Previously in the Darklyverse: When Sirius and Marlene found themselves in a complicated and guilt-ridden sexual relationship, the other Gryffindors often interfered in light of strict wizarding laws against underage intercourse (CH9, CH23). Meanwhile, Mary grappled with the latest in a string of failed, short-lived relationships (CH20), Alice privately sought to reconcile her upbringing with Remus's lycanthropy (CH23), and Remus questioned the strength and nature of his friendship with Sirius (CH24).
xx
February 19th, 1977: Mary Macdonald
"Enough, Mary."
She clutches at her pillows and tucks her head between the two of them, chills running to her knees as a shock of air hits her. "Leave me alone, it's Saturday, I'm not even skiving off class," she tries to bark, but it comes out as more of a congealed puddle of moans than anything.
The top pillow's gone. Mary sinks beneath the bottom one, but then that's gone, too. "You've been moping for months—months!—over a boy you dated casually for how long? It's a Hogsmeade weekend, your birthday was yesterday—we're going out."
The voice begins to take shape into what she recognizes to be Alice's as the frigid sunlight stuns her awake. "I'm not going to go to Hogsmeade."
"We're not going to Hogsmeade," says Alice.
"What—not—what?" she says blearily, wincing as Alice tugs at her shoulders and attempts to prop her into a sitting position. "Who's we?"
"Me, Remus, Sirius. We're taking you out drinking. There you go, up you get," Alice coaxes, brushing short, sticky hairs away from Mary's temples and forehead.
The radically uncharacteristic words spilling out of Alice give Mary reason enough to drag herself into a drowsy state of wakefulness. "What? But you're Alice, you don't sneak off to go out drinking with Sirius, everything about that is something you'd report to McGonagall—"
"Don't be ridiculous, I'm only coming because I'm the only one other than Lily or Emmeline who's old enough to Apparate out of the village, and the whole reason Sirius wants to get out in the first place is to get away from everybody's drama," says Alice briskly. "Remus said Sirius wanted to have him stay sober and take him by Side-Along even though he's uncertified, so I said I'd take care of it for them if I could bring you with me. My birthday gift to you. Awake? Good, let's get you dressed then, come on, sweetie…"
She's startled by Alice's sudden willingness to bend the rules—not even to bend them but to crack them into splinters on a chopping block. Dazedly, then, Mary goes through the motions of dressing herself in robes suitable to wear underground and poking at her hair until her bed-head looks a bit more like an attempt at artistic stylization. "They already left half an hour ago—I told them we'd meet them in Zonko's. Ready to head out?"
The whole ordeal feels a bit surreal, if Mary's being perfectly honest. In the village, Sirius claps her on the shoulder and wishes her a happy birthday as Remus warmly hands her an overstuffed bag of Honeydukes treats "from all us blokes," he tells her. "C'mon, let's find a remote enough spot to do this from."
A quarter of an hour and a disorienting Side-Along-Apparition later, they've arrived. "The Basilisk," says Sirius with a grin. "Best nightclub in the Wizarding Britain underground—not that it only operates at night, mind you."
She was just about to mention that the place is far more bustling than she'd have imagined for eleven o'clock in the morning—jam-packed, in fact, drinkers and dancers dimly lit by the torches sprinkled across the stone walls. From the outskirts of the crowd alone, Mary can spot a gaggle of hags out on the floor, as well as a pair of vampires up at the bar—one sullen, one evidently plastered, judging by his bellowing laughter and disconcertingly pink complexion. A poltergeist gleefully hurtles straight through the torsos of a pair of enraged wizards, and nearby, a goblin woman laments loudly to a visibly uninterested centaur, "I don't believe what he says about them working him late at Gringotts, you know, it's no secret to me all those antics he used to get up to with the mermaids across the way. There ought to be laws against that, honestly."
"Let's get shitfaced," says Sirius, and with an audible humph from Alice, the four of them jostle their to the bar and squeeze in between a pale, heavily pregnant woman and a couple of wizards, maybe around fourteen, chattering away in Spanish over shots. "Round of firewhiskeys to celebrate the birthday girl," he tells the bartender, who, to Mary's surprise, serves them up without question. Clearly out of her usual bounds, Alice meekly calls for a butterbeer instead and awkwardly takes swigs from the bottle as Sirius downs half his whiskey in one gulp.
Sampling it, Mary chokes a bit but recovers quickly when something soothing rolls down her throat. "Bit lax security for a place like this," she remarks. "You'd think you wouldn't just be able to Apparate in like that, no questions asked."
"Oh, I don't think they'll be up for inspection anytime soon," says Sirius, belching.
"This sort of thing is—er—something of a dirty secret well-kept within the wizarding community," Alice says. "Everybody knows about it, but as long as it operates under the radar, the authorities turn a blind eye to it, for the most part."
"Dick around themselves in it, more like," snorts the pregnant woman in a thick French accent.
Mary whips around, both startled that she's addressed them and stricken by how beautiful she is, all blonde-haired and grey-eyed and aglow. "Oh, sweetie, you've had a terribly sheltered life, haven't you?" she says to Alice with a surprisingly warm laugh, sipping on a firewhiskey of her own.
Sirius and Remus aren't rattled at all—strangers must fraternize pretty often here, she supposes—but Alice has been equally caught off guard and regards the woman for a moment, belly and all. "Are you sure it's wise to be drinking that when you have the baby to consider?" she says carefully.
"She's got bigger problems than a bit of alcoholism to worry her, believe me," she tells Alice, "and besides, I doubt it'll have any health effect on her, if the veela blood is strong enough."
Eyebrows drawn tight, Mary says, "But you're not—you can't be—"
"Half," she says, and drags at length on her bottle. Alice shoots the others an incredulous look, but Remus shakes his head subtly and Sirius positively glowers—and Mary realizes that there've got to be pureblood politics at hand here, between Remus and the woman's part-human statuses and the remarks on the legality of the bar. "Delphine, by the way, and you are—?"
"Alice."
"Alice. Pureblood?"
"Yes," she says rigidly.
"Well, Alice, the part your parents haven't told you is that your Ministry—hell, my Ministry, any Ministry you like, even—they don't just ignore the industry, they're the ones behind it," says Delphine. "Does your lot still get up to arranged marriages these days?"
Alice says "no" at the exact moment Sirius says "yes." They look at each other, Alice dubiously and Sirius with exaggerated disgust. "Not in all the pureblood families anymore, but they sure as hell still do it in the inner circles," says Sirius. "It's why the rich ones never date anybody, because their betrothals haven't been finalized yet. If our mums had their way, I'd be happily engaged to Raleigh Greengrass by now and James to Dorcas Meadowes."
"You're joking!" says Mary, starting to feel a bit lightheaded now that a third of her bottle's been drunk.
"Yeah, well, it's all about preserving the bloodline, isn't it? It's where all the underage sex laws come from, too—they were written as extra incentive to keep purebloods from getting ideas about shagging outside their carefully selected marriages and rebelling against their parents' little plans for them, or God forbid tainting the tree with an unplanned pregnancy, because you can never be too sure about contraceptives, can you? Isn't that right, Delphine? You'd know all about that, wouldn't you, if you're a half-breed? That's what they call you, isn't it, half-breed? Right lot of pissy little arseholes—"
Rather counterproductively, in Mary's steadily blurring opinion, Remus calms Sirius down by cajoling him into more firewhiskey. "It's all right, he's right, at any rate," Delphine says calmly. "You know out in the Muggle world they've been going through a sexual revolution? Why other than societal conditioning do you think that hasn't filtered into the wizarding world as well? Especially at a place like Hogwarts—you are from Hogwarts, aren't you, dears?—big castle like that, all those hormones running wild, all those hidden corners."
"Sirius has sex," blurts Mary, watching Delphine with rapture. "He and Marlene have been going at it since fourth year—Sirius, this is Sirius, this one," she says, shaking his shoulder a little. He shakes her off roughly, angrily.
"And I don't suppose any of you have ever let him forget that, have you?"
"Mostly because of Marlene, we're not all purebloods, I'm a Mudblood, that's what they call me, I've had a lot of boyfriends, but I haven't had sex with any of them, but that's because I'm Catholic," she says importantly, puffing out her chest, "not that it matters because I'm damned anyway for doing magic."
"You're not damned, Mary," says Remus quietly.
"If anyone's damned, it's the purebloods," says Delphine. "It's the men and women both—they're forced into marriages they don't want with spouses they only sleep with for procreation, and it's not like they want honest-to-goodness emotional affairs on their consciences, not with the way they've been brought up, which is where the sex trade and underground spots like The Basilisk come into play. Go in, drink up, hook up, chalk it up to whatever you put in your system, and carry on the next morning with your head held high because it was one time with a stranger, doesn't mean it's ever going to happen again, until it does, and does, and does. The best part's the anonymity, because if God forbid you do taint your bloodline you can't be traced. Now, if you're a woman, that's a different story, but just because you give birth doesn't mean the thing's your child if you can't say for sure that it's a pureblood, so usually she'll drop the babe off somewhere in the black trade to be brought up the hard way."
"She's making it up," Alice dismisses. "The laws aren't some backhanded design to perpetuate sexual repression, it's for our own goods, what fourteen-year-old would want to get pregnant and face all those challenges? Better to be strict about it, and it works, doesn't it? It's like you said, there's so much opportunity to shag up at school, but nobody does, do they?"
Sirius says dryly, "Standing right next to you, Abbott."
"Oh, never mind you, you're the exception—and it works, it does, people don't even mention that at school, I doubt people even know how to get out of the castle for things like this, and never in seventeen years have I ever caught wind of a single scandal, that's despicable."
"They don't talk about it because it's not something that's talked about, it's just something that's done that you don't admit to, why do you think you never hear about it from your precious little prefect's seat?" erupts Sirius.
"Don't push it, mate," Remus responds, "just have another drink, yeah?"
"It's true, you know," says Delphine. "Sweetheart, I'm sure I'm not the only half-veela you've seen before, but you never see a relationship between a human and a veela. It's how my mother's made her living all her life, it's how I had to until—"
"Oh, for the love of—"
Not entirely sure why she's jumping to Delphine's defense, Mary says, "It's true, veela aren't around, are they? I know they're the mascots for the Romanian—no, Ukra… no, Bulgarian National Quidditch Team but that's it, mascot, mascots aren't people, it just shows off their looks, which are very nice, but that's not the point."
"Goblins pigeonholed into Gringotts, centaurs corralled into forest reservations," says Remus pensively. "Hell, the whole Beast, Spirit, and Being hierarchy is only in place to keep wizards at the top of the pyramid. Werewolves can't come out because they'll essentially be forced to survive underground—"
Alice retorts, "Because they're dangerous! There's no cure, Remus, you know that!"
"Oh, so you think Remus should be forced under the streets now, do you?" demands Sirius, knocking aside the drink in Remus's hand. "He got bitten as a kid, he didn't ask for this, and that's supposed to negate everything he is as a human being, is it?"
"Sirius, it's all right, I was surprised everyone didn't react like this—"
"Damn that, Remus, if she attacks you then she attacks me, too!"
Alice says impatiently, "I'm not attacking him, Sirius, it's just what's best—can't you see, Remus wouldn't have been bitten if werewolves just followed the laws and came clean and didn't put themselves in a position to harm people! At least it's something that they keep Remus locked up when it's time, because I know he wouldn't want to hurt anyone—"
"Locked up so he can claw himself half to death if he doesn't have anybody else to tear up, because that's what happens, Alice, that's what he goes through, how is that fair?"
"How is it fair to—"
"Settle down, it's all right!" interrupts Remus, starting to break a sweat. "Sirius!"
Reluctantly, Sirius backs away from Alice, panting. Hesitantly, Delphine says, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to provoke—I was only—"
Mary burps and informs her, "That's all right, you're very pretty, you know," and with that she leans in and pecks the woman on the lips.
"That's very kind, sweetheart, but I'm—"
And with that, Mary breaks down in tears. A pair of arms that she thinks belongs to Remus folds itself over her shoulder, around her waist, clasping in the front, enveloped and not letting go; distantly, she hears him say, "I'm sorry about all the trouble, Delphine, we should probably be off now—take care of yourself, all right? Mary," he adds close to her head, quieter, "are you going to be okay, can you get up so Alice can Apparate us out of here?"
"Come off it, Remus, you don't have to coddle her just because she's turned out to be a lightweight," snarls Sirius.
"Piss off, Sirius, come on, just take hold of Alice's hand, there you go—Alice, you don't have to be pleased with him, but just pull it together and get us back to Hogsmeade before you turn on him, all right, please?"
And then they're back and the snow bleeds grey into her knees and she's still clutching that ridiculous Honeydukes gift from the boys in her trembling hand. Alice is gone and Sirius is too and Remus is holding holding carrying kissing her forehead waving his wand and then the Whomping Willow is standing still why is it standing still and she's falling falling and deposited in a heap of blubber and burp at his feet. She wails. "It's going to be all right, Mary, just cry it out until you sober up, okay? Here—" and he sprawls out on the floorboards, nudges her head into the crevice above his collarbone, curls himself around her, massages her head, rubs her back, breathes.
And Mary breathes, too, but it's like sucking through a straw she's plugged at the bottom with her thumb, like asthma attack, like body and body and skin are ballooning around her and she is so small so so so and the air is coming in through a pair of binoculars pointing the wrong way like pinprick at the end like she is a pinprick in all of this shaking, all of this skin. Like sitting in the confessional lying through teeth like there aren't any things that she does that she doesn't mean to do like useless bitch bottom of the class like girlfriend none of them can keep, like dry ice disappearing before she can touch it or anything can touch her. Like maybe this has been a long time coming, more than that, ice born and ice bred and ice all scattered on the wind out the fingers she can never seem to make touch.
She breathes and she breathes and then one minute she slows. Her head is clearer now. "Will it help to talk about it?" Remus asks, and it won't, but his hands are big and warm on her snow-drenched robes and his cheek is resting on top of her head and his words are kind and not a lot of people's words are often very kind.
"I thought it was Reg, but maybe it's just what he does," she says slowly.
"What's that?"
"Proof." Breath breath breath, one two three, steady. "I like him. I always like them. They're very sweet or charming or—whatever."
"You have good taste," he says and smiles.
"Never good enough," she tells him. "To last. I try to make it be." Breath breath breath breath breath breath, one two three four five six, not steady, eff it, open and "She was very pretty." Breath breath "Marlene is very pretty, too."
"She is."
Breath. One. "I'm not, though. I just miss Reg and it's getting to me, that's all."
"Okay."
"I'm Catholic."
"Okay."
She sits up, and Remus does, too, knees touching. "Want to know a secret?" he asks her, knees so close and she nods and "Sometimes, I think I… I think I might like Sirius, you know, that way."
And he's talking to her like they're second years trading crushes, and they're not, but maybe they are. Either way, it feels more considerate than condescending, and she doesn't laugh, doesn't press, just holds her knees so still because if she stays and he stays, and if here is safe, then nothing will be hers to own and everything will be little as a pinprick over there. But silence is never safe long before her head starts to sink in, so at last she scooches back and says, "Can we go get a really big lunch at The Three Broomsticks?"
"Sure," says Remus, and off they go.
In the dorms that night, neither she nor Alice has much of anything to say. "Is it true what James and Pete were saying, that you really went out drinking with Sirius?" Marlene grills Alice when she and Lily first come back that night, flushed and weighted down with shopping bags. "Because I wouldn't have believed it coming from just Jay, but—"
"We and Remus took Mary out for her birthday, yeah," says Alice shortly. "They drank, I didn't so I could Apparate them there and back, we didn't stay long."
"Oh," says Marlene, making a face at Lily when Alice's back is turned. Mary doesn't meet her eye—doesn't, in fact, for the rest of the night.
When the others are long asleep and she assumes it's only her still awake, Mary jumps a bit when someone pulls her curtains the slightest bit back—Alice. "You still up?" she whispers, so softly.
She's tempted to lie, just so this day will end already, but doesn't. "Yeah," says Mary, scooting over so Alice can lie atop the covers next to her on the bed. Funny, she thinks, that today both started and now ends with Alice, only it's really not funny at all because she knows and it's worse than that, she said all those things, all those awful pureblood Remus things. "You're an arse, you know."
"I'm not an arse just because I—"
"Remus is a person, not some kind of, like, bloodthirsty beast, a person with a life and a conscience who's probably blaming himself for things he's not even conscious to control and—"
"I never denied that! I just—"
"You're an arse," says Mary, and Alice doesn't say anything at all. "Look, about the thing—don't tell, okay?"
"The—?" Then her brow straightens and her cheeks fall. "I wasn't going to, but it's nothing to be ashamed of—I didn't think there was anything to tell. You got drunk and a bit sloppy, and it happens—loads of people do loads worse than kiss a pregnant half-veela, you know? Most blokes would do worse when they're sober around a pregnant half-veela, even, I bet."
And they look at each other and after a second they have to stifle their laughter, except Mary's isn't really laughter so much as a whimper. "No, I know, it's just a stupid drunk story, but I don't want—I know you think I should let go and everything, but I don't want it to maybe get back to Reg and mess up my chances, that's all."
"Sure, whatever you want. Just be careful, okay?"
"Yeah, you, too," and she's not sure whether she's talking about Frank or Remus or Sirius or that funny little world in Alice's head that's maybe starting to spin too fast.