keep your promises / blackinnon
If Marlene was perfectly honest, there was more to this than what Regulus had said. After he’d come to talk to her, even though she’d just been flying for hours, she shot back up into the sky to escape into the skies and her own thoughts. It was never a fun place to be, her own head, but this was important, and the words were already ripping her to shreds, so thinking about it wouldn’t make it any worse.
She kept trying to think about Regulus’ words, and to an extent, she did—but when she tried to sort this mess out, unraveling it by going back to the start, her mind kept snagging on one thing: she had promised Sirius she would stay. And maybe he’d done his best to tell her she wasn’t welcome, and if he’d wanted her to realise she wasn’t wanted, he succeeded, but she just kept coming back to that promise, and his words in the library: one more broken promise. And the thing was, she felt ill at the thought, because as much as she didn’t know what to do about this, as terrified as she was that she was just signing up for more lashings, she could not live with herself if she didn’t try keep her promise, no matter how late.
She had been on her way to realising this promise was infringed upon, and that it was her own fault, but Regulus sped up the process with his words, especially because some were undeniable. Others she was questionable about, but she owed it to him to keep her promise, and she owed it to herself and to Sirius too, as much as it terrified her.
It was late, very late at night, or perhaps very early in the morning. She wasn’t sure. Sneaking to the Heads’ common when the portraits were around, some awake, was not easy, but she hadn’t survived seven years as a Gryffindor for nothing. She and Frank had built a friendship on this talent of hers, for Merlin’s sake.
Luckily for her, the Heads’ portrait was still awake. She received a disgruntled glare, but the door opened, and she let herself in. She didn’t know what to expect, and she was half-shaking as she walked in, but still, Marlene entered. It was dark. Very dark. But she could see the vaguest outline of a boy on the couch, and more to the point, she could feel it. It was all there in the way her heart started hammering, her lungs stopped working properly and her stomach started doing flips. She didn’t know if he wanted her there. She didn’t know if she could bear being pushed away again. But she had to do this. “I promised I’d stay,” she said quietly, her voice breaking into the darkness. She was trembling, and she had to hold herself together, to brace herself for him throwing it back at her again. “I didn’t do a very good job of keeping it.” Her voice was tight, and full of shattered glass, but there was an inkling of hope in there that she hated herself for. She didn’t know what to do, whether to cross the room or not, but she just needed him, and as much as she couldn’t bear breaking in front of him if he pushed her away again, she couldn’t stay so far right now either. Marlene took a hesitant step forward, and another, and another, until she was a metre from his couch. “I’m here to keep it now, though—and you can’t stop me,” she added fiercely, even as her heart was hammering and her chest was closing and she was beyond terrified because she was laying herself out on the line here and she didn’t have anyone to blame if it went wrong, except herself.
