twin disasters / marlene & evan.
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.
