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Marlene had never been a fine potionist. And she was fine with it, mostly. If not for the fact that Sirius Black was good at Potions - not as good as Lily or Snape but, surprisingly, better than Remus - and he would have used any chance to rub it in her face. But, that little detail apart, she made her peace with it. What she didn’t begin to understand was the fact that Slughorn chose that very specific day to be an ass about it.
“A perfectly done Potion, Miss McKinnon,” He said, the moment he leaned on her cauldron. She scoffed, as if daring the professor to start to laugh in her face. “Ten points to Gryffindor.”
She wanted to argue, to ask him how further he wanted to drag on at mocking her, but James very likely noticed the way she clasped her fist as she always did before saying something she’d soon regret on the Quidditch pitch and wrapped an arm around her shoulders cajoling her out of the classroom.
“What’s wrong with him?” She asked, the moment they emerged from the dungeons. “I’ll drop Potions right after the OWLs so he doesn't need to be such a bitch about it.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see the problem,” Lily interjected, stopping whatever Potter was about to say - probably agreeing with her about the Head of House Slytherin behaving like a bitch. “Your potion was perfect down to the mother-of-pearl sheen.”
Her friend had a point, but the potion was supposed to smell of something, specifically of the smell of the people and places you loved the most or some other bullshit like that, and when she leaned on it, all she could smell were the vague odors of Hogwarts, minus, maybe, the humidity of the room they were in.
She didn't expect it to smell specifically like anyone she knew; sure, she dated Remus until Christmas break that year, kissed Sirius many times when they both were drunk and shared a couple of hot moments with Dorcas after a Quidditch match, but it wasn’t like she was head over the heels for someone, still she was expecting to smell something.
Marlene wasn’t even sure they’d understand if she told them, so she just shrugged and pretended it wasn’t bothering her for the rest of the day.
–
She waited until later that night. She knew Remus and Lily were on patrol as the good Prefects they were, Mary was doing something with Peter as they’ve been for the past couple of weeks - what, she had no idea, her friend swore up and down each of her dead relatives that she wasn’t snagging Pettygrew and Marlene didn’t even care at that point - and she knew James was on detention because he managed to sweettalk his way out of it during the weekend so that he could have played against Ravenclaw.
When she was sure the only person left in the dorm room would have been Sirius, she walked up the boys’ dormitory stairs and found herself on the threshold before she could step back.
“Black,” She greeted. He was sprawled on his bed, looking extremely bored now that he was alone. He was holding what seemed to be a piece of mirror which reflected what, for an instant, Marlene would have sworn to have been the dark and cold walls of the Slytherin dorm room. But since she wasn’t sure of it and she technically shouldn’t have known how those looked, she didn’t say anything, tilting her head by one side and staring at the embodiment of boredom in front of her.
She would have never admitted it out loud, but Sirius suffered - even the smallest inconvenience - beautifully. He was lying on the bed, dark wavy hair around him in a sort of halo, legs falling on the other side and head slightly tilted back to look at her upside down; his shirt opened on his chest, chiseled with muscles and the faint lines of few tattooed runes disappearing underneath the waistband of his pants, the Gryffindor tie lazily circling his neck.
“McKinnon, my love,” He said, the tone so mocking she didn’t even bother to say anything. “What do I own the honor on this fair night?”
She walked into the room as if she belonged there and, someone, would have said that with the number of times she and Remus sneaked up before everyone else and then out at the first light of the morning when they were dating she could have as well. Still, this time, she curled on Sirius’s bed instead.
“I was thinking about today’s potion,” She admitted. She never liked to face her failures which was why she was a good Quidditch player: she tried to do better each and every time. Her mother always told her it would have been the end of her, perfectionism wouldn’t have brought her nowhere, not when it was shaped in the form of everything I do must be perfect with no space for errors but she was young and reckless and she would have thought about that bridge when she crossed it. “I didn’t deserve to be mocked about it, and the points? That was downright cruel!”
And maybe Marlene waited for everyone but Sirius to be around because she knew that the others, James included, would have tried a different way to make her feel better. Instead, Sirius was on his feet in the beat of the eyes, rummaging around their shared pile of robes and Muggle clothes and emerging a moment later with some silveryish thin coat.
“Let’s go! If you think that sucked so much, we are going to make it again,” He said, dragging her closer to his body and wrapping them both in the cloak. The warmth of Sirius’s muscular body engulfed her and, a moment later, the thin fabric fell over their heads as well. That movement was enough to have her understand what the object was.
Neither she or him were really tall, so they fit pretty comfortably under the cloak even if they had to move slowly and check behind each corner, and Marlene was half sure she heard Sirius saying something along the lines of Let’s hope Moony doesn’t have the map with him which made zero sense to the girl. Still, they managed to reach the classroom relatively without trouble - except for a close encounter with Narcissa Black sneaking in the corridor with Lucius’s Head Boy pin fastened to her robe; which had Sirius starting to laugh uncontrollably and forced Marlene to push him into an unused classroom before Narcissa could hear them. When she glared at him, all Sirius did was shrugging and laughing some more.
“What?” He asked. “Perfect Cissy sneaking around with an old Head Boy pin as only protection? It would make some of my relatives get off my back for a while.”
Marlene rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “And how exactly would you know that if you weren’t sneaking around?”
“Perks of being the family disappointment: they don’t expect me to behave… too much,” He winked at her and then moved to check that the hallway was empty before starting to walk down it once again.
Marlene, or at least a part of her, the one which wasn’t any longer charmed by Sirius Black’s attitude and appearance, knew that it didn’t matter how thought he tried to appear, there would have always been a Grimmauld Place shaped hole in his heart which was the reason why he hated to talk about them or being reminded of his family at all. She knew it, his friends knew it, and that was enough. There were things, with Sirius, casual acquaintances didn’t get to talk about or to ask and while she didn’t know how she got in the numbers of those who could, she was glad of being an exception to that specific rule.
“Your grace,” He mocked a bow as they walked inside of the Potion classroom and discarded the cloak. “Let’s brew some dangerous love filter just to mend your wounded ego.”
She chucked even if she was well aware of the truth behind the absurdity they were in the room for. Still, she was glad he was doing that for her. And was even more glad when it turned out that he remembered almost everything about how to brew the potion, checking only once in a while the successive steps they had to take instead of having to read through the entire pages of their book. If anything because even if it was in the middle of the night and they both casted Silencing Charms, they couldn’t technically just be there.
The potion took long enough to be ready as it was, and if someone would have found them there it would have been obvious what they had been doing.
Marlene knew Sirius wasn’t above to kiss her in the middle of the room to pretend they were looking for a dark place where to get handsy, they’d done it in the past, but the cauldron was fuming and that would have been more difficult to hide.
“I don’t really get it,” He said, after some moments of complete silence, while they wanted for the potion to get of the right color before they could finally sniff it and, in Marlene’s opinion, prove that whatever happened that morning was a huge prank pulled on her by some invisible force. “Your potion was just fine, the best one, if we are to listen to Slughorn. Better than Snivellus’s. What’s the problem?”
With her eyes fixated on the concoction in front of her and only Sirius present in the room, Marlene felt like she could answer that question: “It just… didn’t smell of anything in particular. Or anyone.”
“Who were you hoping to smell?” The question seemed innocent enough, but very few things were innocent when it came to Sirius. “Moony? I mean, I know you two broke up, he didn’t tell us why, but I mean, he’s Moony, whoever got to smell him is a lucky bastard.”
Marlene dared to look at her friend’s face, if anything because there was something weird in his voice. The same bad concealed softness he used when he spoke about Regulus, and upon further inspection, she could see something weird in his smile too. It wasn’t his usual smirk.
She chewed her bottom lip and went back focusing on what she was doing, her brain registering that he was still waiting for an answer. She wasn’t surprised that Remus didn’t tell his friends why they broke up, she didn’t tell Lily and Mary either and the only person who knew was Dorcas because she always knew that kind of stuff and sort of guessed it.
“No, not Remus, and not even Dorcas, because I know that’s the next name you are going to drop. I like Moony, I really do, but not like that,” She shrugged, once again not really sure how to explain it or if he’d ever manage to understand what she wasn’t saying. “As for her, we are just friends who sometimes share a good time together, no feelings involved.”
And maybe that was her problem: she never got past that stage and she didn’t even want to. She was fine with being by her own most of the time and doing whatever and whoever she wanted, no strings attached. She never thought there was something wrong with that, but she had never imagined that would somehow become an academic problem of sorts. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear just as the potion started to turn the right color and then dared to ask: “What did you smell?”
Sirius moved closer to lean against the desk she was working at, once again looking more like an artistically staged statue in an art exhibition than a human being to the point where someone who didn’t know him well might haven’t noticed the way his fingers were fiddling with the Invisibility Cloak secured in his hands. There was apparently something, about her question, which made him really anxious and while she wanted to know, Marlene wasn’t sure it was worth seeing Sirius like this; putting up his mask while he was talking to her. She thought they were past this. That was the reason why she dared to ask.
“I don’t know, it was a lot.” He answered, after what seemed to be an eternity. “And still, James and my Potion wasn’t even that good so I don’t even know.”
He ran a hand in his hair, messing it almost artistically and she could tell it was only half the truth. Eventually, he continued: “At first, I smelled books, cigarette smoke and chocolate. Then brooms polishing wax and the Forbitten Forest, dust and chess set which I didn’t even know had a specific smell until this morning, to be honest, mint chapstick and something else which is just so Regulus I knew I messed up.”
Marlene hummed once. Her brain had absolutely no problems to associate each of the smells Sirius was talking about. Remus’s was the most obvious one, but she knew that the Forbitten Forest and the polishing wax were for James and dust and chess sets for Peter. If anything, she was surprised her own chapstick made it into the mix. Regulus was something she had also expected, just like Sirius’s reaction to that. She smiled, not really knowing what to say.
Luckily, the ending of the brewing time for the potion saved her from giving any other kind of acknowledgement. Trying to sound less expectant than she actually was, she thrilled: “Waiting time is over, you go first.”
She stepped back, letting Sirius lean over the cauldron - the potion looked just the right color, just as it had that morning - and theatrically sniffed it.
“The books, smoke and chocolate scent is stronger,” Sirius said, and he sounded confused by it, as if with his own potion the smells had all been on the same intensity. “But it's pretty much the same. Isn’t it weird?”
“I don’t know,” She knew; she so fucking knew, still she didn’t want to be the one to spoil everybody else’s fun and was sure that they had to figure it out themselves. She wondered if Sirius was really that oblivious or was playing with her but she also knew that asking wouldn’t have led anywhere. Whatever the answer to that specific question was, he’d become aware of the reason why she was asking and that would have certainly pushed him into a panic induced fight or flight state of mind. In the five years she’d known him, Marlene came to terms with the fact that Sirius Black and emotions didn’t coexist particularly well.
“Your turn,” He said, pushing his friend just slightly against the cauldron. Marlene drew a small vial from her robes and took a considerable amount of the potion into it before sealing the vial and evaporating the rest of it with her wand.
“First, we’ll have the others to test it,” She explained. “If my Potion works, then, maybe, the problem is me.”
“If someone drinks it, we’ve never met, McKinnon,” He answered, pretending to sound more serious and rule-obedient than he had ever been. Marlene chuckled and wrapped the both of them in the cloak.
—
The next day was a Saturday, and that meant Quidditch, which was why Marlene dragged herself out of bed at an ungodly hour in the morning, coursing Frank Longbottom on the way: the pitch was always the same, the very same on which they had all their matches and practices, they didn’t need to go and familiarize with it before every match! Still, she somehow managed to wake up and get into her Quidditch clothes without waking up Lily and Mary - who got even crankier than her, especially when they didn’t need to wake up first lights in the morning - and stumbled toward the common room where she and Sirius hide the results of their nightly escapade to have their friends as test subjects after the match. She wasn’t surprised to see a very sleepy Peter and an almost asleep Remus with Black and Potter. Frank was already up and smiling too much for being six in the morning; Emmeline by his side looked ready to punch him in the face and the rest of the team would have probably thanked her.
“Great, Miss McKinnon deigned us with her charming presence, - Longbottom thrilled and he didn’t even sound sarcastic. - Before we head for breakfast and then the pitch, I wanted to let you know we’ll have more of an audience than Black and Potter’s unwilling hostages.” At that, he pointed at Peter and Remus, the former waving while the latter sporting the murderous glance which still had Marlene’s knees going weak despite everything.
“They are not unwilling hostages,” Sirius had to point out, wrapping an arm around James’s shoulder and leaning into his best friend’s side until his head rested on the crook of Potter’s neck. “They love us and are here to support us.”
“I love my bed,” Remus grumbled in response. “And I’d love to be able to show it just how much, for once.”
“You love me more,” Sirius asserted and Marlene really wished her friend didn’t have his head buried deeply into James’s neck to notice the way Remus bit his lower lip at that remark. “Still, Frank, who did you manage to coerce out of their bed?”
At the question, Frank beamed and Fabian and Gideon shook their heads, making it clear that was the wrong question. The twins were proved right when Frank dove into the story of how he managed to invite Alice Fortrescue out and then they were trying to see if their relationship could progress.
“Isn’t she in Ravenclaw?” James asked, mostly to interrupt Frank’s twenty-minute speech about how they’d name their children. Marlene made a mental note to never let Frank name anything ever, not even a pet rock.
“She doesn’t care about Quidditch enough,” Emmeline answered for the captain. Apparently it was something they already ran through between sixth and seventh year students before she arrived. Or maybe Emmeline and Alice were friends, she didn’t know. “And she’s down just as bad as he is so won’t share our team secret for house prestige anyways.”
With that settled, and Peter begging that they at least got something to eat if they had to be up that early (Marlene agreed wholeheartedly), the Gryffindor Quidditch Team paraded through the common room door and was joined by Alice who barely acknowledged the others and stuck herself to Frank’s side.
“One day, Lily and I will be like them,” James popped up.
“You wish, Prongs, you wish,” Was the echo that met his words, followed by laughter and subsequent shushing from the paintings. A part of Marlene, though, wondered if her little experiment could have helped James and Lily as well (there was just so much fake annoyance she could take from Evans before starting to suspect that she liked Potter at least a little bit).
–
Quidditch in the middle of January was always a bit of a nightmare for everyone involved, but that meant that usually, Prefects and Head Boys and GIrls pretended not to see that the pumpkin juice the winning House served at their post-game party looked and smelled terribly like Firewhiskey - especially when said Prefects were the first to having had their servings.
Which led to two different aces up to Marlene’s sleeve. The first was that Lily was a clingy drunk, and the second that Remus couldn’t get drunk, not even tipsy.
Still, she was a woman on a mission even if her partner in crime, Sirius, was monologuing about his beater prowess or something in front of an adoring group of first and second years. Peter was dozing off while talking with Emmeline and a Hufflepuff girl Marlene couldn’t remember the name and James was having the time of his life when Mary decided she wanted to try the karaoke mic someone somehow had in their trunk and left Lily by her own; considering Lily’s clinginess, this evolved in her tiny form sprawled across Potter’s lap.
“May I have your attention, please?" She half yelled-half whispered, trying not to wake up the younger students who fell asleep on the carpeted floor of the Gryffindor common room. “I have one last party game for you all!”
The second declaration had almost everyone looking at her with wide, curious eyes. Save for maybe Sirius, who looked positively scared, and Remus, who, after five years of friendship, almost two of which dating her, knew that Marlene McKinnon could be more chaos-brining than the Marauders together.
“We were collecting blackmailing material,” Fabien said, pointing to the corner where Frank and Alice disappeared the moment they entered the common room and eye his twin brother. “You’d better have something which is more entertaining than the two of them.”
She hoped it would be, maybe, and she also hoped she’d get an answer to the question of what happened the day before. Still, she felt like the only person who would have understood the depths of that was Sirius, so she winked at the twins and retrieved the vial, emptying it into an unused glass and warming the bottom of it with the point of her wand.
In mere seconds, the potion started to fuming in soft heart-shaped spirals of light grey smoke.
“This is Amortentia - SHe said, before anyone could move to drink it; she wasn’t sure people were sober enough not to drink whatever liquid substance they found at hand - I’m going to ask you to smell it and then… The game begins.”
“Oh my, Marls!” Lily commented, drunkenly enough that her words dragged on in a very funny echo as James helped her into a more seated position. “Is this again for Slughorn’s comment from yesterday? Can’t you just… Your Potion is fiiiiine! I’ll prove it!”
She moved to raise and, once again, James’s hands on her back proved more than necessary for her to reach the glass and take a long sniff at it, glaring at her friend moments later as if Marlene had just stabbed her. “Ew, Potter, step aside, all I can smell is your stupid cologne!”
Sirius started to laugh, James looked absolutely crestfallen and that only had as a consequence that his friends were laughing even harder.
“You all heard that, didn’t you?” Potter asked, stepping back from Lily as she required, but without letting her go, fearing, maybe, that she might fall on the ground.
“Heard what?!” Remus answered, flashing his best Marauder smirk. Marlene was enjoying the thing way too much and while a part of her wanted to push it under Lupin’s nose for good measure, decided to let the rest of the party people have their time.
She had no idea how long the game went on, apparently Frank and Alice smelled each other because after a while they went back to try to find the meaning of life in their mouths or something, but she was glad her little experiment was causing so much laughter, that until Sirius pushed the glass under her nose.
“Your turn, McKinnon,” He said, and Marlene couldn’t help to notice that, by now, the only people still in the common room were him, Remus - who was playing with Sirius hair but, once again, he had always been the only one allowed to so she couldn’t tell if her plan worked -, Mary and Emmeline. Peter went to escort his Hufflepuff friend back to her dormroom - and if you listened to the twins’ loud comments, he wouldn’t have showed up in Gryffindor tower until the next day - Gideon and Fabian said they were looking for an empty room considering that Frank and Alice retreated upstairs while the party was still going and James promised to join them once Lily had sobered enough to sleep safely, he wasn’t back yet, but since the stairs to the girls’ rooms let him enter nobody was too worried.
“Must I?” She asked, not even caring about showing her uncertainty to the others. She trusted them, even if the only person who could understand the reason behind her reticence was Sirius. “I mean, we figured out it works, I’ve been an ass to Slughorn without reason and the points were fairly given. Also Evans admitted she smelled Potter which is a win in my book, so…”
Mary looked at her through her curl, her face shrugged in that pouty expression which only made her look more adorable than she already was. And nope, it wasn’t her being bisexual - she was, she wasn’t trying to fool anyone - it was just pure facts. “You either smell it, or I’ll chunk it down your throat and you’ll be desperately in love with me for the next couple of days!”
“If Marls brewed it, I think she’d be desperately in love with herself, actually,” Remus corrected, and then, after realizing he said it out loud, continued, with more intent: “Which she either might need or not need at all depending on the morning.”
Marlene loved Remus, she really did, but she also wanted to punch him in the face for saying that to their friends. Not that it was a secret, everyone knew her self-esteem was peculiar at best, but still. She took the glass, because what else was left for her to do, and sniffed it. Once again, all she could smell was Hogwarts.
“I second my intuition,” She declared, theatrically. “I’m broken or something. It just smells of Hogwarts, nothing in particular.”
“Is that the problem?” Marlene didn’t expect for Emmeline to comment. Less than that, she didn’t expect her eyes to be wide as saucers and her lips, usually closed in a severe line, doing what was possible to hide a smile. “I thought you had a situation like the two of them! - she pointed at Remus and Sirius who looked at each other in confusion, apparently not knowing which situation Emmeline was talking about - I’m going to be blunt, Marls, but do you have romantic feelings for anyone? Like, at all?”
She shook her head. She didn’t need to think about it because she already knew the answer, she maybe had always known it. Physical attraction, yes, she could write entire books on the number of people she felt attracted to, Remus and Dorcas only being the most recent and long lasting among them, but romantic feelings? Wishing to spend the rest of her life with someone? Growing old and doing mundane stuff? Not really, not ever.
The idea of sharing something so long and uncertain with one single person terrified her more than whatever dark nightmare plagued other people’s nights.
“No,” She whispered, maybe missing how that point was so meaningful, but still.
“And this is why your Amortentia doesn’t have a precise smell. Whenever we smell it, the strongest scent is the one of the person we love. It’s a love potion, after all,” She said, as if it was the easiest explanation known to mankind. And the weird thing was that it made sense. “You can also smell your friends’ scent, but it’s not its main aim. So, no, you aren’t broken, you are just tricking the potion.”
That made sense in a way she wondered why she didn’t think about, or why she got so upset the day before. Maybe it was because she hated not knowing things, maybe because that particular potion hit her insecurities harder than all of those she couldn’t manage to brew properly. Still, a moment later, she felt Sirius’s hand in her hair and relaxed into his touch.
“You ok?” He asked, barely a whisper while Emmeline and Mary started to fix what they could with their wands and evaporated the remaining Amortentia. She nodded, daring to look up at the two boys seated on the couch behind her.
“Yes, it’s just, it makes more sense that way and still I couldn’t see it, as simple as it was.”
“I think it should be in textbooks,” Remus intervened, his tone calm and relaxed as always. “I guess you are not the first one to smell nothing in particular.”
Once again, Marlene couldn’t help but nod and, at the same time, needed to get their attention away from her. “What about you, guys?”
Remus turned a shade of red which resembled the same of Gryffindor banners and Sirius seemed to be extremely interested in a specific patch of the carpet where Marlene was sitting on. Considering what she knew, she couldn’t help but chuckle.
“It just occurred to me that I never told you the reason why we broke up, Siri,” She commented, as if she didn’t notice their reaction, chewing a moment later on her lower lip just to give the other boy the time to invent something or stop her. When he didn’t do either, she raised her eyes on Remus, looking at his face upside down and noticing the soft and secret smile everyone seemed to eventually fall for. It was his way to let her know that it was ok. “You know, I figured out Remus here has very strong feelings for someone else.”
And, with that, she raised and left the two Marauders to their own devices, joining Emmeline and Mary and helping them to finish cleaning up.
At the end of the day, maybe being a terrible potionist who could only brew one specific love potion wasn’t the end of the world.