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1981. Where to start? With Marlene, probably, which shouldn’t be a surprise. As much as Mary tries to love things while she still has them, it’s all about the loss when you get down to it.
Everyone feels it, to be fair to Mary. The shift, after April. No, after Marlene dies, she corrects herself, because this is war and there’s no point skirting around reality; if you can’t look a ghost in the eye on the battleground and keep on running, there’s little hope for you. Marlene is dead right from the beginning, and the rest of them have to live with that.
There is a change after she dies, though, which Mary sees in everyone but most of all in the mirror: irises as dull as the pond water where they found Marlene’s body floating and dark circles that creep in under her eyes like doubt at a friend’s funeral. A smile that tastes of rot and khakis that look to be going the same way, material no match for the relentless damp of England in spring. Mary turns away, sick, just in time to feel the body hit the floor like it does every time water hits her face in the shower; at weekly dinner nights and the empty chair, the way James and Lily draw in on themselves while Remus and Sirius draw apart; in the park, in birdsong, flickering lights, hushed voices, the drag of spring. Nothing is untouched.
Were you in love with her? Dorcas asks, at the wake, and neither of them are sure what answer she’s looking for.
She told me once, offhand, that she was the sea and I was the storm. I think about that when I’m down by the coast. I think I know what she meant, how we crashed against the rocks together but never against each other. I don’t know. I was never the poet. But I know I’ll never understand anyone else like that, and nobody will ever be able to really understand me because they won’t know her. Love as a word isn’t something I put much stock in, but she used to sneak me out to the nearest phone booth when I missed my family so much it ached and now I see her in bodies of water, so that's the start and end of it, I suppose.
Dorcas nods, sharp and perfunct, like Mary’s given a clear answer. Maybe she has; maybe it doesn’t actually matter. Only a few days after the death, and Dorcas is already moving like she’s under the executioner’s axe herself, face sallow and neck jutting out like a dare, a bet she wants to lose. Everyone knows, quietly, that she’s going to follow Marlene sooner rather than later, but is much too polite to mention it. They’ll all be headed that direction before the year’s up anyway.
Lily liked to say Marlene was the glue that bound them, stitches searing together skin that never quite fit, because when all’s said and done Lily was a poet, body not built for war, and that’s why they were always going to get her in the end.
Mary is not a poet. She’s never found the time. Twenty one years is short, achingly so, as they all come to learn quickly enough. Still, she understands what Lily’s trying to say, as she does occasionally. Their group is unravelling at the seams, plain to see, and Mary’s not quite sure why she sticks around.
This is all to say, really, that by the end of April, 1981, Mary Macdonald no longer understands how to live, or why to bother doing so in the first place. And this is meant to be a story about her, but to understand it you have to know about Marlene first. They were, and are still, made of the same stuff.
The thing that nobody left alive knows is that Mary did fight. She gave that war three years and the shreds of her sanity, but it’s not enough. Nothing ever is. As May rolls around, she wonders what there is left to give: her skin is already stretched see through tight, her chest has long since been hollowed out by her own hand and her heart is a wretched thing of little use to anybody these days. But there is always more to be taken, so Mary keeps on fighting.
Always, always there are things to be done, and when the funeral’s over she finds the world isn’t. War meetings and bills and missions and game nights and life to be lived, because what else are you going to do- die? It’s just not the done thing, not if you can help it. Or not to Mary, at least.
Dorcas lasts a month, which is more than anyone really expected, and then she’s leaving only an echo behind; a face in a photograph and a name on a long list of names. There’s an obituary too, of course, but Mary can only pray nobody writes her a poem. They like to do that for heroes, especially the ones who go out with a flash. She did it for love, someone might say, how terribly romantic, and they don’t have to watch the way her blank eyes stare and her skin starts to mottle, even before they’ve lowered her into the ground, because it’s not romantic at all, and she’s just dead.
So Dorcas dies with a snarl and a weapon in hand, the way it should be, and the rest of them dance anyway. What else are you going to do? No matter where Mary is; club bathrooms or babysitting Harry or pressed up against a stranger in an alley or staring as the enemy’s blood seeps out or in her bed at night, Mary has no idea why she’s still fighting. Fighting, always, everything. You’re handling this all so well, Lily tells her once, like a liar, like she really believes it could be true. Mary just smiles and deflects. Changes the subject. This is war: they soldier on.
Sometimes, though, or maybe all the time, Mary doesn’t want to be a soldier. Marlene and Dorcas, now, those two were built for it from the first playground tussle to the flash of green light; and look where that got them. But Mary just wasn’t made for it. There’s no spark, no righteous fire. She could care more, probably, since it’s her rights they’re fighting for, but Mary’s had a lifetime of being looked at like she’s the dirt on someone else’s shoes before she even heard of magic, and nobody ever offered her a fist to fight with when people would hurl slurs from across the road. Mostly, Mary just wants to be left alone.
So whenever there’s a lull in the action; whenever Mary lets herself think too much, staring quietly at the chipped kitchen cabinets or a crumpled enemy corpse, she starts to dream of more than this. So very dangerous. A different kitchen maybe, with bright tiles and curtains that let sunlight stream in instead of London fog. A life not spent checking behind her back, always on guard. Chairs that are simply chairs, no regard paid to whose ghost may still be sitting there.
She did have more than this, once, Mary thinks as she watches Harry play. He’s too young yet to learn the true way of his world, and they all pray he’ll never have to. That he could grow up unscarred. Like when Mary was young and everything was bright orange blue green; when the world still remembered how to be kind and it was no bigger than a postage stamp with her best friend’s face on it and the swallows that visited her home in the summer. Once, magic didn’t need to be magic for it to be there, woven into wildflowers and hot cocoa and rooms that held laughter instead of heavy silences.
Magic is a dirty word now. She avoids it best she can. May drops into June into July, Sirius stops talking to Remus, and sometime in the middle Mary finds a pen on her kitchen floor and puts it to paper. She makes a list, pins it above the kitchen sink so she can read it over on days the blood won't scrub away from her palm lines. It’s called Reasons to stay.
It says: these are the people you love, even if they are really only the empty husks of them. Who else will you dance, fight, talk, grow up with? It says: you know deep down in your rotten good-for-nothing heart that staying means doing what is right, and once upon a time that meant something to you. Even if it's hard to remember why now. It says: if you close your ears to the sound of shells dropping, it’s not so bad really, and maybe if you wish upon a dying star you could win this thing for good. Maybe you’ll all make it out, and nobody else will have to die, and then the living will come easy again and you’ll stop going mad and your hair will stop falling out and your heart will stop falling out whenever you see blonde hair.
It says that you have to say, because what else would you do? It says this could be enough, as long as you stop wanting more.
And so it is enough for a while, the same way vodka from the bottle and dinners with friends where she shoots at shadows and never sleeping in her own bed because it feels too big are enough. So she slots herself in the middle of James and Lily’s fucked up domestic bliss like a piece of driftwood. She drags Sirius out to clubs if he’s around and walks with Remus in the park if he’s not. Sirius thinks I’m the spy, he tells her, and she hums in response. He’s taken to walking like the war’s already over and lost, gait slow beyond his years. Mary wonders, idly, which of them is right.
Mary’s not sure what it’s like to live for herself anymore. She lives like a machine, which is to say not at all: she’s trained only to kill, to fuck, to count the days down with no goal in sight.
As much as she can, she tries to hold them all together, like Marlene did, but she’s not much good at it. She puts the kettle on and smiles, sometimes, and invites the others to spill their secrets like blood onto her kitchen table; scrapes real blood from under her fingernails and sweeps away thoughts of more than this in favour of listening to the rain hit her window in an empty flat. It’s a sorry half existence, but it’s what she’s been left with.
All the while, there’s another list creeping its way into the cracks of each moment.
It says: you are Mary Macdonald and maybe has never been enough for you. It says you are brave, and don’t forget it. It says of course there is something more than this, and you can have it.
August burns with grey skies, letting only a little light stream into Mary’s rental kitchen, but it’s enough to see by. Mary looks down at her body, the scars the years have cursed her with that criss cross, barely stitching her together. She looks at the list pinned to her fridge. She looks at the photo of her and Marlene that lives on her kitchen shelf; the one where they’re both young and grinning and undeniably alive.
The other list is called Reasons to leave. When she puts pen to paper again, there is one notch on it. It says:
You could be free.
——
For someone so vibrant, so fixed, a force of nature- it’s remarkably easy to disappear.
Have you heard from Mary? Someone asks one morning in late August. Albus, maybe, or Lily or James- they all merge into one as the fight nears its bloody end. Nobody has heard a thing of course, but the mess of war means people go missing all the time, and if there ever was a person who could hold her own, it was Mary. And if she couldn’t- well, the mess of war meant they were were all more than well equipped for loss as well.
Weeks pass. People grow concerned; people mourn. It only takes a couple months for people to feel nothing at all because all the people who had loved Mary most died on October 1st 1981, one way or another. If you asked around at Hogwarts, some would say, yes, there was a Mary Macdonald here, once. I think. But even that became less certain, as years waned and memories became hazy, those awful war years clouding over in people’s minds with motion blur as they rush to forget. As it turns out, magic makes it very easy to remove a face from a photograph or a name from a long, long list of names.
But if you spoke that name to the graves in Godric’s Hollow, the stone would shift, just a little, and that would be them saying, Mary? Yes, I remember her. How could I not? I loved her.
Anyway. Life goes on, as it always, always does. The sun rises even in the darkest depths of November, the war ends eventually just in time for another, and people hurry to sweep the rubble under the rug. Children are born and they live in castles or in cupboards, and maybe they dream one day they will have more than this, but for a while they get to be only children. There are weddings, funerals, laughter, letters, spring flowers, and death fades into little more than a distant echo for most.
The survivors might slowly rot away, in jail cells and London flats, but this is no surprise; nobody cares about war heroes while they’re alive. While their teeth and trigger fingers are still bloody, and you cannot hide from what they have done or what it has made them. There will be war again, make no mistake.
But Mary Macdonald never wanted to be a soldier, or a hero, or another dead body for the crows to pick at. That’s why life back in England goes on, and Mary is nowhere to be found.
Right now, Mary is somewhere sunny, definitely. She probably doesn’t blink twice when she sees blonde hair, and she is happy, almost certainly.
Maybe she has children, and grandchildren, and they run around her legs and call her by a different name to the one she was born with. Maybe her skin wrinkles with the sun and she wears her grey hairs like a medal of honour. Maybe everything for her is colour and dancing, and she has a house by the coast where she can look out of the window during storms, and her hands are calloused from a life of work but by god, at least they’re clean. Maybe she only thinks about the friends that she left behind on Sunday evenings, when everyone else is asleep, and other than that her smiles come easy.
Mary is just happy to leave the maybes for other people to guess at. This is her life, and she’s done more than her fair share of fighting to earn the peace it brings.
Some would say it makes her selfish, the way she keeps herself clean of politics, war, strife; but she’s alright with that. Mary accepted she was selfish a long time ago, with packed up suitcases in the hall and a war left half-finished.
This is all to say: twenty, thirty, fourty years go by, but April is always the same. The wildflowers are blooming again, scent heady, and the birds sing of Death but they stay away from Mary’s house for another year. Her stitching is all unravelled this time of spring, insides spilling bloody onto the floor, but she tells herself this will pass like a prayer and she isn’t lying. Always, always, there are things to do in the meantime: dancing to be done and sewing piles to sort through and sleep to be had- the unbroken, unhaunted kind. She still never finds time for writing, but she’s decided to be content leaving poems for the ghosts and dogs who howl at the moon.
This is not a poem. Don’t be fooled.
Now, where to end?
Somewhere far from England, it’s raining today, waves crashing down on the beach, but the sun will surely be out soon, and then life will go on. Mary Macdonald has not been back to the country she grew up in since she was twenty one, and the exit wound has never felt so good.