Previously in the Darklyverse: Back in sixth year, Lily got cold feet and shut James out for several months after they started moving too fast toward a relationship. In the present, Lily made a bid for Minister of Magic. Lily and Mary both planned their weddings. James's parents died.
xx
March 30th, 1979: Lily Evans
"Are you ready for your hen night tomorrow?" Lily asks.
Her leave of absence from St. Mungo's started this week, which means Lily is now campaigning with Mary full-time. They're still polling in last place, but their numbers are slowly rising. "So much," says Mary. "I could really use a night off."
"I hear you," says Lily. "I thought this would get easier when I left my job because I wouldn't be juggling two full-time things at once, but it's somehow even worse because I never get a break from campaigning."
"I think we might need to reevaluate our strategy a little bit," says Mary.
"Okay. Hit me."
They've just gotten done with another open house, and they're sitting in a Muggle bar eating from plates stacked high with grease. Mary shovels a bit more fried chicken in her mouth, swallows, and continues, "We keep trying to gain on Bagnold because her followers are closer in ideology than Malfoy's to what we want to create with your administration, but we're not gaining as fast as we need to be to be competitive, and anyway, what happens if we do split Bagnold's supporters? Our worst-case scenario here is for Malfoy to win, and that's what we're setting ourselves up for if we go after Bagnold."
"So you want to, what, target Malfoy's supporters? But that's completely—we don't have a chance in hell. A number of them are probably Death Eater supporters, too, and the rest are purists who will hate me just for being Muggle-born."
Mary nods. "I mean, we can obviously forget about the Death Eater supporters—you're right; we don't have a chance in hell with them. But what about the purists like what Alice used to be like? If we target our open houses toward purists who want to see this war over with as much as we do, we can convince them that you're the most effective candidate for the job and get them to confront their stereotypes along the way."
"It's a long shot," says Lily uncertainly.
"Lily, everything about your campaign is a long shot. We have nothing to lose if we take risks."
She considers this as she dunks a forkful of fish in tartar sauce and chews thickly. "You know what?" she says finally after guzzling down some ginger ale. "Screw it. Let's try it and see what happens."
"I was hoping you would say that," says Mary with a grin. "On Monday, I'll start looking into potential venues and groups in that demographic that we could meet with."
"I'm glad you're taking the weekend off," says Lily. "You deserve it. You work so hard, and you deserve to be able to take a couple of days for yourself for something as big as wedding festivities."
"Damn right, I deserve it. I'm delaying my honeymoon until December so that I can focus on campaigning."
"And you know you don't have to do that, right? I don't want you to feel forced into anything."
"Please," says Mary. "No offense, but your campaign would fall apart if I left it for two weeks."
"And that's why I hired you as my campaign manager," Lily says, smiling. "Come on, I just want to power eat through these chips and get home."
"Amen to that. Are we still good for five o'clock tomorrow evening?"
"Absolutely. Meet at Smethley's flat?"
"You have the address."
"And Marlene's coming, too?"
"I think so. She owled back her RSVP to Ver, anyway. Hey, have you picked a date for your hen night yet? I keep forgetting just because I'm getting married first that you're getting married, too."
Lily shakes her head. "Sometime in May? I need to talk to Marlene about it."
There's an awkward pause here, and Lily has to force herself to hold her tongue. She's not supposed to know that Mary is in love with Marlene and that that's why Mary was so cut up about Marlene getting close to Lily. Even though she's tempted to say something sympathetic or understanding, she doesn't want to get Marlene in trouble, and she doesn't want to embarrass Mary, either. But the moment passes, and Mary says, "Well, I'll look forward to it, whenever it comes around."
"Get some sleep," says Lily mock-sternly. "Seriously, I want you in bed by ten tonight. It's been a long week."
"Every week is a long week," Mary grumbles, but she's smiling.
"Yeah, but you only get one hen night, and I don't want to see you burnt out for it."
"Fine, fine."
Instead of going home herself, she Apparates to James's flat, where she says hello to Alice in the living room and then retreats to his and Remus's bedroom. She knocks on the door and hears James shout from inside, "Come on in!"
When she enters, Remus's bed is empty. "Is he with Sirius again?" Lily asks as she settles down next to James and kisses him hello.
"Yeah. Probably won't be back until tomorrow."
"I hope they know what they're doing," Lily says quietly. "I watched what happened to Marlene when she and Sirius were in one of these types of cycles, and I don't want to see it happen again, not to Sirius or to Remus."
"Padfoot thinks it's all going to work out fine in the end, but I wouldn't be so sure. Moony is tearing himself up pretty bad about whatever it is they're doing."
"Makes you kind of glad you and I are through all the hard parts, doesn't it? Not that marriage is easy, but—at least I know where I stand with you."
"I'm glad, too," says James. "Honestly, I didn't know where we were for a long time, and it's just… this is good, what we're doing now. I'm worried about everything that's going on in the world, but—I'm happy."
Lily feels suddenly self-conscious: self-conscious and guilty. "I'm sorry I put you through all that before we could get to here," she says. "I shouldn't have been so scared."
"It's okay that you were. Everything started happening really fast, and I can see why you wanted to slow down."
"It was a lot to take in," Lily admits. "Not just my relationship with you, but my whole social life reversed itself overnight. Suddenly Severus was the bad guy and the Gryffindors were the good guys, and I… sort of pinned all of that discomfort on you."
"Do you miss him? Snape, I mean?" James doesn't look angry as he's saying it.
"Sometimes I do. I don't really allow myself to think about him much anymore, especially now that we're out of school. When I do, I get upset, and I don't want to be upset all the time."
He asks, "How do you do that? Just turn it off when you want to? I try to do that with my parents, but…"
She squeezes his hand. "Honestly, I try to put my mind on other things. It's hard to stop thinking about something if you keep telling yourself not to think about it. I guess I got lucky that your lot all took care of me right after Severus and I fell out—that Marlene took me in and encouraged me to make all those relationships. I'll always be grateful to her and to all of you for that."
"I just want to focus on the good stuff instead of the bad stuff. I just want to focus on you."
"I mean… you're grieving, James. You can't just fast-forward through that; you have to really feel it for a while first."
"'Fast-forward?'"
"It's a Muggle… never mind. Not the point. The point is, I'm sorry it hurts so much," says Lily. "If I knew how to take it away, I would."
"I love you," says James.
She kisses him and then says, "I love you, too. I'm sorry it took me so long to say it, but I do."
xx
The Gryffindor girls all coming to Mary's hen night was not the original plan. As Mary admitted to Lily last month, she'd originally told Veronica Smethley that she just wanted to go out with her and Greta Catchlove so as to circumvent any weirdness with Marlene, Lily, Alice, or Emmeline. But Smethley wore her down, insisting that Mary get a group together to party with, and eventually Mary caved. "It's a good thing you played matchmaker with me and Marlene the other day," she told Lily yesterday, "because otherwise this night would have been about to be really, really uncomfortable."
Lily can't say she's ever liked Smethley or Catchlove. They're relatively close to Mary, and she respects that, but Smethley is too caustic and judgmental for Lily's tastes. Catchlove seems sweet, at least, but Lily still doesn't really seem to have anything in common with her on which to build a relationship.
When she Flooes into Smethley and Catchlove's flat, Mary and Alice are both already there, and Lily silently thanks Jesus and makes her way over to Alice after saying hello to the whole group. "Mary was just telling me about the campaign," Alice says, giving Lily a half-hug in greeting. "Something about you switching it up and targeting Malfoy's voters?"
"Yeah, we wanted to see if we could capture anyone who's not pro-Voldemort—" Alice winces "—and might be receptive to me if we can get through to them about how privilege and prejudice really work. It's a long shot, but focusing there will mean that we won't split Bagnold's vote and leave Malfoy in the lead."
"If you want, I could talk to my parents and see if they can tap some people who might be able to host town halls for you. They're in with, you know, a lot of purebloods who aren't blatantly racist but still think that preserving pureblood lifestyles is important."
"Really? That would be amazing, Al, thank you."
Alice smiles. "Don't thank me yet. They'd probably be willing to listen to a Muggle-born talk, but you'll have your work cut out for you convincing them to vote for you."
There's a sudden rush of colored flame in the fireplace, and Emmeline stumbles out of it, wiping ash off her face with her sleeve. "Sorry I'm late," she says. "Who are we waiting on?"
"Just Marlene," says Smethley, waving Em inside.
It takes another ten minutes for Marlene to appear, looking tired but smiling. "Are we all ready to go?" she asks.
"Ladies, you all know where we're going," says Smethley. "Mary, take my hand."
They Disapparate to a deserted alley in Liverpool, where Smethley immediately turns on her heel and starts leading them out onto the main streets. They're about a ten-minute walk from the Everyman Threatre, and when they reach it and Smethley pushes open the door, Mary claps her hands together and jumps a few times, beaming. "We're seeing a play? Are you taking me to a play?"
"We are absolutely taking you to a play," says Catchlove, grinning broadly.
"Oh, thank you, thank you! I used to love going to the theatre with my parents before Hogwarts."
"I know," says Marlene fondly. "That's why I suggested it."
"It was your idea?" says Mary.
Lily suddenly feels like she's intruding on a very private moment between the two of them, and she quickly busies herself with looking all around at the sights. The street behind them is loaded with cars and lined with the old, old buildings typical of the United Kingdom. On the whole, it's an entirely unremarkable sight of Britain and does little to distract Lily as Marlene says, "I just wanted to give you the best."
Mary ducks around Smethley and Catchlove and puts her arms very carefully around Marlene. "Thank you," she says, and it sounds sincere.
The play they see is appropriately titled Stags and Hens. It takes place mostly in the restrooms of a club where the protagonist and her fiancé, unbeknownst to each other, are both having their hen night and stag night, respectively. While Dave spends most of the night in the loo with food poisoning, Linda reconnects with her ex Pete, the frontman for the band performing at the club that night, and considers leaving Dave to get back together with him. There's a lot of gossip—the women gossiping about the men, the men gossiping about the women—and a lot of commentary on misogyny and working-class life. In the end, Linda breaks into the men's loo, breaks the glass of the window, and escapes through it without a word of explanation. Lily still isn't sure what this means: is Linda ditching both Dave and Pete or what?
Either way, the Dave-Linda-Pete triangle parallels too close for comfort to the Cattermole-Mary-Marlene dynamic that only she, Marlene, and Mary are aware of, and Lily hastens to take the subject off of the romantic plot when they're all following the crowd out of the theatre. "What do you say, Mare?" she says quickly. "Dinner and drinks before we hit the hotel?"
"Absolutely. Where are we going?"
They catch dinner in a little Muggle pub close to the theatre, sipping on beers with their sandwiches and soups, and then Apparate back to the flat to grab their suitcases and take them to the hotel. They've gotten two rooms with two queen beds each: one room for Mary, Smethley, and Catchlove and the other for Lily, Alice, Emmeline, and Marlene.
"Pensieve time?" asks Catchlove, and Smethley, Em, and Alice all agree.
"What do we need a Pensieve for?" Lily asks.
"Oh, it's a wizarding thing," says Alice. "Everybody puts their favorite memories of the bride and groom into a Pensieve so that they can enjoy seeing what people remember of them. Did somebody bring one in their luggage?"
"I rented a baby one," says Smethley, and she lights on her suitcase, unzips it, and pulls out a small, shallow metal basin. It hasn't got any silvery mist in it yet, which Lily assumes means it's empty. "Who's first?"
More than anything, the series of memories that they watch remind Lily of just how much time with her fellow Gryffindors she lost by shunning them on Severus's behalf. The memories chronicle Mary's journey from ultra-shy first year to valley girl to punk back to whatever it is she's doing now, this version of Mary who is confident and individualistic and impossible to fit in a box no matter how hard you try. But the memory that Lily finds the most striking is the first one Marlene drops in.
Judging by Mary's size and hair color, Lily guesses at first that this memory takes place during their fourth or fifth year. She's sitting on the floor in an empty corridor beside a broom cupboard, and Marlene is next to her, kind of lying down with her head in Mary's lap. Mary keeps carding a hand through Marlene's kinky hair and humming something that seems to be keeping Marlene calm.
When the song stops, Marlene sits back up. "Sorry," she says, wiping her eyes.
"It's okay," Mary says. "You know—you're better than this. You're better than this thing you do with him," she adds, and that's when Lily realizes that this is about Sirius—that this is Mary taking care of Marlene after one of the times Marlene had sex with him.
"I can't stop," says Marlene. "I can't. I'm not strong enough."
"You are. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, you're going to be all the way through this to the other side, and like… you just have to trust your future self enough to know that she's going to be stronger. You just have to keep believing it and telling yourself it until it comes true. And you can do it. I know you can, and I can help you do it, if you want."
"I don't know why you waste time on me, Mare. You've been there for me through all my dad stuff, and all this stuff with Black, and all that I can do—all that you've gotten from me are copies of Witch Weekly."
"Stop that. None of that," says Mary. "I can't believe you don't see how beautiful you are. Yes, you! And kind, and considerate of others, and like—I was nobody when you scooped me up on the first day on the train and made me your best friend. I was nobody, and now I have a whole life here, and it's because of you."
When they fall out of the Pensieve five minutes later, Mary and Marlene are both pretty teared up. "I love you, Mare," Marlene says, wiping mascara off her cheeks.
"I love you, too," says Mary, and Lily hopes against hope that that's enough.