It was one of those nights.
One of those nights where the whole world was held in a moment, where a night could occur and belong to the ether, where everything felt like it didn’t belong—or maybe belonged too much—where everything felt displaced, like the world was spinning off its axis and you weren’t even sure if you were meant to hold on.
( or maybe that was just the drugs. )
It was one of those nights that Marlene was a stumbling mess, a mess of alcohol and other substances in her system, things racing through her bloodstream like adrenaline, or maybe just a seventeen year old girl, fast as the wind and twice as difficult to hold onto, looking for an exit.
The Quidditch Pitch seemed like a safe place to go, or that’s what she assumed she was thinking. Either way, she’d ended up there, wandering in from where she’d been at the edge of the forest. Substances in the forest were a bad idea, generally, because you never knew what you might encounter in there, but as she stumbled onto the Quidditch Pitch, half-chugged bottle in hand, she found herself almost tripping over someone sitting on the ground—someone whom a sober Marlene might regard even more dangerous than anything in the forest, if only because of how deep he was under her skin. Marlene McKinnon knew, after all, that sometimes it was the shrapnel beneath your skin that could kill you.
As it was, though, Marlene was not sober. Marlene was very much not sober. She was drunk and high and had all sorts of things swirling through her body and, worst of all, her mind. And so, instead of leaving or being wary or keeping her distance or fucking anything at all that would have made sense to sober Marlene—because she knew how he could get, all right, she’d known him once, deeper than she knew how to deal with, and she knew the kind of person he was, the way he could smile but also the trappings his personality led to, and she knew the stories, could guess at the result of combining him and substances, she should have known better, but she was also in a state of flux and fuckery, a state of being a mess———instead of doing anything that would have been smart, she stepped forward and stumbled, close to collapsing in a fit of limbs but saving herself at the last moment, a staggering mess, but still standing.
( it feels rather apt as a metaphor for her whole year, she thinks, and swallows a bitter laugh. )
“How the fuck do you do it?” she finds herself asking, even though it doesn’t make any fucking sense, because do what? She doesn’t even know herself. All she knows is that she’s seventeen and she’s completely fucked up full of things she shouldn’t be and she’s so sick of losing and missing people that are part of her heart, whether they’re in the most heartbreaking, permanent way like Matty, or in the casually tragic and destructive way like the boy in front of her. Not that she’s meant to miss him, or let herself. Not that he’s any less betrayed by what she is now, nor her any less horrified by the person he’s been made into. But there was a boy whose heart she once crossed her hands over, like a promise, like a secret, like a forever, and he’s sitting right in front of her, just six and a half years more lost.
it was like every other night.
evan’s world tilted haphazardly on its axis, threatening to tip him off the face of the earth. he felt sick to his stomach, like gravity stopped working properly and his lungs were floating up through his throat. everything was backwards and upside down, fucked up in every way possible. and there he was, right there with it.
his lips pressed against the edge of the firewhiskey bottle, the burning liquid sliding down his throat with an all-too-familiar STING. he let out a breath that hit the air with a cloud of white and pressed the palm of one hand into the hard ground behind him. he let his head fall back and stared up at the reaching stars, pulsating as if they couldn’t get close enough to each other. he thought about that astronomy class he’d actually listened to ollivander when she talked about star deaths. there were novae, the kinds of stars that burned too bright too quick and dimmed out from exhaustion, or supernovae, where the star reaches critical mass and can’t handle it’s own gravity anymore, not big enough to create a black hole, and bursts all over everything around it. and then, there were hypernovae;; massive stars that collapse completely, wiping out everything within hundreds of light years, creating CHAOS, wreaking havoc, becoming cataclysmic. they reminded him of himself.
his head turned when he saw marlene step onto the pitch, bathed in the black night, her presence overwhelming the field ( AS IT DID WHEREVER SHE WENT ), his eyebrows furrowing. he wondered about marlene. they had grown up birds of a feather, hadn’t they? chased each other around the manors, spied on their parents, stolen cookies out of jars. they’d been thick as thieves ( and literal thieves ). there were days when he supposed he missed her. she seemed to bring a sense of calmness to their world, a sense of balance. before she was sorted into gryffindor, at least. but he’d known her when they were both young and warm, eager to learn around the world and eager to understand.
evan seemed to be the type of kid that had it all figured out. at first, when he was younger and didn’t know any better, he thought this was true. he knew what he was going to be when he got older;; just like his father. only he was going to do it better. but then, when he thought he knew all he needed to know, he was bewilderingly kept in the dark. so much, in fact, that there were times when he feared the newfound light would BURN THROUGH HIS EYES. there was so much more to it than just acting. he had to become this cold shell of a man, learn how to tell the same stories at the same parties, over and over and over until even his SKELETON would be reciting that anecdote about his third year in potions. he wondered how different things would have been for marlene. it seemed they’d ended up in the same place after all, hadn’t they?
he watched her stumble across the grass, dangerously close to toppling over completely. he could smell the alcohol on her breath from where he sat, though he supposed the same could be said for him, and let a bit of a smile overtake his lips. “do what, mckinnon?” he asked, and his voice sounded more tired than he’d anticipated, but still laced with a bit of familiar malice, too rehearsed to take away. “not make a complete fool of myself?” there was jest in his words, but he didn’t fear what might happen if it didn’t come across. he wasn’t allowed to miss her anyway, even if she was like a little sister, so what good could the connection bring him? it wasn’t as if he’d told her everything, or as if he watched her cross her hands over her heart, watched her make a promise he knew no one at the time could keep. there had always been the threat of war;; the murmurs and whispers at those god awful cocktail parties. the difference between them, though, is that marlene THRIVED on the war — she came into her own when she was fighting for a cause. but evan;; he was born with a holy battle waged in his bones. he had spent his life trying to hide the bloodshed behind his teeth. he was his own weapon, not just someone carrying one across a battlefield.
