Chapter Text
Lily had been her best friend, once.
Mary had clung to her like a lifeline on those scary first few weeks at Hogwarts. They had been natural allies; Lily was the only other Muggleborn student amidst the gaggle of confident, loud, boisterous eleven-years-old who boasted knowledge and powers Mary could only hope to pretend to one day.
Only, Lily had never been quite as scared and clueless and lonely as Mary was. She already knew so much about the wizarding world, and she had a friend already, a sullen-looking boy who belonged in Slytherin. He didn’t seem like the nicest person to Mary, but a friend was a friend, and Mary had none.
Still, Lily and she had shared the same awe, the same fears, the same discouragement sometimes at being surrounded by people who had a decade-long head-start on them. They had responded with the same eagerness, the same studiousness, the same willingness to prove their worth.
But Mary was fifteen now. You were too old at fifteen to stare at magic with the same starry eyes as a kid contemplating the existence of Santa Claus. She was growing up, shedding her baby fat and also, it seemed, that innate talent of children’s to see the world through rose tinted glasses.
Or maybe it was the magical world itself that had lost its lustre along the way. Mary had survival etched in her DNA, coursing through her veins and through her family’s history; she was too smart to ignore the meaning of the whispers that followed her in the corridors, of the increasing ‘discipline incidents’ that warranted cautionary speeches from the Headmaster and rallying songs from the Sorting Hat, of the political debates and incidents that happened in the real world and that reached Hogwarts in the form of Daily Prophet articles that slowly but surely made their way to the front page, in bigger and bigger prints as the years wore on.
Lily seemed determined not to see it, at least not to the extent Mary did. As for the others… They were smart too, and they only ever meant well. But they were Pure-Bloods, and they believed their world to be too good to fall into the wrong hands. Not all Purebloods, they probably thought, confidently, while looking in the mirror every morning. Not every House. Not every family.
Mary knew that kind of talk. Not all white people, her father insisted sometimes. And sometimes: Not all men. Not all cops. Not all doctors. Not all teachers. Well, perhaps it was not all of them, but it was certainly enough to make her distrust most of them.
Only Remus, who was a Half-Blood and not very well-off and also something else that Mary hadn’t found out yet, seemed as worried as she was. He got the Prophet every day, and they sometimes exchanged wary looks over the breakfast table while their oblivious friends chatted away.
But James and Sirius and Marlene and Peter would have never understood, even if she spent hours explaining. So she saved her breath, got leaflets for both Muggle and wizarding jobs and higher education, and lost sleep over the choices she would have to make in the near future.
She supposed Lily chose survival too, albeit in a different way.
While Mary spent the summer and some of her weekends studying for her O-levels, Lily was made Prefect and enrolled in a four-week Potioneering internship program.
While Mary joined the Duelling club and made sure the Purebloods knew she could take care of herself, Lily finally accepted an invitation to the Slug Club and started networking.
While Mary became increasingly wary of Dumbledore’s twinkling eyes and the Ministry’s useless pamphlets, Lily became the poster girl for Muggleborn assimilation. The brightest witch of her age, a brilliant future ahead of her, the living counter-argument to the filth that Pureblood supremacists hurled at them in the Wizenmagot.
And Mary understood. She really did. It was smart.
She couldn’t help but think it was naive as well.
But what she couldn’t understand, what she could never forgive, was that Lily remained friends with Severus.
There was a fight of epic proportions, not long before Christmas break in fifth year. Lily and Mary, standing at opposite ends of their dorm, screaming hateful and hurtful things at each other, with Marlene between them wringing her hands and making vain attempts at de-escalating. Lily’s red hair was standing on her head and prickling with static, and Mary was vaguely aware that the teacups on the shelf behind her had all shattered as she started screaming.
They did not exchange one word after that.
Marlene had hoped that things would get better with time and distance, and that when class resumed in January all would be forgotten.
Nothing was.
Marlene stopped trying to patch things up some time before Easter break.
She stood firmly in the middle of her two friends, refusing to take either side, and split her time with a scrupulous evenness that must have taken quite the toll on her, though she never said it. Perhaps that was why fifth year coincided with the moment she started throwing herself body and soul into Quidditch. Although she looked quite wary every time she left to go to practice, as if she was never quite sure she would find the dorm still standing and her two dormmates still alive when she came back.
~*~
Spring was finally upon Hogwarts, and the students flocked to the grounds to sprawl on the grass and soak up whatever they could of the elusive Scottish sun.
Mary had ignored Marlene’s attempts at coaxing her outside and elicited to stay in the dorm instead. Having it for herself was a breather; she was growing tired of the library, and empty classrooms and corridors were not as safe as they once had been. Besides, she had always liked her own company.
And if she was growing a bit tired of herself too, and a bit lonely, she had no intention of admitting it – not to herself, not to Marlene, and certainly not to Lily.
Lily and Marlene came back earlier than she expected, and she braced herself when she heard their footsteps stomping up the stairs. Lily burst in, red-eyed and blotchy-cheeked and miserable-looking, and stopped in her tracks when she saw Mary sitting at her desk. She had obviously not counted on her presence.
“What happened?” Mary blurted out, stunned into temporarily forgetting that she hated Lily now.
Lily wiped at her eyes quickly. “I guess you were right about Severus,” she said, stiff and strained.
She looked like the words burnt her mouth and broke her heart.
Mary could have been the bigger person then. Could have offered forgiveness and friendship and a shoulder to cry on.
But she was tired of being the bigger person. Tired of being kind, and polite, and non-threatening; tired of conforming to unattainable expectations, only to get tolerance or whatever scraps of respect she would be deigned worthy of; tired of playing nice.
“Took you long enough,” she replied coldly. “I hope that arsehole was worth defending his bullshit for a whole five years.”
Lily looked like she might cry again. Instead she turned around and climbed into her bed, pulling the curtains shut with unnecessary force.
Behind her, Marlene looked sad and tired and older than her fifteen years.
“Thanks a lot, Mary. That’s exactly what she needed right now,” she muttered reproachfully.
Mary merely shrugged. Curiosity – it had to be curiosity, it couldn’t well be concern, because she had decided months ago that Lily’s life was none of her concern anymore – got the better of her eventually.
“What happened?”
Marlene sagged on Mary’s bed. She eyed Lily’s closed curtains warily before replying in a half-voice: “We were by the lake, and Snape and Sirius and James were at it – you know how they get. Lily saw James hex Snape and went to defend him, and, well –” she paused to wince at the memory – “He said – Snape said, I mean – that he didn’t need her help and he called her a – a – you know. The M word.”
Mary felt cold all over. No matter how angry she’d been at Lily, no matter how naive she had thought her, there had been a small part of her that had hoped that maybe, just maybe, Lily could be right. That if you conformed, and exceeded expectations, and subverted prejudice, you might be rewarded for it. That you might be treated, at the very least, like one of the good ones. She should have known better – they both should have known better. Nothing would ever be good enough for people like them.
“Well, that’s hardly the first time he uses that word, is it,” she said, purposefully loudly. “So what, now that she’s the one he’s targeting it’s suddenly not okay anymore?”
“You know it’s not like that,” Marlene said heatedly.
Mary shrugged. “I know what I see.”
Marlene sighed and got up. She threw her one last, sad look that Mary did her best to ignore, then she carefully padded to Lily’s bed. As she pulled the curtains open, just enough to slither in, Mary thought she heard a sob. Then the curtains closed, the muffling charm slid back in place, and Mary was as good as alone with her thoughts.
~*~
The end of term dragged on.
A cloud hung over the Gryffindor fifth years that seemed to have very little to do with the last of their O.W.Ls. Mary and Lily were both draped in cagey silence, Marlene buried herself in last-minute studying, and an unprecedented chasm separated Sirius from the other three Marauders. James refused to explain how he had gotten his arm injured, Remus looked like he would rather die than acknowledge Sirius’s existence, and Peter wrung his hands nervously but inevitably ended up trailing after James, and therefore after Remus.
Saying that the end of term celebrations were subdued would have been a dire understatement.
The train ride was silent and painfully slow, all of them split up into mismatched groups that did not interact with each other. Mary thought the anxious knot in her stomach would slowly dissolve as the train brought her closer to her family and the Muggle world; instead it only grew tighter.
On the platform she caught a glimpse of Lily, breathing deeply and erasing all emotion from her face before breaking into a bright grin that did not quite reach her eyes but that might be enough to fool her family, waiting for her on the other side of the tracks.
She saw James calling after her, uttering a few nervous words that were rewarded with a glare and a cold shoulder. He tripped over his own trunk, nearly fell over, and stared forlornly after Lily as she hugged her parents and gave her sister an awkward little wave.
For some reason, Mary felt a deep kinship with James as they both watched Lily walk away for the summer.
~*~
What had seemed like half a good idea at best, born out of boredom and guilt and loneliness more than real conviction, now appeared to be the worst idea Mary had ever had.
The train ride had taken forever, Mary’s cotton shirt was sticking to her damp and unbearably hot skin, and she didn’t even know if Lily was home, or how to get there in the first place – the address she had once scribbled on a piece of parchment did not come with a comprehensive map, and Mary was not an owl.
But she had made it this far, and there was no sense in turning back now. Besides, the next train wasn’t for another two hours.
The unfamiliar streets all looked the same, row upon row of prim and proper houses sitting on burning asphalt, a veritable maze of suburban boredom. She stopped to ask her way twice. The first person, a man in his fourties, eyed her up and down appreciatively and offered to walk her to her destination; she had to hop in a providential bus to shake him off. The second person, a sweet old lady who reminded Mary of her paternal grandmother, clutched at her purse and looked wildly around her as if looking for the nearest police box.
Perhaps through sheer dumb luck, or perhaps because there could only be so many streets in the small town of Cokeworth, she eventually stumbled upon the right one.
She shielded her eyes against the rising sun to squint at house number plaques, and gave a start as she approached Lily’s house.
Someone had beaten her to it.
She almost turned around right there and then. Here she was with an olive branch, because she thought Lily must be as sad and lonely as she had been lately and might need a friend – well, it turned out she did have a friend.
What stopped her was the look on Severus’s face: equal parts longing, uncertainty and guilt. It was not so far removed from what her own face must look like, she thought, and was immediately horrified by the comparison. Still, that was certainly not the look of someone who expected a warm welcome.
Mary ducked behind a dusty car, cursing herself for leaving her wand at home. She wouldn’t have been allowed to use it anyway, but it might have made her feel safer all the same.
The metal frame of the car radiated heat, and she was very careful not to touch it as she peeked from behind the tyre to watch Severus knock at the door. It swung on its hinges but Mary couldn’t make out who had opened it; the high-pitched voice didn’t sound like Lily’s. The door was eventually slammed in Severus’s face, and she instinctively reached for her non-existent wand as she saw his hand dart to the pocket of his too-short Muggle pants.
He, too, was under the Trace and forbidden from using magic outside of Hogwarts. He left his wand where it was, opting instead to kick a stone at a plastic garden gnome before turning around.
Mary crouched behind the car again and surveyed him warily as he walked down the street. He didn’t look as much of a threat here, standing in out-of-fashion and unseasonable Muggle clothes, as he did at Hogwarts with that nasty way he had of walking so his robes always billowed after him ominously. Still, Mary knew better than to underestimate him. She waited a good ten minutes before she was certain he was not coming back.
Then she took a deep breath, walked up the short gravel path, and stared at the door that had so unceremoniously refused entrance to Severus only moments before. When it came down to it, Mary was a woman of action, and she did not leave herself enough time to get cold feet before she rang the doorbell.
The door was answered by a thin-mouthed, sour-looking blonde woman who might be two or three years older than Mary. Petunia, her brain supplied while the woman gave her a disdainful once-over.
“And who are you?” Petunia asked, in a tone that could not possibly be construed as polite.
“I’m a friend of Lily’s. May I see her?” Mary ventured with a polite smile.
“Not a friend from school, surely?”
“Yes?”
What little hospitality Petunia was capable of drained away from her face immediately. She turned around and left Mary standing on the doorstep, but not before turning her sour face to the hallway behind her and yelling “LILY! Another of your freak friends is here!”
There were footsteps, and muffled but heated bickering, and Lily appeared in the doorway. She looked Muggle-like in her short denim dungarees and floral tee-shirt, and the irritated scowl she was wearing faded into dumbfounded shock as she saw Mary, who was still standing awkwardly on the front step.
“Hey,” Mary said tentatively.
“Hey.”
“How’s you summer so far?”
Lily laughed mirthlessly. “Really shitty. Yours?”
Mary chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Haven’t decided yet.”
Lily raked her hand through a mass of tangled hair. “What are you doing here, Mary?”
“Can we talk?”
Lily glanced above her shoulder warily. In a room down the hallway, Petunia could be heard talking shrilly. There was no answering voice, and Mary realised she must be on the phone.
Lily slipped on a pair of battered leather sandals and stepped out, closing the door behind her. “I’d invite you in,” she said almost apologetically, “but…”
She trailed off and waved a hand behind her, in a gesture that encompassed Petunia, her house, and possibly her entire life. Mary nodded wordlessly and followed as Lily started down the street – in the opposite direction Severus had gone, she noticed with relief.
They walked in silence and covert glances until they reached a poor excuse for a park. The patch of grass had been burnt yellow and brittle by the July sun, and a meagre tree did its inadequate best to provide shade for the single, heavily graffitied bench. Lily surprised her by walking right past the bench and heading to the children’s playground instead. She flopped down on one of the rusty swings, and Mary followed suit. They sat side by side; Mary scuffed her shoe against the poured rubber ground, swinging slightly back and forth for want of a better thing to do.
“I’m sorry,” Lily said suddenly, and Mary looked at her properly for the first time. Her cheeks were sunburnt and more heavily freckled than usual, and there were specks of light blue paint on her dungarees and in her hair. “I should have listened to you years ago. I’ve been stupid.”
“Yes, well,” was all Mary found to say. She wondered if she should mention that she had seen Severus be turned down at the door. Lily might think she was spying on her. (She hadn’t been spying. Not really. She’d been curious, that was all.)
Lily looked away. “Have you ever felt like you don’t belong anywhere?” she asked, her voice small.
Mary stared at her incredulously. “All the time.” And then, very quickly: “You know my Dad’s white?”
Lily looked up curiously. “You never told me that.”
“Never came up,” Mary said, then changed her mind. She’d decided to go about this by telling the truth, so she might as well tell them all. Lily was in for a ride, but if she was still the person Mary hoped her to be, she would understand. “Actually, I didn’t really want to say. It’s just another shitty thing about my life, you know?”
Lily frowned, puzzled. “What’s shitty about that?”
“Because he’s my dad, but there are things about my life he doesn’t understand. He could never wash or do my hair properly, and he didn’t understand why my mum wouldn’t let the ladies at the daycare do it either. He doesn’t understand why me and my brother don’t like to go to the fancier shops, because the people there don’t look at him the way they look at us. And my cousins on his side don’t understand either. I love them, but there are things about me that they’ll never understand, and not just because of the magic, and it’s exhausting, you know? It’s like I have to pretend or lie all the time. And it’s the same thing with my cousins on my mum’s side. Sometimes I feel like I’m too white for them, and too black for the others, and I don’t know half the things a Muggle girl my age should know, and then I go to Hogwarts and after five years there are still some things I realise everyone assumes I know but no one ever bothered to teach me, so how am I supposed to learn them?”
“I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s shitty,” Lily said.
Mary snorted. “Yeah. Anyway, I figured if anyone could understand, at least a little bit, it would be you, because…”
“Muggleborn,” Lily supplied.
“Yeah.”
Mary took a deep breath. This was what she had been preparing herself for. Because she wanted to get a clean slate, except there was more on the slate than Lily had ever known, and Mary was about to shove her face in it.
“I was so happy when we were Sorted in the same House,” she said softly. “I mean, I was happy about Marlene too, but she was so intimidating, you know? She knew everything about all the different houses and she was already friends with James and Peter…”
“She already knew how to play Quidditch,” Lily recalled.
“Mmh. I couldn’t even get my broomstick to take off until the third lesson.”
“And she had that fancy new cauldron, and ours were second-hand and not the right kind of pewter because the rules had just changed,” Lily groaned.
“But you were still the best at Potions,” Mary pointed out. Her smile was fleeting. “I thought we would stick together, you and me. And we did, but you were with Severus more than half the time, and you were always trying to show that you knew more than me about Hogwarts and about magic and stuff and… I don’t know, I never told you but I really resented you for it the first two years.”
Lily swallowed harshly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I never realised – I didn’t mean to – I just felt out of my depth all the time, you know? And I just wanted to prove that I belonged.”
“I know. I get that.”
“I shouldn’t have made it a competition.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.”
Lily nodded. Her fingers were clutched tightly around the chain holding the swing. “I thought that’s how he felt, too.”
“Who? Snape?”
“Yes. Because he… I’m not trying to excuse him, okay?” Lily said very quickly. “But his home life was shitty, and he never felt like he belonged here. And I had all these weird things happening to me, and Petunia calling me a freak and telling me I didn’t belong with normal people, and Sev, he… He saw it for what it was, and he told me all about the magical world, and how we belonged there. And I was so sure we would be sorted in the same House, but then he was sorted in Slytherin and of course he was going to make friends there, same as I was going to make friends in Gryffindor. And I didn’t like his friends, but I thought maybe he was just as torn as I was. Maybe he was just trying to belong in his House, and if I stayed close to him, and helped him see things my way, he’d come back to me eventually. But instead he just kept stepping further and further away, and I didn’t see it until it was too late.”
“I don’t think he was being very honest with you,” Mary allowed. “I think he probably hid the worst of it from you.”
“Yeah, but you were there to tell me, and I didn’t listen, did I? I should have.”
“You know he wanted to get into your knickers, right? That’s why he was nice to you.” Mary winced. “Sorry. That’s a shitty thing to say, but…”
“… but it’s true? I suppose. God, he really made a fool out of me, didn’t he?”
Lily’s voice was thick with tears. Mary brought their swings closer together and wrapped a tentative arm around Lily’s shoulders. Lily crumbled against her, burying her wet face in the crook of Mary’s neck.
“I just feel s-so foolish and d-dirty and I’m so s-sorry,” she sobbed against Mary’s skin. “I never wanted any of it to be that way.”
There was nothing Mary could say to that. Instead she held onto Lily, and Lily held onto her, and for a while they forgot they were anything but little girls who loved and needed each other.
When they finally detached themselves from each other, it was too late for Mary to catch a return train. They weren’t sure whether they were allowed to use Lily’s wand to call the Knight bus, so in the end Mary ate dinner at the Evans’ and borrowed an oversized T-shirt to sleep in on a mattress on the floor of Lily’s bedroom. Lily’s parents were charming, Petunia made herself scarce, and the leftover awkwardness between them melted away at some point during hushed conversations by the moonlight.
~*~
There were tentative phone calls. Petunia was always grumbling in Lily’s background, and Mary’s little brothers were always running around and fighting behind Mary, and conversations were stilted.
It was better when they could see each other, whenever they could both catch a train to London. It was always Muggle London, away from Diagon Alley, away from the headlines of the newspapers they both read but never discussed. The magical world and its woes could wait until September, they had tacitly decided. Instead they mingled in London, and ate ice cream, and spent their allowance in thrift stores and bookshops and record shops.
“Didn’t you already have this one?” Lily frowned as Mary paid for the second-hand LP at the disc shop she was starting to become a regular at.
“This one is for Sirius,” Mary explained. “He sends me a list in the summer, when he thinks he won’t be able to get out to Muggle London.”
“How is he?” Lily asked with the guarded voice of someone who doesn’t expect good news.
“He refuses to discuss anything more substantial than music, so… Make of that what you will,” Mary replied.
They exchanged a long, meaningful look.
Mary cleared her throat after a while. “Got any news from the other boys?” she asked, in a painfully obvious attempt to lighten the mood.
Lily squinted at her suspiciously.
Mary rolled her eyes. “I don’t mean necessarily Potter. Although if there is news on that front…”
Lily poked her in the ribs and Mary cackled, jostling a poor innocent bystander as she tried to escape Lily’s attack. Lily pretended innocence and stuck her tongue at her like a little kid. “Peter sent me a postcard from Mallorca, he seems to be having fun.”
“Oh, I think we probably got the same postcard,” Mary chuckled.
“I’ve gotten a few letters from Remus as well. I think he’s a little bored.”
“Has he been sick again?” Mary asked casually.
“Not that I know of,” Lily replied in a voice that was perhaps a bit too even. Mary did not insist.
Neither of them mentioned Marlene.
Mary sent her more or less weekly letters, and she was fairly sure Lily did too. She hadn’t told her that they had made up, and if Marlene’s radio silence on the subject was any indication, Lily hadn’t either. She wondered if Lily, too, felt guilty of the secrecy of it all, and of excluding Marlene from their outings. She knew she would have felt abjectly betrayed if the roles had been reversed, and she wasn’t sure how to justify it to herself.
All she knew was that the phone calls and the meetings in Muggle London were different from what their friendship had been before. It felt somehow like they were building something new, something different, and this something could only take shape if they allowed it to exist unencumbered by outside scrutiny and intervention.
It suddenly occurred to her, with a curious twist of her stomach, that the frequent letters between Lily and Remus might be new, too. He and Lily had always been close, but between their Prefect duties and their strained relationship with their other friends, they had spent more time together during the past year than ever before.
“So. You and Remus…?” she asked after a beat. Her voice failed to be quite as light as she meant it to be.
“What about him?” Lily asked distractedly. She had stopped to eye a denim jacket in a shop window. She tore her gaze away from the (frankly offensive) price tag and burst into laughter at Mary’s waggling eyebrows. “Oh, come on! It’s not like that. I love him, as a friend. Besides, I think he has a crush on someone else.”
“Really? Who?” Mary demanded. She was the one who was supposed to know the gossip, for Merlin’s sake.
“I won’t tell,” Lily said mysteriously.
Mary pouted and cajoled and bribed, but Lily was, unfortunately, a woman of honour.
“What about you and Sirius?” she asked, instead of answering the question like she was supposed to.
“Not even if he were the last man on Earth and I had a deadly disease that could only be cured by dick,” Mary replied solemnly.
The man who was waiting at the crossing next to them sent them a scandalised look. Lily giggled, and Mary smiled. Everything felt a little bit lighter and a little bit brighter when Lily laughed.