Mourning Bride and Mulberry
Marlene McKinnon is a study in self-destruction, a fury of anger and disappointment. Gideon Prewett has loved nothing in his life like he loves this burgundy ruin in her haze of cigarette smoke.
They bury her two weeks shy of her twenty-eighth birthday and she doesn't look herself; stripped of the mulberry-red lipstick she loved, the smoky shadow on her eyes, dressed in soft white robes, she looks eighteen again, like the child Gideon never should have loved.
The scent of the flowers, lilies and mourning bride and anemone, threads the air. It's only in death that Marlene doesn't smell of ash.
Sirius thinks she should be buried in her own clothes, made up as she would've liked. He and Gideon 'discuss' this for a short time before Gideon ends the argument with a hook to his cousin's jaw (it felt a little bit funny punching Black; Lucretia Prewett has the same Black looks, and it felt to Gideon a little too much like punching his mother). Maybe it's not fair; he hasn't much of a claim on Marlene anymore and the Black boy seems to have loved her (in his own selfish way) but then, Gideon has never, ever been fair. Noble, never fair.
Marlene screamed at him, years ago as he broke her, you're not being fair, Gideon.
That's the world, Marlene, he'd replied, patient and gentle as always. She was too young to understand, nineteen years old and head-over-heels in love with him, and he was old enough to know better, at twenty-seven, to know that she was off-limits, too young and shining and alive for Gideon (five years as an Auror in these times is enough to make him unfit for anyone).
That he is unfit for her favour doesn't stop him from loving her desperately. He is just noble enough to know it, noble enough to walk away. Maybe he is just a coward. Fabian shakes his head at his elder brother, unable to understand, and puts a ring on Dorie Meadowes' finger. Fabian would never call him coward, but Gideon hears it anyway.
Marlene has the persistence of youth, showing up at his doorstep in the middle of the night, throwing away her dignity, pleading, please, Gideon, I love you.
He loves her too much to relent.
Gradually, she stops. Dignity surrendered, she builds herself back up on flimsy foundations. He sees her occasionally, on Order business, but mostly he hears through the gossip (there's suddenly a lot of it about her). She quits her job as a legal clerk for Gringotts, transferring over into the Curse Breaker training program. She picks up smoking, drinking, and (Poppy Pomfrey whispers to him, aghast) Muggle drugs.
He thinks it's to punish him. That all her self-destruction is some great show, look how badly you've broken me.
Marlene is still a child, for all her vices and 'adult' ways; she plasters her face in cosmetics and pretends she doesn't care at all how he's hurt her, pretends she doesn't see him at all but for the momentary, shadowed glances when she knows he's looking, when she knows he's weak with wanting to fix her (because that's what he does; he fixes broomsticks, he fixes the world, Gideon fixes.)
Maybe that's all it was, at first, a childish plea for attention. But then the war steals her away from behind her mask, rips out the fragile props of the broken child she's hiding, lets her cave in on herself ever-so-silently behind her din of playacting, and fills in the shell with the aftermath of a hundred deaths, a hundred ugly scenes of hate.
And maybe that's when Marlene stops choking on those cigarettes, starts to crave the burn of alcohol down her throat, the few stolen moments of drugged serenity, of sound sleep, of temporal happiness, false as it is. And maybe that's when she stops loving Gideon.
She's strong enough, Gideon lies to himself, watching her fight (so competently, so elegantly, like she was born to it), listening to her obsidian-edged laughter as it slices above the roar of the battle to reach his ears (it's the absence of that terrifying laughter that truly scares him; it's how he knows she still has breath in her body). He pretends not to understand (or perhaps he truly doesn't understand) that, for some, such mad bravery isn't strength at all.
War breeds fragility more often than strength in its children; Marlene is a sapling in a hurricane, bending this way and that in a mad frenzy, too frail to do anything but bow to the wind. One day, she will snap and fall away to kindling on the forest floor.
He hurts to see her. She hurts him right back. (Stupid, noble) Gideon nearly kills Sirius when Marlene answers his cousin's door in the early hours of morning, her dark makeup smeared around her eye sockets like ghoulish black bruises, her deep dark hair a tangle, with bite marks all down her neck.
Marlene's still strung out enough on whatever it is she's taking to laugh vaguely, sighing out for Sirius as she strides in languid, free-formed movements back to the bedroom in a haze of smoke and ash.
Why don't you stop her doing that? Gideon manages to ask his cousin as unassumingly as he can manage, once all the business matters are settled.
Sirius' shrug is careless as he takes another drag on his cigarette (they're Marlene's, Gideon notices, Benson & Hedges, not Sirius' usual Marlboros). I'm not her mum, he says, dismissal written across his handsome face. She could be doing worse things. (Gideon likes his cousin well enough, but the man is Blacker when James Potter isn't around to stir up the sediment.)
When Sirius goes into the bedroom to retrieve the book Gideon came by to pick up, he stops by the bedside and kisses Marlene (curled neatly on her side, her hair a blackish whorl on the pillow) on the forehead with a strange, fond smile while Gideon watches from the door.
There's a slight mumble, a quick flutter of her eyelashes, the tiniest quirk of a sleepy smile. Gideon doesn't know what she said, but it sounded a little like 'I love you, Sirius' and he reels. (Marlene didn't say anything of the sort; Sirius will admit I might have at her grave, long days after she is buried, and that will be the most ever said about love between the two.)
And the next time he sees her, she is not asleep, not breathing in his bed (curled neatly on her side, her hair a blackish whorl on Gideon's pillow). Her mad, musical laughter is forever silenced and Gideon watches Sirius vacillate between black-smoldering anger (it's how Sirius paints his grief) jealousy (Marlene was hismore than she was anyone else's, why didn't they leave her in his bed?) and disgust (with himself; who the fuck gets jealous over a woman's body left by sick murderers in another man's bed? He isn't supposed to care that much.)
And so (Gideon thinks) ends the tale of the proud, noble, foolish Prewett and the innocent girl he broke. (In truth, the war broke Marlene, and she broke herself out of mulish pride and the remains of a romantic heart, but Gideon is too foolishly noble to see, to understand.)
Gideon buries Marlene as the girl he fell in love with (in white robes and peach-coloured blush), not the ruin he made of her (the war made of her, she made of herself), not the mess of sorrow and pride and addiction that Sirius loved (maybe). He buries his nobility with her, as well (he buries his fear).
The only thing he regrets, a few months later in a back-alley of Newcastle with Death (Eaters) circling round him, is that Fabian is standing next to him and Dorie Meadowes will cry.
Damn. I know I tend to write dark, but I've shocked myself with this piece. I just always seem to see really light, idealized characterizations of the First Order and I kind of wanted to convey that some of these people, after years of fighting a war that they were losing, were going to be terrifically fucked up. I think the First Order members are so very interesting because they fought so hard knowing they probably weren't going to get a happily ever after, but were they going to die trying.
Also, I'm a bit obsessive with the meanings of flowers; 'Mourning Bride' is a flower representing 'unfortunate attachment' while mulberry signifies "I shall not survive you". Anemone implies forsaken love, and lilies are traditional funeral flowers. So, me being ridiculously dorky, in short!
Strangely, I started writing this and found out only halfway through that Gideon Prewett (as well as Fabian and Molly, as children of Lucretia Black-Prewett and Ignatius Prewett) was Sirius Black's first cousin on his father's side. Huh. I've looked over the Black family tree plenty of times and that never actually clicked for me!