rencontrer la lune
Marlene had never been good at falling asleep. That had not changed during the first week of Hogwarts. Sometimes at home she'd lay in bed for hours just waiting to get some shut-eye, as her mother called it. Other nights she would cry out of sheer exhaustion. She'd not gone on anything hours before bed, skipped dinner as to not upset her stomach, and nothing had worked. At Hogwarts, that was no different. She could hear Mary and Emmeline snoring away while she waited to simply fall asleep.
"Where're ya going?" Mary groggily mumbled at her. Marlene ignored her, and simply went out the door as Mary was already asleep again. Emmeline hadn't a chance of waking up, Mary and Marlene had figured out after trying everything to wake her up one very late morning. They'd eventually resorted to calling her mom, who then played her childhood alarm. Emmeline was mortified, but it made a story. That morning was also the morning Marlene had seen her first display of James Potter's toe-raggedness (Lily's words) after he rented a pink confetti canon and blew it up when Lily had walked into the dining hall.
Marlene smiled back at the memory, as she kept walking towards who knows what. Her original plan was to go to the library to do some extra studying, even if in this state she'd never remember anything, when she saw a young man in the studying room.
The room had been invented for the sole purpose of studying without going all the way to the library. It had floor to ceiling book shelves, and a few plush and wooden chairs and tables scattered around the edges, but the size prohibited it from growing to a level as equipped as the library. The only books you could find were the ones that were provided for the limited amount of courses Hogwarts offered, as to keep the study room only for studying.
Marlene had never actually been in the studying room, much preferring the dorm room desk or the library for the quiet, so she never could have expected the overwhelming smell of... lilac? Why would the studying room smell like lilac? The scent annoyed her, despite it's calming and sleep inducing qualities, and she might have left had she not noticed the man who'd created her lunch table conundrum sitting at the far end of a long table. He was half asleep and his head lay in his hand like he had forgotten it was there.
Marlene browsed the limited shelves. After her first week, she had proved to be terrible at French, and figured that if she was going to study anything it would be the cursed language.
The man, now opposite her, woke up in a daze in tune with the loud scraping of her wooden chair against the stone. Marlene silently cursed herself for not grabbing a bean bag.
He looked around quickly, seemingly spotting how empty the room was, and in what seemed to be Welsh, cursed many, many times. Marlene didn't know Welsh, but she figured he couldn't have been giving her a warm welcome.
"I will kill them." He looked at Marlene with startlingly threatening honey brown eyes. She gazed back, confusion obvious on her face.
"Oh, I'm Remus by the way." Remus stuck his hand out in a mocking way. Marlene shook one of his pinkys awkwardly.
"Marlene." She told him. She dropped her hand, letting her arms dangle on the side of the chair.
"Well, Marlene, pleasure to meet you." He said this with an exaggerated British accent. Marlene felt self conscious of her own, all of a sudden. Nobody had commented on it.
She nodded back at him.
"Sorry, er, Remus?" She started. He gave a nod. "Do you need to sit with us all day tomorrow?" She knew he would be there at breakfast, and wondered if it was possible that he might need to sit with them at lunch and dinner as well, if his friends had left him here.
"Oh thank god you asked." He breathed a sigh of relief. "My two idiotic best friends left me here to fall asleep and humiliate myself in front of a stranger, and I want to show them I have other friend options." He explained. I was right. Marlene thought, with a hint of satisfaction.
"I admire your pettiness. Are these two best friends by any chance James Potter and Sirius Black?"
He groaned. "Unfortunately, yes."
Remus then gathered his stuff and left the study room with incredible speed and a small limp. Marlene made a mental note not to ask him about that later. Just to remember the lunch arrangement, she pulled a scrap paper from a rubbish bin and wrote it down, sticking it in her pocket and praying she'd remember it the next morning.
She figured that her lunch group, knowing what she knew so far about their opinion of James Potter and Sirius Black, would be happy with the arrangement. When Marlene eventually went back to bed that night after getting through half of the French book and not learning anything, she fell asleep faster than usual, if you could count falling asleep at 3 am faster than usual, which she did.
In the morning, she felt relieved when Emmeline and Mary immediately gave her plans a thumbs up. Remus walked down to the cafeteria with the three of them, and when they explained the situation to the group, everyone quickly agreed it would be necessary.
He fit quite well in with the girls, and due to problems with the seating before the incident, Marlene had never sat by him before. She found Lily and Remus enjoyable companions, and they even invited her to a study group they had created in their first year and were thinking of restarting. She originally thought to decline, before realizing how badly she needed it for French, and quickly signed herself up.
French was actually the next class, and this time on her way there, Marlene walked with Mary and Lily, eventually having to separate from Mary when she went to Italian.
"Marlene, do you think Mary likes anyone?" Lily asked, as they were busy queuing up for the class. Marlene thought about it for a second, before shaking her head.
"No, I don't think so." She answered. Truthfully, she didn't know enough about Mary to make that call, but she figured Mary would have told her.
"Oh. Well, let her know Sirius Black likes her." Lily said, before flipping her red hair and walking into the class. There was a hint of resentment in her voice, giving way to a number of questions Marlene had. Does Lily like Sirius? How would Mary not know? And things along those lines. Marlene also wondered why Lily didn't tell Mary herself, but brushed it off.
Class was starting.
Out of the 3/5 days Marlene had been at school so far, the days that had involved French, Dorcas had never been late, besides the first day. Only having two days to observe, Marlene couldn't be sure, but she felt like Lily might be right about the competition. And Marlene's observation of Dorcas hadn't been coincidental, or crucial to Lily either. Something about her intrigued Marlene,maybe the way her glasses were slightly crooked above her long eyelashes, or how she carried herself with pride answering questions or talking to bullies, but seemed to sink into whatever seat she was in or wall she was next to whenever she wasn't.
Ever since the encounter with the greasy haired man, Dorcas had acted cold towards Marlene. She didn't know why, and it only made her observe her more. From Mary, she'd learned Dorcas mostly kept to herself, and from Marlene's own recordings, she had noticed Dorcas' friends were limited to about 3 people. She had yet to find the names of those people, and hesitated to ask the all-knowing Mary. She didn't want her to be suspicious.
Professor Flitwick greeted them the same as always, a small grunt and warning about behavior issues, before he started today's lesson. They were talking about family, which was quite boring. A lot of grammar rules, because of course, and the gender roles were also quite confusing. The idea that ton and ta (your), mon and ma (my), etc, had to be switched between mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers was ridiculous. Marlene's only reassurance was it was 10x more consistent than English, though the way to tell what gender nouns were was odd. It should have been something about the letter e, but where did that leave maison (house)? Because somehow that was feminine. Marlene didn't quite get it, to say the least.
No matter her quarrels about the language, Marlene still wrote down things to study later in the group with Lily and Remus. She didn't know who else would be there, if anyone, and she didn't want to have to consult a book again. Flitwick simply droned on and Marlene dutifully copied down what he said, and occasionally shared her notes with the inattentive Lily beside her.
At last, the bell rang. It made Marlene jump, but the sweet sound was music to her ears. She'd been absolutely famished all day, after spending most of breakfast fervently chatting with Lily and Remus.
Greasy grilled cheese sat on a platter at the center of the table, but Marlene scarfed it down. She wasn't entirely sure that grilled cheese was an English food, but any food in her stomach was fine with her.
Her next classes carried on as usual, as she anxiously waited for the end of the day to come. She had no classes with Remus, and only chemistry with Lily, so she took her chances then and at lunch to calm her worries about the studying. Really, she knew she was overreacting big-time, but their reassurance it would only be a few friends truly did help lessen her nerves.
By last period, which was the ever-boring English, taught by a Professor McGonagall, ended, Marlene made a beeline straight for the library, the agreed upon space. Lily had decided that their collection of dorms, nicknamed Gryffindor Hall,'s study room had been to small, so she had moved the location to the library.
Taking everything with her, Marlene had just sat down in an exhausted huff on a cushy beanbag, when the rest of what she assumed the study group consisted of. There was Remus, Lily, Emmeline, and surprisingly her scholarship twin, which is what she had taken to calling the long distance runner she recognized as the other scholarship kid. Mercifully, it was small, and they all sat comfortably around the circular table Marlene had accidentally chosen.
Occasionally, someone asked for a pen, or an extra sheet of notebook paper, but that was all the talking they did. It was glorious. Marlene actually found out the guy's name, Grant, because Lily asked him for a pen, which was nice, because she didn't have to call him the scholarship twin anymore.
At the end of the session, while Marlene felt she didn't really learn much, she was glad she had at least found out Grant's name, and that Lily was incredibly gifted in her memory, as she took no notes and breezed through every piece of homework. She's a witch, surely. Marlene figured. But by the look on Mary's face when she came in to check on her missing roommates and friends and saw her, anyone would have known she thought the opposite.