Prologue
[64.1865 N, -51.4285 W]
Nuuk, Greenland
20.38; 2 February 1982
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dorcas opens the door.
Honestly, Marlene could not be any more stunning. She’s standing outside the door, boots shaking off snow in every direction. She’s shaking her head wildly so her hair swings in all directions. The snowflakes aren’t even falling out.
‘Oh, she’s wearing the hat I crocheted her,’ Dorcas thinks, and promptly smiles. ‘Of course she is. Because she’s perfect.’
As lovely as Dorcas thinks the scene is, Marlene just scowls and swears. She steps back to let her in, and Marlene shuts the door behind her, taking her scarf and hat off to hang them on the hangers mounted to the wall. She shrugs off her jacket as Dorcas grabs the grocery bag and carries it into the kitchen. “You sound happy.”
She hears Marlene snort. “Yeah, thrilled. Because only Mary would ever suggest visiting the middle of nowhere where it’s so cold you can’t feel your own balls and think that it’s romantic.”
Dorcas hears her scream in frustration and peers over the counter. She watches her rip the boot from her left foot into the air and stumble backwards from the effort before falling on her back. She grips her hair in irritation and chucks the boot forward. It lands with a thud on the floor a distance in front of her.
Slumping her shoulders, she turns towards Dorcas. “Why’d we have to come here,” she whines. “The northern lights are so overrated anyway.”
“That is not what you said last night,” Dorcas scoffs. “You loved them, stop complaining about a little cold.”
Even as she turns around to fill the kettle over the sink, she can feel Marlene’s glare on her back. She hears her stand up and slump over to her. As she’s setting the kettle on the stovetop she feels arms around her waist. “You’re fucking lucky I love you,” she mumbles.
Dorcas laughs at that. “Yeah, yeah, I am.”
Her tone turns sincere as she twists around in Marlene’s arms to face her. Her eyes are looking up at her in mock annoyance. ‘So lucky’.
She spends a moment looking at Marlene. The snowflakes that dotted her hair before have mostly melted now, and she notices that there’s an eyelash resting on her left cheek. She gently reaches to pluck it between her thumb and pointer finger and her wife doesn’t even move. She just stares up at her like a lovesick puppy with those eyes.
Few people have been able to do this for her. It’s like Marlene stops all time. In a windowless cottage in the middle of Greenland, Marlene McKinnon has defied the most concrete of physics’ forces. Time doesn’t exist between the two of them and Dorcas is so fucking thankful for that. For her.
For someone that’s lived through all of humanity’s marvels, Dorcas Meadowes knows that there’s no other moment she’d rather exist in. But no one knows time better than she does. Infinity is always just around the corner.
‘I want this forever.’ You can’t have it.
Marlene interrupts them.
“Best honeymoon ever,” she breathes out, eyes closed.
Dorcas laughs loudly at that, grateful for her ever-impeccable timing. “Wow, you switch up quick.”
Marlene hums, leaning against Dorcas’s neck. “What can I say. You make everything better.”
She blushes at that, turning her head away to glance at the kettle. It’s just begun to whistle. She gently unwraps Marlene’s arms from around her and hears her scoff. “I confess my love to you and the tea is more important. Hm, wow okay, I see how it is.”
Dorcas rolls her eyes and opens the cupboard to take out the tea bags, dropping them into the mugs she’s set out earlier. She takes the kettle off of the wood stove and pours it into the two mugs. “Drama queen. You and Sirius are one and the same.”
Marlene walks over to the table and seems to turn slightly somber at the mention of Sirius. She clears her throat, drawing out the chair and slowly sitting down. “Have you heard any from Regulus?”
Dorcas picks up the two mugs and walks carefully over to the table, back straightening reflexively at the topic.
“No.” she sets the tea down at the table, sliding the brown mug over to Marlene.
“Oh.” Marlene goes quiet at that for a little bit.
They sit in silence for a bit. It wasn’t long ago, but two months should have been enough for Dorcas to be over it by now. She knows he’s unstable after everything. She knows. It’s okay. He deserves time. He does, he really does.
And despite Dorcas knowing that they both have all the time in the universe, it never seems like enough.
No, it’s too much.
“You said there were others, other than just you and Regulus, right?”
Again, Marlene’s impeccable timing.
Dorcas looks up at Marlene from her tea, pausing. “Yes,” she starts, hesitantly. She trusts Marlene. Marlene deserves to know. “There are three others. But I haven’t spoken to them since the industrial revolution.”
Marlene looks as if she’s deep in thought. “Do you think he might’ve gone to any of them instead?” She meets Dorcas’s gaze. “Instead of you, I mean,” she whispers. “At least that way he’s not alone.”
“Maybe,” she hums. “I doubt it though. Regulus has never been the type to want help. Not even James could…well, get past that barrier of his.”
Marlene looks sad.
They sit in silence. Marlene’s tea sits untouched on the table, and goes lukewarm.
“James would hate this,” she eventually says.
Dorcas looks up above the rim of the mug in her hand, not answering.
After a pause, Marlene asks, “Did James know? About Regulus?”
“He did, yes.” Dorcas hesitates, unsure if she should continue. ‘Come on, this is Marlene. It’s Marlene, she knows James, she loves James, she deserves to know, come on.’
She clears her throat, coughing slightly. “Regulus…also knew about James.”
“What do you mean?”
Dorcas sighs. “James travelled through time.”
Her jaw goes slightly slack at that, and she seems to catch herself, shaking her head and blinking. “I knew James my whole life, you told me that he wasn’t one of you guys and I believed you and I believed him—”
“No no no, that’s not how I meant it,” Dorcas reaches her hand out quickly, placing it on Marlene’s arm. “I wasn’t lying when I said he wasn’t one of us, he truly wasn’t. He—” she sighs. “He wasn’t there for all of it. Not like Regulus and I and the rest of us were. It’s complicated, I—he wasn’t, he couldn’t really control it. And he wasn’t immune to death, obviously, but—”
Marlene groans at that, dropping her head down onto her arm. “Not funny.”
“I didn’t mean it as a joke,” she answers, tone flat. “I just want you to understand how it actually was.”
Her voice is soft and tired as she looks up at Dorcas and asks, “Okay. What was he like then?”
Dorcas stares at her for a beat.
“It was like…” she pauses. The silence seems to stretch between them, wearing thinner and thinner for every second Dorcas searches the space surrounding them for answers.
“Like he could travel through time," she eventually blurts out. "And he would just show up at random times, but it was always at these big turning points in history. He and Regulus first met in Ancient Rome, and then he was there when we fled from the French revolution, and he was there again when every war broke out, at the beginning of every cultural or artistic movement, he was there for quick little bursts at a time and then would vanish and then he’d be there again, a hundred years later,” The words fall out of her mouth quicker than she can think them through.
“Regulus hated him for it. And he was so in love with him for it.”
Marlene’s eyes narrow. “You mean, he,” racking her brain for the right words. “He could travel through time?”
It sounds ridiculous being said out loud.
But yes, that must’ve been what it was. There was no other explanation.
James Potter could travel through time.