Arthur exhaled. Maybe Ben was right, maybe it wasn't his whole life, maybe it was just a little piece of it, maybe things would be fine. Maybe he just wanted to skip ahead to the part where everything was broken and he had to fix it, instead of now, when he was still in the process of breaking everything. There were other things he wanted to say: I think I'm just going to be a little fucked up forever, or she told me I was ruining us and she was right, or do you think I've been angling for a divorce and I didn't even realize it?

Instead he said, more to his pint glass than to Ben, "Witch Weekly was right. Not about the divorce but, — the rest of it. All of it." Ben knew that already, that he was gambling again, Art had circled the drain of admitting it all night, and Ben wouldn't have been here if he didn't know. Of course he knew. He knew Arthur too well not to. "And I don't know what to do."

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   Reuben Crouch

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Ben had expected that. Partly it was because he knew Art, and he had watched (albeit from some distance, in his grand fuck-around-Europe-wasting-Aldous'-money tour) as Art had done this before, and he knew what it looked like even if he hadn't wanted to recognize it. Partly it was because Ben knew Meredith Watchword. She'd written about him less than a month ago, and Ben knew she didn't make shit up. She was so spot on with the facts that by the time he'd read the article he'd almost been wondering if maybe her vague suggestions about what he was hoping for were right, too, and he just hadn't realized it yet.

"How much money is it?" he asked, glancing back up at Art. Ben didn't have a lot of money, but he had some, and he would have handed it over in a heartbeat if he thought it was what Art needed to pull through this.

  

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Arthur rested his chin on one hand and studied Ben's hands, and did some mental maths. It had been seven galleons (with some exaggerated wiggle room) when he had last talked to Dez, but he had also spent a not-insignificant amount of money on drugs and alcohol in the last week, and hadn't exactly been keeping careful track of it.

Merlin, he was fucked.

"Like, ten galleons," Art said, sliding his hand up to bury his face in it because he could feel himself flushing red, because he hated admitting this, hated — all of it. "I think."

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Ben let out a long breath. Ten galleons was bad, but it wasn't disastrous. Ten galleons wasn't a lark, but it was fixable. The I think tacked onto the end was worse, because if Art wasn't sure then it might have been more. More importantly, if Art had been spiraling so hard lately that he was losing track of how much money he'd lost, it might be more sooner or later. That was something Ben wasn't sure he was equipped to deal with, if Art wasn't — finished with all of this. Neither of them had ever been very good at stopping bad decisions in progress; that was a lot harder than being around to clean up when everything was over and done.

"Ten galleons is okay," he said in a vaguely reassuring tone, though they both knew that okay wasn't the right word. "We can handle that. How — uhm, how... urgent is it?" Ben asked, one eyebrow raised slightly. This wasn't really something he wanted to ask, or force Art to say, but it did matter. If this was the sort of debt that no one had even tried to collect yet, they had a little time to figure things out, move things around. If it was already in the sending goblins after you territory, they might have to get a little more creative. Ben didn't have ten galleons to just hand over, though he would have. He might be able to borrow some, though, because his credit was almost certainly better than Art's, and he might be able to get something from Aldous if he lied about what it was for.

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   Arthur Pettigrew

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Ten galleons was okay, but Art suspected that ten galleons was only okay if he was done, and he could only be done with gambling if he could successfully put himself into another outlet, and — he did not know what that outlet could possibly be. He just very likely needed to find one.

Art knew exactly what urgency meant in these cases, having lost a great deal of money and property to creditors in the past. (Again, he was reminded that he knew better — again, he was reminded that he was supposed to be better now. It was quite evident that he wasn't, now, but he didn't understand where things had gone wrong.)

"I don't think anyone's looking for me yet," Art said, "Or — if they're looking, they're not looking very hard." It wasn't easy to find Arthur at Ester's or at Fitz's, but — he was sure that clever people could have managed it. He was still going to work, sort of, so it was not as if he was well-hidden. They could have managed it.

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"Okay," Ben said, with a nod. "That's good. Good." It was good, of course for the surface reason that it wasn't ideal to have people out looking for you. More than that, though, it meant that this hadn't been going on that long, because if Art had been ten galleons in debt for a year, or something, someone would have been looking for him by now. On the other hand, ten galleons over a year would have been a significantly less dire sort of problem — it made Ben wonder again whether he was catching Art on the upswing of this whole situation or whether they were still somewhere in the middle. There wasn't any way to know until they were on the other side of it, was there? And past experience would be no indicator — the last time Art had gambled everything away, he'd only stopped because there hadn't been anything left. He wasn't going to do that now, not with a home and a wife and a kid. Ben couldn't let him do that, so they had to be on the recovering side of this.

(He would have lent him the money even if they weren't, though — even if Ben didn't believe Art was better yet, or was capable of getting better, he would have given him the money because he would have wanted Art to believe that it was almost over, that he could get better and that someone believed that he could).

"I can do five, I think," Ben said, tapping one finger on the edge of his pint glass. "And then we can figure out the rest of it. You can pay me back later," he added; he was sure that Art was going to refuse, at least at first, and this statement was meant to preempt that whole dance where Art refused and Ben insisted and they eventually clawed their way back to the original offer. It wasn't necessarily something Ben believed, but it didn't really matter whether he'd ever get the money back.

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   Arthur Pettigrew

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His face flushed again and he pulled his hand away from his face, with half a mind to turn Ben down. He couldn't take money from Ben. He hadn't before, and it was bad to start now, and — he couldn't be trusted, not when he had spent most of the last week in a haze and it was the longest he'd gone without betting on something since January.

Except that he couldn't conjure money from nothing with nothing to sell, and every time he tried to gamble his way back to normalcy he just ended up further in a hole, and five galleons would get the boxing ring off of his back and probably save him from having his nose broken again. It wouldn't solve all of it, but it would solve — at least a little bit of it. It would buy him more time. It would save him from having to ask Perpetua Collins for money, and for having to see the look on her face when he did.

Ben was a better friend than he deserved.

All of this reluctance and resignation played out on his face, and Art said, "I'll pay you back."

He wasn't sure he believed it, but — he had to say it, and then maybe it would be true. "And — thanks."

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Ben shifted in the booth, trying not to have any sort of reaction one way or another to the phrase I'll pay you back. He didn't know if he believed it, but it didn't matter, because he was going to give Art the money anyway. He did know that it might be important to Art that he believed it, though, so he was keen not to let anything flash across his face that might have looked as though he didn't.

"Yeah, of course," he said easily; he shrugged. "You'd do the same for me." Not exactly the same thing, obviously, because Art didn't have money (nor had Ben ever been in particularly dire need of any), but Art had been there for him through a lot of tough shit, before. Art had visited him in Canada. Art had seconded for him at his duel. It wasn't even a question, in Ben's mind — obviously he was going to help, however he could. Art deserved that from him.

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