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"You can't let Mulciber win, Mary!" Lily shouted. Mary was glad the three of them were already halfway to Hogsmeade, or Lily's yelling might have brought unwelcome attention. Marlene was shaking her head gently; Marlene knew.
"I'm not." Mary said calmly. "He has nothing to do with this - well, very little. He's just a symptom." A very unpleasant symptom, granted. That moment when the Imperius lifted and Mary found herself standing on the squelchy path between the greenhouses and the castle, robe at her feet, blouse half-unbuttoned, euphoria suddenly vanished, and she knew, horrified, that she had been about to take all her clothes off, roll naked in the mud, and proceed to Herbology like that, for all of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff to see, and she would have been happy doing it - well, it certainly made the top five of the worst moments in her life. "The thing is, I was always going to leave."
"Always?" Lily squawked. "But - but magic!" Yes, magic, Mary thought back, remembering all those notebooks she'd filled as a child, every incident meticulously documented, something smashed or broken or inexplicably changed, the time of day, the predominant emotion, where it happened, who else was there. One set of notebooks for the raw data, another for analysis. Charts, graphs, so many attempts to find out what the problem was, to try to make it stop. Control eluded her, distant as the moon, until that visit from the woman in tartan with an accent mirroring her father's, the promise that what she'd experienced was normal, and that she could learn to control it - but she'd have to go away to boarding school to do it. Secrets and distance.
Magic for Lily was something more... 'magical', Mary knew. Flowers and flying; being brilliant, being powerful, being special. Lily had shared her feelings freely; Mary could never quite bring herself to. Not with Lily, anyway. She'd dropped hints, but Lily had never taken them. Other people had dropped hints to Lily, too, Janet Drinkwater in the year above, and Nancy Murdock in fifth year who seemed to do more Prefect stuff than the actual prefects, and when they'd done the same to Mary, she'd revealed more of her actual feelings, and they'd taken her under their wing. The Muggleborn Association, though some of them called it 'Mud Pride'. The ones who didn't see why they should have to assimilate to the norms of magical society; the ones who made a point of reaching out to the younger ones, to let them know they weren't alone in the madhouse. If they saw it as a madhouse. Some didn't. Some, like Lily, were eager to belong.
"Lils, you had to see this was coming," Marlene said. "I've known since fourth year. Remember the O-Levels thing?" Mary remembered. She'd worked hard to be ready to sit her O-Levels at the end of her fourth year, a year early, since she'd have to sit OWLs in fifth year, and nobody would let her miss those. Besides, she needed to pass at least two out of Transfiguration, Charms and Defence in order to have the right to carry a wand after Hogwarts, in order not to have her memory wiped, and her parents' memories likewise. (From her notebooks and the gaps in them, she suspected there were at least two occasions where she'd had an incident at school; she'd thought at the time that there had been something compromising her memory, and learning of the existence of Obliviators had clarified quite a few things.)
Mary had pored over descriptions of the Chemistry and Biology classroom practicals she wouldn't be able to do; had memorised endless diagrams, facts, dates, rules, functions. She'd taken music lessons in the holidays; she had learned not to fear the transcription bit of the exam. And there were pianos at Hogwarts, if you knew where to find the practice rooms, if someone showed you how to book them. (Electric bass guitars, on the other hand, were a non-starter. Nowhere to plug in the amp.) She'd talked to people at two different secondary schools, thrown a sob story about her own school going all 'alternative' and how she wanted a 'proper education with real qualifications', eventually got herself booked in to sit the exams at a local community college, where they blatantly didn't care why she was taking exams with them, as long as she paid the fees. Mary's parents had written a note excusing her from Hogwarts lessons on the days the exams were scheduled; Nancy, who was now studying English Literature at University College London, had agreed to come to Hogwarts and Side-Along Mary to the college and back every day. ("Just pay it forwards, kid.")
But it was to no avail. Professor McGonagall had put her foot down. Mary was not permitted to miss class; her parents' note counted for nothing. Yes, students skived off class all the time, and were given detentions when they did; but deliberately planning to miss class for days at a time was a far more serious matter, and detentions would not suffice; truancy on this scale would mean punishment not just for Mary, but for any adults aiding and abetting her, which meant not only Nancy, but also Mary's parents. The Ministry would have to be involved. Those were the rules. No, Professor McGonagall could not and would not make an exception; she did not see the value in Mary sitting the muggle equivalent of OWLs. Mary should concentrate on her real OWLs; her Transfiguration could certainly do with the extra work, since it was barely of Acceptable standard at this moment in time.
"Well, yes, I remember you were upset at the time," said Lily, sounding puzzled, "but I didn't know it mattered that much. You've got your OWLs now."
"I have," said Mary. "OWLs, seventeenth birthday, and apparition licence. All ticked off, and I'm done, and I can actually get back to the things that matter, without having people track me down to snap my wand and obliviate me and my parents, or, I don't know, chuck us all in Azkaban for truancy or whatever."
"The things that matter?" Lily spluttered.
"So, you're taking your O-Levels for real this time?" said Marlene.
"Yes!" Mary said happily. "O-Levels this summer, and then I'm starting an actual sixth-form college in September. I'll be a year older than the other students, but only losing one year to the whole magic thing isn't too bad. I'm taking four A-Levels. Maths, Further Maths, Music and Physics."
"Physics is the one that's partly Astronomy, isn't it?"
"Physics is the one subject that magic makes an absolute mockery of!" Lily cut back in angrily. "I don't see why you would waste your time on all that nonsense-"
"And I don't see why you would waste your time on the nonsense of catering for and assimilating to a world that's a complete dystopian nightmare and hostile to boot," Mary returned, voice cold and level, "but I've learned to accept that we feel very differently about these matters." Lily and Marlene had both got used to Mary using phrases like 'Jesus Christ' and 'for God's sake' by now; Marlene (and Sirius Black) had actually started copying her; but back when they first heard her swear like that, pretty much every pureblood (and half-blood, and Lily) had been shocked. Witches and wizards, Lily had explained, did not mention the names of deities unless they actually intended to invoke them. ('Well, I'm a witch, and I do, so there,' Mary had said.) It was one of many cultural nuances Lily had passed on that either began or ended with 'Sev's mum said', and even when Lily finally worked out that Snape was no good (two years after he'd first called Mary a mudblood), her observance of the taboos didn't change. Marlene - half-blood, wizard-raised - followed the rules automatically: it had always been Lily who was keen to share them, and Marlene who was keen to keep the peace. Marlene had said that as long as Mary knew everything she was implying about herself with that haircut, and didn't mind, then it was an entirely valid decision, and long hair was rather a lot of work to keep up. Lily had shuddered for weeks: nearly as bad as Mary's mother had been, bemoaning the loss of her 'pretty curls'.
"Come on, girls," Marlene said. "Don't fight. We're coming into Hogsmeade to see Mary off, and have a nice goodbye."
"But she's making a terrible mistake! She's the best in the class at Arithmancy!"
"I'm good at Arithmancy because I'm good at Maths. And I'm going to be an accountant."
"You could do so much good here, if you stayed! The war - the Death Eaters - they need to be stopped. Marlene, you know, you agree with me, you're joining - you're going to be working against them."
"The war's another reason to get out, as far as I'm concerned." Mary had every intention of helping in what was to come, but via the Muggleborn Association, not the Order. She'd left her textbooks and robes, her quills and parchment, in the trunk that belonged to the Association, where her Potions supplies had gone once she'd finished the OWL; she'd passed the trunk to Kevin Brooke (third-year Gryffindor), who would hand it over to the most senior member still at Hogwarts, Martin Reeve (fifth-year Hufflepuff); the senior member in Hogwarts kept the trunk, but the senior member in each house had a key for it. That had been the system, ever since the incident in Mary's second year where the then senior member, one Robert Newnham, died suddenly and the trunk had been destroyed with the rest of his personal effects. (The Aurors and the muggle police had both ruled it was misadventure, but since it had happened mere weeks after Robert took a heritage test showing his biological father had been a Rowle... well, most of the Muggleborn Association believed otherwise, and they'd been passing on the warnings ever since. Looking into one's ancestry can be dangerous.) Now Mary, like Nancy and Janet, like Malcolm and Gavin, had become one of those graduates whose contact details the senior Hogwarts members kept. Post and phone if at all possible, owls only in an emergency. The school supplies would see good use: more than one of the current students had parents who refused any kind of financial assistance, parents who only begrudgingly gave house-room to 'unnatural devil-spawn', and the school's hardship fund only went so far. Though, of course, Mary wasn't going to tell Lily or Marlene about any of that. 'If they know we're organised, they'll try to put a stop to it, so it's best we keep things to ourselves,' Nancy had said, and Mary hadn't asked how the Association had learned that. She hadn't been in the mood, that day, to hear another depressing story.
"And are you saying that I can't do good in the world as an accountant? There's a whole branch called forensic accounting, people who look through the accounts of suspected criminals and try to find out where they've hidden the money from the proceeds of crimes, and stop them getting away with it. Or even if I don't do that, if I just end up helping small businesses keep their books in order, and volunteer for other good causes in my spare time, would that not count? Because it's helping muggles, not wizards?"
"It's just so... limiting."
"For you. For me, it's liberating. I get to be who I want to be. And nobody can tell me otherwise."
Not Mulciber. Not McGonagall. Not Lily.
Not her parents, who, as a doctor and a nurse, might have preferred Mary go into medicine, rather than accounting, and definitely didn't approve of Mary's short and spiky haircut, or her interest in the nascent punk scene.
Not even Nancy.
Nobody.