Previously in the Darklyverse: Mary planned her wedding to Reg with Veronica Smethley, not Marlene, as her maid of honor. Sirius and Remus broke up.

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November 11th, 1978: Mary Macdonald

The morning of her and Reg's wedding shower, Mary wakes up early to the feel of Ver stripping the sheets and duvet off of the bed. "Time to get up!" Ver trills, fully in her element. "Reg is already up making omelets for us all downstairs. If you want to look like a princess for your special day, there's no time to lose!"

"I thought the day of the wedding was supposed to be my special day," Mary croaks, voice rusty with sleep.

"Can't a girl have more than one? Come on, I brought my own stuff for you and everything."

Ver's "own stuff" turns out to include a variety of makeup, nail polishes, perfumes, moisturizers, and wigs. "But I like my short hair," Mary complains, allowing Ver to prise away her pajamas. "Why do I have to have feminine hair to be good enough for you?"

"You'll thank me one day when you're looking back over the photographs, honey, trust me," says Ver. "Do you want me to turn around so you can change your underwear?"

"Yes, please."

It only takes Mary a couple of minutes to change her bra, undies, and socks, and then she tucks herself into a bathrobe and opens her closet to Ver. It takes them a while to agree on an outfit: Mary doesn't have much in the way of dress robes, and Ver keeps wanting to alter what Mary has to be more low-cut and form-fitting. They eventually settle on a purple number that Ver charms to fit a little more snugly.

"So Greta's coming, of course," Ver prattles while she rubs cream into the skin on Mary's face and neck. "And Gilly and Amos and Davy. A few of the Ravenclaws—Samantha Spinnet and Alexander Zeller and Dana Madley. Charlotte Fawcett wasn't sure if she could make it, last that I heard last night, but I have a feeling that Spinnet's going to drag her along. Both your parents and Reg's sister, obviously. Oh, and most of your Gryffindors."

"Most of them?"

"Yeah, Black might not make it," says Ver, and Mary lets out the breath she's holding. "I think he's avoiding Lupin? They had some kind of fight."

"Yeah, they broke up," says Mary. The blood is rushing back into her limbs, but she still feels anxious. Marlene's coming, she tells herself. Marlene's coming for her. That's all that matters.

"Black and Lupin broke up? That's no surprise. If anything, I'm surprised it took them as long as it did. Black never struck me as the gay type. Neither did Lupin, for that matter, but he'd never dated anyone before Black, so it's not like—"

Mary interrupts, "Can we just not for once? Don't you think it's hard enough on both of them already without the whole world gossiping about their private lives?"

"Jeez. Touchy," says Ver, but she drops it and starts carrying on about Fawcett and Zeller's hookup last week.

It takes a while for Ver to be satisfied with the work she's done on Mary. They end up compromising on the hair: she doesn't wear a wig, but Ver colors her hair blue and gels it into spikes. "I still think you look better blonde," Ver tuts, "but I guess you can sort of rock the punk-rock look. Makes you look edgy instead of train wreck."

"Gee, thanks," says Mary, but she's smiling.

"Only saying it because I love you," says Ver.

By the time they make it downstairs, the breakfast Reg made for the three of them is starting to get cold, but he reheats it with a wave of his wand and they sit down in the kitchen to eat. "Thanks so much for putting all this on, Ver," says Reg fondly. "Mare and I really appreciate all of your hard work."

Ver tips her head and smiles. "Just remember that after we get to the venue and I've put you to work setting everything up."

For the occasion, they've rented out space in a community center on the outskirts of town. They do the place up with streamers and balloons, fairy lights hovering in midair and heart-shaped confetti floating down from the ceiling. They didn't splurge for a live band, so Ver brings along Mary's WWN and sets it up to start playing from the center of the room.

The first guests to arrive, ten minutes ahead of schedule, are Gilderoy Lockhart and Davy Gudgeon. "Thank you so much for coming," Mary says, hugging Davy tightly.

"Only the best for my favorite ex-girlfriend," says Davy, grinning. Mary slaps his hand lightly but smiles back.

She turns to Gilderoy and hugs him, too. "We're so excited to have you as best man," she tells him. "Reg is really looking forward to his stag night."

"He should be. The plans I have already for him! He's in for a delightful night. Will you open my present first? It's the big one." He points to a large and lumpy package sitting on the table they've designated for gifts.

Guests keep trickling in over the next twenty minutes. Out of the Gryffindors, Alice comes first, bearing apologies and promising to meet up with Mary again next week, along with her roommates, Remus and James. Remus kisses her on the cheek and smiles a little sadly—he's one of only a few people who know the real backstory with Mary and her sexuality and Marlene.

She tries to stay away from Remus a little after that—she doesn't want the reminder that Reg is hardly her first choice. Seeing Marlene is even worse; they hug awkwardly, and Marlene congratulates her, but they both know whom Mary wants to be with, and it's not Reg. So she leaves Marlene to hang out with Lily, and Remus to sit with Peter and James, and Mary kind of gravitates toward the Hufflepuffs, meaning mostly Gilderoy and Greta and Ver. They may be a bit much at times, but at least they don't feel sorry for Mary, or avoid her, or make sad faces at her when they think she isn't looking.

Spoiler: Mary is always looking. She always notices, and she's getting really tired of being an object of other people's sympathies.

The party has been underway for about an hour when she starts opening gifts. Gilderoy's turns out to be a large set of dragon-skin luggage that's under an Undetectable Extension Charm rendering it bigger on the inside. Most of the gifts turn out to be household-type things, of course—dust-proof curtains, self-warming and -cooling bed linens, a coatrack that dries your cloaks when you hang them up, glass dishes charmed to perfectly preserve their perishable contents—but Sirius and Lily got her writing supplies, much to her pleasure; Alice went all-out building a grandfather clock; and Marlene—

—Marlene gives Mary a photo album filled with pictures of Mary and Reg and their friends at Hogwarts. There's a camera in the package, and Marlene says quietly, "It's charmed so that any time you take a picture with that camera, a copy of it will appear in the album, too. You won't even have to develop it: the pictures will start moving on their own." Mary barely registers this: she's too distracted by the photo on the very last page, one of herself and Marlene at the last girls' night they ever had, back in October of their seventh year, the one they had right before Marlene found out Sirius had kissed Remus and that her father was missing. In the photo, Mary and Marlene are both laughing and clutching each other's arms, like Marlene's world wasn't about to fall apart in an hour's time, like Mary had never even heard the name Lily Evans.

Marlene's standing up at the front by Mary and Mary's mom and Reg, ready to take a picture with Mary and her gift, and it's absolutely not the place for them to start talking things out, but she has to say something. "Lena, I…"

"You haven't called me that in a long time," says Marlene quietly.

Mary opens her mouth—to say what, she doesn't know—but she's interrupted by the appearance of a silver lizard with grey markings around its eyes, little wisps of color vaporizing off all its edges, slamming through the closed door to the community room and stopping to hover in the center of the room. The confused muttering that first started when the lizard appeared stops when it opens its mouth to say in the scratchy voice of a man, "Emergency. All hands on deck. Coordinates in the orb."

Muttering breaks out again—what kind of emergency? What orb? Coordinates to where? And whom exactly is the message trying to reach?

"Was that a Patronus?" Mary says in an undertone to Marlene, but Marlene has gone pale and whipped out her wand.

"I'm really sorry, Mare, but I have to go. We—we all do. Order stuff."

"But Lene—"

"I gotta go, Mary. I'm sorry." And she Disapparates with a crack.

More cracks resound as every other Gryffindor in attendance pops out of the room, leaving behind a mess of gifts and half-eaten plates of food. "What's the Order?" Reg asks from beside her. "Where did they all go?"

"I don't know," says Mary, which is only half a lie: she doesn't know where they've all gone off to, even if she does know exactly what they mean by "the Order." She looks at her mum, who looks confused and maybe a little offended on her behalf.

She knows it must be important if someone from the Order sent a Patronus all the way here to drag the others out of their routine at the expense of potentially blowing their cover from everyone in attendance. She knows that what they do saves lives and puts bad people behind bars. But Mary has already been shunned enough for not wanting to join them—do they have to flaunt their work in front of her in the middle of her wedding shower?

Mary wants to scream, but instead, she turns to the stack of gifts next to her and picks one up at random. "Let's just get through this, okay?" she says to Reg, who is frowning.

"This isn't supposed to be something that we 'get through.' This is supposed to be for you and me—it's supposed to make you happy."

Mum breaks in, "I just don't understand what's so important that practically half your shower guests have to leave in the middle of it to go on some cryptic—some—some mission. Can't it wait half an hour?"

"It's okay, Mum," says Mary, even though it's not, even though she's seething. "They're just—"

But Mary is saved the trouble of having to label what, exactly, her Gryffindor friends are by Ver, who picks up another gift and puts it into Mary's hands. "Don't let them take this day away from you," she says sagely, and she pulls down another sip of her butterbeer.

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A/N: An update on the revisions: Chapters 1-25 have been lightly edited to bring them in line with the prequel fic, Legacy, but they should still be understandable without having read Legacy; Darkly is designed to be read first. Chapters 43-61 have been significantly revised, with a lot of triangle-related scenes taken out and more development for all nine Gryffindors added in. Further revisions will be made over time to Chapters 62-89ish.