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No one was surprised when Lily walked out of Hogwarts, a smile on her face, hand in hand with the boy she had both hated and loved so fiercely, a perfect row of O and E-grade NEWTs, and smouldering eyes. No one was surprised when she said she was going to fight. “If there is nothing I can do to stop them hating me for who I am, I might as well give them a reason to regret it.”
Marlene was fierce. She had worked in deadly tandem with Sirius, hurtling bludgers across the quidditch pitch with the same intensity on her face that she had as she stared at where Snape and Mulciber whispered quietly with some of their other ‘friends’. Her entire family had been fighting Death Eaters for years. It probably never even occurred to her that she would do any different.
Dorcas kissed Marlene’s cheek. There was nowhere one could go, that the other wouldn’t follow. Dorcas had her muggle father’s name, her witch mother’s ferocity, and strong beliefs that were entirely her own.
(Later Mary would ask Remus why he thought the boys had done the same. Remus had shrugged and said James couldn’t have done anything else, Peter would follow wherever James led, and Remus didn’t have anything better to do. He didn’t say anything about Sirius. Mary thought about the boy who had spoke so passionately against the beliefs of the people whose name he bore, and couldn’t reconcile it with the man who betrayed the people he had so insistently claimed were his real family.)
They all then looked at Mary, and she had bit her lip.
(She still bore the scars from when she was sixteen. Mulciber had never even got a detention. She had learnt then that there was no justice in the world. The others had discovered the same thing, but the difference was they decided to find their own. Mary just wanted to avoid the need for it.)
(When she was eleven, a hat told her that she had an abundance of kindness, but the potential for even more bravery. Mary would always be glad for the incredible people she shared a house and a dormitory with, those wonderful, brave people who had made all the insults and taunts cut a little less deep, but she never stopped thinking that the hat had made a mistake. Mary wasn’t brave. She never had been.)
No one tried to convince her to do otherwise. They were all so accepting. That made her feel so much worse. She packed her trunk, and took a portkey to France. Her mum had a friend out there, who would help her get settled. She moved into her muggle apartment with a wave of her wand, hid all the magical things under her bed, and started a job in a boutique, once her French was good enough.
A year later Mary took a taxi from her portkey landing zone to Godric’s Hollow. She hugged Lily, who looked stunning in that white dress, and spent the night laughing and drinking and dancing with her old friends. It didn’t escape her notice that everyone had a few more scars. They looked more used to frowning than smiling, and their hands would drift towards their wands in sleeve holsters or at their waists, even in their formal gowns. Everyone except Mary. Her wand was somewhere at the bottom of her sequinned handbag.
A few weeks after the wedding Mary spent a day packing boxes and a suitcase in her small apartment in France, and shipped them, and herself, to the US. She used magic to fake a few documents, and enrolled in an English Language course. After all, she already spoke the language, how hard could it be to get a degree in it?
Harder than she expected; from day one she realised she was so far behind her colleagues, but at least her classmates seemed to like her English accent, and she relished the challenge. It took her mind off what might have been going on in Britain. She didn’t bother registering with the American ministry… congress… thing. She hadn’t done enough research on magic in the States to even be entirely sure what they were called.
Marlene died in January. Lily’s letter had been stained with tears when she opened it, and covered in even more when she was finished reading.
They are having a funeral for the entire McKinnon family, but it’s too dangerous for James, Harry and I to go, now we’re in hiding. We were going to have a Marauders send off at the cove we spent that last summer at.
(The Marauders had started as just a reference to the boys, something McGonagall had called them in their first year that had stuck. By their seventh year, it applied to the girls as well, despite, and perhaps because of, Lily arguing against it so hard. (“We weren’t the ones who set firecrackers off under the staff table on five separate occasions!”) Mary sometimes liked it, a name that connected her to her school friends, even after they went their separate ways. Sometimes she hated it.)
Mary took a plane to Heathrow, a train to Somerset, a taxi as far as it could go, and then hiked the rest of the way to the small, out of the way lake, surrounded by cliffs. The rest were already there, and Lily and James had brought baby Harry. Mary held him for the first time, lightly kissing his forehead, as they took it in turns to tell stories about how incredible Marlene was. All of them sobbed at one point. Dorcas barely stopped. Harry made things easier, though. He was so young and innocent. A reminder that there was still good in the world. A reminder that even as their strange family shrank, it was growing too.
“When we were in sixth year, we got into an argument during quidditch.” Sirius began. “She sent a bludger straight at me, and laughed as a fell. I broke three bones in my arm, and she wasn’t even sorry that bastard.”
“Sirius,” James began in a warning voice, and Dorcas wiped her eyes to glare at him.
“No,” he replied, sharply. “If you want to tell stories about how much she will be missed, and what a great person she was, there was a funeral for that, where everyone said she was wonderful, and did everything right. But I’m not going to do that, because she didn’t. She wasn’t, and she’d be the first to admit that, and would hate to be remembered that way. Sometimes she was a right wanker, and laughed when you were hurt. We’re marauders. We know better than anybody that nobody is perfect. We didn’t love Marlene because she was kind and patient and whatever bull people sprout at funerals. She wasn’t kind. She wasn’t patient. She was rude and violent and loyal and always stood up for her friends. That was why we loved her. And you know what? Poppy fixed my arm up in a flash, and when fucking Aubrey tried talking to me in the next match so I would miss the bludger coming my way, I spotted it, and bloody hit him with it.”
Everyone was silent as they took his words in. It was Mary who broke the silence. “She always used to steal the muggle chocolates Dad sent me from home. She would always deny it, said she hated them, but I knew it was her. This went on for years. I got so angry with her. And then one day I opened my trunk to get my charms textbook, and it was completely crammed with chocolate, both Honeydukes and muggle, with a little scrap of parchment saying sorry on the top. She had had to remove my things to fit them all in.”
Dorcas managed a weak smile. “Before I started dating Marlene, there were a few boys. A few girls too. They would only last a few weeks though, before they would abruptly come up to me one day and end things. I found out it was because Marlene had been duelling them with the deal that if she won, they had to end things with me, and if they won she would give them twenty galleons. I was furious with her for most of fifth year.”
“So that was what that was about,” James said with a grin of realisation.
“She never lost a knut.” Dorcas added, before her face turned dark. “The Death Eaters had to murder her in her bed, with the rest of her family, because they never would have been able to take her awake, and they knew it. I am going to end them, one by one. I will destroy them.”
They went to a small cave at the edge of the cove and James, who had always been the best at transfiguration, turned part of the rocky wall into a small, smooth, gold-metal plaque, inlaid with a wand crossed with a beater bat, wand sparks and a bludger flying around. Sirius then took over, and engraved into the metal in his beautiful cursive:
Marlene McKinnon
1960-1981
He then hesitated. “Marlene would hate to rest in peace. She would only be happy if there was a good argument to be had.”
“Remembering her for who she really was, right?” Mary asked. “What about her favourite sentence?”
Sirius grinned through his tears, and waved his wand again.
Don’t touch my chips, you fucking twat.
Dorcas was true to her word, and even as Mary studied English in America, she destroyed Death Eaters, cutting them down one by one, three by three. Long after others would have cut their losses and apperated away, she would stay and always came out victorious. She became such a thorn in the side of the Death Eaters, that eventually You-Know-Who himself took notice. The spy that the Order was beginning to realise they had told him where she could be found, and she finally joined Marlene. There was, after all, nowhere one could go that the other wouldn’t follow.
Mary didn’t go to the memorial. The day after Lily’s letter arrived, she dragged her trunk full of her robes and spell books and moving pictures and wand and anything else that a muggle might be confused by to the woods and set it alight with a match. Even the books didn’t catch. That was the trouble with everything being fire resistant because wizards still insisted on using candles rather than much more sensible lightbulbs, for the ‘aesthetic’. She snatched her wand out of the trunk, and after a moment, the pictures as well. With a wave of her wand, and an hour (she used to be able to burn an entire tree in seconds, and grow it back almost as quickly), there was nothing but a small pile of ash. She bought a gaudy pink bag, put inside the wand and the photos, emptied a cupboard and stuffed the bag in there where she wouldn’t have to see it. She went back to her studies, and tried not to think of Dorcas, the girl who would punch anyone who said the word mudblood to Mary (then hex them for good measure).
Lily and James were dead. Peter was dead. Sirius was… gone. Mary hated that that was what finally brought her back to Britain. Remus met her at the airport, and the war had killed him too. Not like Lily or Marlene or Dorcas, but perhaps in a more painful way. They hugged each other, and Mary rested her head on his shoulder, she could feel his tears soak into her hair, as he buried his face into her head. When they pulled away, his sweater was wet. Mary side-alonged with Remus to the cave. There was another plaque up:
Dorcas Meadowes
1959-1981
I’m right, you’re wrong, and you can write that on my grave because you don’t argue with a dead person.
“Lily sent the quote, but she and James couldn’t come,” Remus said quietly. “It was just me, Pete, and… him.”
Mary burst into tears again, and they just held each other for what could have been minutes or hours. The rest of the country was celebrating, but for Mary and Remus it had ended. Finally, with a stuttering breath, Mary said, “he looked so ridiculous, strutting down the corridors like he owned the school.”
“And messing up his hair,” Remus agreed, forcing a laugh though tears still rolled down his cheeks. “We used to laugh at him so much.”
Mary moved back to Britain when her dad got sick in 1984, and it was there she met Asif. He had left Uganda with his family as a teenager during the deportation of South Asian Ugandans by Idi Amin.
“I’ve never even been to India,” Asif said. “I was born in Uganda. But my parents weren’t, and that was enough for them to decide I didn’t belong.”
Mary thought of being called a mudblood, before she even knew what the word meant. “Who gave them the right to decide who does and does not belong?”
Asif and Mary married in 1988, attempting as best they could to combine the big wedding she had always dreamed of with a rushed event that her dad, who’s condition had made a turn for the worst, could still come to, and their limited funds.
Mary had been a sociable child, and it was almost a shock when the guest list for her side of the church was nothing more than her father, a cousin, aunt and uncle she hadn’t seen in years, a couple of the women she worked with in her job as a receptionist, and the only friend from university she had managed not to loose contact with, who thankfully agreed to play bridesmaid for her. After Asif added another half dozen cousins to his own list, he tried to insist some of their mutual friends should sit on her side, despite the fact he had been the one to introduce them in the first place. After a few uncomfortable days, they decided that they would eschew the bride/groom side tradition altogether, but that didn’t stop Mary sending an invitation to Remus, the only other person she could even think of to buffer her own support.
She didn’t get a reply, despite sending him both her phone number and address, but even so she spotted him sitting alone in the back row of the Church pews as she said her vows, his face gaunt and his coat worn, shabby, and clearly made for someone who got more meals than him. Even as the rest of the congregation surged forward to greet the happy newlyweds, he slipped out of the door, unnoticed by everyone but herself.
Or so she thought. During their honeymoon, a long weekend in an isolated hotel in the Yorkshire Dales, he brought it up. “Did you see that man, in the back at our wedding?”
“Remus,” Mary said. “I’m sorry for not telling you, but I invited him. He didn’t reply, so I didn’t think he would actually come. We went to school together.”
Asif frowned. “You never talk much about your school. I didn’t know you were still in contact with anyone from there.”
(In fact, Mary said almost nothing about it, not to Asif. He had asked once, but all she had said was that she went to a boarding school in Scotland. “Sounds glamorous,” Asif had said. Mary had shrugged. “It wasn’t as great as it sounded. Just a bunch of rich snobs who hated me for something I had no control over.” Asif had nodded knowingly, and never brought it up again.) (For all her English degree, Mary didn’t have the words to describe Lily and Marlene and Dorcas, the girls who had made her return to Hogwarts, year after year, almost as magical as she had first assumed they would be.)
“He looked homeless.” Asif commented.
(Secrets had a way of getting out, and Mary’s friends weren’t stupid. Lily had been the first to discover it, and spent years covering for him around the others, but by seventh year they all knew. Mary had never quite got over the guilt of the stab of fear she felt when she first found out, followed by the awful, smug satisfaction of finding someone who would have less chance and more prejudice in the Wizarding World than herself.)
“I’m not sure he isn’t,” Mary replied.
“We should invite him over, when we get back,” Asif decided.
And so Mary began her married life, and reignited contact with a wizard for the first time in years. They often met at her home, with Asif present, and Remus played a surprisingly convincing part of a muggle as he discussed music and politics with the two. Even alone, they never talked about magic, although Mary knew he hadn’t and couldn’t cut it out of his life as completely as she had.
He was a sporadic and irregular returner of letters, and even worse at meetings. Sometimes they would see each other three times in a week, other times he would disappear for months on end. Mary could see the hollowness in his cheeks, the shabbiness of his clothes, and knew he was lying every time he insisted he was ‘fine’, but there was nothing she could do but make a large meal when he visited, and insisted he took the leftovers with him.
Mary was glad Asif was working when the owl knocked on her window, in 1992. She had taken the day off when she had woken and instantly had to run to the bathroom to forcefully purge herself of last night’s dinner. If she had to make a list of things she missed about the wizarding world, it would not be long, but Madame Pomfrey’s draughts would certainly make it. The bird was a large barn owl she didn’t recognise (not that there would be any owl she still would, unless James Potter’s infamous eagle owl, the scourge of Gryffindor breakfasts, had somehow survived the twelve years since she had last seen the beast).
After some consideration she took the letter from the owl, which perched on the back of a chair, talons digging into the wood (Mary hoped she wouldn’t have to explain those marks to Asif), watching her with beady yellow eyes. She felt no surprise to see her maiden name, Mary McDonald, in scratchy writing on the parchment scroll. How long had it been since she had held parchment rather than paper, she wondered as she unrolled it?
Mary,
I hope you’re well. I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Hagrid, the Hogwarts groundskeeper. I’m writing about Harry, James and Lily Potter’s boy. He’s been living with muggles and don’t even know what his parents look like! I was putting together a photo album for him, and I know you were good friends with Lily back then. I wondered if you had any photos of them you could donate?
Hagrid
The owl continued to watch her beadily. If she shooed it away it would probably go, but she would then have no access to another owl. She wouldn’t be able to send anything. There wasn’t long until Asif was back, and that thought was perhaps the only thing that propelled her to the bottom drawers in the spare bedroom, and a gaudy pink bag. Tipping it upside down released a shower of moving photos and, at the top, her wand. She shoved that quickly back into the bag, trying to ignore the tingling of it on her fingers, the connection still there after so many years.
There were so many more than she had remembered. Dorcas kissing Marlene on a beach she couldn’t remember, Lily, face down in the sand, laughing or crying. The eight of them in their Hogwarts uniforms, the castle behind them, looking so young. Her eyes found the grinning face of Sirius, and she cast it aside.
Eventually she came up with a small pile, either of Lily and James, or Lily alone. She didn’t know what Remus would decide to do about the Sirius situation, but he seemed to be there, grinning in the background (or more often foreground, he did love attention) of every group photo, and she couldn’t bring herself to let Harry Potter see the face of the man who as good as murdered his parents grinning and laughing with them.
The owl was gone before Asif got home, and when he asked about her day Mary said nothing about birds, or old photos, or orphaned babies.
She found out she was pregnant three weeks later.
There had never been a conclusive study done, on the probability of a muggle and a muggle born producing magical offspring. Greater than zero, she was sure. It was always greater than zero, even with two muggles - she was proof enough of that. When Maya Marlene Bibodi was born in November, she knew she would love her daughter whoever she became, but still she prayed Maya would never possess magic.
(She had been called a mudblood in her first week of school, and had laughed, thinking it some failed taunt that didn’t land, no idea what it meant. She asked Dorcas in the dorm later, and she grew so angry she threw her transfiguration textbook across the room. Then she told her. It never failed to land again.
She was in her third year by the time she realised she couldn’t go to Madam Pomfrey every time she was jinxed, or she’d never leave the hospital wing. She kept dittany under her bed, and shared it with Lily in return for the pain potions the other girl brewed with stolen ingredients.
In her fifth year, she spent four weeks in the hospital wing, and the day she was released she spent a double period in the dungeons, sitting three rows in front of the very boy who had caused it.
By her sixth year, she found out that Sirius and Remus both knew a surprising amount about dark magic, and reversing curses, and together they could fix almost anything (and the perpetrator tended to find themselves in an… uncomfortable position within a day). She all but stopped going to the hospital wing altogether. There were younger students who needed the beds more.
She spent her entire seventh year knowing she was done. Lily convinced her to finish NEWTs she knew she would never use. She had her connection to Paris ready before she even boarded the Hogwarts Express.)
The morning she woke to Sirius Black’s name on the news, she spilt her coffee. The picture above it was almost unrecognisable - a skeletal man with a mess of long, black hair, lips twisted into something approximating a smile, or perhaps a sneer. Sirius had always been the handsome one, the one every girl fell for, though they all knew he was untouchable. Once, Mary had had a crush on him too. Now, in the still photo Mary knew should have been moving, he looked almost dead.
More alive than Marlene, or Dorcas, or Lily, or James, or Peter though. More alive than any of the people he had killed, directly or indirectly.
“They haven’t given a location,” Asif commented, misinterpreting her interest when he saw she hadn’t taken her eyes off the news. “Aren’t we supposed to know where he escaped from?”
If Mary had ever known where Azkaban was, she couldn’t remember. “I knew him,” she whispered.
“What?” Asif stared with wide eyes. “What do you mean?”
“We… we went to the same school. Were in the same year, even. His best friend married mine.” She said it dully, like it was just plain facts. Like it wasn’t years worth of heartbreak.
“But he went to prison?”
“For killing them - my best friend and his. Another of his friends. Twelve strangers, too.” Asif looked aghast, and Mary didn’t feel much better. “None of us could understand it,” she added, before pausing. “Well, I say none of us, I mean Remus and I. We’re the only ones left, after he killed the rest.”
“The news says he has a gun,” David said. “Do you think he… if he’s killing your friends…”
“No,” Mary said, because talking was better than the image of Sirius - the handsome Sirius she remembered who got so excited and asked her so many questions about muggle things - with a gun. If it wasn’t so horrible, it would have been funny. “I’ve never been very important to him, and even if I was, he doesn’t even know I’m in the country. I’ve changed my surname, too. We aren’t in any danger.”
Remus called that evening. His own number changed too often (and quite often didn’t exist) so she was never able to call him in return, and was glad when the phone rang and his voice was on the other end.
“I’m going to Hogwarts,” he said. “Dumbledore gave me the defence position.”
If it had been any other year, if it didn’t have the same build up, she would have been delighted. As it was, she could only manage a shaky smile she was glad Remus couldn’t see.
“Because of him?”
“Dumbledore believes he is coming after Harry.” Mary swore, and thought of holding a little baby boy in a secluded cove. How old would he be now? Twelve? Thirteen? In her mind he was still as young as her Maya.
“What will you do?” she asked. “When you find him?”
“When? I’m not going to hunt him, but the aurors are searching for him…”
“Do you really believe the aurors will catch him?”
Remus didn’t reply. Mary didn’t know what secret Remus was keeping, would keep for more than a decade and the escape of a murderer, but she knew such a secret existed, remembered that much from her school days, a secret that kept Sirius Black ahead of the aurors, doing the impossible. The boys had spent their school years trying out all kinds of illicit, if not outright illegal, types of magic. Nothing dark, perhaps, but certainly intrusive. She’d never learnt the reason for their overheard conversation on how to track every person in the castle. She wondered if it was selfishness; Remus protecting himself from what that secret would mean. Maybe it was protecting James and Peter’s memories, that were still alive in a thirteen year old boy. She wished she could believe it wasn’t to protect the man who had killed them.
Remus cried on her shoulder as he spilled the whole sordid tale of how Peter was alive, and Sirius was innocent. It didn’t make sense, it was the kind of craziness and trickery that was only found in movies and books, but Sirius being a traitor had been the same.
She refused to see him, when Remus called to tell her Sirius was back in the country. She would have had to go to the Order’s headquarters, because he couldn’t leave, and that would put far to many secrets in her head she really didn’t want in there, now that the war had started again. Maybe if she was seventeen again, with no Asif or Maya, nothing tying her to the country. If she could leave straight after, to Paris or Boston or anywhere else in the world. But Asif and she had jobs, Maya was settled in pre-school. How could she give that up for the ghost of a friend she had hated for most of the last 14 years?
“He’s… Sirius… he’s dead.”
She wished she felt guilty for not seeing him when she had the chance. But Mary had already cried for the handsome teenager she’d once had a crush on, and she had never known the gaunt escapee in that photo on the TV. She did cry, in the end, but it was for Remus, the one who was left behind, and her tears were long dried by the time Asif got home.
She never saw, nor spoke to Remus again.
“Are you sure, Miss? There’s nothin’ here.” The taxi driver had more curiosity than sense.
“I’m sure,” she replied. “You’ll meet me back here in five hours?”
“If you say so, Miss.”
Mary checked her watch out of habit. 11:30. The funeral would be starting, according to the woman who’d called her. Andromeda Tonks, Remus’s mother-in-law. She hadn’t even know Remus had got married, before both husband and wife were dead.
The war was over; properly, this time. Andromeda had told her that too. There was no real risk in going to the funeral. Harry Potter would be there, a full-grown man now. She could introduce herself, tell him stories about Lily even Sirius and Remus hadn’t known. She could meet Remus’ new baby, watch little Teddy Lupin grow up.
Instead she was walking through miles of forrest, to their secret lake. She read off the names carved into the rock.
Marlene McKinnon
1960-1981
Don’t touch my chips, you fucking twat.
Dorcas Meadows
1959-1981
I’m right, you’re wrong, and you can write that on my grave because you don’t argue with a dead person.
James Potter
Prongs
1960-1981
Died doing something spectacularly stupid.
Lily Potter
1960-1981
Cool, calm and collected if you ignore the fact I’m not any of those things.
They were all old now, half covered by lichen and moss, weathering making the letters hard to read. Beside them all was a blackened scorch covering cracked rock, where Peter’s name had once stood, and then in sharper, newer lines an addition she had never seen before.
Sirius Black
Padfoot
1959-1996
Failed to prove he was immortal.
She reached into a pink, sequinned bag.
It took her a long time to remember the spell, and longer still to get it working. She was going to be late for her taxi, and all she managed to carve to mark Remus’ life was a messy, lopsided circle. It was nothing like the beautiful illustrations adorning the others, and she would never manage readable letters, let alone the delicate calligraphy matching the markers in Sirius and Remus’ neat hands.
Maya was five now, and had never shown any sign of magic. It wasn’t a certainty. She was still young. But with each passing day, it became less and less likely. Mary’s last human connection to that world was dead. She had long since photocopied still pictures of the least magical-looking of her photographs. She used a lighter to set the moving pictures on fire, and then placed the cherry-wood wand she had been so excited to get from Ollivanders all those years ago on a low, flat rock. With one foot, she held it steady, with the other, she stamped down. Hard.
She didn’t know what she’d expected, but for all the magical potential imbued in that wand, it snapped like an ordinary stick. The unicorn hair that had sat in the core was impossible to see, and the wood looked unusually polished, but was otherwise just a plain stick on the forest floor.
Mary turned and walked away. She had a taxi waiting.