Previously in the Darklyverse: Sirius and Marlene started officially dating, despite their rocky history, as did Lily and James several months later. Mary felt left out when Marlene, who had always been her best friend and with whom she was secretly in love, formed a close bond with Lily. When his mother came down with a contagious case of spattergroit, James moved in with Lily and Sirius for the second half of the summer. With Mary and Marlene on the outs, Remus avoiding Sirius, and Alice jealous of Lily for becoming Head Girl, the Gryffindors splintered into distinct groups when they got to Hogwarts for seventh year: Lily and Marlene with James and Sirius, Peter and Emmeline with Mary, and Alice with Remus.

Revised version uploaded 14 January 2022.

xx

September 8th, 1977: Marlene McKinnon

It's weird, being a part of the quartet that is herself, Sirius, Lily, and James. A year ago, this clique would have been the most popular one in the school, between James and Sirius's Quidditch fame and Marlene's perceived coolness at the height of the Gryffindor then-sixth year girls. And spending all her time with her boyfriend, her best friend, and her boyfriend's best friend, who also is Marlene's close friend? She ought to feel so complete, happy, wanted.

But—

For one thing, Mary was supposed to be Marlene's best friend, for most of their lives, and now she feels like they barely speak outside of mealtimes and the two classes a week they share together. Mary's always off now with—not even with the Hufflepuffs, which honestly would have bothered Marlene less, but with Pete and Em, who are starting to feel just as alien. So are Remus and Alice, to be honest. Marlene knows that the group has always veered way over the line of codependency, especially last year—appreciated it at times like Liz and Millie's deaths when she had eight other people who understood, and appreciated it a lot less at times like when her best friends in the world would try to get in between herself and Sirius, before they were properly together—but at least then they didn't have this weird us-versus-them-versus-them dynamic that makes her feel a little sick to her stomach.

Of course, until last year, there was always an us-versus-Lily factor in the Gryffindors' relationships, as Lily always sided with Snape when he pitted himself against the rest of the group. Even last year, while Lily was integrating nicely into the gang, there was the business of Emmeline avoiding everyone but Peter, and the tensions between everyone were so strong that they came to a head during that out-of-control duel in Andromeda's class that landed them all in detention together. Still, Marlene can't help feeling like they achieved something admirable, even enviable, during the long days after Dumbledore invited them into the Order of the Phoenix—like they were a united front against all the forces that could try to shatter them—and now, that front is gone, and they're fragmenting.

She misses Mary. Not everything about Mary—the gossip, or the drama, or the oversharing—but she misses the familiarity of Mary's chattiness, her loyalty, the way she was a menace to anybody who tried to get in the way of Marlene's happiness. It's not to say that she would trade Lily for Mary—she loves Lily, too, just as much—but Marlene doesn't understand why she can't have them both, why they're fracturing and she has to choose.

And it feels like the choice isn't even hers, like she's been buoyed over to Lily and Sirius and James out of expectation, when really, she's on the outs with even them. Not that they would ever mistreat her—she doesn't mean that. But Sirius and Lily live together now, like actually paying rent on a flat together-together, and James spent a month staying in that flat with them while his mum suffered from spattergroit at home, and Marlene didn't. She was over at the flat nearly every day of the summer, but she didn't have the simple intimacy of skirting around each other's boundaries for meals and showers and sleep.

No: instead, she was spending every night navigating the hell that was her dynamic with Mum and Neil and her siblings. It's not like they don't love each other or even like the McKinnons don't treat Marlene like she's a part of their family. Sure, she's always felt an invisible divide between herself and her siblings, knowing that they're really only her half-siblings—but she's used to that, at least, and it didn't bother her so much once she started to truly feel secure in her relationships with the other Gryffindors, like she had her own found family who had picked her. The trouble came this summer, when she started to feel like she was on the outside of that found family with Sirius, Lily, and James—and when her siblings stopped seeing her as big sister Marlene and started seeing her as some kind of…

It's not like they don't know that Marlene was there when Liz and Millie died. She hasn't confirmed it—they haven't even asked her about it—but the whole school knows that the seventh year Gryffindors were somehow involved in whatever happened, even if none of them seem to have leaked word to any of the adults (besides the ones who already know—Dumbledore and McGonagall and Madam Pomfrey). Marlene's siblings haven't told Mum or Neil about Marlene's involvement—she doesn't think they have, anyway, since Mum and Neil haven't acted strangely around her or tried to ask her anything about the deaths—but she overheard Mike and Matt gossiping about her at least once a week all summer, and at one point in June, she even eavesdropped on Maggie filling in Meredith, who hadn't started at Hogwarts yet, about the rumors.

That last one hurt—because the last time Maggie spread any rumors, it was about how Lily and Marlene spent the second half of the previous summer, and she circulated them to the entire school. Sure, Maggie had had her reasons at the time—she'd said she'd been sick of Marlene keeping secret all the things that were hurting her, that she'd wanted to see Marlene grow—but it still had felt like an invasion of privacy, and so did Maggie clueing in Meredith about Marlene's quite literally fatal mistakes. Besides, it's not like Maggie was telling Meredith to go easy on Marlene or to try and look out for her—she'd come down quite squarely on Liz and Millie's side, just like how the rest of the school seems to think that all of this is Marlene and her friends' fault, like Liz and Millie weren't just as deep in it as they were (and still are).

Now that they're all back at Hogwarts, Marlene's basically just been dodging her siblings every time she sees any of them. It happens again the morning of her first Defense lesson of the trimester: she passes Meredith in a corridor, and when Mer smiles brightly at her, Marlene just twists her lips and ducks her head and keeps walking. Behind her, she can hear one of Mer's little Slytherin friends asking, "That's your sister, right? The one who helped get those girls murdered?"

She doesn't wait to hear what Mer says back, allowing Lily to grab Marlene by the elbow and hurry her along. "Don't listen to them. They don't know what they're talking about."

But the problem is that they do know what they're talking about—or, at least, they have suspicions that are dead on. And it's so stupid because they're first year Slytherins—it's not like they have any social overlap whatsoever for Marlene to care what they think of her. But—Marlene was on the outs with her siblings all summer, and she feels like she was on the outs with Lily and Sirius and James for the whole second half of it, and just for a while, she wishes she could feel like she isn't alone.

Not fitting in seems like such a stupid thing to be worried about, given that there are two girls dead because of them and a war raging outside the castle in which they can't seem to make a difference. Four months later, Dumbledore still hasn't contacted any of them about meeting with the Order, and it seems like the only thing they've contributed is the black stain of their misstep last May that cost Millie and Elisabeth their lives.

So Marlene is—not excited, exactly, but definitely anxious to begin Defense lessons a week into the term. It's the only class that all nine Gryffindors share together, but even as they walk down to the classroom together, Marlene is flanked by Sirius, James, and Lily and is barely able to get a word in to Mary or any of the others. How did they get to be so segmented like this?

Bungs is already in the classroom when they stride in five minutes early and take their seats, Marlene automatically sitting next to Lily. She sets her wand and her textbook on the desk, crosses her legs, and waits, watching Bungs out of the corner of one eye and Lily, who is twirling her wand around and around her fingers, out the other.

She turns a little in her seat so that she can look over her shoulder behind her. Sirius is sitting with James, Alice with Remus, Peter with Emmeline, and Mary is left alone at a desk toward the back of the classroom, skimming the textbook's introduction and looking rather glum. Marlene feels a surge of guilt, a familiar feeling at this point, but before she can really stew in it, Bungs calls their attention to the front of the classroom.

"Welcome to seventh year Defense Against the Dark Arts," she says severely in a low-pitched, raspy voice. "My name is Rosalind Antigone Bungs, and I will be your Defense professor for this year only, after which I'll be returning to my post as the Deputy Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation at the British Ministry of Magic. Before I became Deputy Head of the department, my research was about Gellert Grindelwald's rise to power and the French Ministry's attempts to infiltrate and convert members of the Alliance away from Grindelwald's side. This work included both breaking the Imperius Curse set upon some followers and convincing others to see the lies in the ideological premise of creating a better, safer world for wizardkind that Grindelwald had promised them. Get out your quills, write this down…"

It's the most unusual Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson that Marlene has ever had, and she's had some unusual Defense lessons, between now seven different professors of the class in her time at Hogwarts. Bungs lectures for an hour and a half on the Imperius Curse, including ways to recognize its tells and ways that the French government intercepted it after it had been cast by followers of Grindelwald in the 1940s. "I want a meter on the Imperius Curse by class time next week," she says raptly at the end of class. "Next lesson, we'll begin on susceptibility to the Imperius Curse and strategies for overthrowing it after it has been cast on you."

"She's not going to actually cast it on us, is she?" Marlene mutters to Lily, who shrugs, her morning-frizzy hair obscuring her face as she tucks her parchment and quill back into her bag.

"It's fascinating, the idea of taking a historical-political angle to Defense the Dark Arts," Lily says avidly that night as they're working in the common room on their Imperius Curse essays. "The Prophet has said that the Death Eaters have been using the Imperius Curse on people already; maybe this will help us learn how to fight it off, or better, how to recognize it being used on people and figure out a way to free them. That's what Bungs's research was all about, right? Partly, anyway?"

"Too bad information on her research is proving basically impossible to find," says James, gesturing at the enormous stacks of books they had hauled with them to the common room out of the library; they've pored over half of them already while only coming up with a few centimeters' worth of information relevant to today's lecture.

"All the more reason someone should be teaching it," Lily argues, smiling faintly.

Sirius adds, "Wonder if this has any relevance to what Dumbledore's going to have us doing in the Order."

Marlene looks over her shoulder at Mary, who is in the opposite corner of the common room laughing with Emmeline at something Peter said. "Hey," says James. "Don't worry about Mary, all right? She made the choice she needed to make for her, and she knows we're good with it."

"Does she, though?" Marlene says. "She's obviously noticed that we all avoid talking about the war in front of her anymore."

"Yeah, but this—this splitting up that's happened, that's not just about Mary. No one can make Alice want to be around Lily or Remus want to be around Sirius," says James fairly. Lily twists her lips, while Sirius rubs the back of his neck self-consciously. "Peter and Em have had a weird, isolated thing going on ever since last year. Mary's just…"

Feeling like a third wheel, probably, in Marlene's opinion, but she doesn't say so. She casts one more look over to Mary, who accidentally catches her eye. Marlene smiles weakly; Mary quickly looks away.

"You're just happy because Lily finally said she would go out with you," Marlene mutters, not really intending for James to hear her, but he does and looks embarrassed by it, rubbing a hand down his face and looking away.

An hour later, after she kisses Sirius goodnight and climbs the stairs to the dormitory two at a time, she finds it deserted except for Mary, who's sitting on her four-poster working on what looks like their latest essay for Charms. "Hey," says Marlene, and Mary spins around with a surprised rise of the eyebrows and one corner of her mouth twitching. "Can we talk?"

"Yeah, we can talk," Mary mumbles.

"Thanks," says Marlene, totally unsure of what to say now that she actually has Mary alone for the first time in what feels like forever. "Listen—" she starts to say at the same time as Mary says, "Lena, I—"

They both stop talking abruptly, and then Marlene grins and Mary smiles sheepishly and tucks a few strands of hair behind her ear. "You first," says Marlene after a pause.

"I'm not going to say I'm not jealous because I am—I'm jealous. Really jealous. Of you and Lily, and of—of you and Sirius." Mary looks like it's taking a lot for her to admit this, which frankly seems sort of dumb to Marlene, who had already figured that this must be the case. "And I'm pissed at you for ignoring me, but—but just because I'm pissed doesn't mean I don't want to be close to you anymore."

"I don't know how this thing where we all avoid each other started," Marlene admits. "I really don't. I felt so connected to everyone in the wake of everything that happened at the end of last year, and then over the summer Remus started drifting away, and then Alice started drifting away, and then James moved in with Lily and Sirius, and I…"

"He's your boyfriend, and she's your best friend," says Mary dully. "I know."

"Yeah, but you're my best friend, too. You're always going to be my best friend, too," Marlene insists, although she can tell that Mary doesn't believe her. "I don't care if Lily is around or if you're not in the Order—I'm always going to love you, okay?"

But from the look on Mary's face, Marlene has said the exact wrong thing, and she can't for the life of her understand why.