Mary isn't an idiot. She knows that she isn't alright. Between her inability to sleep for more than a few hours at a time and her new paranoia that she's constantly being followed, she's definitely spiralling in a downward direction. Still, sitting on the roof of her childhood home blowing smoke into the pink evening sky, she's finding it hard to care. Well, actually, she's been finding it a bit hard to care in general lately.
It's too cold for this but she can't stand being inside anymore. She feels trapped. Trapped by the bedroom she grew up in, more full of the kid she used to be than the person she is now. She barely recognizes herself these days, barely remembers caring about the boys whose posters are hung-up on her walls, or the names of her stuffed animals or the girls who gave her the friendship bracelets still sitting on her dresser—carelessly taken off one day and never put back on.
She breathes in deep, filing her lungs with all the smoke she can, letting it burn, holding it in until she starts to cough and choke. She sits up, throwing the nearly finished cigarette off the edge of the roof and letting the tears squeeze out of the corners of her eyes. She doesn't really cry, hasn't in a long time, this feels good though, even if it isn't the same.
She hears him coming before she hears the window sliding open.
"I thought dad fixed this?" Damian says, pulling himself through like he was invited.
"He did," Mary nods at the window screen she'd popped out and thrown further down the roof.
Damian lets out a low whistle as he settles next to her. "You're gonna get hell for that."
Mary only shrugs, looking out at the quickly darkening sky. A particularly bitter gust of wind blows through them, sneaking right under her jumper and through her skin.
"Fuck," her brother hisses, crossing his arms over his chest. "Bloody freezing out here."
"No one's stopping you from going back inside."
Her brother lets out a huff. They're close in age, only two years apart—Damian being the older sibling. They used to be close in other ways too, used to be friends. Though every time she comes home it gets harder and harder to remember that. Damian's at Uni now. Mary can never remember which one. Can't imagine she'll ever go to one herself.
"Who was he then?" Damian asks.
Mary reaches into her pocket and pulls out another cigarette. Excessive, but she knows he hates the smell and she's hoping it'll make him go back inside. "Who was who?" she asks, lighting the thing the old-fashioned way—with matches she stole from the kitchen. She's gotten too used to doing this with magic.
"The boy who's got you out here being moody."
She inhales, the smoke scratching her raw throat. "There's no boy," she says on her exhale, it's insulting but not surprising that he thinks everything she feels is because of some boy. But then, she supposes there's no way he could guess at what the actual problem is.
It's incredibly easy to hide things from your parents as a Muggle-born. For all their talk of inclusivity Hogwarts has never been particularly committed to communicating with the Muggle families of their students. From what Mary can tell, all her parents were told about her attack was that she got injured and would recover quickly. When her parents asked her about it she told them it was a Quidditch injury, just the mention of the word 'Quidditch' made their eyes glaze over. There were no more questions after that.
"Then what is it?" Damian pushes, she can feel him looking at her without turning her head. He coughs as she lets go of another cloud of smoke. "What's going on with you?"
It's an interesting question; what is her problem exactly? Is it that a group of boys she goes to school with violated her in every possible way? Is it that there's a war coming that she has no choice but to be a part of? Or, perhaps, is it that the one person she trusted with the truth—with her feelings about all of this—is involved with one the bad guys? Because maybe James doesn't know about the Mark but he still knows who Regulus Black is. The kind of person he is. And what people like him do to people like Mary.
