April 8th, 1891 — Early Morning — Greengrass Home, North Bartonburg

There was no particular reason this conversation had to happen now, except that now that it had occurred to him Ford wasn't sure he'd be able to think about anything else until it happened. On another day that still might not have prevented him from going to work and going through the motions with his mind half a world away, because most of his job Ford could do with very little thought. Today, though, he had bigger problems to solve, and he needed to be able to focus (as much as someone could focus without having slept). This was one loose end he thought he might as well wrap up before he got down to it, so that he could really devote his full attention to solving the problem of the dementor in the wardrobe in Muggle London.

That, and — well, you never really knew how much time you had, did you? So this wasn't the sort of conversation he could put off.

It was still dark outside but Ford thought the sun would probably rise soon. He hadn't actually checked the clock, but it felt like that time of the night. He paced down the hall towards Noble's room, then thought better of it. If he was going to wake his brother up, it might be best to do so with a peace offering. Ford trekked down to the kitchen and made coffee, pacing while he waited for the water to boil. With two cups in hand, he headed back up to Noble's room, and went in without knocking so that he didn't risk waking anyone else in the house.

"Noble," Ford whisper-hissed at his brother. "Wake up!"

Noble Greengrass Cassius Lestrange

  

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Set by Lady!

Noble slept on his stomach with his head tilted to one side, breathing steady, in a soft shirt and his underwear under a thick comforter. He usually slept pretty heavily, too, but it was one thing to be able to tune out the sound of wind against his windowpanes and the creaks of his house, and another to tune out the sound of someone whispering at him, and the smell of coffee. He rolled over a beat after Ford's words, and sat up, still tangled in the blankets. Noble blinked at his brother, trying to clear the sleep out of his eyes — his head was foggy with it, too. His hair stuck up at all different directions.

"It's early," Noble said, slowly and obviously. He held his hand out for one of the coffee cups less because he was thinking about it and more because his mind was caught on it — coffee, and the sun wasn't up yet, and Ford was here, and Noble wasn't yet caught up to the real world.

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"Yeah, I know," Ford said with a slightly apologetic nod, though he didn't really regret waking Noble. If he'd felt like he had other options he might have explored them, but since Grace or Mama were usually the first ones to come down for breakfast it wasn't as though Ford could count on having a few spare minutes with his brother that morning unless he hollowed some out for the two of them.

"I wanted to talk to you before the girls woke up," he explained, moving to half-sit, half-lean on Noble's nightstand as he cupped his hands around the coffee. "And I was already up, so."

  

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Noble took the coffee and a sip. The smell of it under his nose did a little to jolt him more awake. "You didn't come home last night," he said — it wasn't an accusation in tone, just a fact, as he caught up to being awake. Noble rubbed at one eye with his free hand. Had Ford slept at all? He supposed it depended on when he'd gotten back, but Noble tended to go to bed late — it was very possible that Ford had just never gone to bed.

"What's going on?" he asked.

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set by Bee

"Yeah, I know. Something came up," he said, a little evasively. Obviously he wasn't planning to tell Noble about anything that had happened yesterday, both because he'd promised Cash he wouldn't tell people and because he didn't want Noble to think this was the sort of thing Ford regularly did with his free time, wandering off to handle dangerous magical entities and possible mental breaks as favors for old schoolmates. Noble would probably have said that Ford didn't have any business getting involved in something like that, and that he was in over his head — and he would have been right, on both counts. Ford really ought to have handed this off to someone with more experience with dementors (at the very least someone who had cast a patronus sometime prior to yesterday evening), but he hadn't, and now this was his — he owned it and he wasn't going to let go of it, no matter how stupid it was that he'd started down this path to begin with. It was a little like Noble testing potions on himself, although all of the particulars were different. Which brought him back to what he had intended to talk about in this conversation, the reason he'd woken Noble up before the sun rose.

"But I wanted to say you were right," he announced, realizing only as he said it that he'd given exactly no context for the statement and that Noble was unlikely to be following his particular train of thought. After half a second he added hurriedly, "When we were talking last month. After Lestrange came to dinner."

  

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Set by Lady!

Noble blinked. He felt as if he was still too foggy with sleep to wrap his mind around this properly, and also he hadn't expected it at all. Things had been weird between them for weeks. It had been easier still to shore up the weirdness after Daffy left him, because he hadn't had the capacity to cease hostilities. But here was Ford, ceasing hostilities. Noble ran a hand through his hair, trying to flatten it.

"You think I was right?" he said, slow and perhaps a little disbelieving. Because it was hard to believe, that Ford had decided he was right after even Bella Scrimgeour said it was a bad idea.

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Right, more context. The look on Noble's face and the tone in his response made it obvious that he still wasn't following, which was logical since Ford had decided to start at the end rather than the beginning. He probably would have done a better job of conveying this sentiment if he'd slept last night, but it was too late for that now. As if he might become more loquacious with caffeine, Ford took a quick sip of his coffee — too quick, and burnt his tongue a bit.

"Yeah," he said, wincing slightly at the burn and reaching up to rub his jaw with one hand, as though that would help. "I don't have any rights to tell you how to do your job. And — you were right that I said all that because I was scared," he admitted. "I was scared. I'm still scared."

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   Noble Greengrass

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Noble took a sip of coffee and watched Ford carefully. "Oh," he said; this was not a conversation he'd expected to have at all, much less before the sun was even up. "I — I really didn't want to scare you. For what it's worth." And maybe it wasn't worth much. Noble's family wasn't supposed to have to worry about him ever, and he'd broken that, and he'd been trying to recover things ever since. And Ford didn't have a right to tell him how to do his job, and Noble stood by that, and by having tried the potion — but he hadn't wanted to scare his brother, either.

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Ford glanced at Noble and squished his mouth to one side of his face, not quite a frown but certainly not a smile either. Noble hadn't wanted to scare him, for what it was worth, and it wasn't worth much, but it also wasn't nothing. At least Noble had intended for his little stunt to stay self contained. It was better than thinking he'd been trying to kill himself — but not much better, because Noble was still doing reckless things in secret. And he may have still been feeling the same sort of way, underneath — doing stupid reckless things in secret may have just been how it was manifesting itself, because not everyone could go spawning dementors overnight when they were desperate.

"I know," he said after a second, then took another sip of his coffee (without burning his tongue, this time). "I don't want you to feel like... like you have to keep things secret from me," he said carefully. "Because of how I'd react. Or because it might scare me. I'd rather know, because then at least I'd know how to help if you needed me."

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   Noble Greengrass

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He had an impulse, all of a sudden, to take the thing in his chest that had been sitting there for the last two weeks and share it with Ford. Because Ford was telling Noble he could tell him things, and because Noble wanted to believe him, and because — if no one knew about him and Daffy, it was like it had never happened at all. And Noble hated that, too.

He was feeling vulnerable, here, half-asleep and tangled in his blankets and sipping his coffee, and faced with his brother's vulnerability. Noble scooted upwards in his bed so that his back was against the headboard, at least giving him the illusion of being an adult. He didn't know what to do with his legs, though, and adjusted his sitting position so that he could sit cross-legged. This was at least better than just being tangled under the duvet. The impulse remained.

"I — I did something fucked up," Noble said, "Not with the potions, but I — I'm going to tell you something and I need you not to freak out, alright? Because it's over." It was over, so over, it was done, and it being over made it easier to want to tell Ford. Because if it was over and if Daff was never going to talk to him again, then it didn't matter if his brother knew, because Ford wasn't going to be able to figure out who the girl was, and at least then Noble would have told someone. And there were ways to adjust the story so that it wasn't as bad, wasn't as recent, and — he could tell Ford something.

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Oh. Ford had been saying all of that mostly as lead-up to where he wanted to go next (or where he'd kind of already gone, since he was doing this all out of order). He did mean it, but it wasn't the part of the conversation he'd thought was going to be most important; this was all just context he'd skipped over before because he hadn't slept and wasn't very good at confessional conversations, apparently. He hadn't expected there to actually be something. Something else, anyway — but this wasn't about the potions, so it was something else.

"Okay," Ford said, voice level. Whatever it wasn't didn't sound awesome from Noble's descriptors so far — fucked up, but it's over — but there also wasn't a lot to go on, so Ford was trying not to jump to any conclusions. "I won't freak out." Hopefully that was a promise he'd be able to keep. They were both going to find out fairly soon.

  

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Noble ran another hand through his hair, mentally calculating what he could say about this — the right balance of telling Ford enough that he felt he'd given up some of the story, but also not so much that he would realize that Daff had been on the property a few weeks ago. He sort of regretted saying anything even before he'd tried to confess, but he didn't really do anything that was messed up enough to cover this up, so — he was going to have to try.

"Before Papa died," Noble said, adjusting his hands on the mug. He was watching Ford carefully, but otherwise mostly expressionless, trying to flatten all of it out of himself.

"There was a girl. And — I was going to try to marry her. And then when we found out, I wasn't, obviously, and I ended it. But — " he couldn't tell Ford that he had tried to find another way to make it work because that was a betrayal of the family, but "I see her around. And seeing her is — terrible." Now he was assuming, because he hadn't actually seen Daff in the last two weeks, but — yeah, he was pretty sure it would be terrible. He was remembering the tears on her face and he adjusted his hands on the coffee mug again.

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set by Bee

Ford took a deep breath in at before Papa died and held it through most of Noble's confession. It wasn't that shocking, in the abstract. Noble was far too young to be thinking about marriage (Ford knew this because he was far too young to be thinking about marriage), but it wasn't as though feelings laid dormant for someone's whole life and then suddenly switched on at twenty-eight. So it wasn't that ridiculous to hear that he'd had a girl he wanted to marry. It even made a sort of sense, if that was what Noble had been thinking when he'd moved here in the first place (rather than that he had just been tired of living with Ford and Verity at home, which was what Ford had previously assumed). On the other hand, it was something Ford had never contemplated before, even briefly, and now here it was.

Ford exhaled, pretending he was blowing steam off his coffee so that it wouldn't be obvious he'd been holding his breath. His stomach was sinking again, but probably not for any reason Noble might have guessed at. This was just... too much to wrap his mind around. Too much to hold onto. He'd already known that coming to Noble for help with this had derailed his brother's life. He'd had to make space in the house that should have been his, make room to accommodate them all in his life, and now this problem of how to get the girls married was going to occupy the next two or three years, at least. That wasn't fair, and Ford knew it wasn't fair — and since dinner he'd been thinking more and more often that he shouldn't have done it. He should have found some way to deal with this himself, no matter what it meant, because what he was asking from Noble was too much to ask from anybody. And now there was this, dropped into his lap: the knowledge that it had been an even bigger ask than he'd realized, and Noble had still done it, and now it was over so there was nothing left to be done about it.

Debt. It was going to be the defining feature of the rest of Ford's life. Even if everything worked out just perfectly, if all of the girls married well and quickly and then Mama got the idea to go live with one of them and Ford was able to put his money towards some sort of financial reparations for all of the grief he'd put Noble through, he was never going to repay this. Fuck.

"Yeah," he eventually said, his voice sounding a little disconnected from the rest of him. "I imagine it... would be." He hesitated. He thought he ought to look at Noble for this next bit, but managed only to raise his eyes as far as Noble's bare foot on the sheet. "I'm sorry."

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   Noble Greengrass

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Set by Lady!

There was something about Ford's voice, and the way he wasn't looking at Noble, that didn't feel right. Noble swallowed. Maybe he shouldn't have put this on Ford — maybe he should have kept it to himself — because even if he wanted some proof that things had been real, this had maybe been too much. He should have just told Ford about how he almost killed Mrs. Crouch, at least that story had a neat bow on it.

"Yeah, well," Noble said, "I don't think it was ever going to work out anyways, so." He wasn't sure he believed that yet, but he could come around to believing it — plenty of people did not marry the girls they loved when they were fifteen, and they ended up happy and fine. Maybe this whole thing with Daffy had been childish in the first place, something he believed because he wanted to believe it, rather than something that could actually happen.

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Ford took a breath. He couldn't really speak to that, without knowing the girl and more about how Noble felt about her, but he didn't get the impression that his brother was really looking for his commentary on that bit. Noble wouldn't want to hear him hypothesize about whether this thing that was over might or might not have worked, but Ford wasn't sure what he did want to hear. If it had really been over for more than a year, why bring it up now unless there was something he wanted to talk about? He wondered why Noble had brought it up at all, but he couldn't ask. The obvious answer was because Ford had just told him he could, though he hadn't been expecting this. He was worried, too, that if he asked it would come out as though he wished Noble hadn't said anything, which — maybe. Ford had meant what he'd said a moment ago about wanting to know, so that he could have all of the pieces in front of him when he was trying to figure out how he was going to steer them all through this mess, but — this was heavier than he'd been expecting. He could feel the weight of it settle on his shoulders.

Maybe there wasn't anything Noble wanted him to say. Maybe he'd just been carrying it around too long by himself and he didn't want to hold it in any more. If that was the case, Ford couldn't blame him. And it was healthier than pushing it down for several more years and then maybe creating a dementor in his bedroom someday.

Ford managed to look up at Noble's face before he responded, but he felt like it was tenuous; he wasn't sure he could keep his features composed long enough to hold this if they were going to actually talk about this. "Do you want to... talk about her?"

  

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Set by Lady!

Noble's eyebrows shot up at Ford's question.

"Oh, absolutely not," he said, almost immediately because the thought of talking about Daffy was horrific. He hadn't talked about her with anyone at all, ever — some of his friends probably knew that they had been friends, that they still talked at parties, but not the extent of it — and he wasn't going to start now. Certainly not with Ford. Almost definitely not to anyone, at all.

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