“Storm’s coming.” Moody says, his voice gruff and hoarse. When he extends his finger to the rain-soaked window it shakes.
Mary looks over from where she sits on the windowsill. There’s dark, angry clouds covering the horizon, as well as the new moon. She traces the rim of her glass absentmindedly, fighting the urge to throw it at the wall and watch it break.
The room is quiet, and sick with a loss that lingers. Nobody died, not recently, but they never imagined things would go so far.
She hasn’t seen him in what must be weeks. Mary hasn’t kept track. Order meetings nowadays are few and far in between. But they have a certain permanence. When they’re in the same country, they don’t even ask before intruding.
It’s all for the greater good, obviously.
Moody sways on his cane like he can’t help it. His eye is covered with a hand-sewn patch, which is new, but nobody even bothers to question it.
It’s not hard to imagine.
She wonders where Marlene is. If she’ll get to America before the storm passes through the West. If she’ll come at all.
Lily pours a drink from the kitchenette of their motel room. Distinctly audible, through their thin decaying wallpaper, the quality only no money can buy. Despite this, there’s no sound when she makes her way to the closet. No vague patter of feet, or a single creek in the decades old floorboard.
You took her from me.
She thinks in Moodys direction, reaching for her pack of cigarettes and lighting one in between her teeth. They don’t use magic anymore. Mary supposes he took that too.
Outside, a couple in yellow raincoats laugh as they run to seek shelter. One of them, the man, looks up at her through the window and winks. Their laughter rings through the room, almost as loud as the dull blow of the heater below her. The stormclouds swell, lightning strikes.
“No.” Mary flicks ash off the cigarette, still unsmoked, “I reckon the storm’s already here.”
⛆
They move motels soon after.
If she’s honest she’s lost count of how many they’ve seen. Tens. Hundreds, maybe. It’s hard to keep track on the road.
Mary’s perched on the cargo bed of the small truck with chipped, washed-out red paint they bought in cash a while back. It hardly runs, and the AC doesn’t work, but sometimes the radio hums a broken staticky hum if you hit it hard enough. Small victories, and all that.
Her lips are wrapped around a straw with dark pink lipstick stains on the rim that she’s stuck in a glass Coke bottle. The drink stains her fingers with cold, but it hardly matters in the biting winter chill. The West is hardly London, rain comes and goes with no real frequency, but the rawness comes in ever-present blasts of wind. Mary shivers and shoves one hand into the pocket of her leather jacket, a good find from a trip to the charity shop in North Dakota while Lily was out. Though her knees almost bend under the cold in her shorts.
Lily doesn’t seem all that bothered with it, though. She’s wearing a black tank top and blue denim shorts, with her hair up. In fact, she seems to be sweating with the effort she’s putting into the ATM in front of her. Mary offered to help, but her girlfriend just shot her a grin and said, ‘Don’t you worry your head about it doll.’
It was always like that with her now. She was always pushing her back, when Mary used to be the only one she’d let in.
She did do something, though. He’s visible now, through the fogged up window in the flickering light of the gas station. The owner of the place, a nice old man probably around seventy, Kevin. Or maybe it was Keith? She didn’t pay much attention.
The second they got there she split off from Lily. She beamed at him, before hitting him with calming drought in a spray bottle. Then she raided the store for food. Menstrual products too, which she didn’t miss costing money. He’s fast asleep on his arms now anyhow, without a care in the world.
They don’t go in together anymore, to the shops they take from. They stopped in Spain, or maybe it was Korea. The location doesn’t matter. They used to do everything together, frantically, back when everything started. Mary would do her part, and then they’d run down the short isles together, tearing open candy packets, kissing by the fountain machines.
There’s no time for that now. It feels, some days, like there’s no time at all. Like they’ve run fresh out. The war is at its peak, and they’re all thinking that maybe if they all run a little bit faster, they’ll win.
She’s halfway through her second drink, and 40 pages into Lily’s annotated copy of Wuthering Heights when she looks up again. And when she does, it’s like she can’t look away. Lily Evans always had that effect on her. One that drew her attention, captivated her endlessly. Even in Hogwarts at eleven years old, she knew that it was inescapable.
Lily has her tounge poked out the corner of her mouth, her thin eyebrows furrowed in frustration. Occasionally, she bops her head to the rock song cutting back in when the car gets a good signal through the door blown wide open. She has a pistol in her back pocket and a dagger strapped to her left thigh, if Mary looks close enough she can still see a speck of blood on the hilt.
But she’s still Lily. It amazes her, how after everything, she still manages to be her. Mary thinks that Lily’s a force too strong for this world, that she could never not be her if she tried.
The world is collapsing around them, and her round face is still peppered with sun-kissed heart shaped freckled the color of gold. Her hair is still that vibrant red it’s always been, and her smile will always make Mary fold.
She knows her, so, so well. Mary could draw a map of every plane in Lily’s body with just her lips. She could find her without her senses, without anything at all. Somehow she’d still end up in Lily’s arms, at the end of the day.
But things have changed. She’s changed. Or, she’s grown. The war has stuck new things into her skin as if she were a pin cushion, something simple to pick apart. But she’s not, and she never will be. So instead of falling apart, Lily overflows.
And there are times where she feels like she hadn’t known a version of her before that could do what she does now. That’s not true, obviously. Lily was always passionate to a fault. Loyal. Willing to do anything without taking a single drop for herself.
Mary hates that it’s translated into this.
Two years ago, in 1981, Voldemort was winning. And he thought he did, for a while. There were rumors around the order that they’d have to surrender. Dumbledore seemed to be at a loss. There were a couple of suicides. People who joined the order after they left school, kids Mary used to see running up and down the corridors of Hogwarts, who decided that if they couldn’t win, they wouldn’t die by Voldemorts hand either.
That wasn’t the last straw. Inevitably, the one who tipped it all over was none other than Lily Evans.
She lost it a bit, when she came home to find her sister and her family murdered in their beds. Even their little one, who was only three. Mary remembers the day like it was yesterday, the way Lily clung to her, sobbing so broken it cut her to her core. “We were just starting to be okay.” Was what she said, right before she fell asleep that very first night.
And it was true. The Evans sisters had been at odds for years, it was no secret, but before it happened Lily would come home from a visit to their little flat in London with an award winning smile and a glint in her eye.
The day after that Lily threatened to burn it all down. Nobody could stop her, but nobody really even wanted to.
It was Moody who calmed her down. He took her aside, and spoke in a low voice that only she could hear.
Later, when they both got home and Mary asked what he’d said, Lily looked at her. There was something manic about her eyes, giddy in a way she’d never seen before.
”Moody came up with a new system.”
It turns out, that Moody had planned to separate from Dumbledore and the orders mission for a while. He lost a daughter not long before Petunia died. “We aren’t winning this war with rainbows and sunshine.” Was what he said when he explained it to all of them, back when they were in the same room everyday.
But his idea wasn’t dark magic, in fact, a lack of magic was important. The Ministry was completely overrun at that point, and they could track every spell, even wandless ones by the users magical signature.
Moody didn’t talk around it. He told them, very bluntly, that they’d be turned into assassins. Muggle ones.
The system worked in pairs: one of them brewed potions to compact and subdue the victims magic, and the other one would do the killing. He didn’t want people getting distracted by taking on multiple roles, especially when there were a lot of purebloods on the team he selected who would need to train with muggle weapons.
It worked out quite well actually. None of their relationships were particularly a secret (though they could all tell some of the older order members disapproved of their chosen partners) so duos worked well. Marlene and Dorcas, Sirius and Remus.
Nobody knows where James ended up. He ran off at some point, after they found out Peter joined the death eaters. As far as she knows, he’s still in Moodys alliance, but he won’t tell her much. Sirius went a bit mad trying to find him, but all he found was whispers that he was with someone in Brazil. Eventually they stopped trying.
Lily and Mary were obviously together.
Ideally, Lily would’ve been the brewer. She’s the best out of all of them. But Mary couldn’t kill. She tried, for Lily, she did. But her hands shook, and Mary couldn’t force herself to pull that trigger.
It makes her feel a little sick, knowing what Lily sacrificed for her.
That was the first time she saw Lily kill somebody. She took the gun from her trembling hands with such gentleness that it struck her to see Lily immediately turn and shoot the death eater point-blank in the head.
The memory is still fresh, as she sits out there in the cold now. She can still feel the blood splattered on her cheeks, the slow icy shock that spread down to her stomach. The look in Lily’s eyes.
Vengeance.
“Mary?” She’s brought out of her thoughts by Lily’s smooth voice, and her gap-toothed smile. “Space cadet. What were you thinking about?”
Her girlfriend places her hands on either side of her, staring at her face to face hungrily.
I’ve seen you kill people.
I saw you covered in blood.
“Nothing.” Mary shakes her head, pecking her on the lips. “You’re beautiful, is all.”
⛆
There are rare good moments on the road. Some of her favorites are when they get to pick where they go next. Moody sends them maps in the post with options, and information on the victims there. They’re placed in the West until for the next six months until September, but America is vast, and most importantly it’s full of places they’ve never seen before.
It’s sweltering now, about 43 degrees. The man on the radio said it was one of the worst heatwaves in recent history. Mary doesn’t think she minds though, as she takes on hand off the steering wheel to change the station to one that’s actually playing music, settling on one playing Abba. Her hair is tied up in a half hazard bun, and her make up is pretty much melted off, but it’s a welcome change from the blistering cold during the winter.
They’re barreling down the empty roads slowly, or, as fast as the truck runs. She hasn’t seen a car for miles. It’s as though the world is entirely there’s.
Lily is looking over brochures they collected for the places they could go. She’s not ranting endlessly about the pros and cons, like she would’ve before, but there’s a content grin playing at her lips. Which means it’s a good day.
She’s in those same denim shorts, they don’t have much clothes nowadays, but she abandoned her shirt hours ago for her bra. It doesn’t matter anyway, nobody’s there. Mary finds herself worrying that she’ll burn, though.
“What about… Idaho?”
Mary scrunches her nose, shaking her head.
Lily hums, accepting this. “Oh! Alaska! Please, doll, we have to go to Alaska.”
“Why’s that?” She looks over, accidentally swerving a bit. Technically she doesn’t have her license, but she’s also technically a war criminal. So. The government will have to cut their losses, unfortunately.
Lily lights up and fumbles with one of her brochures, finding the right one and pointing to a photo on the cover. “The Northern Lights! I’ve always wanted to see those!” She pouts and puts her hands together, begging.
She laughs, shaking her head.
“Okay. Yeah, Lils. We’ll go to Alaska.”
Lily cheers, and her heart melts a bit.
Anywhere. She thinks, as the sun washes over her.
I’ll take you anywhere.
⛆
“You know,” Lily starts slowly, so Mary knows that it’s bad. “Mulciber is here.”
She stops dead in her tracks. They’re on the second floor of the motel they’re staying at, walking to their room along the balcony surrounded by the vending machines. Lily winces and turns around, giving her a bashful look.
“You don’t have to come!” She insists.
Mary crossed her arms. “Of course I have to come.”
It’s you.
She tries not to think about Mulciber. It feels so long ago now, her fifth year. He’d hit her with an Imperious curse, and she only managed to break out moments before he tried anything. It used to keep her up at night. The not knowing what would’ve happened if she hadn’t gotten out.
Lily holds the grudge though, she always did. She’s half sure Lily would’ve killed him then, if she’d have let her.
Her girlfriend holds her ground, scoffing, “He deserves it. Just as much, if not more, than the rest of them.”
“I know he does.” She insists, because she does. But she doesn’t want Lily to do anything else for her. Mary sees the toll it takes on her, when she kills them. It tears her up, from the inside out. And it’s Mary’s fault. Lily took the fall for her, and while she’s never once complained, it could’ve been her.
Lily gives her a coy look, and takes her hands, “Come on… don’t be mad. Forget about him, okay?”
She feels herself start to give in.
“The bed’ll be warm…” Lily tilts her head, and all it takes is her eyes, completely blown.
The next thing she knows, she’s up against the wall in a room she hasn’t even had a chance to look at. It’ll never be as comfortable, as safe, or as theirs as the flat they had in London. Covered in plants and photos from the day they met to the day they left. But it doesn’t matter when Lily’s hands are on her.
It’s all she feels, the need.
It’s like oxygen, her lips, her fingernails scraping her scalp. Mary let’s her take the lead, she can’t think much anyway, not when her knees are so weak she can barely stand.
Lily takes her jaw and tilts her head, roughly, but she moves to her neck with devotion. She turns her and backs them up, pushing Mary down on the bed. She knows she’s being too loud, they’ve had issues with their neighbors in the past.
But she never has more of Lily now than she does when her hands are on her. She hardly seems to be able to find the right words lately, falling into silence mid-sentence, but her body always knows.
And Mary always takes it. She can’t help it. If it’s the only way she can have all of her, she’ll take anything she can get. Even if it’ll never be close enough. She can never crawl inside her skin, or burry herself between her bones.
Everything else falls away, and they’re the only people in the entire world. Sharing a heartbeat, and the same short, labored breaths.
⛆
It all falls down, there, in Alaska. The temperatures drop again, and before the killing they spent the first day huddled under the scratchy blanket in their room. It stood draped over them as Lily dozed off on her shoulder, and she worked to brew the potions she needed and compact them.
She thought about her dad a lot that day, for whatever reason. The classical music that played over the radio reminded her of him, and his obsession with jazz. Mary’s mum died during childbirth, and her dad never remarried so it was always just them. She wanted to call him, to hear him joke about his co-workers or rant to her about something he saw on the tele. Or anything, really.
Mary really, really wants her dad.
She doesn’t know if he’s seen her on the news. They’ve been a couple of times, for theft. Mary never told him much about the war, and she didn’t tell him she was leaving. Their last conversation was about Lily.
Mary wants to tell him that she fell in love. So far in love that there’s no way out. There’s nobody else. Maybe she could’ve had other people, or told other stories. But ever since Lily blew into her life, that’s the only story she’ll ever be able to tell. It’s the only one that matters.
The next day came around, eventually. Lily wasted the daylight trailing Mulciber and his friends, and overheard them saying they’d be at a local wizard pub that night.
So they went. They had limited ingredients for Polyjuice, so the strain she brewed would only last for around thirty minutes. It worries her, a bit.
Lily’s good at what she does, the best killer they have, according to Moody. But she doesn’t trust Mulciber. She refuses to give him power over her, but she isn’t stupid. He’s a powerful wizard, and they don’t have magic at all.
When they got to the bar everything was normal. Disco music played from the jukebox, some American artist she hasn’t heard before. It’s a bit more high end than they anticipated, and their dresses are hardly expensive but it’s not enough to make them stand out.
She hears Mulciber before she sees him. His piggish laugh. He has a girl on his lap, a nymph who laughs at everything he says. He doesn’t spare her a glance as she walks in, and it gives her an overwhelming sense of relief. Mary hates his eyes the most.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees Lily’s fists clench until her knuckles are white, but she keeps her cool. Mary surveys crowd, it’s not crowded, which is good. They only have about 4 minutes until the potion wears off, so she makes quick work of the room, dusting people as she walks by and innocently looking away when they drop.
Lily strikes up a conversation with Mulciber and his gang. She’s a good actress, but Mary can tell she’s on the verge of snapping. Her grin is strained like it takes physical effort to hold it up. She can see Lily eyeing the exposed dark mark on his wrist, red and angry from years of calls.
It doesn’t slip past her, though, that Mulciber has dark circles painted under his eyes. It’s clear the war has taken a toll on all of them. Especially because they’re going to win. The death eaters have started to cower into hiding, shrinking away from the mysterious killers wiping out their comrades.
Mary hopes, venomously, that they all choke on their fear.
They’re going to win, this she’s sure of. But as she looks at Lily, she knows that it’s the cost that really matters.
Her heart drops to her stomach when she realizes they’ve run out of time before Mary got to Mulciber. Lily insisted she do him last, but now her hair is turning from black and falling back into vibrant red curls. Immediately, when the potion falls off of her, Mulcibers eyes find hers.
Like he knew.
His dry, cracked lips turn into something sinister. “Mary Macdonald…” He moves to stand up, and looks down in brief shock when he finds that Lily’s iron-clad grip on his forearm holds him back.
She digs her nails into his dark mark, and he cry’s out in pain. Lily tugs his arm down, forcing him to her level, and speaks in a low tone. “Look at her one more time and I’ll cut off your arm.”
The nymph shrieks and jumps back in front of the rest of Mulciber’s little gang. Three or so people. Mary feels white-hot fear run down her spine, because Lily’s never taken on this many people before.
Mulciber’s friend reaches for his wand.
All she can hear is the rain pattering against the roof, and Mulcibers cry’s as Lily bends his arm when she jumps forward and takes the gun slipped under the fold of Lily’s dress. She turns to her, giving her a look. “Put it down.”
But she can’t. Mulciber’s mate points his wand and Lily and she just-
Shoots.
Mary doesn’t even close her eyes, doesn’t even think. In the heat of the moment, her mind reduces it down to very simple terms:
He was going to kill her. So he had to die.
Everything happens quickly after that, and Lily immediately jumps into motion. She uses her free hand to take the dagger from her thigh and slices Mulciber’s hand clean off, snapping the bones in his wrist. “Get your filthy hand off me.”
He screams out, angrily, and moves to stand up. But he’s too slow for the whirlwind that is Lily Evans, and she stabs him as soon as he pushes himself up. Once. Twice. Three times.
Once his friends get over their shock, one by one, they go for her.
And she kills all of them. Every last one of them. Without blinking. Without missing a beat.
Something shifts when they make eye contact. All they can hear now is the rain, and the cheery doomsday music that’s playing. She isn’t even shaking.
The entire room is stained red, and Lily is covered head to toe in it.
Mary falls forward into her arms.
⛆
They don’t talk much after that. Lily drives, staining the steering wheel. Mary has the window wide open, hanging half outside it with her entire arm outstretched to the stars. The breeze causes the splattered blood on her arm to flake, but she hardly notices.
Lily’s hand is on her thigh. She killed a man not twenty minutes ago. But somehow she knows, without thinking, where Lily is taking her.
They don’t speak when they get to the lights. Lily puts the car in park, and stares for a moment, before opening the door. Mary gets out too and watches as her girlfriend takes the towels they keep in the back and follows her down to the creek.
The sky is painted with colors that reflect in the water. It’s freezing when they get in, chilling her all the way to her toes, but her mind doesn’t even process it. Lily comes up behind her, setting her clean hands around her waist and her chin on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” She whispers. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
Mary snorts, playing with Lilys fingers at her stomach. “I did. You can’t take responsibility for something I made the decision to do.”
She turns around in the water, and Lily searches her eyes desperately. She tucks a strand of hair behind Mary’s ear, her touch to featherlight and gentle it’s like she’s afraid Mary will break.
“Would you do it again? If I asked?”
Marys answer is immediate. Because she knows now, with complete certainty. “Yes.”
Because she would. If Lily asked it of her, she’d burn the world to the ground.
The lights above them dance across Lily’s face, and she can barely tell where the water ends and the sky begins. Like they’re in an abyss, right between heaven and hell. Judgement day.
“Would you stop? If I asked?” She replied in return.
It was a question Mary wanted to ask before.
To her credit Lily also doesn’t waste a second. “I’d do anything for you.”
But that’s the thing. No matter how much she wants Lily to be happier, no matter how much she wants to take the burden away from her, she couldn’t ask that.
She couldn’t ask Lily to stop fighting.
Mary needs her, desperately. In a way that nobody should need another person. And she knows that Lily needs to fight. It’s built into the fabric of her being. She’d never want to change her, or ask her to be different.
Even if it means loosing her in the end.
Because she knows now, that just as Lily is the only one who can change her, Mary can change Lily too. They’re each others weaknesses. The only exception to all of their rules.
It’ll kill them. That need, the desperation that spreads like a wildfire rot throughout their bloodstream. But as long as they die together, they’ll be okay.
Maybe they’ll reincarnate as simpler creatures. Hummingbirds singing in the morning, droplets of rain racing one another down a window. Maybe they’ll be muggles, and find one another in an art museum on a sunny day.
Mary looks up at the sky as the rain clears, leaving only the painted colors behind. She clings to Lily, the only warm thing in the entire world, like a love blind addict.
We’ll be okay.
Lily looks into her eyes, and for a moment it’s like they both know.