Chapter Text
Mary macdonald had been born at 6 am on Valentines day, she had been born prematurely and kept in an incubator. Her dad who had been staying in England for only 10 months at the time had said that he had known she would be ok when he'd seen the half moons the fingernails had pressed into her fleshy palms.
Ever since then she’d been fighting through her life, her dad after working minimum wage jobs to fend off unemployment, he had finished his degree in film studies and taken up a job as a location production assistant in a small short film company. When she was younger her dad would create his own short films starring just him and Mary. Her six year old self had loved it, Mary and Dajuan productions was what she had called it. Friday evening would come and she would run to the nearest charity shooo and tooth fairy money would go to 60p lipglosses and on weekends she and her dad would make props so she could be a ballerina or a model or a young heiress or an American prodigy.
Now at 19 she was working through her gap year, trying to get enough money to ease her university loans, and then coming to her apartment and refining her portfolio for a course doing fashion design. She had now taken up a job as a waitress in one of the hotels where aimless middle class foreigners would come to lament about the meaningless jobs they wasted their lives on. Lily had connected her to the job through a friend of hers, Remus Lupin, who had managed to get her an interview as a waitress. Her manager, Arabella Figg, had put her in charge of bingo. Mary thought Arabella was an old bint, though she had to admit—she could down a pint of whiskey better than most. Mary believed bingo was one of the things that should've been left in the fifties alongside lobotomies, segregation and poodle skirts but alas as her father had put it, money is the music of the rich and the rest of us are just the backup band.
Plus it had been made slightly more bearable as Remus had agreed to do Tuesdays and Fridays in exchange for convincing Arabella to let his band, "The Marauders" play every Saturday night. Mary had expected them to be a band of university drop outs still chasing that high from secondary school but she was willing to admit, albeit grudgingly, that they were pretty damn good and even she couldn't deny that. Lily claimed to know another one of them, and said they'd volunteered at the same charity shop in their teens. In her words "James Potter was an egotistical rich kid with a savior complex" which was probably true but Mary couldn't help but like him. He smiled easily which was something she didn't see often. The lead singer Sirius, Mary already knew from her previous job working at a movie theatre, he had left but they had remained close friends although they had dated for a week befor eboth of them had decided their hearts were't in it and they made much better friends. He had a smirk and a stage presence that Mary doubted she'd forget till she was rocking in a chair at some damp stained care home. He had a yearning voice though, as if he was singing to the moon. The final was Marlene's childhood neighbour Peter Pettigrew on the keyboard who had eyes that flickered between intense concentration and lost dreaming and worn through brown boots Mary thoughh must be stitched int othe soles of his feet.
She spent most of her time serving drinks in a dress ceh had altered to make her look less like an awkward teenager and if she was especially bored of this mundanity she would flirt with the men and women that visited but she never did more than that. Nobody was worth the effort, she'd spent too much of her teens watching her dad raise a child on his own to waste her life a chance like love. It was like playing rock paper scissors, and Mary had never liked that. Perhaps if she'd had some faith in an upper power, being as devoted as Kingsley, she might have been willing to risk it.
She had been, until her 16th birthday when she'd driven her dad's van home higher than the angel Gabriel and her dad in a fit of disappointed anger had told her that her mother Beatrice Finchley had wanted to abort her. It had been her mother's only wish, but out of a fear of smiting from Jesus himself she pushed the wretched screaming child out of her birth canal then fled moments after umbilical cord was cut. From that moment on Mary had become a devout atheist, our fear of suffering her mother's fate and pit of a petty spite that if there was a God he wasn't one worth worshiping.
For her most recent fashion project she’d convinced Marlene to set her up with a guy she’d met in the waiting area at one of her impromptu tattoos, Evan Rosier, who studied photography and film studies so he was probably Mary’s closest shot at a professional.
Currently she was curled in a fetal position in the bathtub of her apartment while Lily dyed the underside and the front sections of her afro pink. She’d thought it would fit the Neon romantic theatre project she was doing and Marlene, who they were on facetime with, seemed to agree so. Lily was heavily complaining about her fingers would be dyed bright pink and she and Marlene were caught up complaining about their respective university professors. Lily was engrossed in a story about her Philosophy professor Amos Diggory who apparently seemed to consider the works of Nietzsche to be something apprehensible. Mary had zoned out once Lily had started harping on about “the death of moral authority” and was scrolling through her comments on her fashion instagram, hoping desperately tthat one of the big names in the industry would finally notice her.
They were the usual fire emojis,sloppy compliments, comliments form Marlene so riddled with typos she couldn't read them, a message from Evan detailing some ideas for the next shoot, a sideways smiley face from Peter, a few thoughtless comments about how pretty the designs were. She stopped at a comment from “tea_stained_ballerina” ,her most consistent commenter. It read “Holy overcompensation, the pink is certainly giving neon but I’m not sure about romance. That many sequins on ciggarettes is certainly a choice, Coco Chanel is pissing herself right now” Mary smirked, for someone whose username sounded like a rejected poetry zine they certainly a shit ton to say, yet the comment stuck like the cloying scent of perfume or the feeling of the pink dye Lily had spilt down the base of her neck.