WHO: Liz Fortescue and Ian Bell
WHAT: Surprises in the form of a little firecracker named Katie
WHERE: Players' Hotel in Istanbul!
WHEN: Weekend after the England/Ireland match



“Okay, listen,” Liz said, elbows on the counter with her hands out in a pleading manner toward the concierge, “I know I’m not---a spouse, but---” She waved backward toward the little blonde girl who was jumping from armchair to armchair, pigtails flapping in the wind, “That is really Ian Bell’s daughter, I’m not some loony trying to get in his pants. I’ve already been in his pants.”

The mustached man stared blankly at her over the top of his glasses, unamused. Liz flustered, reaching into her purse to search once again for the security pass in which she’d been given so that Katie could visit her father. This was supposed to be a surprise and Liz had a decent job at keeping it a secret, but how could she ruin it now? This entire hotel was on lockdown for anyone outside of the teams and their spouses (and even then, stays were cut short, supposedly!) and this---this hotel manager was not budging!

“Can you at least ring him down? I’ll stay here. I will sit quietly on the porch. I will drop to my knees and beg you to get him down here!” Liz whirled around, beckoning her daughter over, but then--“KATIE LEAVE THE CURTAINS ALONE!” Feeling frazzled and utterly disheveled, as a long, early morning portkey trip with a rambunctious kid like Katie would make someone, Liz rushed across the lobby to grab hold of the four-and-a-half year old’s hand to get her out of the thick red cloth she’d wrapped around herself.

“Come on, you’re going to get us kicked out before you can see Daddy,” she muttered, hefting Katie up. The little girl squirmed and a moment later she shrieked right in Liz’s ear:

“DADDY! SURPRISE!”

“For heaven’s sake----” Liz twisted around to drop Katie onto a nearby couch, and her mouth dropped, “Oh---Hi, Ian----surprise?”

He couldn’t believe he had lost.

It wasn’t as if he thought Troy wasn’t a good player. It wasn’t as if he somehow felt that the rules had been unfair, or as if there had been a bad call, or that his teammates hadn’t given it their all. No, Ian was only upset with himself, upset with his own shortcomings. And so short they were, so miniscule, that it ate at him all the more. To think that he had lost by so little and yet managed to lose so much in that one mistake was heartbreaking.

This happened all the time in Quidditch, of course. But the stab of such a missed close victory would never dull as long as he was still playing--professionally or not. Maybe that was what it meant to be a real player though. Maybe that was how you knew that the sport was just in your blood.

It was little consolation, of course, but it had, after two days of moping in his hotel room, allowed him to finally pull himself out of his spiral of self-pity and agree to one of the incessant invitations his team had been sending to go out and explore the city. He was not looking forward to the reporters and paparazzi who would undoubtedly be hanging around, drooling in anticipation to get a word out of him about his loss, but he had to leave sometime. If it wasn’t tonight, he had practice tomorrow morning. Better to not let them psych him out before that instead.

So, that thought in his mind and hands stuffed in his pockets, Ian half-dragged his feet out the lift door and across the lobby. Trying his best not to appear conspicuous, he kept his head down and concentrated on the pattern in the carpet. So much so, in fact, that he never even noticed the little blonde flash flying across the room, screaming at the top of it’s lungs, until it was practically Spell-o-Tape’d to his leg.

“What--? Katie?” He blinked, slowly, trying to comprehend why his toddler-aged daughter was halfway across the world from home. Confused as he was, he wasted no time in hoisting the tiny girl up into his arms and enveloping her in a tight hug. “How did you---?”

Just then, he finally looked up from the floor and his little girl to see his ex-wife standing there, looking fairly frustrated and lost for someone who--he assumed--had been coordinating a surprise. “Oh, Liz, wow--I mean... Hi--I mean... Wait, how did you get past security?”

Liz whirled on the concierge with a triumphant smirk, “See.” She pointed sharply at the reunion of Katie and Ian, feeling quite smug, “I’m not crazy.”

“Some may beg to differ...” the man said, but he waved a hand and made his way into a back room. Liz bristled, somewhere in her head knowing that she deserved that, but. There were more pressing matters to attend to at the moment. She turned to Ian, clasping her hands.

“I didn’t make it very far,” she said, nodding her head back and forth at the empty lobby she’d been detained to. “I guess having the wild child helped. I thought---you’d want to see her, going into the second round. And she was missing you like crazy, so.”

It had gone something like that. Katie had been very keen on listening to the wireless matches, only asking when Daddy was coming home and was pleased when the number continued to dwindle. Liz was the one who had been itching to get out of the house, the country, as a break-up was prone to do to a person. It hadn’t even been...she just didn’t see Rian anymore. Liz had never been good at relationships (obviously), or at least, what she could recall, so---it had only been a matter of time. She smiled tightly up at Ian, who seemed so incredibly tall today.

“So---I can leave you two alone,” she said, her eyes betraying her smile. The last thing she wanted to do was wander around a foreign city by herself, but she didn’t think tagging along would be the greatest of ideas. This was supposed to be something nice for Ian. Liz lifted up Katie’s book bag, everything that was needed to keep the girl in check packed away nicely. “My hotel information’s in here, for when she drives you completely crazy.”

Katie stuck her tongue out at her mother and Liz pulled an identical face.

Ian wondered why Liz felt that she could get away with lying to him about things. Not that she lied about important things, like where Katie was or if she had done something that she knew would upset him, or anything like that. It was always about her feelings. Because they both knew that Liz had not been open with how she felt about things since her amnesia had thrown up that stone wall in between them.

During those horrible months in which they had attempted to live together and make their marriage work, Liz had told a lot of lies about how she felt about things, in order to protect his feelings on the matter. What Ian did not understand was, after an experience like that, why she felt he could not tell when she was hiding something.

Oh, and they had been married for years before the shit had hit the fan. There was that little detail as well.

Repressing a sigh--not at her, but at remembering freshly once again this weird state their relationship was still in even after all this time--, Ian let down a squirming Katie and faced Liz full-on with a smirk.

“You come all this way out here and you’re just going to say ‘Hi, bye, see you when the brat gets tired’?” he asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he kept a half-hearted watch on Katie, this time taking to climbing over the rather lavish lobby’s furniture. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be able to stop her, after all, so she might as well have a good time while no one else was around to yell at them. “When I saw you, I had hoped that the three of us could have a family dinner together or something.”

He shifted on his feet, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. It was the way he had felt with her ever since she had moved out and he had been forced to realize that this Liz was not the same Liz he had married. Even after all the time spent healing, sometimes he still felt like he didn’t know what to do or how to act. “You know Katie likes it better when she gets the two-for-one deal on parents.”

She flushed. She couldn’t help it, her cheeks burnt and she felt like a third year ready to go on their first Hogsmeade date. Not that this was a date, it most definitely wasn’t because that was not how things worked. No, maybe she was turning a bright red because she’d been caught trying to avoid the potential awkwardness, or perhaps it was the fact that he wanted to spend time with her (and Katie! Of course!), or---she didn’t know. Liz’s life for the past two, nearing three years, had made little to no sense, so why should this encounter be something she could understand?

“That’d be great. I---” Liz put her hands up, cheeks puffing as she searched for words, “I’d probably end up getting lost and you’d have to come claim me at the police station when they found me like some runaway puppy.”

She shut one eye in a wince. Everything turned into a joke for her, it seemed. It was an easy way to hide how strange she did feel, how out of place she seemed to be from the rest of the world. Her one friend nowadays in Marissa MacFusty was only really her friend because their year mates---their allies, the people they’d grown up with since they were eleven...they were dead. Or committed to St. Mungo’s, or in Azkaban, or completely cut off from the rest of the world. The few connections Liz still had to her life before the end of the war were strained, and she herself had no idea how she fit in anymore.

Except---with Ian, she’d always have Katie. Her daughter was the most important thing in her life, and he had helped create her, so---Liz took a breath; she should work harder at this.

“I mean, that would be nice. I was hoping so too, I just didn’t want to intrude,” she admitted. Liz opened her mouth to say she’d always wanted to try real shish kebab, when Katie slammed herself into her legs. Liz groaned, and put a strong hand on the back of the girl’s head to keep her attached to her hip, “Lead the way, before there’s a Katie-Shaped hole in the wall.”

Ian let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding when she accepted his invitation. Being careful around Liz with what he said or what lines he accidentally crossed had become such a constant in his life that he didn’t even realize how worried he was anymore. But he had spent so much time trying to make sure to say the right things, or not push her too hard, or not make too big a deal out of things that the only sign he had been concerned of her response now was that he suddenly felt a trillion times lighter.

Finding his smile came on easier this time, he reached down and scooped up his daughter again as he lead their party out into the streets. Truth be told, Katie was getting far too old to be carried around anywhere, but try telling that to a man who had not seen his daughter in a couple weeks. Ian was suddenly thankful all over again for having Liz and her good sense around to bring them all the way across the continent to see him. He might have been the life of the party before their family had happened, but sometime in the past several years, the trips away for his job were more of an annoyance than anything. He genuinely enjoyed being around Katie, and as strange as it often was, he enjoyed being around Liz, too. She was still the girl he had married--at her core, anyway. Just because she had forgotten who he was didn’t mean that those memories could be erased for him too.

“Honestly, if you want to know what’s good around here, you came to the wrong guy,” he admitted, glancing idly at the stores and restaurants around them. “I haven’t actually left the hotel for anything but matches since I’ve been here.”

He had had time before his loss to leave, sure, but Ian’s heart just hadn’t been in it. Then again--it wasn’t like this city was what he cared about now, either. His free hand ruffled through Katie’s blonde hair as she beamed up at her father.

The streets were busy with tourists, media, and the regular crowd of the port city. It was strange to see the mingling of wizard and muggle culture, but it seemed like Istanbul did it with great ease. Liz found herself entranced with a lot of the non-magical products, but then a stand would appear with glowing, spinning, shiny objects that just burst with magic that only wizards and witches could see (or who knew!). The bright colors were nearly overwhelming to her senses, and Liz forced herself to stop in front of a stand that had dolls that were as tall as Katie. They were so cool!

“Look, Cakes!” she nearly squealed (okay, she did squeal). ‘Cakes’ was a nickname that had morphed from ‘Kate’s’ which had been Liz’s poor attempt to use a more adult nickname with Katie for when she was misbehaving. Obviously, that hadn’t worked, though Katie had laughed quite a bit at her mother’s scolding tone and was actually amused enough to pay attention and listen. Liz picked up the arms of the doll and made it dance on the ground, twirling the doll until it, magically, began to mimic the dance on its own. Spinning and bowing and everything!

Liz’s eyes lit up as if she were four years old and had never seen magic before.

“Ian, we need it!----Katie needs it,” she corrected herself with a clearing of her throat. Liz winked at her daughter, who was just as mesmerized. Katie turned those baby blue eyes up to her father and oh, oh. Liz knew that he was a dead man.