Previously in the Darklyverse: Things exploded between Sirius and Marlene when he admitted to her that he and Remus kissed. The Gryffindors cofounded a student organization, War Stories, to talk about issues related to blood prejudice and the war. Marlene hid her true blood status.

Revised version uploaded 21 January 2022.

xx

October 30th, 1977: Marlene McKinnon

Constantly, Marlene feels like everybody is staring at her. It's not what she thinks it is, 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 the malice and judgment she's seeing in everybody's eyes as she walks down the corridor is about Liz and Millie, not about Sirius. 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. After she and Sirius had started dating properly in sixth year, Marlene really thought that she'd put all their baggage behind herself—started fresh—and that she was taking care of herself. Now, she and Sirius are gone—dead—and it turns out she wasn't healthy all along, 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 Lily 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," Lily 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."

"He kissed my boyfriend," Marlene retorts in a low, urgent whisper, glancing around herself as she says it. "I don't owe him a damn thing."

"Did I say anything about doing it for him?" Lily points out, raising her eyebrows. "I just think you'll feel better if you quit bottling this up. You're going to make yourself crazy with this, and anyway…"

She hesitates and stabs at her cereal. "What?" says Marlene, and she has a feeling she's not going to like Lily's answer one bit.

"Don't you think you're… being a little irrational about this?"

"Irrational? Are you joking?"

"Think about it," says Lily, very quickly, as if ripping off the bandage will somehow make her argument easier for Marlene to hear. "I'm not saying Remus didn't make a mistake by kissing him, and I'm not saying Sirius didn't make a mistake by waiting so long to tell you about it. But—Sirius did own up to it. From how it looks and what you've said he told you, he's gone out of his way not to do anything with Remus that might be disrespectful to you."

"Because it wasn't disrespectful when he lied to me for months about what he'd done?"

"Maybe he just didn't know how to tell you," Lily shrugs. "Maybe he didn't want to embarrass Remus any further than he already has by rejecting him. He told you outright that he's not going to cheat on you—"

"He cheated on me when he kissed Lupe!"

"Yeah, but they haven't been actively carrying on an affair, have they? Even if he screwed up, it sounds to me like Sirius is still putting his relationship with you first."

The anger flaring up inside Marlene feels like it's going to boil over. "You have no idea what this is like for me," she snaps. "You weren't around until last year—you didn't see the way Sirius and I were. He used to have no problem stringing me along while seeing other girls. Who's to say that this is any bloody different?"

Lily presses her lips together and reaches over for Marlene's hand. "I know I wasn't there for most of your relationship before you got together—"

"I'm sorry," Marlene mutters. "That was a low blow. I shouldn't have gone there."

"It's okay. It's just… I know I can't understand what this feels like for you, but all the evidence points to this time being different. He's committed to you, Lena. I don't think he wants anything more than to make things right—and I think Remus would want the same thing for your friendship with him."

"I—"

She breaks off when James joins them at the table. She doesn't know if Remus or Sirius has filled him in, but he's not talking to Marlene about it, at least, and so she likes to think that he won't know what's happening as long as she doesn't tell him. "Later," says Lily, and Marlene nods glumly.

She doesn't mean to take Lily's words to heart, but somehow she finds herself doing so anyway. "Bottling this up"—yeah, Marlene can see her point there. But unlike Lily, Marlene doesn't think it'll get any better by talking to Sirius or Remus or even someone like Lily 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 Marlene 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 Lily thinks it's a good idea for us to talk, not me," she says flatly, but Remus laughs and says—

"That sounds like Lily. 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.

Talking to Remus hasn't really helped 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.

xx

They've got War Stories on Thursday night, the only day they could find in a two-week period that didn't conflict with anybody's Quidditch practice. A quarter of an hour into this week's meeting, they've dipped into a full-length discussion about the etymology of the word "pureblood." "It's complete bogus, of course," Dirk Cresswell is saying from where he's sitting next to Alice, a quill stuck in his hair. "The only reason we even call it that—blood purity—is because of people wanting to prove that they haven't got any Muggle lineage, as if they'd be dirty and bad if they did. Your wizard or Muggle ancestry doesn't have any tangible effect on you being a pure person or not, but we go around calling it that because—"

"And what's with the obsession with blood?" Benjy Fenwick pipes up. "What does your parents'—we call it blood status, but—what does that have to do at all with blood?"

"Or the term 'Mudblood,'" adds Amelia Bones. "It's not possible for blood to literally be muddy. It's like purebloods want to connect your ancestry, an intangible kind of concept, to some sort of visual that will make people associate Muggle-borns with something—sick and ugly."

"And it's working, isn't it?" Lily says, nodding. "How many of us shared during our first meeting that we've lied about our blood status before?"

For a second, her eyes meet Marlene's, and Marlene burns with shame. On that first day—when James was reading out forms of discrimination related to blood purity—it was a baldfaced lie when Marlene didn't sit down with that very first group who admitted to having been dishonest about their blood status before. The thing is, there was a sizable part of Marlene that wanted to give it all up—to sit down and own up to this lie her family concocted for her—but nobody knows but Mary and Lily, and she wasn't about to do anything that would throw what her friends think they know about her into question. Besides, Marlene's been dealing with enough rumors since June without people also gossiping about her parentage, thank you very much.

She just—gets so tired sometimes of covering it up and pretending like Doc doesn't mean more to her than people think he does. Nobody understands. Even here in War Stories, surrounded by people who've admitted to lying about this—it was a fleeting lie for most of them, one they told to acquaintances but not close friends. Marlene has never heard of anybody else passing off a stepparent as their biological parent in order to maintain that kind of lie long-term.

It almost makes her wish that Mum and Neil had just—been honest from the start about Doc being Marlene's real father. Sure, Marlene's life would have been harder if they'd done so: she would have faced discrimination that she doesn't have to this way, not just for being half-blood but for the circumstances under which her parents conceived her. It's bad enough that people think Mum got pregnant with Marlene when she and Neil were engaged instead of married—Marlene can't even imagine how much worse the gossip and discrimination would be if people knew that Marlene's real father was Mum's rebound.

It'll get better when the war is over, she promises herself. Maybe then, people will be more open-minded, more willing to accept Marlene for her true parentage, and she can come clean. When they defeat Voldemort—

But will they defeat Voldemort? Marlene doesn't know how well the rest of the Order is doing—Dumbledore has pretty effectively shut the Hogwarts side out of their plans—but she certainly hasn't noticed the number of deaths and disappearances reported in the paper going down at all. Does Dumbledore even have a plan? And for that matter, if he does, who's to say that taking down one wizard will dismantle centuries of prejudice and discrimination?

"You looked sort of uncomfortable in there," Lily says in an undertone after the meeting as they're all walking back to Gryffindor Tower. "You're usually not so quiet. Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Just—dad stuff."

She doesn't elaborate, but she doesn't have to: Lily cottons on quickly and pouts her lips sympathetically. "I'm sorry things are so… I'm just sorry."

"Yeah," says Marlene, her thoughts a million kilometers away. "Yeah, me, too."