April 7th, 1891 — Late Evening — A Small Town Somewhere

They'd ended up in this particular town for no reason at all, except that Ford had gone and investigated something here the week prior and so he knew the address of a public floo in the area. It was a mostly Muggle area — the "haunting" he'd gone to investigate was only a set of old pipes and a window that let in a draft even when it was shut — so once they'd left the floo behind they were more or less off the grid once again, which Ford had gotten the sense was important to Cash. And no wonder, with the nature of their conversation so far — it wasn't the sort of thing Ford would have wanted to discuss with his friends and family, if he had been going through this. Maybe in that respect Ford was the right person to be here, in that he was sort of a non-entity. He knew Lestrange, and he liked Lestrange, but the two couldn't have been considered close since they had only reconnected a few months ago, and they hadn't spoken once since the disastrous dinner party. Maybe saying all of this to Ford was a way of hedging his bets, because if Ford cut and run at least it wasn't much of a loss.

Ford didn't plan on running, though. In for a penny, in for a pound. He didn't think he could just leave now, after trapping a dementor in a wardrobe and listening to Cash talk about how lonely he felt and asking him questions about the boy he'd been in love with.

Since leaving London, the conversation between the two of them had been confined to only occasional superficial exchanges. It was like taking a break from climbing a mountain; they both needed the rest. There was probably more to be said, before Ford would feel as though he could leave Lestrange alone in good conscious, but he was hesitant to dive into it again, and he wasn't sure he knew where to start.

"Curry's good," he commented mildly, glancing from the bowl on the table up to Cash sitting across from him. They were in a booth at the back of the sort of place that doubled as an inn and a pub, which was one of the few places still serving food by the time they'd made it here.

Cassius Lestrange

  

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Cash would have gone almost anywhere outside of London, although he had also been utterly unprepared to think of anywhere. So it was lucky that Greengrass knew this place, and that there was an inn that served food, although Cash didn't really feel like eating. He knew that he ought to eat something. He'd had a few bites of toast at breakfast with Belphoebe, but that could hardly be called breakfast, and had to have been more than twelve hours since then. For the rest of the day it had just been — chainsmoking and gin and brandy and his stomach had twisted a few times to let him know it was empty, but that didn't mean he was ready to go through the motions of dealing with that.

So he was eating bites of curry, but not very quickly, and he was trying to tune out the noise of the muggles in the inn, which seemed at the same time like a blanket of liveliness and oppressive. He felt at least a little better than he had in London, maybe because of the increased space between his person and the wardrobe dementor. Or — and this felt more likely — because he was eating a little and because he was no longer talking about things he tried not to think about.

"Oh, yes," Cash agreed, similarly mild. He was good at small talk when he wanted to be, or when he went to it on automatic — a posh little shield that meant he was fine at parties. "I'm glad you thought of this place." His tone at this was more genuine. He was still a little surprised that Ford hadn't bailed once they trapped the dementor, or once Cash revealed things about Eli, or after the park bench.

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Ford shrugged the comment off. It was less that he'd thought of this place specifically than that he happened to remember a floo address that wasn't in a highly trafficked magical part of the country, and then this inn happened to be nearby and open and sold food. But the curry was good, and Lestrange was eating some of it, which was good too. They were taking little baby steps at this point, but they were still making progress on their slow march back towards normalcy. Which was... good, maybe. Ford wasn't entirely sure what the end game for this was supposed to look like, since he'd never dealt with this situation before, but he did know that both of them were going to have to go to work again tomorrow, so there needed to be some degree of normalcy reinstated in the meantime. It was equally clear, however, that Cash couldn't go back to doing exactly what he'd done before, because he'd reached the point where not dealing with everything in his past was no longer sustainable.

Ford turned his attention to his curry for a moment, turning the question over in his mind. On the one hand, he did think that what they'd talked about so far had been... necessary, or useful, maybe. He didn't know, because he didn't really know what he was doing. On the other hand, he also still felt like maybe he wasn't the right person to sit here on the receiving end of this, but he didn't know that he could suggest anyone better suited to the task. Was it important that someone be here at all? Maybe not, but Ford knew he couldn't just tell Cash to work through things on his own and trust that he would. If he knew how to do that, he wouldn't have spent the last day lying around with a dementor hanging over his head.

"I think maybe I should give you some homework," he said eventually. This was sort of a weird thing to say, because it wasn't as though Ford had any authority over Lestrange whatsoever. He wasn't even here in an official Ministry capacity, which might have given him a bit of a leg to stand on. Lestrange had written to him because he needed his expertise, so maybe that was something, but Ford was hardly an expert in this part — except that he had never spontaneously created a dementor, so he at least had that distinction over Cash. "Because I don't think we can get through everything in one night. But it's too important to just put to the side."

  

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"Oh, homework," Cash said, "That would be very appealing to my whole Ravenclaw thing, you know." It was easier to make a little quip than to actually engage with the reality of homework — to Cash's surprise, Ford still seemed committed to ensuring that Cash was something approximating alright. This was both very kind of him given that they weren't that close, but also probably at least a little futile. There was nothing Ford could do that would ensure the crumbling house of Cash's memories didn't cave in on him, which was — with some academic distance — what he was starting to suspect had contributed to the situation today.

He sort of liked the idea of this as a puzzle he could solve. Things would be easier if his head and his grief were a locked-door mystery where the detective could walk in say aha! and then the mystery would be over and everyone could go on with their lives. Cash didn't really suspect things could work out that neatly.

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Ford managed a brief flicker of a smile, but it was only superficial and it quickly faded. He shifted his weight in the booth, uncomfortable. He thought Cash was probably making a joke because he was trying to deflect, because he didn't want to talk about this, which... fair. It was hard to talk about, and he'd already shared more than Ford had any right to know, and where did Ford get off coming in with a sentence like I think maybe I should give you some homework? Much as he would have liked to have chuckled and brushed it off, though, this wasn't something he thought Cash could afford to brush off. Ford didn't want to be talking about this at all, and he wouldn't have brought it up in the first place if he hadn't thought it was necessary.

"I mean it," he said quietly, intending to look at Cash but finding his gaze mostly drawn to the table between them. "It's important. Not just because of the dementor. It's —" he hesitated, unsure what to say. He pushed the handle of his spoon along the edge of his curry bowl a little flippantly, as though this might shake the words loose. He hadn't planned this little speech, so he wasn't even sure what he was trying to convey until he said it. "— I don't want you to feel this way anymore."

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   Cassius Lestrange

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cw: depression

"Oh," Cash said. There was something endearing about Ford giving a shit, about this — he didn't really know Cash that well, and Cash was sure he had more than exhausted any goodwill Greengrass ought to have for him. So it was touching. Ford didn't want him to feel like this. He didn't think Cash deserved it.

A few different responses popped into his head. Good luck with that; or I'm not exactly having fun with this either; or I don't think it's that simple; or I owe this to him. Feeling like this was a way of repaying Eli for what Cash had cost him. If Eli had to be dead then Cash could at least be miserable, or empty, or — whatever this was.

He didn't really think this was what Eli would have wanted. This was a holding pattern at best. He owed Eli staying alive, but he could not hang in here like this forever. It would kill him eventually. The dementor today, the thoughts he'd hovered around in the room of the inn and hadn't considered too directly, all of it — they had made it abundantly clear. This feeling would kill him.

And Cash realized: he did not want to die. He wasn't convinced he wanted to live, either, but he didn't want to die.

After today that was nearly as surprising as everything else that had happened.

He'd been sitting staring at Greengrass, motionless for once, for several beats now, and he'd run out of flippant excuses.

"I can try," Cash said, finally. His mouth was dry and the words came out deliberately, but: he could try. He didn't want to die. He could try. He wasn't sure it was possible — he was at least half-convinced that the damage to his memories had rendered him permanently broken in a way that could not be recovered — but he could try.

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During the several beats of silence that followed Ford's statement he'd managed to pry his eyes up from the table and look at Lestrange's face. He thought he saw something in Cash's expression change, though he couldn't have said what — and maybe it was less of a change and more of a flicker that had passed through, but there was something there regardless. Whatever it was, it made Ford believe what he eventually said, and he felt a rush of relief.

"Good," he said, with a twist of his mouth that approximated a smile but wasn't quite. He thought, but thankfully prevented himself from saying aloud, Thanks.

Trying may not have seemed like much, in the grand scheme of things, but Ford had enough of a sense of what Cash had been going through today to recognize that it wasn't just a baby step forward; if he really meant it, that was a huge leap into the unknown for Cash. And it was important, because it wasn't as though anything Ford said or did could actually make a difference if they didn't start here, with Cash trying.

Ford leaned over his curry bowl, elbows on the table. He picked up his spoon, though not to eat but rather to skate the edge of it over the top of the curry as he turned over what to say next. "So, I don't really know what I'm doing here," he admitted; giving Lestrange an out in case the next thing Ford said was too strange or too much. "I've never —" been in love, he was going to say, but stopped; Cash hadn't ever actually said it, and though Ford thought by now it was obvious he was hesitant to be the first of the two of them to put that word to it. He glanced away from the booth for half a second as if trying to decide whether or not to finish his sentence, then decided against it. "Anyway. I think you should write him letters."

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   Cassius Lestrange

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Hearing Greengrass say good and watching his mouth twist in a not-smile was sort of pleasing, in a weird way. It meant that Cash was maybe doing something right, or that he was thinking about doing something right, because even if Greengrass didn't have any actual authority over him — he was here, and that meant something, and maybe that something was that Cash should probably listen to him.

Ford didn't know what he was doing but neither did Cash, and he was willing to give the authority over to Ford in this situation because Ford wasn't the person who had created a dementor. He glanced down at the curry and then up at Ford, mulling it over in his head. I've written him letters before, Cash thought, but he didn't know where the thought came from — he had no memory of writing Eli letters, and he certainly hadn't done so in the aftermath of Eli's death.

It sounded like it would hurt. Cash bit his lip.

"I trust you," he admitted, because that had to be obvious at this point in the night, that Cash was handing over a lot of trust here, along with all of this. He had only partially trusted Ford when he wrote him, in the way that he trusted any friend, but — now he owed Ford something, and for a lack of anything else to give, maybe that thing was trust. "But — what if that makes things worse?"

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Cash trusted him. Ford swallowed at the words. He supposed Lestrange had meant them as a gesture of good will, but it made his stomach sink a little bit all the same. It was a lot of responsibility, and it was responsibility in an area where he had no idea what he was doing, which was sort of a running theme in his life, Ford supposed. He didn't have Noble to lean on here, though (and maybe shouldn't have leaned on Noble so much to begin with). He wouldn't have anyone, because he'd already promised Cash not to tell anyone, and it was obvious that Cash wasn't going to be of much assistance himself. This was just going to be Ford shouldering the burden of trying to mend Cash's broken heart, because the way things were currently was unsustainable and he couldn't just turn and walk away from it all. It would just be Ford, because there was no one else to do it. There was no reason it should have been — probably anyone would have done a better job of it, and any number of people would have been more deserving of Cash's trust, but it was going to be him all the same because there wasn't anyone else it could be, at this point.

And what if it made things worse? Ford looked down at his curry and used his spoon to push what was left of it around his bowl. Worse than creating a dementor overnight? Ford thought, then frowned. That sort of comment wouldn't be particularly helpful at the moment, though it was hard to imagine that things could get any worse from here.

"Yeah, it might," he admitted. He'd already told Cash he didn't know what he was doing, so affecting some sort of bravado about this now seemed inappropriate. "If it does, we can try something else. We'll — we'll probably want to talk pretty regularly," he added, glancing up at Cash across the table briefly. Because I wouldn't trust you to tell me if things were getting worse, he thought, but he wasn't going to say it. It had nothing to do with Cash, after all — it was just what he was dealing with, and the feeling Ford had that if it started to get worse the first thing to go would be Cash's ability to recognize that it was getting worse.

"We can meet at the club on whatever nights you don't have Quidditch," he suggested, with a shrug to indicate that he wasn't particularly attached to the idea if Lestrange had any better suggestions. After a slight pause, he added, "We don't need to talk about this. We can just talk."

  

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If Ford was taking this seriously — which it very much seemed like he was — then they were going to want to talk pretty regularly. And this was better than the Ministry finding out about it, because if the Ministry found out about it then his family would find out about it, and if his family found out about it he was liable to have someone poking around inside his skull again. Or Lucius would just kill him, but — if he'd decided that he didn't want to die, then he couldn't rely on that as an option. Fuck.

"That sounds reasonable," Cash said, "We can figure out a schedule. Or something." Maybe he could trick himself into working on this if he thought about it as a puzzle, rather than something horrible rattling around inside him — if they found the right steps, maybe he would feel a little less dead all the time, and then there would be no more weird magic.

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"Yeah," Ford agreed with a nod. A schedule, sure. The logistics of it all could wait, because he honestly wasn't that interested in thinking through the details of anything beyond tonight and tomorrow; he had his hands full right now without trying to bring to mind his (Verity's) social calendar for the coming month. It was enough that Lestrange had agreed in principle, and now Ford wanted to steer the conversation back towards the more important element of this plan (at least in his mind, not really knowing what he was doing): the letters.

"I think writing to him might give all those feelings someplace to go," he said uncertainly. Ford felt as though he needed to convey the why of the letters somehow, so that Cash knew what purpose they were meant to serve, but he was aware that this explanation was likely going to be rather clumsy. It wasn't something he'd ever had to articulate before, because people didn't really talk about these things. Not having to talk about things that were uncomfortable was half the point of etiquette rules. Polite society ran on the assumption that you'd never have to put something like this into words. "Instead of having them sit inside you until something terrible happens."

  

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Is it really so bad if something terrible happens? Cash thought, but didn't say, because he had decided that he didn't want to die and because even he knew that could be filed under 'too concerning.'

"Okay," Cash said, and maybe it was a little over-pronounced, like he was trying to wrap his head around this. Maybe this could work. Maybe he'd get to a point where the thought of writing down things to say to Eli wasn't a weird road block he couldn't overcome. He knew the magic he'd use to do it, too — like what he had on his journal with Angie, but going to nowhere.

"And —" he wanted to say something like what if I start hearing from him again? but that was again, maybe too concerning, he didn't want Greengrass to think he was unhinged. Cash swallowed. "— I mean, what do you think I should say?"

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Ford frowned down at his curry at the question, then started to slowly chew the inside of his lower lip. That was an excellent question, because it did matter, didn't it? But it was also a very personal question, and one Ford didn't feel he was qualified to answer. He couldn't know what would help Cash, but he had the sense that maybe some degree of closure would, and that maybe this would get him here. Ford's only sort-of comparable experience here was losing his father, but he knew it wasn't the same. Losing a father could not be the same as losing a lover, and he didn't have to have ever been in love to recognize that. But there were similarities — it had happened suddenly, unexpectedly, and it had left him adrift in ways he hadn't even known were possible before. And Ford missed their father, too, though he didn't tell Noble that. Noble was angry and Ford was too, but the anger wasn't everything; sometimes he just missed his Papa.

With his eyes still on his curry, then, Ford took a deep breath and tried to think of everything he'd ever said or thought when he visited his father's grave, either with one of the girls or on his own when he went alone and didn't tell Noble about it. And he tried to think of what he'd felt in that moment last month when Noble had said I did this to myself, and what he wished he could have said to his brother instead of everything that had come next.

"Well, if it were me," he started slowly, "I think... I'd ask him questions, even though I know he wouldn't answer, because sometimes it... helps just to ask. And I'd tell him how everything was different after he left. The bad parts, but the good ones, too, like —" he struggled to think for a moment. Grace graduated Hogwarts this month, Papa. It's nice to have her home. Of course, that wasn't the sort of thing that transferred over to Cash writing letters to a man he was still in love with years after he'd died. "— like what your friends are doing now. Like becoming Quidditch Captain. And... tell him how you feel about everything. Whether it's nice or not. And I'd — sometimes I'd tell him stories," Ford continued, and this was more like a confession than an instruction now. "About us. Things he already knows. It's not about telling him, really," he admitted, pushing past a lump that had appeared in his throat. "It's about making sure I remember them later."

  

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He listened carefully to Ford, and at first he thought that maybe this was academic — solely a guess. But the further Ford got into the explanation the more it took on the cadence of a confession. Oh. They were talking about someone, something Ford had done — maybe not letters, probably not a lover, but he'd obviously experienced grief. Maybe this was about his father, Cash remembered that his father was dead — and most people were more invested in their fathers than Cash was. So it stood to reason that maybe, and maybe this had worked. It had at least worked a little, because Ford wasn't walking around with dementors following him.

Cash swallowed. "Thank you," he said, trying to catch Ford's eyes despite his usual aversion. "I —" and thank you did not encapsulate it, Ford Greengrass had probably saved his life today, and wasn't walking away, and there was nothing Cash could say that would really encapsulate the reality of this. "— I'll try. I think I'd like to remember."

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cw: suicide

I think I'd like to remember was such a desperately sad thing to say. On the one hand perhaps he ought to get used to Cash saying desperately sad things, based on the night they'd had so far — he had real, tangible experience that proved Cash was probably more desperately sad than anyone Ford had ever met. On the other hand, he didn't think he would ever get used to it, because it wasn't the sort of thing anyone should ever get used to. It brought him up short this time. For all that he'd already guessed that Cash spent more time feeling Swan's absence than remembering what it had been like to be with him in the first place, it was different to hear it dragged out into the open like that. No wonder Cash thought about dying sometimes, if he was sitting under the weight of this all the time and he didn't even remember anything that would have made it worth it.

"I think it helps," Ford said, swallowing down the lump in his throat so that he could focus on Cash again. "It puts what you're going through now in perspective. It tethers you."

  

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Cash was a little worried that if enough of this hinged on his remembering, he was fucked — and he couldn't tell Ford the depth of it, because that was too much and threw up some flags about the broader Lestrange family, but he was a little concerned regardless. But. Since he had not tried at all yet, he ought to at least wait and see if this did improve anything before assuming that it wouldn't. And maybe he could fashion a tether to the earth regardless. That was what he'd been trying to do before this, wasn't it? It was hard to remember clearly after today, but he had been better the past few months — less apathetic.

"I hope you know," Cash said, "I'm usually — or, used to be, maybe — more fun than this."

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