Valkyrie

October 1979

What does it mean to die?

Papa says it is quiet, like submerging in a bathtub. Auntie says it is like being roasted over a fire, blinding pain and sizzling skin. Uncle just hisses, and that is even worse.

Are any of you dead? Each of them comes to her in the little room, and for a moment they are alive and breathing and flush with blood, except it’s not true. They come to her like corpses, riddled with holes and missing flesh, skin hanging off the bone with no muscle left to fill it in, maggots streaming out of their mouths. It’s a staggering, limping movement, reaching out to her with a decomposing hand. They mean her no harm, but they are no less horrifying.

This room oozes white pus, not blood. The woman cleaned the blood a month ago, told her to say if it came back. She does not have it in her to explain that these walls are infected. Home was pure, clean, solitary in its wound. This place is polluted and dirty. The whole world is polluted and dirty. She has to go home.

Three, three, three. Three bodies crawling towards her, wanting her. Whatever a mother was to her, she isn’t there. Was there ever a mother? Perhaps she began as she is now: a half-eaten carcass, left for the deer to gnaw on, ribcage bones poking through mottled flesh.

Food is brought to her, and she ignores it. when the woman puts a needle in her arm, her flailing fist connects with a solid force. This place becomes loud and unbearable, voices speaking over one another, not just hers but others, like the room is haunted by awful spirits who breathe too close in her ear and try to put their hands down her pants. When she claws at their faces they just smile and vanish into thin air, leaving her sweaty and dazed and broken.

She rips open an artery in her arm with her fingernails and laughs when it gushes over her face and clothes that aren’t hers, and she sees Papa watching and she crawls to him, arm limp at her side, shoving it onto him so he is covered in her blood. Purity is ruined, because whatever purity they had in the house is gone. They are tainted, forever stained. Red blood tinged with black, growing larger and larger in the pools soaking into the carpet, like a parasite.

The bedsheets make an effective noose until she is dragged down, head lolling, oxygen being manually shoved down her throat, literally choking on life itself. The air tastes of dust, of desolation, of destruction. Everything she has ever known suffocates her with its might. She is unworthy to hold it.

The word flesh invokes meat, tearing, chunks of bloody pulp cradled in the palm of a hand. It is primal, down to the sinew and tissue. To bite, to butcher, to consume, to carve, to hack, to gnaw. A body becoming a mangled and unrecognizable formation of fat and muscle and blood and bone. The beating heart keeps her alive, but it also dooms her to a constant agony of living in this cadaver, an alive thing within a dead thing. Everything begins to reek of rot, and it is her, molding on the bed, skin tearing away from bone like it is pried away with cold nimble fingers, Auntie above her whispering to hold still, and she can feel it but not where she is supposed to, but crying does little good. Take my flesh, take my blood, but do not take that. Every synapse screams, a high whistling sound as the world explodes into a strange greenish colour that she associates with the sickness, the festering wound spreading over every conceivable vulnerability, infected from the outdoors and not the betrayal.

The woman leaves her plates of human meat, and she tears at it like a feral dog, sticking in her teeth and staining her chin red. It is delicious, grinding the marrow into a mulch with her molars. She only eats it because Uncle’s leg is ripped away, leaving exposed tissue that weeps on the carpet. It is only fit to consume if it is from them, if she can taste the meat and know it is not tainted with the sorry touch of an outsider. Perhaps if she allows it to settle in her stomach, she will become more than she ever could be: a sorry excuse for an heir. Had she been pure, she would have a kingdom, the crown sinking into her skull, burning away the hair until it touches clean white bone and becomes solid. The queendom requires a sacrifice of the self, a purging of anything human or dirty. To become an ideal is to abandon mortality completely.

Thoughts become blocky, tangible in her hand like a plum, easily squashed if not delicate. The words splattering across her rotted brain, leaking into the crevices and poisoning whatever soggy mess of sanity remains. The room quiets to a dull hum, gnats buzzing all around, inside the decaying wallpaper, the pus slowing to a trickle. Auntie’s body lies prostrate in the corner, joints yanked out of sockets and loose at her sides, like worms being slowly feasted on by the vicious maggots.

Everything alive in the room is wilting, overcome by the sheer desolation of living. Somewhere, her mind begins to dull, the holes closing up with raw and pink skin, leaving her an unrecognizable creature of breath and newness. Not since she was an infant, unwanted and unloved, has she ever been this pure, cleansed of the sin of being born. Purity dissolves into her bloodstream, a powerful sedative that strips any doubt.

And yet, it is wrong. It is wrong, the silence, and it cannot remain. Choking on it, drowning in the thick syrupy waves of peace, and she is not a thing meant for peace. She is a thing meant to die in the bathtub, to be slaughtered on the bare earth like the chthonic beast she is. Peace breeds challenge, peace cannot exist with supremacy. What does purity of the body mean in a world of equality, of kindness?

If there is peace, then everything in her existence has been for nothing.

~*~

Emerging from the depths feels like dying, every bone and muscle and blood cell forcing itself to awaken, the sheer force of being dragged to the surface a destructive and exhaustive ordeal. There are no voices, the walls are bare, and the world takes on a shimmering tint at the edges. It is not real, Papa said, and the thought makes her breaths quicken in her lungs, stuttering and gasping.

The woman is here, in the room, with trays of food, of fruit and meat and greens, and it is all wrong, all of it. Forcing movement into her arm, she takes an apple and chucks it at the wall, watching the red flesh explode with violence, pulp dripping down the wall in a satisfying and familiar sight. She can feel her lips twisting, perhaps not a smile but a grimace. Nobody ever smiled, except for Toby—

Toby. Toby, kin, lost, gone. Head swinging, looking for him, but he isn’t here.

“What’s wrong?”

The voice is high and soft and familiar in that it is strange and not of hers. It’s the woman, solid at the edges, somehow true, somehow tangible.

What have you done to me? the words in her head are less painful, less prone to drawing blood. Like petals of a flower, easily plucked and tossed into the wind. Forcing them to her lips is still impossible, though. Speech is treachery, betrayal of all that is sacred. There is no help for the wicked, no guidance for the sick. It simply will not be.

“It’s an anti-psychotic. Medicine. I hoped this one could help you.”

The body tightens, rejecting what is foreign. Muggle? To resort is weakness, stupidity, counter to all she has been taught. Choice is ripped from her calloused hands once more, no is not an acceptable answer.

The woman folds her hands in her lap. Something about her suggests a rat, mousy and fearful. She could be easily crushed and splattered under the sole of a boot. “I truly am sorry, Olivia. I had my orders to follow.”

You follow him. To think that anyone could take such a command from him, devilish and lurking, is unfathomable. Either of them, they blend together into a monstrous conglomeration of ambition and cruelty. Monster hunts monster, monster becomes monster.

“I follow her.” The woman’s voice is quiet, and her eyes keep trying to make contact, but she is pulling away, trying to yank any part of herself as far away as it can go, tucking it deep inside. “He comes as a consequence. How do you feel?”
Did you feed me the leg of my uncle?

“I—no. it was chicken.”

Where did they go?

“I’m sorry. That’s what the anti-psychotics do. They’re supposed to help with the hallucinations.”

Hallucinations, Auntie laughs close to her ear. Is that what she thinks we are? She believes we’re not an integral part of you, lodged in your brain and heart like a splinter? There is no you without us. You exist because of us, be fucking grateful.

Where is he?

“Away. I don’t know exactly where, if you want details.” The woman leans forward, as though trying to peek into her skull. It is invasive, cruel, and every bone tightens in her body. “Olivia? Can you talk to me? I’m here to help you.”

There is no such thing as help. Help is thinly veiled torture. What is he going to do with me? She doesn’t need this woman to answer; her mind is defenseless. She feels the coldness surround her, plummeting into her head. The woman loves too much, she loves the boy with the scars and the woman with the tight face and the man with the dark hair, it is a disgusting display of vulnerability. She sifts through the rubbish, finds the gleaming mirror amidst it all, the key.

Poppy, are you going to let him lead me like a lamb to the slaughter?

She feels it, the woman does, a chill running down her spine. She arches an eyebrow to mock. If there is anything they are good at, her kin, it is manipulation.

She worries about the scarred boy, worries he is being dragged to the guillotine. She is weak, soft, a marionette to manoeuvre. Auntie would call her a cheap child’s plaything: easily broken and tossed away once it has served its purpose. Love is a curse, a noose around the neck, damming its subject to eternal hell. Love is a failed experiment, designed by sadists, to watch the world burn.

They never spoke the word love in the house. No, they all knew it was worthless. The mere act of expressing the care would be enough to shatter Auntie completely. It was an unnecessary waste of breath.

Tell me the truth.

She doesn’t need it vocalized, she can see Albus Dumbledore in her head, and even through the tint of another woman’s mind, he is still horrific and terrible; a layer of truth that cannot be peeled away. She will die before her cousin, her kin, sets eyes on her again. Would rather die than be faced with herself in the mirror, a reflection that is her but twisted, somehow lucid and powerful, everything she could be before the rot set in.

The pinprick in her fingers begins to grow into a sharp, needling pain. Magic is dangerous, Papa said, the way it builds through your body, dismantling any primal need for survival. Everything becomes a service to the magic, like a blinding force, very little else matters.

“Olivia—” A trembling, outstretched hand ghosts over her shoulder and the magic explodes out of her in a haze of colour, of vivid reds and royal purples and sick green, always the sick green in her vision. The pain is nothing, a broken body nothing to a broken mind, and so she scrambles as fast as she can, reaching before she realizes it for the stick on the floor. The rejection in her hand is not a deterrent, no isn’t an acceptable answer, and the bottle of pills on the ground where she is sprawled, chest rising and falling with life, is enticing for its danger. Death is not the answer, but she considers it more merciful than the horrors of life.

What does it mean to run? To run like the monster is after you, tracking your every move, a little girl whose legs are weak and brittle from years locked inside a house, a mass of grime and illness bolting onto the street, wishing for the voices to tell her where to go, where to hide, how to be safe. There is no safety here, though, that is wishful thinking for a child to believe anywhere can be free of pain.

In an alleyway, amid the trash, she crashes to the ground, knees liquid and unstable, crawling into a crevice to sob incomprehensible tears for the first time in years, mouthing the words she wishes to hear in her ears, but she is alone. She is alone.

~*~

It would be untruthful to say that Minerva McGonagall has ever been a good aunt.

A good daughter, maybe. A good sister, debatable. A good friend… what kind of friend almost immediately ditches the people she loves right out of Hogwarts over a man? Perhaps it is defensible, only if you saw her in the months after the rejection; barely human, a half-dead girl trying to remember the feeling love left in her chest, the warmth and tenderness she yearns for.

But aunt, no. maybe whatever love she was supposed to have when she first saw the swaddled bundle, cradled in Malcolm’s arms, just wasn’t meant for her. Her wires were crossed, Alphard used to joke, and maybe that’s why her ability to love is so impaired. It’s just who she is.

This theory doesn’t explain why she wakes up in a cold sweat every night, reaching for a figure that may or may not even be there, a figure who turns halfway and smiles that odd little smile that is so distinctive of her first niece that it breaks her heart to wake up empty-handed.

She keeps looking, over and over again. Keeping an ear out for someone matching Maria-Gabrielle’s description, hoping against hope that she will come home.

Malcolm never really did understand her. He understands neither of his children. Maria-Gabrielle is strange and off-putting, he said to her late one evening, nursing a glass of scotch, and Elsie is childish and antisocial. I can’t figure out what to do with them.

Minerva said nothing, nails scratching across her wrist, trying not to remember their mother’s face, the devastation on her lips when her three children stood across from her, waiting for praise or acceptance when there would be none.

The girls’ mum died around when Elsie was born. Minerva was never particularly fond of her, a perky black haired woman with sharp eyebrows and lipstick on her teeth every time. Malcolm loved her, or at least he loved the idea of loving her. With the McGonagalls, it’s hard to tell one from the other. Maria-Gabrielle was eleven, about to start at Hogwarts, and Elspeth was just a little thing, tucked in a crib in the corner of the main bedroom. Malcolm didn’t get out of bed for days, and so Minerva took to feeding her, to drawing the curtains and placing glasses of water on the bedside table.

She loves Malcolm, even if she hates how he has turned out. Sometimes, she wants to shake his shoulders and scream “you could have been great!” even though that won’t do him any good. Knowing you are past your prime rarely helps with motivation. It’s true that he settled, settled for a quiet and boring life that never really excited him at all. He used to have dreams, big dreams, of going to Peru or Nigeria, to become a magizoologist. But no, now he works at a publishing company, sitting at a desk, and coming home to two daughters he loves but doesn’t really like.

Like Minerva, Malcolm gets restless. Like Minerva, he won’t really do anything to assuage that. He will sit and stew in his misery, his deeply uncontented life, and act as though it is what he deserves. It is the same as their mother, as Robert. None of them really know how to claw out of the hole of normal life.

Maybe that’s why she could never say yes to Dougal or Poppy. Or Elphinstone, every time he asks her. She loves them, certainly, perhaps one more than the others. It’s hard to tell. Anyway, to marry would be to fall into the trap everyone else in her family has. Today, October 4th, Minerva is forty-four years old, and yet everything she does is still characterized by her mother and father, like a little kid. It is humiliating, the weight of it all on her shoulders and around her neck.

Olivia Gleaves, shut up in the safe house, looks like Maria-Gabrielle, looks like Minerva’s father. In very old photographs, he stares out at her with dark, blank eyes. Before the war, he smiled a little, something charming and handsome about him. Here, he just looks haunted.

Maria-Gabrielle was haunted too. Is haunted, because there is still an ‘is’ possible here. There has to be.

To see her reflected in this girl’s eyes, the girl who may be more important than any of them could have thought, is horrifying. Minerva wants to grab Maria-Gabrielle up in her arms and hide her away, tuck her somewhere safe and happy. She’s a cabin fire though, burning away. There’s no hiding away a blaze.

Isn’t the whole point of having children that they be better than you were? Minerva hopes that’s true. She thinks the world would be in much safer hands in those of Robert, Maria-Gabrielle, and Elspeth. There has always been a sweetness to them, a sweetness which she knows is slipping away the longer they spend living through a war. Soft edges replaced by a hard shell, a protective layer. She mourns the loss of childhood for them, hopes they can be better. Is it not why they fight, for the next generation?

Still, she cannot bear to get close. Maria-Gabrielle is gone, Elspeth is scared, and Robert is quiet. And Minerva doesn’t want to bother them at all. Maybe that makes her a coward, unable to really feel anything for her nieces and nephew. Maybe it became too painful to care so much that something had to go. Maybe she’s an awful person because of it.

All she knows is she really, really hopes she can find Maria-Gabrielle.

~*~

James and Lily are sloppily making out in the bathroom of a bar.

Mary can hear them, the moans and giggles. Why did they have to pick a booth so close to the back? Also, who ordered so many tequila shots? There’s another one in front of her, as though it has materialized out of thin air, and she fucking hates magic because if it’s there then of course she has to take it, right?

Marlene is yelling in Remus’ face about fruit, which he seems to be taking with an air of utter exhaustion as he nurses his beer and glances around desperately for help. Peter and Sybill are dancing in the corner together, lost in their own little world. Mary watches the frizzy blonde curls weave in and out of her eyeline. Sybill is nice, if a little odd. Certainly not as strange as people used to think she was. She complimented Mary’s ladybug earrings right at the start of the evening, and so Mary took a liking to her.

Sirius is—somewhere, presumably. Last she saw, he was getting the numbers of a few muggle girls, chatting them up at the bar. No doubt they stood no chance against those striking gray eyes, that sultry look he’d somehow perfected. When he kissed Mary in third year, right before, he’d given her that look, but back then it looked so out of place on fourteen-year-old Sirius Black that she’d laughed right in his face. It was after a quidditch match, and he liked flying off the pitch straight to her, liked the attention he got when he pulled her in close and kissed her. He tasted like sweat and spearmint (from a breath freshening spell, she learned later from James) and arguably he was pretty decent at it.

Apparently, this was all for a stupid bet between the boys as to who would have the first kiss, and Sirius didn’t even win. It was Peter, who kissed Charity Burbage in the Astronomy tower at the end of second year and had kept it hidden somehow. Still, Mary didn’t really mind being kissed for a bet. She and Sirius “dated” for a while, which basically meant they walked to class together and kissed for fun. It wasn’t terrible, but it just felt like a further divide between Mary and Mari. Mari wouldn’t let herself be a rich boy’s plaything. It’s not that, Mary would tell Mari, I like him, really, I do, but Mari would never believe it.

It sort of helped with the muggleborn thing. The Slytherins still loathed her, but at least Sirius got some of the blowback. Anyway, him walking her to classes meant less opportunities to be ambushed by a hex, which was nice.

She didn’t really care about him at all. It was something born of circumstance, really. When he decided he wanted to break up, that was it. Mary didn’t cry, didn’t beg him to take her back. She nodded and gave him back his jacket and told him she’d see him in Herbology the next morning. Then, they were back to being acquaintances again, Mary went back to sitting with Marlene and Lily, and Sirius went back to the boys. It was as though nothing ever happened.

Now, Mary does like Sirius. She likes how loud he laughs and his almost encyclopedic knowledge of muggle rock bands, developed after years of learning. She likes that he will make jokes to her in Spanish so nobody else will understand, how his eyes glimmer when she snorts. She likes that he barely lies, that he has excellent table manners, that he always smells lovely.

Of course, he drives her insane. He makes cruel jokes; he says ignorant things as though without realizing. He treats everyone like he is a king, and they are his servants, like that’s his natural way of moving through the world. Being around him is exhausting, there can never be enough room in the world for anyone else alongside Sirius Black and his massive ego.

The two can coexist at once. He was never weird to her about the dating thing, aside from usual Sirius jokes. Is it wrong to say that she appreciates his basic decency? Mary hates it, hates praising him for the bare minimum, but he never taunted her like that, not like Milton Mulciber. Sirius and Mulciber, Mulciber and Sirius, purebloods with the world promised to them on a silver platter, but two different responses. It is strange, the dissonance.

There have been other boys, but just casually. Even deep down, she was never really interested in any of them. Usually, they wanted her more than she wanted them. After Sirius, it was easier to dissociate, to be Mary instead of Mari, to keep Mari far away. Maybe that’s why Mari feels too far away to reach, these days. Mari wouldn’t debase herself like this. Mary just doesn’t care.

(She does care, more than she ever wants to admit. She cares a lot.)

The more she hears thumping against the wall, the more she wants to rip off her skin. She balls her hands into fists, so tight that she can feel the blood slow, and thinks uselessly of walking down her childhood street, the flowers in the front yard, the gentle breeze at her back pushing her forward with the love and care of an old friend. Home, like a prayer to no one, the house where her height is scratched into the doorframe, where she knows which tile in the hallway squeaks, where the hum of electricity and life fills the air with a familiarity that nothing else can quite capture.

Home, where she can’t go back.

~*~

“Do you think about them a lot?”

“Constantly. Always.” Mary traces the curl that rests lightly on her bicep. “I don’t think they really understand why I have to leave them. They’re too little for that. I mean, Ana still is. Rafe and Nico just think I’ve abandoned them willingly. My mum and dad—”

Hestia stays quiet. Never will she step on Mary’s feet to speak.

“I think they believe the life they gave me wasn’t enough. Like emigrating to Britain for us, working their asses off, that I’m just throwing all that away for a new life, a new world. It breaks my heart, you know? I don’t want them to blame themselves, I just… didn’t have a choice.”

“Are you able to talk to them about it?”

Mary snorts, turns a little so she’s lying on her back. “They’ll deny having any hard feelings about it. Neither of them wants to hurt me. It just goes unspoken.” She sighs a little. “My dad is a lawyer, he knows how to read between the lines. He’ll twist my words so that it reflects onto him and his role as a parent. That’s what he does, he takes it personally. He did nothing wrong, and I miss him every day, but I don’t know that he’ll really hear me through the hurt. He just wishes I was home, and I can’t blame him. I wish that too.”

“And your mum?”

“She wants me to be happy. It would break her heart more to hear that I’m not happy here.”

“Do you regret coming to Hogwarts?” Hestia’s voice is soft, as gentle as a summer’s day. There is a tinge of hope there, that Mary cannot miss, the hope that Mary will say no, no because of you. But Mary isn’t that person, or maybe she is, and she just cannot bear to admit it.

“Yeah. Yes. I wish it had been different. That I could go home and forget all about magic. Start believing again that magic is when the wind blows through the branches like a song, not this. Not anything like this.”

She feels it against her arm, Hestia’s hurt. Mary turns her head, stares at Hestia’s face, which she knows so well and somehow never gets tired at looking. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does Hestia, but Mary knots their fingers together on the pillow, their palms fitting together perfectly, and hopes it says everything she cannot bear to. Maybe some of it is a lie, a merciful deception, but some of the light comes back in Hestia’s eyes, which makes it worth it.

~*~

What do you want, Mary?

Marlene asked her that one night, riding the wave of sleep, curled up against Mary’s back on the mattress they share at the Potters’. Marlene’s body, warm and solid, ridges of her spine jutting into the softness of Mary’s flesh, a constant presence that brings comfort to her soul. Sweet Marlene, who lives life based on whims and wants, who is so afraid of being burned that she lingers away from the flame. Mary pretended to be asleep that night, waiting for the rustle of sheets, the sigh caught in anticipation to be let out in rest.

Afterwards, she stayed awake, unable to close her eyes, unwilling to dream.

It was easier to pretend she hadn’t heard than to admit it: I don’t know. I don’t know what I want, because I was never really allowed to want anything. Nothing happens like you want it to in life, ever.

Mary cannot ever go back to the way things once were, she cannot erase Milton Mulciber from her memory, she cannot kiss Lily like she wants to, she cannot reverse her mistake with Emmeline, cannot ever turn to Hestia again. She is useful for another man’s plans, and her wanting plays no role in that. Mary becomes an abstract, a weapon to be used and cleaned and put back on the shelf until she can be useful again. An object, not a girl. Not a person.

But here in the bar, listening to awful music that pounds her skull, her friends scattered around the room wrapped up in their own lives, Mary just wants home, whatever that means. Not her childhood house, because that place doesn’t fit her anymore. Not the Potters’, where she is eternally a guest. Somewhere quiet, where the sun filters in through the windows in such a way that everything is bathed golden, and mismatched mugs in the cabinets collected over the years. It will be big enough for everyone that she loves to stay and feel welcome, and there will be no obligation, nothing to demand of her. It will just be existence, co-existence, and love.

~*~

Sirius is drunk, really drunk, and they are on the dance floor, surrounded by sweaty bodies pressing up against her, and Marlene is singing loudly and off-key, and Sirius leans down to kiss Mary suddenly, tasting like vodka and regret, and he laughs when she laughs, because there is nothing else to say.

Lily and James are back, and Lily grabs Mary’s hands and pulls her into a waltz, even though the music is too upbeat for that, and Lily’s plaits are loose and her cheeks are flushed and she looks angelic, a goddess sent from above to taunt Mary with what she cannot have, and it is sufficient enough to press her face into the crook of Lily’s shoulder and breathe in her jasmine scent and pretend as though it is all hers, that Lily is all hers.

Peter laughs when he twirls her, and he seems so happy for the first time in months that Mary could believe she made up his discontentment, but there is Sybill and she’s not jealous, she takes Mary’s hands too and twirls her, and she has such a beautiful smile that Mary could love her too, love her beyond the fact that Peter loves her, and it is so lovely to be held with such care, that even to be moved without her express purpose feels okay in this light, under the strobe and the music.

Marlene gets her a drink, and there is glitter all over her face from Mary’s makeup palette, so much that she seems dazzling, incandescent, and they take turns dipping one another back and forth, Marlene’s hands fitting so well with Mary’s that she wonders how it could not have been Marlene that she loves so irrevocably, Marlene of the bright eyes and dyed hair and crooked teeth, who won’t stop singing into Mary’s ear while they dance.

James is here, and he smells like Lily too, her lipstick smudged on his lips, and they take over the stage, he hoists her up like a professional dancer, and she feels light and free in the air, in his arms, confident in the knowledge he will not drop her, and he fixes her with that grin as the people cheer, the knowledge that they are the winners of the evening.

And Remus, poor sweet Remus, who won’t look Mary in the eyes when they get back to the table, who glares at the ground and lights a cigarette when Sirius kisses Mary again outside of the club, giggling like a schoolboy and demanding a drag off the cigarette while his lips are red with Mary’s lipgloss, and Remus looks as though he might die, and Mary’s world is tilting off its axis as she stares at his face and tries to remember why that might be, even though words slip through her fingers like grains of sand right now, and Marlene is pulling on her shoulder to drag her home, and as they leave she looks back to see Sirius and Remus standing face to face outside the building, the only light between them the tip of the cigarette, and it is a tableau filled with so much raw and barely restrained emotion that Mary cannot bear to watch, so she looks away and tries to focus on walking in a straight line without vomiting.

~*~

The moon shining overhead is bright and beautiful when Mary, still drunk and wobbly, makes her way outside to the back porch. She knows it’s Lily sitting there, can feel it somewhere deep in her bones. Stepping deliberately, ankles unsteady, Mary goes to sit on the bench beside her, shoulders brushing. Lily’s face is tilted upwards, the moonlight reflected back in her green eyes, a pensive expression on her face.

Mary wants; she wants so badly. What do you want, Mary? Mary wants her, she wants Lily. that’s what she wants. A yearning, gaping hole in her chest where the heart should be, but the heart is Lily’s. Mary would lay down her life for Lily, would scale the highest mountain if only to demonstrate her love.

“Are you just going to stare at me, Mary?” Lily is smiling at her, eyes winking in the light, and it takes everything in Mary’s body not to burst into tears or kiss her. “You can if you want to. Don’t let me make you self-conscious.”

“I’m still a little drunk.” Mary says as a lame excuse, but her heart flutters when Lily’s grin widens, and she pats Mary’s knee with a fondness that is so uniquely Lily’s, the love only she can hold.

Lily’s glaze flickers back to the moon. “Do you ever wonder how something so beautiful can be so destructive for someone?” Yes, Mary thinks, watching each freckle on Lily’s cheeks link together in a constellation of awe and wonder. “I used to love the moon, until I saw Remus flinch from it. Now I can’t really see it as anything but a vector of pain for him.”

“Nature is cruel like that, I guess.” Mary stares up at the sky, at the large burly tree in the distance, and touches at her wrist below her bangles.

“Can I ask you something?” Mary glances at her, at the way Lily’s eyes fix on the glint of the bracelet under her fingers, and nods. “Your bracelets… you started wearing those near the end of fifth year, right before my whole thing with Sev—Snape. When you went to the hospital wing. Snape told me what Mulciber had said…”

Mary sneaks her hand away from her wrist, plants her palm firmly against her thigh, and stares up at the moon. From here, she can see the crevices in its surface, the human flaws of a non-human entity. “Yeah.” That’s all she can say, voice failing her, but she doesn’t have to say anything. Of course, Lily knows. Who else pays better attention than Lily?

“Did he… Oh god, Mary, did he?”

She can feel the sweat under her hand, skin against skin. “Yeah.”

“Jesus.” Lily presses a shaking hand to her mouth.

“I don’t remember it.” Mary lies, because it’s easier, easier to believe she doesn’t than to see his face hovering above hers, to know it is true and that it was her rather than some indistinct woman whose face is blurred and unreal. “It’s okay, Lily. I’m okay.”

Lily shakes her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him for that, Mary.” Her throat closes up, and her hand reaches for Mary’s, knitting their fingers together and squeezing. “I’m sorry I never asked before. I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it… but I should have been there anyway. I should have been there for you even if you didn’t want to tell me.”

“Lils—”

“You’re my best friend, do you know that? You’ve been my best friend since we were eleven. You understood what it meant to be there, and I didn’t feel as alone as I could have because of you. It was us against the world.” Lily is looking into her eyes, and somehow Mary has turned towards her, a sunflower yearning and twisting up to the sky for sunlight. Lily is beautiful and real and solid, and Mary could reach out a wavering finger and trace the contours of Lily’s face, because she exists. “You deserve everything good in this world, Mary. I know that because you are good, and you deserve to be happy. God, if I could give you the earth and sea and heavens, I would, you know I would.”

Mary thinks suddenly of earlier that day, walking to the phone box with Sirius and Peter, watching two black birds soaring through the air. She stopped in her tracks, watching them dive and spin and glide together, movements synchronized like a beautiful dance meant only for the other. They swooped and tumbled, wings brushing, winding around a tree, never quite getting too far from the other. A mating dance, she thought, but it was more than that: it was love. The bird in the front never straying too far from the one right behind, the dives carefully coordinated to remain in contact. It was fun, it was earnest, it was the purest form of love she’s ever witnessed.

“I love you, Lily.” The words slip from her lips, and she means it. She means it more than she’s ever meant anything in her life. “I love you.”

Lily doesn’t look surprised, doesn’t seem fazed. There is a resolved sadness to her lips, tears in her eyes as her thumb rubs lightly against Mary’s finger. “I know. I know.” It’s all she can say, and Mary knows it, but it doesn’t stop the hurt that chews its way into her soul, gnawing on the glowing ball of light from the luminosity of Lily’s smile, ripping her insides to shreds. She cannot say it back, and some part of Mary doesn’t expect her to, but her chest aches with a dull, pounding pain that hurts the longer she breathes. The only thing she can consciously think is that hers and Lily’s palms don’t quite slot together nicely, but she holds on anyway.

The birds ducked around a building, wings outstretched and glorious in the wind. Only one bird came back around, soaring away into the unknown. Mary craned her neck but couldn't find the other bird. It was over, almost as soon as it had begun. It was not meant to be.

“Mary.” The sheer tenderness in Lily’s voice is the trigger, is what sends Mary in a wave of sorrow and tears, unable to breathe around the lump in her throat. Lily is stroking her hand and Mary loves her, loves her more than her body can bear. “Mary.” Soft fingers against her jaw, brushing away wayward tears running down her cheeks, and Mary cannot see through the water, cannot reach through the haze to Lily. “I’m so sorry. I would if I could.” Repeating, over and over, Mary feels like she is being sucked down a drainpipe, whirling in the water like a tiny creature, unable to stay afloat.

“Mary, you deserve someone who can love you like that. I’m so sorry that it can’t be me.”

I wish it could be you, Mary wants to say. The problem with wanting; popping the cork lets loose the flood. All Mary does is want, want, want.

“I would ask a kiss of you if it would help.” Mary’s voice quavers, and she’s barely conscious of what she’s saying.

Lily just gives her a watery smile and reaches up to touch at Mary’s forehead. “It won’t help. I can’t make it mean what you want it to.”

Gently, Lily pulls Mary into her arms, resting her chin on Mary’s curls, and Mary breathes in Lily’s jasmine scent and the softness of her skin and has a terrible sinking feeling that this will be the closest to Lily she’ll ever get, because it will all be different once they pull away.

So, they stay, under the moonlight, slowly sobering up together.