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I found a little plot of land
In the garden of Eden,
It was dirt and dirt is all the same;
I tilled it with my two hands
And I called it my very own,
There was no one to dispute my claim.
Well, you'd be shocked at the state of things,
The whole place had just cleared right out;
It was hotter than hell, so I laid me by a spring
For a spell as naked as a trout.
The wandering eye that I have caught
Is as hot as a wandering sun,
But I will want for nothing more, in my garden
Start again, in the hardening to every heart but one...
—
There is, Marlene supposes, supposed to be some sort of relief that hits. Any day now.
But it’s been months. 1981 has come and gone, the war is over, she should finally feel at peace—but it feels wrong. Perverse. It feels as though she's narrowly escaped something, a reality shift in the space of some moment or another back in the thick of it throwing her headlong in an unassumed future. Back before they got to James, to Lily, before Sirius was ripped away behind bars in the North Sea, before—before Dorcas. Before Dorcas was taken from her.
The feeling took root before then, an unease that she thought was probably because of the war but far more likely because of something knit into the volatility of magic as a whole readjusting itself around catastrophe. When something from beyond the physical is divided so sharply, there are bound to be invisible changes. Marlene has felt ill about using her wand, dipping into any of her skills, since long beyond any of this got so dire. But now, she’s nearly sworn off the stuff.
She found land in the the west country, far enough away from where she lost her heart but still close enough that she could easily mourn its emptiness when the worst waves of it want to crash at her inner doors. It was a plot of mostly clay they told Marlene would never take landscaping well, But oh, you’re welcome to try! , the quick adjustment with a salesperson’s smile when Marlene toured the plot in person back in the ice-rain and bitter cold of January. Fallow, had been the exact description of it.
Marlene took it personally enough that she dredged up the last of her tolerance for magic and sucked the sallowness out of the whole acre, spilled the last of her savings into a Muggle contractor who built her a beautiful little cottage, and took to sewing life into the land again. If my heart won’t take it, the ground might as well.
It was dirty work. Her hands came away cracked, chapped, muddied, bleeding on more than one occasion especially when she was wrestling those rose bushes into her new home. The magic may have made the soil livable again, but Marlene’s own two hands would be the only things at work here. This was therapy. There were very few people who had experienced Marlene’s particular brand of loss during the war— Why does it still hurt to call it that, come on, Marley, address it head-on. War, war, you lived through a WAR— and so she did her best to pour every ounce of anguish and fury into the dirt. But even still, even after all the cutting of the beds and the mulching and the tending to roots and leaves and all of the above, Marlene had come away from the whole of it feeling not quite whole herself.
She touched magic again and cut a creek through the far end of the garden, the edge of the land pressing up against an anemic stand of fir trees that rakes out weakly into the greater sprawl of a forest that sprawls north, in some sort of reach for finality. The sound of running has always soothed Marlene, always made her think of her childhood nearer to the Channel down south when the only sense of loss she knew had been the brief hand of sorrow for a goldfish gone belly-up.
Marlene goes to that creek—her handiwork, her place, her piece of pure creation—when she finds the white noise of Getting On With It too loud to bear most days. The summer touches Stroud with an unforgiving eye the year after Marlene has finally unpacked the last box in the cottage getting steadily buried now in climbing roses and ivies like hungry fingers, and so she imagines she is truly alone in this empty shell of a world and strips down beside the creek in the high noon sun.
It isn’t that she wants to swim, more that she hungers very suddenly for her body to be something besides a vessel for tragedy. Marlene carefully tucks her socks into her shoes, creases her trousers into a neat square, folds her shirt down atop it all and shakes the tight, springy curls in her hair loose from the tie holding it back. She sits gently on the grass and shuts her eyes, feels the sun along her shoulders for a moment; Marley, look, I can make constellations on you.
Her heart clenches when she remembers with a sudden slap in her memory the way Dorcas had first traced the spray of flat, tiny moles peppered across Marlene’s back. Both plagued with nerves that first time they shut Dorcas’ bed hangings around them, they hadn’t gone any further than looking and touching and kissing so carefully, softly as though one of them might have dissolved into mist and taken blissful reality with her. In the sun-bleached present, empty without Dorcas and so full of things that can’t possibly matter anymore, Marlene squeezes her eyes shut tighter as the burn of tears begins to build suddenly behind her eyes.
Here, we can study. Dorcas’ sideways grin that evening had really been what did Marlene in, when she has the space and the time to think about it—lion’s bravery, corded Chaser’s limbs and long, blonde hair, huge blue eyes like sapphires, all that beauty paling in comparison to the angle of her smile when she looked at Marlene— Here’s Ursa Major, she had hummed as she traced along Marlene’s right shoulder, and here’s Aquila, and her touch slipping down to Marlene’s lower back with the king’s ransom of cheek taking over that smile; and I’m sure I’m due to fail astronomy this term, but I think this here is Eridanus?
“You perfect idiot,” Marlene whispers to herself, echoing her reply in that delicate past before they were all aware of the maelstrom at their doorstep— Quit that and kiss me, the rest of her insistence lost to time and disaster and all the failings of the world around them stacking up to the pain of silence here beside the babble of water across rounded river stones, the soft roar of trees in the wind.
Marlene presses the heels of her hands softly over her eyes and lets her face crumple, her mouth breaking into a grimace as tears spring from beneath her lashes as though they crave to join the creekbed. She weeps for a while simply sitting there, hunched over, the sun warm on the bare brown of her skin in such rude dissonance, before easing herself down onto her back with her belly up to it instead.
Just take me over, she wants to roar at the maddening, perfect blue of the sky staring down at her, fill me to the brim with so much fucking light that I forget all this grief.
“I’m sorry,” the only plea Marlene can find to whimper into the quiet of the garden, what feels by now like her mantra to the punishing passage of time and the tilling scrape of it on her life and the life of everyone she’s ever loved. “I’m so sorry.”
She takes her hands away from her face and spreads her arms out flat beside her body, flat on the grass, naked as Eden and hollow as salt-stained driftwood, crying into the sunlight and wishing she could sear out the pain along with the sweat the sunlight begs up from her skin.
Nothing is ever so easy, and surviving is not a game for the weak in the aftermath of chaos. Marlene knows she will wake up tomorrow with the same pinhole bleed in her heart she’s had since the night she learned Dorcas was gone, and nothing she can do will ever make it go away completely. But for now, tears tracking their steady crawl down her temples and into the sprawl of her hair fanned beneath her as the creek trips along beside her, Marlene allows herself the luxury of sensation and feels the sorrow wrapping around her beside the grass beneath her and the sun poured warm across her front—she lives, she lives, despite everything she lives.
—
Meet me in the garden of Eden,
Bring a friend,
We are gonna have ourselves a time;
We are gonna have a garden party,
It's on me, no, sirree, it's my dime.
We broke our hearts in the war between
St. George and the dragon;
But both, in equal part are welcome to come along,
I'm inviting everyone.
Farewell to loves that I have known,
Even muddiest waters run;
I believe in innocence, little darling,
Start again,
I believe in everyone.
—
It’s Minerva, oddly enough, who suggests talking to someone.
“You’re not, truly, Ms. McKinnon,” the wizened rebuttal coming not on a clipped snap as it might have in a classroom but instead on a gentle murmur in Marlene’s sitting room one Sunday afternoon. Minerva—strange still to call her by her first name, even after the warped stretch of time away from school that makes her feel out-of-place and perfectly-placed all at once in Marlene’s second armchair—had asked Marlene if she was doing well. Marlene lied.
Gripping her teacup with a forceful pinch of resistance, for it’s rage Marlene has begun feeling in the face of this more often than not these days instead of the overwhelming sadness that came after the bland denial—she may be doing some of this backwards, no matter to her as long as she gets through it—Marlene bites her lips together briefly. “No,” she finally admits before blowing across the top of her tea and taking a shallow sip of almost nothing at all along the cup’s rim, “no, I don’t think I am.”
Minerva mentions Lupin on her way out the Floo later, her hand delicate and fine-boned around the fistful of powder she takes up gently as though she shares the feeling that at any moment, within any fraction of a second, all this peace might shatter without warning. “He’s outside of Brighton these days,” she says offhandedly, with an odd look as though recalling somewhere faintly unpleasant. “I...worry about him, sometimes. He’s never been one for listening to opinions that aren’t already his own, but you might speak with him sometime when you have the chance.”
“I’ll owl him soon.” Secretly, Marlene is unsure of the truth of that. Minerva purses her lips.
“Better to write a letter, the mundane way. He doesn’t much care for magic lately, you understand.”
Nodding, Marlene holds in the More than you could ever know, because even as Minerva dashes the powder at her feet and disappears in green flames—and Marlene has to look away, shut her eyes, quell the sick feeling that grips her throat when she sees green anywhere and has to not think of the spell, that spell—Marlene is sure Minerva has lost far more than she could ever know.
In the end, she writes Lupin. She gets his address from Alice, a short chat over tea at a small cafe nearby full of too much avoidance and careful treading since it feels more difficult to try and pretend nothing ever happened than to flat-out talk about it in the middle of another obstinately beautiful day in town. Marlene pens him a short letter on flat, crisp Muggle paper with an old fountain pen that leaks just a bit: I’ve a little house here now in the West Country and a garden I think is too lovely and on which I’ve worked too hard not to share for an afternoon. You don’t have to come, but Minerva suggested I reach out and I’ll be looking sideways at every cat I see until I just do it already. So hello, Remus, would you like to stop by sometime for tea?
His response is equally as short, coming in a cramped-looking envelope with a faded stamp several days later: Tea would be lovely. I agree with what you mean about the cats. I’ll bring biscuits.
Marlene dusts the outdoor furniture and plants just a couple new tulips the day before Lupin comes over. Dorcas, with all her brilliant and sensible perception, would give her a good frown and ask her why she feels the need to pretend she—or, by extension, her cottage—is any better than beyond how she’s feeling in that very moment for someone she’s known for such a long time.
“Respectfully,” she says aloud to the twittering idyll of the garden, wiping her dirty palms off on the ragged flat of her working jeans, huffing slightly with the heat and the effort beneath the wide brim of her sunhat over a tightly-knotted kerchief, “the circumstances are quite fucking unique here, don’t you think, dove?”
It’s surprising to find that imagining Dorcas cracking with a laugh at that doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it might have last time Marlene talked to no one like this. She blinks quickly, holding back a light scrim of quick and tidy tears, and goes into the kitchen to prepare the tea.
Lupin arrives exactly four minutes past the hour they agreed on, the crack of his Apparition scattering a burst of daws from the spindly oak overseeing the lane that comes up Marlene’s way. The clock on the mantle ticks over to five-past just as he knocks sharply at the entrance—two raps, clear and terse.
Marlene opens the door and feels as though she’s looking in a mirror for the first time in far too long.
He’s got unfathomably sad eyes. When they were children, those coltish half-adults trying to learn the ins and outs of wonder, Lupin’s eyes used to be bright, carnelian things full of wit and quiet charm. Marlene blinks. Lupin smiles, and it doesn’t reach those eyes of his. Marlene thinks, Sweet Morgana, have I been smiling like that as well? , and she says nothing as she pulls the man into a fierce embrace there on the doorstep, knowing immediately that the answer to that thought is yes.
Clinging to the too-big shoulders of Lupin’s shirt, Marlene holds back a sob and forbids herself to cry. It takes a moment for Lupin to calculate the moment before he slowly returns the hold with the one arm not holding his tin of biscuits, but once he does Lupin’s hand is large and comforting and terribly warm where it grips around Marlene’s shoulder.
“Hey,” he murmurs gently, the bitter coffee-tinged waft of his breath from so near fluttering a few of Marlene’s curls near his nose. “It’s alright, Marlene.”
Marlene clamps her throat down around an angular hiccup of air and tries not to be angry at herself for letting a few fat tears trip out from the stays of her eyelashes. “You look good,” she says into Lupin’s collar, a gentle lie for of course they both probably look like relative shit, murmured along the pale parallel of a thin scar tracing along one cord of his neck. Lupin sniffs a laugh.
“You’re still an awful liar.”
“Oh, piss off.” Marlene steps back and wipes tidily at her eyes before she runs a hand self-consciously through one side of her hair. “I still make a good fucking cuppa too, would you care for one or would you just like to compare our shortcomings all afternoon?”
She fears for just a moment that she’s cut too deep with her old sense of humor, so unused to fitting it now around how she speaks and acts and moves in the glass case of the present—always new, always unsure. But Lupin sniffs a laugh and proffers his biscuit tin another moment later.
“And I still make a bloody good biscuit.”
He helps set the tea tray as Marlene fills the pot, nestling the empty cups into their saucers and stacking an attractive handful of Lupin’s slightly-misshapen biscuits onto a small plate. Lupin insists on carrying the tray, and Marlene leads them into the garden. There are rudely fluffy clouds chasing their way across the sky in front of a butter-bright sun when they step outside, and Lupin looks around with his eyebrows up in mild surprise.
“I didn’t know you liked herbology,” he hums. Marlene shrugs and realizes she’s still in her dirt-tracked trousers and a hair kerchief.
“Neither did I. Did it all myself, without any, ah, help. You know.”
Lupin sets the tray down and nods, a flicker of shadow shuddering behind his pupils. “I know.”
Marlene pours them tea and they talk about stilted things—Brighton, weather, both of their spotty bids for regular non-magical work, Marlene’s time spent here in the garden more often than not. Lupin watches her not with a coolness but a mild disconnect, as though he’s trained up a screen between them so as not to let her in too closely. Marlene wonders if that’s something he wears constantly nowadays.
Inevitably, their chatter shifts unguided into the darker swoop of it all. They talk haltingly of old friends lost too soon, those they knew in school who became the worst of the lot, the whole collective of those memories pressing hard as iron even though the sunshine continues beating down and the birds keep singing through it all. It seems that talking of the worst of it gives Lupin a sense of easement, a comfort in living with the pain, and Marlene does her best to keep up.
In the middle of their thread of the Death Eaters—counting them, nearly, ticking them off as if losing track of even one would bring the whole war back to life beneath them—Marlene pauses and twists her teacup around in her hands. “I...feel awful for feeling it, truly, but a very small part of me wants to forgive them all.” She leaves off the part about that smallness growing larger the more distance she gets between her and the riot of wartime.
But Lupin, she realizes as he frowns, is still in the middle of his own sort of war. Marlene often forgets that Sirius isn’t dead. As much as it should be a sort of death sentence, a black shroud over the stretch of one’s time left alive, Marlene sees Lupin’s fist clench very slightly on his knee and sees a cord twitch at the back of his jaw and finds immediately that Lupin is holding onto those fraying, flaking ends of hope.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes.
Lupin makes a small sound at the back of his throat which he chases with a quaff of tea and shakes his head. He flexes his hand open, his fingers trembling slightly, and lays it flat on his knee. “No need to apologize. Your feelings are your own.” He grinds his teeth together softly, lost in thought, and Marlene remembers to take a sip of her tea before Remus lets a slow, thin breath out from his nose; “I appreciate that you can look for forgiveness. A very small part of me wishes I could, but truthfully I want them all dead. Ruined. Nothing to their names but a black smudge on the goddamn flagstones.”
He says it the way one might remark on tomorrow’s weather. A chill chains up Marlene’s spine. She feels rage every day, a vague and cottoned sort, but nothing close to the brush of feral vengeance she feels rolling off of Lupin’s energy at that moment. But he clears his throat and shrugs, and the ripple passes in an instant. A bird sings a warbling little song far off in the firs beyond the creek. Marlene lets its tune come to a close before she screws up her courage and looks Lupin right in the eye.
“Do you still relive it sometimes? Losing him?” Marlene wills herself to shut her trap then, her question asked, but the dam is rammed open and she’s powerless to stop the surge of reaching, searching feeling pouring from her in a spout; “Because I do, nearly every day. Like clockwork, I sit there and I stare out my window and I run through every choice, every single thing I might have done differently to keep Dorcas with me, because I—”
She stops when that same warm, gentle touch covers her hand where she’s begun fussily picking at her thumbnail on the tabletop. Marlene sniffs sharply, trying immediately to put brakes on the tears that have begun welling up again behind her eyes again like some sort of hideous refrain. Lupin is smiling at her again, gentler, and the ferocity in that look has softened massively into the deepest sort of understanding Marlene has seen in years.
“Absolutely every. Single. Day,” Lupin says, his voice low and intent. His mouth twitches with a skip of suppressed emotion that Marlene couldn’t have caught before knowing exactly what it feels like to hold it in; she twists her hand around and grips Lupin’s fingers in her own. “And I could have done a hundred things differently, Marlene, but you don’t have to fight that war anymore.”
Marlene sharpens her gaze, bright and tearful and intent as when they were children trying to argue their way out of studying. “Neither do you.”
Leaning back, Lupin keeps their hands together there on the table and watches her mildly for a moment. “I’m not fighting,” he finally says gently. A breeze picks up softly and rustles the plants to life, whushing softly against themselves in their beds and against the walls of the cottage, before it softens again. Lupin sips his tea once and sets it down with care and silence on the saucer. “I was a coward and turned away from it all; I’m trying to find my way back to it now, and it’s too late to change much of anything at all. But that’s my penance. Not yours.”
A creature chirrups somewhere from among the roses. Marlene marvels for the umpteenth time at the voracity of the life in this place and decides quietly not to press the point. She nods slowly. “Fair enough. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’ve ever been a coward a day in your life.”
“On the contrary.” Lupin’s eyes are sad again, sad alongside a twist of rueful wryness. Marlene’s stomach twists. “Running away into the mundane, trying to ignore everything going on right up until I left him and lost him because of it? I think I’ve been a coward every day of the whole mess until now.”
Unable to hold in another steady press of emotion, Marlene dredges up her deepest reaches of strength and manages a wobbly smile across the table. It isn’t fair, Dorcas had told her once, wrapped up in their bedsheets and propped up on their elbows facing one another in the half-dark with one bedside lamp burning soft yellow, that you can pull a smile out of anywhere.
Careful, dove. Marlene always preferred to warn Dorcas when she was about to make an innuendo, or else risk maybe stopping her own heart with the way Dorcas would laugh so brightly at the result of it. It never mattered; Dorcas always laughed like that regardless.
Promise me, Dorcas had said gently in the tail end of skipping laughter-breath, reaching over to brush a tight, fuzzy coil of freshly-bed-tossed hair away from one of Marlene’s eyebrows—her face had become serious in a calm sort of way, like a lake just gone calm after the last lip of wake flattened out of its banks. Marlene could see forever in that face then, forever and a day. Promise me you’ll never forget how to do that.
“Are we brave, Remus?” Marlene presses her other hand over top of Lupin’s as though shielding him from something, ever the protector her entire life but for what it was never clear until her world went up in emerald flames around her, the message in the aftermath shimmering clear as day—her future. From here, each day crawling forth out of the ooze of pity and desolation and one inch closer to peace, that has become her purpose. She presses Lupin’s hand between her palms, and there’s a moment of hesitation there in his tendons and knuckles before he curls his fingers around hers. “Is this, is all this just some mad scrabbling at chance that we got out alive, or are we the brave ones now?”
Lupin watches her carefully, his gaze unreadable. Their tea has quit steaming in the air, warming charms a thing of a simpler past, but neither of them marks it.
“Every day you spend without her is proof you can brave anything this fucking lifetime throws at you,” he murmurs, conviction tight in his voice and the angle of his grip. He says nothing of himself. Marlene decides to leave that be for another day, another tea through which she might drum the courage not to cry as she picks herself apart bone by bone by smallest, aching bone.
Marlene stands steadily and presses a simple kiss to Lupin’s forehead, gently smoothing his tired and already-greying waves of hair back. He squeezes her hand once more before letting it go, directing his stare somewhere far off into the flat hills that rake out past the woods by the creek without an end or a beginning. “Shall I find us something stronger then?” Marlene nods at the teacups, and the tiny grin that just barely tips up the corners of Remus’ mouth pairs nicely with the sweet smell of blooming flowers and the tang of the fresh, livened dirt in the air.
“Please. I’ll take a double, if you’re feeling adventurous.”
It’s a strange feeling to let old happiness in alongside the grief. As Marlene slips into the kitchen and digs out her gin and her whiskey and the stout little glasses into which they go, the aleatoric flutter of honest enjoyment wakes up in her chest and shakes off the leagues of dust crusted over it. She is, after all, feeling adventurous.
So Marlene brings the drinks outside, ice clinkering lightly as she settles back into her seat across from Lupin, and pours them a pair of steel-strong doubles in order to face their first trek back into the vaults of blessed memories—the hallowed, the half-baked, the hedonistic alike—of those they’ve loved and lost in more ways than one. The springtime sings softly around Marlene’s garden as they go, underscoring and overscoring each twist and turn of remembrance, and with every soft breeze and delicate sound from the trees and the bushes Marlene feels the journey forward get just a bit lighter.
I won’t forget, she thinks to her very core, to the pit of her being that still belongs to Dorcas even in death, as she breaks into an unexpected grin with Lupin’s details of a plan gone awry in the library just before exams one year; I won’t ever, ever forget.
And Marlene believes herself this time, believes herself alongside every Do You Remember that weaves itself together in the safety of her garden, will believe herself with every beat of her heart that calls back to a woman brighter than light and life and everything left here to live it.
—