April 30th, 1888 — Crouch Home, Bartonburg

It had been two days since Ben had been able to walk out of the Ministry, and in the intervening two days... nothing had happened. Which was good, on the one hand, since he had been worried that he would have an irate and possibly unscrupulous former auror knocking down his door. On the subject of Miss Scrimgeour, however, it was rather ominous, and the longer they continued this sort of stasis, the more restless Ben felt. His latest interlude at the Ministry was more than enough for Ben to let Aldous take the lead on this whole matter, but he was beginning to wonder if Aldous had really taken him seriously or not. He'd been staying at home with his brothers over the weekend — something he typically objected to simply on principle but which given recent events seemed prudent even to Ben — but by Monday morning, he was beginning to wonder whether he ought to move back in to Excalibur and do his best to pretend none of this had ever happened.

Except he still didn't have any response from Miss Scrimgeour. It was possible that her father wouldn't have known where to look for him after he vacated his room at the club, but an owl ought to have been able to redirect any letters she'd sent him in the meantime. Something had happened to her — and at this rate it seemed unlikely that he was ever going to find out what.

Until the morning paper was delivered, at any rate. Ben had been sulking over a cup of coffee at the table (he spent most of the time that he spent in his brothers' home sulking for one reason or another), but sat up straight when he caught a glimpse of the front page. "That's her! That's the girl!" he declared, leaning in to read the headline. "I told you she was missing!"

Aldous Crouch / open to Roman Crouch if you like!

  

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Aldous had expected very little from life. He would reach his thirties, find a bride, produce an heir or two, and work a respected Ministry of Magic job until he died. It was not, perhaps, the most exciting future, but it was one with which the wizard had been very content. One he would have had, were Reuben not such a troublemaker!

The days since he had all but sprung his youngest brother from prison had seen Aldous turning over solutions in his head—not to that same brother, but to the missing Miss Scrimgeour he had evidently been trying to save. None had come to mind, and he had avoided saying as much to Reuben lest his brother find some other, more reckless option.

“And I believed you,” he reminded his brother calmly at the breakfast table, even before looking up from his freshly poured tea to see the paper Reuben indicated. “Believed you and, no less, agreed to help you—though I would wager the auror’s office is on it, if this is what’s in the papers.”

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— Aldous walks with a cane and pronounced limp as the result of a splinching accident. —

— graphics by lady ❤ —

Ben couldn't really argue with Aldous there. If it was coming out in the paper on Monday morning, there was a chance that the aurors office had already been working on it all weekend, unbeknownst to anyone in the Crouch home. It was hardly as though they would have had any reason to suspect that Ben had a vested interest in whether or not the subject was under investigation, and they didn't generally go out of their way to telegraph the movements of law enforcement officers to the general public.

He was hungry for details, but he didn't want to seem as though he was too eager to grab the paper up off the table. He was, after all, still trying to pretend as though nothing at all had happened between the two of them, and although he didn't seriously think that Aldous believed him, he was planning to keep up the charade as long as he could. Mostly, he just wanted to avoid if all possible being put to direct questioning regarding the whole Ireland interlude; he'd learned from having had to confess it to Art that it didn't really play in a good light for him, and that was with Art.

Reaching out, he nudged the corner of the paper over so that it was facing the corner of the table, so that he could lean in and skim the article. He had to roll his eyes at the quote from Mrs. Scrimgeour — was she really so oblivious as to think the only thing her daughter was getting up to was spending evenings and nights with 'friends'? He was willing to wager that no one in the Scrimgeour family would have included him in their definition of the word, so they either had no idea what Miss Scrimgeour was really doing, or else were pretending ignorance for the sake of their reputations. Either would have been likely under normal circumstances, but given that the girl might very well have been dead by now, it seemed a little crass to care about something as thin as a lady's reputation when the true information could have helped find her.

"Do you think they're investigating her father?" Ben asked, a hint of nerves underlying his tone. He still thought Argus Scrimgeour had something to do with all of this, but he knew he couldn't prove anything — particularly not with a 'bad vibe' from a few curt letters and the word of a possibly hysterical teenager.

  

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He paused for a moment, thoughtful. The whole reason he knew about the matter was because Reuben had taken investigating Argus Scrimgeour as an ill-advised personal project. While the terms of his brother’s Unbreakable Vow would keep him from using polyjuice to sneak into the Ministry offices again, there was still a world of foolish possibility out there that Reuben could enjoy given the right incentive. Even were it not for that, Aldous had said he would help—to what extent, the wizard still was not sure—and so lying would hardly be keeping his word!

“It seems doubtful that they would. The man moved Heaven and Earth to retrieve her when she was lost—” Aldous had conducted his own mini-investigation on the young lady in question “—and is a retired auror. What motive could he be seen to have to do her harm?”

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— Aldous walks with a cane and pronounced limp as the result of a splinching accident. —

— graphics by lady ❤ —

The mere fact that the man had once been involved in law enforcement did nothing to assuage Ben's worries regarding the man. He'd had both positive and negative experiences with aurors in the past, and while generally speaking they were capable and trustworthy wizards (and witches), they did seem a bit more likely to have metaphorical sticks lodged up their asses. It didn't seem terribly far-fetched to believe that Mr. Scrimgeour had gotten angry with his daughter following some bit of trouble she'd gotten into, particularly given what he knew of Miss Scrimgeour's propensity for getting into trouble. He wasn't sure how to articulate that to Aldous, though, since he was still trying his best to keep his involvement with the missing girl — and particularly the shenanigans in Ireland — from coming to light. There was no sense in being punished for something that probably wasn't relevant anyway, which Ben assumed it wasn't; there wasn't any way for her father to have found out exactly what had gone on that night when she'd slipped away with him, unless she'd told him, which seemed unlikely.

He was very briefly tempted to respond sarcastically. The words well, I don't know, what motive did you have for sending me to Canada? were on his tongue, but he bit them back. Sarcasm wouldn't endear Aldous to him, especially after this weekend, and Ben still needed all the help he could get.

"They don't get along," he said instead, vaguely and sulkily. He didn't actually know many of the details of the pair's relationship, and was fully expecting it to come up at some point in the conversation and for Aldous to call him on his bullshit reasoning. After his last hunch had seen him thrown in a Ministerial holding cell, his older brother likely wouldn't be inclined to trust another. "I think she moved to her aunt's or whatever to get away from him."

  

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Aldous managed to restrain an undignified snort, but both his eyebrows raised pointedly in his brother's direction. The same, to an outsider, might have been said of the two of them, but that was neither here nor there in the moment.

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— Aldous walks with a cane and pronounced limp as the result of a splinching accident. —

— graphics by lady ❤ —

The meaning behind the look was not lost on Ben, and he frowned back at Aldous. He wanted to argue that this was different, but couldn't come up with any very concrete reasons why it would be. He might say that this was different because, while Aldous might have been stricter than Ben would have preferred in an older sibling, he wasn't insane, like some people's families apparently were. He had no proof, however, that Argus Scrimgeour was one of those people, aside from his gut feeling that there was something sinister about the man. He doubted, too, that bringing up other wealthy, established families that Ben considered insane — like the Pendergasts — would do much more than derail the conversation from the topic at hand. He could, instead, have tried to point out that there was a significant gap in what was expected of women her age and men (of any age), and that Miss Scrimgeour had done plenty of things that might make her father particularly angry, but he couldn't go down that particular path without telling Aldous the details of their little jaunt through Ireland, which he was still avoiding at all costs.

Maybe it was hard to think of articulate reasons the two scenarios were different was that deep down, they really weren't much different. If an outsider had speculated that Ben lived in Excalibur because he wanted to get away from his older brothers, they wouldn't have been wrong.

"She seemed scared of what he'd do, the last time she wrote," Ben tried instead, changing tack slightly. "And I thought she was probably being melodramatic, but then she disappeared the day he came to see her. That can't be coincidence."

  

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Aldous nodded. Even if Mr. Scrimgeour had not been involved in his daughter’s disappearance, if she was actually concerned about him, that spoke—if nothing else—to his character. Aldous had had little enough to do with the wizard in question personally, but would consider the man’s daughter a good source.

“Are her letters something that could be brought to the aurors and investigators in question?” Aldous asked. It seemed more tactful than ‘did you try to proposition her by owl’, and would produce the same vein of answer. “It could prove to be the push they need to consider Scrimgeour seriously.”

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— Aldous walks with a cane and pronounced limp as the result of a splinching accident. —

— graphics by lady ❤ —

"I — er, I think so," Ben said, trying to wrack his brain to remember exactly what had been in those letters. It wasn't as though they'd been sending each other pornography, or anything, but Aldous' question was a valid one all the same. It might raise some questions if, for instance, she'd signed her letters Rebel instead of Miss Scrimgeour, but now he really couldn't remember. Either way, she wouldn't have said anything explicit about what had happened in Ireland, would she? It didn't seem like the sort of thing anyone would want written down in ink, so it seemed unlikely she would have put it in at all.

He probably shouldn't have been worried about getting himself into trouble with his brother when there was a girl who was missing and possibly dead, but — well, he couldn't help but want to be cautious, after the whole Canada fiasco.

  

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It was not the confident response Aldous had hoped for—but then again, it wasn’t a ‘no’ either. That was something.

“Gather them, all of the letters that reference ‘Mr. Scrimgeour’ or ‘My father’,” he directed. “If she does not resurface in a day or two, we will take them to the authorities.”

We. He had promised his brother he would help, and Aldous was a man of his word.

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— Aldous walks with a cane and pronounced limp as the result of a splinching accident. —

— graphics by lady ❤ —

Aldous might have meant the inclusive pronoun as a comforting gesture of solidarity, Ben supposed, but it was hard to read it in such a light. It seemed more likely that Aldous was trying to impress upon him the importance of waiting and acting only under his older brother's guidance, instead of rushing back to the Ministry to confront the aurors himself. While it wasn't an unreasonable fear for Aldous to have, given recent events, the Ministry was the last place that Ben wanted to be (particularly the aurors' office). He would have agreed either way, but he did feel as though he was being chastised again, which made his tone rather sulky when he replied.

"Yeah, okay. I'll go see what I've got this afternoon," Ben agreed, before turning his attention back to his cup of coffee. It seemed Aldous was done talking about Miss Scrimgeour, at least for the moment, and Ben didn't have anything else he wanted to talk about with his brother over breakfast.

  

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