Despite everything, Ford couldn't help but chuckle at that. "Are you?" he quipped. His tone was far too bright, as though he was having trouble imagining what could possibly be more fun than this. He could have continued, and he might have had this not been such an abrupt departure from the mood of the evening so far. Battling new dementors and unpacking four-year-old trauma is my idea of a good time, Ford might have said. Most exciting Tuesday night I've had in ages. Please, tell me more about your dead lover. I'm enjoying myself ever so much. He wasn't sure that Cash would take that sort of joke as well as Ford might have intended it, though. Cash might have still been too fragile to really joke about this sort of thing, and could have been only pretending. He'd used jokes as an attempt to deflect before, when they'd been back in the room at the inn with the dementor in the corner. This could have been the same thing.

Ford shifted in the booth, drawing one leg up onto the seat and tucking his foot beneath his opposite knee . It was a childish sort of pose, but no one was around to chide him for it — Cash wasn't really in a position to be judging anyone about anything, and this would have been a silly thing to latch onto — and it was comfortable in the same way that old clothes were comfortable, so it was easy to slip in to while he tried to think of what to say.

"I had fun in Londonderry," he admitted, with an almost apologetic smile, as though he wasn't sure whether he ought to have been having fun (really it was that he'd thought they'd both been having fun, and now he was questioning it, because now he knew this — colossally sad thing about Cash that seemed to preclude the idea of fun existing so recently). "And at the club before that." Not particularly at dinner, but he didn't need to bring that up. It hadn't been Lestrange's fault Ford had been on pins and needles that whole night, even before Noble had passed out.

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   Cassius Lestrange

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"Me too," Cash said, hoping that Ford would believe him. He had had fun in Londonderry. The night at the haunted house had mostly been a fantastic escape from the things he usually thought about at night, and interesting, besides. Muggle haunted houses provided an inherent puzzle, an inherent little mystery they needed to figure out — genuinely, that was the sort of thing Cash found fun. That that night had been followed a little over a month later by a slide into unreality seemed almost irrelevant; to Cash, the night in Derry seemed like it could exist separately from the way he felt most of the time.

He didn't really know what had caused this, the sudden — (was it sudden?) — appearance of a dementor in his bedroom. He'd been something like better lately; more engaged with the Cannons, with Gallivan, with the club. And then a dementor. He didn't get it, but was worried that Ford would be too concerned if he said it out loud — this knowledge implied that Cash had just been a ticking time bomb, and unaware of it. Hm.

"I've still been thinking about haunted houses, you know," he admitted, a little wry, because that seemed a little silly in the light of what had happened, and because he was not entirely sure that Greengrass still wanted to be actual friends and not just to observe him. "I read something about — ouija boards, is that the phrase?"

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Lestrange seemed genuine, which was a pleasant surprise, though Ford wasn't sure whether or not he ought to believe him. He wasn't sure, either, how much it mattered. It was mildly pleasing to think that Lestrange had enjoyed the haunted house experience enough that he'd been thinking about it since then (particularly given his dearth of letters or conversations, which had implied the opposite), but it wasn't as though they could actually do anything like that anymore, was it? They probably shouldn't have done anything like that to begin with, although obviously Ford hadn't known that at the time. He was aware that this sort of stuff was fairly morbid, though, and that it probably wasn't the best thing for Cash to be doing in his leisure time. Probably that was why he'd had those two strange moments during the trip to Londonderry, where things had seemed to go a little wrong for a few minutes.

Then he mentioned ouija boards and Ford's face lit up, muddled thoughts about whether or not he ought to invite Cash to engage in his death-centric hobbies entirely forgotten. "You read about ouija boards?" he asked eagerly, leaning forward slightly on the table (elbows on the table again — it was a good thing he was never planning to invite Lestrange for dinner again because his etiquette did seem to suffer terribly when the other man was around). Ouija boards were relatively new, so it was quite a niche thing to have read about, and it wasn't really something Ford had gotten to talk to anyone about since he'd first learned about them last year. The mechanism itself wasn't new, of course, but this was the first tool that made it so accessible to the common people, as opposed to just the Muggles that thought themselves mediums and whatnot, and Ford was utterly fascinated by them.

"You know the best thing about ouija boards?" Ford asked, not pausing even once to think that perhaps he shouldn't be delving into a conversation about a tool Muggles used to speak to the dead when they'd just spent the whole evening — well, doing everything they'd been doing. "They really believe in them. Like — they did an investigation into it, the MACUSA did, when they first started being used in America. All these Muggles sat around and someone, or maybe all of them, moved that little wooden bit around, yeah? So that it spelled out the words and everything. But they interviewed them afterwards and they all said they hadn't moved it, and they all thought they were telling the truth," Ford said empathically. "It's just — it's mental, but it's so interesting. Where did you read about them?"

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Cash grinned when Ford started explaining ouija boards, and maybe it was soft around the edges due to the circumstances but it was genuine. He had spent several hours with a dementor, and Ford Greengrass knew some of his worst secrets, and muggles thought that ouija boards were real when they used them. Life was weird and complicated, and maybe some of it was okay, even if he still felt like he was clawing through the water of a very deep lake and trying to burst through to the surface and the air and the sunlight.

"My cousin lives in America now and she was here for the family weddings, and, um, whatever," Cash said, aware that this was a weird opening to the story but unsure how else to tell it. "I borrowed one of her books before she left —" or stole, he had not really remembered to give it back "— and I only got around to reading it recently. But it was an American book and there was a whole thing where the detective was trying to use a ouija board to solve a crime."

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MJ made this!

Lestrange was smiling at this turn in the conversation, in a way that seemed more genuine than he had so far tonight (maybe not entirely genuine — Ford wasn't sure he knew the other man well enough to say that for sure — but more genuine, anyway), which made Ford's shoulders feel a little lighter. And it occurred to him, now that he wasn't talking, that probably this was not the ideal conversation topic, and it might lead them back towards something dark in a moment or two... but when Lestrange was smiling it was hard to think about that too seriously. Besides, having fun for a minute and then swerving back towards something dark was a fine alternative to what they had been doing before, which was just openly wallowing in it all. Actually, of all the times to talk about morbid things that normal people didn't tend to talk about, this was probably the best one — it wasn't as though anything they said was going to trigger a mental break in Lestrange when he had already broken down so dramatically tonight.

"Like it was a clue?" Ford asked, raising an eyebrow. He didn't tend to read detective stories, and he still hadn't managed to get his hands on a copy of the Poe stories that Lestrange had recommended. He felt as though perhaps the purpose of the ouija board in the story might have been obvious if he'd been more versed in the medium, but as it stood he wasn't sure he was following. "Or — oh, were they trying to talk to ghosts to solve the crime? But if they were Muggles surely that couldn't have been admissible in court," Ford pointed out with a skeptical eyebrow raise (losing sight of the fact that this was presumably a work of fiction, and that detective novels didn't really concern themselves with what would or wouldn't stand up in court). He'd been involved in a few back-and-forth paperwork battles over what the testimony of a ghost could or couldn't be used for, legally speaking. If the wizarding world, who knew with a certainty that ghosts existed, was still undecided about a lot of this, he couldn't imagine Muggles would make any important decisions on the testimony of someone they couldn't see or hear.

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   Cassius Lestrange

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Talking about mystery novels was easier than talking about anything that had happened today, and much easier than talking about the rest of his life and how to manage this without pulling another magical monster out of his head. Cash leaned into it, pleased that he'd found a conversation topic that didn't necessarily generate concern, and that made things feel easier.

"They wanted the ghost to tell them who his murderer was," Cash recounted easily, with another smile. "I don't think they thought it through so far as court." It hadn't been a very good book, but it was funny that that was what Ford was most concerned about — ghosts and court and whether or not things were admissible.

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"They wanted the ghost to solve his own murder? Oh, that never works," Ford commented flippantly. He'd come across a handful of ghosts in his life who had very elaborate theories about how they had been killed, none of which seemed particularly plausible — but maybe that was because the ghosts with elaborate theories about how they were killed all tended to be a little bit off anyway. It took a certain brand of not all there to be in denial about your own method of death when you were most likely un-living with the reminder of it floating around with you at all hours of the day and night.

Not to mention that if a ghost did solve their own murder, that definitely wouldn't hold up in court. There were all sorts of conflicts of interest there.

"Muggles always ask the wrong questions when they try to talk to the dead," Ford remarked dryly. "They never ask about anything a ghost would actually want to talk about. Maybe that's why they can't see them," he joked. "The spirits just collectively decided Muggles were all too tiresome to deal with."

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"So what do ghosts want to talk about?" Cash asked, leaning forward at the table. He — was not sure how much interest he had in the actual reality of ghosts, beyond flippancy and haunted houses. But maybe if they were talking about something Greengrass liked then Greengrass would remember that he actually did like Cash when Cash wasn't being insane. And while this had sent Cash into one of his weird little brain hurricanes when they'd been in the haunted house, he didn't think it would do so now — not when he was so wrung out by everything else he'd been thinking about all day.

So they could talk about ghosts, and what the dead wanted to talk about, and maybe then eventually the rest of this would all feel doable.

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Ford shook his head dismissively. "That's like asking what do people want to talk about," he pointed out. Actually, what do people want to talk about may have been slightly more specific, because unlike spirits, living people were mostly all born in the same era. They had geographic and culture differences, but not temporal ones. "But they almost universally don't want to talk about their death," he continued, with a shrug. "Which makes sense, you know. It's probably the worst thing that's happened to them. Imagine if you had some awful, traumatic experience and then someone started asking you —"

He dropped off mid-sentence, mouth falling open into a horrified little oh as he realized what he was saying.

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   Cassius Lestrange

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Cash couldn't help it: he laughed.

It was more manic than it was natural, but he was startled into it, a bark of laughter that had him putting his hand over his mouth because he was startled by it.

"I'm sorry," he said, "It's just —" he broke off with a shrug.

It was just that it was funny, the idea that he had something in common with a ghost — it was funny, if morbid, to think of Eli's death as the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to him. And maybe it was the most traumatic thing, but Cash had never thought of it like that before.

"— it's not really funny. Graveyard humor, maybe."

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Laughter wasn't at all the appropriate response to Ford's latest faux pas, but it was something of a relief nonetheless. If Lestrange had just stared at him, Ford really wouldn't have known what to say next. And, of course, there was always the possibility that Cash would have broken down entirely. Laughter, while inappropriate, was at least easier to respond to.

His initial surprise at the response transformed to a sheepish smile. "Well," he said after a moment. "That magazine did say that about you. Morbid sense of humor."

And wouldn't it have been nice to have just left it at that? To not care that it was inappropriate or worry about what else was going on behind the scenes in Cash's brain? For a few seconds during this conversation they'd seemed to hit their old stride again, like when they were at the haunted house in Londonderry and they'd both been having fun and Ford hadn't known to worry yet. He wanted to recreate it, to remind both of them that they were still friends, not — Ministry official and troubled youth, or healer and patient, or whatever these roles were they'd assumed. He didn't know quite how to do it, though, at least while they were sitting at the table with that last comment hanging in the air.

"Finish your curry," Ford suggested, putting his toe out to gently nudge Lestrange's foot under the table. "Let's go for another walk."

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