Morning of 15 February, 1890 — a Muggle hotel in Scotland

Ben woke to sunlight starting to stream in through an old and battered set of shutters, placing golden ribbons across an unfamiliar ceiling. He blinked and started to get his bearings. The first thing he noticed was actually a lack of something: his head didn't hurt in the slightest, which wasn't exactly typical for mornings where he woke up in strange places. He was warm, both because of a soft blanket that was pulled over his bare chest and because of the presence of another person in the bed beside him. He had his arms around her loosely, one under her neck and the other over her waist. It took him a fraction of a second to put the pieces together and figure out who it was — forgivable, maybe, because it wasn't as though he was used to seeing her from this vantage, with her hair loose and her shoulders bare. Most of her seemed to be bare, actually. Which made sense, given what he was starting to remember about the night before.

He was married to Melody Finch. Well — only that wouldn't be her name now, would it? Melody Crouch, then. Married.

That set his head to spinning. How had this happened? Well, he remembered how — the conversation in Art Pettigrew's backyard, then the floo to Gretna Green and the search for someone to actually marry them. The why he was slightly less clear on. He remembered the panic that had followed their little adventure at the party, but there had to have been a better option. Apparating to her house and waiting to see if her family came in in a rage, for instance, knowing that they could have always run off as a last resort. Sending someone back to the party to figure out what the actual damage was and if it could be repaired. Even sending one of them back, if they took some precautions to prevent them from being recognized — magic was, after all, a thing. They could have just momentarily disguised Ben and he could have gotten a clearer idea of the situation.

But they hadn't done that. They'd panicked, and Melody had said that marriage was the only option, and Ben had gone along with that. Merlin, where were they going to live? He had nowhere to take her home to, after this. She couldn't even walk into Excalibur to so much as help him pack his things. He had a membership at Black's where he could've gotten a room as well, but that would hardly help. He needed a house, and he didn't have one, nor did he have enough money to get one. Maybe he could rent something, but on his kind of income, what sort of something would that be?

Merlin, she was going to hate him. She might have thought marriage was a good idea in the moment (or the best idea they had left to them, anyway), but he was going to have to move her into some shit-hole flat in London, where she would be holed up all day doing nothing but reflecting on all the things she didn't have, and in a fortnight she was going to realize what a horrible mistake this had been, and she was going to hate him. What would she do when she reached that point? Walk out on him? Run off to try her luck somewhere else? Beg her family to take her back?

He instinctively tightened his grip on her. It was a slight movement but it was enough to cause her to stir slightly. Ben leaned in and kissed her shoulder lightly, wanting to preserve this moment and this charade of happiness as long as he could. It would be over all too soon. "Good morning," he murmured into her hair.

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   Aldous Crouch, Elsie Kirke, Melody Crouch

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Sleep hadn't come easily to Melody once they settled in for the night. Hours ticked by as she memorized the feel of his body against hers, and the slow, steady sound of his breathing. An eternity passed as she faintly - so as to not wake him - traced the contours of his torso. He was so beautiful - it was tremendously unfair the circumstances meant tonight would likely be the only time she saw him vulnerable like this. Morning light would only expose her wrongdoings, and, for the first time, Ben would truly see her.

Melody woke up exhausted and slightly disoriented. For a single, blissful moment she wasn't Mrs. Reuben Crouch, the whore married in a fit of passion and desperation. She hadn't betrayed the man she loved or abandoned her family. For a singular second, until the unfamiliar sensation of a warm body behind her registered, she was as she'd always been - Melody Finch, the reluctantly obedient daughter and bride-to-be. However, seconds disappeared before she could blink and moments expired just as quickly. It all came rushing back in a blur of panic. Her body went rigid against his. The potion had to have worn off by now - Ben would start shouting any second now.

Except, he hadn't flown out of bed as she expected. Instead, the skin of her shoulder tingled under where his lips had just been. Terrified to move and break the spell, Melody sleepily replied, "good morning". She wasn't fool enough to believe he wouldn't realize what she'd done, but she'd also be a fool not to greedily accept these last few minutes.

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   Elsie Kirke

Ben’s mind hadn’t stopped churning since he’d come to terms with this new reality. How was he going to fix this? Because just waiting until she eventually realized she could no longer endure the misery of a life married to him couldn’t possibly be the best option. Merlin, what had he been thinking, agreeing to elope without so much as a second thought? He hadn’t been thinking, that was clear.

But that wasn’t like him. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought about all of this stuff before. He’d even brought it up to Melody, when she’d originally broached the idea of marrying him, back in — August, was it? So it wasn’t as though he’d needed to really think this through at all — he just had to not forget literally everything. Just hang on to one bit of sense or logic, and he hadn’t. The panic, he supposed, had been too much for the both of them.

Except that didn’t make sense, either. For Melody, maybe — she was a proper girl and her family had a tendency to overreact where her virtue was concerned, so this sort of thinking made sense coming from her. Ben, on the other hand, had been caught in far worse predicaments, and he had always survived. He could have kept a level head about him last night and nothing dire would have happened. Maybe Canada, again, but he could manage that if it was the only option that allowed Melody a chance at repairing things with her family or her fiance. Of claiming the life (and lifestyle) she deserved.

There was no reason in the world he could think of why he should have gone along with her suggestion of eloping, Ben thought to himself. At first this was just another way of beating himself up for poor decision-making, until something occurred to him. He’d just gone along with something that Melody had suggested...

But that wasn’t possible. She wouldn’t do that to him. She wouldn’t even do that to her hated would-be husband. He remembered how she’d reacted when he’d given her the potion on the rooftop — she’d called it poison.

But she had taken it, after all. At his insistence. So she’d had the means, and — and he didn’t distinctly remember her doing anything with any of his drinks, but he certainly had
been drinking, so she had the opportunity .

He still didn’t really believe it, so he was hesitant to sound like he was accusing her of anything. There was still a large chance that this was all his stupid fault, for having made a bad decision when he’d been drunk and still groggy in the aftermath of sex he shouldn’t have been having in a closet and faced with a sudden panic-inducing incident. That was well within the realm of possibility, but… he needed to put this needling doubt to rest, somehow.

“Can we… talk about last night?” he asked gingerly, not sure how to broach the topic.

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   Aldous Crouch, Melody Crouch

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And there it was.

Melody knew without further explanation from Ben that he was beginning to realize what she did. Would he believe that her use of the potion had originally intended only to get him out of the party? That she didn't dare risk the fall out if he had remained behind when midnight struck? Eloping hadn't even been a thought until they were suddenly standing in Arthur Bloody Pettigrew's backyard and the sky was falling upon them. Even then, she mentioned an alternative that he had quickly shot down. Though, reflecting on it now, Melody realized he couldn't have agreed with her, for she hadn't presented waking the Pettigrew's as a suggestion. Merlin. The amount of mistakes she made last night was incredulous.

She untangled herself from his grasp and moved to sit up against the headboard, gently pulling the blanket from him to cover herself. Melody wished they could have dressed before having this conversation but knew that would be an admission of guilt all on its own. How to explain? How much of it did he remember? Melody kept her eyes trained on the distracting pattern of the comforter. "Yes." Not enough of an answer. Melody couldn't leave it at that; she couldn't allow him to fill in the blanks on his own.

"How much of the night do you remember?" She cautiously asked after a long pause. Already, Melody was making a mental list of where her belongings resided throughout the room. Their clothes were thrown everywhere, but her wand. Where had she left her wand? She couldn't allow Ben to cast her out onto the streets without her wand.

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   Reuben Crouch

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beautiful set by mj

Before she said anything, her body language clued him in that something was amiss. At the very least, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the question. Maybe that was all it was, he thought as she sat up against the headboard. Maybe there hadn’t been any magic or mischief involved and she was suddenly standoffish because his question implied that he was rethinking the decision to marry her (which, in all fairness, he was).

While her responses didn’t conclusively point to her having drugged him last night, they didn’t rule it out, either. Ben felt his heart rate rising as he moved so that he was sitting in the bed as well, leaning on one arm. “I remember everything,” he said plainly. At least, he thought he did — but if there was something missing, he obviously couldn’t articulate what it was.

  

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"Okay." No. Not okay. Everything was already poised to break around them. There was no avoiding the unasked question, though. She could deflect and try to talk her away around her reasoning, but at the end of the day she did the unforgivable: she drugged him. Ben would be right to cast her aside, to divorce her and publicly shame her. There was no turning back, though. It was done - they were married.

Swallowing against the growing lump in her throat, Melody quietly prepared for the end. "I heard a servant talking about some reveal at midnight, and I panicked…I had to get us out of there. I couldn't risk you not listening to me." Melody was already butchering this explanation. He had to already know what was unspoken, but she still had to say the words. She still had to take a hammer to them. "I used the potion. But I didn't - I never - I just had to get you to leave the party. That was my only intention...I swear."

  

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Ben could feel heat rising to his face as she admitted to exactly what he’d suspected. Moments ago, he’d been concerned only for her happiness — specifically, how much it was liable to suffer since she was married to him and how he might best mitigate that suffering — but now he didn’t know what to think. It was as though the floor had fallen out from beneath him and he didn’t even know how to orient himself in this new, strange space, much less which way to go from here.

“You didn’t even try to ask me,” he said, in a tone of disbelief. Maybe she was telling the truth about originally giving him the potion to try and convince him to leave the party, but why would he believe her at this point? Why would he trust a word she said? If she’d asked him to leave the party, he would have. Depending on the tone of her voice when she’d asked, probably immediately and without hesitation. Particularly given what they’d done earlier that night in the little side room, he would have trusted her if she’d said there was some reason he needed to make a quick exit, even if she didn’t explain what that reason was.

Now that he was thinking about it, though, did he know that that was when she’d given him the potion? Maybe it had been earlier — before the little interlude in the room at all. Had he been drinking anything right before that had happened? He couldn’t remember now. He was always drinking; it wasn’t the sort of detail he committed to memory. Not that he was doubting that he would’ve slept with her — but he would’ve left the party, too, and he apparently hadn’t done that of his own free will. This called the entire night, and his memories of it, into question. What if he wasn’t remembering everything? Or what if his memories of it had been tainted by the potion he’d had, and he was remembering some sugar-coated version of the truth? How would he ever know?

“Well, it doesn’t matter much what your intentions were, does it?” he asked rather hotly. “That’s certainly not all we did last night.”

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   Melody Crouch

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Despite all her preparation, the fallout from last night was worse than she expected. No matter what path he chose (and it would wholly be his decision) he would hate her. Melody had either effectively trapped him into a marriage he never wanted or a man who abandoned his wife. There was no positive outcome here, no alternative to salvage any chance of happiness.

"I know I didn't. I'm sorry." What else could she have done, though? Waste time trying to tell him to leave and then drug him when he wouldn't? There were only minutes to get away from the party - minutes to avoid their ruin. Melody wasn't leaving anything to chance, not when their lives were on the line! Surely, if he believed nothing else he would believe that? Melody folded her arms tight across her chest. "I panicked and didn't think. I'm sorry."

An apology would never be enough, she knew that. However, presently it was all she had to offer. Biting back tears, Melody quickly continued, "I'll do whatever you decide to do. I can't turn back time and undo it, I would if I could. I … everything got way out of hand. And if you want … I'll do whatever you decide." She repeated, at a loss as to what else she could do to fix her mistake.

  

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Panicked and didn’t think. That might be true — in fact, he didn’t doubt it in the slightest — but marriage was sort of a big fucking deal, which was probably why it was generally advisable to let two people have a chance to fucking think about it. It wasn’t her fault for panicking, given what had been at stake and her perception of the situation, but Merlin. There were plenty of ways to panic that didn’t involve giving people illegal potions and
then mind-controlling them into eloping!

Part of this was his fault, though. He was the one who’d given her the potion in the first place. While he’d never anticipated that it would be used in this way, he supposed he’d made his own bed in this case, and now he was going to have to lie in it. That was the only thing left to do, at this point. She could say whatever she wanted about how contrite she was or how willing she was to bend over backwards to fix this, but there wasn’t a way to fix this. They were married. Even if there was a way to reverse it (which, although he was no legal expert, Ben didn’t think was possible once they’d consumated the marriage — which they certainly had), what then? Just drop her back off at her parents’ house and hope she could talk her way out of whatever trouble she was in? Pretend she’d wandered off and gotten lost, instead of intentionally running away from them? Stage a fucking kidnapping in order to keep the myth of her virtue intact?

“Easy to say when there’s nothing left to do,” he said, climbing out of the bed and looking around the room for his underclothes. He needed to clear his head and see if there was a way to fix this, and he wasn’t going to figure it out staying here and talking to her about it.

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   Melody Crouch

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"You can divorce me." It wasn't what she wanted, for sure. Melody would be ruined and likely unable to return to Hogsmeade without bearing the weight of the shame. She wrapped the blanket around her as she stood. "You can reveal what I did and escape this. I won't stop you." There was a chance she would be arrested if he did, but it wasn't as though she deserved any better.

Had she not just spent the past twelve hours becoming intimately acquainted with him, she might've blushed and turned away. Instead, she remained fixed by the door watching him. "Where are you going?" She asked quickly. Melody understood wanting to dress - clothes were armor in a woman's world, after all, but he looked as though he was about to run. "We have to talk about this. You can't just leave."

  

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Ben had found his clothes and was only half-listening to her as he dressed. None of what she was saying was a valid option, anyway. There were a multitude of problems with remaining married to her, but none of them would be solved by divorcing her. She’d be ruined and off worse than she was before her fiance had been brought into the picture — stuck with parents who would resent her, if they allowed her to return at all.

Despite what she’d done, Ben couldn’t just cast her aside so coldly. He didn’t want her to be miserable — shit, the whole point of getting her the potion in the first place was that he wanted her to be happy. If there was still any possible chance of salvaging her happiness, he had to find it — and quickly, before things spiralled too far out of control and their options evaporated before their eyes.

“I have to think,” he said tersely as he pulled his wrinkled shirt on. “I’ll be back.”

  

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Short of physically stopping him from leaving, Melody could think of little ways to get him to stay. It wasn't as though she could chase after him either. By the time her layers were fastened enough to be deemed appropriate he would be long gone. Her grip on the blanket tightened. Would he come back if he left? She wasn't sure. How long was she to wait before fleeing herself?

She would have to chance returning home while he was gone. Her trunks were all mostly packed, and she was going to need goods to sell if she did need to flee. Melody started at him with wide, pleading eyes and defeated asked, "when will you be back?"

  

"I don't know," Ben said, honestly. The anger was still there in his chest, but he was trying to keep his tone level and as free from emotion as possible until he had a chance to get out of this room and process some things. There was something else rising in him, too — defeat, maybe, or despair. It was probably stirred up from beneath the layer of anger and disbelief by the look in her eyes as she asked the question, and strengthened by the knowledge that no matter how this ended, it was going to be awful for both of them. There was no painless solution — and he wasn't even sure there was a solution at all.

She would be better off back at home, that much he was entirely sure of. The problem was whether that was still possible, which Ben didn't know. What had happened at the party last night, and how much did everyone else in the world know about what they had done? If their faces were plastered in the Prophet this morning with a damning headline, that would limit their options considerably.

But if there hadn't been a reveal, or if getting them away from the party had been enough to exclude them from it, maybe there was a chance. If her fiance didn't know what had happened last night, and if her parents could be persuaded to either overlook or turn a blind eye to it... it was possible. It was in their best interests, after all, for the wedding to proceed as planned, if that was still a possibility. Maybe he could still fix this, but he needed more information — and he needed to act fast, before things started to happen elsewhere.

"Soon, probably," he said as he finished getting his clothes on and checked to ensure he had his wand in one of his pockets.

  

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Soon wasn't a very apt description. Did he mean an hour? A day? How long was she to sit here waiting for him before realizing he wasn't coming back? Much as she wanted to, Melody resisted pressing him for a further explanation. Ben was already furious with her and determined to leave, she wasn't about to add another reason to not return. "You'll be back, though?" She asked hesitantly, unable to resist the need for reassurance.

  

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The continued questioning was making it hard to keep a cool head through this. Ben let out a huff of breath. "Yes. I will."

She was dealing with a lot, too, he tried to remind himself. Assuming she hadn't planned to force him into marriage from the start, the past twenty four hours had brought many unexpected changes, and she would be struggling to find her place in the chaos, too. Maybe she deserved a little slack.

Or maybe she didn't, because they'd fucking eloped and it had been, if not entirely her fault, entirely her decision.

"Just... don't do anything stupid while I'm gone," he said, heading towards the door.

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   Melody Crouch

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She wasn't sure why she struggled to believe he would return. Ben had always remained true to his word, even when months of silence elapsed between them. His solutions weren't always her first choice, but he always came through. No matter the fights or the vile words she threw in his direction, Ben was there. Last night was only another prime example of his nature, for it couldn't have been easy to grant her her moment of comfort. Not when her very presence was salt in the wound of their separation.

Melody's guilt grew as she watched him leave. Ben was selfless when it came to her, willing to give and do whatever so long as she remained comfortable and happy. And what was she but a greedy harlot? Last night's events played once more through her mind as she quickly dressed. It was one thing to make a panicked decision and regret it later. It was an entirely different being to fully grasp how wrong a decision was and proceed with it anyway. Perhaps that was why she was convinced he wouldn't return. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Ben's character but instead with her mountain of guilt. For if Ben could pave a path for himself out of this wreck, then maybe she wasn't the awful person she now knew herself to be.

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   Reuben Crouch

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beautiful set by mj