Well, if Ben had felt guilty before, that comment really left him feeling like shit.

"Oh," he said, because what the fuck did you say to something like that? Quidditch had been her thing — she'd played for years, even after getting married, and had only quit when she was pregnant. She'd been back in as a coach, and he supposed he might have heard vaguely that she wasn't doing that anymore, but he hadn't really known that it meant she was not doing Quidditch anymore, like as a Whole Thing. He didn't really know Dez as a person — knew her primarily as Art's wife — but he knew what that was like, a little bit, because he'd quit Quidditch when his parents had died, and he'd been rather miserable about it for years afterwards. Did she feel vaguely guilty, like he had? In Ben's case it had all be abstract — his parents disapproved of Quidditch and he was off practicing it when they died — but in her case there might have been much more tangible guilt. She'd been there when it had happened — maybe she thought it wouldn't have happened if she'd been somewhere else.

"I didn't know," Ben said, after a long pause. It was true, he hadn't, but he felt awful for having pulled the conversation in this direction all the same.

  

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Talking about Desdemona lately had Art feeling like he was dredging things out into the sunlight, things that were better left unspoken and left alone. "Yeah," Art said, because he didn't know what else to say. He shrugged. "I think maybe she just needs time." And maybe that was optimistic. Maybe Dez would be able to Work Through Things and then she'd be back to normal, but maybe this was just the way things were now, Desdemona a shell of herself and Arthur sliding back into his worst habits.

He shoved the thought down; he couldn't afford to think like that.

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She doesn't need time, she needs you, Ben thought, but obviously could not say. For one, it wasn't his place; he didn't know Desdemona well enough to have any opinions on what she wanted or needed, and Art hadn't asked for any advice about his marriage. But he knew how he'd felt, leaving Quidditch after suffering a loss. As the months stretched on his grief and guilt had turned into anger, but the sort of undirected and unproductive anger that couldn't be solved, and then he'd set off adventuring around the continent, then around a whole other continent, trying to bury it in self-destructive behaviors and vague lies to his family. He hadn't really started to process the loss of his parents until years later, when he'd connected with Una and they'd sat around on her farm in the middle of nowhere and had nothing to do but talk about everything that had ever happened to them. Time hadn't helped him. Connection had helped him, and having someone listen, and having someone empathize — but this was not the sort of thing Ben could say to Art.

"Yeah," he said instead, turning his attention to the surface of his drink again. "Maybe."

  

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Art was having a hard time sitting here with Desdemona's leaving Quidditch hanging in the air between them; he had a hard time being here at home with the knowledge of it already, and verbalizing things to Ben made them seem more real, tangible as opposed to something that quietly happened in Arthur's house.

He'd never been able to abide silence for long, and finished his drink in a gulp, reaching to pour himself more in nearly the same motion. This was dangerous for him, he was going to blurt something sooner or later, and it was by chance that it was: "She says she's happier now than she was with her family. Irish."

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Again, it took Ben a moment to catch up, this time less because it had been so long since they'd talked about her and more because of how abruptly the conversation had changed. At first he thought this was about Desdemona — that she was apparently better off living with grief than she was before she'd married Art, because her family was Irish, which was... news, definitely. Except obviously that wasn't what Art was saying, and Desdemona's family were not Irish.

"Well, that's a low bar," he said, taking a drink to try and catch up with Art since he was already on his second glass. "But that's good, I guess. Did she say what she's doing?"

  

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It took Art a beat to remember what she'd said. "The zoo," he said, "Apprenticing, she said. I'm not sure what that means though." They had mostly been poking fun at one another, as opposed to catching up - that was another point to Miss Scrimgeour over Melody Crouch, Art thought. Miss Scrimgeour could take a joke.

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The zoo. Same place Una worked. Ben made a mental note not to suggest a trip there with Melody anytime soon, for obvious reasons. It would be easy to avoid, though. It wasn't like adults went to the zoo that often. Briefly, he considered offering it as a neutral meeting place for Elliott's mother to bring Elliott to meet him, but of course that was a terrible idea for all the same reasons taking Melody there would be.

"I could've worked at the zoo," Ben said absently. "I had Aldous convinced I was writing a book on magizoology for two years."

Convinced was perhaps a strong word, and Ben wasn't sure he would've been able to keep the charade up under the closer scrutiny allowed by being home, however, so it probably wouldn't have worked out, after all.

"I think liquor is more my thing," he added, polishing off the glass.

  

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"I mean, I think you're Jewell's perfect promoter," Art said, raising his glass at Ben. "You got me to commit to a brand." Now that they weren't talking about Desdemona, he was much more at ease - maybe Ben wasn't even here to talk about the whole casino thing, anyways.

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"Yeah, well, you're easy," Ben teased lightly. "It's the people with money who are hard." Not that he was implying Art was poor. He meant convincing people to go in on big contracts was harder than getting people to buy bottles, and Art wasn't in a position to decide who was supplying the after parties for all the Quidditch matches that season. He felt like it was sort of a weird comment, though, after he'd said it, so tried to shift the tone slightly.

"Half my job is just flirting with unattractive women, anyway," Ben joked. "Not Melody's favorite thing."

  

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”I used to have money,” Art blurted out, before he could even think about it. This was not the sort of thing he usually said - it wasn’t a healthy line of thinking for him, it made him feel guilty and bad and like he needed to do something risky - and he was visibly surprised that he said it. He tried to continue as if it hadn’t come out of his mouth, like they could just wallpaper over things: ”It could be worse. They could be attractive women.”

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   Bella Scrimgeour, Reuben Crouch

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Ben blinked at the comment, but Art seemed just as surprised by it as he was. Of course Ben knew all about that — in Hogwarts Art had been Ben's rich friend, until one day he was living in a tent and hiding from goblins. But Art didn't talk about the money any more than he typically talked about the goblins. So what was this? Some weird cry for help? A joke that hadn't landed? Something else entirely?

He shifted on the sofa, uncomfortable. He went for another sip and found his glass was empty, but didn't move to refill it. "Art," he eventually said, though he had no idea what he intended to follow it with.

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   Cassius Lestrange

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The silence stretched between them and Art kept his mouth shut, this time, because he didn’t trust his traitorous mouth to say anything else without admitting to his newfound (returned) habit.

The thing was - he knew the casino was bad for him, knew where it led, knew that he’d never stopped before. He’d known the whole time. It was as if some alternate form of gravity kept dragging him there, and Art came up with excuses because nothing made him feel the way gambling did.

He felt like he was eighteen again, like he was looking at Ben whose parents were dead and trying to find a way to say he’d put his house up as collateral without it sounding like he’d up and decided to ruin his own life.

The stakes were different. Twenty sickles was not a fortune. You couldn’t lose a fortune twice, because Art knew intimately well that you couldn’t earn it back.

It wasn’t as bad as it had been. All of this was recoverable, and he was fine, he was fine, he was different now.

”Sorry,” he said, a beat too late. ”Weird thing to say, I know.”

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   Reuben Crouch, Seneca Lestrange

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There was a moment in which neither of them said anything, and Ben was painfully aware that he ought to say something. He'd said Art, and he needed to follow it with something, but everything he could think of seemed too fraught. It couldn't have just been a bad joke, he thought, even if Art wanted to play it off that way — there had to be something that had brought it more to mind, pushed it to the tip of his tongue. Art wasn't just going to come right out and say it, though, as his delayed deflection made clear. But could Ben just openly ask about it? How could he phrase it in a way that didn't let on that he suspected everything already — that he had suspected a week ago and could have, should have, stopped it all before it happened?

For a long moment Ben said nothing, instead staring at Art and running through a thousand different versions of what he might say. Yeah, that was a weird thing to say, what brought that up? (Too direct, and he didn't think Art would answer him honestly anyway). Yeah, anyway — what's been keeping you busy the last week? (Too obvious of a shift; too obvious what he was asking; too easy to avoid because the simple answer was Quidditch and they'd already talked about that). Something about the attractive women comment? (Would lead back to talking about Melody, which Ben didn't want). Something about Bella Scrimgeour? (Not really what Ben cared about, and not what this conversation was about, and if he derailed it again in order to try and approach this from a different angle later they might never get back to it). Something else entirely — ask if he wanted to go somewhere, maybe, like they'd talked about at New Year's? (The timing wouldn't work now; Ben couldn't leave Melody and Art couldn't leave so close to the next Quidditch game, and if he was gambling again it wouldn't really have helped, it would have just delayed things).

"— you know we could talk, right?" was what eventually came out of his mouth, though it felt awkward and forced and absurd. Of course they could talk; they were talking right now. Probably what he'd meant to say was something like you know I'd help, if you asked me, but Art wasn't going to ask, which was the whole problem.

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   Arthur Pettigrew

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It was like he was standing on a precipice, one he'd been on before: he didn't entirely understand how he'd gotten up here on his own. He could ask for help, could tell Ben, could admit that he kept steering himself to the casino with so much planning and justification that he knew it was problematic. But - wasn't there a sort of failing, if he needed Ben to bail him out when things weren't even bad?

"Yeah," Art said, "Yeah, I know we can talk."

He could get out of it on his own though, couldn't he? He'd essentially done it before. He didn't need to talk about it, didn't need it to be a thing - he was fine, he could be fine, and he could be better, and it didn't have to be like last time. He'd ruined his life, his mother's life. He couldn't ruin his life again. In the scheme of things, twenty sickles was nothing, and Arthur - Arthur didn't know why he could never stop gambling, once he'd started, when other people could stop all the time.

He wanted to say Don't tell Desdemona, but as soon as he said that, they knew he was doing it again. And he wasn't - not really.

And once he talked about it, it would be out there, and never mind that they both seemed to know what they were dancing around.

"Everything's alright, Ben," Arthur said, with an easy shrug of his shoulders even as he knew he was lying.

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   Reuben Crouch

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Art said everything was alright, and Ben didn't believe him, but he had to pretend to, didn't he? He didn't, ostensibly, have any reason to suppose they weren't alright. And maybe they weren't. Maybe he was overreacting. Maybe things were fine. Maybe nothing had happened at all. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

And Art said he knew they could talk, so if things weren't alright, or if they became not-alright, he knew Ben was here. Was that enough? Had he done his due diligence as a friend by making the offer? Ben didn't feel good about this, but he didn't know what else to do in the moment.

"Alright," he said, with a nod. He tried to convince himself he was okay with this, as a resolution to the conversation; failed; took a drink. "Alright. Good. I'm glad," he continued, still trying to convince himself — but now he worried that it sounded obvious he was trying to talk himself into it, and subsequently obvious that he didn't believe it — obvious that he suspected what Art was doing, which was as well as admitting that he could've stopped it a week ago.

"Not that I thought it wasn't," he added, speaking just slightly too quickly.

  

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"Yeah," Art said again, lamely. Things had to be alright, because if they weren't - if they weren't alright, then what the fuck was the point of everything he'd been doing for the past five years, just to backslide into the same bad habits? And - well, he hadn't actually fucked up yet, had he? Twenty sickles was twenty sickles, it was barely more than a galleon - he couldn't get into real trouble until there were things to bet on, again.

(Maybe, he thought, it was a shame that the Howlers were playing on the twentieth. Art didn't bet on his own games.)

There were some things he wanted to ask Ben, the existential sort of questions that he'd been kicking around his own head - could people actually change, could Arthur actually change, did he ever just wish he could burn his life down and walk away without feeling like he was leaving people behind?

Instead he said, "Real Quidditch is back soon, anyways," like that was going to solve all his problems.

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