Mary’s very first birthday goes something like this:
A little girl wearing a red jumpsuit - somewhat red, mostly red, kind of red (red enough for her, alright! her standards aren’t the highest) - tears her way through a small single storey abode. Blue flora blossoms across the fabric of her frilly outfit, drawing coos, swallowing the under layer of crimson effortlessly.
Swallowing, she thinks (and then it’s another thing that she’s seeing), like a hungry sea licking clean one man’s weeping blood until he can’t weep the copper anymore, until blue layers over red swirls and makes them disappear. The carmine becomes indistinguishable from the typical overwhelming - and honestly, incredibly dreary - mass that has consumed it. Dark and gloomy and doom-full. Threatening to drag more down into the depths.
One man is not much: a drop in the ocean. Neither is a woman.
Swallowing, she thinks, like how she has been because already, her innocent reminiscence stabs for the blood she has long been drained of.
All these years, that’s the comparison which leaps to the forefront of her mind, the image that overtakes. She chokes.
It’s alright, though.
She didn’t know what her clothes would come to look like back then, didn’t know of the bodies that would be dragged from lakes lacerated.
It was just pretty colours - carmine and cobalt, rich and vibrant, fashion fascinating her even then. It had made her babble once, twirl on stubby legs that had her deemed a prodigy - walking at nine months old! What a girl! So eager to experience the world. Ha.
Her parents, always so fussy over their baby, apple of their eyes, certainly wouldn’t have dressed her like that if they could have predicted how she’d sit decades later.
Pouring over the photos of a faded album, her boy holding a handkerchief at the ready because it’s all so pretty it’s painful. She doesn’t want to ruin the carefully preserved polaroids - her memories - with her hurt.
Her mother catches the tiny toddling terror, swings her around. The photo she’s paused on is in mid-motion, the only way she knows - no fancy moving pictures for the muggles. Slowly, Mary snags herself on the glint in her mother’s eyes though, and thinks it might not matter very much at all.
Capturing fluidity is one thing. It distracts. Nothing can take away from the intoxicating love that the split-second image seeps.
Her boy catches the tear before it falls. She turns her head to press a soft kiss to his wrist. He’s always so reliable like that.
There’s a flat cake, the last of the photo spread. It’s cut into small burnt gold lozenges, all glittering under a syrupy coat. An unpeeled almond is pressed into every portion, like a precious jewel to be relinquished. Freshly one-year-old Mary’s reaching for it.
Kingsley has an answer even before she turns her pursed lips to him. “Basbousa,” he says, something solemn in it, letting her linger in it. Basbousa.
But then he smiles, all lopsided - “There’s a place, somewhere in town centre. It’ll be a date?” - like this is the first and not the millionth date he’s asked her on. What a boy.
It might taste like blood, the cake that is. The almond that bejewels could be hard and unpleasant, refusing to give beneath her teeth. It might taste like love.
She’ll learn.
He gives her the strength to turn the page.
Her third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays are relatively the same. The cake keeps the same throughout.
Gradually, her nausea dissipates, then there’s a gnawing ache in the bottom of her stomach. Sugar wouldn’t be wise nor filling with her weak appetite.
She fantasises anyway, licking her lips like her mother staring back at her, gloss and syrup alike making sugar-plum lips shine.
Does she look like her? Mary, along with all else she has forgotten, thinks she has lost sight of herself as well. What does she look like?
The eleventh birthday has scarcely a polaroid. They’re unnecessary: it’s clear as crystal in her memory, like it’d just been yesterday. That jaw-dropping rib-slamming heart-stopping sensation, the floor flying from beneath her feet, came back to her quickest, overlapping her vision, when the spell she had casted - Obliviate! - fell.
The moment between the blooming of magic on her eyelids and the hasty retreat it beats; the minuscule space she is knocked back, wilting as she takes the weight of a lifetime on her slim shoulders; the breath she’d hardly known stolen from her, cut at its infancy, making her a sudden soundless spectator swaddled in a sour grief.
It is in them that Mary Macdonald is, briefly, once more eleven.
Eleven-year-old Mary wears a loose fitting fuchsia gown. The neckline cuts down shortly, embroidered flowers in an impossible white branching off, shimmering. They create a deeper triangle, one that loops and lifts and litters beauty in its abstract pathway - elaborate, effervescent. Beneath the brilliant morning light, she shimmers in her gallabiyah.
Her mother demands a spin. Giggling, she obliges, a princess.
Halfway, her back is turned when her glass world shatters. A snowy owl lands on the kitchen sill and nothing is the same again.
Coming face to face with her confounded parents again, Mary gathers her robes, wide eyed. Not a princess, it seems.
A witch.
She’s never had a thought with more or less clarity. In the turn of her robes, Mary Macdonald becomes dead, becomes reborn.
The cake is forgotten that day; her parents alternate between sweeping her up and spoiling her with their affections and sequestering themselves away when they think she isn’t looking to have out their harried whispers and worries.
The patterns on her gallabiyah shift, pearlescent flowers sprouting on stems. This does not help. Her mother looks like she’s biting back a cry of unreadable emotion, her father like he’s withholding a laugh for fear it’d come out delirious.
Their child really is different, and not for the reasons Britain in the 70’s sees. Something deeper. Something they can’t weather with her.
It’s fine. Glistening like goodness, the cake still tastes fresh as a cheeky breakfast the next day. Hardly anything has been resolved. But it really is fine.
All that is true is her parent’s love.
When she blinks back to twenty-three-years-old, even that is gone and boxed, cold and hard six feet beneath muggle soil.
Three places tussling over her - her dim-lit room, the moment the wards around her mind fractured and fell, a flat brimming of nostalgia, of memories painful to unwrap - Mary Macdonald falls back into her sanctuary.
Kingsley, lovely he, lines himself up to her back, mimicking the curve of her spine, uncaring that they sit upon hard cold wood that must make his long legs incredibly sore. The two of them are glued together, shards in the wake of destruction, an attempt at making sense of vandalised pottery. Solace exists, in her knowledge that though their vase may be cracked - carelessly crushed underfoot by war and responsibility and ideology - each piece remains with her. Always with her.
A boy and girl meeting eyes as little more than children in a grand hall, their breaths mingling still: the same strangers. A boy and girl sprawling across the picnic blanket their respective friends had abandoned, making more than due with one another even as everyone else moved on from what once was: the same best friends. A boy and girl parting with purple tongues, cherry-red slush and blueberry-blue, in a quaint corner store, war thrumming and tugging and sparking flames and yet there being the chill of perception, of understanding in their goodbye: the same forsaken lovers.
All three iterations coexist, in this room of flighty shadows that favour fancy - hers, no doubt, from the weight which always bore heavier on her dainty shoulders than her peers, ensconced besides a man conjured from fairy dust, from dreams of chivalry and from knightly devotion unearthed.
He who has always been with her is he who sits with her like two spent swimmers. He is still hers, all hers. Every shard of his soul lays bare beside her, for her to cut herself upon as she wishes, for her to embed so deeply that leaving again becomes impossible. She never wants to be apart from him - and thus from herself - again.
Their jagged edges gleam and conspire, mosaic. The silence caresses her ear. Pages are flipped.
Birthdays at Hogwarts were shadowed by war.
Twelfth: few knew her name, let alone her date of birth. She hadn't disappeared though, and neither had her parents, despite what Slytherin swots liked to hold over her head, so she helped herself to an extra portion of dessert as a treat. Living as her kind was hard work.
Thirteenth: better. Lily Evans and Marlene McKinnon had discovered her usefulness in prying secrets from dark corners and tight lips. They wished her a happy birthday in the night, and spurred on by the childish glee of becoming another year older, Mary laughed with them, told them... everything. She found friends in the big, new world, finally.
Fourteenth: The newspaper arrived. It dropped down in front of her and she was wary to pick it up, even though it was teetering precariously on the edge of her beans-on-toast like a threat.
'Pick me up, or ruin a perfectly good breakfast. I'll stick, peel off flimsily in your bean juice and you won't be able to extract me. Believe me. I stick. In your dreams, your nightmares.'
Mary picked it up.
Like clockwork, her eyes sought out the obituary immediately, then slowly scoured the page as a whole.
A girl has died, she thought distantly.
She was their age, the girl, and had her hair in twin braids in the moving photo her parents provided to the Daily Prophet. They swung around her head as she turned her head, laughed at something someone said or did off-screen. Mary has always wore her dark curly hair cropped to her ears, she can't imagine caring for it when its that long - to the hips, but there's other similarities to be found.
The same reddish-brown sepia skin, the same pink glow revealed on their cheeks by their smiles, the same downwards slanted nub on the same straight nose, the same dimples creasing their skin, and perhaps most damningly, the same necklace. That one. The golden chain from which a name dangled in Arabic, the fad amongst young woman like them.
A girl has died, she thought distantly, and she looks just like me.
Mary told the girls she felt ill and excused herself from the hall hastily. She asked them, softly, not to celebrate. Their pitying faces told her they read the newspaper too.
Fifteenth: Girls began to notice boys. Boys began to notice girls.
Lily fancied a Ravenclaw called Luke Harper - although Mary privately thought he was more a pretty distraction from the war, from the hatred and from James Potter's downright charming grin than anything else. She had a date to attend with said blue boy. Marlene didn't have one per se, but Sirius Black had wrangled her from her lone corner and the two would no doubt spend the evening dancing around one another as they were wont to do.
The melancholy from the previous year left her friends reluctant to prod the sleeping bear they believed to be her mood, liable to swing at the drop of a penny.
Herself, the birthday girl became acquaintanced with a loneliness that was far harsher than she remembered. Brushing it off, she had wandered out her dorm past curfew, considering if she could make it to the kitchens for a slice of cake. Something magical, when what she truly wanted - toe-curling insidiously sweet romance! the serial dater finally admits - was far beyond her reach, to make herself feel better.
She was coloured surprised then, when she met Kingsley Shacklebolt in the common room.
He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly, so unlike his usual steady certain self and gestured vaguely to a box of chocolate frogs on the table between them, "Didn't know if you wanted to celebrate this year, Mary. So I was thinking..."
Her greeting is a grin, flopping beside him. Forget this business of boys and girls! She has Kingsley.
Sixteenth: She didn't feel like celebrating. Snape called Lily a mudblood, which meant Mary had to pass him by whilst he camped outside Gryffindor dorms too many times to scrounge much sympathy at the sight. She couldn't find much sympathy for anyone or anything at all, like she was still drowning under the Imperus, faulty in its casting, dark enough it didn't matter. She was still held under.
The only company she desired was that of Kingsley, who sensitive to her emotions as he is, sat beside her in the common room as the fire waned, feeling no need to talk even when the crackle cut off.
His dorm was as tense as hers, for reasons he puzzled over, while she tried to forget the cause of the pity plaguing hers like a tripwire, the invitations to explode when she just wanted to be.
Life was no story, she had realised when the wilful pink of her view rushed up her cheeks as malicious spellcasting commanded a striptease of her. Spare her the dramatic scenes: where was her peace?
His hand grazing hers felt like a lifeline, like safety.
Seventeenth: Her final birthday at Hogwarts. She'd made her decision by then. It had been made for her, she consoled herself.
It had been made by: the children, the adolescents, the teenagers, the adults, the middle-aged, the elderly lining the headlines, indiscriminately murdered for their blood or their sympathies; a spell that held her body as her soul thrashed, privacy turned to tatters like the oldest of her bow collection, everything the wizarding world took from her - even this, for no reason other than to be unkind; dreams of an era long past which resurfaced under starlight, whispering to her of something more, something better, telling her to take the peace she craved.
Those treacherous whispers like most things of hers were heard by only one other. By Kingsley.
She knew he'd know before he even approached her. He had a habit of parsing through her. Mary, against better judgement, despite the shameful burn sizzling when anyone dared look too close after Mulciber took every eyeful he pleased, let him do so. She almost liked it. Did, if she were honest.
He didn't try to move the furniture of her mind, although Mary's mental layout was incomprehensible in its chaos: chairs balanced atop a dozen stools, books splayed open in a ritualistic circle, a vanity reflecting shoes and lipstick stains on a door. No. He made himself comfortable instead. He settled himself beneath a furry throw of hers and prepared to listen. Soft like hers, his own heart, song as mellow as a summer evening, serenaded her as his puppy-dog eyes drank her and her tale in.
And then they - hand in hand - marched from their school. It was over - almost.
Birthdays since Hogwarts have been empty save for one, glamoured by France, embraced by Egypt - neither could ever melt her into something resembling a whole person once more. She is no sword to be forged in flames.
She was a plaintive girl, wanting to live and love as soft as the fairy-tales she was fed as a babe. She was a woman, wanting to spread her wings and soar to better skies, wanting to tug the threads of violence out from her cardigan and be the person she had once dreamed of, not subject to the cruel pessimist's game she had been thrust into at eleven.
This culminated in her eighteenth: the last time she had felt as though herself.
Mary was never one to turn her birthdays into large, frivolous bashes.
As a little girl, she might've - heavy emphasis on the might - entertained the thought more than a few times, imagining big poofy ballgowns, being decked out in her mother's gold, a dozen giggling friends beside her, each princesses in their own rights. Merlin, she was sappy!
Still, the dusty dream teases a faint, warm smile from her - almost longing. Strong arms around her waist tighten, a thumb brushing an arc over her stomach. Her smile strengthens.
There's nothing glamorous about her twenty-third birthday, except for her company. Except for the fumes of love wafting in the air. That heady atmosphere she had sought - ambient, eclipsing, tender - come to her in the person she had least expected: her very best friend. Suppose she hadn't entirely disappointed her younger self.
There was nothing glamorous about her eighteenth, either.
Mary, Marlene, Síle, Lily - accompanied by her barnacle James and his dogged group Sirius, Remus and Peter, crowded the living room of Mary's muggle flat. Donnie, Mary's newfound and beloved crup, yipped as free as he pleased with so many friends in, despite the tacky signs disallowing pets stuck on the stairwell.
The boys and Síle had squashed their party of five onto a sofa meant for three at most, and James and Sirius - childhood menace days not entirely in the dust - played at making her delicate nose scrunch. She gave as good as she got and worse, baiting them into debates over quidditch, brooms, artists, spouses and everything under the drab skies.
Remus had good-heartedly flicked on a record to drown out their nattering. Tough luck. The three pushed their noses together and whispered harsher insults, colourful enough to make any mother blush.
Peter, his only unabsorbed comrade, and he, instead, jammed to the muggle tune. At some point, they'd began a jape of a waltz, falling over themselves, cheeks taught with smiles, harmony interspersed with youthful peals of laughter.
"One more try, Remus. Swear I'll get it! Solemnly."
"My feet, you sodden-"
Mary, Lily, Marlene and Kingsley held a more sombre affair within the kitchen. They talked over the buzz of the oven. Mary felt tears prick her eyes. Pearl bracelets dug into her wrists, cutting thin bruises. When she flung her arms around her friends shoulders, squeezing them as tight as if she was attempting to miniaturize them so that she might be able to pack them away behind the slats of her ribs to be wherever she went, her jewellery caught on long hair.
Tough luck. She pulled away and they were still too big. Everything was far far too big.
Marlene's updo, honey-brown locks having been carefully curled by a hand far more precise and genteel than she had ever learned to be (Sirius' work if she ever knew it), was in a disarray, bobby pins dropping like spiders on cobwebs when the wrestle for freedom had begun. Lily lead her out to the bathroom, sharply teasing. Even Donnie, who had been alternating between chasing his own tail and greatly judging whomever dared distract Mary from her crup-ear-scratching career, trotted out.
As always, one man was left.
They should follow to where the party goes.
They don't.
Kingsley met her eyes unerringly. There was a downtick to his dark lips, like he's tasted something sour. Mary had spent the evening spewing to her friends her gratitudes, reminiscing, giving gifts in turn for the ones she had tried to insist she shouldn't receive.
Marlene received Mary's carefully curated collection of makeup, though no doubt she'd be using it far more alternatively than ever was Mary's fancy. Her mother's dusty rouge brushed over Mary's lips a final time that morning. Once, it had made Mary a princess. Her heart creaked, hoping Marlene won't be so swamped with the Order so as to forget to explore its transformative capacity. The smile flashed as manicured hands took the box off her, Mary knew there was no need to be distressed. Sirius would be waking up to a vampire and going to sleep to a zombie for a long time to come.
Lily, in turn, had rolled up muggle posters piled into her arms, for her new home with James. Some of them had been enchanted to shimmer but the pop of the pink was all down to ordinary artists with ordinary talents. Mary preferred it that way. Like the magic she knew as a tot: limitless.
Síle, bounding to her happily ever after with the doting Finnigan she jealously guards, received a pregnancy test that had the Marauders hooting and then, privately, a broom tassel - a lucky charm. A rare gift, when Mary had so thoroughly sworn off magic, sworn off the world Síle knew and loved from birth, since the war. It earned her a hard tackle to the floor.
Discreetly, a little black book had winded its way in to Remus' coat pocket. Flipping through the pages would reveal a messy scrawl, a detailed record of every event since first year - once so Mary could record her boarding school adventures, like all the great protagonists, now, for his blackmail purposes.
Peter's passion for people rewarded him Donnie. Mary felt terribly letting him go, but soon, she knew she'd be unawares how to calm her little guy in muggle crowds. There would be blood. Mary was sick of the sight of it. The passage of ownership was passed off as an allergy, the handing over cited as why the thought of giving everyone gifts had spawned. They believed her. She'd always been sweet like so.
Idling, James appreciated the privacy when he'd received his stack of books. Self-help mostly, and something vulnerable had flashed in the eyes of a man who had stammered for words, still unlearning arrogance. The discovery of the few trashy romance she had disguised between a surplus of the expected genres solved the issue for him and everything became easy once more, to tease and laugh. Still, he squeezed her shoulder tightly on his way past her.
Kingsley, alone in her kitchen with her, wasn't so eager to enjoy her generosity. He levied accusation under soft tones, like a particularly complex transfiguration. No one second had second guessed her but he: Mary was prone to being weepy, that was all. All to everyone but him, someone of her same empathetic disposition. The excuse sounded feeble to her ears when she tried to convince him of it.
In the end, Kingsley left last. He was cajoled out the door by Sirius, his only relief seeming to be that she would not be alone. A gold earing glowed luminously in the moonlight, staining his skin luxuriously, when he passed by her window. The matching gold dangling from her ear burned like the day she'd had it pierced in, saying goodbye to the one made with - for - it. Would it be lonely now? She would be. Yet, a fragment of herself would be carried by the man most worthy of her childhood imaginings, the prince that in their age should not exist still.
Imprinted on the back of her eye, his visage comforted Mary. Her fingers clenched on the windowsill, holding still her mind's picture, she told Sirius, "Now, please."
Empty-handed save for his wand - he didn't get a gift, Mary was no fool in thinking anything material could make up for the betrayal she was making him commit - Sirius was almost sinister for his grim face in the low light.
Then, as messily as a reckless teenager, colour blooming on their skin from a shoddy tattoo being done by a shaky-handed friend in unsanitary conditions, all light in the room shuttered. Concentrated. Flashed.
"Obliviate!" said Sirius.
And on her eighteenth birthday, Mary Macdonald ceased to exist.
With a final shuddering sigh, Mary closes her album. There is no need to recount her nineteenth and twentieth in France her twenty-first and twenty-second in Egypt. Those had not been cast away by her, diminished of their individual significance but not their toll.
The glossy matte black of the cover is blemished by thin scrapes from where her long nails had raked it over, tracing the inscription. She does so once more, wistful.
Mary Macdonald. This is PRIVATE. Do not open unless agreeable to death. Please and thanks!
"Alright?" Kingsley intones, handsome nose grazing her ear.
She almost flusters. Does fluster, in truth. Ever-present, the pink tinge running beneath her skin becomes more prominent. Her spine straightens like she's been rapped with her old professor's cane and he accommodates the movement, chest still pressed to her back.
"I'll-" She moves to stand, and goes to explain herself. As if leaving his cocoon of warmth was a crime necessitating justification. Her heart tells her it is so.
"-You'll?" Kingsley challenges. His arms constrict around her and her album floats to its place upon her shelf wordlessly. Oh. She’d forgotten she could do that, now.
She settles back into him, his thighs bracketing hers. It is familiar and it is not.
He's grown bolder in the time she's been gone, although her memory - imbued with undoubtable fondness - supplies he's always been rather sassy.
Only, he’s more forthright now: how she had slipped through his fingers like a wilting stem of a once-great flower seemed to have transformed him. Tormented even, but she does not want to acknowledge it.
The last of his baby fat had whittled itself from his cheeks, leaving him with a hollow where once had been an apple, rimmed by strong cheekbones that seemed to stab at the air, knives that were ever present and wary. His tongue had been bled. He was steady as ever, yet more truthful, more liable to speak up. Speak out.
A stand up guy. A hero, with all the connotations that held in times of war. The gritty, the grim and the glorious.
And she?
In the same time, she had become darker, unable to fill the hole she'd dug herself and morose for it. Mary had thought she’d known desperation when she unshackled herself from this life. Being without, however, had chilled her worse than any horror. Danger lies in wondering, if she’d gone so far then, how far would she dare now?
(She's still sorry, to Sirius mostly. But also to Kingsley. To Lily, Marlene, Síle, to the memory of her parents. To everyone she left behind. Her definition of peace has changed. The lengths she would go to for it? She’s afraid they’ve only broadened.)
Neither had exactly stayed the same. Neither had changed so irrevocably, either.
In this man grown, Mary sees her boy and sees something more, too. She does not mind this derivation, does not think she could lift her nose at any variant of her Kingsley. She loves him in all his states, in all of hers.
And this one, admittedly, comes with his benefits. Her stomach contracts under his possessive hands - even the kindest of boys are clever enough to be twice shy when once bitten by her abandonment - peals of laughter gushing forth from her maroon lips.
"To the bed, you oaf, you’re as handsy as a drunk-"
She chides him. He attempts not to play shameful, not allowing their skin to be apart for a singular moment. Her hand guiding him by the wrist makes this all the easier.
"On love! Only on love. Fine, alright, Madame-"
What a way to spend her twenty-third, indeed.