March 23rd, 1891 — Ari & Dio's Bartonburg Home

It was a last-minute arrangement, but somehow she felt more prepared than the previous time he'd come over. It was easier now that she knew him and knew his intentions, and after sitting with him during their last visit it did not feel as though a stranger was coming over. But that was another thing—Dio had thought she had a good grasp of who the real Ben Crouch was, but then she'd heard the rumors, and now she did not know what to think. He'd gotten into a fight with one of the Macmillans—a public brawl—and the way his letter had been worded suggested that something was not right.

It was 7pm when Elliott had gone down for the night, which at first she was a little disappointed about (she'd been trying to keep him up, but he'd woken up so early and he was so cranky) but upon further reflection she decided it would give them a better chance to just talk. Then, if the opportunity came, she could wake up her son and let Ben hold him, just as he'd done last time.

She was still in her afternoon dress, but she'd slipped on one of her larger coats on top of it for the comfort rather than the warmth and curled up on the couch in the drawing room, her arms crossed over her chest and her gaze fixated on the fireplace. She told herself, first and foremost, that she did not want this to be a confrontation; his business outside of Elliott was his own, and she did not want to accost him with questions about matters that she was not involved in, but - still. One did not work as a mediwitch for years without being able to tell when others were trying to hide when something was wrong, and his letter was met by the gut instinct that there was something there.

Dionisia rose off the couch as the floo lit up, and by the time she reached her feet Ben Crouch was there in her home.

"Hi," she said softly, suddenly realizing how quiet the house really was.

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Reuben Crouch

  

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The date was set: Friday morning. Ben wasn't nervous, not really — not about the duel, anyway. He was more nervous that someone he didn't want knowing about it would hear between now and then and try to stop him. This wasn't going to be that big of a deal, he was convinced, and it was necessary. Macmillan wasn't planning to shut up any time soon, as his letters clearly indicated, and while Nova might have been shielded from the worst effects of rumors by her happy and secure marriage, she wouldn't remain entirely insulated from them for long if this kept up. Macmillan's letters implied that November had interacted with him in some capacity, maybe even encouraged him, which Ben was loathe to believe — but if it was true, this had gotten far too out of hand already. Someone had to put a stop to it, and it made sense that it was him. He had less to lose than either Aldous or Roman from illegal dueling — and he was better at it, besides.

The most likely outcome on Friday was that he would give Macmillan some minor injury, and that would be the end of it. That was all Ben wanted, for all his blustering about killing him. He wanted to shut him up and scare him off, so that Nova could go about her business in peace. Macmillan seemed like a bit of a diva, so it probably wouldn't take much. A broken arm or a bloodied nose might do the trick. Ben didn't expect that he would walk away with anything more than a bruise, if he was even hit at all — but it was always good practice to get one's affairs in order beforehand, just in case. Ben had been second at more than his fair share of duels during his days at Excalibur; he knew the routine. So he was glad that Elliott's mother had suggested a visit — he wanted to see him again, just in case, but thought it would be too morbid to have asked himself.

When he stepped out of the floo, though, the boy wasn't anywhere to be seen. It hadn't even occurred to Ben, who was a father only in the vaguest and most superficial sense, that this was sort of late for a toddler. "Hey," he answered, with a glance around the room. "Where's Elliott?"

  

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She gave him that moment to glance around before she answered, because she needed to prepare the words she intended to speak. It was easy to envision a conversation when the person was not in the room—now that he was here she found herself a little befuddled.

"Elliott fell asleep half an hour ago. I did not think it wise to keep him awake, lest he scare you off with his screams." It was a joke, and she smiled as if it was one, but there was a somberness to her tone that sucked away the humorous intent. She stepped towards him and motioned with a hand in the direction of the hall. "He's in his nursery. I thought I'd wait for you here."

She watched him closely with each word she spoke, trying to make out any symptoms of distress or dishevelment. He seemed fairly normal, but Dionisia was not the type to give up on her suspicions without explicit proof that she was wrong.

"If you'd like we could...?" She looked down the hall, and then back at him, a soft smile on her lips.

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"Oh," Ben said, unable to entirely mask his disappointment at this response. Of course he couldn't advocate for keeping a kid up past his bedtime so that he could hang out with someone who was essentially a stranger, but he had been hoping to be able to interact with him again, especially if there was a chance — however slight — that it might be the last time. But she was his mother and she knew best, and Ben had to be content with whatever small snippets of Elliott she thought she could manage to give him without disrupting things.

Then she invited him down the hall, which surprised him. This seemed weirdly intimate, being able to walk through her house (another man's house, a man whom he had never met and likely never would). Last time he'd only been in the parlor, and since that room contained the floo it was hardly like even being properly inside; it was like the entryway at one of those big Wellingtonshire houses. Going down the hall felt — different. Too comfortable. Definitely something that Melody wouldn't have liked, especially after the Witch Weekly article, but — well, Melody didn't know, and it might be the last time. Everything might be the last time.

"Uhm, sure," he said, taking a hesitant step to follow her.

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Dio slowed down as they walked through the hall so she would stay in line with Ben, allowing him time to take in their surroundings. It was times like these that Dionisia realized how out-of-place she was in her own home; she focused on the wallpaper, the pictures that hung on the wall, the little decorations that put everything together. It was nothing like the home she'd spent the years after leaving Hogwarts in, which she'd shared with a few other girls in Pennyworth. It was like she'd never been the poor girl in the orphan house—now she had a home with an actual staircase, old portraits on the wall, and she was in charge of keeping house.

She glanced at him as they neared the stairwell. Her hands were clasped together in front of her to resist the urge to reach out and touch his arm. She knew she shouldn't, even if it was not meant like that, but she felt a strange sense of familiarity that she could only feel with him as the man who had fathered Elliott. They started up the stairs and Dionisia finally found the courage to say something for the first time in a few minutes.

"I've worried about you," she said. It was an intimate thing to say, and she realized it the moment she spoke it, but it was not unwarranted; most men did not go brawling in public, and it seemed especially out-of-character for the man who had spent time reading children's books to their son. "But I'm glad to see that you look uninjured."

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It was like being invited to another world. Taking a step into the hallway, Ben was immediately surrounded by unfamiliar faces staring out at him from photographs. He tried not to look, at first, because this wasn't his family. He didn't even know these people. The fact that they were Elliott's family didn't give him any right to know anything about them, or to see into their lives even in still shots. He couldn't entirely avoid looking, though, and then once he'd glanced at one he couldn't stop. He walked slowly, keeping pace with Elliott's mother but hardly aware of her presence at all.

They looked happy. They looked nice. This was a good place for Elliott to be.

He looked up with some surprise as she spoke. She'd already said the same thing in her letters, and he'd already dismissed it once, but he shook his head again. "You shouldn't worry about me," he said. He didn't mean to imply that he was fine, or not worth worrying about — rather that their relationship didn't, shouldn't, require her to worry about him. His tone wasn't a chastisement, but more of a gentle reminder: it wasn't her responsibility to worry about him. She didn't owe him anything, and she’d given him a lot already.

"Is this him?" he asked, gesturing at a picture of a much smaller baby in the arms of an unfamiliar man. He meant Is this Elliott, though he supposed the question might've stood for her husband, too.

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What she should and shouldn't be doing had been a source of contention over the past few months. She shouldn't be lying to Ari. She shouldn't be letting Ben see Elliott behind everyone's back. She shouldn't be trying to mislead Zelda. She shouldn't worry about Ben, but she'd done all the others when she shouldn't have, so why not this one, too? If she hadn't been so invested in ensuring that Ben thought this entire arrangement wasn't likely to cause the downward spiral of her marriage she might have said as much. Instead she merely smiled, but in her eyes the worry was still there.

She stopped next to the picture Ben had picked out out of all the ones hanging on the wall, and yet another pang of guilt hit her. It was a picture of Ari and Elliott shortly after Elliott had turned six-months-old. He was smaller and blonder, his features much less defined; he looked more like Dionisia there, with his soft chocolate brown eyes and heart-shaped face. Nothing like Ari—but less like Ben than he did now.

"Yes," she answered, "Elliott and my husband. His hair has darkened in the last year—I suspect it'll darken even more as he gets older. My sister was the same way." She hadn't seen Tristessa in years, but that had been one of the differences between them: Dionisia had always been blonde, while her sister was considered a brunette by the time they were older children. She wondered if Elliott would be the same, and if it would make him look more like Ben.

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Ben smiled at the confirmation, albeit a little sadly. "He's so small," he commented, though this was not likely to be much of a revelation. It was what stood out to him, though. The baby in the picture both looked like Elliott and looked like an entirely separate child, the differences were so vast. Art was right; they did grow up quick at this age. Was Elliott going to be different now, even two weeks later, than he had been the last time Ben had seen him? And if he didn't see him for weeks or even months after this, how much would he change? How long would it take before Ben didn't recognize him anymore?

And he was never going to see Elliott at that age in the picture. He'd missed that entirely, and it was never coming back. The closest he could get was drinking in a picture like this.

"Do you have more?" he asked, glancing at the nearby picture frames for any sign of his son.

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"He was," she echoed, but the longer she looked at it the tighter her chest grew. She could not admit—and certainly not to Ben—that in the first few months of Elliott's life she had been deeply sad, almost all of the time. She hadn't wanted to hold him, comfort him, nor do any of the things a mother would naturally want to do with her child. Those months of his life were lost to her.

The rest of the hallway was scattered with family portraits, more of Ari and the Fisks than Dionisia and Elliott. Eventually more pictures would be taken as Elliott matured, and they would slowly replace the pictures the were less sentimental. "We keep most of them in his nursery," she explained, glancing down the hall. They were nearly there now; the Fisk home was larger than any home she'd lived in bar Brannon's home, but most of the rooms were easily accessible. All of the bedrooms—Ari's, Dionisia's, Elliott's, and another spare—were kept in the same hallway, and between Ari and Dio's was another parlor-style room that was only accessible through either of their rooms. They were the only rooms on the second floor; everything else was on the first.

She began walking towards the nursery, motioning for Ben to follow her. "What caused your fight with Elmer Macmillan?" she asked suddenly, as they passed by the empty bedroom. He'd said not to worry, but she was determined to make sense of it; he might think she deserved an explanation, after all, since he was still allowed to see Elliott.

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Ben's gait stuttered just a little at the unexpected question, but hopefully not enough that she would have noticed. He didn't particularly want to talk about it, because while he found it hard to regret fighting Macmillan he wasn't exactly proud of the way things had worked out. He wasn't proud of having left Melody at home alone while he panicked and went off looking for Greengrass, but there wasn't anything he could do about it now. And Melody was awake now, and was recovering, so everything had worked out alright in the end. And this duel wasn't going to be a big deal, in the end — a minor inconvenience, a few spells shot off and the thing resolved. Macmillan would have learned his lesson and Ben would be none the worse for wear, and that would be that.

"He, ah — insulted my sister," Ben said with a slight flush of his cheeks. That wasn't the whole truth, but it was close enough for anyone outside of the family. The very notion that she might be interested in someone like Macmillan was an insult, and Ben wasn't going to further the stain on her character by repeating what Macmillan had actually said. "But it probably wouldn't have escalated the way it did if I hadn't already been — in a bit of a mood," Ben admitted, reaching up to rub his neck. That was, of course, putting it lightly, but that was another thing he didn't really think she needed to know.

  

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Even though she would tell anyone—Ben included—that there were better ways to handle disputes than fistfights, the fact that he'd done so to defend his sister alleviated her worries about the why. Dionisia did not typically involve herself in conflicts between grown men, but she could list out a multitude of reasons that two men might brawl in broad daylight, and defending his sister's honor was probably one of the best scenarios she could imagine. He said he'd already been in a bad mood, but he did not elaborate, and Dionisia would not push him for an explanation unless he volunteered it.

"I take it you've settled your differences now?" she asked. She'd hadn't heard that either men had ended up arrested, which was - good. Physical violence was heavily frowned upon in the magical community—more so than in the muggle community, if her childhood was any indication.

She came to a stop in front of a door halfway down the hall. The sound of music could be heard coming from behind it—one of Dionisia's many charms on the room to ensure he slept soundly. She put her hand on the knob and looked up at him, awaiting his answer before they entered.

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Ben hesitated, and he might have just shrugged in response and not said anything at all, except that she'd paused. She was waiting for an answer, so he'd have to say something, and certainly it could not be the truth — but he didn't want to lie to her, either, when she had been nothing but honest with him. It wasn't necessarily that he was ashamed to admit it, or anything — he'd told Aldous he was planning to duel Macmillan before he'd even officially challenged him, and Art too. People just tended to think this was a much bigger deal than it needed to be, and he didn't want to start a conversation with her that would become a whole confused mess of her — well, he didn't know her well enough to know how she'd react. Concerned? Disappointed? Angry? Confused? In any case — it wasn't why he was here tonight.

"It's... not exactly resolved yet," Ben said, a little evasively. "But it will be."

  

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A look of confusion crossed her face, and she made no effort to conceal it. It was an evasive, if not outright ominous answer—definitely too much so to let it slide without question. She did not want to push, or pry, or do anything that would anger him into cutting off the relationship with Elliott she'd gone to great lengths to help cultivate, but his comment, combined with her initial gut instinct that something was not quite right, drove her to her next comment.

"You must be aware of how worrying that sounds," she said, making a conscious effort to keep her tone soft and unthreatening. Her hand remained on the doorknob, but made no move to turn it.

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He really hadn't meant it to sound like anything, but after she pointed it out he realized it was fairly obvious that he wasn't saying the critical piece of that story. Ben sighed. Of course she would hesitate, when she'd asked him a direct question and he hadn't answered it. The right thing to do now would be to just admit it, he thought. She might change her mind about letting him see Elliott, which would be painful — they were only a few seconds from having been inside the nursery — but that was her prerogative. She was his mother, and Ben had no rights to inflict his presence on Elliott if she thought it wouldn't be a good idea.

"We've exchanged some letters," Ben said experimentally, as though he needed to say this phrase out loud in order to test whether it was a plausible stopgap that would prevent her from pressing any further on the subject — he did want to see Elliott. He decided, on hearing it, that it sounded just as evasive as his previous comments. He chewed his lower lip for half a second, then admitted, "I've challenged him to a duel."

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   Dionisia Fisk

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The answer was - unexpected. Dueling was a popular magical sport, but in this context Dionisia was most familiar with muggle dueling with pistols, and that had been outlawed for many years. She had a vague understanding that they still happen on occasions, but she'd never considered that wizards also participated in them, and so her mind was filled with images of Ben Crouch in the middle of a field dueling with his wand to the death.

Or something like that. Her brows furrowed at a particularly bloody image in her head and her expression collapsed into a mixture of worry and confusion.

"Surely not with the intention of... you know...?" Killing a man?—or worse, being killed himself? Her heart skipped a beat at the thought.

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"No, of course not," Ben said easily, reaching up to rub his thumb across his lower lip. He knew exactly what she meant by the question, because of course that was what everyone thought when they thought of a duel. That was the reason he didn't want to bring it up to anyone, because of reactions like that. And yeah, sure, people could die in duels; it had happened in the past, and that was why it was illegal. Ben had no intention of killing Macmillan, though, and he certainly had no intention of dying himself.

"Just knocking some sense into him," he explained. "Minor wounds, probably. Maybe some broken bones if he's stubborn. Nothing a healer can't fix."

  

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