And Norway. The people who run Durmstrang, that type."

Regulus goes still for a moment, deadly so, almost paralysed. "Maybe we can split up for that," he says. "I'm not going back to Norway."

Marlene pokes at that tension, digs knuckles in tight. "You scared?"

"You know me. I'm scared of everything." He's joking. Joking despite the change in his voice, in his face. Dancing his own corpse around this time, which is a refreshing change.

"I was aware," Marlene says dryly. "What happened there, anyway?"

Regulus is no longer joking as he says, "I'm going to get on the train," and steps away from her.

"Regulus-"

But he's already striding off down the street, no hesitation in it. Marlene stares after him, unsure whether to shout after him. Coward, perhaps. Get back here. Or maybe, the trains don't run this early.

In the end she says nothing.

The hardware shop is right on the other end of the town. Kamnik itself is tiny, barely fifteen hundred people to it. Marlene grew up in a small town, in Northern Ireland until the Troubles broke her family into small chunks and she and her mother and uncles ended up in northern England. She's used to small places, liminal spaces, how people eye you like a stranger when you don't look like you belong, so she doesn't pay it any mind as she strolls through the streets to her destination.

By the time she finds the place, it's mid-morning. The sky is absent of any clutter here, almost never cloudy. The sun is always hard to find. Hiding behind some mountain somewhere. It makes the world feel very empty. It's going to be a warm day; not hot but not cold either, it'll be.

A scuffed backroad leads to the line of industrial trade etched along the west end of the town, thick with overgrown brown weeds and heavy, dappled grey stones, small lines of them, scattered like crops. Marlene catches a glimpse of herself in the glass storefront as she approaches and doesn't recognise herself for a moment. She walks with her legs further apart than she used to, set at shoulder-width to keep herself sturdy. Sallow-faced and heavy-footed, she looks like a ghost washed up on the shores of the lake. Something the fucking mountain lions dragged in.

A bit unsettled, she reaches the door and opens it slowly, reaching up to keep the bell above the door from ringing.

The inside isn't pretty, the high ceiling thick with metal pipes and brash foil-like insulation, bulging in heavy clumps through gaps in the tiling. There are half a dozen tight-pressed aisles, full of sheets of material, tools, nails, rope.

Marlene can't see anyone around; she glances at the desk at the back, for checking out items, and it's empty. The air is very still.

Shoving her hands into her pockets, she starts towards the last aisle along, which will put her out of sight of the doors. Perhaps today she'll get lucky and not have to whittle away so much of their dwindling funds after all.

The back aisle is all fishing materials. Nets, reels, lines, poles, bait. It stinks. There's a row of heavy, dark canvas jackets against the back wall, presumably for going out boating with. Marlene occupies herself fumbling through them, glancing at the price tags. Out of her range, but hey, that's never stopped her. She glances around again. Still, there's nobody around. No staff, no customers.

With one hand, Marlene pulls one jacket off the hook and shuffles it around her shoulders, shoving her hands through the arms. There's a thin mirror beside the rack and she looks at herself and almost laughs. It's far too big for her, the lapels folded back, the neckline flipped up. The coat hangs halfway down her calves. It makes her shapeless. A flat, canvas-textured shadow. A weary fisherman. Something that is not her.

"Huh," she murmurs, and fumbles her fingers along the sleeve, feeling it between her fingers. It won't provide much warmth, but it's got a hood. She looks larger than she is in it. Stronger.

The bell rings.

Marlene freezes. Very slowly, she turns on her heel and ducks down behind the end of the aisle, then peers around it towards the front door.

There's a figure stepping inside, in a canvas jacket much like her own. Sloping shoulders and long, gangly legs. A teenager, made blurry and dark by the light behind him.

From behind the desk across the shop, a worker pops up, obviously having been in a basement storeroom. She says something in Slovene.

"Uh," the teenager replies. British accent. "I don't." He gestures vaguely.

"Ah." The worker clears her throat. "I help?"

"I'm okay, thank you," the teen says quickly. He gestures to the wall beside the door, hung thick with cables and chains, like the type you'd tie your bike up with. "I can, uh. Um."

The worker nods, looking mildly uncomfortable, before clunking back downstairs again.

Marlene breathes out once, slowly, and then back in. Very silently, she slips from this aisle to the next. She hesitates and reaches out a hand to snag a heavy tank of petrol from the bottom shelf. It must be six litres at least; it weighs her down and she staggers a bit, feet thumping the floor.

The teenager looks around, blinking. Marlene barely gets out of the way in time, panting, holding the handle tight in both hands as she hovers against the back wall, hidden. Waiting.

She hears him hesitate and then turn back to the wall.

"Fuck," Marlene breathes. Tenuously slowly, she creeps back to the very back aisle and ducks down there, out of sight. She can wait for him to go and then make her escape.

The kid takes an inordinately long amount of time to pick out a chain, and then doesn't just pick one; he takes a whole long loop of bicycle chain off the wall and counts out the metres. Like he's trying to get as much as possible. Eventually, he loops the whole thing into a coil and hauls it over to the front desk, dropping it on there gently.

"Hello?" he calls. "I'm ready to pay."

Marlene peers out at him again. She watches him turn to look out of the front windows, and then— then she recognises him.

It's Remus fucking Lupin.

"Oh, you motherfucker," she whispers.

The shop attendant climbs out of the basement again, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. She stares from the chains back up at Lupin, and then shrugs and rings him up.

Marlene can't hear them talk, can't even hear the birds outside, the lake rushing; all she can hear is the fierce, dark pounding of her heart between her lungs. It whips up a great roaring in her ears, so loud she can hear nothing past it. She feels her pulse jumping in her neck.

Chains. Remus, here, after last night. It all makes too much sense.

She watches him wave a hand in thanks to the attendant before wrapping the chains in a great loop around his arm and heaving them off the table. Lupin staggers to the door and elbows it open, disappearing into the brightness of the vacant morning.

The attendant watches him with narrow eyes for a while, before going back down to the storeroom again, leaving Marlene alone.

Marlene no longer wants to look like a fisherman, she decides, as she stands up and jogs for the door, stepping into the sunlight with her petrol in one hand, the coat cold around her shoulders. She wants to look like a tropical storm. She wants to look tempestuous. Squalling.

She stands in the light of day for a few moments, blinking into the sunlight and at the empty road, and then decides that she doesn't care if they catch her; she turns around and goes back in for more petrol. And, she supposes, a coat for Regulus too.

They reconvene by the lake. It feels very duplicitous, like they're meeting to trade bags of coke or something similarly more fun than the reality of their situation. Marlene gets there first and sits with her legs dangling from the seawall, arms folded around the railings, waiting for him. The morning slides into afternoon. Boats glide silent and gentle from the lakeside towards the horizon, far away, greener than this side. Her petrol tanks sit on either side of her.

"I got you paper," Regulus greets as he sits beside her, sticking his legs out over the end and kicking the backs of his heels against the wall. He crosses his arms on the middle railing, mirroring her. "I figured you'd forget."

"I did," Marlene admits. "I got you a coat."

They watch each other. Regulus pulls out a sheaf of yellow paper, wrapped in brown twain. Marlene tugs the rolled-up fisherman's coat from her lap, matching her own. Like a hostage exchange, they snatch each other's spoils at the same moment.

Marlene runs a thumb over the yellow paper. "Thanks."

"Thanks yourself." Regulus sniffs contemptuously, pulling the coat on. They match. "This is too big for me."

"Don't complain about things you can't do anything about."

"That's why I spend most of my time complaining about you," he jibes, and waves the knife in his sleeve at her.

Marlene hasn't been afraid he'll slit her throat in her sleep for a few weeks now, but he doesn't need to know that. Putting your guard down puts you in prime position to get fucked over and she's not in the business of choking on her own blood; not yet, anyway.

"I thought it was just because you enjoy biting the hand," she snipes.

Regulus shrugs. "Never had a hand before."

"The Blacks are millionaires."

"And I never exactly had a trust fund."

"Suppose that would've been your brother," she admits.

Regulus considers that. He shrugs, balling cut-up hands into the coat. "Well, I'm not the spare anymore."

"You think you'll go back and take up the mantle someday?"

"Merlin, no. Let that family rot."

Marlene hums. "I didn't think you thought that."

"I didn't think that," Regulus says shortly. "I do now."

She watches him out of the corner of her eye, running the pad of her thumb up and down the edge of the paper, almost willing a papercut into it. Regulus keeps battering his heels into the wall, child-like, and doesn't look back at her, eyes weighing down on the lake, glued to a distant, hazy horizon which the mist soon will swallow.

"We should get drunk sometime," she says. "You'll cry like a baby about it all and then I'll have blackmail."

"You've already got plenty of blackmail," Regulus protests.

"Like how your regular blood treachery has ascended international borders and accrued about a million euros of property damage," Marlene agrees thoughtfully.

"That's a low estimate."

"That's because I'm taking most of the credit there."

Regulus laughs through his nose. A bit like when air goes out of a dead person.

"I've got blackmail on you too," he offers. "I read your letters when you throw them away."

"You think I don't know that?" Marlene asks, even though she didn't until he mentioned it. "You're not as subtle as you think you are."

He nods, like he's taking on board the criticism of his shoddy execution of duplicity so he can do it better next time. "You quote things a lot. Books I know you haven't read."

"I've read 'Pride and Prejudice'," Marlene defends.

"Yeah, but not recently."

"The quote stuck with me."

Regulus shrugs a shoulder. "You should try to speak with your own face on," he says after a short pause. "Without a quote to put someone else's words in your own mouth."

"I didn't ask for you to psychoanalyse me."

"Better than divination, isn't it? I'd rather the muggles overdiagnose me than the wizards tell me death is hunting me. I would always get the grim," Regulus says morosely.

"Me too," Marlene lies.

"Well," he replies, "if we are being chased by death, she'll have to wait until we're done getting away from these men first."

Marlene claps her hands. "What do you know? Regale me."

"Unsavoury folks. It's not a large complex. An old manor house, converted from a church. 1800s, perhaps earlier. The rafters aren't charmed to hold up, I checked. It should catch alight easily, if we start it on the roof."

"It'll be tricky," Marlene says.

"So you want another way?"

"Of course not. Keep going."

Regulus clears his throat. "It's isolated," he says. "On the far side of a river, five miles from the estuary the train stops at. A long walk, and a lot of forest to hide in. It'll have to be in and out. They've got guards."

"Stupid-looking ones?"

"Oh, just the stupidest."

"Perfect," Marlene remarks. "What else?"

"Two floors and a basement," Regulus rattles off. "Flat roof. The mortar's old, pre-war the last time it was redone, so it'll burn easily. Muggle-made, which tipped me off that the place is stolen, not an ancestral home."

"None of these bastards have the money for ancestral homes."

"Or the class," Regulus sniffs. "They've only been based there for ten years, fifteen at a stretch. Rotating cast of clowns, too. I think it works as a stronghold for whichever big one is in the area at the time. It's death eaters in there right now."

He looks at her then, full in the face. Rare for the both of them, for their incessant push-and-pull, how cruel the grinding rhythm of their distrust can be.

"They've got prisoners in the basement," he says. "I think. I can't be sure, but it sounded like it."

Marlene doesn't know what to say for a moment. It takes every inch of her willpower not to ball her fists up in her lap. She searches Regulus' face. He searches hers right back and does not look away.

Eventually, she raises her chin. "And?"

"My thoughts exactly," Regulus agrees simply.

"I didn't think so."

He shrugs. "Whatever they've done to get in that basement, they'll die anyway. With the security of the place… they're not civilians. Order members, maybe. Probably not, but maybe."

"Speaking of which," Marlene puts in. "Remus Lupin is here."

Regulus stares. "What?"

"I saw him in the hardware shop. He didn't see me."

"Merlin."

"He was buying chains," Marlene says, frowning. "Metal chains."

Regulus turns to look at the ocean. "You think he's hunting us."

"It makes sense for the Order to send someone after us. They're too noble for this shit. And… he's with the Order… I think he might be here with Dorcas." Marlene swallows. "To bring me back."

"Well," Regulus says, with very blunt simplicity. "It doesn't make much sense. They wouldn't send him to chain you up and drag you home. We're wizards."

"Nobody can use magic. They would if they wanted me smuggled back over international borders."

"How would they know the arson was you?"

"Dorcas knows," Marlene says immediately. "She knows me well enough. She's figured it out."

She can't know that for sure, but it's a nice thought.

Regulus looks dubious. "Why would they send two teenagers, then? Especially a werewolf."

"Since when has the Order made good decisions?"

"Fair," Regulus admits. "It still doesn't sound plausible to me."

"I'm just saying that we should keep our guard up."

"And I'm just saying that you're getting paranoid."

Marlene barks a laugh. "You say that like I wasn't paranoid before. And like you're not, too. We both eat, sleep, breathe paranoia."

Regulus, seeming to know he isn't going to win this argument, sighs. "Speaking of paranoia," he says. "They've got spikes on the roof. We'll have to do something about that."

"Hmm."

"My thoughts exactly."

Marlene clicks her fingers. "You can climb a tree," she says. "Take a big stick, lean across, drape some insulation across it. We can steal some. That fluffy brown shit they use to isolate sound."

He stares. "Are you crazy?"

"It'll make us quiet, too. And it burns quick."

"The spikes will go right through."

"I won't need to be up there long. Five minutes, probably less."

Regulus shakes his head. "We need to deal with the guards too. We would do better with another person."

"Unless you want to go employ the werewolf, I think we're stuck with just the two of us."

He exhales heavily. "At least I'm needed. A downpayment on our continued survival. Life insurance."

"That's what I will be referring to you as from now on."

"Oh joy. Objectification."

"It's what you get for reading my letters," Marlene responds. She heaves herself to her feet. There isn't a lick of wind on the air today, but she leans against the railing and wills it to rush through her anyway, cold and unable to forgive.

Regulus stands too. "We do it on Sunday night," he says. "There'll be less people then."

"I don't think they're the religious type."

He shakes his head. "If they go out poaching for muggles, it'll be then."

Marlene stares at him. Then she laughs, half disbelieving, a cold swell rushing over her. "Christ, I hate you pureblood monsters. I hate every one of you."

"It's just tradition to do it on Sundays. I didn't make it."

"I'd kill you if I didn't need you, you know that?"

"It's a wonder I haven't done it myself," Regulus responds, looking a bit lost even as he says it, as if he's not sure that he means it. One of his hands goes up the other sleeve to dig a great divot into the flesh of his forearm.

"Come on. Hostel. We'll plan out the small details."

Regulus nods. He turns to watch the lake one last time. When Marlene looks him in the face, he has an expression like he's staring down an old enemy. Inevitability. She's tempted to push him right back into the cold black water.

Dorcas,

Feels weird writing to you now. I saw Lupin earlier. Did you know he's here? Are you with him? I don't know who I'm asking. Perhaps the vague spectre of you that exists in my head. You are as much a ghost as she is now. I dreamt that I drowned you last night. You bloated like a dead fish.

Regulus said I shouldn't talk with someone else's face on. I don't see how his advice is worth anything, since it's his nightmares I'm having now. Sometimes I wonder if he dreams of fire in turn. We aren't alike, me and him, but I worry that we're becoming similar, our awful twisted selves all knotted up in each other, this horrible symbiotic mess we have created. He is lying more. I can tell. We try to kill each other everyday and we've been trying harder since Autumn started.

I should be careful when I throw this one out. I'll say this, to the you that I'm writing to, this character in my head who exists in the common room, by the window, writing to your parents in broken something-or-other. I never asked the language. I never asked a lot of things. I'll say this to you: do yourself a favour, and don't find me.

- Marlene.

PS: Proud of me? Nothing crossed out. Except this: we might kill this time. And I am not afraid of it. I am not afraid of anything. Except you.

"I despise you," Regulus says. "I despise you, and your fucking games."

"Get in the tree."

"I've never climbed a tree in my life."

"Seriously?"

Regulus squints at her. "I grew up with Walburga Black as a mother," he snaps. "I learned how to stitch my own wounds before I learned how to tie my own shoelaces."

"And what age were you then? Sixteen?" Marlene mocks.

He spits at her. "Eleven."

"Talk to a shrink," she recommends. "I'll find you one myself. After you get in the tree."

Regulus grits his teeth, staring from Marlene to the tall oak. Then, all the air seems to go out of him.

"Help me," he snaps.

Marlene shuffles over and drops to one knee, linking her hands together over it, palms up. "Step on."

Regulus blinks at her and then obliges. She lifts him and they wobble for a moment, both of them, before his hand finds a branch above and he pulls himself up onto it.

Grey daylight peeters through the leaves overhead. They're just inside the copse of dark evergreens that surrounds the Sedem Delov house, out of sight of the guards stationed outside the huge wooden doors at the front. The building is tall, narrow and stocky. It stands like a matchstick against the sky.

"Lay it down," Marlene instructs. "Get up there. Spread the petrol. Then pull the tripwire. And then stay fucking put. Got it?"

Above her, Regulus' shadowed face twists. "If I die here, I will haunt you," he says. "I'm not joking. I'll follow you as a ghost until- until-"

"Until I die too," Marlene replies. "Won't be long now. We can annoy each other in the afterlife. Making each other miserable for the rest of our days."

He spits again, and misses her again. Then, he turns to look up, foot finding another branch, sloped towards the sky. Regulus begins to climb.

Marlene shakes the tension out of her hands. She looks away from him; if he falls and snaps his neck, she would rather not see, though she'd never tell him that. Very quietly, she pads to the treeline, stooping under a raised, wizened root at the base of a heavy old oak and peering out across the grass towards the house.

It has a basement alright; she can see it peeking from the weather-sunken foundations, raised ever so slightly from the ground. A wooden partition, the house's floor and the cellar's ceiling, splits it from the higher walls. The stone there is paler, not aged by sunlight as much as the rest of the house. A wine cellar back in the old days before the war. Now something far more valuable.

The guards don't look much like they want to be there. One looks half asleep, slumped leaning against the closed doors with his arms folded. The other is completely asleep, sitting on the ground with his back to the stone wall. Regulus was right about them looking stupid. The death eaters with any skill will all be in France now, managing the Accord. Managing PR for death eater prime too, Marlene suspects, since even Direct Action seems to have finally caught on to the fact that he's been suspiciously absent from the public eye as of late, and it takes about as long as is possible for them to catch on to much of anything.

There's a creak in the trees; Marlene glances over her shoulder. Regulus is high up, clambering down a thick bough towards the rooftop, where it juts into a patch of the forest thirty yards away. Easy pickings. Neither of the guards even looks up. Marlene thinks she could probably walk right up to them, douse them in petrol and set them alight and they wouldn't stop her in time.

Regulus reaches the very end of the bough, crouching to cling to it with both hands. Against the sky, he looks very still, fingers dug around the branch like the claws of a bird. Marlene watches the subtle flexing of his back, how he breathes in, then out.

Very gently, he pulls a hand off the bough. It creaks dangerously; he sways. For one tense moment, Marlene is sure he'll fall, but he doesn't, balancing perfectly. In a tenuous movement, he reaches back and over his shoulder and snares the slab of insulation from his backpack, pulling it out. The zip tears open and the huge mass of it expands against his jack, outside of its confines. One of the guards looks up for a moment and then back down, Regulus too far around the side of the house to see without turning their heads, which the guards are obviously too stupid to do.

Marlene's breath is caught in her throat; she can't dislodge it. She looks back at Regulus, who is holding the spongy insulation in one hand against his back. She wills him to move, move, move, move.

With uncharacteristic bravery, Regulus reaches out, throwing the insulation onto the spikes. Then he lunges from the end of the branch and lands on his knees on top of it.

He was right, as Marlene suspected he would be; the spikes pierce right through into his knees. She watches Regulus' mouth open inhumanly wide in a mercifully silent scream. He rolls off the spikes and onto the flat middle of the roof, gasping quietly with pain. There is blood on his hands as he clutches his legs with them.

Marlene almost feels bad. Almost. What she feels mostly is frustration. Tripwire. Pull it. Pull it.

Regulus lies there panting for almost too long, curled into a ball. Even from this far away, Marlene can pick apart the small details of him. Blueish skin, hair in need of a cut, mostly in his eyes. Knobbly wrists and bony hands covered in small cuts. It hits her that she has come to understand him better than she understands herself.

He drags himself to his feet and limps to the very edge of the roof. There is a pause in which he stares at Marlene with a very hard look on his face.

Marlene raises the tank of petrol at her side, as if to say, cheers.

Regulus flips her off. He raises the spool of wire from his pocket, leading back into the forest west of Marlene, and gives it a great tug.

There is a sound like a gunshot as the severed branch they cut down earlier falls through the trees and to the ground, cracking as it hits the rocky earth. Birds rise in a dark mass to the sky, a cloud of them.

Both guards' heads snap up. They begin speaking in low voices to each other. Slovene or Austrian. Perhaps Hungarian; Hungary isn't far from here.

Come on. Cowards. Go.

One guard, the taller, more awake one, pulls his colleague to his feet. They look at each other and then around through the trees, missing Marlene, because of course they missed Marlene; she's too good at this. Then, they set off into the trees west of her, across the grass right under Regulus. Into the undergrowth to see what the disturbance was.

Marlene doesn't stop to check both ways. She stands and leaps over the raised root, sprinting headlong across the grass to the doors. Wind whips her face and each footstep rings impact through her like a gunshot. Bam bam bam. With fumbling hands she uncaps her tank of petrol and tips it. Clear fuel pours, oily and globular, in great watery gulps from the opening.

There is no time to think of technique, to think of anything except time itself, time and the fire. Marlene jogs in a long circle from the doors to the hooking corner of the outer wall and around it, splashing petrol in great unhinged masses across the dark earth at the base of the house. It hits the wooden foundations and drips into the ground. Above, she can hear Regulus doing his own rounds, thinks she can hear his small noises of pain but cannot be sure of it. She makes it around the next corner and floods the pitted black earth along the back of the house, and the far side too, the ground there scattered with torn chunks of industrial insulation, stuck in the grass like snow.

Regulus pours a great mass of fuel over the side, tripping it down the flat stone wall in a clinging trail. It connects Marlene's ring of fire and his own ritual circle, vow-like. Then he dumps his empty canister and leaps for the tree branch.

Marlene doesn't stop to see if he made it. She's already running for the trees again, trailing masses of petrol in her wake, a trail of it through the grass. She has barely made it back to her root, to the treeline, into the shade of it when she hears the men making their way back through the forest, talking in low voices.

She looks up; Regulus is spidering along the creaking branch, smearing blood and fuel in dark trails along the wood. He barely makes it to the part of the bough thick enough to stand on before the men step out of the trees.

Out in the open and exposed, he makes a daring jump, on his feet, for the tree trunk. One of his feet catches and for a moment, Marlene thinks he'll fall, but he wrangles a hand around a solidary knot on the trunk and uses it to swing himself down, down, from branch to branch until he is on the forest floor. He hits it running, sprinting silently off into the dark woods. Deserter. That's nothing new.

Marlene ducks her head low. The guards are halfway back to the house by now, but some part of the commotion seems to have reached them. One of them turns but the other doesn't stop. They seem to think it's a wasted effort.

"Thank Merlin," Marlene breathes. She doesn't have long now until they smell the petrol. Until they realise they've been duped.

She drops the empty tank, not caring that it clatters. In one movement, she pulls the lighter from her long coat and flicks it open, pressing the flame to the edge of the pearly trail of fuel with shaking hands. She makes this a prayer; she makes this burning a warning.

Fire licks up in the grass. Marlene watches, hungry, as it scorches in a great hissing trail to the west side of the house, to the sunken pit of the cellar.

When the flame hits the side of the building, it rises roaring up the trail Regulus left it, up and up to the rafters. It's already catching in the foundations, fire rising in a great coffin-shaped mass from the ground, its unholy hands casting black ash across the stone.

Marlene stands up. She can't stop watching it. She puts the lighter back into her pocket and brushes her teeth against her lip, trying to find something to bite. She stares as flame lurches in a great, wide arc around the outside.

The guards start shouting. One of them raises their wand. No, some unwell part of her says, no, let it burn, let it keep on dying.

A hand on her arm. Regulus is there, stinking of blood and soil. "You would have left me to die," he says.

"Of course I would," Marlene responds. She pulls out her knife. "Help me?"

Regulus stares from her to the blade. He pulls out his own and clinks it against hers, as if to say, cheers. Marlene thinks he might kill her in that split-second, might plunge the knife deep into her guts, but he just turns and heads out of the trees. She follows him.

The house burns for hours. They leave the guards on the grass, both of them unconscious. The fire might spread to them, Marlene doesn't know. As intimately as she knows fire, she is not of a technical mind, not this afternoon, anyway.

She and Regulus sit like birds in a tree on the east side. Regulus rolls his trousers up and Marlene daps antiseptic into the wounds without much care for being gentle. They breathe in the thick woodsmoke. They do not speak. If the prisoners in the basement are screaming, it isn't audible. All they can hear is the crackling of the fire, the thunder-crack pounding and snapping of the foundations of the house crumbling to pieces.

"They really hurt," Regulus tells her as the sky goes dark. "I think I felt them scrape bone."

"No you didn't," Marlene dismisses, even though she can see glints of white poke through the gouged flesh in bright, small pockmarks. "You're fine."

He leans sideways against her. It isn't affection; he's probably afraid he'll fall otherwise. "Hurts," he repeats, more insistent.

"Oh, shut up."

"One of these days, you'll get hurt on one."

Marlene shows him the jagged scar through the edge of her lips. "First job," she explains.

"You got caught?"

She tripped and fell on a rock as she was running away. "I got into a knife fight with a French mob boss on the way out."

"Far less valiant than me," Regulus says, "we can agree on that."

"Sure," Marlene agrees. Regulus' cheek is cold against her shoulder. She would like to shove it off but she doesn't. "Either way, there's nothing broken."

"A miracle."

"It's a miracle that they didn't catch you."

Regulus squints down through the trees at the guards lying in the grass. Knocked out with the butt of Marlene's knife, bleeding a bit but not enough that it'll kill them. "I've never killed someone before."

"Before now," Marlene corrects.

"I only did the roof."

"Are we working from technicalities?"

"I would rather that," he admits, sounding exhausted. Bone-deep tired. Like he would like to sleep and not wake up.

"Okay," Marlene agrees, rather than pick this fight. She will pick and pick and pick another day. "We should go soon. They'll come back soon, the other death eaters. A miracle they weren't in the house."

"Sunday," Regulus says knowingly.

It isn't a comforting thought. "Poaching, you called it."

"The Blacks never did it. We're not particularly active people. Some families do it like muggle families hunt foxes."

"Did Sirius know that?"

Regulus goes dead still against her. "Yeah," he murmurs eventually. "The fire in Newhaven, it was started by a Pureblood."

"Oh?"

He nods. "It's a Pureblood heritage spell. They used to use it to burn traitors."

"Pleasant."

"Always thought he would die by fiendfyre someday," Regulus mutters. "Trial by fire. I've imagined he'd go out like that since he was a child."

"Do you think it was him that started it?"

He shrugs against her shoulder. "I can't figure it out in my head. The why. So I can't know the who yet. But… there's something about it…" He trails off.

"Well," Marlene says. "I don't care what your brother is doing, no offence. I really don't give a shit. So we should probably get out of here."

"I don't give a shit either," Regulus protests, sitting up straight and shuffling away from her.

Marlene ignores him. She shuffles her hands onto the branch beneath her and slips off, dangling for a moment before dropping to the ground.

"Come on," she calls up to him. "I'll catch you. Bridal-style."

"Shut it," Regulus groans, dropping down after her. His knees buckle. Marlene doesn't step forward to help him get to his feet again, just watches him struggle until he reaches them.

They trek west, in a great arc around the burning building, which pours a great pillar of smoke into the sky, tall and wide as the hand of god. Marlene leads this time, as she usually does. Regulus hobbles along after her, not seeming to know which leg to limp on. The thick, greenish smell of the forest weighs in around them. They fall over rocks, not coordinated enough to avoid them.

It hits Marlene when they are half a mile from the house that they have murdered people. That it isn't hypothetical anymore.

She doesn't stop walking, though she thinks it would help her. She doesn't rest a flat-palmed hand to a tree to hold herself up. The leaves feel like eyes, watching her, blinking in the wet light. Behind her, Regulus doesn't stop moving either, nor does his breathing stutter. His brittle uneven stride doesn't break. The great, unspoken reality of this rots between them like some strange dead thing.

If only Dorcas could see her now, Marlene thinks. If only Mary could. Her mother, maybe dead now. Her uncles, worrying about her back home. Would any of them ever be able to look at her again? The doubt swelters in.

Behind her, Regulus coughs. She doesn't turn to look at him.

"Are you okay?" he asks exactly once.

Marlene nods. "Are you okay?"

She doesn't hear him answer, and fills a nod into that stretch of silence.

They continue their silent funeral march. Marlene pulls her lighter out and flicks it open and shut, open and shut. Open and shut. She watches the fire strain against the quiet air, flickering with no wind. The only sound in the whole forest is its very faint, very small roar. Behind her, Regulus picks holes into his hands.

Marlene is so engrossed by the flame that she doesn't look where she's going; she trips and falls, then, over something large on the ground, and stumbles.

"Fuck," she snaps, finding her feet. She flicks the lighter closed and turns around, and against her will, a scream tears out of her.

There's a body on the ground, so black with soot it looks charred to the bone. Unmoving, sprawled still in the dust.

Regulus stares with big eyes at it. "They… must have escaped."

Marlene collapses to her knees beside it. She feels scattered into small bits. She puts her hands on its shoulders and then its back, and then feels its face. It's still warm. She puts a hand in front of its nose.

"It's still breathing," she whispers. Then she shouts it. "It's still breathing!"

"He's still breathing," Regulus says, kneeling down on the other side of the body. He uses the sleeve of his jacket to push soot out of its face. "Not burnt badly, either. Must have gotten out when the fire ate through the cellar roof."

Marlene sits back on her haunches. She pushes her face into her hands and breathes in and out, in and out. "Oh fuck."

Regulus rolls the body onto its back. "A prisoner…" he murmurs.

"He's properly alive?"

"Yeah," Regulus promises. "Just passed out."

"Jesus. Jesus Christ. Christ alive. Fucking hell."

Regulus stares at the man for a long time. "I know him," he murmurs, looking up. "Mundungus Fletcher. He was a seventh year when I was in third or fourth. Slytherin."

Marlene blinks at him. Her brow feels pulled so tight it may force tears from her; she can feel them burning behind her eyes. "What?"

"He's a thief," Regulus says. "When he left Hogwarts, he got on the Death Eaters' radar for… petty theft, mostly. Minor stuff."

"Oh," Marlene says, unsure of what he wants her to say. He almost died. Not to mention the ones who did. The ones he left behind in there.

Regulus shakes his head slowly. "It doesn't make any sense. If he was only a thief, they would've just killed him. Why drag him out here? Why…?" He trails off, frowning.

"We fucking killed people," Marlene spits.

"I'm trying not to think about it!"

"Me too!"

"Then don't say it!" Regulus shouts.

Marlene grabs him by the lapels of his coat and shakes him until his teeth clack together. Regulus grabs her by the throat, holding it in both hands, throttling her. She topples forward over Mundungus Fletcher's body and hurtles, screaming, at Regulus; she grabs him by the hair and slams his face into a rock hard enough to make him bleed, to break his skin. He twists under her and pounds his knee up into her stomach over and over until Marlene is retching.

They tear at each other's hair and clothes and faces until they are both bloody messes. The cuts on Regulus' hands all rip open, dripping ichor. Marlene bites his arm so hard that rusty wetness bursts into her mouth, a torrent of it, too thin and liquid. It fills her throat like water and she swallows it.

Regulus tears her face from his arm and throws Marlene against a tree, and she kicks out at him over and over. She catches his face and his clavicle and the knobbly bit of his shoulder. He snaggles both hands into the lip of her boot and pulls it right off her foot and Marlene shoves her socked foot against the flat front of his throat and presses him into the mud.

He makes a choking sound, eyes huge as he stares up at her. Marlene stares back. They watch each other, breathing hard. Regulus on the floor and Marlene over him, she thinks- she thinks- she thinks it begins and ends here. Foot on his throat, an inch from crushing it.

Marlene shuffles away. Regulus heaves in a great gasp and scrambles backwards. Their backs find opposite tree trunks. They both leave their knives in their pockets. Nobody else will die tonight.

"We should take him," Regulus croaks, rubbing his throat. It'll bruise. "We can hold him ransom."

"What the fuck could we possibly have to gain from that?!" Marlene snaps.

"We can try to get some money off him. From the Order, if he's with them."

"The Order's trying to kill me!"

"You're not important enough for them to try to kill you!"

Marlene hesitates. "We can't exactly drag him five miles to the train station."

"We could steal a car. Once we get there. Tie him up and put him in the boot."

"You're fucking insane. Don't you rich people have house elves?"

"One. I freed him." Regulus laughs in the back of his throat. "He used to bring me food and bandages at Durmstrang so I wouldn't die."

"I didn't fucking ask. I don't care. I couldn't care less." Marlene runs a hand back through her hair. "I should kill you."

Regulus shrugs a shoulder jerkily. "I'm thinking pragmatically. That's usually you."

Marlene shakes herself. "Don't try it."

"Sorry."

She stands up, padding half-barefooted to Fletcher's unconscious body. He looks dead to the world, eyes closed. Probably collapsed from malnutrition, just by the look of him, drawn and rattish.

"You'll be the death of us one of these days," Marlene says over her shoulder.

"That's a yes," Regulus replies. He gets to his feet and limps over to her, putting the boot back into her hand.

Marlene leans over to put it on. Regulus punts his elbow into the small of her back to knock her to the ground and she takes him down with her; soil fills her mouth, closely followed by blood as he kicks her in the teeth, and they're fighting again.