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Mary macdonald had been born at 6 am on Valentines day, she had been born prematurely and kept in an incubator. Her dad who had been staying in England for only 10 months at the time had said that he had known she would be ok when he'd seen the half moons the fingernails had pressed into her fleshy palms.

Ever since then she’d been fighting through her life, her dad after working minimum wage jobs to fend off unemployment, he had finished his degree in film studies and taken up a job as a location production assistant in a small short film company. When she was younger her dad would create his own short films starring just him and Mary. Her six year old self had loved it, Mary and Dajuan productions was what she had called it. Friday evening would come and she would run to the nearest charity shooo and tooth fairy money would go to 60p lipglosses and on weekends she and her dad would make props so she could be a ballerina or a model or a young heiress or an American prodigy.

Now at 19 she was working through her gap year, trying to get enough money to ease her university loans, and then coming to her apartment and refining her portfolio for a course doing fashion design. She had now taken up a job as a waitress in one of the hotels where aimless middle class foreigners would come to lament about the meaningless jobs they wasted their lives on. Lily had connected her to the job through a friend of hers, Remus Lupin, who had managed to get her an interview as a waitress. Her manager, Arabella Figg, had put her in charge of bingo. Mary thought Arabella was an old bint, though she had to admit—she could down a pint of whiskey better than most. Mary believed bingo was one of the things that should've been left in the fifties alongside lobotomies, segregation and poodle skirts but alas as her father had put it, money is the music of the rich and the rest of us are just the backup band.

 Plus it had been made slightly more bearable as Remus had agreed to do Tuesdays and Fridays in exchange for convincing Arabella to let his band, "The Marauders" play every Saturday night. Mary had expected them to be a band of university drop outs still chasing that high from secondary school but she was willing to admit, albeit grudgingly, that they were pretty damn good and even she couldn't deny that. Lily claimed to know another one of them, and said they'd volunteered at the same charity shop in their teens. In her words "James Potter was an egotistical rich kid with a savior complex" which was probably true but Mary couldn't help but like him. He smiled easily which was something she didn't see often. The lead singer Sirius, Mary already knew from her previous job working at a movie theatre, he had left but they had remained close friends although they had dated for a week befor eboth  of them had decided their hearts were't in it and they made much better friends. He had a smirk and a stage presence that Mary doubted she'd forget till she was rocking in a chair at some damp stained care home. He had a yearning voice though, as if he was singing to the moon. The final was Marlene's childhood neighbour Peter Pettigrew on the keyboard who had a distant look in his eye that Mary found vaguely interesting and worn through brown boots Mary thoughh must be stitched int othe soles of his feet.

She spent most of her time serving drinks in a dress ceh had altered to make her look less like an awkward teenager and if she was especially bored of this mundanity she would flirt with the men and women that visited but she never did more than that. Nobody was worth the effort, she'd spent too much of her teens watching her dad raise a child on his own to waste her life a chance like love. It was like playing rock paper scissors, and Mary had never liked that. Perhaps if she'd had some faith in an upper power, being as devoted as Kingsley, she might have been willing to risk it. 

She had been, until her 16th birthday when she'd driven her dad's van home higher than the angel Gabriel and her dad in a fit of disappointed anger had told her that her mother Beatrice Finchley had wanted to abort her. It had been her mother's only wish, but out of a fear of smiting from Jesus himself she pushed the wretched screaming child out of her birth canal then fled moments after umbilical cord was cut. From that moment on Mary had become a devout atheist, our fear of suffering her mother's fate and pit of a petty spite that if there was a God he wasn't one worth worshiping. 

For her most recent fashion project she’d convinced Marlene to set her up with a guy she’d met in the waiting area at one of her impromptu tattoos,  Evan Rosier, who studied photography and film studies so he was probably Mary’s closest shot at a professional. 

Currently she was curled in a fetal position in the bathtub of her apartment while Lily dyed the underside and the front sections of her afro pink. She’d thought it would fit the Neon romantic theatre project she was doing and Marlene, who they were on facetime with, seemed to agree so. Lily was heavily complaining about her fingers would be dyed bright pink and she and Marlene were caught up complaining about their respective university professors. Lily was engrossed in a story about her Philosophy professor Amos Diggory who apparently seemed to consider the works of Nietzsche to be something apprehensible. Mary had zoned out once Lily had started harping on about “the death of moral authority” and was scrolling through her comments on her fashion instagram, hoping desperately tthat one of the big names in the industry would finally notice her. 

They were the usual fire emojis,sloppy compliments, comliments form Marlene so riddled with typos she couldn't read them, a message from Evan detailing some ideas for the next shoot, a sideways smiley face from Peter, a few thoughtless comments about how pretty the designs were. She stopped at a comment from “tea_stained_ballerina” ,her most consistent commenter. It read “Holy overcompensation, the pink is certainly giving neon but I’m not sure about romance. That many sequins on ciggarettes is certainly a choice, Coco Chanel is pissing herself right now” Mary smirked, for someone whose username sounded like a rejected poetry zine they certainly a shit ton to say, yet the comment stuck like the cloying scent of perfume or the feeling of the pink dye Lily had spilt down the base of her neck.

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On his 18th birthday Remus had a plan. He would wake up at 6 a.m., much earlier than usual. He would take his bass guitar, his camera, and his old paperback copy of Oliver Twist and leave them outside Lily's house. By that time it would be 6:30; he wouldn't bother ringing the doorbell because at 7:00 Lily would leave the house to go to school. At 6:30 he would walk back down Lily's driveway to the train station 10 minutes from her house, and by 7:45 he would reach St Mungo's Hospital. He would leave a large gift on the reception table after exchanging pleasantries with the blonde hospital receptionist, Charity Burbage. The gift would be for Nurse Poppy Pomfrey and it would contain his mother's old violin, a Freddie Mercury vinyl, and an envelope containing all the photos he'd taken since he'd been given a camera when he was 16. By this time it would be around 8:30, and from there he would call an Uber to not delay himself by taking the train. First and foremost he would go to the Chinese and chippy and order himself a chow mein with dirty fries, wolf it down after texting Lily a picture of his meal, and then throw it away and take the brown paper bag with him. From there he would go to his dad's flat in central London and leave the final piece of his legacy. He hadn't been sure whether to leave his father anything at all; as Lily put it, "The only thing he ever gave you can be measured in millilitres," but perhaps out of sentimentality or perhaps for his mother he had. In the same takeaway bag he would put his mother's Palestine necklace, his bass guitar strings, and a packet of cigarettes.

Then his final stop would come at 9:05 at the park bench where he had raised himself. It was positioned underneath a sickly oak tree and it was peppered in burns from cigarette butts. He would sit there and then from his back pocket he would retrieve his mother's notebook and on its well-thumbed pages he would write his final words. Finally at 9:15 he would do the 5-minute walk to the bridge behind the factory, and by 9:22 he would be dead.

On March 10th his day had gone exactly to plan, down to the minute. At 9:05 he had reached the park when he saw somebody else sitting on his bench, stealing his final moments of solitude. A man with black hair draped over his shoulders with his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. He had a black guitar resting on his lap and his fingers glided noiselessly over the strings. He looked up at Remus and smiled before gesturing to the empty half of the bench next to him. His eyes were bloodshot, but he was oddly calm, and Remus found himself walking over to sit next to him. It meant nothing, Remus reminded himself, if he died at 9:22 or 9:27. That was all he would waste on the guitar-playing stranger—five minutes exactly.

As Remus got closer he realized that the stranger was singing softly under his breath, Back to Black by Amy Winehouse. Remus sat down, his breath clouding in the cold morning air. The man didn’t look at him again, just kept singing, voice raw and cracked like a broken record. He leant his head against the back of the bench, the splinters of wood burying in his curls. His nail beds grazed the silver memorial plating of the bench. Would somebody make something for him?
“Didn’t expect company today,” the stranger turned around and smiled at him. His smile was a boyish smirk, full lips stretching over sharp canines.
“Yeah, I wasn't exactly keen on it myself.”
“But you sat? Unless I truly have lost it and you're a suspiciously good-looking hallucination.”
“That's right. I’m a sleep paralysis demon.”
“Just any sleep paralysis demon or mine especially?”
Remus graced that with an eye roll.
The stranger seemed to be amused by this answer; his lips quirked and he went back to plucking the strings of his guitar, his eyes squeezed shut, creasing his eyeliner. He was wearing a black, well-worn leather jacket, and a ripped white shirt with the words “YOU CAN’T ARREST ME I’M A ROCKSTAR” in fading capital print and black Sharpie stars over the nipples.

Remus tried to focus on the music; if this was going to be his last moment on earth then Amy Winehouse wasn't a bad end. He was slightly aware that his plan was going off-kilter, that he needed to get up right now or he wasn't going to do it.
“What’s your name? If I’m going to be an efficient demon I think I’m going to need to know that.”
“Let me give you my number and you can find out.” His phone was about to be in pieces at the bottom of a canal. His phone would be discovered in a few weeks after a lacklustre missing person’s case. His phone number wouldn’t matter.
“You’re infuriating. I think I might go be someone else’s demon; they might be nicer to me. Or at least a bit scared.” He still handed him his phone as he made to get up from the bench. The stranger typed in his number, and Remus pocketed his phone and began to walk.

1, 2, 3, 4. The bench was getting further away from him. He was counting seconds on his fingers, bending the joints backwards as he walked. 83, 84, 85, 86. He was walking past the Middle Eastern grocery store and one of the employees was leaning against the wall rolling a joint. 216, 217, 218, 219. The brutalist arts complex with neon lights disappeared behind his line of vision.

At 220 he stopped. He could see the bridge but it was mostly cut off. Police cars had jackknifed the road and there was yellow warning tape enveloping the buildings surrounding it. There was a woman he didn’t know who looked delirious with grief, legs splayed on the floor, blood-struck pupils peeking between her long nails. A middle-aged police officer was pulling a body out of the river; all Remus could see was their hands. Plain white hands, bluish and stiff.
“What happened?” he asked a portly policewoman who was taking pictures.
“Poor bugger offed himself,” she said, a Liverpool accent lacing round her tongue.

1 year later

Remus was 19 years old, working through his gap year at some fancy hotel as far away from the fucked-up part of London as it could be. This was the part of London where the adults were the quiet kind of racist and the teenagers were loud about it regardless of what skin colour they themselves were; where the people earned a decent wage but still hailed the royals; who were slowly losing their faith in God but still spared a kind glance to the preachers in the town square; where the beggars lay drunk outside Gucci stores and Sainsbury’s alike, and every now and then a doe-eyed liberal teen would think they had wandered into some metropolitan Eve’s garden before realising it was the capitalist apple she’d choked on.

His colleagues weren’t half bad at least. Mary Macdonald, who was a friend of Lily’s, was his closest friend at work, although she listened to Sabrina Carpenter a bit too much for his taste; she called him a music snob, which he didn’t entirely disagree with. There were two other waiters: Gideon Prewett—Remus probably would’ve said yes if Gideon asked Remus out, if Remus wasn’t a complete goner for someone else—and Amelia Bones, with her thick Cockney accent and box-dyed hair, who worked part-time so she could get her law degree.

Remus’ band was playing that Saturday night. They’d spent their Friday night practicing “Softcore” to boost “morale” in James’ words, before they had ambushed his boss and asked if they could play more than just covers. Remus called it a better use of his time to pine over Sirius Black while playing the bass guitar than to pine over him lying in his bed doom-scrolling. He’d met Sirius on his 18th birthday; Sirius had met him on the anniversary of Regulus’ disappearance. He’d found out about it after Peter—a concerned Peter—had let it slip and begged him not to tell Sirius. Remus had cobbled together what he could find out from a series of true-crime podcasts on Spotify before Sirius himself had told him everything that he knew about it one night when they were supposed to be at band practice.

The night had come. James had been stuck picking up Peter, so he and Sirius had managed to convince Arabella Figg using sheer willpower. That was Sirius’ incessant flirting and Remus’ incessant begging. She’d given them quite the lecture about the extra shifts he’d have to work if so much as one of the grannies started snoring in the middle, and the thought was giving him a bloody fucking headache so he tried to ignore it.

Sirius got a call. Freddie Mercury started crooning from the front pocket of his black jeans and he answered it with a smirk. Remus flicked on his headphones at full volume and idly scrolled through the philosophy essay that Lily had forwarded to him, when he turned around to see that Sirius had gone chalk white. His fingers were clutching the phone, trembling slightly, and his grey eyes were wide with shock.
“Fucking hell, are you okay?” Remus asked.
Sirius stared down at his Doc Martens before he said, “That was my brother.”

Chapter Text

When Lily Evans was six years old, she’d jumped off the top of a swing. She had been a very rational child, knowing full well she would fall—but falling was the only way she knew how to fly.She had never believed in Santa, the Easter Bunny, or any of the nonsense adults spouted; she enjoyed telling other children that they needed to call out their parents for stealing their teeth, because silence was complicity,so to her that had proved that she was simply to smart to be lied to. Her knees were slightly bloodied, and her newly brushed hair had knotted from clumps of grass that stained her face. Her wobbly baby tooth had been knocked slightly loose, but she had been grinning so hard her cheeks hurt, and there were a few ladybugs crawling over her fingers, so it hadn’t mattered to her.

Lily carried a similar attitude into the classroom, taking it personally whenever anyone in authority tried to treat her as lesser. She had heard one teacher mutter under her breath that Lily was a bitch, and she had gone running to Petunia, two years her senior, who then told their father. Connor Evans had heard Petunia’s story over a cheap gas-station can of beer and done what any half-decent parent would: he called the headmistress of Lily’s school. The teacher, who'd been absouloutely enamoured by Petunia, had been suspended for a week.

“You have no idea how selfish you are, do you?” Petunia hissed at her after their mother had laughed over it at dinner. That was when Lily had learned to fear the fall.

When she was eleven, her school friends Zephyr and Chloe had both fallen head over heels with various boys and started dating Henry and Jayden. Lily found most boys awfully boring; they had nothing to contribute to the rare conversations when they deigned to grace their girlfriends with their presence. Beyond occasional romantic gestures, she didn’t see what good they were for—she found them an intellectually unfulfilling pastime they only could provide the girls with the occasional misogynistic quip or heated discussions over football. Lily fucking hated bloody football, the only time she owuld watch it was the women's world cup and that was only for the sake of feminism.

None of Lily’s friendships lasted particularly long; most were largely one-sided, and her ego had always been slightly too high to traipse after someone like a scorned dog for more than a term. That was until she met Remus Lupin. They met at one of the scholarship-student meetings that happened every fortnight. He had been sitting in the back corner of the room, head bowed over his lap, his laptop folded underneath the desk. He looked new and had quickly discarded the learning buddy he had been assigned. Lily threw her bag over the desk, laid her blazer over the seat of the chair as he had, and sat down pointedly, ignoring the dirty look the teacher gave her. Remus gave her a bemused smirk.

They started off testing each other in the library. Remus didn’t seem thrilled by Lily’s die-hard diligence to studying, but he appeared to prefer wasting away under the gaze of Mrs. Pince rather than hiding in the staff diasbled bathrooms like he'd been doing before he met her.

By the time Lily was fifteen, Remus was the only friend she truly enjoyed spending time with. Much to her mother’s delight, she had started spending time outside the library. Daisy Evans had always claimed to love both daughters equally, and she did. If either had died, she would have mourned equally; if one was sick, she would have sent a worried text to their grandmother just as fast. However, she had never truly been able to see her husband, or herself in Lily. Sometimes she wondered if the opinionated girl with the bookcase stacked full of charity-shop books was some leftist academic’s child swapped at birth.

“The nurse was pretty effing ditzy,” she would joke occasionally to Connor over glasses of cheap boxed wine, the only thing that they could afford on a lorry driver’s wages. Daisy had worked as a hairdresser—the rather unimpressive type who gossiped with elderly women with thinning hair that still insisted on a bleached perm monthly, who's favourite past time was bitching about their ex-husbands new wives, or some TV star who clearly had fake tits, or their daughter in laws. After giving birth to Petunia (or Tina, as she’d called her when she was a newborn), she had never quite managed to return to the workplace. She preferred Lily when she was three. The age where she had the strength to be wrangling ribbons into Lily’s knotted waves and lacy stockings onto her pale kicking feet. Petunia on the other hand had been a mirror of Daisy in her youth: pursed lips, stinging jealousy, clear mascara. The girls were like two reflections of Daisy—one of what she had been, the other of what she could have been. However when she stareed at both their faces too long, and they began to blend together. Their hair smelled of apple shampoo, and their wonky-toothed smiles.

When she was fifteen, Lily started volunteering at a Marie Curie hospice charity shop, sitting with her puffer jacket splayed beneath her while scanning brooches and CDs in fading cases. There she had met James Potter, a pretentious prat who had started working there along with her. He was charming and knew it—the kind of boy who, while organizing a bookshelf, could suddenly make a couple of twelve-year-olds very interested in works of fiction. What irritated Lily wasn’t that; it was his complete lack of rationality and how easily he got away with it. Lily labored over organizing the shop within an inch of its life: arranging the books alphabetically by age group, cardigans from cheapest to costliest, shoes by colour and contrast. James came in, threw his pillarbox red rucksack behind the counter, texted his parents, and almost doubled the store’s sales by making small talk. She had to quit the charity shop when they moved house so she could attend a grammar school for her A-levels and hadn’t seen him since, though she thought about him occasionally, lying in bed in that weird contemplative way where it felt as if her soul was looking back at her.

Right now, she was lying with her knees curled to her chest, submerged in lukewarm shower water. She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there; the pads of her fingers were crinkling, and the blue writing on her palms rippled. The bathroom sink had a few red strands in it after she’d cut her hair into curtain bangs; a few had found their way onto her white tank top, lying atop her bell-bottom jeans on the closed toilet lid. Her heartbeat felt heavy in her eardrums, the water cool against her cracked lips. She washed the shampoo out of her hair and wrapped a white towel around herself.

She brushed her hair, blinking the water from her eyes. She had made the mistake of leaving her Philosophy textbook next to the bathroom sink while waiting for the water to warm up, and someone had spilled water over it; the pages were now waterlogged. Pulling on her pajamas and carrying her clothes with one hand, she made her way back to her dorm. Wendy Slinkhard, her roommate, crouched by the mini-fridge they’d placed between their beds, Red Bull in hand and laptop covered in Star Wars stickers on her lap. Their room was divided into three sections: Wendy’s covered in Star Wars posters, pottery she’d made with her girlfriend Juliette, and a trans flag over her single bed; Lily’s contained Polaroids of herself, Marlene, and Mary, a bookshelf crammed with feminist and psychology texts, various ABBA, Fleetwood Mac and Taylor Swift posters, and a moodboard of almost every feminist icon she could name, podcast equipment on her side table; Emmeline’s, who was out at Caradoc Dearborn’s house party, had chipped china trinkets, a camera lying top of her bed, TV Girl and Girl in Red records hanging on the walls, a bookshelf with ratty, tea-stained ballet shoes balanced on top , and a side table crammed with silver and navy jewelry and pill bottles.

Lily’s half-finished essays lay atop the pile of laundry, partially covered by Emmeline's grey zip-up hoodie. The room felt unnaturally small today, and she had an irrational urge to escape. She opened WhatsApp. She had messaged Petunia daily since arriving at Oxford—an inside joke, something she thought Petunia would understand, like a picture of her lunch, asking how Vernon was. All the messages had two blue ticks, like Petunia’s eyes acknowledging but uncaring. There hadn’t been a single reply. She sent a picture of her pile of laundry with a superficial complaint underneath and saw that Petunia was online. A notification from Mary popped up with a picture of a box of pink hair dye; Lily smirked and sent her message saying she was on her way.

Chapter Text

Marlene McKinnon was sitting in a lecture hall. Professor Binns was talking about the Big Bang Theory, his eyes overly bright as his chalk left marks against the blackboard. He flung his arms out with excitement as he climbed on top of his desk so that he could get a better look at the students in the back. Usually, these were the lessons she looked forward to the most. Here, she could imagine that her thoughts weren’t trapped in the walls of her mind, that she was floating outside her body, a particle in the expanse of space-time.

Right now she was watching her cat Renee through a cat monitor attempting to claw her—the claw of shame—on her head. She wasn't quite sure why she was watching; it wasn't amusing her, and if anything, it was making her slightly sad. Absent-mindedly she opened Amazon as she added peach-scented air freshener to her basket. One of the unfortunate side effects of renting a shitty apartment above a fishmonger was using a truly horrific amount of air fresheners. She switched the tab to WhatsApp, alternating between texting her mum; it was as if she could hear her mother's Scottish brogue rough against her tongue, as her mother despaired over Marlene having to arrive late to the family's Hanukkah celebration. On the other side, she was texting Dorcas Meadows, the girl who volunteered with her at the domestic abuse shelter. Dorcas was a student of Intelligence Studies and Strategic Security at King's College London; she was one of the most obnoxiously determined people Marlene had ever met. Dorcas texted Marlene several venues for a fundraising event to raise money for new bedding at the shelter- in that extremely annoying perfect grammar and spelling way of hers. Once she had used a semicolon in some ambigous text about ice cream and Marlene had changed that to her contact name.

It was a Friday night, and Marlene would have to convince her boss, Aberforth Dumbledore, to give her the night off from serving drinks at the Hogs Head. He was a softie at heart underneath his knotted beard, so she doubted he wouldn’t let her attend the course—but she’d certainly endure a fair amount of semantic lecturing as a side effect.

She left 20 minutes early through the back door, getting altogether too bored now that Binns had started repeating himself like a broken record.
“If you’re going to bullshit your way through a career, you might as well be good at it,” she thought resentfully. She scrolled through her phone, opening her folder for future tattoo ideas. She reapplied her cherry chapstick in the reflection of a motorbike mirror. She got an odd look from a girl standing next to her, and Marlene became crudely aware that, to the outside perspective, it looked as if she was checking herself out in the middle of the pavement. She wondered if this was Dorcas’ way of controlling the universe to remind her to keep her hubris in check. Marlene wasn’t sure why that was her first thought, but it seemed like something Dorcas would do.

California Gurls started playing over headphones. When she was younger, still living on the same street as James and Peter, she’d got her driving license first out of all of them; she hadn’t been shameful about rubbing that in their faces—fucking mercilessly—at every opportunity she got. James, however, the rich idiot, had been the first to get a car as a present for his GCSEs, way before he got a driving license. It had been a red convertible, and she, Peter, and James had driven in the car for hours, Peter in the backseat standing up with the roof rolled back and California Gurls and Call Me Maybe blasting atrociously loud over the speaker. Her parents absolutely hadn’t been happy about that when the neighbors had snitched to them, but having four kids was keeping them far too busy to pay too much attention to one misfit.

She watched her mum’s name flash across the screen again, this time choosing to ignore her. Marlene had little to no interest in going back to her family home, although out of a misplaced sense of duty she went anyway. It wasn’t as if Marlene didn’t miss her parents; she just wasn’t particularly keen to sit through the Tory bullshit that her uncle Joseph would definitely be spewing, or to listen to her grandmother weep with devotion over a book Marlene didn’t believe in, or to see her younger brother get in the inevitable argument with his cousins. Not to mention the amount of concealer she would waste on hiding her tattoos. The only people she truly wanted to see were her siblings, even if it was mainly to make fun of them as publicly as possible.

She pocketed her phone, the sharp tang of frying doner kebabs and hash curling through the winter air as she walked to the tube station. She skipped the song, feeling slightly too spiteful at the world to endorse teenage sentiment or bloody Katy Perry. If she timed it right, she would be able to make it to the fundraiser event without looking like a queer-coded ragdoll.

At 8:00 pm when they arrived. It was a massive charity gala where rich women wore dresses that cost more than Marlene earned in a month. Each table sponsored a different charity, most with aristocrats and British socialites who had decided that the odd philanthropic endeavor would help brighten up their Facebook account, or at least give the world something nice to say at their funeral. She took her seat next to Minerva at the Holyhead Home Charity table. Two women were conversing a polite distance from each other, one whom Marlene recognized from Dorcas’ carefully profiled list of every single person who would be there. Minerva leaned over to her, pretending to fill her champagne glass,
“On the right is Iudra Choudary, CEO of Honeydukes Chocolates, currently running a recyclable food packaging initiative with her husband. On the left, Bertha Jorkins, editor of the Telegraph.” Marlene thought the world couldn’t get drearier, and her slightly threadbare suit made her feel underdressed.

Her eyes flicked towards the door as a man who certainly didn’t belong here entered. He wore a black suit, a thin tie slung around his tattooed neck, and his shirt was fully unbuttoned, showing the barbed wire tattoo across his collarbone. His features looked as if they were made of broken glass, his hair was jet black, but a few neon green strands fell across his eyebrows. It wasn’t him, though, who the whole room gravitated towards—it was the girl with whom he had his arm linked. She had waist length senagalese twists that were done up decked out in gold, and she wore a deep form-fitting purple slip dress. God, Marlene thought, Dorcas Meadows is going to be the death of me.

Chapter Text

When Sirius was 16 years old, he had run away on March 8th. By March 9th, he had reached the Potters’ house, and on March 10th, Regulus Black went missing. On March 18th, five minutes after midnight, Barty Crouch Jr. and Evan Rosier had shown up at the Potters’ house, sure that he had taken Regulus with him and that he was somewhere in the house—that was when he’d known that Regulus was truly gone. Sirius had shown up at his mother’s house alone, despite James’ despairing pleas to take him with him, and screamed at her and felt her sharp fingernails drag down the side of his face. He had screamed at her. The door had been cracked open slightly; he could see the staircase, the spot next to the railing where Regulus had sat at the top and watched as Sirius had left. Orion Black was standing behind on the same step he’d stood on as Walburga Black had yanked on his hair and screamed, her throat hoarse. Sirius could see the police car’s reflection in his mother’s grey eyes, behind the glassy, distorted image of himself. Two police officers had come to drag his crying form from the house. When one of them had reached out a placating hand, Sirius had panicked and slapped him hard. He had spent most of March 11th in the police station but had been released with a police caution. On April 15th, the police had ruled his alibi valid; he'd been charged with a hefty fine, and his name had been cleared.

The case had been one that the media had lapped up: the youngest son of England’s richest family mysteriously missing the day after the eldest son had run away. Some thought he had run away, some thought he had killed himself, most thought Sirius had killed him.

On March 9th, two years later, Euphemia Potter had knocked on his door and pushed the chestnut-wood entrance open to see Sirius as he usually was on the anniversary of Regulus’ disappearance: a mess. His hair was a funeral veil over his face, the KISS poster on his wall was peeling off the wall, the record player was beyond use with unused vinyls stacked on top of it, and Feel Anything by Nxdia played on a low volume from his laptop, but the sound seemed to get stifled in amongst the bedsheets and pillowcase like water dripping from a clogged faucet.

“Sirius, this is the first time you’ve been in the house for a week,” she reprimanded. Sirius flinched slightly, not enough for her to notice. It wasn’t as if he’d been sleeping on the streets for a week; he was putting his uncle’s inheritance to good use, getting either high or drunk out of his mind and forgoing sleep entirely, or going to Travelodges on the side of the motorway and ordering room service if he felt worthy enough to eat. He’d taken the motorbike to every spot Regulus might be on the nights where he was sober enough to see straight.

“I’ll be moving out soon, sorry,” he replied. He knew that wasn’t what she meant. “I was visiting Mary.”

“Look, Sirius, I know this must be hard for you.” She pitied him. He could hear it in her voice.

“Living with this lack of closure must be torture,” she sighed. “Sirius, sometimes when people have been missing for such a long time, it becomes kinder on themselves to assume that—”

“You think that he’s dead.”

“It’s not wrong to hope, Sirius. Me and Fleamont just think that it might be more healthy for you to just—”

“I need to go to work, Mum.”

He was out the door before he could answer Effie’s goodbye, his guitar bungeed horizontally to the side of his motorbike. He stopped at the Diagon Café for a black coffee and a chocolate crepe. The warm air was stifling him; slowly, the idle chatter of the red-headed family next to him suddenly sounded like his father’s ring slashing through his eyebrow or his mother’s silver scissors cutting his black hair into the kitchen sink. It sounded like Regulus hurling a chess pawn at Sirius’ head.

The next time he was in that coffee shop was the morning of their third gig at Remus’ hotel. He and Remus were sat at a table, and Peter was serving them drinks with a less-than-excited look on his face—fair enough, considering the amount they were haggling over him, Remus sighing in parodied exasperation every time Peter served another table. Sirius was sure the only reason Peter hadn’t faked being sick today was to impress the daughter of the man who worked there, Sybil Trelawney. They’d just come from the place James worked and had convinced the teenage waiter to deliver notes to him in the kitchen, which had been Sirius’ idea, so Remus refused to take responsibility.

Remus’ shift had ended early so he could go and get everyone for the band ready, and Sirius didn’t work that day at the movie theatre, which had become far less exciting since Mary had left—it wasn’t half as fun to flirt with the people visiting there. They’d spent their Friday night practicing Softcore to boost “morale,” in James’ words, before they had ambushed Arabella Figg and asked if they could play more than just covers. Sirius personally thought another rehearsal was slightly unnecessary, although he’d been the one to agree to it first. At least it would be a better use of time than sitting next to James and thinking about Remus fucking Lupin. Sirius had met him on the anniversary of Regulus’ disappearance. At first, he had no intent of pulling another person into the tangle of his life, but Sirius was so very selfish, and Remus was so fucking confusing. Sirius himself had told him everything that he knew about it one night when they were supposed to be at band practice.

The night had come. James had been stuck picking up Peter, so Remus and Sirius had managed to convince Arabella Figg using sheer willpower—Sirius’ unstoppable cajoling and Remus’ unstoppable begging. She gave them quite the lecture about the extra shifts Remus would have to work if so much as one of the grannies started snoring in the middle, and the thought of which looked as if it were putting Remus in physical pain.

Sirius got a call. Freddie Mercury started crooning from the front pocket of his black jeans, and he answered it with a smirk, half-expecting it to be James with a cheery pep talk that he always reserved before a gig. The caller was unknown.

“Hello, this is Sirius Black.”

“It’s Regulus.” He sounded tired. He sounded so fucking tired. Sirius opened his mouth to reply.

“Don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything. I’m at the Radisson Hotel, London. Can you come and get me?” He didn’t say it like a question. The line went dead before Sirius could respond. Sirius didn’t know what his face was doing; he didn’t know if his fingers were still bone-white around his phone or if they had reached up to grab Remus’ shoulder.

“Fucking hell, are you okay?” Remus asked.

Sirius stared down at his Doc Martens before he said, “That was my brother.”

Chapter Text

Dorcas Meadowes – Vanilla cheesecake and a silk dress

Pandora had been the one who called to tell them that Regulus had been found. She and Barty had been at that damn charity event; she’d been trying her hardest to ignore the way Marlene had been glaring at her with nothing other than unadulterated fury in her eyes. She’d missed the first time it rang, smoothing out the crinkles in her silk dress, discussing tax policies with Cornelius Fudge, the shadow finance minister. Barty had been making conversation with Bertha Jorkins; he was abominable at small talk. Instead, he seemed to enjoy making the poor woman even more disturbed with each sentence until there were sweat streaks on her head from rubbing her temples. He had been offering her some of his vanilla cheesecake when she’d handed him the phone.

Pandora had called her from Emma’s car, Evan in the backseat; they had been driving to Sirius’ flat. Of course Regulus had called Sirius first. It made Dorcas go slightly cold. It was irrational to go to Sirius. It was really fucking stupid, actually—if CCTV footage of a missing person with his suspected murderer got leaked, she didn’t even want to know what the Black family would do to get that video. But he was his brother.

Dorcas hadn’t quite understood Regulus and his brother. At first, she’d thought nobody hated Sirius more than Regulus. Sirius’ name was like bile at the back of Regulus’ throat, coming out in every argument, souring his forked words, the bitter shadow behind his last name. She had two younger half-sisters, from her dad’s side, but she’d only met them a few times after her father had moved to Norway. Their families were vastly different. The Black family had a cult-like closeness nobody ever left. It wasn’t a family; it was poison that each member would shoot into their blood.

Dorcas’ family was loosely threaded: her mother, an economic immigrant with little relationship with their family in Somalia; her parents had divorced when she was twelve, and her dad had moved to Norway two years later for a prestigious job in an architecture firm. She’d been closer with them when she was younger. She remembered once when she spent the weekend at her dad’s and they’d taken the girls out cycling, how she’d sat in the basket swing reading Rebel Girls, and Este had collided with a cyclist, fallen on the pavement, and scraped the skin off her cheek while Lois had howled. Este hadn’t gotten up for two days after that; the people in white coats had kept saying something about her brain that Dorcas hadn’t understood. All she’d seen was Atem Meadowes, her dad, with his head in his hands, and Lois hiding in Dorcas’ stepmother’s braids so she didn’t have to see her sister on those white sheets. That was the first time she remembered true fear. This was the second.

Emma Vanity – Tattoo ink and a car horn

Naked in Manhattan was playing when Pandora got the news. That was the first thing she thought of—how much it would’ve pissed Regulus off that the news that he was alive was delivered to a glittery, sordid song about teenage lesbians. He ideally would’ve preferred a classical symphony coming to a crescendo as Pandora received the news alone, perhaps in a grand library of sorts, or among the remains of dead noblemen as she stood and delivered a soliloquy to a rapt audience. Or maybe he would’ve preferred Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing, with him emerging through the back of an illuminated room while he remained hidden in the shadows. Regulus, who was so desperate to be known but to never be seen, wouldn’t have wanted them to find out in such a disjointed way. Despite being a sworn introvert, he always had a flair for the dramatics deep down.

Emma considered this as fingers scratched half-moons into her car wheel. She slammed the car horn as a reckless driver cut across them on the motorway. There, she thought with detached, clinical satisfaction—there was his music crescendo. That was the dramaticism she owed to him after being his family for so many years.

Her black leather bomber jacket was wet around her wrists with spilled tattoo ink. Barty had left early that day, so it was just Pandora in the shop with her. Her back was cramping badly from bending over to tattoo a dragon down Mundungus Filch’s spine. She’d been laughing in raucous, tear-jerking bursts over his abominable impressions of various politicians, yet her hands didn’t shake. In her godforsaken life, if she’d been blessed with one thing, it had been steady hands—long fingers that used to be gnawed from sharp canines and salty tears, that had once been clutched in prayer around a final glass shard of hope that she might someday find salvation, now calloused from the tattoo gun.

She’d lost all faith after the third day sleeping under a bridge to hide from her parents. She and Regulus had resented each other at first—Emma, who had gained nothing and lost everything, being the battering ram of the patriarchy, and she hadn’t had much sympathy for the perfect son. Regulus hadn’t had much sympathy for the girl who got out. Now she was pretty sure she would kill for him to get out as well, although from the sound of it, he’d done that on his own. She just hoped it hadn’t cost him as much as it had her.

Pandora Rosier – Septum piercing and sign language

Pandora Rosier had just pierced a woman’s septum. The woman had been so excited to go and show her fifteen-year-old brother when she went home for his birthday, waving her hands around as she spoke. Pandora had laughed at her enthusiasm as she grabbed the needle, talking about her brother’s reaction to her bridge piercing. Her smile had been a lie, Panodra had been thinking about that fifteen year old boy about how that was the age Regulus was when he went missing.

Dorcas thought he was dead. Emma, who was the most outspoken out of all of them, seemed to go rigid at the thought of that. It didn’t scare Pandora in the slightest. She wasn’t naïve; she just knew it wasn’t true. Regulus would’ve sent a sign if he was dead. The wind would’ve screamed through her ears, the sea would have broken with sobs against the cliffs, the salt in her tears would’ve stung against her cheeks.

Missing Regulus was less like a knife to her spinal cord and more like the phantom pain that a fairy would feel if its wings were severed—like shards in her diaphragm every time she took a breath. Her ringtone was her mother’s voice singing a lullaby in her cracked voice in Swahili; most thought her mum was dead when they heard that. She wasn’t dead or close to Pandora—Pandora just missed the way her mother had spoken to her while she was young. They’d grown apart after Pandora had lost her hearing, and her mother’s voice hadn’t sounded the same through the tinny sound of her cochlear implant.

Regulus had been her first friend after Evan. He knew sign language after him, and Sirius had become fluent in it so they could speak in their house. She and Regulus had first met at one of the Black family galas; her aunt had married into the Black family, much to their grandparents’ delight. It had been complete and utter chaos. Pandora had come in and immediately become fascinated by their lethargic bloodhound, Kreacher; he had the aroma of misfortune to him. The night had ended with Sirius emptying a juice bottle over Evan’s head after Evan had stolen Regulus’ teddy. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time after that, until they started Hallows Boys Boarding School together.

When he’d gone missing, Pandora had assumed that Sirius had taken him. She had seen the pleading look in Sirius’ grey eyes whenever he talked to Regulus about leaving. It didn’t matter how private they thought their conversations were; their carefully curated museum frames of apathy had little effect on her.

It was Sirius who called her.

“Hi, it’s Sirius. I’m Reg— I’m Regulus’ brother.”
“I know.”
“He is— he said— fuck, Regulus, just take the damn phone.”
“Regulus? What the fuck—Regulus, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Pandora, that is usually the goal accomplished by screaming into one’s ear,” he snapped; the harshness of his words was strangled.
“Holy—”
“I’m at Sirius and James’ place right now. Can you come over with everybody else? Hazarding a guess that you guys don’t need an address.”
“No, Dorcas—we’ll be there.”
“I know.”