Previously in the Darklyverse: Lily and James went into hiding after Voldemort found out about the prophecy and Death Eaters burned their house down. Mary and Lily grew closer after Mary served as Lily's Minister of Magic campaign manager. Sirius and Remus split up for real with Sirius, unbeknownst to Remus, suspecting Remus as the Death Eater spy.

xx

March 22nd, 1980: Mary Cattermole

"Anyway, their new address is 46 Church Lane in Godric's Hollow in Devon. Remember that, because if you forget it, I'm the only person who can tell it to you again."

Mary commits it to memory, repeating the address under her breath a couple of times. "Thanks for looping me in," she tells Sirius. "I heard about Helene's Manor burning down in the news, but Marlene couldn't tell me where they'd moved to, obviously, and I couldn't reach Lily without knowing, so I've been… you know."

"I'm sorry I didn't get here to tell you about it sooner," says Sirius. "Things are good with Cattermole?"

"Oh, yeah, they're fine. We're fine."

"All right. Well, I'd better, you know, get back to it."

"Yeah. Thanks for coming by."

"Thanks for having me over. We should do coffee or something sometime."

"Yeah, sometime," says Mary.

She doesn't really believe for a second that she and Sirius are actually going to ever go out for coffee together. He couldn't even be bothered to tell her what had happened to Lily and James until three weeks after they cast the Fidelius Charm. At most, Mary is an afterthought to Sirius, a footnote past which Sirius turned the page a long time ago. Why should he bother to make time for her? Why does anyone?

It's been driving her crazy not being able to talk to Lily. Even though Mary spent the better part of at least two years feeling hugely jealous of her, ever since running Lily's campaign, she's felt a kinship with her that nobody else gets to have with Lily—Lily's loss was Mary's loss, too, but they also got to share the achievement of every mind they changed on the campaign trail who decided to vote for a Muggle-born girl with no experience for Minister. According to Sirius, owls can't go to the home of someone protected by the Fidelius Charm—that explains why she wasn't able to send Lily mail all this time—because there's a possibility that a wizard could follow an owl's path and be led to the secret location, so she's been stranded here with no one but Marlene to keep her company, and Marlene hasn't come around all that often. Too busy shacking up with Lily in Godric's Hollow, Mary thinks bitterly.

She doesn't really blame Lily anymore for what happened between Mary and Marlene, and she's glad to have Marlene back in her life in a meaningful way, but that doesn't stop her from feeling jealous—jealous constantly. Three weeks it took Sirius to fill Mary in. How much have Lily and Marlene seen each other in that time? And Mary has been stuck here at home all this time, just waiting for somebody to remember her.

She knows that's not entirely fair: after all, she's been here with Reg, and Reg has been a wonderfully attentive and devoted husband for all these months. They're coming up on their one-year anniversary next month, and Reg is thrilled. To hear him tell it, he and Mary have the perfect marriage, and he couldn't be happier.

And it's not that Mary isn't happy with him. She cares about him, and she appreciates the way he treats her. It's just—he's not Marlene. No one is. And being alone here with him just reminds her not only that nobody else is paying attention to her, but also that she's failing her husband, probably the one person in the world who sincerely wants to spend time with her.

It's not that she treats him so terribly. She tries to be a good partner; she listens to his hardships and celebrates his successes. She loves him in her own way, but she's not in love with him, and he deserves better: he deserves to be with someone who is.

Mary doesn't want to talk to Marlene about it: Marlene may know how Mary feels about her, but it hits too close to home to loop Marlene in on anything to do with Mary's romantic feelings. She does wish that she could talk to Lily about it, but Lily is trapped in a house with James and fundamentally has no privacy from him, and Mary isn't sure that she's comfortable with James overhearing full conversations about Mary's relationship woes.

So she owls Remus, her go-to friend for anything gay. They meet up in Muggle London—Remus suggested Diagon Alley, but Mary doesn't want to chance being overheard by someone who could go back to Reg and tell him anything she's about to say.

"I just thought, even if I don't like men enough to ever feel that way about Reg, well, probably eventually I'll stop feeling that way about Marlene, and I won't be so disappointed with him by comparison. But it's just not going away, Lupe. I stopped really being friends with her for a long time, and it didn't go away all that time. Now she's back in my life as my friend—maybe not my best friend, but my friend—and it's not going away now, either. I feel like I'm running out of options here of ways to try to exist around her and still be okay."

"I know what you mean," says Remus, sighing. "Sirius and I tried being friends, and we tried dating, and we tried having lots of breakup sex, and we tried not really interacting together at all, and it's just the same old feelings every time, no matter what."

"I don't need a romantic relationship with her to be able to function. I don't. I've been getting by for a long time without having that, and I can keep getting by. I just wish it didn't have to feel so… so…"

"Lonely?" Remus supplies, and Mary nods. "I hear you. I really do. I wish I had the magic answer I could give you to fix everything, but if I had it, I would have fixed things with Sirius already, and that clearly isn't happening."

"Thank god you understand," she says. It's not an exact fit—Remus got to have his relationship with Sirius, and that's more than Mary will ever be able to say about Marlene—but he knows what it's like when nothing you do ever makes up for the way you feel about someone, and he knows what it was like to have feelings for years for someone who (to his knowledge, at least) didn't return them. "Nobody else gets it. I mean, not that I've told a lot of people, but who else am I supposed to tell this to? Lily? Marlene's probably filled her in with her side of the story, and I'm not interested in trying to plead my side to someone who's already biased. Marlene knows how I feel, but that's the whole point."

"I doubt Lily is biased against you even if Marlene did tell her what's going on. I'm sure if you just talked to her…"

"And risk James finding out and listening in and then spreading it around?"

"Do you really think James would do something like that?"

"I don't know. Maybe. None of the nine of us have ever been very good at boundaries or keeping things to ourselves, haven't you noticed?" says Mary.

"Point taken," says Remus, laughing a little. "Listen, Mary—you're going to be okay. You're going to get over Marlene one of these days. This can't go on forever—it just can't. I refuse to believe we live in a world where that's possible."

"Do you still refuse to believe it when you're thinking about your feelings for Sirius?"

"I…" Remus falters, and that's all the answer Mary needs.

She does end up taking Remus up on his suggestion to go see Lily, although Mary doesn't share what she's feeling about Marlene with her. "I feel so cooped up in here," Lily says as Mary takes a seat in the living room. "It's barely been three weeks, and I already feel like I'm going to lose my mind if I can't go outside somewhere. Anywhere. When you get out of here, take me with you, please."

"And me," James chimes in from the kitchen. "We can't even buy our own groceries, you know that? Sirius basically has to feed us himself."

"James is obsessively cooking to fill the time," says Lily, "and I'm obsessively cleaning. We'll see how long that lasts after Hurricane Harry comes into our lives."

"Goddamn Voldemort," says James, and Mary winces. "You might as well get used to hearing the name, Mare. It's not like he's not going to be a major part of all our lives for years to come, probably."

"I'm so sorry this happened to you both," Mary says, and she means it. "I can't even imagine how scared and powerless I would feel if Reg and I were in jeopardy, never mind if we had a child on the way."

"'Scared and powerless' pretty much sums it up," says Lily, smiling, "but thank you. And thanks for coming to visit. Seriously, come anytime. We're so bored."

"Terribly bored," James adds over the sound of something sizzling on the stovetop.

"Really, we should be feeling grateful that this didn't happen sooner," says Lily. "I should have had to go into hiding as soon as I gave that speech at graduation implicating myself in Millie's and Liz's deaths. Really, we all should have had to go into hiding as soon as they died in sixth year. Even without hard proof, it's not like the whole school didn't know about it, because they totally did, and I'll bet you anything that there were already Death Eaters at Hogwarts willing to feed our names back to their overlord."

"Do you think Snape would have been a Death Eater as early as when we were still in school?" asks Mary carefully.

Lily sort of deflates at that. "I know he wasn't one yet by the end of fifth year, when we stopped talking, because I would have known about it if he was. But did my leaving him push him over the brink? I don't… I can't say for certain that it didn't. It's possible."

"Snape going dark side wasn't your fault, Lily," says James gently. "If anything, it would have happened a lot sooner if you hadn't been such a positive influence on him for so many years."

"James is right," says Mary. "Snape was interested in the Dark Arts as early as first year, wasn't he, Lily? You did everything you could to turn him away from it, and he still called you a Mudblood and went and ruined his relationship with you."

"It's not like I hadn't heard him call other Muggle-borns 'Mudblood' until I was on the receiving end of it," Lily admits. "I turned a blind eye for a really long time, and maybe I did that because I just didn't want to cope with the reality of losing him. But I think, somewhere in my mind, I was prepared to leave him. The truth is, I jumped from being best friends with Severus to putting all my attention on Marlene and James without all that much inner turmoil."

"I mean, I'm not complaining," says James, grinning. "I got my wife out of it, the way things worked out."

"It's Snape's loss, Lily," says Mary. "You did way more for him than he ever deserved. I don't care how sweet he was to you when you were friends—he's always been a bigot, and now he's a criminal, too."

"Sirius keeps telling us that Snape wants to see me," Lily says, "but I won't let him give away our hiding place to him. Let him miss me. Just let him do that."

Mary wishes she could feel the same way about Marlene—that she could be the one holding all the cards, with Marlene left knowing that she's out in the cold. But the truth is always going to be that Mary is Marlene's puppet. She has been for years, and it's starting to feel like she always will be.