Zelda's face flushed bright red. She hadn't expected him to bring that up, at least not so directly, and it was as if her mind was wiped briefly, gloriously blank as she tried to come up with an answer for him. "I - erm," she stammered, stuck. She blew the air out of her mouth in a big whoosh of breath, and paused. Alright. She could handle this. She had, after all, come here to see him on purpose.

She could lie. But the thing was, she had never been a very good liar.

"I still - I still like you," Zelda admitted, looking up at him out of the corner of her eye. "But I can't - do that, again. The boat. I can't." She couldn't risk pregnancy, couldn't risk getting caught, could not risk disappointing Ari any more than she was right now. But she still liked him. When Mr. Darrow looked at her with his ears all red, like he was now, her heart rate kicked up.

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AMAZING set by MJ

She still liked him, and that was really the essence of what he'd been asking, however clumsily. He hadn't even considered that she might take the wording of his question in any different way, which was rather stupid, given everything that had happened. It caught him off guard, and he found himself tripping over his words while he struggled to find the fastest possibly way to back out of that assumption.

"I, uhm — I didn't mean — obviously not," he managed, flushing furiously. Did she think that awkward question had been his way of propositioning her? Right in the middle of the London streets? Merlin. He could very well have died of embarrassment right there on the spot. "I wouldn't — uhm. You know."

He was so caught up in the misunderstanding there that he wasn't even able to fully process the actual answer to the question he'd been trying to ask. She still liked him — he supposed he felt vaguely... relieved? — but mostly just too embarrassed for words.

"I didn't mean — I shouldn't have said it like that," he finally managed. "I — uhm — I wasn't trying to imply... I wouldn't ask you to... you know."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda regretted saying it almost immediately, because she was not sure they were ever going to claw their way out of embarrassment long enough to actually have a conversation. Really, the more she thought about it the more surprised she was that they actually had managed to get naked together, because they really were not very good at interacting normally.

She didn't know what to say, so she shrugged at him. "Sorry," Zelda said. There was a bit of relief that he didn't expect her to do that normally, now, although mostly she felt bad for making Mr. Darrow stammer. "I didn't mean to imply that you were - rakish." Now that she knew him a bit better the idea of Mr. Darrow having a string of lovers was rather foreign to her.

(Although there was the girl from the book.)

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The following 1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post:1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post
   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

"No," he answered immediately, shaking his head. "It's not your fault. I've — I've acted the rake, haven't I?" As foreign as the idea was that he would go and do something like this on purpose, he could not deny that he had done it. Actions were more important than intentions, particularly when it came to something like this, where the consequences for both of them could have been so much worse than they had ended up being. It might take two to tango, but he was the one who was older and more experienced and who should have known better, regardless of how intoxicated he'd been. He had known better, and he'd gone through with it, anyway, because in that particular moment he had wanted it badly enough to ignore the fact that it was wrong — if that wasn't rakish behavior, what was?

"I thought you'd hate me," he continued hastily. It now seemed important to explain why he'd asked the question in the first place, so that she might actually believe that he hadn't been bringing up their conversation about kissing because he was looking to continue it. "Or that you wouldn't ever want to talk to me again, at least. And when you didn't write for so long..." he shrugged, still flushing. "It would've made sense if you never wanted to talk to me again. But — if that's not the case — I'm glad," he managed, tone becoming more strained as he drew nearer to a subject he didn't really know how to talk about. He hadn't had these sorts of problems before the Sycorax — but he had been young and brash, then, and he'd thrown around all sorts of words and concepts with ease because he hadn't really earned an appreciation for what they meant, yet. As a sailor of twenty-two, about to set sail and presumably make his fortune and his reputation within the course of a year, John Darrow could have come right out and said I'm very fond of you; a decade later, it was difficult just to admit, in a roundabout way, that he wanted to be able to keep seeing this girl.

The following 1 user Likes J. Alfred Darrow's post:1 user Likes J. Alfred Darrow's post
   Zelda Darrow

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda couldn't help but grin up at him. Mr. Darrow had been worried about her hating him - which meant, probably, that he didn't hate her, either. And if he was not expecting her to sleep with him again, then he probably didn't think she was loose, either, despite all the evidence he had to the contrary.

"I didn't write because I was embarrassed," Zelda admitted, "That what happened happened." She had never been that sort of girl before a few months ago, and now she was. It hadn't helped that she had been on edge for weeks, trying to figure out if she was pregnant, if she was going to have to ask Ari for help. And it turned out that getting thrown down the street by a troll tended to resolve a lot of things, because not only was she now definitely not pregnant, she had also been finally motivated to write to him.

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AMAZING set by MJ

That made sense, and in her shoes Alfred wasn't sure that he would have had the courage to write, either. Besides, English etiquette was such that keeping up correspondence should have been his responsibility, regardless of the circumstances — but English etiquette didn't really extend to how to handle yourself after you've just deflowered a girl, and he'd thought it best to leave the ball in her court on that front. Particularly since, as previously mentioned, he'd been almost entirely convinced that she was going to hate him, and that silence on his part was probably only expediting the inevitable.

"It wasn't your fault," he said. "I shouldn't have put you in that position." Exactly what position he was referring to, Alfred wasn't quite sure, but he was sure that whatever the fatal point of no return had been, it had been his fault that they'd gotten to that point and then crossed it. It hadn't been a grand idea to go wandering through the bowels of the Voyager with an unchaperoned, impressionable girl in the first place, particularly after she had already tried to talk him into kissing her once before. Maybe the mistakes went even farther back than that — maybe if he'd been a little more transparent with her during the first conversation on the Voyager, she wouldn't have ended up seeking him out just before the expedition's departure to try and find some greater degree of closure.

"I — uhm," he started, unsure of exactly how he was going to phrase this into anything that made even the slightest degree of sense. "I don't know that I've been entirely honest with you."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda tilted her head quizzically at Mr. Darrow. "How so?" she asked. Her heart thumped nervously against the inside of her ribs. She had already admitted that she liked him - but what if he didn't like her? She had thought that the boat had rather answered that question, but - well. He had already said that he shouldn't have done it, and she agreed. What if he really had slept with her by accident, and didn't like her at all?

(She supposed - well in the scheme of things, if he did not like her now, she was in rather the same position as she had been when she was convinced he was dead. But she would be upset nonetheless.)

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred looked down at his feet as he walked and flushed again. He knew what he wanted to get across (at least in theory), but he still hadn't found a very good way to do it, and he had the sneaking suspicion that he'd regret whatever words he chose as soon as he started talking. There was also a huge mental hurdle to overcome in just starting the conversation, because he thought it was inevitable that he'd have to talk about Lily, and it still went against every instinct he had to willingly talk about his one-time fiancee with Zelda. She'd already read the book, though, so it wasn't as though he was breaking any news to her that she didn't already know. If anything, the book had made it all sound much worse than it really was, as far as how emotionally attached he was to the idea of their engagement.

"The — uhm, the girl from the book," he began, unable to actually look at Zelda as he spoke. "Before I left the last time, on the Sycorax, we'd — made all these plans." Plans, while not an inaccurate description, was perhaps putting matters a little lightly. "And set up all of these... expectations. And then when I didn't come back when I should have, it made things — a lot harder on her than they had to be," he continued. "And I didn't want to do anything like that again, this time. I didn't want to have someone... waiting on me, I suppose. With expectations," he glanced up at her here, to see whether she seemed to be following his explanation or not. "So there's — a lot of things I didn't say, before I left. And maybe if I had, things would have gone differently."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda's nerves weren't helped when he started by talking about the girl from the book. She pressed her hands against the side of her legs. Then Mr. Darrow kept going, and he definitely wasn't telling her that he had secretly been in love with Book Girl the whole time, so that was a relief. She just wished that he would look at her - Zelda fixed her gaze on Mr. Darrow's face, and tried to read it.

She guessed it was fair. She had been convinced, until he came back, that he wasn't going to. If that had been a little nervy for her, it hadn't been for Mr. Darrow - he, after all, had been missing for years. She was just always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"What would you have said, if you - weren't nervous about that?" Zelda asked. Hopefully it wasn't 'the girl I had a thing for was secretly your sister, Xena,' because then she was going to have a serious problem.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred scuffed one foot against the ground. "Well, you know," he said, but she didn't. That was the whole point of forcing himself to actually say it, wading through all of this awkwardness. It seemed incredible to him that it wouldn't have been obvious, because when he looked back on his interactions with her it seemed as though it had always been the case. He couldn't pinpoint any particular point where his feelings had changed, though up until he'd left on the expedition, there had always been something more pressing overlaying them. His desire to avoid setting her up for the same sort of thing Lily had gone through had overridden any attempt to even parse out how he felt in his own mind — but still, she had to know, didn't she?

"I really like you," he finally blurted. "And... if I hadn't been about to leave, maybe I would've... done something about it."

He didn't really know what that something was, but in retrospect just about anything would likely have been better than letting her continue on in ignorance until they'd fallen into bed together. He couldn't pretend to know what her thought process had been, either leading up to that night or during the course of the events on the boat, but there was a small and increasingly guilty part of his conscious that wondered if she would have ended up in that position if she'd known he'd already started falling for her — or whether following him around the boat and indulging in his intoxicated stories was something she'd only done because she was still trying desperately to make him like her.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda smiled widely at him. "Oh!" she said cheerfully. Her steps actually bounced a little; she had been so nervous that he was going to say something terrible, she hadn't even gotten to hoping about this yet. "Oh, that's - well, that's great to hear, obviously." It probably would have saved them a lot of trouble if he had just admitted to it months ago, but she was still so delighted just to hear it that she couldn't be remotely mad at him.

"I was hoping you liked me. When I came by today," she admitted, with another little grin. She didn't know what to do with that information, but it was great to know nonetheless - she didn't think that anyone had ever actually liked her before.

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The following 1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post:1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post
   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred smiled, too, despite how nervous and awkward he'd been just a moment before. The mood seemed to have lifted immediately when she'd smiled, and the entire atmosphere was different, now. It was also what she said that made him grin, because it fit right in to the idea he'd formed of her. He was quite aware that they didn't really know each other that well yet, after only having met a handful of times over the past several months and having been acquainted at all for less than a year, but still. Deciding to strike out and talk to him on the chance that maybe he liked her was such a sweet and innocent and entirely Zelda thing to do.

(Though some part of him thought she must have known, on some level, that he did; he may have been awkward but he was not exactly subtle).

"I was sure you were going to be angry," he responded. "Maybe because I already felt guilty — but when you asked if you could come talk it sounded so ominous."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"I mean, I guess that's fair," Zelda said. If she were in his shoes, she would have expected the other party to be angry, too. (Zelda decided not to think too hard about what it said about her that she wasn't.) "But I'm not angry. Promise." She wasn't angry, she was determined to be at least slightly less scandalous, and he knew that Ari knew. So - she felt better. Still exhausted, but better.

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AMAZING set by MJ

"Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?" he asked, just in case he had derailed her plans for the conversation with his little confession. Even though they hadn't gotten very far from the Museum, though, they'd covered a good deal — that she wasn't pregnant, that she never had been, that she'd told her brother about what had happened, that she wasn't angry. If there was something else, he couldn't imagine what it would be. Theoretically, now that they'd established that they both still liked each other, they could talk about what to do next, but Alfred wasn't sure he was quite ready for that. He hadn't been planning on having this conversation in the first place, after all, until he'd stumbled upon Zelda asleep on the Museum bench, and she couldn't possibly have been planning on talking about any of that if she hadn't even known, until a moment ago, that he liked her.

"Not like I'm trying to get rid of you," he clarified, in case she'd gotten that impression. "It's not like I have anything to do. We could walk around the whole city if you like... but I don't want to keep you from sleeping," he added, remembering how their interaction had started.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"Not really," Zelda said. She smiled brightly at Mr. Darrow. "I think we covered it." Things had actually turned out better than she had dared to hope, and there was a tiny worry in her gut that if they kept talking she was eventually going to screw it all up.

"I'd like to walk around a little bit more, if that's okay," she said, because after not seeing him for so long it would still be nice to spend a little more time together. "But. Should probably go home soon." Her limbs were heavy and she knew she could only power through this energy for so long before it crashed. But until that happened, she ought to at least talk to him.

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AMAZING set by MJ

"We can walk," he agreed quickly. He really didn't want her to feel as though he was chasing her off, when the truth was anything but. He was undeniably concerned about how little she seemed to be sleeping, but a few more blocks wouldn't hurt anything. It had been ages, after all, since they had seen each other — and even longer since they'd had a proper interaction that didn't involve a good deal of sexual tension distracting from the conversation. Given what they'd just discussed, he was eager to get to know her better — to develop the kind of relationship that he'd spent most of his underway time mourning the loss of.

"Not too much longer," he further agreed, with a sheepish sort of smile. "But — well, I'd like that."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER