And the toughest part is that we both know
What happened to you
Why you're out on your own
Merry Christmas, please don't call
Merry Christmas, I'm not yours at all
Merry Christmas, please don't call

Her father received an invitation through his business, and with one of her half-brothers down with some sort of flu, Mor was his guest to the Minister's ball. She arrived on time, which was slightly unlike her especially at this point in her life, but mostly because she was here with her father. She drank champagne and marveled at the snowflakes that floated in the glass, although her tone was slightly sarcastic. She chatted with frequent library customers. She watched Brooks Watson from across the room, while trying very deliberately to look as if she was not watching him.

He was seeing someone again. Morrigan knew this information in the way she knew most things about him — by keeping careful tabs, and by occasionally appearing in his home, although they had never discussed the girl. It was one thing to know this and another to see her, with him, from across the room — once she'd ascertained what she was seeing, Mor committed to conversing in a different room of the hotel.

She left early, as she was wont to do, and told her father she was going to floo home. (Not because he was chaperoning her — they had largely done away with that ancient custom when she committed to being a spinster — but because it seemed polite when she was here as his guest.) Except instead of going home, she too the floo to the Leaky Cauldron, wrapped her scarf around her head to mask her face, and walked over to Brooks' building.

It wasn't difficult to break into his flat. She'd done it before. She lit the candles and helped herself to one of his wine bottles, and was drinking the crisp white wine from it when he unlocked the deadbolt that she'd re-locked after letting herself in. "You should really change your locks, you know," Morrigan suggested, from her seat in his parlor armchair.

The corner of Mor's lip twitched up, and she carefully tried to will it back into her usual neutrality. When they were courting, and for much of the time when they'd been engaged, she'd had a private game she played, and she had never been sure that Brooks knew she was playing it. Mor wasn't a very expressive person, but when she was around Brooks, she veered closer to it than usual — and sometimes she'd wanted him to know that she was smiling, but that she only wanted him to see it.

It was cruel, now, to play that game. It was cruel enough to step in on him, but she had never once actually tried to stop herself from doing so. "Probably not," Mor said, tilting her head up at him. She tapped one of her rings against the glass she was holding, creating a brief tinny sound. "But you would make me work more for it."

She could, Mor thought, get him to do anything that she wanted. "I thought we could have a drink," she said, her tone implying a joke even though one did not follow. "For old time's sake." She wanted to know more about his fiancée, but she did not want to have to ask, so she wouldn't.

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "I got you something. For Christmas."

"I think you got me this wine," Morrigan said. She let the corner of her mouth twitch up, this time — it was fun, to tease him, like things were the way they'd been. She took a large gulp of her wine, then reached into the pocket of her coat. Even before she'd left him, Morrigan had been in the habit of leaving breadcrumbs for Brooks — gifts that meant something, if she ever gave him enough context to piece them together. A ship in a bottle. A book on Great Lakes wizarding history. A flower arrangement that had an unusual amount of asphodel.

This, though, was particularly on the nose — she held it out to him, an offering. A silver pocketwatch, with gold detailing on the face of it. Time. The thing she so desperately wanted, and would not allow herself to have — when Morrigan was being particularly dramatic, she likened it to her relationship with Brooks. "I know you weren't given one when you turned seventeen."

Brooks had no parents to give him heirlooms — Mor was a poor substitute, but she could try.

He was looking stricken at her. Mor knew there were countless reasons that he should say no — (and that she would find a way to leave it here whether or not he accepted it was probably not one of the reasons) — but she wanted him to say yes. She would break back in if she had to, but she didn't want to.

"You're a gentleman and you saved up for something nice," she said, slow and measured, "You turned in your old one to take the cost down a bit. You deserve it."

Crossing a line. Well. She could see how firm his boundaries held. Morrigan pocketed the watch — he would be getting it whether he agreed to it or not, she was sure of it — and stood up from his armchair. Morrigan strode across the room, wine glass in hand. When she came to a stop, she was only a few inches in front of him.

"You would feel better if you let some of those principles go, you know," Morrigan said, looking up at Brooks and meeting his eyes. Her lips quirked up in that secret smile she used to reserve for him, and kept it like that, because she wanted him to see. "If you let her take you as you are."

(This was the first allusion Morrigan had made to the woman, Euphemia — she wondered if Brooks had known that she knew. But of course she knew. She still knew everything about him.)

God, Euphemia Clarke was going to go and make him boring. Morrigan looked up at him, a slight squint appearing on her face. Did he want to be boring? Part of why she'd left him had been so that he could find someone normal, which he had apparently gone and done — but really she had left him because she did not want to widow him. She couldn't tell Dru that. If Mor died, so did all her friends.

She had left Brooks so he could be boring, but she wasn't dead yet, and the thought of him being boring bored her. Part of what she liked about Brooks was the ways in which they complimented each other — their intellectual curiosity, their stubborn sense of right even when they betrayed it or betrayed the morals they should have, their drive for success and their shared need to be needed.

She could need him.

Could Euphemia Clarke? Probably Euphemia Clarke did need him; probably that was why Brooks wanted to change all the interesting parts of him. She did not need him in the right way, then. Mor wanted him as he was.

"Kiss me," she breathed, like it was a dare.

He kissed her like he needed her, still — whether he was engaged to Euphemia Clarke or not, Brooks kissed Morrigan because he still needed her. Mor took the kiss as a victory, and as clearance to touch him — she reached for his coat and grabbed onto it, pulling him to her until they were touching. Her wine sloshed onto her hand and out of the glass; if he was not in the doorway, she would have discarded it.

"Then make it hurt," she requested between kisses, leaning up to lick his bottom lip.