For a second he thought that Greengrass had figured him out and was going to stand up and leave, or that maybe he was sliding closer to hit him — either were reactions that would have made sense, given what Cash had just admitted to, and given how often they'd been alone in places where no one they knew could have found him. He expected anything, really, except what actually happened — which was that Ford's arms were wrapped around his shoulders and there was the bottle of brandy at a weird angle between them, and Cash inhaled because he was so caught off guard by this that it caused another swell of feeling to rise in his chest.

Cash closed his eyes; it was as if his breath was caught in his chest. Ford had touched him a few times in the room of the inn but this was different — he had felt so disconnected from his own body that it had been impossible to really react to any of it. And this was different, too, because now Ford knew he was broken and might have even guessed why, and he was hugging him anyways.

He remembered the dream from the night before. He'd been walking through Hogwarts trying to find Eli — this was a little recurring for him — and eventually ended up in their dorm room, shadowed unnaturally in a way it had never been in reality. Eli was sitting on his bed with the curtains open, partially undressed like he had been the night he died.

Cash walked towards him and knew, knew, that he was in a dream, knew that Eli was dead, knew he was going to wake up sooner or later. And Eli, sat on the bed, had tangled his fingers in the fabric of Cash's shirt and said, "I died for you and you don't even remember."

And then the door of their dorm room exploded and a green light flashed and Cash woke up screaming in his own blankets in London.

It hadn't been the same as the other three nights, things were different and some of the moments he did not even remember — but he had woken up thrashing in his blankets and there was a dementor at the bottom of his bed, pulled from his dream or pulled from nothing or maybe it had even just found him and slipped in through a crack in the window.

He gripped onto Greengrass' coat, fingers tangling in the fabric; too gentle to hold him in place if he wanted to pull back, but Cash's breath was frozen in his chest and all of it was still coming back, and Ford was hugging him, and there was surely more to be said but he could not find the words.

---

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Ford had moved to hug Lestrange on impulse, because in the moment it seemed like the only thing that he could do. It didn't occur to him until after he'd tucked his chin in to Cash's shoulder that this might not be something he wanted. They were friends, but they weren't really that close, all things considered. Lestrange hadn't written him at all after the dinner party, up until this morning, so it was possible that Ford was here now more as a matter of convenience or necessity instead of because Cash wanted him around — it may have had more to do with his job than it did with him. Be that as it may, he didn't regret wrapping his arms around Cash. After a confession like that, dragging something that hurt that much out into the open, Ford thought a little physical contact would be in order. It might be the only thing that held all of his feelings inside his body at the moment, the boundary of arms around his shoulders. And Cash had wrapped his fingers into Ford's coat, so presumably he didn't mind.

Ford closed his eyes and took a breath. All of Lestrange's clothes smelled like cigarettes which was making Ford's empty stomach twist in a nauseating way, and the brandy bottle was poking him in the ribs, but he stayed where he was. He tried to think of something that was peaceful and pleasant, as though by transporting himself there mentally he might be able to drag Lestrange along with him, without even saying a word. The garden behind their country home, the one that Ford and his siblings had grown up in. During the day it was bustling with activity from all of his siblings, girls practicing sketching and Noble when he was a kid catching bugs to scare their governess, but at night it was so still. Ford's bedroom overlooked a corner of it, and when he opened the window he could climb out when he was supposed to be asleep and walk to the far edge of the garden. There was a gap beneath one of the rose bushes where they had been trying to get it to grow back in for years but it never quite did, and if he ducked he could walk straight out past the edge of their yard and out onto the undeveloped wilderness behind the property. Picking his way through little nests of brambles and fallen branches, he could find his way to a tiny, ice cold stream he didn't think any of his siblings had ever visited. A place that was just his and an atmosphere that existed only for a few moments, only at night when other people were asleep and no one knew where he was. Sometimes when you lost something, you didn't miss the thing so much as you missed the way it made you feel.

He was trying to regulate Cash's breathing, he realized. Ford hadn't thought about it consciously at first but that was what he was doing by tracing his way through the window of the bedroom that was no longer his and the garden they no longer owned and finding the stream he'd probably never see again. He was taking deep breaths and ignoring the smell of cigarette smoke and trying to get Cash to follow his lead and start breathing more regularly. Eventually Ford shifted, moving one arm just long enough to pull the brandy bottle out of the way and set it on the bench next to them, then settled into a more comfortable version of the same embrace.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," he said softly. He still had his chin on Cash's shoulder, so the words didn't need to travel far. "I'm sorry I made you talk about it."

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   Cassius Lestrange

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Ford was breathing so steadily and Cash could still barely get past this hitch in his chest; he couldn't remember the last time he'd admitted to what happened to him. (The thing with Antigone did not count — what he told her was so distant from the actual truth that he couldn't manage it.) Other than Angie, had he actually told anyone? He thought about it all the time. He was going to be broken forever because of it, and he couldn't tell anyone, because Eli was dead and because Cash had loved him. And he'd confessed because he had to and there was still this; the steady heave of Greengrass' chest in and out, and his chin on Cash's shoulder, and the weight of his arms over Cash's shoulders.

Cash's breathing started to regulate, although it was still shallow; he was worried that if he inhaled too deeply it would dislodge whatever was waiting in his chest and waiting to be set off. He didn't want to feel it; it was bubbling up anyways. I died for you and you don't even remember, and the Eli he'd seen in his own mind had been right, except that Cash remembered loving him. Belphoebe could take the rest of it but she couldn't take that, and maybe he would have been better off if she had. He kept his fingers tangled in Ford's coat.

He tilted his head towards Ford; the curls at the top of the other man's head were pressing against the side of Cash's face. "You shut that thing in a wardrobe," Cash said, soft and a little wry; he might be trying to deflect again, and he knew it, but he was not putting an abundance of thought into the deflection. "You can make me talk about whatever you want."

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MJ made this!

Ford still had the feeling that there was no particular reason it ought to have been him, sitting on this park bench with Lestrange and having a front row seat while he unfolded himself and laid bare things he probably hadn't talked about in years, or maybe ever. It wasn't as though he'd earned this confidence in any meaningful way; he just happened to be the person Lestrange sent a letter to that morning, and things seemed to have worked out alright so far. All the same, he smiled against Cash's neck at the other man's response. Ford loosened his grip on him a little, though he left his arms in place. Cash was breathing better now, and he was making wry remarks, but Ford still felt that there might be some danger of him simply falling apart without some external support to hold him together.

"I did, didn't I?" he said with a touch of pride. There were certainly moments when it hadn't felt like an inevitability, except that Ford knew he was going to figure it out because there simply wasn't any alternative. "But I still have to figure out what to do with it next, so don't thank me too soon," he pointed out. The dementor wasn't dead, it was only trapped. Boggarts could still feed on fear when they were locked away, if something came too close — were dementors the same way, even with obstacles between them and their prey? The fact that he'd still been able to feel that sense of dread, albeit muted, once the door to the wardrobe was shut implied that they were. Since dementors just wanted emotion it was hard for Ford to believe it could be effectively starved out in an area with such a high volume of people coming in and out. And if it latched onto someone the way it had latched on to Cash, then it might be able to grow. It might even break out of the wardrobe, if it grew too much, and — well, obviously Ford didn't want to have to explain to his supervisor in a few weeks or a few months or a year why there was a dementor running about Muggle London, if it did.

Besides, if it found a way to break itself out, it might come back for Cash. It was his dementor. In the room at the inn it had been affecting Cash almost exclusively, which was lucky for them — if it had been actively fighting Ford, he might not have managed the patronus. Ford didn't know that it would return for Cash, if it had the ability to wander again, but he had a strong suspicion.

"You have to help me starve it out," he said, pulling back far enough to look at Cash again. This wasn't exactly true — he didn't think any active involvement in the process was necessary from Lestrange, but he didn't know. It could have been true that the dementor would have some sort of connection to Cash as long as it was still around, that it would be able to survive so long as Cash felt this way, but maybe not. Ford's statement was more of a tactic; Lestrange had been very good at following directions back in the inn and he suspected that framing it this way might make him more willing to go through all of this. It might give him some courage to face things that he was currently unsure of. "We've got to do something about — this," he said, pulling one hand down to gesture vaguely at Lestrange's chest.

  

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Set by Lady!

They couldn't just leave the dementor in a muggle inn, as much as Cash wished they could. It would be easier to just forget that, too. He shifted a little in his spot on the bench, not to get away from Greengrass but rather to get a little closer — if Ford was going to sit here holding onto him for reasons Cash didn't entirely understand he may as well relax into the steadiness of the other man for as long as he could. Especially if they were talking about the dementor. Cash ought to have opinions about what to do with it, and he knew it. But thinking about that thing just reminded him of the afternoon he'd spent with it in the dark, waiting for something to happen while it drew everything it could out of him.

He raised his eyebrows at Ford, at the gesture to his chest, and bit back his instinctual response, which was: well, then we're fucked Cash was a haunted house of a person, a haunted house with shoddy foundations and an attic on the verge of caving in. And he didn't know how to begin to explain to Ford that something was very wrong with him, fundamentally, that things had been wrong with him even before memories were picked out and moved around and artificially adjusted. Maybe then he would have been able to do this, but he couldn't now — the grief was overwhelming and formless and everything, and he didn't know who he was anymore, without it.

(He owed Eli his grief.)

"I don't know how to do that," Cash admitted, a kinder version of what he had wanted to say.

---

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   Fortitude Greengrass

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MJ made this!

Cash shifted on the bench and Ford did too, without really thinking about it, so that he was a little closer to the other man but only had one arm around his shoulders. This was a little more comfortable if they were going to be talking, because it gave him options of where to look besides just Cash's face — not that he minded, but they were sitting very close together and Ford recognized that looking right at each other was a little intense, and maybe if they were going to keep talking they would get to a point where one of them wasn't capable of handling that.

"No, I know," he said responded with a nod. If Cash knew how to do that, they wouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place. It wasn't as though he'd sat down four years ago in the immediate aftermath of what had happened and decided he was going to let himself spiral out of control, and he certainly had never planned to wither away in a Muggle inn with a dementor lurking in the corner. To be honest, Ford didn't know how Cash had gotten here, because this wasn't the sort of thing that was supposed to be possible. He'd never heard about it happening before, and some part of him felt like the fact that Lestrange had even survived this long was improbable. Since he had, though, Ford had no intention of abandoning him to himself again.

"I don't, either," he admitted. "But we'll figure it out." Somehow. Ford had the same sort of resolution about this that he'd had about finding a way to best the dementor; he didn't really know what he was doing, but he had to figure it out, because it wasn't as though they had alternatives. And this might feel a little less frantic, sitting on a park bench instead of sharing a room with a creature that wanted to devour Lestrange's soul, but it was no less urgent.

Ford glanced up at the sky, but there weren't any stars visible here. Too much light pollution from the London streets nearby. "Is it alright if we talk about him?" he asked tentatively.

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   Cassius Lestrange

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Set by Lady!

They would figure it out. Cash wasn't sure he believed it was possible, but he did believe that Ford was stubborn enough that he wouldn't let him just give up — there were plenty of people who would have backed out of the room if they'd found Cash with a dementor that evening. Ford hadn't, and it was probably off-brand wishful thinking to expect him to give up now.

Talking about Eli was like stretching a muscle he hadn't used in a long time. He expected it to hurt. Cash bit down on the inside of his lip and let a beat pass. "Yeah," he said, "That's alright. Or — we can try. I might have to stop." Talking about Eli meant poking at all the more empty places of his memory and hoping he didn't send anything toppling. He knew it was going to hurt, too, but — maybe it couldn't hurt as much as spending all that time with the dementor had.

He brought his knee up towards his chest; he was preemptively ready to make himself smaller if he had to, but didn't want to curl up enough to pull away from Ford's arm. It would have been nice to be held like this if he wasn't so emotionally wrecked by the day.

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MJ made this!

Ford's arm tightened around Lestrange's shoulders when he brought his knee up. It wasn't something he'd thought about; just a reflex to try and keep the other man from falling apart. Ford assumed when Cash said I might have to stop that he meant it might hurt too much to continue, or that he didn't think he would be capable of bearing it, and he didn't have any response to that. He hadn't ever been through something like this, so how was he supposed to tell Cash to just be stronger? If they needed to stop, he supposed they could. Now that he'd definitively missed dinner, it wasn't as though Ford had anywhere else he had to be, until work tomorrow morning. So he had time to tease this out, if that was what it took to try and find a way forward.

He didn't know where to start. Ford felt like he shouldn't be starting at all, because while he knew a few things about Swan he obviously hadn't seen him the same way Cash had. He didn't know the sorts of things that would have stuck in Cash's mind about him, or the sorts of things it might be helpful to retrace if they were trying to find a new path to grieving him. Which was what he was doing, Ford realized only now that he'd already asked the question. His assumption was that after it had happened, Cash had buried it inside himself and never grieved the other boy, and that maybe if he did grieve him, it would help.

Not that Ford really knew what he was doing. Maybe it would only make everything worse. Maybe it would shatter the rather delicate emotional stability that Cash had found once he'd gotten away from the dementor. Maybe it would lead another one to appear, or make the first one stronger even from this distance, or maybe something else would happen that was totally unexpected. There was no precedent for this, as far as Ford was concerned, which meant there was no way to know what was going to happen next. But if there was no way to know what would happen next, the only thing left was to do something — and if it had some terrible consequences, he supposed he'd find a way to deal with it just like he'd found a way to deal with the dementor and just like he was slowly finding a way to deal with this, picking his way through it like he was walking through the brambles behind their old home on a moonlit night.

"Tell me what sorts of things made him laugh," Ford suggested softly. "And how his eyes looked when he smiled."

  

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Set by Lady!

Trying to remember things Eli laughed at was harder than Cash would have liked to admit, because so many of his memories of the other man were — unsorted or tampered with or otherwise just gone. He had an easier time remembering things they'd fought about, little innocuous conversations when they were in public, the sort of things that had been buried too deep or otherwise left alone just because Belphoebe missed them. He had flashes of it, instead, little things that he was sure were true but could not explain — Eli was always doing clever bits of magic, but Cash couldn't think of examples; Eli was smart and always had been; he was the first person to playfully tease Cash and probably the best at it, too, but Cash could not remember as many examples of that as he could just the feeling of it, of knowing Eli.

He leaned into the weight of Ford's arm, grounding himself a little in this moment — Cash suspected that things would only get worse if he slid out of focus here. He ought to be trying to convince Greengrass that he wasn't crazy, but it was a little late for that, now — he'd been excruciatingly honest all night.

"He smiled like he was letting you in on a joke," Cash said, a little slowly, "And — you could always tell what he was feeling from his smile." Or maybe Cash just could, and most people wouldn't have been able to read Eli that well. He didn't know, anymore.

"He'd tease me and laugh about it. He knew me too well. And he was always getting himself into trouble," Cash added, remembering him, this ghost of Eli. Eli had never really been the one to get in trouble in Hogwarts, but after he was always getting himself into problems, like when Cash found him in a hallway in Black's.

---

  

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MJ made this!

For a moment everything was quiet, and Ford wondered if he'd pushed one boundary too far and Lestrange wasn't going to answer him. Ford didn't have any rights to hear this, and he knew it. It was personal and intimate and it had nothing to do with him. It was less important that anyone be around to hear it, though, and more important that Cash said it, so Ford was glad when he finally did start answering.

Ford listened, and smiled. "Good. That's good," he said, when it seemed that Cash had reached a pause in what he wanted to say. Ford didn't know what he was doing, and he didn't really know what would help, but this felt right. This felt like the sort of thing that could pull the other man back from the edge, if anything could. He smiled like he was letting you in on a joke. That was perfect, because it was so evocative of the relationship they'd had, of the mannerisms Swan had, of the way they'd interacted. Ford had never known the other boy well but he felt like he could picture this smile, from that description. He figured Cash was probably picturing it, too. Remember why you loved him, Ford thought, looking up at the blank night sky again. Make me fall in love with him too.

Merlin, he hoped this worked, because if it didn't, it was really going to make everything dramatically worse.

"What sort of trouble?" he prompted gently.

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   Cassius Lestrange

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"Curses, mostly," Cash said, "He was a cursebreaker, and sometimes he would do some stuff with cursed buildings — extracurricularly." That was the nicest possible way to say that Eli had stolen things that he could think of; Cash had an inclination that Ford wouldn't exactly smile upon illegal behavior. His general way of being in the world was very much not that of someone who did illegal things — this was not a bad quality for Ford to have, but it did make stories of Eli's stealing feel a little risky.

"And — well the obvious is that he decided to be —" Cash paused for a beat, and glanced at Ford's face. If Ford hadn't fully put things together then this would be damning, and he tensed a little, ready for fight or flight, except that he did not have much of either in him. "— with me. And that was stupid."

Sometimes Cash thought that Eli was so clever he did not think anything bad could really happen to him; he always found a solution to the trouble he found himself in. Maybe the other boy would have done things differently if he'd known what was coming — Cash would have stayed away if he had known.

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MJ made this!

Curses, and curse-breaking, were very much in the realm of things Ford had as little to do with as possible. He'd never been good at practical magic unless he used it often enough that he worked out all the kinks, so the idea of just messing around with something and trying to undo someone else's magic was a little anxiety-inducing on its own. And that was before adding the layer that these things were cursed and wanted to hurt you. He could recognize that it took a good deal of skill, though, and that being a cursebreaker was impressive, so he thought maybe he should ask more about that. That, and the way Lestrange had phrased that last bit was sort of intriguing. How did one do something extracurricularly with cursed buildings? What did that even mean?

The next thing that Lestrange said, though, made Ford lose track of the cursebreaking thread entirely. It wasn't decided to be with me, because Ford had pieced together that part already (as much as he could, having no particular first hand experience of what a relationship like that might look like), but rather how Cash had ended it. And that was stupid. Like it was an immutable fact, a foregone conclusion. And Ford supposed that standing here now, looking back on it, maybe it did seem that way.

"Was he happy when he was with you?" Ford asked, catching Cash's very-blue, very-bloodshot eyes. This was a safer question, he'd decided, than did he make you happy, because he wasn't sure they'd retraced enough of this for Cash to remember that he had been happy, before the crushing weight of everything that had come afterwards.

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That was — a question, and Cash tilted his head upwards at it, looking at the London sky above them. He didn't even really know what time it was — he supposed that Ford had gotten there sometime after five, but all time had seemed so lost in that room, and now it could have been nearly any time after sundown, and it didn't feel real to him.

The entire day had that quality of unreality that came from one's nightmares coming to life; the weirdest and worst case of anything can happen today already had, so what did time really matter, anyways? He was not at all drunk from the brandy — if anything he felt dreadfully sober, and suspected that the strange slightly disconnected feeling he still had was because of the dementor — but this still all felt fake, like they could have been on a park bench anywhere in the world, and Ford's eyes and his voice were the only real things at all.

"I think so," Cash said. I'm supposed to be with you, and it was a memory and not hearing Eli's voice, but he knew Eli had said it. "But — even if he was happy, it's still my fault he's dead." He felt like Ford didn't get that, that it was Cash's fault Eli was dead, that Eli would have been better off not knowing him at all. And Cash would have been worse off as a person but — Eli would still be alive.

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MJ made this!

CW: suicide, depression

Ford watched Cash's eyes as he answered. Lestrange had never said how Swan had died, and Ford had never asked. Maybe that was a key piece of information here, but — somehow without even knowing what it was, Ford felt like maybe it wasn't as critical to this as Cash thought. Cash had been focusing on that one moment, on the death, for the past four years. He was fixated on it, to the point where he didn't actively remember anything else about his relationship with Swan. And yes, it must have been traumatizing to lose him in that way — obviously it had been traumatizing, to have done this, to have still had such repercussions four years later — but it wasn't the only thing that had happened.

"Maybe," he allowed after a long moment. Ford didn't know, and had decided not to ask, so there wasn't any point in trying to argue whether or not Cash ought to feel responsible for it. In any case, he understood the impulse to take responsibility for things, and it would have been difficult to argue Lestrange out of a position that he was still sitting in himself, most of the time. "But everybody dies. And not everyone gets to be happy before they do," he pointed out. He worked with a great many dead people, and most of them had been terribly unhappy for a long time before they died. Not all ghosts were like that, of course, but most of the ones that had frequent interactions with the Spirit Division were. That was a frightening thing, to see someone who had gotten to the end of their life and had nothing to show for it, nothing to look back on.

There was something about Noble wrapped up in all of this, too, Ford realized. The difference between a boggart six months ago who had tried to show him Noble dead and the boggart in Macnair's attic who had tried the same thing. The first was just the death, and what it was meant to represent was simpler: being left alone, being left behind. The second was so much more complicated. It had been obvious when the boggart showed it to him that Noble's death hadn't been an accident, but something he'd done himself, and it didn't just make Ford feel alone. It made him feel like a failure, not because Noble had died but because he had wanted to, because he had been feeling like that, living with that, and Ford hadn't done anything to help him. It was the sadness, the emptiness, the expanse inside his brother's heart that really terrified Ford. His siblings dying had never been a very effective boggart before that possibility had been put on the table; he had always dispatched it with ease. The one in Macnair's attic had been different because it wasn't the sort of fear Ford could just pick apart and isolate. This part is in the room, this part isn't; the second part isn't real, and it can't hurt you. The thing about wondering if his brother might be suicidal was that it could be real. It wasn't just a boggart. It could have been happening right then, right now — it could have been hurting Noble right now and Ford wouldn't have even known, and he wouldn't have known how to help if he had.

So if they had been happy, even if it was only for a few minutes while they were together, it was worth it. If it had kept this darkness inside Cash's chest at bay for years, it was worth it. If it made Swan smile like he was letting you in on a joke, smile in a way that you could always tell what he was feeling, then it was worth it. No matter how it ended. Everybody died, sooner or later. Not everyone could push that feeling out long enough to be happy.

At some point Cash had leaned in to him, and now his head was at the right height for Ford to lean his cheek against the top of his head, which he did. "It doesn't seem that stupid to me."

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   Cassius Lestrange

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cw: depression

Maybe Ford was right, maybe Eli had been happy and maybe it was worth it, and maybe Cash would feel a little less fucked up about this if he could remember. There had been a point where he thought maybe things would hurt less if he just let Belphoebe take whatever she wanted from him — but that wasn’t true, because now all those things were gone and Cash was just empty. He wouldn’t even describe himself as sad, first-off — just empty, with that space inside him that used to house Eli and now held — nothing.

They were supposed to be together. They were supposed to be together but Eli was dead and Cash was still here, left behind in London with Ford’s arms tethering him to the real world. Eli was dead and Cash was still here and sometimes Cash thought that if their places were switched Eli would have been able to handle it better. But Eli was gone and Cash didn’t know where his body was, and instead he was sitting here curled towards another man’s chest, admitting that he wished he was dead.

And was it worth it? He didn’t know. If he could remember Cash thought he could know, but he didn’t.

Maybe he should tell Ford about his memory problems, maybe he shouldn’t; maybe he should try to go home. Maybe he should accept that if he was the sort of person who could generate a dementor he was also the sort of person who should just give up on any expectation that things would improve.

”I’m so lonely,” he admitted instead, ”I’m so lonely and I don’t remember and it’s just — I’m so lonely.”

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Lestrange's words were like a gut punch; Ford could feel them hit his insides. He was responding before he'd even had a chance to think about it, because there really wasn't anything to think about, was there? There was only one thing he possibly could have said, to something like that. "I know," he said, his tone the sort one might adopt to soothe a startled animal. "It's alright. I'm here. I've got you. It's going to be alright."

Ford had spent so much of this conversation acting on instinct and figuring out what he was doing after he'd started that the weight of his own words didn't really occur to him until they'd already left his mouth. Oh, no — this was all wrong. It might be what Lestrange needed to hear, in the moment, but it wasn't something Ford had any right to say. This wasn't his place, he didn't know Lestrange that way, and he was making very serious promises too lightly. And he'd been sitting with his arm around this other man for however many minutes, and now he was leaning his head against Lestrange's head, and this might have been what Cash needed at the moment but it wasn't right, it didn't fit. It shouldn't have been Ford.

"Let's go get you some food," he said abruptly, to prevent Cash from feeling he needed to respond to Ford's loaded words from a moment ago. He squeezed Cash's shoulders lightly, to signal that he was about to let go.

  

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Set by Lady!