kiss your knuckles before you punch me in the face | lucius
date: for anyone trying to keep up, this is set the day after say something (rodmarls confrontation thread) and this is an sos (blackinnon thread immediately after rodmarls), which sets it around the first few days of february.
There were no words for how much Marlene felt like her world was ending, again.
Sirius had helped. Sirius had reminded her how to breathe. Sirius had kept her from breaking into something utterly irreparable last night—but holding her together wasn’t the same as fixing her. She was suspended in the act of falling apart, and she didn’t know whether she was going to make it back or not. She didn’t know anything. She was numb—a mess of emotions that were too big to know how to feel, the image of Rod cracking on the floor in endless replay, the feeling of her heart stuttering then breaking then shutting down constantly thrumming through her. There was too much for her, and she didn’t know what to do. She was frozen.
Marlene didn’t know where she was. She didn’t even know who she had been with beforehand, if she’d even been with anybody, or where. All she knew was that there was a languid tone hitting her ears, so close to her, cutting through the unintelligible noises of everyone else, and it was achingly familiar. It reminded her of a night sprinkled with alcohol and the stars of the last night of the year, of nostalgia and memories and an uncharacteristically bittersweet, fond smile from a boy she had known once, had laughed with once, had loved once. (She thought it was a past tense—she needed it to be a past tense, or else how could she live with herself?) It reminded her of being seven years old and rolling her eyes in a garden not fancy enough for his tastes—of being nine and critiquing flying fields with him. It reminded her of how he was the very best friend of a boy whose name she couldn’t even bear to think—of how he’d have been with him, how he’d have been there. She knew it in her bones. Marlene wanted to throw up. Marlene wanted to scream. Marlene wanted to punch him. There was nausea and betrayal and devastation heady enough to choke on, but overwhelming it all was this steady fury, mounting higher, sharpened and more acidic for the sting of betrayal that accompanied it.
She didn’t think. She just moved. She didn’t think there was anyone around—or at least, nobody important. There were younger students scattered around, she thought, and there were whispers in her ears as people moved out of her way when she turned to face him, storm that she was. She didn’t care. Let them talk.
Marlene didn’t know what she was going to say, but she thought she’d have something. There was so much rage and pain in her, she thought some of it would spill into words, even if she couldn’t actualise them right at that moment. But that wasn’t what happened.
All she could see was his face, smug and supercilious and too fucking familiar and, most importantly, not looking at her, not exactly, not yet. And before she knew it, Marlene’s hand was clenching into a fist — she was swinging back — barrelling forward — and with an almighty CRACK, the sound of skin and bone on skin and bone, of furious knuckle against aristocratic bone structure, Marlene’s fist connected with Lucius’ face in a ferocious and altogether unexpected punch. Even as he staggered, she found herself shoving at him once more, gripped with a fury she could not contain. Part of her was incredibly satisfied with the idea that he was going to have a horrendous bruise, and probably a broken nose and fucked up cheek, but most of her was shaking—rattled by what she’d done, but rattled by what he’d done too.
She was closing her stinging fist again, pulling back slightly to punch again, but now her words were working, now that she was sickened and desperate and raw and on the verge of breaking down something fierce. “How could you?” she demanded, her voice more a cry than a question. “You—you were there,” she hissed, almost daring him to deny it, except he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t—at least, she didn’t think to her. She thought she would be all the more furious if he tried, but she wasn’t worth lying to. She knew the only thing beating out the nausea was the adrenaline—knew that Lucius was probably the only one she could actually bear to approach, because something about it felt less like betrayal than Rod and Amycus, because he hadn’t been lying to her face for six months—but it still felt like betrayal because they had been friends, because Lucius had known Matthew, because Lucius had known the kid he was and still... she couldn’t think about that, so she focused on her anger. Anger, because it didn’t matter that they hadn’t meant to get Matty, because they’d meant to go to someone’s house and kill them anyway and that made her so furious, she wanted to throw up—but anger as well, because they had gone there, and even if they hadn’t meant to, her brother was dead.
