April 6th, 1891 — Wizzhard Books

Les Miserables had been staring at him ever since it had first shown up on his desk four days ago. Melody had some fucking timing, because he really didn't want to deal with this right now. He had his own shit to deal with — or he had Art's shit to deal with, which was sort of the same thing. So really, what he wanted to do about Les Miserables was nothing. If Melody couldn't be assed to come and talk about her feelings with him like a fucking adult, why should he go out of his way to try and play her silly game?

He'd been half hoping that when he wrote to Dionisia to ask for advice about it (which was far from ideal, but his other married friends were Art and Greg Turnbull, neither of whom were in the right sort of headspace to be giving him advice about marital spats at the moment) that she would say something like that's childish, just ignore it, but she hadn't. She'd told him to find a book that matched his own emotions. Which was easier said than done, first of all because Ben wasn't the sort of person to have an extensive at-home library, and secondly because he wasn't even sure what his feelings were. He felt frustrated, he felt exhausted, he felt like she really ought to have just said something instead of delivering cagey book messages, but probably there wasn't anything at Wizzhard's that had that as a title.

Ben had shown up five minutes ago and was wandering aimlessly, hoping a title would jump out at him, because he didn't know what else to do. Eventually, he wandered by one called Giving Up that seemed promising. He didn't want her to think he was giving up, though. Was inking in another phrase beforehand acceptable, or did that defeat the whole purpose of doing this through a book (was there a purpose of doing this through a book)? If only it said I feel like you're Giving Up, then it might be suitable. He pulled it out and looked at the cover, and realized that the full title was Giving Up: How I learned to increase my magical potential by putting my insecurities in the past. Which was... affirming, he supposed, but not right at all.

Ben sighed and shoved the book back on the shelf, glowering at the rest of the books and hoping something better would jump out at him.

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   Angelica Selwyn, Dionisia Fisk

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Angie had every sneaking suspicion she would be set out on assignment soon enough and for that she needed to pick up some new reading material. Angie was nothing if not a Ravenclaw and so while she had adapted to needed to keep her body busy, she also needed to keep her mind active as well. A book on Mayan runes and something of a mystery or two to keep her occupied.

Whizzhard Books had always been a refuge for her, even in her youth. Angie had always found solace lost in the stacks of a bookstore or library. She'd been wandering for near an hour now, a stack of five books in her arms as she continued to wander. She had half a mind to stack these on the counter and keep perusing, when something caught her eye as she walked past. She wobbled a little bit to stop and just barely managed to keep the books in her hands from falling.

"Hmm, what have we here?" She asked more to herself than anyone else, a habit of talking to herself came from living alone and traveling alone sometimes. Balancing the books in one hand, Angie pushed up to her tiptoes to reach the one that had caught her eye, managing to pull it off the shelf, but losing her grip on it as the tome crashed to the floor. "Whoops." She winced as the loud thud echoed through the store.

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Ben had been having no more luck, and had started mumbling titles under his breath as he read potentially promising ones — he did not often talk to himself but apparently when he was frustrated enough he did. He'd just reached for another possibility (Breaking, by Phyllis T. Hadley) when a crash sounded nearby, startling him and causing him to look over to where a few books had tumbled into the space between the aisles. Ben couldn't see where it had come from, but assumed whoever had dropped them would probably appreciate the help. It wasn't like he was accomplishing much, anyway.

Moving to pick up a few of the fallen books, Ben glanced over to see — Angie Swan again. He had gone years without seeing her, and now here she was thrice in what felt like as many weeks. Was this a bad omen? The previous two occasions hadn't been fortuitous, though neither had anything to do with Angie per ce. The first had lead to him getting written up in Witch Weekly (he had a suspicion she was the nameless working girl in the article, but couldn't be sure), the second had put his wife in the hospital. Angie hadn't been at fault for either, but he was a little nervous about her being here all the same, as though she was a harbinger of some marital stress to come.

Of course, it wasn't as though things with Melody could really get much worse than sending each other coded messages through passive-aggressive book titles.

"Oh, hey," he said brightly as he handed her the book he'd picked up. "Starting a library?"

  

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Angie managed to get her grip on the few remaining books in her hands when the dropped one was handed back to her. "Well, well, don't you just keep popping up like a bad habit?" She teased lightly with a knowing smile. They had both once been the other's bad habit indeed. A fun habit certainly, but probably still a bad one.

The fact that they had gone years without seeing one another and then seemed to keep bumping into the other around town said that Angie had clearly been stationary for too long. "You know I don't do idle well." She shrugged. "I'm hoping to ship out again soon and I'll need reading material either way." Angie passed him a lopsided smile, tossing a stray lock of brown hair over her shoulder.

"Last place I expected to find you though?" She quirked an eyebrow at him now. The bookstore was not a haunt she'd ever thought to see him and she was here plenty often.

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Popping up like a bad habit. Ben knew she was teasing, but the phrasing was a little grating, if only because of recent life events. Years ago, when they'd been involved, he might have simply grinned at a comment like that, or he might even have teased her back. After having been dragged through the mud by Meredith Watchword, though, with everyone thinking he was running around on Melody... he just didn't want to be thought of as a bad habit. And Melody seemed eager to jump on the band wagon now, with this Les Miserables thing. Everything was always his fault — he was the one making them both miserable. He was the rake, the one who didn't deserve her. He was a bad habit.

"Well, good for you," he said, pushing down the bad sentiment and replacing it with a mostly-genuine smile. He was happy for her, though he couldn't help but think of how much he missed travel. Cursebreaking was another thing he'd given up for Melody, not directly, but because when her father had lost his shit and gotten Ben shipped off to Canada, he'd had to shelf his freelance work for six months, and he'd never been able to pick it back up.

So between the reminder that everyone thought worse of him than was fair and the reminder that his lifestyle had changed so dramatically because of Melody, even before they'd married, Ben was perhaps a little more free in his response to her question than was wise. "Looking for a book for my wife, actually," he said darkly.

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Angie's brows furrowed slightly at his reply. She'd been expecting something... Well other than that. Given their last couple of exchanges, she supposed the playful banter they used to trade so easily was no longer appropriate, but she still didn't expect his somewhat sullen response about the book either.

"Oh," To be honest, Angie kept forgetting about the wife situation. When she had seen him in the pub he'd seemed alright, but maybe there was trouble in paradise after all. Just another reason Ang knew she would never bother. "You alright?" She asked a little more sincerely, blue eyes turned up toward his, a hint it a smile pulling her lips. They'd been friends once too, after all.

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Ben's throat tightened a bit at her question. This wasn't really the time or the place to answer, but it was nice to think that there were still people out there who would care enough to ask, in a genuine way. That was what he'd told Melody during their last fight, and it seemed to have upset her: I have people who care about me. Maybe it wasn't that statement that had upset her so much, though, but rather what he'd followed it with: I'm not going to burn all my bridges with them so you can get your claws even further into me. And maybe that hadn't really been a fair characterization, but Merlin, sometimes he felt that way. Like anything he did was the wrong thing to do, and there were no right answers. Like just being himself was an affront to their marriage, in her eyes.

He should probably have said nothing, or just brushed off the question and said I'm fine, but he hesitated.

"We're not really talking," he admitted, with a frown. After he said it he glanced around to see if anyone was close enough to hear, as though he expected Meredith Watchword to be lurking around the corner of the nearest shelf. "She put this book called Les Miserables on my desk, and I asked someone what to do about it and they suggested I try and find a book for her. So that's what I'm doing."

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   Arthur Pettigrew

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Angie could not understand married dynamics. Her own parents' marriage was a clusterfuck of mixed emotions, not to mention they had been vampires. They hadn't been faithful to one another and frankly it had taken her too long to realize just what a toxic situation it had been. She was thankful to them, for saving her and raising her as their own for seventeen years, but that was about as much as she could stand.

"For what it's worth," Angie tilted her head up toward him curiously. "I think you're better than that." Shifting the books in her hands, Angie wasn't sure what had happened in his life to lead him to this point, but she thought the whole thing rather petty. She couldn't pretend to know what kind of passive-aggressive bullshit was happening in between him and his wife, but it sounded like a mess.

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   Reuben Crouch

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Her response was so unexpected that it brought him up short. You're better than that. It wasn't the sort of thing that people said to him, even before everything had changed. Aldous and Roman certainly had never been eager to praise him for any of his decisions, throughout his entire life. The duel was the first time that Ben actually felt as though he'd earned Aldous' approval on something, and even then it hadn't started that way — it had started as just another thing Ben was probably fucking up, another way for him to jeopardize the family and ruin his own life, until he'd learned the details. November might have thought better of him, but not after their last two conversations, when he'd admitted to being a deplorable rake to keep her from nosing out anything to do with his wife. And obviously everyone thought the worst of him now, with Watchword talking about how he wished his sick wife would hurry up and die already so he could go back to his careless philandering ways.

"That's —" he started, but couldn't continue. His throat had tightened and his mouth had gone dry with a sudden, unexpected emotion he couldn't name. She might have meant it as a criticism — you're better than that, cut it out — but it was something to hear those words all the same. "— thanks," he said after a minute, shoulders slumping slightly.

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Angie could only shrug. She wasn't sure if she'd surprised him by the comment or not, but Angie rarely said anything she didn't mean. Once upon a time, in another life it felt like now, they'd know one another fairly well and though the easy cadence to their relationship was a thing of the past, Ang wasn't so sure she believed much of what society had to say about him. She wasn't overly connected to the rumor mill these days, but it was hard to ignore a familiar name when it popped up around her.

"It's not a bad read, you know." Angie teased about Les Miserables, treading lightly. "But probably not your style and quite long." Angie sifted through the books in her hands until she came upon the adventure novel she'd picked out for herself. "I'd get something like this if you want to read something and get your wife some flowers instead." Maybe that was overstepping, but almost all women would prefer flowers over spite books, of that she was pretty sure.

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   Reuben Crouch

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Ben took the book she handed him without hesitation, even though he hadn't really been looking for anything to read. He certainly wasn't about to spend his evenings with Les Miserables, that was for certain, even if it had come into his possession under slightly more auspicious circumstances. The book she'd handed him had an interesting title, though; it was the sort of thing he might have read if he'd been out traveling and had no one else around for company. That was probably what she'd had in mind for herself when she picked it up.

Merlin, how much different would his life have been if he'd ended up married to someone like her? Someone down to earth, someone who traveled like he had, someone who had some things in common with him. Of course, he wouldn't have ended up married to anyone like her — that was sort of the whole point of this ongoing argument he kept having with Melody. Sometimes Ben felt like the person that he was deep down was incompatible with being a husband, no matter who was on the other side of it. He certainly seemed to keep making everything worse, no matter what he did.

Ben laughed quietly, which seemed to release at least half the tension in his shoulders. "Yeah, maybe I'll do that," he agreed. He didn't seriously think flowers would fix anything that was wrong with him and Melody, but at the very least Angie had managed to talk him down from buying an ill-considered book as a way to argue by proxy. "Thanks."

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Ang exhaled a little as he relaxed. She cast him a genuine smile and let out a soft sigh. "Good plan." Even Angie, as unconventional as she was, liked getting flowers, what woman didn't? Clearly she didn't really know what he was going through and she didn't really have much of a role to play in his life anymore, but if she'd been able to help in any way, she'd take it.

"No problem," Angie wasn't exactly sure what she'd done to earn the thanks, but she accepted it easily enough. She felt like the conversation was drawing to a natural close, they were nothing but acquaintances anymore, but she felt a little restless rumble in her chest and so she looked up at him once. She leaned in slightly and lowered her voice, "Address hasn't changed, if you need a place to get away. Whether I'm in town or not." That was probably too much to offer, but Angie had always been adamant that her place was a safe space for whatever her friends needed, whenever they needed it.

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She leaned in, and for just a fraction of a second Ben's breath caught in his chest, because he didn't know what she was going to do next. Of course, it wasn't anything scandalous — they were in the middle of a bookstore, and they hadn't been together for years, and he was married now — but his mind had bounced to it all the same. Maybe it was because they had a history, or maybe it was just because that was the way his mind worked. Once a rake, always a rake...

He might have interpreted her offer in that same sort of tone and turned her down out of hand, were it not for the last sentence. Ben might not have been a good husband — he was quite obviously and publicly a bad husband, actually, with everything Witch Weekly published about him — but despite what people thought, he wasn't going to run around and be unfaithful to his wife. He might not be able to make Melody happy, but if he owed her anything for his part in creating this situation they were in then he at least owed her that much. He couldn't make her happy, but at least he would do his best not to make her miserable, and not to make her feel as though other women were laughing at her behind her back. That last phrase that Angie had added on changed the tone of the offer significantly, though. A place to go, whether she was there or not. It wasn't so much about her, then, or about them — she was offering it to him, because it was something he might need.

And he really might need it. There were times when things got so tense with Melody that coexisting in the same house seemed unsustainable, and he was running out of places to go. Art had his own problems, and his circle of friends who could entertain last minute houseguests was shrinking as more people grew older and got married themselves. Aldous would never turn him away, but Aldous would also ask questions in a way that Ben suspected Angie might not.

"Yeah, thanks," he said, voice level despite the tight feeling in his chest. "I might take you up on that, sometime."

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   Elsie Kirke

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