Felicity leaned against the doorframe of Luca’s room, silently watching him sleep while she waited for Betty to arrive. They hadn’t been separated that long, often Jasper had him for longer, but not knowing when the next time was going to be, not knowing how she’d be punished for trying to run with a muggleborn, had made it so much worse.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there when the knock came, one last lingering look that Luca was okay before she welcomed her friend into her too-clean house. “It’s good to see you,” she greeted, immediately pulling Betty in for a tight hug.
Betty had gone from denial to anger to bewilderment over what had happened with Flick in recent days, but it wasn’t enough to ever cloud her feelings for her best friend. The bag of carefully-wrapped Christmas presents was almost dropped as she welcomed the hug, letting out a noise of frustration even as she hugged Flick back. “Seriously, Flick, what the fuck — I’m so glad you’re safe.”
“I’m sorry,” Flick apologised, giving Betty one last squeeze before she let go. “I wanted to tell you but…,” she trailed off with a shrug, too many possible answers to that sentence. It wasn’t safe. She would’ve wanted Betty to talk her out of it. Talking about it would have made it too real. “They’ve been threatening us. Luca. We just wanted him to be safe.”
“I get that part,” Betty assured her, holding out the bag of presents so Flick could take them. She lowered her voice a little and continued to speak. “But the Ministry holding cell part is something new.” She peered past Flick, wondering if they were alone and they could speak freely. A shrug just wasn’t going to satisfy Betty’s curiosity.
Flick took the presents with a ‘thanks’, putting them aside so she and Luca could open them together later. “If you’re going to run, running with a muggleborn is a bad idea,” Flick replied, keeping her tone light so she could more easily discuss what happened. “Wine?”
“It’s in the bag,” Betty told her quickly. “As promised.”
Betty didn’t say anything about the revelation that Flick and Luca hadn’t been alone for a moment. She touched her temples briefly, sighed softly and just hoped desperately the wine would help this make more sense. “Getting caught was probably where it went wrong,” she suggested, trying to mirror Flick’s light tone.
Felicity fetched it, filling their glasses far past the standard drink level before bringing them, and the bottle, to the lounge, gesturing for Betty to take a seat too. “Probably,” she agreed, taking large gulp. “But some Snatchers are very good at their job.”
Betty sat without hesitation, only taking a lingering sip of her glass once it was passed to her. “Was it someone — are they —” Betty couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence.
“Wandless.” Her stomach turned as she said it, twisting itself into knots of guilt. She and Luca were safe, nothing more than a couple of nights in a holding cell and a travel ban her punishment, but her actions had hurt someone else. Taken everything from him. She half-drained her glass, blinking back tears. “But how have things been with you?” A feeble attempt to change the subject.
Betty reached towards her with a sympathetic hand, touching Flick’s arm briefly. “It’s not your fault,” she tried to reassure her. A pause, she drank deeply from her glass and rolled her eyes at the question. “Home until I’d fought with my mother enough, birthday, back to work, wine,” she shrugged her shoulders, not thinking much of the past week or so of her life. And yet there was something else she wanted to mention, even though Flick had changed the subject. “Can you be a sounding board for a moment? Tell me what you think of something?”
“Of course. Always,” Flick replied, glad for the question that took her mind off the birthday she knew she'd missed and her own job which she doubted she still had if her voicemail messages were anything to go by.
Betty twisted an anxious hand around the wine glass before starting to speak. “I was talking to someone, a girl I know and her mother is incarcerated. I want to do something with her story, maybe lots of stories.” A sip of wine, perhaps for courage. “I'm not sure how to go about it, I'm just getting names of people to talk to but —” another sip. “The human side of things. Is that mad?”
“No, it’s beautiful,” Flick gave a sad smile. “Dangerous, probably . Are you going to write it under your own name?”
“Maybe. Eventually.” A large gulp of wine. “I like my job. Liked, I guess. I still need the money.” Betty gave a low groan of frustration. “It's such a… not even a problem, I guess. Other people have problems,” a sympathetic nod in Flick’s direction, she didn't envy her friend’s position in the slightest. “It's just shit.” Betty’s summary was shorter than she'd expected.
“The shittest,” Flick agreed, sipping from her near-empty glass again, reaching for the bottle to top both herself and Betty up. “But I think it would be good. To have a record. For the future even, so maybe this never happens again.”
“Luca deserves better than growing up around this. You all deserve better,” Betty remarked darkly, giving her a nod in thanks for the top-up. “I'm glad you're okay, though.”
“Yeah,” Felicity sighed heavily, leaning her head against Betty’s shoulder. “Hopefully he’s too young to really remember any of this. But, I don’t know. He loves this stupid cat given to him by Bellatrix Lestrange and it’s just like we’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. When is this cat going to turn around and attack? What’s the next thing they’re going to do to him? No one deserves any of this,” she waved her free hand around in a vague gesture at ‘this’, “But bringing children into it?”
Betty pulled Flick into a half hug, wine abandoned for the moment. There was a silence where usually she'd have insisted that things will turn out, that it'd all be okay. Instead she cleared her throat. A joke might be easier. “I'm happy to take the cat far away and abandon it. Maybe on a Death Eater’s doorstep. Replace it with another one.” She tried to smile. “Maybe he'll never notice.”
Flick gave a half-smile at the joke, replying with one of her own. “You'll have to take that up with Jasper. I think he's way more fond of cats than he lets on.”
“Only if we include him on the plan,” Betty remarked lightly. She watched her friend for a brief moment, counting her blessings to have a friend like Flick to trust and confide in, and then returned to her wine.