Marietta Edgecombe;
An infamous name, which calls to mind the words traitor, turncoat, tattletale, SNEAK – but Marietta Edgecombe never wanted to be remembered. Not like that, and not at all. She wanted to be neither hero nor villain; just silent, still, safe. Invisible.
Forgotten.
She had been a good girl, once, and many people agreed she was quite pretty, too. She had her mother’s face. Her mother’s eyes. Her mother’s copper curls and cautious composure. Like mother, like daughter, and a career at the Ministry was supposed to be her future.
She mostly considered herself a good student. A model student, even: she always sat in the back, buried in books, blending into the background, sucking the end of her eagle-feather quill and taking in every word like a sponge. She was never late, never disturbed the lesson, and never made a mess. She always got top marks and was never distracted. She hadn’t missed a single class in all her years of school.
Yes, she was a good daughter, the kind most parents would be proud to have. Hers certainly were. They admired her quiet intelligence, the way she kept to herself, caused no fuss, and never even once lost a single house point.
She did everything by the book, for she had been taught that defying authority was like standing barefoot in a thunderstorm, waving a metal rod at the sky, begging the gods to smite you – and she did not want the gods to smite her, and so she kept her head down, did as she was told, and disappeared into the crowd. She made sure she was just another face. Just another student. Too forgettable to be a favourite, too faceless to be bullied, too faint to befriend.
Yes, there was a time, before any of this, that if you’d gone around asking people about her, they’d only frown and perhaps say, ‘Isn’t she one of Cho Chang’s friends?’
And she was.
Cho Chang had come crashing into her life like a Bludger to the face, that autumn. They were housemates – dormmates, even – and she had been around her and her group of friends quite a few times in the year before. So it wasn’t as though they’d only just met … but they hadn’t really ever talked. Not until Cedric. Not until Cho, wild-eyed and haunted by his death, had to cry herself to sleep each night. Not until all of her friends turned their backs on her, and she clung to Marietta, desperate and alone.
Marietta had dropped everything for her in return. For Cho who wept and raged and loved and cared with her whole heart. Cho, who pulled Marietta out of the shadows, out of the classroom, and into stinky pubs, to forbidden meetings, whispering words of war.
Dumbledore’s Army.
That was Cho’s way of saying ‘thanks’, begging her to join with her beady eyes and her sad smile, coaxing her.
‘It’ll be fun,’ she’d said – promised! – but Marietta thought it was about as fun as cleaning a dirty cauldron with her tongue.
Still, she came. She hated it – hated how everyone spoke about fighting with fiery fervour, hated how they all took Potter at face-value and looked at him as if he was their Messiah, hated how Cho’s cheeks flushed whenever her eyes made contact with Potter’s – but she came. Because Cho had asked her to, and Marietta couldn’t say no to tears.
So she promised she’d keep coming, even if that meant listening to Potter shout about war and You-Know-Who and how ‘the Ministry lies!’ like the self-righteous, spotlight-starved ‘saviour’ he was. Even if it meant watching them all ready themselves to set the world on fire, expecting everyone to be grateful for the warmth. But Marietta didn’t want the warmth. She didn’t want to duel. She didn’t want to fight.
She didn’t want to change the world. She just wanted silence. She just wanted her mother to keep her job and for everything to go back to normal.
She had told Cho this, once, that night she’d set her sleeve on fire.
‘Just once more, Marietta, please,’ her friend countered, voice trembling, eyes already wet with fresh tears. ‘We’re learning real stuff, and Harry says –’
Harry says.
Harry says.
That was the problem, wasn’t it? Harry said a lot of things. None of it was true, but they believed him anyway, hung onto his every word like it was Gospel. Cho included. Blushing, sighing, hanging back to see him alone. Repeating his words for days. They were all brainwashed.
But not Marietta.
Marietta believed her family. Believed the Prophet; she needed to believe it. She needed to believe that Harry Potter wasn’t special, wasn’t right, wasn’t important in any way. She needed him to be wrong. Because if he was wrong, then maybe she could still go home and have tea with her mother and sleep through the night and pretend none of this had ever happened, and everything would be all right.
And Marietta wanted – needed – it all to be all right.
And so it was only ever a matter of time before what happened would happen. It would be foolish to think there was ever another way out.
She didn’t do it out of hatred. Sure, she despised Potter and wanted his reckless rhetoric halted, but she cared about the rest of them. Classmates. Housemates. Cho. Children and teenagers with wide smiles and big dreams who just drifted down the wrong path, much like herself. She didn’t hate them.
Didn’t do it out of spite.
She didn’t want to hurt anyone.
She didn’t want to play the hero or be the villain of the story. Didn’t do it for gold or glory.
She just … crumbled. And broke. And stood in front of the office of the most terrifying toad in all of teaching history for seven minutes before she raised her hand to knock.
And when she did, it trembled.
This was not how she wanted to be remembered.