"I'm-" Rose started to announce as she stepped out of the fireplace, but froze for a beat or two when she found Al's sitting room to be more crowded than she'd expected. "...home." She squinted around the flat, taking stock of its inhabitants.

Elspeth, Hugo, and Malfoy sat on the couch in that order. Malfoy was on her right with one leg crossed over the other, chin in his left hand with his right arm crossed over his bare stomach. His nostrils were flared, his hair was a mess, his mouth was set in a signature scowl. His entire body was angled away from the rest of the group, and if he pressed himself any further into the arm of the sofa he was going to become part of it. Elspeth sat on the opposite edge, legs tucked up in front of her also angled away from the group, both knees resting demurely on the arm of the couch. Her hands were folded on the pillow in her lap, fiddling with whatever she could reach from that position - which amounted to her bracelet, the pillow fringe, and her own fussing fingers. Her brows pinched together as she chewed her lip, which Rose recognized as her 'I want to help, but I'm afraid I'll only make it worse' look; though with her eyes glued to her fidgeting digits Rose couldn't tell what the cause of said look was. Hugo sat between them, back pin straight with his legs pressed together and his hands clasped tightly, arms tucked close to the rest of his body. His face was white as a sheet, eyes unfocused like he hadn't even noticed his sister's arrival despite the fact that he was staring right at her. Poor thing looked like he might hurl at any moment.

Tate Hawthorn stood behind the center of the sofa with his lips pressed together against a poorly concealed smile, gaze torn between amused and concerned as he massaged Hugo's shoulders. Behind him, near the door in naught but a negligee - would it be inappropriate to ask where she got it? I do like the color - stood an unfamiliar witch, currently in the process of tying her hair up in a messy bun. She looked a bit out of sorts, eyes flicking nervously about the room, but her gaze failed to land on anything helpful; at least, assuming she wasn't terribly afraid of gauche decor.

Albus, on the other hand, looked like he did most mornings: half asleep and utterly unwilling to bother himself with whatever nonsense was going on around him. He was draped across the overstuffed armchair in the corner next to the floo, one foot on the floor while his other leg stuck haphazardly over the arm of the chair, dangerously close to tipping over a lamp with his toes. The rest of him was squished into the seat, head propped up by the opposite arm at a neck breaking ninety-degree angle as he blinked bleary eyes at his slice of half-eaten burnt toast.

Ah.

She took all of this in before any of them could react, so when Tate looked up from her brother to smile and offer a perfectly lovely, "Welcome back. How was your trip?" she was too caught up in putting mental puzzle pieces together to take proper notice.

"You split up again?" she blurted in lieu of anything that might've been considered an appropriate response. "Already?!"

Elspeth's gaze lifted from her lap with a start and a quiet, "How did you…?"

At the same time, Scorpius snarled without breaking eye contact with the wall, "What gave us away?"

"You're hardly subtle. Merlin, I was only gone four days." She blinked, glanced to her cousin; but he only grunted and shrugged, which she should have expected. He'd never been a morning person. She wouldn't get anything helpful from him before noon, not without an actual emergency. So, she turned her flabbergasted gaze back to the sofa. "What happened?"

"Ask her," Scorpius grumbled. His eyes cut toward the opposite end of the sofa, but every other part of him remained motionless.

"Wha-! I…" Elspeth floundered for a moment, clearly upset at being put on the spot. She hugged the throw pillow in her lap and rested her chin on it, face sheepish when she finally met Rose's imploring gaze. "He... He called our sofa ugly."

"Our sofa is ugly."

"He threatened to set it on fire!"

She lifted her eyebrows and looked over to the man in question. "Did you follow through?"

"Nah, she kicked me out before I got the chance."

Rose hummed. "Shame. Would've saved me the trouble." The smirk he gave her then was positively conspiratorial.

"Rude!" the brunette gasped. Malfoy snickered. Elspeth glared past Hugo at him - to no great effect, mind you. Elspeth Avery was many things, but intimidating would be the last thing anyone might put on the list. When Malfoy neglected to look in any way apologetic, she huffed. "He didn't have to be so mean about it," she mumbled with a sniff.

Her cheek twitched with the effort not to roll her eyes. "Plum, it's not even really our sofa. Mr. Wilkins left it behind. It's threadbare, lumpy, stained, and at least a third of the fabric has been shredded by his army of cats. Not to mention the color was probably nauseating to look at even in its prime, and it's certainly not worth breaking up over so what…?" She glanced between the pair, who may have had the good sense to look abashed but remained equally unwilling to talk about whatever was actually going on between them. "What is wrong with you two?"

"I'm sure you have a list," he quipped, in a tone she hadn't heard from him in years.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. After a few deep breaths, she said, "You know what, I do." He raised his eyebrows at her in a challenge that she proceeded to ignore, eyes turning instead to her best friend. "The day Malfoy becomes a Legilimens is the day I eat my hat."

"Um, rude," Malfoy mocked.

"Oh, full offense, I assure you," she tossed back at him with a brief smirk. "Point is, he's not a mind reader. If something is bothering you, you have to spell it out for him, otherwise he's not going to get it. And before you start giving me excuses about why you can't tell him everything," she tacked on when Elspeth opened her mouth, looking indignant, "you don't have to. If you aren't ready to talk about something, or you can't without violating someone else's privacy, or whatever, then say that. I love you, plum, but you rely too heavily on body language and waiting for your partner to come to you. Malfoy isn't like me, you can't just avoid the subject and expect him to get the hint. He's only going to assume the worst and he'll end up scowling at the walls until he snaps like he always does."

"And you," she turned narrowed eyes on Malfoy, who was already frowning in apprehension. "Quit trying to start a fight just because you're feeling cranky and haven't figured out a better outlet, that shit only works on me. Els avoids conflict like the plague, so if you don't approach her calmly, like an adult," she stressed, leaning forward slightly and dipping her head to keep him from breaking eye contact, "then you're never going to make any progress. And for Merlin's sake, be honest with her. You can't just keep telling her what you think she wants to hear. Either she'll know you're lying, which will only make things worse, or she won't and you'll be right back where you started. Elspeth is hands down the most understanding person I have ever had the pleasure of knowing, she isn't going to judge you for having emotions no matter what they are, but you're never going to see that if you don't give her the chance."

By the end of this tirade, Rose was dizzy and out of breath. In the ensuing silence, her hand flexed around the handle of the briefcase while the other pressed to her growling belly. She straightened, closed her eyes, and inhaled as deeply as she could manage.

Then Hugo, who had apparently snapped out of his trance during the monologue, let out a low whistle that stopped the crickets from chirping. "Haven't seen you dole out a tongue lashing like that since we caught mum and dad considering divorce."

"And not one broken vase," Al chimed in, eyes sparkling and surprisingly alert.

Hugo made a show of examining their surroundings with a hum. "Bookshelves are still attached to the walls… All the furniture's still right way up, too."

"You should be proud," Al teased. "Really held back, there, Rosie Posie."

Rose rolled her eyes but felt the tension leak from her shoulders, replaced by a stifling exhaustion.

"Am I expected to take relationship advice from someone whose engagement lasted, what, a month?" Scorpius snarled; though she couldn't help but notice that his pose had relaxed by a mile.

"Scor," Elspeth hissed, arm swung across Hugo's lap to whack Malfoy with a pillow.

"No, don't-" Rose shut her eyes again, took another deep breath. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but go easy on him. He's just looking for someone to bicker with, it's not his fault he doesn't know what he's talking about." Malfoy wasn't the only one whose eyebrows raised at that. She frowned. After a second, she held the briefcase with both hands again, knees rocking slightly. "I have a lot of explaining to do, but first I need to put this somewhere safe, and... Well. Tate, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not quite comfortable sharing this part of my personal life with you. Would you mind terribly if I asked you to step out, maybe fetch some tea? Hugo could probably use it, he's looking a bit green around the gills and Albus insists on keeping nothing but coffee in the cupboards."

Hawthorn looked on her with kind eyes and an understanding smile, bless his heart. "I'd be happy to." He tilted her brother's head back for a kiss, then took his leave.

Rose stepped further into the flat so he could pass into the floo, then turned her eyes on the unidentified witch who was still shifting uncomfortably by the front door. "Sorry, who are you?"

It took a moment for her to respond, seemingly taken aback at having been acknowledged after so long spent as a fly on the wall to their mess. "Oh! Me. Apologies," she said in a disarmingly sweet voice, smiling as she stepped forward with her arm extended. For a handshake, Rose realized belatedly, and obliged. "Sarah Cloversby, at your service."

"Pleasure to meet you, Sarah, I'm Rose. And how do you...?" She glanced around the room, making a circular motion with her finger pointed at the rest of the group, once Sarah released her hand. How do you fit in? she was asking, but the words seemed indelicate and she struggled to come up with anything better, knackered as she was.

"I..." Sarah trailed off, eyes flickering between the figures on the couch. Hugo immediately turned red as a beet and diverted his attention back to the fireplace. Elspeth was so lost in introspection that she didn't notice, and Malfoy was intently frowning at the loose thread sticking out of the sofa arm as he rolled it between his fingers.

It was clear none of them was going to step in to explain, so Albus did. "Hugo walked in on her and Malfoy shagging on our kitchen counter," he punctuated that bit with a glare at his roommate, "bout twenty minutes before you got here."

"Ah." Rose lifted her eyebrows and gave the woman a once over, then leaned a little closer and commented quietly, "I can't tell if you're feeling left out or trapped."

"Bit of both, really," she responded just as quietly, cheeks slightly pinker than they had been a moment ago.

"Your clothes still in Malfoy's room?" Sarah nodded sheepishly. "Right." Rose gave her hand what she hoped was a reassuring squeeze. "In that case, there's coffee in the kitchen, or you can wait for Tate to bring back some tea. You can leave if you'd like, of course, but if you're still here when we're finished I feel I must warn you that I'm going to insist you divulge where you acquired your undergarments." She finished with a wink.

"I'll keep that in mind," Sarah responded with a whisper of a laugh.

"Alright, you lot," Rose announced to the rest of the room. "We're going to mine. If I'm going to tell you everything, I need bloody smoke." She was already pulling a pack from her pocket as she led the way out the door.

"You can't smoke in these flats!" Al warned as he scrambled to follow.

"Ours has a balcony," she gloated without looking back.

"What?! That's not fair! Why don't we get a balcony?"

"That's what I said, mate," Malfoy concurred from where he trailed behind an oddly quiet Elspeth.

Scorpius wasn't sure how much of what Weasley had said about Elspeth was accurate, but she'd been disturbingly spot on about him. It made him... uncomfortable. He briefly wondered when she'd come to know him so well, but it didn't take much reflection on their Hogwarts days to realize that she'd always had a knack for finding his weak spots. The real issue was in the execution.

Sardonic commentary and explosive outbursts, he could deal with. Their bickering was a comfort zone for him. Sure, sometimes they took things too far, but he always found it relatively easy to recover from anything she said with fire in her eyes, and Weasley'd always been incurably resilient. If his feelings got hurt or she exposed a sore spot he wasn't prepared to deal with, he could chalk it up to something said in anger and move on with his life. Full on lecturing was a different story. There'd been no wildfire in the hazel eyes that bore into his, only an overwhelming tiredness. She hadn't been enraged, she'd been... disappointed.

He didn't know what to do with that. He hated it. It made him feel small, in a way that was typically reserved for especially tense nights at the Manor when his grandfather hacked his ego to pieces, or his dad fixed him with the cold, downright despondent gaze he'd perfected over the years. Scorpius had long since given up on pleasing anyone in his family, save his mother, but Weasley?

He took pleasure in riling her up, not letting her down. He wanted them on equal footing, trading blows and gloating in turn. This was just...

Well, this was no fun at all.

The redhead in question led them out into the crisp morning air, and if she felt his eyes like static on her spine she didn't show it. She simply snapped her fingers, and lit a cigarette with the blue flame that sprung from them.

"Neat trick," he said in what he prayed was a casual tone.

She spared him only the briefest of glances before rubbing her fingers together to smother the flame. "My mum taught me." She took a disconcertingly long drag, eyes fluttering closed, then let it out in a burst. "Hugo can do it, too." Her brother demonstrated, and Scorpius nodded in acknowledgement.

She held the half empty pack out to him with a question in her eyes, but he shook his head with a frown. She shrugged one shoulder and moved on, Al and Elspeth each taking one. She neglected to offer Hugo one, but he assumed that was a conscious decision; something something 'baby brother,' he was sure. "I didn't know you smoked," Scorpius remarked in a hush.

"There are a lot of things you don't know about me, Malfoy," Rose responded airily, leaning over the balcony - probably so she didn't have to look into anybody's eyes. "Though, I suppose it's about time that changed." She took another drag, ashed over the edge. "We should make a game of it, one of these days. Tit for tat and all that. Anyway, I don't. Smoke, that is. Or... I didn't. Consider it an unfortunate side effect of my time with Graves. Plan to kick the habit soon, but for now... Well. Anything to take the edge off, really."

He quirked a brow. Before he could formulate a response past the warmth in his chest and the lump in his throat, her brother leaned his back against the balcony next to her. "You're stalling," he said gently.

Her eyes were unfocused again, flicking down through the air for a moment before she shrugged one shoulder. "You're not wrong." After two more drags that left Scorpius wondering if she was going to finish the whole thing in silence, she cleared her throat. "Right. Well. I'll just start at the beginning, then, I suppose; or as close to it as I can get. I..." She huffed, puffed. "The details are still..." There was a pinch in her cheeks as she held her hand flat, cigarette held between her middle and index finger, and wobbled it in a so-so motion.

"Hazy?" he guessed.

"Fuzzy?" Elspeth supplied quietly, at the same time.

Rose's gaze flicked over to them, then down to the railing next to her elbow, then back out to the sky before she nodded. "I don't know how much of that is from the memory charms or how much was just good old fashioned gaslighting, but... Mum could only fix so much." Another drag, and Scorpius found himself with a new craving.

"We met years ago, back when he was still an Obliviator. I told you about him, actually," she said with a wry edge as she turned to look at Elspeth. "The initiate that kept following me around like a puppy, remember?"

Elspeth frowned. "I thought you said his name was Greg."

"Mm," she nodded. "I knew him by a pseudonym, at first. Always thought 'Greg' was an odd choice, but I digress."

"Told you lot he wasn't her type," Elspeth grumbled, to which Al and Hugo exchanged glances.

"Oh, absolutely not. Hell, Malfoy's more my type than he was." Scorpius gaped at her, which seemed to improve her mood, if only by a little. "And I told him as much, which... looking back on it now, may have been my first mistake. He was persistent, to say the least, and then one day we found ourselves hunkered down in a barren safe house in the middle of nowhere. South America somewhere, I think, but... I'm not sure, I just know it was hot. Muggy and painfully boring. We had nothing to entertain ourselves with except each other, so we got to talking and he was just so... nice, you know?"

She turned away again, took a few more drags, and steadied herself before continuing. "Funny, too, in a way. Seduced me with his politics, if you can believe it. I thought it was just a one night stand, but... he became obsessed." She finished her smoke, stamped it out on the railing, and lit another.

"Why you?"

Elspeth swat at his arm with a warning look.

"I've been wondering that, too. I have some people looking into it while I work on getting my memories back, but... If he was working some sort of angle, if he was put up to it, if he was after anything other than me, I..." She frowned into the middle distance. "I haven't been able to figure it out."

There was a pregnant pause, during all ten seconds of which Scorpius struggled to keep his hands at his sides.

"Anyway, he... he just couldn't take no for an answer, I guess. No matter how many times I told him that I wasn't interested in anything serious, that even if I had been I'd had more than enough of monogamy and I'd never agree to be exclusive... He just kept coming back. Every time I moved, there he was, standing on my doorstep with a big, goofy grin, asking me out to dinner. Followed me across at least twelve states and into three foreign countries, that I know of, before he switched tactics on me."

She grit her teeth, brought the smoke to her lips and closed her eyes for a few seconds. "If you won't have dinner with me, at least let me join you for tea," she quoted. "He'd just gotten some as a gift from a friend, he said. An 'extra special blend' he called it, claimed it would help keep me focused during work and sleeping soundly through the night." She folded an arm over her belly and stood up straight. "So I let him in. Worst mistake of my life, that. Extra special blend," she repeated with a strangled laugh that made Scorpius's stomach churn. She flipped back around to face them then. "Stuff was chock full of Amortentia, among other things. Don't worry, I don't expect you lot to know what that is - except Malfoy, of course. It's highly illegal these days, hasn't been part of Hogwarts curriculum since at least a decade before our time."

"Strongest love potion in existance," Scorpius explained to the others' confused faces, a growing trepidation coursing through him as the pieces clicked into place in his mind. "You said it smelled like citrus. Elspeth hates citrus, replaced all of my cleaning supplies with lavender instead one time and had to listen to Al gripe for weeks about how it made him too sleepy to get anything done. That's... that's why you stopped us from drinking it when she said it smelled nice."

Rose clicked her tongue and pointed at him in a gesture that said bingo. "Also why Els took one gulp and spent the rest of the day thinking Graves was handsome rather than repulsive."

"Wait, but... why was I the only one you asked what it smelled like the me?"

"Because you were the only one whose amortentia scents I knew," she replied as if it were obvious. He didn't actually have to ask how on earth she knew that, though; the befuddled look on his face was enough. "Sixth year. Christmas. Uncle George gave Lily an amortentia-scented candle, and the second she opened it she marched right up to you, shoved it in your face, and asked what you thought it smelled like. I think she wanted to know what kind of perfume to buy in her efforts to seduce you." Al gagged, Rose snorted.

Scorpius blinked wide eyes at her, bewildered. "And you remembered?"

She shrugged one shoulder, looking him over with an expression he couldn't quite pin down. "I thought it was interesting. Anyway, Amortentia doesn't actually cause love, nothing can, but it causes infatuation and... well, combined with everything else in there that extra special blend was enough to keep me... compliant. Mostly." Her eyes flicked to the ground and she turned, relighting the smoke that had gone out in her fingers. "He kept me well stocked in it throughout our entire relationship. He eventually got me to tell him what it smelled like to me, then whiped my memory of the entire conversation and started pretending that it was just... how the tea smelled. Every time I figured it out, every time I confronted him or tried to leave, he'd muck up my memories before I could make any real headway. And when the wand wasn't enough to stop me, he'd switch to fists until it was."

She finished her cigarette and put it out on the railing, but didn't turn around. "Guess I'm lucky he thought having our engagement in the papers and giving me a tin for the road would be sufficient to keep me under his spell long enough for me to convince everyone back home I didn't need rescuing. Didn't think I'd be able to fight the overwhelming urge to go crawling back to him long enough for the tea to run out, I suppose."

A heavy silence settled around them, until Scorpius couldn't take it anymore. "Merlin, Red, are you even safe here?" he asked in a rush, fists clenched.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," Hugo groaned, looking rather faint as he leaned over the edge of the balcony.

"Where is he now?" Albus ground out, looking murderous.

"Won't he know where to find you?" Elspeth breathed, face pale.

Rose laughed. Actually laughed, shoulders shaking, but the wobble of her mouth wasn't much of a smile at all and her hands were shaking. She attempted to steady them by crossing her arms, but he could still see the way she trembled. "Heartwarming as your concern may be, I can assure you that it's wholly unnecessary. Thomas Graves won't be darkening any doorsteps anytime soon." She turned then, brow furrowed, and cast one more glance around the group before stepping toward the door. "He's dead."