Arthur's chest constricted. Not because of the name, Dionisia Fisk — other than a vague knowledge of Fisks it did not mean anything to him — but because of what it represented. If Ben died tomorrow, if, Art was going to be responsible for reaching out to this woman, and he was not going to be able to, full stop. It was the cowardly thing and he knew it, but he wouldn't be able to. He took another step back, and wished he had a tree to lean on — something that could put pressure on him and make all of this feel less high-stakes.

"Valerian?" Art said, as if he'd ever clarified, catching on Ben's voice again and not knowing what to say, "Yeah, yeah he's good." And Art was going to have to get him to do it, that was another thing he'd have to do today — talk to Valerian and go to practice and write Selwyn and try to make some money and just everything, it all felt impossible, he could not possibly have enough time to do it.

Fucking November Crouch, why couldn't this all just be Macmillan talking shit, and never mind the duel itself, Art was not convinced he would make it to tomorrow at all.

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"Good," Ben said with a nod, his voice still sounding far away. It was good, having a good healer for something like this. It was objectively good, and his saying so was not a sign that he was worried or that he thought he was going to die tomorrow, or anything. Even so, he felt he ought to add: "Macmillan might need him. Not me." Just — in case either of them still needed to be convinced. At least one of them did, he knew, because that feeling was in the air in the garden, crackling in the empty space between their words like lightning, and Ben honestly didn't know if it was coming from him or from Art anymore. At least one of them was worried that Ben was going to die tomorrow, and maybe it was both of them, and Ben couldn't stop to figure out whether it was him or not because he was busy holding back this constant wave of white noise in his brain.

There was one thought that drifted into his mind, floating atop the wave of muddled panic that had subsumed everything else. He tried to push it away, but it rolled right back as though it was being pushed in by the tide. Trying to get rid of it was like fighting the ocean, so he had to do something else with it, and the only thing he could think to do with these intrusive thoughts if he couldn't force himself to ignore them was to externalize them.

"Hey, Art," he said, without looking at him. "I don't have to tell Melody about this, right?"

  

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Art was trying to get it together, trying to pull his to-do list into some semblance of something he could actually handle — and Ben sounded like he was on some other plane of being, and he should be worried about that, too, but all he could think was I should be able to do all this. He should be able to do all this, or he should be able to talk Ben out of the duel, and — both options seemed so impossible. His chest was still tight and he was trying to push through it, because at least he did not feel as underwater as he had at the boxing venue on Saturday.

And then Ben was asking about Melody and Art exhaled, needing to push air out of his lungs because Melody Crouch had not even begun to occur to him. "She doesn't know?" Art said, trying his best to keep his voice level; he wasn't off-kilter, he was Art and this was fine, he was fine, he could do this. But — maybe, probably, Melody actually should know.

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   Melody Crouch

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Art's voice may have been level, but it might as well have been an attack. It wasn't the vague reassurance that Ben had been hoping for, the response that would have allowed him to dismiss this and push it back into the background with all of the rest of things he probably should have been thinking about and trying to resolve. He felt defensive, which was — actually kind of good, in a weird way, because at least he felt here. Maybe this would happen at the duel tomorrow, too — maybe seeing Macmillan would make him angry enough that he'd be present and he could cast spells and win a duel, and everything would be fine.

"She's sick," he said, voice tight. "And she'd try to talk me out of it, if she knew. And it's not — she doesn't need to know, because it's going to be fine. It's not about her," he said, listing off all of these disparate reasons as though he thought if he threw enough of them out maybe one would stick. "It's about Nova. And it's going to be fine, so she doesn't have to know. It's not like I'm — " going to die "— it's not like anything's going to happen. It would just worry her, you know? And there's no reason for her to be worried. She just needs to focus on — on getting better."

  

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Art pressed his hand to his forehead, briefly, as if checking himself for a fever; really it was an attempt at a steadying gesture. Get it together, Art. He had to string together some semblance of advice, something — something about staying married to someone when you were making decisions that would hurt them, something about a right to know, and while he didn't think Melody really had a right to know about the baby if she was going to do things like go through Ben's mail, this was — something else entirely.

"I know," Art said, "I know it's about November and it's going to be fine but what if —" nope, he couldn't do that, couldn't say it, his chest felt vaguely pained again "— what if she finds out anyways?"

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   Melody Crouch

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What if she found out anyways? A good question, but how would she find out? There were possibilities: she found out before the duel, she heard about it after the fact, or she found out because Ben had died. None of them were great. If she found out before, she'd tried to stop him — or maybe worse, maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she had already given up on him, because the last time they'd had a real conversation she'd asked if he meant it and he'd said meant what instead of yes. So they'd either have a big fight and then he'd go off to the duel and she'd hate him, or there would be no fight and he'd go off to the duel and she'd hate him, and either way it probably meant their marriage was not going to survive past the baby. Aldous had already planned for that eventuality, though obviously not with these particular details. Melody would stay at the house in Irvingly, and Ben would send her money. He'd live in London. Their child would... live with one of them, he wasn't sure, or maybe go between. It wasn't an ideal situation to raise a child in — it wasn't healthy. If Melody found out that Ben was going to duel and didn't try to stop him, though, then that would be the only option left for them, because keeping a child in a house with two people with so little love left between them would have been worse.

If she found out after — presuming everything went fine, that there were no lasting negative consequences from the duel, maybe they could make it months or years before she found out. Maybe his plan to patch things up would work, and they'd build a real, solid marriage together. Maybe they'd be happy as a family when their child came. Depending on how long it went on, maybe they might even have a second — maybe Aldous would eventually forgive Melody for the things she didn't know she needed to be forgiven for — maybe even Art would grudgingly be happy for them, if they got things fixed enough that Art thought Ben was really content. And then if she found out about the duel, and she thought this was some kind of betrayal — that even at the earliest stages when he had promised he was trying, even when she was weak and fragile and had been unconscious only a week ago, he was off getting himself nearly killed in duels... It would be even worse, to lose it all then after he'd worked so hard to build it.

And if he died — well, the only slight consolation was that at least he wouldn't be around to suffer through it. There was no way anything could work out well if he was gone. His child deserved to have their mother in their life, and they also deserved Aldous and Roman and Nova. Without him there to bridge that ever-widening gap, he knew at least one would be impossible. As things stood now, he wouldn't have trusted Aldous to be in the same room as Melody, much less to trust her to raise his niece or nephew.

All of which was to say, Art was right. It would be worse if he didn't tell her and she found out anyway, and he should tell her. He should go tell her right now, and if she wanted to try and talk him out of it then he should let her. If she wanted to plead with him or reason with him or leverage the love he had for her or for their unborn child to keep him from dueling, that was a battle he should lose. He knew that. Art had told him, and he knew it, but there was still a problem.

"I can't," he said, shaking his head. And that was all there was to it. He didn't know why, because he knew he should have, but there was just — no reality in which he could tell Melody about this between now and tomorrow morning. "I can't." He wasn't really good at telling Melody things at all, was he? He could add this to the list of things he just couldn't bring himself to tell her, because telling her would shatter whatever fragile peace they'd established between themselves. Elliott's existence, the visit to Dionisia's home, the duel. He could just pick up a new thing every month and keep throwing it into this chasm that had opened up between them, because no matter how many things piled up he wasn't ever going to have enough material to build a bridge to the other side of it, and he didn't know why but suddenly it all felt so impossible — and now this was unavoidable, looking at this instead of just pushing it back and trying to pretend it didn't exist. He was starting to panic again but it really had almost nothing to do with the duel at all. It was everything. The duel was just the catalyst for it, but it was all the tension that he'd been carrying in his body for the whole year of marriage and the constant worry about how sick Melody was and the blind panic from when she hadn't woken up last week and having to juggle what Aldous knew and what Nova knew and how those would affect Melody and the fact that Art still didn't know about Ben's marriage and the feeling in his chest when he thought about the baby and the how simultaneously overjoyed he was to meet Elliott and how guilty he felt about doing it without telling Melody first and now there was a fucking duel, and maybe it wasn't very likely but it was possible he was just going to fucking die tomorrow and leave this colossal pile of garbage behind him, a trail of broken glass.

"I'm a bad husband," he announced, though he was vaguely aware that from Art's perspective this would probably seem a little besides the point. "I can't do this. Any of this."

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   Melody Crouch

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Holy fuck, he couldn’t let Ben go through with this. He couldn’t. He should have just taken Selwyn’s bribe — stupid — because at least then he would have a map, lies to fall back on, because he couldn’t let Ben go through with this. He couldn’t. Someone had to put a stop to this and apparently it was Art, because no one else had, and Melody couldn’t if she didn’t know, and November couldn’t manage her own love life, and Elmer Macmillan was an idiot, and Selwyn couldn’t get him to back down, and Ben took his sister’s honor more seriously than his own, and and and. His chest tightened again as he was struck by the realization of it: he could not let Ben do this. Because Ben was saying he couldn’t do this, any of it, and because Art — Art could not be responsible for Ben’s death and the wreckage of his own life. He was already responsible for the latter. The former was too terrible for him to even fathom.

It was like he was looking at a train wreck; or, it was like the moment in the Creothceann game where they realized someone died; or, it was like he was approaching the wrong side of a hospital door an hour too late. He was looking at the wreckage and trying to reverse it and he didn’t know how, but he couldn’t let Ben do this, and he could not catch his breath.

”You’re not a bad husband,” Art said, and if his voice was hollow and scraped raw then that was fine, he could ignore that, ”You’re still trying. That means you’re not a bad husband.” Art knew this because he — he had given up on trying, he was a bad husband, he was carrying around five galleons worth of debt and he could not remember the last time he’d had an actual conversation with his wife. He couldn’t do this. He could stand here talking to Ben in the garden but he couldn’t be what he needed, couldn’t be what Desdemona needed, could not be the father Gwenog deserved and the stark fact of it had him right on the verge of caving in. It was all just too much, and he didn’t know what to do except press his hands to the thighs of his trousers like he was trying to hold himself in place.

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   Angelica Selwyn, Melody Crouch, Reuben Crouch

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set by MJ <3

"Trying isn't enough," he retorted, shaking his head. "Not if everything's still shit when you're through."

You're still trying, that means you're not a bad husband was the sort of thing that might have seemed encouraging to Ben in February, when he'd thought that trying would be enough. It was the difference between the first year of his marriage, from the elopement up through January, and the resolution he'd made when he found out about the baby. Before he'd been pretending, and he'd been doing a good job of faking it, but when things got difficult he hadn't been trying. He was there for the easy bits and when they fought, he had that trump card he could pull out and hide behind: I never wanted this. Even if he didn't say it, they both knew. He'd decided in January that he was going to start trying, and at the time he'd thought that would be enough. If that was enough, though, things would have been better by now. Maybe not fixed, but at least improving. He'd been trying, though, and he still hadn't managed to get through a conversation of any significant degree with Melody. She still wasn't leaving her room. Witch Weekly had started theorizing that he was just waiting around for her to die. He'd tried to be helpful during the course of her illness in the only way he knew how, and he'd sent her into a fucking coma that the healers at the hospital had needed to work to get her out of. He still didn't know if it had affected the baby, either her being so sick for so long or being unconscious for days.

"I just — need to get through tomorrow," he said, running a hand through his hair. He didn't know how he was going to get through anything else, but tomorrow was more pressing — and everything else wasn't Art's problem, besides. He was here as Ben's second for the duel, not as his second for the whole shit storm that his life had become. "I'll — I'll figure out how to tell her afterwards," he said, though with absolutely no confidence that he ever would.

  

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Arthur still felt like he was standing on a precipice, trying to figure their way out of this: there were a couple options, none of them good. He could go beat the shit out of Macmillan so that he wouldn't come to Ireland tomorrow, but that was liable to land Art in prison. He could write to Aldous, except Aldous probably already knew. He could tip off the Department of Magical Law Enforcement but, again — prison, and maybe they would just reschedule the duel, and did Art know anyone in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement anymore? He could write to Valerian and maybe Valerian would say no and then they'd have to call it off because they didn't have a healer. He could go to Ireland early and find a way to shut off the floo's connection on the other end, but that also felt illegal, and what if he got caught there? He could talk Ben out of it, except that wasn't working so far.

He couldn't let Ben do this.

He didn't have any good options.

But maybe one of those things would work.

He wasn't as smart as Aldous was, though; would a scheme even work?

"And," Art said, "You're sure we have to go through with this? Maybe the threat was enough — " It wasn't a lie if he was just asking what Ben thought, and maybe the threat was enough — maybe Macmillan would back down and he wouldn't show up, or maybe they could pretend he would. Maybe November would manage things herself, even if she was as fragile as her brothers believed her to be. Maybe if Art could solve just this one thing without anyone bleeding on him tomorrow, he could figure out the rest of his fucked up life.

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set by MJ <3

Ben let out a long breath. He wished the threat had been enough, really he did. He wished that Macmillan had just backed down when he'd sent the initial letter. He wished that he'd shown any indication at all that he even felt guilty about it. If he backed out, Ben would have let him without question. Since he hadn't, though, they were stuck. A threat that Ben later rescinded wasn't an effective threat at all — it was worse than nothing, it was proof that he couldn't follow through and that November had no defenders. It was as good as a license to continue as he had been before.

"If the threat was enough, he would have refused the challenge," Ben pointed out. "Or he would've told his second to talk it down. It's too late now. He's — he's committed to this, which means I've got to. I've got to," Ben said, shaking his head again as though to bolster his own nerves. He could do this. All he needed to do was hold it together for an hour tomorrow morning. Long enough to look brave and fire off some curses and then get a promise that Macmillan would stop his behavior before he left. He could do this. With Art's help, anyway — he might or might not have been able to hold himself together long enough on his own, but there was a reason he'd asked Art to be his second instead of Aldous. If Art was coming with him, he could do this.

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   Arthur Pettigrew

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MJ made this <3

Ben was committed to this, which meant that Art had to be, too, — or he could pull the ripcord and get them out of it through one of his other dire strategies. Except those were all bad, too — and he could not see his way out of any of them. He wished that he could talk to Desdemona about this. He wished that he could tell Ben you might not want to rely on me right now. He wished, vaguely, that he had the sort of relationship with Melody where he could tell her about this himself, where the thought of being in a room with her didn't make him think of her spitting Desdemona deserves better than you. (He wished he didn't know she was right.)

"Alright," Art said, "Okay." It would be fine. They could do this, and he'd find a way to talk to Valerian, and — this would be fine. He added, with a sheepish little smile: "But promise me you won't die, alright? I —" he could not tell Ben how thin the thread he was hanging on by was, how close he was to just cutting and running, not on the duel but on his family and his job and all of it "— just promise me."

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   Reuben Crouch

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Ben felt a slight twinge in his chest at the question. Maybe just because it was the first time that either of them had actually said it. Of course they'd both been thinking it, throughout this whole conversation, but this was the first time it had been put in words. Even when he'd asked Art to tell Dionisia earlier, Ben had only danced around it — if things don't go well.

"I promise," Ben said with a nod, and now he knew they were going to get through this. He'd been telling everyone he talked to about it for the past week that it would be fine, and that there was no chance of him dying, but — there was always the chance. And with how he'd been feeling lately, with the panic attack at Dionisia's house and the fraught conversation with his sister and this wave of constant low-level dread he was trying to smother and his inability to talk to Melody, it had been seeming increasingly likely that he might not be alright. But he really wasn't going to die now, because he'd just promised Art he wouldn't, and he wasn't going back on a promise.

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   Arthur Pettigrew

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