Rose scowled into her tea. "This is a disaster."

"Could have been worse. Five minutes sooner and you'd have been caught breaking the Statute of Secrecy-" Rose tossed the New York Ghost back onto the table in a huff, "-quite spectacularly." That addition had her cheeks warming, lips pursed in a reluctant smirk. Thomas gave her a lopsided grin, all sunshine and hopeful eyes. "Come on, Rosebud. Is it really so bad that the world knows we're getting married?"

She was utterly entranced in watching him tie his boot and took a moment to respond. When his hands moved to prop up his chin, her eyes escaped back to his. "That engagement was a last second distraction for the press and you know it. It was your idea!"

He leaned forward with a chuckle, easing his hand over hers. "Would you have had it any other way?"

She took a big gulp of her tea and all but leapt over the table to settle in his lap. He wrapped one arm tightly around her, the other retrieving her cup. "Who says I even want to marry you, hmm?" He raised a brow, lifting her cup between them. She rolled her eyes, but let him press the cup to her lips and finished her tea off all the same. He gave her a smile that had her angling her face closer.

He pulled back, smile faltering. "Don't you?"

"Hmm?"

"Want to marry me?"

She plucked the empty cup from his hand, deposited it so carelessly that it nearly rolled off the table, and guided his hand to her thigh, then draped her arms around his neck. "I..." she kept leaning forward, pressing to him and searching for his lips, voice dazed. He squeezed her leg and stared at her with an intensity that had adrenaline rushing through her. "I might be open to some convincing."

Thomas growled. "Woman."

"Man," she said in a mockingly low tone, wiggling in his lap.

His lips crashed to hers and she sighed as he stood, her legs still wrapped around him. He tossed her onto the settee and she giggled, brushing her long curls away from her chest. There was fire in his eyes, but when she lifted her arms in wait of him, his smile returned. "You..." He raked a hand through his hair and glanced around the room with a huff. She curled her fingers at him impatiently. He chuckled and shook his head, groaning as he dove to her, "You're going to be the death of me."

Rose squealed as his hands tangled in her hair and his teeth found her throat. She was too preoccupied to notice the insistent humming of the invisible charm bracelet at her wrist, even as it reached a crescendo. "One can only hope."

Three days later, and no one had heard from her. She was ignoring all of their calls, and as usual seemed to be staying somewhere Unplottable. Albus was especially irritable and getting worse every day. Hugo was a wreck; he barely spoke, and seemed to lose track of what he was doing approximately thrice as frequently. He'd skipped at least one shift, which wasn't helping the state of his father; Elspeth hadn't actually seen the man recently, but Rita Skeeter had written an expose about he and the Minister getting into a fight at dinner, and she suspected Hermione had slept at the office last night. It wasn't a difficult mess to imagine, but that didn't mean she wanted to.

Still, they all hung onto the hope that everything was fine, and the lack of news was just... Rose being Rose, busy with whatever puzzle she was solving and content in causing a stir in her absence. Keeps everyone thinking of me, she could almost hear Rose saying, they'll be so happy to see me that all of their questions will be about whatever I've let hit the papers recently, and no one will even think to ask about the work I was doing in between. Mr. Potter, for one, was worried and curious but relatively unbothered; Elspeth suspected he was biased due to Rose's supposed fiancé's status as an Auror. She'd always thought the entire Potter clan to be just a bit too trusting, and far too forgiving - an opinion Rose shared, openly. Well, save Al's mum. That firecracker had more sense than the lot of them combined as far as Elspeth was concerned. No, Mrs. Potter was unbothered for an entirely different reason: she was simply certain that whatever she'd gotten herself into, her niece could handle it.

While her confidence in Rose was heartwarming, Elspeth did not share these sentiments.

Respectfully, she knew Rose better.

Not that Rose wasn't bloody brilliant, possibly the strongest witch she knew - certainly of their age. Just as likely to deck someone outright as to hex them into oblivion, that one. Never one to take things lying down. But something was wrong, and Elspeth hadn't a single doubt of that in her bones. She had the advantage of a distinctly non-familial relationship with the woman, and that meant she knew a lot of things about Rose's life that none of her relatives ever would, if Rose had anything to do with it.

No one got more than a kiss from Rose Weasley without Elspeth Avery hearing about it.

And this Auror she was purported to be engaged to, this Thomas Graves?

Elspeth had never heard his name in her life.

Scorpius carried himself like an exhausted ragdoll by the time he came pouring out Elspeth's floo. She acknowledged his arrival with a mumbled, "Hey," but then her eyes flicked to the stack of newspapers on her coffee table and suddenly she was a thousand miles away again.

He tapped his fingers anxiously as he watched her pace, until it became too much and he flopped onto her sofa in a heap. His elbows propped on his knees, he rested his face in his hands. She didn't seem to notice. He closed his eyes, fingers pressed to his temples. "I missed you," he said finally.

It took too many seconds for her to respond. "Sorry," she said, sounding not very sorry at all. "Lost track of time."

He watched her take a few more laps around her flat, but found that her restlessness was infectious. "Elspeth," he whispered. Finally, she looked at him. "You stood me up."

She frowned, glancing about with blinking eyes. "I..." Her lips pursed. "I know you don't believe me, Scor, but there's something wrong." He quirked a brow. "With Rose." He scowled, an expression she immediately returned. "It- it's just not possible, it doesn't make any sense!"

He helds his palms flat against each other and rested his forehead on the tips of his fingers, thumbs in line with the bridge of his nose. "So you've said."

"He's not even her type!" she lamented, joining him on the couch. "Rose likes pretty boys with sharp tongues," an interesting tidbit he'd have been eager to hear more about, if he hadn't been listening to conspiracy theories about Rose Weasley's love life for three days already, "and this guy- I mean, look at him!"

So he did, for approximately the twenty-seventh time since the image had made it onto the front page. Weasley's fiancé was a man of average height, with a large jaw covered in dark stubble. He had wide shoulders and the sort of build that made his muscles nigh impossible to hide, even in a three piece suit. He looked about a decade older than them, but Scorpius suspected that had more to do with his life as an Auror than his actual birthyear. He found himself resenting how much consideration he was giving the appearance of a man he'd never met, but he nodded his concedence all the same. Graves was what one might consider ruggedly handsome, but the last thing he'd describe him as was a 'pretty boy.'

"People end up with people outside of their... 'type,' all the time, Elspeth," he muttered.

Elspeth shook her head. "Not this time. There's something going on, I'm sure of it. I-I don't know if... if he's blackmailing her," Scorpius scoffed an incredulous laugh before he could stop himself, but that only spurred her on, "o-or if he's... paid her to fake an engagement? Or if it has nothing to do with him at all, but-"

Her words halted, and Scorpius peered over at her carefully. She was hugging a stiff throw pillow in her lap and looked on the verge of tears. With a sigh, he tugged his girlfriend by the wrist until she was tucked neatly into his chest, one arm wrapped around her and rubbing calming circles across her back. After a few shaky breaths, the glistening of her eyes subsided, and she continued with renewed fervor. "Or maybe it has nothing to do with him, which would mean it must have to do with her work and... and I'm not sure which is worse, because if whatever she's working on is enough to have her leaking an engagement to the press without warning her family, it-" She bit her lip, hard. He watched her hands as they fiddled anxiously with her bracelet, rolling a pumpkin-shaped charm between her fingers. "It must be something dangerous. Something so dangerous it could only be covered up by her biggest scandal yet, and that..." She shook her head.

The room fell into silence for a while, Elspeth worrying at that silly charm and Scorpius left to ponder how his life had become filled with people so hopelessly obsessed with Weasley, of all people. It seemed everyone he cared to be around was so hung up on his nemesis that they hardly noticed he was there anymore. For Merlin's sake, Albus was supposedly the most important person in the world to Weasley, and the man was a wreck. Meanwhile she was so busy galivanting around the other side of the planet, so self-absorbed that she couldn't be bothered to send so much as an owl to ease their suffering. And she calls me heartless.

Scorpius struggled to think of a time when he'd hated Weasley more than in that moment.

Yet she'd wormed her way into the hearts of all his closest friends, of his girlfriend, and was rooted there so soundly that Scorpius found himself kicked down the ladder of their priorities.

"I can't do this anymore." The whispered words were out of his mouth before he'd consciously decided to utter them, but he wasn't about to take it back; even if he knew he'd regret it a few hours later, as he lie alone in his bed and stared at a darkened ceiling.

"What?" Elspeth jerked up, and seemed to look at him, actually look at him for the first time in days. If irony could kill, that'd have done the trick. "What 'this'?"

"This," he gestured between them and stood.

"But-" She remained seated, but shifted to her knees and set the pillow aside. "But I love you, Scor-"

"I love you, Els, but I can't-" He caught himself before he could raise his voice to an indelicate volume, and rubbed his temples again. "I'm tired, Els. I'm so tired, of fighting for a place in your life and being left wanting with- with no idea where I went wrong!" His eyes flicked to her fingers, which had gone back to that little, greying pumpkin. He gave a wry laugh and shook his head, gesturing at her. "Merlin, you pay more attention to a friendship bracelet for people you haven't spoken with in two years than you do to me-"

"Don't," Elspeth snapped, gaze hardening. It was the most passionately she'd regarded him in he didn't know how long, and it made his stomach churn. "You haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, Scorpius, so don't."

His jaw clenched, and he swallowed, hands slipping into his pockets to hide the whitening of his knuckles. "Maybe I don't," he said softly, resigned. "But if so, it's only because you won't tell me. You are the world to me, Elspeth Avery, but I can't keep being... an afterthought, to you."

He stepped into the floo, and Elspeth neglected to speak a single word that might stop him.

He didn't want to think about how much that stung.

He lived through the next few days on autopilot, too jaded to do more than go through the motions. He'd have lost track of the date if he hadn't pre-set alarms a month ahead, his schedule a blur of mind-numbing paperwork and avoidance punctuated only by one sleepless night after another. Then, one otherwise unremarkable Thursday evening, he stepped out of his fireplace and directly into a whirlwind of curly red hair.

"Malfoy, you made it! How unfortunate."

"Go easy on him, Rose," he heard Elspeth mumble from somewhere in his sitting room. He wasn't sure where, because his entire line of sight was taken up by the woman in front of him, who stared directly into his eyes with an aggravatingly bright grin and a familiar flame in her gaze.

"Whatever for?" she asked with mocking sweetness. "He can handle it. Can't you, Malfoy?"

She looked entirely too happy to see him, despite her words, which he chalked up to her hankering for a scrap. Scorpius found himself torn between giving her one or denying her the satisfaction. "What are you doing here, Red?" he sighed as he thought it over, expression carefully blank.

"Oh, didn't you hear?" She crowded him, fingers straightening his tie. He slapped her hands away with all the enthusiasm of a lazy cat. The flame in her eyes roared. "I came back to fuck up your life."

AN: A very special thank you to tatapb (if anyone reading this hasn't read Good News, Bad News or Witch Slap, you absolutely should), Pilarofdoom, PityThoseWhoLiveWithoutLove, and katiejeanrose. Your kind words are keeping me motivated to get this story down before I forget anything, and I promise I am writing as quickly as I can! I really appreciate you taking the time, and I hope you're all excited for the next chapter - I know I am.
Now, before I get to work writing the next chapter, I wanted to address a few things.
I am thrilled to hear that I'm managed to make you curious. I have a lot of surprises in store, but I'm trying to leave hints that you'll be able to look back on later!

As for the relationship between Scorpius and Elspeth, it's not healthy at the moment, no. I want to assure you that I do not intend to portray it as healthy at this stage. They both have needs that aren't being met, and that's largely due to their own neglect to voice those needs. They aren't communicating well, and don't trust each other as much as they think they do. They both have their own trauma responses that they've developed without fully realizing it (or, in some cases, have noticed but haven't taken the time to properly reflect on), and it's something I plan to explore in depth as the story progresses. I can hardly wait to share their journey toward healing with you all.

The premise of this story is that they're a mess at the beginning, but I love a happy ending too much to not give them one, haha.

Again, thank you all for reading.

See you next chapter!