Suspicious Minds
We're caught in a trap
I can't walk out
Because I love you too much baby
September 1978
When Dorcas ends up joining the Order, Mary hates and loves her just a little more.
One of the reasons Mary quite enjoys Dorcas' company is that she realises the other girl's the only sensible person around here these days. She's made it clear that she doesn't plan on joining the Order, regardless of where Marlene stands and her persuasive skills, and that she probably likes the idea of Marlene joining as much as Mary does.
It doesn't help Marlene's case that she keeps coming home to their apartment with badly healed wounds and bruises or that she keeps getting called out for Order business at ungodly hours. She sees Marlene getting frustrated at their newfound friendship but she doesn't care if the other girl likes it. It's something they've bonded over for the past month or so. Mary thinks to herself, at least Dorcas understands, that it's fruitless having barely graduated wizards join the war at eighteen. Like it's actually going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
By September, that no longer holds true.
Mary confronts her when Marlene's not around because she just needs to confirm her theories. Marlene's been giving a lot of half-truths these days when it comes to Order related stuff, and Mary knows she'll get a straight answer from Dorcas. It's different because Marlene feels the need to protect Mary. Dorcas doesn't.
Or maybe it's just the fact that Dorcas knows that Mary's one of Marlene's closest friends and has the misguided belief that Marlene's already told her most of it anyway. Maybe it's just because she doesn't have the energy to come up with more lies at the end of the day. For whatever reason, Dorcas trusts her enough to give her the truth, the whole truth, even when Marlene doesn't.
Dorcas ends up on a hospital bed at St Mungo's on the last day of August. In a profession where there's supposed to be healer-patient confidentiality, the healers at St Mungo's certainly gossip a lot, especially when a girl shows up with injuries that make it seem like she should be dead. She should be, but she isn't.
Mary gathers that Dorcas' been sidelined after some Order operation that Mary's not supposed to know about. Dorcas' version of being sidelined means she came in to St Mungo's unconscious, on the brink of death. Mary only puts two and two together because she knows about the existence of the Order.
For a supposedly super-secret underground organisation, they're pretty shite at coming up with convincing excuses for their members who constantly walk through the revolving door at St Mungo's. So naturally, the healers gossip about who and what attacked Dorcas and Mary learns about how her survival is because Dorcas is some sort of medical anomaly. Dorcas has power that is beyond imaginable.
When even the most experienced healers can't explain her injuries, or more accurately, the lack thereof, they figure it must be something innate that's protected her from it. Though none of them can explain how she's still alive, Mary's more than glad she is.
She tries not to pay attention to the gossip because it's tiring having to distinguish the truths from the lies. Part of her also feels like it's just one more secret to keep, whatever she manages to decipher with her limited knowledge of the Order. But she finds that she's also grown to care about Dorcas and she finds herself just wanting to know if she's okay, both mentally and physically.
The healers tell Dorcas that she'll be fine with two weeks' bedrest, and Mary checks in on her as much as she possibly can, without it seeming suspicious. After all, she's still new to the hospital and she tries to come off as professional. She's not assigned to Dorcas but she is admitted to the Janus Thickey ward so access isn't a problem. Mary goes out of her way to grab supplies and secretly sneaks food in because she knows the food here's not much better than what they give out at muggle hospitals. She supposes that's something they have in common - wizards and muggles alike.
Marlene stays there most nights and Mary returns home to an empty flat.
There's a shift in Marlene's demeanor around the flat after Dorcas leaves the hospital and Mary boils it down to her kidnapping. Once again, her kidnapping's something Mary's not supposed to know about. But it's hard not to notice when your roommate goes AWOL and your roommate's girlfriend's the one who swoops in and saves the day.
Mary gets the truth out of Marlene, eventually, and Dorcas gets discharged after a week (against healers' orders) but she's stubborn enough that they let her get away with it as long as she signs something. Dorcas returns home to her parents' for a bit but she comes over to their flat often because she downplayed her brief hospitalisation to her parents and she doesn't have to pretend that she's still recuperating when she's here.
So when Dorcas lets her know that she's changed positions in the Ministry to become an Auror and it's the reason she was injured, Mary just knows it's a lie. She knows Marlene's disappearance was Order-related and she knows that Dorcas knows and did something that she's just not telling her.
So when Marlene's boss Caradoc takes the night to take Marlene out for dinner, his way of telling her to take a break from her work, Mary makes sure Dorcas stays by inviting her over for dinner without Marlene. Dorcas doesn't object and the two of them enjoy a nice, quiet dinner courtesy of Mary Macdonald.
That is, until Mary decides it's time to confront the other girl.
"You said you wouldn't."
Mary goes with a vague statement. She sees the look on Dorcas' face and knows that she gets what she's referring to. It's an eerily similar conversation less than a month ago and she thinks she was naive in believing that Meadowes would never join. She supposes it's different when someone you're in love with is putting themselves on the line everyday and you're trapped in the stands feeling helpless.
She thinks she loves Marlene and Lily, more than she'll ever be able to put into words, but still, it's not the type of love where she'll risk everything to fight in the war. She can't imagine doing that to her family, to little Georgie, to Eli and to her mom and dad. She can't imagine how it'll feel if they lose her to a war that they're barely able to understand, by reason of letting her go off into the wizarding world at eleven.
She thinks of them and realises that she hasn't visited them in a while. She would make excuses about how work's been hectic but truth is, it's been hard balancing two completely different lives. It's easier when she was at Hogwarts, because it's never been much of a choice. Christmas, easter and summers at home like clockwork, where she gets to flip a switch between the two worlds. Now, she doesn't get two weeks off to unwind. She has to make time and she supposes she really doesn't have an excuse for not visiting when she can apparate to Manchester in a matter of seconds. She thinks she brings a little more of the baggage home when she visits so she goes less and less.
Dorcas looks at her and Mary thinks that it's of pity. When she first realised Dorcas joined, it felt like a gut punch. Right now, the look in Dorcas' eyes makes it ten times worse because it feels like the other girl hates it as much as she does. The look in her eyes tells her that she doesn't have a choice.
"You know why."
She does and that's the worst part. She thinks Marlene's the luckiest girl in the world and part of her hates what she's doing to Dorcas. But it's not like Marlene forced her. Dorcas has as much autonomy choosing to join the war as she has in choosing to love Marlene. Part of her wants to tell Dorcas that she has a choice, but she's not sure if that would be a lie. Mary blinks to keep the tears from surfacing.
"What they've been saying about you, at St Mungo's, is it true?"
Dorcas sighs before she goes into an explanation. About how her twin turned out to be a squib whereas she started showing signs of magic at two. Her family figured it out, that Dorcas absorbed her twin sister's magic in the womb. It's rare condition, this sort of blood magic and Mary thinks she'll probably never meet another witch like Dorcas in her lifetime. The power Dorcas holds in her hand, well, it's unimaginable to most.
Mary thinks she get it now, why Dorcas wanted to leave it all behind when she first left Marlene and the war behind. She thinks she might too if she were Dorcas - it's a lot, to say the least. She thinks about the rare instances she's seen Dorcas use magic. She performs simple spells like she hasn't given a thought about the consequences of it until the second after she's cast it. Most wizards she knows control their magic. With Dorcas, it's like the magic controls her, like it's a sort of power that's too much for one person to hold.
"You've done it before. During that quidditch final."
She thinks of that final quidditch match back during their seventh year, when Gryffindor won the house cup, and watching from the stands as Dorcas, Marlene and Mulciber end up in a disagreement where Mulciber almost falls to his death.
Mary remembers the two of them confronting Marlene about what Dorcas did at that final game. Mulciber had swung a bludger at Marlene, missing her by half an inch, and Dorcas had lost it. They barely blinked before Mulciber was falling, broom shattered into pieces, his body hanging in mid-air and Dorcas hovering a few feet above. She recalls Marlene's outburst, that it didn't make sense for Dorcas to do what she did because she's made it clear that she no longer reciprocates whatever Marlene's feeling. That it wasn't revenge on Marlene's behalf. Lily had asked, insisted, that Marlene tell her what spell Dorcas had used on him. She remembers the shock on Lily's face when she realises Dorcas used wordless and wandless magic. She didn't get it at the time, but she supposes it all makes sense now.
"I can't control it sometimes." Dorcas admits. "It happens when I'm angry. I saw Mulciber aim for her and I just...I lost it. Dumbledore called me into his office afterwards, basically to tell me that he knows. About my magic."
Dorcas lets out an empty laugh and it's obvious that she does not approve of Dumbledore's methods. "He wanted to let me know that there's a place for me in the Order, in not so many words."
"So he's been trying to recruit you. All this time. Since Hogwarts." Mary doesn't hide the frown on her face.
"Well, he tried. I told the old man to bugger off. It's a bit ironic, eh? He got me anyway, like a bloody trophy." Dorcas says sarcastically and a forced smile on her face. Mary lets out a laugh in response to Dorcas' joke, but it does nothing to lessen the gravity of the situation.
"Was it..." Mary doesn't know how to phrase what she's thinking.
When Marlene was kidnapped, Dorcas ended up at the right time and place to save the day. She thinks that they could have sent in other Order members, instead of having to utilise Dorcas who's not even part of it. She doesn't know how to ask it, whether the whole thing was orchestrated so that Dorcas joins them. She's never been a fan of Dumbledore, aside from harbouring simple respect towards him being the headmaster of Hogwarts. But there's so much she doesn't understand about the old man and she just doesn't know how a man like that is so comfortable letting her friends join a war they have no business being part of. How he thinks that children no longer need protection the second they're out of Hogwarts. How he's literally risking Dorcas' life by asking.
"I have my suspicions." Dorcas understands and Mary doesn't need to say much more.
"Well, I'm glad she has you." It doesn't take a legilimens to know who she's referring to.
Part of Mary wants to hate Dorcas for betraying their unspoken vow not to join the Order, but she also knows that it's petty, holding a grudge over something that is out of Dorcas' control.
It's the fact that she fucking knows that Dorcas is doing this for Marlene and she wonders if Marlene's able to understand the gravity of it, the sacrifices she's making. Mary turns away and heads to the kitchen just in time to hide the tear she sheds. She's not sure how she's able to feel gracious and this level of anger at the same time, so she just grabs the bottle of wine she's saved for a rainy day by the neck and two wine glasses and heads out the kitchen door. She pours Dorcas a glass as a silent thank you.