Early Afternoon, February 15th, 1890 — a Muggle Hotel in Scotland

Despite not knowing what was to come upon seeing Ben again, a heavy sigh of relief left her as she moved through the hotel hallway. Returning home had been an even greater mistake than eloping was, for all she heard for the past two hours was the carnage she was leaving behind. Dorothy's chances of finding a husband her first season out were greatly diminished. Arthur's business prospects had evaporated into thin air. Not to mention how terribly society would view her now that she was publicly branded as a hussy. By the end of the day, Melody was to be a friendless, jobless, possible divorceé with no family to return to.

Oh, joy.

The conversation with Samuel left her bewildered and furious. For all that man spoke of love, he knew nothing of it. Love wasn't stalking a person's every action to ensure they stayed in line. It didn't allow for two wholly different personas when in the presence of their partner. It was learning to accept and forgive their partner's worst faults. Love was everything her relationship with Samuel wasn't - kind, passionate, good. Even if Ben were to abandon her shortly, Melody was confident she had dodged an unforgivable curse by eloping. Samuel didn't love her, how could he? They had never gotten the chance to know one another.

She unlocked the door to the hotel room not knowing what she was to find on the other side. While Ben also didn't love her and likely never would, he was still her husband for the moment. And her husband had said he would return at some point. Melody made countless wrong decisions last night, the foremost of which was not trusting him. If they were to remain married (and Merlin, she hoped they would), she had to put faith in him. She had to believe he would return when he said he would, that he really had only fled like a thief from the crime to process what she did.

Still, when Melody didn't immediately see him upon entering the room her heart fell to the floor. Placing her faith in the unknown wasn't amongst her strengths. She had always had to know anything and everything there was to know before acting. And yet, here she was - married to a man that wanted her even less than her family did. Melody wiped frustratedly at her cheeks as the leftover tears from the battering she'd just taken escaped her eyes. Ben might still return, and she had to pull herself together before he did. The guilt she harbored was already a vast ocean between them - she had little desire to add to it.

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   Elsie Kirke

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Ben had come straight back after his conversation with Felix, eager to seize the opportunity — assuming it still existed — to fix this. His momentum hit a brick wall, however, when Melody wasn’t in the room he’d left her in. It had never occurred to him that she might leave. Where would she have gone? And why? It wasn’t as though she would have just popped off to a friend’s for a chat, with things as unresolved as they’d left them. Had something he said this morning hurt her more than he’d realized or intended, and she had gone off to seek solace or confide in someone? If that was the case, he had no idea how to find her. How had he known her so long and not ever figured out who her friends were?

Another possibility was that she didn’t believe that he was coming back, after he’d left. Where would she have gone then, if she assumed she’d been abandoned? Back home, he would hope — at least, that was the only logical place to go. It wasn’t as though he could follow her there to find her, though, because if she wasn’t home, that would cause quite the scene and throw her family into panic — not to mention severing any chance that they could reconcile this without revealing everything that had happened in the meantime. But if she hadn’t gone home, where else could she be? Again, Ben had no idea. Timbuktu, for all he knew.

He felt uneasy waiting in the room alone, so he went for a walk around the town and visited a bakery. He still didn’t want to waste time when she did arrive, however, so his trip out was short lived, and he soon found himself lingering in the room wondering how long he would be waiting for her to return — or if she even would.

Ben had taken up residence in one of the armchairs — the bed, for some reason, did not seem trustworthy, and he couldn’t just casually sit on it as though last night hadn’t happened — and waited. Should he write her? What would he say? And was there any chance the owl would end up not in her hands, but in those of her parents?

Finally, he heard the door open, and breathed a sigh of relief. He stood and walked away from the chair to confirm that it was, in fact, Melody at the door (and that she was alone, not heading an army of angry family members) before he let himself relax more fully. “I bought you a scone,” he said by way of awkward greeting. “The tea’s probably cold, though. But by now I suppose you’ve had breakfast?”

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   Aldous Crouch, Melody Crouch

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Melody's eyes snapped to his corner of the room as soon as she heard movement. He hadn't completely abandoned her, then. Though, knowing what she knew of him, it shouldn't have come as such a surprise. At the very minimum, Melody knew his chivalry (or what was left of it in regards to her) would forbid him from abandoning her without any further discussion. Perhaps after having the morning to process his thoughts they would be able to manage a more constructive conversation.

She hadn't yet had anything to eat or drink this morning, but still her appetite was nonexistent. The high pitched panicked screeches of her mother were still ringing in her ears, as was her father's icy cold last words to her. Arthur Finch was never a particularly kind father, but Melody never believed him capable of cruelty. No one, not even the worst glutton, could eat after such a morning.

"I'm okay, thank you though." She replied as she remained standing guardedly by the door. "I was at my parents'." The Finch Manor was no longer a home to her, of that her father made certain. He wouldn't act against her as Argus Scrimgeour did Bella, but it was clear to anyone with two functioning brain cells she was no longer any daughter of his.

  

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Ben had been trying to decide how best to transition to the conversation he wanted to have ever since she’d walked in, which was: it seems like no one knows anything, so we still have a chance to fix this. All thought of bringing that up died at her explanation of where she had been, however. When he’d been speculating on where she might have gone when she left this room, he’d considered a lot of possibilities, but nothing he’d thought about had her going to her family and then coming back. They couldn’t possibly have allowed that — so what had happened?

“...And?” he asked, his shoulders tense as he waited for her response.

  

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"And they already knew," she answered. Melody had envisioned thousands of scenarios as she laid next to his sleeping form, and none of them had prepared her for the brutal reality she faced. How hadn't she noticed how Samuel never lost sight of her before? Did she not have the sixth sense of being watched like so many of her friends claimed to have? None of it made sense.

Melody leaned heavily against the door as she thought of how to explain exactly what happened to Ben. "The wedding was already called off when I got there. Apparently, Samuel -" his name passed like venom on her lips, their heated argument still played on a vicious loop in her head, " - saw us slip away. It wasn't great." Truthfully, Melody had little desire to relay the entirety of the conversation to him. The pair of furious parents had assaulted every aspect of her character. A physical attack might have hurt less.

The outcome of her conversation with her parents didn't sway her resolve to follow whatever path Ben chose, though. As awful as it would be for her future, she would still grant him a divorce if that was what he wanted. "Where did you go?"

  

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It took him a second to remember that Samuel was the name of her fiance — or to piece it together, rather, because he had purposefully not committed the name to memory, so that he would have less chance of reacting poorly to it on instinct were the man to be mentioned in conversation or even introduced. When he did figure out what she was saying, though, it hit him like a sack of bricks. This wasn’t the worst news she could have brought back, but it was fairly close. “Shit,” he mumbled, letting out a deep breath and running his hand through his hair as he tried to think.

The wedding was called off already. That would be a blow to her reputation in and of itself, but how large of a blow depended on whether this Samuel shithead was inclined to keep his mouth shut or not. Given the circumstances, Ben’s money would be on not, but if her family was willing to stand by her through this particular storm and try to get her back into society, or arrange something else down the line, or even let her continue on as a woman destined for spinsterhood… there might be some hope. Any of those options would be better than staying married to him, of that he was quite certain.

“I went to see if anyone else had heard. It doesn’t seem like anything happened at the party,” he said, keeping his tone flat. That little insight meant that her drugging him had been entirely unnecessary — particularly if her fiance had already been ready to call the whole thing off before they’d even gotten to that point — but there was no use in holding that against her. It wasn’t as though she could have known.

(Unless the entire situation had been orchestrated to get him away from the party and into a state of mind where he might agree to elope with her, but Ben refused to let his mind linger on that possibility too long. He had to give her some benefit of the doubt, here, or else he wouldn’t be able to get through this conversation with her).

“If we found a way to get it annulled, would your parents take you back in?” he asked frankly.

  

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Regardless of whatever Ben believed, Melody was confident someone knew something about what happened at the party. The servant wouldn't have made the comment he did if there weren't nefarious intentions planned. In hindsight, everything about the bloody ball was too convenient, from the discreetly positioned rooms to the casually mentioned tips. She should've known better than to trust a bored society housewife, but there was nothing to be done about it now. It was done, and someone - whether Ben believed her or not - knew just how far they went in the closet. "I know what I heard." Melody stubbornly muttered. Let him believe whatever. The truth would come out eventually.

She wasn't ready to admit that she was disowned - that she would never be permitted to knowingly interact with her siblings again. The damage Melody did to her family's reputation would exist for years to come. Her sister's suitors would learn her last name and associate it with disobedience and whores. It was a consequence she hadn't thought through in her panic driven state, and it was a consequence she would have to live with for the rest of her life. To admit it was acknowledging every insult flung at her this morning was true.

And, well, she didn't want it to be true.

"We will find a way out for you." Melody answered. Perhaps if she confessed to using the potion while drunk they would grant her a more lenient sentence. Though...she likely would have to say where she procured it and that would eventually lead back to Ben anyway. They had to figure out something that worked - they simply had to.

  

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She hadn’t answered the question, at least not directly, and the way that she had answered it was a bit jarring for him. A way out? That sort of wording sounded like he’d gotten into some minor debt while gambling on a game of troll boxing, or he’d “forgotten” to pay someone off after a purchase on the black market. Some objectively poor decision that had resulted in some truly awful consequences, and he would now have to find a way out in order to go about his normal life. Ben had been in that sort of situation before, plenty of times, and this was not that.

“I’m not looking for a way out,” he responded, his tone harsh despite how he’d been determined only moments earlier to keep emotion out of this conversation as much as possible for the sake of getting through things smoothly. “I asked about you.”

He should have just left it there, but the implication behind what she’d said — that he would be looking for some quick and easy escape route, and that he would take it when it presented itself without so much as a backwards glance at her — hurt. It aligned, he supposed, with what he now knew about her in the light of last night’s events: she didn’t trust him at all, and maybe more than that, she didn’t seem to know him very well, despite all of the time they’d spent together and all he’d risked (both when they originally met and over the past two months) for her sake.

And now they were married — maybe forever, if things had really played out the way she said they had this morning. Ben was married to someone who didn’t even think he had the integrity to consider more than one side of the coin, or the empathy to realize that his actions would have consequences for her, too —

So yeah, forget leaving emotion out of it. Ben wanted to say some of this shit, and maybe she needed to hear it.

“And you know why I asked?” he began hotly. “Because the two of us being married is objectively bad for both of us. There is no dimension of this that’s good. Do you know where I live, Melody? In a rented room at a men’s club — and not even one of those ‘let’s all sit around and smoke cigars and be respectable’ men’s clubs, either. Excalibur, best known for staging drunken broomstick races in the middle of the night and hosting boxing matches. So where are you going to live? I have no fucking clue, Princess,” he said with an aggressive shrug. “And you know what I do for a living? I get paid — not an exceptionally large amount, by the way — to drink with people. I drink for a living, and on the side I hustle people out of their money in gambling rackets, which aren’t always legal. And what are you going to do if I get arrested some day, hm? What happens then?” he asked. “I’ve gotten pretty close before. I’ve been in the holding cells at the Department of Law Enforcement. I’m not legally allowed to requisition my own portkeys.” None of which she would have known, because it wasn’t as though he advertised any of this — certainly not to young ladies he was in the middle of flirting with — but he had told her many times that marrying him was not an option, and she apparently hadn’t believed him — so he was going to explain a few of the reasons why and hope she caught on.

“I’m not trying to ‘find a way out,’ here,” he continued in a tone of exasperation. “But I am not fucking husband material. If you have any other options, they’re better fucking options,” he insisted. “So I’d like it — Princess — if you’d answer my question.”

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   Aldous Crouch, Melody Crouch

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Had she not spent the majority of the morning standing in a corner of the parlor listening to the vengeful airing of all her negative traits, she might have had a more biting response to throw at him. As it was, Melody was too emotionally exhausted and overwhelmingly confused to react in any great way. The expression on her face remained neutral, her body perfectly stilled. The past twenty-four hours had become a nightmarish whirlwind of events. And now, as if this nightmare required more ammunition to fire against her, Ben had joined the ranks of those who despised her.

The relief she felt walking into the hotel vanished as his anger grew. Melody knew, both by his own sayings and what others said about him, that he wasn't a prime candidate for marriage. Though, the picture he was painting was far worse than she expected. A rented room and a low income job was fine for a bachelor living his life, but not for a married couple. She certainly couldn't reside with him there. Still, what option had she had? If they hadn't eloped - if she hadn't drugged him - she would still be the disgraced Finch daughter. The wedding still wouldn't have happened, and she still would have been cast out. Melody reached into her dress pocket to reassure herself with the presence of the transfigured trunks, for at least with their contents she would have a roof over her head for another night.

What was perhaps the hardest fact to cope with of Ben's lengthy rant was he was still, despite her obvious trapping of him, considering her well being alongside his. Even when he was within his rights to return the Excalibur and wash his hands of her. Perhaps he wasn't marriage material, but he was a far better person than she would ever be. He would sooner face disgrace on his own before dragging her down alongside him. Of that much she was certain.

"No, Ben. They won't take me back." Melody said quietly. Arthur Finch was a prideful and spiteful man. In his eyes, she had sullied the family name beyond repair. To have any continued association with her was simply incomprehensible. There were still two other daughters to marry off as well, he didn't dare risk her tainting them with her foolishness. "I'm not to have contact with any of my family." Her focus dropped from his face to an indiscriminate spot on the carpet. If Ben chose to annul the marriage or divorce her (unlikely, but still an option in Melody's mind) she was to find a new last name. The Finch's were a respectable breed of which she was not.

Melody bit the inside of her cheek to refrain from crying. There was no use sobbing over something she couldn't fix. Perhaps one day, when the stain of scandal wasn't quite as obvious, she would be permitted contact with her siblings again. Margaret would likely never forgive her - the uppity snob, but Dorothy…that loss would forever sting. Hopefully her sister had enough grace to overcome the scandal. Hopefully Melody hadn't single handedly destroyed everyone's happiness.

Swallowing against the growing lump in her throat, Melody steeled herself to maturely continue on with the conversation. Ben was allowed to be furious and emotional - he was the victim in this situation. However panicked she was, she still knew what she did was wrong and proceeded anyway. She deserved whatever Ben had to throw at her. "I only meant … I only meant that I'll find a way to carry on if we can find a way to free you. This is a mess of my making and I won't hold it against you if you want to be rid of me."

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   Aldous Crouch, Reuben Crouch

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Ben let out a huff of breath as she responded to his question and turned away from her briefly, his eyes scanning the nearest wall as though it would have some sort of answer. He would never understand families like hers. He and his brothers seldom saw eye to eye on anything, but neither of them would have been able to stomach standing idly by and watching his life spiral out of control without intervening. At least, not any more than it did semiregularly by virtue of his own lifestyle.

He'd had an experience once before, though, where he'd assumed that families were families, and cared about each other despite their differences, and written off the concerns of Bella Scrimgeour as melodrama. He'd been sorely mistaken there. Melody's family were of the same general type as the Scrimgeours, and had proven once before that they were prone to overreacting (vis a vis Canada), so he had to take what she said at face value. There was no hope of reconciliation. Her fiance had seen them slip away together. She was ruined, in a word, with or without him.

There was a long and difficult silence. This wasn't the conversation he'd been preparing himself to have, nor was it even heading in vaguely the same direction. Ben was struggling to reorient himself, now that his — their — options were disappearing as they spoke.

"I want the potion back," he eventually said quietly.

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   Yuri Podsnapper

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"Of course." She answered without hesitation. It was a far request, and it wasn't as though he had any reason to trust her with the potion. One dose of panic and Melody was completely upending their lives. Truthfully, she wasn't sure if she trusted herself with it either. To be rid of the responsibility would be a relief.

Melody quickly reached for the vial and crossed the room to place it gently in his hand. Though she was only an arm's reach away the space between them felt as vast as the ocean. Was it truly only last night that they were kissing in the closet? The ball seemed so much longer than only a few hours ago. Years, maybe. She dropped her hands to her sides and her gaze to the floor. Now what?

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   Yuri Podsnapper

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She handed it back to him, and Ben resisted the urge to hold it up and see how much of it was left before putting it into his coat pocket. He didn’t know exactly how strong it was, so he didn’t know what to expect… or how to interpret whatever he saw. If she’d used a lot of it, would that mean that she’d been planning for him to be drugged the entirety of last night? Or only that she was panicked, and wasn’t sure how much to use?

Best not to go too far down that road, right now. It wouldn’t change anything. The facts were: the two of them had eloped. Her fiance and her family wouldn’t take her back. She had no place to sleep tonight, and between the two of them they had some, but not a significant amount, of money. He didn’t know if she had any, to be honest, and his habit of spending his paychecks nearly as soon as he got them meant that what little he could pull from Gringott’s wouldn’t last the two of them long.

“I can go ask the hotel to extend the room through tonight,” he said wearily. He suddenly felt years older than he had yesterday morning as the weight of everything that had to be done settled in on him. He dropped back into the armchair and put one hand to his forehead, staring off at some small piece of floor rather than looking at her. “But the first problem to deal with is where we go after that.”

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   Yuri Podsnapper

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Later, perhaps when the initial sting of her actions had worn off, Melody would warn Ben of the potency of the potion. She had only placed a few drops into the wine for the effects it produced. Using the full vial on someone could have potentially disastrous outcomes (far greater than forcing someone to elope even). Though, maybe they ought to use it to lessen the fallout from the scandal.

It took one glance at Ben to remind Melody why that was a horrible idea.

She removed the trunks from her pocket, which were transfigured to look like tiny wooden toy horses, and placed them on the small table. "I don't have much money, but we can sell what's in those…" she gestured towards the toys as she sat in the armchair beside him. "There's a few rare books, those alone are worth something. I don't know how much a place to live costs, but we would be able to afford something if we found a buyer."

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   Yuri Podsnapper

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Ben wasn’t sure what to make of her comment about selling things. It was possible that she hadn’t realized what selling things actually meant. Not the definition, of course, since she wasn’t stupid, but more of what it would feel like to see all of her most prized belongings walking out the door, never to be seen again. Maybe she didn’t realize how traumatic that might be, to exchange luxuries for a few nights in a hotel and some meager food. Maybe she did, and she was just resolved to martyr herself for having gotten them into this mess. Either way, he wasn’t keen on the idea of taking her suggestion, if there was anything they could do to avoid it. It seemed unlikely that he’d be able to afford to replace anything she might have brought with her, and if they were stuck together, the last thing they needed was one more thing to build resentment between the two of them, given what had happened so far.

“We’re not there yet,” he said simply. “Let me think.”

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   Yuri Podsnapper

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Despite her resolve to accept whatever his thinking was, Melody's own irritation was growing. She felt coddled, like a newborn infant incapable of fending for oneself. It was true that she was woefully inexperienced in the real world, but she was resourceful enough to survive. It was her quick thinking that left them with any possessions to sell, after all. When not making somewhat drunken, panicked decisions, Melody was capable of complex problem solving.

"Okay." She agreed as she sat back in her chair. If Ben was determined to think this through without further input from her, who was she to stop him? It was the same sort of marriage she had faced with Samuel. Melody could be the dutiful wife. She looked towards the forgotten breakfast and asked, "would you like me to reheat your tea?" The role of dutiful wife was one she was bred to play.

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   Yuri Podsnapper

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Ben was deep in thought about how they were going to solve this, considering favors he might be able to call in, or people who might have a connection to someone who could cut him a deal. Her question caught him off guard, and it seemed so ridiculous a thing to be talking about that at first he wondered if there was some sort of hidden meaning behind it that he was missing.

“I bought it for you,” he said with an indifferent shrug. “Do what you like with it.”

There were two main issues surrounding the problem of where to live: the first was the immediacy of the problem, and the second was the money. How soon could a place be procured? There might be some classifieds that would be available immediately, but they probably wouldn’t be high quality. A nice flat (or a house, which was what a married couple ought to have but which seemed a little too optimistic at this point) would require references and paperwork, which would require time.

Still, it would be nice to have options. Even if they were bad options, they might help him feel a little more in control of the situation than he currently did, since his plans for annulment had been quashed so quickly and he was still trying to adjust to this current reality.

“I can probably get a loan,” Ben said uneasily. A loan was better than selling things, that was certain, but it wasn’t exactly a great solution. Maybe if he was lucky, Aldous or Roman would be willing to contribute something on the promise that they’d eventually be paid back, but if not, there were always the goblins. (Art’s experience with lending money to goblins aside, Ben knew they’d have the money… and as long as he paid them back, it shouldn’t turn into a situation where he was camping in a tent and trying to avoid being murdered, like Art had, so…)

“I have a copy of today’s Prophet,” he said, gesturing. He’d taken it from Felix’s house, just in case he’d needed to prove to Melody that no one knew about their midnight escapades yet — though that was a moot point now. “Maybe you can look through the classifieds and see what sort of places are for rent. But don’t write anyone yet,” he advised. He didn’t want this getting out of their hands before they’d had a chance to prepare for the fallout. Before he’d had a chance to talk to Aldous.

Merlin. He supposed that was the next thing to be done. He’d have to go talk to Aldous.

  

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