June 22nd, 1892 — Crouch Home, Swallowbury
Crouch’
Five days.
The near week of space shouldn’t have bothered her as terribly as it did, for she was already nearly certain what his answer would be. The countless promises they’d both made to try and find happiness together was the only evidence he had to base his decision against. Nevermind that neither of them had ever truly put in the effort such a promise required, nor had either of them ever really meant the promise at all. When all he had was the past to consider, it was obvious what was to come.
She tried to remind herself that his continued absence wasn’t necessarily an ending to any romantic aspect of their marriage. Additional time to think had definitely proved prudent to her, for she was now keenly aware of how difficult working through their issues would be. Even despite her wanting to try, it didn’t mean anything fruitful would be the result. More than that, she had grown somewhat convinced that becoming friends was a better goal for them than happy lovers. Being able to be friendly towards one another, to chat over dinner and play games with their daughter (for more children would be entirely off the table if they decided to remain friends instead) would be the best thing they could do for Nora. A happy home filled with laughter and their mutual love for her could be enough.
Except, just as she had become aware of how difficult it would be to truly forgive one another and move forward, she’d also realized how desperately she desired a happy marriage. Melody wanted more mornings of waking up besides him, his smile shining brighter than the sun streaming through the window. She wanted more children, even if pregnancy was difficult and uncomfortable. She wanted him. Melody hadn’t lied when she told him it was him that she had dreamt of for all those years. It would just be a hard mountain to climb now to get there.
Melody had quietly asked that they talk after supper once Nora had been put to bed and their staff gone for the day when he had finally come home. The conversation they were to have was one that required their full attention, and she was certain one or both of them would become emotional at some point. Still, when everyone had left for the day and she’d settled into her chair at the table to his immediate right, she couldn’t help but wish they continued to avoid this altogether.
Ben had broken the silence first with a question about her quick flip in thinking. Just last week she’d been too tense and, quite frankly, angry to discuss anything remotely close to their being together, and now she was determined to try and fix things if he wanted to, too. “I’m still angry and confused.” Melody began uncomfortably, her hands folded on the table. “I can’t seem to understand why you remained resolved to withholding information even after seeing how stressed it made me. I know it would’ve been a difficult conversation and a lot of it I’m sure we’d both rather forget … it’s just … it’s still a part of what happened to us. I guess … I guess I just don’t understand the decision making there and that’s something I have to come to terms with.”
Pausing to breathe, she looked from her hands to him. “But, at the end of the day, we’re still married. We’re still married despite all the conversations of divorce and how close we came to it. Don’t we owe it to one another to seriously, genuinely try at least once? To not just say it, but to actually follow through?”
Ben had rehearsed a million versions of this conversation, but that didn't mean he felt ready to have it. He had returned home mostly because he was tired: tired of being away, tired of imagining what she might say, tired of having this lingering unresolved over his head. He'd promised himself not to respond in haste or emotion to anything she said; that had only gotten them into trouble in the past. As a result, though, by the time Ben was ready to respond to what she'd said first, she had continued on to three or four other things he probably ought to address. He knew he wouldn't be able to speak to all of them without interruption. He had to consider carefully what he actually wanted to say, and let the rest go.
He let a moment pass and took a long breath.
"We owe each other something. I'm still trying to work out what," he said evenly. He paused to see if she would interject, and when she didn't he continued, "I didn't tell you because if the roles were reversed, I wouldn't have wanted to know."
Part of the disconnect here was that the roles could never have been reversed, of course. If Ben had coerced her into marrying him, he wouldn't want to know because he didn't know that he could live with that information — knowing that deep down, he was that kind of person. Clearly, Melody lived with that every day.
Rediscovering what she had done had broken Melody more than the initial fall out had. In retrospect, she was able to recognize every mistake of that night and how wrong she'd been about him. Had she trusted him and explained the situation while he was sober he might've been willing to elope regardless. Ben might not have needed the boost that the potion provided if it was meant to save her from ruin. But, she hadn't trusted him and had ruined his life, and he thought she wanted to forget that.
She folded and unfolded her hands as she fought to gain control of her thoughts. If they were to have a genuine conversation then there could be no emotional outbursts. They had to remain level and focused on actively listening to one another. "I don't want to forget what I did." Melody replied. "It's one of those things that you carry with you, that you remember as a reminder to never make a mistake of that caliber again. I don't mean that using a potion on anyone has ever been a thought outside of that night ... I just ... it's not something I would want to forget, is all." She finished a bit awkwardly and was unable to continue meeting his eyes.
Ben couldn't relate. He had made a lot of mistakes in his life; his brother could attest to that. Still, he had never made a mistake of the caliber they were discussing now. Even as Ben replayed some of his biggest blunders in his head, he could defend most of them. His execution had been off on a lot of things, but his intentions had almost always been good. He put himself into bad situations to help people, when he could. He made sacrifices, though not ones that always turned out for the best. His mistakes were in line with what he supposed his character to be. If he had ever done something like she had done — taking away someone's agency to save herself — it would have meant redefining what he knew about himself. He wouldn't have wanted to live with the knowledge that he was capable of that, even under stress.
Which led to one of the bigger issues: he supposed he had never forgiven Melody for what she'd done that night. He didn't know if he ever would.
"Do you think you trust me now?" He asked seriously, frowning at her.
"Yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt." Melody immediately answered, her tone sincere.
Ben wasn't sure he liked how quickly she'd answered, but he supposed he had given her nearly a week to think it through and be sure of her answer.
He sighed. "I don't. Not yet."
Melody expected as much. Whenever conflict arose he always thought of the worse case scenario when it came to her. He thought she'd harm herself or the baby, or that she'd disappear into the abyss. Ben believed her to be dramatic and impulsive with major decisions, but she hadn't given him much reason to believe otherwise. Melody had seriously intended on abandoning her life to be destitute in a foreign country. She had forced him to elope with her because she wasn't sure he could be persuaded otherwise. She showed time and time again that she was irrational.
Except when it came to Nora.
With Nora, Melody had played it as safe as possible. She had returned home when she realized she was pregnant, had sought out proper medical care, had followed all her healer's advice to the letter. Melody put herself through hell for Nora's sake. Surely, Ben trusted her in regards to their daughter?
"Do you trust me to keep our daughter healthy and safe?" She asked, not brave enough yet to touch on why he distrusted her so.
Ben shifted his weight in his chair. "Yeah, I do," he admitted. "I didn't always. But when it matters, yeah."
"The rest can come in time then." She hoped it did, too. Even if all they ever were was friends, she hoped he would learn to trust her. She hoped to one day be worthy of it.
Ben took a breath. This was one of the things he'd kept coming back to, over the time he'd been alone at the club and trying to think through things. It would come in time, maybe, but how much time? And what would their quality of life be in the mean time? They couldn't just stay together for Nora's sake and think that everything would eventually work itself out. There had to be something between them worth building on.
It had occurred to him that it was probably impossible to know at this point whether the pair of them could ever have been happy in isolation. They were both always thinking about what their choices would mean for Nora, so they weren't ever fully free to make an unfettered choice based on how they felt. Even before Nora, they had always been bogged down with other things. Melody had no other options except him, after her parents had disowned her. That had always loomed large in both their minds when they brought up things like the possibility of divorce.
He wished there was a way to know, unequivocally, whether the two of them even could be happy together, but there wasn't.
"We get caught in these patterns where we feel unhappy and we don't talk about it and eventually one of us blows up," Ben pointed out. "We can try again, but I don't want to fall back into that. I think we should put some sort of timeline on it. If we try, and we're not happy, then we stop before we have another big fight."
Melody was hesitant to put an exact timeline on this for a multitude of reasons, the foremost of them being the added pressure it would put on their fragile relationship. Should they say there was a six month time limit to happiness and after reaching the five month mark they were still making slow, but minimal progress one of them could decide to simply give up then. What would be the point of pressing on if things were to be mostly the same as they were now? More than that, who was to say that a major breakthrough wouldn't happen at seven or eight months?
"What if we planned to have more talks like this instead? Rather than having a strict date to be tied to we could keep talking and if we didn't think it was worth continuing we could decide that then?" She suggested. Honestly, Melody was surprised he was willing to try at all. She had prepared herself for everything short of him asking for a divorce during the past few days.
Ben could understand why she was hesitant, but he wasn't sure leaving things entirely open-ended was a good idea, either. Every conversation like this that they had was another opportunity for someone to make a terrible decision. Ben was working very hard to think through his words before he spoke this time, so that he didn't end up somewhere he hadn't intended to be. Obviously the night that he'd been drunk, things had gotten out of hand. He'd been unhappy for a long time going into that conversation, but after things became emotional they'd ended up in bed together. If they had one of these sorts of conversations every few months or even every few weeks, what if they ended the same way?
Still, if he was going to agree to give things another chance, he couldn't reasonably turn down a request to have more earnest conversations. Ben wavered.
"If we do end up deciding on something else, it would be better for Nora if we got it all sorted when she was too young to understand," he pointed out.
It almost felt like he was looking for a reason not to try, like he was searching for an out and just hadn't found the right phrasing yet. Ben was so focused on the negatives of their situation that Melody began to wonder why they were having this conversation at all. After all, she'd already given him the out, had already made the offer of being only friends, and he hadn't accepted it.
"Nora isn't even a year old yet, we have time enough to know where we stand before she understands the differences between a loving marriage and one of only friends." Melody pointed out.
Ben sighed. She had a point that he couldn't argue. There wasn't really anything else to say, logically, except to agree to give it another attempt and see what happened. He was still anxious about that, though. What made this different from any previous conversation where they'd said they were going to start over? They'd been here before, and it had never actually worked. He wanted this to work, but he was having a hard time relying on faith to see them through. He wanted there to be something specific he could point to that was different about this time, some reason that it would work when all the other attempts hadn't.
He shifted in his chair so that he was facing her, not just sitting next to her and having the conversation in parallel. He leaned one elbow against the back of the chair and his head on his hand. "How do you want to do this? Trying."
The actual act of trying wasn't one Melody had given much thought to over the past week. She'd been concentrated on doing it, yes, but the actual logistics hadn't mattered as much when she was still mostly convinced it wouldn't happen. They'd been here before, after all, and without meaning to they hadn't followed through on any of the promises to fix things.
She turned in her chair in turn, their knees now touching as they faced one another fully. Her hands fell from the table and into her lap, her spine nearly rigid from both her corset and the tension. "I'm not sure," Melody answered genuinely. "We can't just jump in and suddenly act as though we're in love. It has to be sincere this time, I think. Maybe we should start by not avoiding one another? What were you thinking?"
Ben glanced down at Melody's knee when she brushed it against his. After a beat, he dropped his free hand down to rest on her knee, while he continued leaning his cheek against the other hand. He looked off to the side and considered. He didn't think 'just not avoiding each other' would be enough. The pair of them had a lot of baggage to work past, and because of the way their relationship had begun they'd never set expectations for a real partnership between the pair of them. They couldn't expect to fall into it by chance. They also couldn't just sit here and pull rules for themselves out of thin air. They needed to trust each other first — well, he needed to trust her. They probably needed to get to know each other better in order to build the sort of relationship they wanted.
This was a double-edged sword, though. Ben could take her to visit his childhood home and tell her all sorts of things about his life that she'd never known before, but then if things went south again, he would only have better armed her against him.
But he had to give her something. He had to risk corrupting something in order to give her a chance to earn his trust. Otherwise, they'd still be stuck here in three months, or six.
He looked back at her and rubbed his thumb against her knee. "I think we should take a holiday."