August 30th, 1888 - Aphrodite Ball

Nothing is fun
Not like before

Nicky had been delighted to win the Witch Weekly sweepstakes, and was happier still to take Mrs. Esther Browne, who had once been the less attractive Miss Diggory, with her. They had rekindled their friendship since Nicky's return - Mrs. Browne and by extension her husband were the only people who knew Nicky as nee Dippet although she was still clinging to the Van Der Sandt surname - and so she was Nicky-the-widow's company. Nicky-the-widow was staying at The Three Broomsticks after moving her young daughter here. Nicky-the-widow had been disadvantaged by her husband's will. Nicky-the-widow was low-key a bit of a gold digger. Since Mrs. Van Der Sandt was supposedly a British widow, she was using a lilting received pronunciation accent. Her gown was one she'd had in South Africa, high quality, a bright purple dress in gentle fabrics that draped. Her hair was done up in a distinctly British style. She'd made a few cheerful introductions. An hour or so into the party, standing at the edge of the dance floor in the midst of conversation with someone else, she saw a man twenty-feet-away and took pause. Nicky trailed off mid-sentence, mind suddenly blank.

He was tall; it was easy to spot him. He stood above the men around him. Even from here, she could tell that his suit was well-made; it would be. He had always been more than willing to spend money on things like that, an almost exorbitant amount that marked them as new money - it was how Nicky's fashion was able to slide under the radar with this dress, as well asthe foreign fabrics masking her. The facial hair was new. If she got close - and she was not going to get close - she knew that he would look older, because she looked older. He would have aged well, though. Both his parents had aged well.

Max.

She looked away. "I'm sorry," Nicky said to the person she was talking to, in that careful RP accent. Her smile was gentle; she looked up at them from under her eyelashes. Her heart thumped against her ribcage. He could ruin everything. He was going to ruin everything. Her face did not betray her. "What was I saying?"

She didn't know what he was doing here, but she had her suspicions - Max had always wanted European wives. And she was suddenly glad that Josie was nowhere near, safely sealed-up in her room in The Three Broomsticks. Josie mirrored Nicky physically almost exactly - but.

But, she could be Max's.

As someone else started talking, and she nodded as if she was listening, Nicky glanced over the shoulder of the person she conversed with once more. Had he seen her? Was he going to?

Their eyes met.

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Nicky has been out of the UK since 1881; you probably don't recognize her, but talk to me if you think your character might!
She is currently living in the Three Broomsticks, pretending to be a middle class Afrikaner from South Africa.

He was in his element here. Everything was going well. This was to be a new chapter, a fresh start. He deserved that.

At first he thought he’d imagined her. Understandable, maybe, to be surveying the room, the clusters of young ladies gleaming with dreams of making a match, and to think of her, the way she had been when he had met her eight years ago. Max had determined to forget her, in recent years - but it was a task resistant to trying, and not one that could be won completely. He thought he might be forgiven here, at least - being back in Britain, hunting for a wife amongst a sea of brunettes, thinking that one of them might as well have been her - for a memory roused.

Still, he was almost inclined to laugh at himself, derisive, for letting his gaze halt on the girl, to try and dispel the vision by the differences - the hair was the same, there was something about the dress, but she was slimmer and slighter than Nicky had ever been, a touch visibly older than Nicky was when he’d known her -

But her eyes were the same. Her eyes were the same, and there was recognition in them. How could she be a vision... What imagined ghost would have the audacity to find herself in conversation with the party guests?

Somehow, the sudden jolt in his chest was more compelling proof than believing his eyes. Nicky. A gear had stalled in his head, sputtering to a stop because this did not make sense. What the fuck did she think she was doing here? Calling her dead had been an unearned grace, for all of them - him, her, her surviving family. Surely the understanding of that had been that she would be consigned to staying out of sight? Surely she had not merely run home, and the Dippets had decided to take her in? Surely she did not think she had any right to be here, after what she had done?

Perhaps she had gotten tired of her new life, he considered bitterly, once she’d gone. In his head, she regretted it. In his head, she had regretted it since the moment she left, but she was just too stubborn to come back and have to say it. He’d clung, ludicrously, to this idea for years - perhaps because he still didn’t know what, exactly, had gone so wrong. But that, none of that, meant he ever wanted to see her again.  

And not bloody here, where she could so easily screw him over yet again.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said to his current company, thoughtlessly. She had seen that he had seen her, that much he didn’t doubt. Whether, from that distance, she had caught the flashes in his face - the dazed shock in his eyes, the disconcerted twitch of a muscle in his jaw, a smile dissolving - Max couldn’t say.

Still - regardless - he was not going to grant her the satisfaction of seeing how off-guard she had caught him, of betraying anything more. So, deliberately, he turned away.

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