Melody said she still loved him, and all Ben could think was yeah, right, because this is what love is supposed to feel like.

"I didn't give up," he said, voice tight. Not that saying it would make any difference whatsoever, when she had apparently already made up her mind about it all. Everything she was doing was proof that she cared — everything she was doing being, apparently, lying around feeling sick — while everything he was doing was proof that he'd given up already. "But I don't know how to prove it to you. I don't know what else you want from me. Because I can't just — not fucking talk to anyone ever again because it might make you insecure," he said tensely. He retrieved his shirt from the floor and started to pull it over his injured arm, not looking at her anymore. "I need a life beyond just waiting around for you to say something to me. And I'm sorry if your whole life is just staying in your room feeling miserable, but — but you don't get to take it out on me because I'm not sick."

  

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MJ made this <3

"What have you done to try?" She pressed. Ben made her promise to write to him — a promise she had fulfilled — and his letters soon dried up. "I'm genuinely asking, Ben, because maybe I'm just blind. Maybe I haven't noticed the effort made. Maybe I slept through a conversation about my husband possibly dying in a duel. What have you done to try like you said you would?"

Her stomach was rolling again now, bile was high up in her throat. But, if she threw up all over the floor maybe then he would understand she wasn't intentionally avoiding him. Melody wasn't staying in her room feeling miserable because she wanted to, but because she couldn't fucking move without vomiting.

"I didn't mean to confront you over the article like this — at all, really. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that." Her questions over it remained, but those couldn't be answered now. She wanted to have a conversation about it initially, it was why she took the fucking potion in the first place so that she might be rested enough to think properly. "What do you want from me, Ben?"

  

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beautiful set by mj

"Right now?" he responded harshly. "I just want some fucking space."

It was a cop-out, and he knew it, but it wasn't a lie. He'd been up since before dawn, and he'd dueled someone that morning; he was tired. He would have been tired regardless, but he especially didn't have the energy for this. He didn't have the energy to recount everything he'd done since the end of January and try to defend every action to her. He didn't have the energy to try and convince her of something she'd already decided she didn't believe, for all she said she was genuinely asking — her very next sentence belied that one, because if she was genuinely asking she wouldn't be making passive aggressive comments about sleeping through conversations about duels. And she'd apologized for the way she'd brought up the Witch Weekly article, but that didn't mean anything. It didn't mean that she felt any better about allowing him to go talk to other people. It didn't mean that she trusted him. It just meant that she realized at least that piece of her narrative couldn't be used to keep spinning herself into the role of victim. Confronting him over the article just didn't fit the act she was putting on, so she wanted it expunged from the record. This whole thing had always just been an act, and Ben was tired of trying to keep it up.

  

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MJ made this <3