October 30th, 1977: Marlene McKinnon

Constantly, Marlene feels like everybody is staring at her. They're not, of course: miraculously, the truth about why she and Sirius fell apart hasn't leaked out to the rest of the student body yet, so she knows she's largely imagining the malice and judgment in everybody's eyes as she walks down the corridor. Given that she's stopped speaking to Remus as well, Marlene would have thought it would be easy for anybody to figure out what was happening, but apparently the idea of two boys being in love is too radical for anybody to even fathom.

Are they in love, or are their feelings for each other as confused as Marlene's understanding of them? She doesn't know, and she's not sure if she even wants to know. She keeps picturing different versions of Sirius and Remus kissing in her mind, and she thinks that if she got a more accurate idea of what actually happened, it would hurt far more than her own speculation already does.

She's not even avoiding Sirius and Remus out of anger. Well—she is to an extent, but mostly she just feels humiliated that Sirius could cheat on her, and not even with a girl, but with a boy. What did Marlene ever do to deserve that kind of shame?

It's like she can't get her mind off of it. Sitting with Mary at breakfast in the Great Hall, she looks down the table to where Remus is sitting with Alice and Sirius is off with Peter and Emmeline, and she feels a fresh wave of horror pass through her. At least Sirius and Remus aren't together—yet, a little voice inside her head whispers, but she shakes that off, unwilling to consider the possibility that Sirius could leave her for Remus.

How is this her life right now? How?

It's like she's never free from it. The ironic thing is that Marlene had wanted to take a break from her relationship with Sirius to get some fresh air and make sure she hadn't wrapped up everything she was into her relationship with Sirius, to make sure that she was being healthy and taking care of herself. Now, she and Sirius are gone—dead—and it turns out she wasn't being healthy or taking care of herself, because she feels like her whole self is dead alongside it.

She doesn't really know what she wants from Sirius, now that she knows this terrible thing about him, and she doesn't really know where she stands with him, either. It certainly seemed like he wanted to stay with her, and it was Marlene who started avoiding Sirius, not the other way around. She didn't exactly break up with him—she just abruptly started avoiding him until he started avoiding her back. Does he still think that they have a chance of staying together? Has he started dallying around with other girls again? Again, she's not sure she really wants to know the answer to that. He and Remus seem to be on the outs, at least, so Marlene doesn't imagine that the two of them are doing anything she wouldn't want to know about, and she clings to this knowledge because she doesn't have much else to hold onto.

"Lene," says Mary beside her, and Marlene tears her eyes away from Sirius with effort.

"Sorry."

"Everything okay?"

"Same old," says Marlene, because it is—it's nothing new.

"You should talk to him," Mary insists, not for the first time, but Marlene doesn't know how she's supposed to be able to do that when she pictures death every time she sees his face. "At the very least, talk to Remus. He might be easier to talk to, and if you keep bottling this up, you're going to go crazy."

"Sorry, but how would you know what it is that I'm supposedly bottling up?"

"Lupe told me what's going on last night," says Mary staunchly.

"You talked to—?"

She breaks off when Lily and James join them at the table: she doesn't know if anybody has filled either of them in, but neither of them is talking to Marlene about it, at least, and so she likes to think that they won't know what's happening as long as she doesn't tell them. "Later," says Mary, and Marlene nods glumly.

She doesn't mean to take Mary's words to heart, but somehow she finds herself doing so anyway. "Bottling this up"—yeah, Marlene can see her point there. But unlike Mary, Marlene doesn't think it'll get any better by talking to Sirius or Remus or even someone like Mary about it. If the problem is that she spends entirely too much time thinking about Sirius and Remus, how is talking about them or to them supposed to help?

Still, she's going to crack up if she keeps going on the way she's been going. Something has to get better. Marlene needs for something to get better.

So she sucks in her pride, bites the bullet, and chases Remus down in the library after breakfast. He's there with Alice, who watches Mary a little suspiciously, and agrees a little too quickly when Marlene asks to speak to him in private. He packs up his stuff, and then they head outside: it's starting to get bloody cold out, but that just means they'll be guaranteed a quiet place with privacy where they can talk.

"I'm here because Mary thinks it's a good idea for us to talk, not me," she says flatly, but Remus laughs and says—

"That sounds like Mary. I'm sorry if I overstepped by talking to her. I mean, it wasn't—I didn't do it on purpose. She already knew I had feelings for Remus, so she put two and two together and then confronted me about it."

"Oh." Marlene feels a little heartened to know that Remus hasn't been gossiping about Marlene's train wreck of a love life willy-nilly. "Mary knew this whole time and didn't tell anybody about it? That's impressive for her. I mean, she didn't even tell me."

"Yeah, we don't always give Mary enough credit. She comes through when it really counts. Listen, Marlene—I know I screwed up, but I want you to know that I've always respected your relationship with Sirius and never wanted to interfere with it. I don't want to be your—competition, or whatever. If things work out between you and Sirius, I want to respect that."

"But you didn't respect it," says Marlene dully. "You stopped respecting me the moment you kissed him."

"I know. I'm sorry. Honestly. It was a momentary lapse of judgment, and I've regretted it ever since I did it. I don't know how to repair what's broken here with words, but that's the truth."

And she looks into his face and knows that he means it.

Remus and Marlene have never been particularly close. Sure, they're part of the Gryffindor seventh year group and she'll call him one of her closest friends on the stand, but individually, they've never really spent much time together intentionally. Here, now, standing outside the castle shivering in the wind, she really feels like Remus could actually care about her, and that makes the betrayal so much worse—that she could mean that much to him and he still did it.

At least before, she was able to sort of treat Remus like he was faceless, like the thing on the other end didn't have a name. No more.

xx

They don't go back to normal after that, but Marlene tries to take little steps to let Remus back into her life. She and Mary eat lunch with him and Alice that afternoon, and in Charms and Transfiguration the next couple of days, she sits at Remus's table and helps correct his wand movements while they grill each other on theory. They don't talk about Sirius again, but Marlene can feel him in every glance Remus casts her way, in every word they don't say.

Mary was wrong: talking to Remus isn't really helping get Marlene's mind off of anything, and it isn't helping tamp down the obsessive jealousy and heartbrokenness that are consuming her. More than anything, she wants her normal life with Sirius back, but she's starting to doubt that that's ever going to happen. He kissed Remus, and it dragged up everything she thought she was over about the early stages of their relationship.

Did she ever trust him, if whatever trust she had in him was feeble enough to break at the first sight of somebody else? Were they really as happy as she thinks they were?

Because when she remembers Sirius and the way they were, she can't separate the good from the bad. He's the man that she adores, but he used to be the boy who used and then discarded her like trash every time they got together. How much of that was really Sirius? What was a product of their circumstances, and what was the way he really felt about her?

How does he really feel about her?

How does she really feel about him?

She doesn't know—not anymore—and she probably won't figure it out anytime soon. Marlene just wishes that the endless loop asking these questions in her mind would turn off so she could get some goddamn peace and rest, but apparently that's too much to ask for.

Her first real interaction with Sirius in weeks comes entirely by accident: they bump into each other, literally, in the hallway, when they're both obviously lost in their thoughts and not looking where they're going. "Sorry," Marlene mutters, dropping to the floor to clean up the contents of her bag. Sirius crouches down, too, to help her.

"Are you okay?" he asks. "You look good."

She'll bet anything that that's a lie. "I don't—" she starts to answer, and then she suddenly remembers that she's not supposed to be sharing these things with Sirius anymore. "I'm fine, thank you," she says instead, rising to her feet.

"So we're not going to talk about this?" says Sirius.

Marlene crosses her arms with a frown. "What's there to talk about?"

"For starters, where does this leave you and me?"

"I don't know. I just know I can't be around you right now."

"Okay, then how soon can we talk?"

"I don't know, Sirius," says Marlene, getting exasperated.

Sirius holds up his hands. "I'm not trying to push."

"Well, try harder," she spits.

He lets out a loud, whooshing breath. "For what it's worth, I'm not going to see anybody else until we figure out what we want to do. What happened with Remus isn't going to happen again."

"Yeah, that's what all of you keep saying."

"Marlene, I still love you, okay? I love you, and I'm going to be here to work things out—or not—whenever you're ready."

He loves her. Funny how those words still affect her so strongly, even knowing what she knows now. She wishes it didn't mean so much to her, but it does. She considers snarking something back, but ultimately manages to hold her tongue in the interest of being able to someday salvage the wreckage of this relationship. "Okay," she tells Sirius instead, and he smiles thinly at her.

"I miss you," Sirius admits, twisting his hands around and around.

She wants to say that she misses him, too, but doesn't.