Chapter 10
Gus has been waiting in the Muggle coffee shop for fifteen minutes. He normally doesn't arrive for appointments early, but it took so much persuading to get Becky to agree to meet him that he didn't want to risk making her mad by showing up late.
She's precisely on time. He's already ordered a coffee for her, added milk but no sugar, the way she likes it, and surreptitiously cast a stasis charm to keep it hot until she arrived. She sits down across from him and waits.
Now that she's here, observing him with that cool, contemptuous expression, he finds himself at a loss for words. He spilled them all in those long, rambling letters he kept owling her, letters she either ignored or answered with only as many words as it took to tell him to leave off already, because it was over.
She breaks the silence first. "You're my best friend," she says. "But I'm in love with him."
"No, you're in love with the version of him you saw in that other world. He's not the same man."
"You think I don't know that?"
"Yes, that's exactly what I think," Gus snaps in frustration. "I think you don't know that. Or, rather, I think your brain knows it but your…your hormones don't."
Becky narrows her eyes at him. "Leave my hormones bloody well out of this, Gus."
"We were good together," he says.
"We were a dysfunctional shit show together," she counters. "This conversation is over. And if you continue harassing me, this friendship is going to be over, at least until you get past this nonsense and can behave like a rational person again."
Gus stares at her, dumbfounded. She's threatening to end their friendship? After more than twenty years? Friends since before either of them could remember?
Her expression softens. "That's not what I want," she says. "I want things to go back the way they were before. Before we tried to make something more out of this than it is. Because what it is, the friendship part, is one of the things I treasure most."
Gus stares down into his coffee cup. She doesn't know what she wants. She's confused. Or that bastard has used magic to seduce her. That's it. That must be it.
"You aren't really in love with me," she continues. "You just want to be in love with me. If you really were, you wouldn't keep going back to Cass, like a moth drawn to a flame."
His mother said essentially the same thing when she refused to plead his case with Becky. "Someday, I want you to have what your dad and I do," Pansy told him, "and I want Becky to have that, too. And I don't think either of you is going to have it with each other."
He wonders if he might have better luck with Becky's mother. She's always liked him. Yes. He'll go talk to Hermione.
"What does your mum think about all this?" he asks.
"My mother got to live her life," Becky says, "and now I get to live mine."
Reading between the lines, he knows he was right. Hermione will be on his side.
Unfortunately, it isn't Hermione who answers the door. Severus looks down his long nose at Gus with that same cool, contemptuous stare Gus saw earlier today in the same eyes in a much prettier face. The silence stretches between them as Severus doesn't invite him in, or say anything at all, or stop looking at him.
"May I come in?" Gus asks finally.
"To what end?" Severus asks.
"Severus!" Hermione admonishes, appearing in the doorway behind her husband. "Come in, Gus," she says, reaching past her husband to take Gus's arm and draw him inside. "I think I know why you're here."
Gus nods miserably.
"Have you seen her?" Hermione asks.
"Just now," Gus says, "but only for a few minutes."
Hermione sighs. "That's a few minutes more than I've had."
"Don't be dramatic," Severus says. "She's coming to dinner tonight."
Gus looks at Hermione hopefully, but can't quite bring himself to ask what he wants to with Severus looming and glowering the way he is.
Severus casts a Tempus charm. "I have a potion that will be ruined if I don't attend to it," he says, then turns that glower on his wife. "Do not get involved in this, Hermione."
"She's my daughter. I am involved."
"She's an adult witch. You are not involved."
"Go on," Hermione says. "Don't ruin your potion."
Severus looks back and forth between Hermione and Gus, then reluctantly leaves for his lab in Hogsmeade.
"You'll talk to her for me?" Gus asks when the door has closed behind Severus.
"I'll try, at least," Hermione says. "But you see what I have to deal with here." She gestures toward the door.
"Surely he doesn't approve?"
"He doesn't approve, precisely. He just thinks Becky is old enough to make her own mistakes, and we should stay out of it."
"But he does think it's a mistake?" Gus presses.
"He hasn't said one way or the other, really," Hermione says, then looks up in surprise as a silver mongoose rushes through the wall.
"Hermione, I need you in the Gryffindor common room!" the Patronus shouts with Neville's voice.
"What have those little fiends gotten up to now?" Hermione mutters as she rushes for the door. "Close the door on your way out," she calls to Gus as she hurries toward whatever mischief her Gryffindors are making.
Whatever the kids are doing can't be anything near as bad as what he and Becky got up to with Hermione's Time Turner, Gus thinks, heading for the door. And then he stops, hand on the knob. The Time Turner. It's here, somewhere in these chambers, and he can use it to fix this mess, to save the woman he loves from a married man who's taking advantage of her, a man she never would have looked twice at if the two of them hadn't used that Time Turner when they did.
He closes the door, and walks to Hermione's study.
Author's Note: Thanks as always to the world's best beta readers, turtlewexler and Fragilereality and to you, dear readers. Thanks also to all the readers who have added Past Imperfect to their favorites. It broke 700 this week!