27 March, 1893 — Padmore Park

Ben had finished his work for the afternoon with two hours to spare before Melody expected him home, so he'd set off to Hogsmeade with the intention of paying Aldous a visit. He'd checked with the housekeeper earlier in the week to see what time Aldous was expected back home and felt confident they could talk through everything before causing any suspicion from his wife. He was nearly at the end of it, now. He'd been so careful at every step not to show his hand, but reading the rest of the family in to what he was planning was the last step before telling Melody, and then he could let out the breath he'd been holding since the beginning of the year.

It was strange to be coming to Aldous without the expectation of advice. There was nothing Ben needed his brother to fix, in this case — there was nothing left to fix. Just loose ends to tie up. He was only telling Aldous and Roman at all so that they wouldn't be surprised when rumors inevitably trickled their way about it; so that they would know how to respond when someone said is it true your younger brother lives in London now?

Ben knocked at the door and the housekeeper let him know that Aldous wasn't home just yet, and would he like Mrs. Crouch to receive him while they waited for his brother? Ben would not. He had no reason to dislike Aldous' wife (though he hardly knew her well), but the idea of trying to make small talk didn't appeal — to say nothing of the fact that if the conversation began with her in the room, someone would have to decide whether or not they asked her to leave before it continued. Ben hadn't been planning on explaining everything to Helga; he'd rather talk to Aldous and have him filter whatever details he wanted to share with his wife, and be able to speak more freely. So instead of going in for a cup of tea, he decided to take a turn around Padmore Park and circle back to Aldous' home after another half-hour.

He had reached the edge of the Headmaster's boundary and turned back around before it happened. It wasn't a remarkable occurrence — just the sort of thing that happened all the time at Padmore Park, but it stopped him in his tracks and seemed to lift all the air out of his chest. A family was walking on the path ahead: a man, a young mother, and a girl a few months older than Nora. She had dark curls peeking out of her bonnet and she was teetering along the path, tiny fists grabbing at a moth that fluttered overhead, far beyond her reach. She was laughing with the sort of wild abandon unique to young children, and her mother was echoing with a more restrained giggle, amused by her daughter's enthusiasm. And it struck Ben all at once: he would never have that.

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MJ made this <3

Eight months.

Eight whole months had passed since Mr. Hunt’s death, and the visions of that day still haunted her. She had been content enough to meander through on Christmas Day because she was miserable enough, but most other times unless it was absolutely necessary, Irene had elected to avoid the park as much as she could. The ambiance of liveliness was never so great that it could drown out the sights, sounds and smells of that day. It wasn’t until Bear had darted off for the second time since she acquired him, and Irene was left to chase the damned creature once more, that she really was forced to go back into the park. This happened so many times that by now she was seriously considering if someone had sent her the cat with the express purpose of desensitizing her. Regardless of how the cat had come to be in her possession, it had done the trick. She’d ventured onto the paths once with some hesitation at first (she’d purposefully left the cat at home), and now she was able to walk the complete length of her old route without outwardly wincing. Screams of laughter and playfulness still caused her heart to leap out of her chest, but at least she’d gotten herself used to merely glancing this way and that as opposed to wanting to jump into the nearest obliging bush.

Today was the day that she’d decided it was time to start painting once more. Out of some mad impulse, she’d also brought the cat. Mercifully he had leapt inside her basket, curled up and was content to snooze for the time being. After laying out a blanket and taking out a sketch pad and pencils, it wasn’t long before Irene had lulled herself into a rhythm of sketching everything she saw: plants, flowers, women’s hats, croquet equipment, her own basket with Bear’s black tail protruding from underneath the flap, and even a few horses.

She’d been unprepared for the gust of wind that suddenly billowed out behind her. It blew through the loose sketches she’d discarded, immediately scattering them. Cursing to herself, Irene leapt up and shoved a hand in the basket to find her wand. The yowl of protest told her she’d clearly woken up the cat. The flap popped open and what looked like a massive black ball of soot had shot from the basket and off on the path. Cursing again, Irene lurched after him, wand in hand. The papers immediately obeyed and started to sweep back towards her. The cat, however, darted into a bush. Sighing, Irene slowed down to a walk, holding out her hand to collect the pieces of parchment. Up ahead, she could see one of the pieces struggling to get back to her. It was caught under a man’s foot, but he seemed to be paying no mind to it, and instead was looking at a nearby family; the same one Irene had been focusing on from afar when the wind had disrupted her.

There was nothing about this man that looked familiar, and yet when she walked towards him, she thought she recognized the pang that was plain on his features. There was something about how his eyes; he stared at the family, then she could see his gaze unfocus, then refocus. It told Irene all she needed to know; caused her to slow down even more as she approached him. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” She inquired tentatively. “Erm - my apologies, but…it seems my drawing got caught under your foot.” Upon further inspection, Irene realized it was the very drawing of the family he’d been staring at that he’d stepped on.

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Ben wasn't aware that he had lost focused and drifted off until someone had addressed him. He snapped back to the present, immediately sheepish about what she might have observed. How long had he been lost in thought? Had she seen him staring off into space, or did it look as though he'd been staring at someone in particular? He didn't have any attachment to the family he'd seen, and he certainly didn't want to get a reputation for the sort of person who might obsess over strangers. Best course of action was probably to end this interaction as quickly as possible and get out of the park as soon as he could, even if that meant beating Aldous back to his home, Ben figured.

"Oh, my apologies," he said, stepping back and stooping to pick it up. "Hope I didn't ruin it," he added, imagining a dirty boot print right in the center of the page. He glanced at the paper to see if that was the case and saw no stain, but what he did see arrested him once again. It was just a sketch, but it had plenty of life and motion to it. It was the same family he'd just been looking at, and just seeing them on the page he could feel that they were happy.

"Oh," he murmured. His mouth felt dry. He nearly lost himself in thought again and had to make a conscious effort to stay in the present moment. "It's, ah. It's very good," he said, to try and explain why it had so obviously caught his eye for a moment longer than it should have, before he pressed it back towards the young woman's hands.

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MJ made this <3

She hadn’t been sure if he was going to answer, or if she would have had to ask him once more to break him out of his reverie. Even so, it took him a beat and Irene saw his eyes refocus before he started moving. In any other scenario where she hadn’t gone through witnessing Mr. Hunt’s death - or where she hadn’t known the look on his face like she knew the back of her hand - Irene might have brushed off his apology, taken the paper and walked off. Instead, she remained there, papers in hand and watched his expression flicker once more.

It was an intrusive thing to watch him take in the picture in his hand, something that Irene knew she sympathized with; at least on some level.

The picture was returned back to the pile, and Irene looked back down at it. It was crumpled with a bit of dirt here and there, but otherwise the paper remained intact. She should have said thank you. Should have smiled and walked away, wished him a good day. Instead, looking up at him, placid with a wry expression: “Is it?” as if he’d just commented on the impending weather. “I only saw them from further away, not closer than you.”

Irene looked up from the sketch, not at him but at the family who were now walking away. It was her turn to furrow her brow and stare after them. The father was tall, almost as tall as Elias. Even if he had been all alone, she would have known with one look from across the park that it wouldn’t have been him. The only similar appearance between the two was his height and hair color. The mother had darker hair too. And the child…looked a perfect combination of the two. “Lovely family.”

She shook herself from her own thoughts before pressing her lips together and peering up at him. “You don't know them, do you?”

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Is it? she asked, and Ben felt as though he needed to defend his statement or she'd see right through him. Even as she continued he was scrambling to compose his thoughts for his eventual reply. When she continued with you don't know them he felt as though she'd found him out, like he'd been caught red-handed, although he couldn't have said what crime it was she'd caught him at.

"Ah — no," he admitted. A part of him wanted to deny it, but he knew that was a slippery slope; he'd get himself into trouble quickly if he started trying to spin up lies or half-truths to get through this conversation with a stranger in a park. And he hadn't really done anything wrong, just gotten caught staring, which wasn't a crime — so there was nothing to lie about. "No, it's just — a familiar scene, I guess." That wasn't quite right — it wasn't a familiar scene in that it was like something he'd seen or experienced before, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of familiar. It was the sort of thing that he could have had, if everything had happened differently, and that was what he'd found so striking about it.

"Your drawing," he continued, rather ineloquently — not because this flowed particularly well but because he'd already thought of what to say, and now it seemed a waste not to say it. "It wasn't the details, so much, but it had the feeling. That was why I said it was good — you could sort of feel like you were there."

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MJ made this <3

He looked justifiably sheepish as she caught him out. A pang of guilt stabbed at her briefly, however it didn’t last long; she didn’t intend to press the matter. Even if she did, it was obvious she’d spent a great deal of time observing the family too. Listening to his explanation, it seemed he also had a family to think of whereas she had none. Hoping to put him a bit more at ease, Irene smiled softly at him before glancing back down at her sketch.

Her smile widened at the compliment, and she scoffed a light laugh. “I suppose I should gain some amount of satisfaction from that.” It was an odd phrase to have slip out, especially in front of a stranger, but he seemed quite immersed in his own world that for some reason she didn’t feel the need to correct herself. “Artists are supposed to convey their message clearly and from what you’ve just told me, I’ve done exactly that.” Her thoughts drifted to the half-finished painting she had of Elias back at her flat. It was the one thing she couldn’t bring herself to finish. To do so would mean discovering the ending of a story she didn’t want to know.

“But sometimes we want to mask our feelings, don’t we?”

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The conversation had seemed to be drawing towards a conclusion — he'd returned the drawing, she was talking about art and he was nodding idly as though he understood anything about painting — but then her last question made him stiffen suddenly. It took a second for him to find his tongue and form a response: "I'm not really an artist." As though her question had actually been about art. It may have been, of course — maybe he was projecting, reading more into what she'd said than what her intention had been. Maybe she was just making idle conversation and she didn't expect him to have an answer one way or another. Maybe she was thinking about something else, her own personal drama that she'd gotten wrapped up in naval-gazing, and this had nothing to do with him. But to his ear it sounded as though she'd found him out; she may as well have said I see you; I see what you're trying to push down.

He let out a long, shuddering breath. He had been fine a moment ago — not good, but fine, he had been surviving — and now he felt as though he were on the verge of a breakdown, as though his voice might crack the next time he tried to speak.

"They just looked — happy," he said, as though this was an admission. "And I guess you never really know what's going on beneath the surface, or what might happen down the line, but they — they'll have that, that memory of walking in the park today and just being happy."

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MJ made this <3

It was easy to see when her comment fully landed. Irene wasn’t the type to pry into someone’s personal life without being prompted, nor was she the type to press an issue however something told her this was to be an exception. Her instincts seemed to do her credit - the man hardly looked offended. In fact he looked as if he were trying to decide what to say, chewing over his words.

And then the full weight of his troubles seemed to burst forth on his features, as if she’d somehow managed to break through a dam. Irene must have recognized this man’s expression as some manifestation of her own inner turmoil, for she wasn’t at all surprised when his comments continued to focus on the family.

Happy.

So. He too seemed to know not what happiness felt like….but what it looked like. Her immediate instinct was to break through the shiny mirage of a family that he’d conjured for the two of them. To counter his illusion with her own comments on reality and how no one was ever how they appeared in the outside; but after a while, Irene decided not to break it so harshly.

“They did look quite happy, didn’t they?” She murmured in agreement. “I wonder if they actually were, though. It’s so easy to convince others that you feel one way when in reality you might feel quite the opposite.”

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Ben let out a quick, strangled laugh without any actual mirth attached. Easy to convince others you feel one way when you actually feel differently — maybe for some people, but he wasn't doing a stellar job of it at the moment. He would have much preferred to have put on a convincing show of being nonchalant today, at least long enough to have gotten past a brief interaction with a stranger, but he hadn't managed that. He had his heart on his sleeve, today and always.

But some people were convincing. Melody had been convincing.

Was that uncharitable? Maybe. Maybe when she'd said she wanted a clean start and wanted to work through things, that she thought they could have a future together and be happy someday, maybe she'd actually meant it at the time. Ben was still convinced that she'd never really loved him, though, whatever she'd convinced herself of or tried to convince him of. People who loved each other didn't need such light prodding to betray each other.

"I should go," he announced. He didn't know where he was going to go — he was no longer in a suitable mood to go break the news to Aldous — but he didn't think staying was a good idea. "Sorry I stepped on your sketch."

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MJ made this <3

Looking back down at the sketch, Irene chewed on her bottom lip. While she wasn’t always the most perceptive, especially when she was elbow deep in her work, she couldn’t get rid of the nagging suspicion that there was more to be said here; that all their lighter comments had only managed to peel back the first delicate layer of many that were marred with their own unique scars. But of course, this was a stranger, and she didn’t know how to say any of that. She could only pay attention to the unpleasant feeling that poked at the back of her skull like a persistent woodpecker.

And so instead of trying to pry into this man’s life, instead of forcing a subject that she wasn’t sure was all that appropriate to breach, Irene offered the sketch to the man. “Keep it.” And as if to try and lift up what little of the stranger’s spirits that she could, she smiled. “Do with it what you wish.”

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Ben looked down at the sketch. His brow furrowed and he chewed his lower lip. Did he want it? She'd said do with it what you will, so if he didn't want it presumably he could just throw it away later, but he couldn't help but consider. The scene of the happy family had such a visceral effect on him, and her sketch really had captured the moment well. It might be painful to keep something like that around, glancing at it and being reminded of the things he would never have. On the other hand, maybe after he'd been separated from Nora long enough, he'd want something to make him remember — even if it hurt.

"Thank you," he said with a nod. Maybe he wouldn't put it anywhere he was likely to see it on a regular basis, at least for a while. Maybe he wouldn't look at it for a year. But he did plan to keep it.

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MJ made this <3