When Marlene is six, her parents fight, scream at each other in the kitchen. She pads down to Martin's room in the middle of the night and he comforts her. It doesn't matter what happens outside, because her older brother promises to keep her safe and that makes her fearless.
The first time she comes alone, she is nineteen years old and she stumbles in still holding her handbag and everything is strangely full of memory. She's still dressed in black lace and dirt, her mourning clothes muddied around the knees and earth pressed into the lines of her palm. Her brother is dead and she's already cried herself out; she fell to her knees in the shadow of one of the trees and keened wretched loss.
And Gideon had been there, his hair painfully, beautifully auburn-red against the black. His hands smoothed across the table of her back as she cried on all fours, picked her up and cradled her to his chest when her elbows buckled under the weight that seemed to be accumulating between her shoulder blades and she collapsed face-forward into the dirt.
She strips off the ruined lace and curls up in Martin's bed in his favourite Tutshill Tornadoes jersey and thinks of her brother's best friend. It's the farthest she can venture from Martin, but it's far enough.
They walk through Hogsmeade hand in hand, and every one of her female classmates whisper, who's that handsome Auror with McKinnon? And Marlene is seventeen and beautiful and envied and almost innocent and the world is only a few metres short of perfect.
Three weeks later, she comes back, fingers the bruises on her neck and hips and thighs and remembers Gideon's guilt (more potent and encompassing than his passion, and that's rather saying something).
She imagines that, when she woke, that she had found Gideon there beside her, some surreal blend of disbelief and adoration in his eyes, instead of just gone. She imagines she just lost her virginity to someone who would stick around, someone less wrapped up in nineteen and twenty-seven, or my job, or the war or (the one that goes unspoken in his guilt-soaked apology), your brother.
Marlene wishes Martin were here to be her champion and defend her honour, because he would thrash the life out of his best friend for treating his baby sister like this. She misses that kind of loyalty.
Marlene is back again in days. I'm sorry, he'd apologised, and she's never heard anyone mean words more. Let's try, he'd said, touching her face reverently and there had been only the slightest glaze of guilt in his eyes.
She waits for him in there, with painful, agonizing hope in her heart; it wears a white dress. There's love there, Marlene whispers in some compartment in her soul, hands clasped to her chest in some anxious, prayerful plea. Deeper inside, though, in a more truthful place…she's just waiting for him to disappoint her. She's already seen it in his eyes. Because there is love, but so far that's never been enough.
There was a man in the bar she ran to. She'd only run there to get out of the rain, really, too distraught to Apparate without Splinching herself. A Butterbeer in her shaking hand had been slowly downed, but when it was gone, a Firewhisky had found its way in there and Marlene was looking up in puzzlement and there was a man.
Anger and Firewhisky drove her home with him, and shame drives her back to Martin's room the next morning with more disgusting bruises and a wicked hangover.
All in all, this is possibly the worst revenge ever taken; Gideon doesn't know to care and Marlene just hurts inside, discarded again.
Her lips are bruised and she has an Order meeting and Gideon's seeing feels more like shame than vengeance. She paints them wine-red and rather likes it. The kohl around her eyes is just to finish the picture.
Marlene doesn't know quite when she had the Phoenix tattooed on her lower back. She notices it in the mirror after a shower one morning, a rising phoenix in stark red and black.
She has the strangest idea that maybe it just bubbled out of her skin, that it's something bred in her bones come out in the flesh.
After finding her best friend dead with her parents, the Firewhisky doesn't taste quite so abhorrent.
The Muggle man she pulls in a pub after the funeral…well, it doesn't matter if he's nice. The painkillers he has in his pocket are nice enough.
He has the same colour hair as Gideon. Not that she thinks about it. It's nice to run her fingers through anyway.
She stumbles home, past her absently curious parents and just collapses on Martin's bed, too tired, too high to feel shame or pain or regret.
Marlene smokes a joint in his room before the next Order meeting. She manages to keep a straight face throughout, but inside she's gone and all the terrible words from Alastor Moody's mouth, all the casualties, maimings, instances of torture…she giggles inside because it's all very unreal.
She doesn't even have to notice Gideon looking at her at all with that pathetic mix of longing and censure.
Fix.He'd wanted to fix her. Gideon had cornered her after a meeting, while she'd rummaged through her purse for a fag before slinking her way down the The Fox and Fey for a night's diverson.
Come back to me, please. His lovely, clear eyes met hers, bleary and blood-shot and smeared with black.
And maybe she might have done, but for that fuckingguilt in his eyes. It's always the same, he might even love her but in the end it's not about that atall.
Fuck off, Prewett, she'd sneered; her eyes might be cloudy, shot with red, but the deep brown could still lace themselves up with venom and barbed wire.
And she'd come home, to Martin's room. She means to cry; she laughs instead.
Three days later, she sits on the floor and diagrams in her head twelve steps to falling out of love.
She'd gone to the Order Christmas party out of obligation. Two drinks in, she's more than ready to clear out and find her diversion of the night in the nearest pub.
And then nineteen year old Sirius glides up and bums a fag and saves her the trouble of Apparating all the way to Liverpool.
It's strange: this one needs her as much as she needs him, which is to say not at all. But there's something desperate in the way he throws his virginity away on her that's sad and vulnerable.
Marlene makes Sirius utterly miserable, and he hasn't the slightest idea that women aren't supposed to do that.
She's stunned to near-sobriety. She's just bought a new bottle of Martin's cologne to spray about the room. He's been buried nearly eight years now, and all the smell of him has gone from the room, even from the clothing in his wardrobe. So Marlene tries to recreate. It's not right, of course, there was something about Martin that altered the scent a little bit, deepened and broadened the woody, slightly spicy smell.
With the first spritz into his wardrobe, she recognises it. It's all too newly familiar; her hair already smells of it because it's the same cologne Sirius wears.
She stays in his bed a little while longer than normal that night because it smells vaguely of warmth and safety and love, mixed in with the spark of life so lacking in the scent she engineers in Martin's room.
Then she remembers herself and pulls herself out of bed, abandons Sirius for the somehow-clinical, cold recreation of memory in Martin's bedroom.
And Marlene cries and the tears burn more than Firewhisky and fags.
This place has always meant safety. It's where she hid from thunderstorms, from her parents' ceaseless arguing. It meant Martin, the only person in her life to love her unselfishly, to protect her like a big brother should.
Strange that she'll die here. But there's nowhere else to go; her parents lie dead below, in the kitchen or the entrance hall or the lounge. And she's just waiting, wand in hand, to sell her life dearly.
It's the end she's been anticipating, really, and she can only pray (pray?...yes, she can't pretend she's not afraid) that she's worthy of...something beyond this.
It's not much of a duel, really, only a few volleys, (there are just too many, she tries) but the verdant, sharp green that wipes the vision from her eyes smells strangely warm and soft and safe, and she never quite hits the ground.