Prologue
Marlene waved goodnight to Lily, laughing boisterously as the exhilaration of the night had not yet made way for the quiet companionship that the sixth-year girls always seemed to share in the dorm after particularly wild nights.
"Goodnight, Mare!" she shouted in return, before making a run for the entrance hall stairs to avoid any of Marlene's typical revenge jinxes. Marlene really did hate that nickname.
"I'm not a fucking horse," she grumbled under her breath, resigning herself to the idea of going back into the Great Hall alone to search for her carelessly discarded shoes.
Picking her way around the last dredges of students departing the Hall, Marlene found herself turning down the hallway just beyond the Great Hall instead of through its massive, heavy doors, deciding to go by way of the trophy room. Stopping halfway down the hall, Marlene ran three fingers over the crack in the wall which would open up to the hallway between this one and the trophy room—the hallway in which she and Dorcas had first really seen each other.
Marlene smiled softly to herself, recalling whispered words under an unspoken agreement to never be spread beyond their speakers. Merlin, that felt so long ago now, though it couldn't have been more than a year since then. Coming upon the door at the end of the corridor—its beautiful, stained-glass window twinkling from the small bit of light bouncing off Hogwarts's thousands of trophies—Marlene took a deep breath, readying herself to brave the dark room alone, as Dorcas had once taught her not to fear.
With sweet memories of the fifth-year girl at the forefront of her mind, Marlene strolled briskly through the maze of awards, suddenly in higher spirits than she had been since her and Sirius's disagreement. With a whispered, "alohomora," Marlene squeezed past the wrought-iron gates at the front of the room, and nearly sprinted up the spiral stairs leading to the Great Hall.
She may have been happy reminiscing, but Marlene still was not uneager to finally get back to her dorm and rest. She reached one hand out to wrench open the plain, wooden door at the top of the stairs but froze in place once this took her close enough to see through the small glass window at the top of the door.
Meadowes, her Meadowes, was slow dancing in the arms of none other than Sirius fucking Black. As she looked on, paralyzed by her surprise, Dorcas reached upwards to rub at a stain on the boy's face, just by the corner of his lips, before leaning into him, foreheads close, as "American Pie," Dorcas's—no their—song came to an end: Them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye/Singin', this'll be the day that I die. As the last note faded into the vast, echoing space, their heads came together softly.
Suddenly feeling the need to throw off her stunned immobilization, Marlene's body knew to turn her away before she could see what happened next, but it had no way to shut off her ears. Marlene heard, all the way from her hiding place, the sound of one kiss, then another, and then a third.
Springing into action in much the same way as it had begun to moments before, Marlene's body took the reigns of her life and steered her far, far away from the Great Hall, away from the sounds of her first love and her best mate kissing, just mere hours after Marlene had resolved herself to speak to each of them and clear the water.
The water is surely fucking muddy now, Marlene thought bitterly to herself. It was so, so filled with dirt and grime, and Marlene never wanted to swim again, for that kind of ocean was no place to drown.
It wasn't until three hours later, as the sole sixth-year Gryffindor awake after she had waved off her friends' concerns at what Marlene was sure were the worst smudged mascara tracks they had ever seen—she had applied quite a bit for the ball, after all—that Marlene, in between fits of sobbing in her muffliato-ed bed, realized that she had thought earlier of Dorcas as her first love, and that she had unconsciously been doing so for weeks now. This set off another fit of crying and screaming into her undoubtedly very confused pillow.
Marlene did not sleep that February night, not a wink.
A/N: I will be editing this promptly, but am posting the unedited edition briefly to figure out Archive of Our Own's formatting, as this is my first fanfiction. If you're here while this note is still up, I love you haha. In the meantime, I would love any suggestions or requests you might have, whether they be corrections on grammar, requests for eventual pairings, or anything in between