At some point between the ages of seventeen and twenty, they become soldiers. They take orders – they give orders, which terrifies him and thrills her. They sleep sporadically, eat infrequently, and learn to be so quiet they cannot hear each other breathe. He gets a scar on his arm, one that spirals around his bicep, like a spider’s web. She tries her best to heal it for him, because they can’t go to St Mungo’s (too many questions) but she’s never been any good with practicalities. She deals in dreams, in loving too fast and too hard. She has no time to learn how fix broken things.
She breaks her leg on one mission, and in an attempt to not cry out in pain, she bites his hand so hard she draws blood. He swears, but holds her hand regardless. They crouch (she lies, he squats) behind industrial bins, round the back of a Muggle pub, waiting for help. In the distance, he can hear James’ roars of rage as a Death Eater goes for Lily. Marlene’s blue eyes were filling with tears, and she looks dangerously pale.
“Hold on, McKinnon,” he hisses into her ear, “just hold on.”
She tries to smile, and it sort of feels like dying, her head resting on his knee and her hand in his. But they’re not going to die here, are they? They can’t die here. They’re soldiers, and they survive.
“It fucking hurts,” she groans, and he presses a kiss to her forehead. She can do it. She can do anything, mad, bad McKinnon.
Blood seeps through her jeans and drips onto the tarmac beside them. He hates the smell of it; it reminds him of a childhood of torn skin and broken glass, but he keeps it in all the same. She’s the important one here, Marlene. Star of the sea.
“It’ll be alright, I promise, I promise,” he mumbles into her ear, and there’s a wailing noise from inside the pub. Apparently, the landlady has just noticed the ruckus going on outside. “I promise,” he repeats.
He closes his eyes, and tries to ignore the cramp he’s getting in his toes. The risk of attracting Death Eater attention is too great to call for help, and he can’t for the life of him remember the charm to stop blood loss. This is why they have Healers on every team, dammit!
“Don’t,” she says suddenly, and he nearly jumps, “don’t make promises…you can’t keep…”
Fuck it, he thinks. Clearing his throat, he brushes her blonde hair off her face and lies her down so gently she barely notices. And then, quick as a flash, he’s on his feet, and he’s screaming. “OI!” he yells, “OI WE’VE GOT A MAN DOWN!”
“Woman,” she mumbles, “woman down…”
“OI!” he yells again, and then ducks to avoid a shot of white light that clearly came from foe rather than friend. There’s the sound of boots on tarmac, and Marlene’s vision blurs. She is a soldier, but right now she feels like a child. She hates it. The pain in her leg is consistent, and does not ebb and flow, but is sharp and cutting and awful.
“How bad is it?” comes a female voice, and Sirius’ reply is low and shaky. Marlene closes her eyes, because maybe that’ll stop the ache in her head for a moment.
The last thing she hears before she is engulfed by the darkness is Sirius screaming at the Death Eaters.
She goes out and gets a tattoo a week before her twenty first birthday. He goes with her, and they hold hands in the Muggle tattoo parlour. No one knows them here. No one cares about them here. And they don’t have to be soldiers here either, they can just be them. She likes it best when it’s just them.
“What do you want?” asks the nervy art student on the desk. She keeps tapping at a typewriter, and it drives Marlene mad. She explains that she wants a phoenix, rising from the ashes of the nape of her neck. She wants it there so that no matter what she wears, people will always know that can bounce back from anything.
“Like a phoenix?” the art student says, and she nods. Sirius is drawing teeny tiny circles with his thumb over her knuckles. She ignores him, and pulls her hair up so the artist, who is hovering in the doorway, can see her neck.
“So?” she asks, trying to keep her voice steady (she hates people knowing how goddamn nervous she is all the fucking time) “Can you do it?”
The tattoo artist, who has a beard and wears a checked shirt, nods and begins sketching and she almost wants to cry because she’s wanted this for ages, a permanent reminder to herself that she is invincible.
“You getting anything?” she asks Sirius, and he wrinkles his nose.
“If I ever get a tattoo, McKinnon,” he tells her, “it’ll be magic.”
“What’ll be magic?” the artist wants to know, handing Marlene the scrap bit of paper. He’s wearing Doc Martens, and it makes her smile. She can trust this bloke. She can trust him with the back of her neck, and with the needle that will colour her skin forever.
“Nothing,” she says, slightly distracted by the anticipation of what is to come, “nothing’s magic. How much will it be?”
“My treat,” Sirius jumps in quickly, and she very nearly does cry right then because he never treats her. To anything.
“First things first – is this okay?” he points to the drawing. It is okay, she thinks, it’s beautiful. The phoenix is rising indeed, smoke curling underneath it. She nods.
Sirius balances his chin on her shoulder. He’s so bony, but she doesn’t care.
“Yeah,” he mutters, “yeah it’s nice.”
It is a strange feeling, knowing that he loves her. He hasn’t said it, not those three words that bring empires to their knees, but he knows how many sugars she takes in her tea, and he reminds her to take an umbrella when it’s raining, and she knows that he loves her. And if she believed in love – which she doesn’t, how can she believe in love when she is surrounded by the broken and the dying every day? – she thinks she would love him too.
“Shall we get on with it then?” she says brightly, and he laughs his bark of a laugh and takes her hand.
Yes, if she believed in love, she would love him.
One morning in December, she lets himself into his flat, soaked in rain, and finds him kicking in his wardrobe. It was falling apart anyway, but still – it’s a pathetic sight, this beautiful boy with his foot in the door of a falling down wardrobe. He’s crying too, but she never mentions it.
“Christ, Black!” she hisses, running to him, “What are you doing?”
He lets out a sort of groan of pain, and sinks to the ground. This is when she knows for certain – and certainty is hard to come by in times like these – that he loves her. She is seeing the inside of his soul, and it terrifies her.
“It’s all fucked, Marlene,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes with his fists, “everything’s gone to shit.”
“You’re going to have to be a bit clearer than that, boy,” she says. Her heart’s in her throat and she feels dizzy. He is never normally this broken in front of her. In front of anyone.
“C’mon, Black,” she tries to laugh, but it sounds fake and uncomfortable, “it can’t be that bad!”
It feels like she is falling, like she has jumped from a great height and now she is heading for the cold, hard ground. The wind rushes past her ears and all she is really aware of is that she will, eventually, crash. Little Regulus, sweet Regulus, Regulus who Sirius loved, who Sirius loved first, before James, before Remus and Peter – before her, even.
Sirius nods. “Was. He was nineteen.”
She thinks she may be sick. He’s a boy, Regulus Black is and was and will always be a boy, and it doesn’t seem fair.
“Death Eaters?” she asks, and he nods again. Her stomach turns. It occurs to her that it could’ve so easily been Sirius. Just a few different moves – a wrong turn here, a late train there – and it could’ve been Regulus who just broke his one piece of good furniture.
She drops to her knees beside him. She doesn’t feel like a phoenix right now. She feels broken, and messy, and horribly, horribly human. And if this is what humanity is, then she doesn’t want any part of it.
“Who told you?” she croaks, and he shrugs.
They fall into silence, and Sirius’ tears eventually dry up. When he speaks again, he sounds calm, cool, collected. Like how he is normally, she thinks.
“You been to see Emmeline?” he asks, in a desperate bid to change the subject and stop his heart from breaking. She nods.
“She’s a mess. It was just her and her dad for years, I – I don’t know how I’d cope, to be honest.”
“She’ll be alright in the end,” he tries to assure her by patting her knee, but it doesn’t work. Everything is so broken, and she doesn’t know how to make it better. She used to think it was because she didn’t have time for broken things, but now she knows it’s because they frighten her. Not having control scares the shit out of her.
“She’s a survivor,” Sirius continues, and it takes Marlene a few moments before she realises that he is still talking about Emmeline.
“And what about you, Sirius?” she whispers, grabbing his hand, “what about us? Are we survivors?”
He closes his eyes for a moment. A thunderstorm rumbles above London.
“Nah, McKinnon, we’re not-” he pauses, “we’re on fire, McKinnon, that’s what we are. And we’re going to burn.”
And then he holds her in his scarred arms until the rain stops.
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