April 7th, 1891 - Bartonburg North

He’d gone back to Fitz’s the night before, because he couldn’t even think of how to begin to process this. He’d paced around, no doubt alarming the butler — who probably had not been prepared to host Arthur for this long. (Longer, even, if his home was really gone.) He thought about going to the casino. He thought about going back to Ester’s. Finally he decided he had to try to find her, because — well, she couldn’t just be done.

Or she could. He had told her she was better off without him. She had the right to decide she was over this. But he wanted to hear it from her, directly, straight-up, that she was leaving him — he wanted to see Gwenog and get his things and find out what he could do to fix this. It felt impossible to fix the gambling; it felt equally impossible to let Dezzie fall out of his life.

She had to be at her mother’s house. There was nowhere else she would go, he thought, and — if she wasn’t there he’d have to figure something else out, but it made sense.

He was probably feeling a little manic.

He waited until the next morning, apparated to Hogsmeade dressed in some clothes in his size that he’d left in Fitz’s guest room closet at… some point. He knocked on the door to the Collins house. He watched the blinds in the window over the door draw upwards, saw one of the maids, watched the blinds go back down. The door didn’t open. He knocked again. He was not admitted. He waited five minutes. He knocked a third time. He knew they were in there, or at least that someone who knew where Desdemona was was in there, but no one was opening the door.

He didn’t know what to do. There was a part of him that wanted to give up and leave, a part of him that wanted to slam his fist on the door and start yelling, and a part of him that was just — utterly defeated, by the way he’d fucked up his life so badly.

He sat on the porch of her parent’s house and put his head in his hands.

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He could have sat there forever, might have sat there forever, a monument to his own mistakes that had gotten them here. He sighed and tilted his head upwards as if to evaluate the weather, flying conditions, maybe he could bury himself in Quidditch and pretend there was nothing wrong with him —

Except there she was, above him, on the balcony. Arthur’s breath caught in his chest. He didn’t move, just stayed watching her, expression caught somewhere between broken and betrayed and apologetic; he’d had all these ideas of what he wanted to say, but now he was looking at the reality of her, and all of it felt inadequate.

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She turned back inside and Art got to his feet. He didn’t know what to do — couldn’t apparate to the overhang because he was fairly confident Perpetua had a spell against it, couldn’t force her to talk to him, couldn’t find the words. In this absence of having something to do, he turned to the front door, balled up his fist, and slammed his hand against the door in a knock that did about as much to hurt his hand as it did to make sound.

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Art stood there with his balled up fist against the door for what seemed like forever, waiting for something to happen. And finally the butler opened the door and gave him a look, and while Arthur was not exactly fond of that he knew now wasn’t the time to be particularly offended by it.

The door swung shut behind him. He swallowed back what he wanted to say, which was You left me. Because he’d left too, hadn’t he? Somebody had left somebody and now they didn’t have their house and he didn’t know where any of their things were.

“Desdemona,” he said.

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“I always come back,” Art said, because it was the only thing he could think to say. This had only happened once before — or, this had only happened once before with them. This had happened countless times when he was younger, and he’d always come back, but she wouldn’t know that, and she wasn’t meeting his eyes, and maybe Ben was right, and it was her decision whether or not she wanted to be done, and she was done.

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“Yeah,” Arthur said, because what else could he say to that? Yes, he had let her down, yes, he was continually fucking up, and — maybe he could get it back together now. Maybe this was what he needed to turn around. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“Did you — the house,” Arthur said. The house. They were going to make a poor show of being married if they didn’t have a house.

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So she had gotten rid of the house, not just changed the locks — Arthur’s mouth went dry and he felt his stomach drop out from under him. He actually faltered where he stood, for a moment. It was not that he’d never been somewhere like this before — he had, obviously — but he had never expected it.

There were a hundred things he wanted to ask her but he was not sure he could stomach the answer to any of them. They ranged from where are my things? to is it over, then? and all of them were questions he needed answered eventually, but Merlin, he was just stuck on I could hardly keep it.

The lease was broken and their house was gone. Unconsciously, Art reached to touch his wedding ring, and folded his hands nervously in front of him.

”What do you want me to do?” he asked, sounding more helpless than combative — he could fix this, maybe, with time, but he was in the thick of it now and could not see a way out.

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Arthur actually flinched, physically, at the sound of her laughter, shoulders hunching upwards in a self-protective gesture. ”I — I can fix it,” he said, although he had no idea how to — any ideas he’d had about fixing it had gone up in flames the moment he found out that she had broken the lease.

Ten galleons is okay, he remembered Ben saying, but if it was ten galleons and if Art’s head still didn’t fucking work right and they also didn’t have a house, then — what the fuck was he supposed to do?

”I can fix it,” he repeated, desperation leaking in.

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