Marlene Lupin is plotting her revenge (on_the_wall) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2009-04-03 22:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! [1980-04] april, kingsley shacklebolt, marlene lupin (née mckinnon) |
Who: Marlene McKinnon and Kingsley Shacklebolt
When: 3 April, 1980, 7pm
Where: The King Street Diner in Dundee
What: Kingsley and Marlene meet up before it's Resistance Radio time.
Rating:
Status: Complete
It hadn't been too hard for Kingsley to find the King Street Diner in Dundee. They had a number of very detailed maps back at the Gairloch campsite and he simply studied them thoroughly and found a back alley to Apparate into. The diner was just around the corner. The days had been getting longer and he was in a predominately Muggle area, so Kingsley was hiding in plain sight, dressed in Muggle clothes - a rather bright tshirt under his charity shop leather jacket and a pair of sunglasses on. He entered the diner after a short stop to pick up a Muggle newspaper and spied Marlene sitting alone in a booth not too far from the door. He gave the waitress a little wave, indicating he was meeting someone, and slipped into the seat across from her. "What's Dorcas' middle name," he asked immediately. "Wilhelmina Sunburst," Marlene answered immediately, then turned a question back on him. "Hufflepuff vs Gryffindor match your last year in school. Two players crashed into one another, and one of them scored a goal completely on accident because of the collision. Everyone who was at that game remembers. Who were the players, and what happened after the match?" "Leitch and Parkin," Kingsley remembered, grinning at the thought. "Leitch started crying but she was faking, and when Parkin went to apologise to her, Leitch gave her Fwooper feathers." That had been a good one for Marlene to pick - everyone knew about the goal and the feathers, but not that Leitch had faked crying. "Mine wasn't the best question but yours assures me well enough that it's you." He relaxed a bit and leaned back in the booth. "Thanks for letting me do this, by the way." "People deserve to have their voices heard, especially now with those idiots running the media. If this helps you do that, then I want to do it," Marlene nodded, curling her legs up into her seat with her and leaning sideways against the wall, sipping the soda she'd ordered earlier. "Did you want food? I've got some chips coming if you want to pick through mine, but feel free to get whatever. They make great burgers here," she said, waving the waitress over to get her a refill. Burger. Kingsley hadn't even thought about it until then, that they were in an actual diner where he could order actual food. Real, greasy, delicious red meat between two buns with greasy, soggy chips and a nice cold pint. No, no pint, he told himself, but the rest of it. The waitress came over and after Marlene asked for her refill, Kingsley ordered the largest burger they had complete with grilled onions and a thick slice of cheese and a Coca-Cola to wash it all down. He was positively giddy, though he knew they had business to discuss. "Dunno how long your things normally go," he said to her, pulling the notecards with their message out of his jacket pocket. "But we've got a lot to say." He frowned a moment at them. "Maybe it's too long." Marlene turned the notecards towards herself, scanning over what Kingsley had written down. "Don't worry about it -- long is good. We have the security to have all the time you need to take," she explained. "We've got some other stuff to cover too, but it'll be good to have another voice around. They keep killing off our reporters," she frowned, stirring the ice in her empty glass. "Oh! That reminds me. You need a bird name. Not Turtledove though. It's retired." Kingsley sat a moment, not sure how to take her comments. "Sorry about Turtledove," he said, squirming very slightly in his seat. "Whoever it was." There was another slight pause, then he went on, a bit quieter. "And actually, I'm just planning on using my real name. Gives us more credibility and it's not like our faces aren't up all over Diagon last I heard." Of course, that meant he couldn't come up with a fun codename. "Though I could still be Kingfisher." She debated for a moment whether or not to tell Kingsley, seeing as how she'd known that Dedalus had been under the radar as an Order member, but reconsidered once she'd recalled where he had worked. "Turtledove was Dedalus Diggle. I think he was a secretary in the DMLE back before everything happened," she explained quietly. "BUT! Kingfisher is great. A little obvious, but since you're going with your actual name on the air too... which reminds me, would you want a voice changing potion then? Because if you're using your real name, you probably shouldn't, since that'll maybe help keep them from knowing the rest of us use them, if that makes sense." Kingsley froze, completely in shock and not even processing the second part of what Marlene said right away. "Dedalus?" Dedalus was dead? He immediately pictured Dedalus' cheery face sitting only a few desks away from him, as it had the past three years and his heart sank. "Oh, boy. He- ah. Wow." His thoughts went to Gina - he wasn't sure if what his partner and Dedalus had was considered a thing or not, but it wasn't nothing. He finally processed the rest of what she said and decided he needed to follow her lead. They were there for business, and there would be time to mourn later. "No, it makes sense," he said to her. "And I don't want one. It's more effective if I don't hide anything, and it isn't like I've really got anything to lose by doing it." Marlene sat quietly for a moment to give Kingsley a chance to grieve, feeling terrible for having to be the one to break the news of another death to him again. Instead she remained quiet as the waitress returned with their drinks and food, picking through her chips before continuing on with their plans. "Alright. I wrote out the spell we were thinking of using so that you can't say anything outside of meetings with us if you want to look it over and make sure it's okay -- it's totally not because I don't trust you, we just don't want to chance what might happen if you end up getting captured and vereteserumed or anything of the sort, just to be safe. I know you'll have bigger problems if that happens and I hope to god it doesn't, but this is still a big just in case." Kingsley already had two bites out of his burger (which was delicious, by the way) by the time Marlene started talking. "Mmrmph," he said, putting up a finger for her to wait while he swallowed the food in his mouth. "Like a 'nothing you see or hear here can be repeated' type of thing? S'understandable." While they were both fighting for the same thing, the vigilantes and the former Ministry were not the same group and secrecy was still very important to them - Kingsley understood that. "Can I have a look?" "Sure thing," she nodded and slid the piece of parchment across the table after glancing up to be sure that there weren't any muggles in the area. Once she saw the coast was clear, she removed her wand from her pocket and cast Muffalato, "just in case." While Kingsley was busy looking over the spell specifics, Marlene returned to the script that Kingsley had written out. It momentarily caught her off guard when she reached Dorcas's name in the script, rereading that section a few times in hopes that it would mention who it had been that had killed her, but wasn't surprised that it hadn't specified. The rest of the log looked good... until Marlene reached a section at the end that caused her to roll her eyes. "Mhm,"ing as she pulled a pen from her pocket, not wanting to whip out a quill in a muggle restaraunt. "I'm just going to make a quick little edit for time here." "This looks good," Kingsley said about the spell. It seemed to just say that he couldn't (intentionally or not) reveal anything about the people who were there. He was glad, actually, since it gave him an excuse to not have to tell Rufus, yet it didn't take away his ability to tell any of the other things he knew if there was ever a real need. He felt a bit bad, to be honest, that he wanted to keep things from Rufus, his boss and their leader, but they disagreed fundamentally on the subject of vigilantes (not that Rufus knew, since Kingsley kept quiet) and Kingsley felt it better he didn't know. He simply tried not to feel disloyal. "But, um, an edit?" "Mmm. Yeaaah, this little bit at the end here?" Marlene replied, tapping her pen at the end of the paragraph. "About how other people shouldn't fight back against the Death Eaters just because it's dangerous, and that they should leave the fighting back to the "trained professionals?" Not gonna fly," she shook her head slightly, wrinkling up her nose. "I appreciate what you guys are doing and I know what you're trying to do, but you can't be everywhere at once anymore. Everybody needs to know how to fight back." Kingsley swallowed the food in his mouth and took a sip of his Coke to wash it down. "Fightin' back and going after them yourself are two real different things," he pointed out. "I appreciate what you lot are doing but it's our official stance and even if it weren't, I'm sure as hell not encouraging people to fight Death Eaters." "Well, this is our lot's official radio programme, and while I don't expect you to encourage it, that's kinda shit to use our stuff to tell us that what we're doing is wrong," Marlene replied, crossing the section out with her pen quite thoroughly before sliding the speech back across the table to Kingsley. "I know what the old Ministry's stance on vigilantes was. Don't encourage it. That's fine. But don't discourage it either, since the people who may or may not've done that in the past are kinda doing you guys a favour here." "It's also kinda shit to- no, forget it." He popped another chip in his mouth and swallowed it without even chewing. "We shouldn't argue with each other. I'll say we don't support going off and trying to take on Death Eaters yourself, but I'm not leaving it out completely." Marlene sat back in the booth, beginning to start rambling on about how the Ministry types weren't the ones who got to call the shots in this, that this was why they hadn't wanted them involved in the first place, and that this was Agnes's radio and they were doing it Agnes's way and Agnes's way involved not catering to the demands of The Man. She instead reached for her drink, finishing the rest of its contents until there was nothing but the obnoxious sound of the straw pulling in the very last drops of liquid from between the ice cubes and set her glass down. "Fine. But I want to see what you're going to say before it goes on the air." Kingsley shrugged. "All right, fine. Have you got a biro?" He started patting his sides and pulled one out of his pocket. "Never mind." He flipped the paper over and stuck the end of the pen in his mouth a moment, pulled it out, tapping the ballpoint pen on the table and sticking another chip into his mouth. "Ah." He wrote for a moment, then slid the speech back to Marlene. Remember that they're evil and dangerous, even to us trained professionals, so we can't condone up and trying to take them on yourself. If this wasn't acceptable to her, he'd just say what he wanted on the radio anyway since it was rather unfair for Marlene to invite them to say something but dictate what it was they could say, but he'd much rather reach a compromise if it were possible first. Marlene read it over a few times before replying, still not feeling completely supportive behind it but appreciating at least that he admitted that the Death Eaters were dangerous to everyone, even the "trained professionals." She passed the paper back over to Kingsley with a short nod. "I can work with that." She finished off the rest of her chips, fishing some muggle money out of her pocket and laid it on the table. "If you don't have any more questions, we can head out of here whenever you're set. But um. Favour first: I'm kinda shit with muggle money. My order's supposed to come out to 3.20. What coins would equal that much?" she asked sheepishly, feeling a little bit embarrassed that after all this time, she still didn't quite get it. "Ace," he said, then let out a laugh and counted 3.20 out of Marlene's money and pushed the rest back toward her. "S'not a problem at all." He popped the last chip in his mouth and pulled out his own wallet, counting out the money and setting it next to hers on the table. "All right," he said, grabbing his Coke for one last sip, "ready when you are." |