22nd December, 1889 — Hogsmeade Hall
Church of Magical Jesus Solstice Luncheon
Conall MacKay

It was an unfortunate consequence of being a pillar of a particular community that one was obliged to be part of certain events that had a tendency to become rather tiresome. Temperance was more than happy to contribute what little spare money the Fairchild household found itself with come Christmastime and she certainly did not resent the time she dedicated to spreading the good word of the Lord to the somewhat less than enthusiastic inhabitants of Hogsmeade, but it did grate on one terribly to see quite how disinterested they truly were.

She could cope with being disliked, but the gazes of those that walked past were practically pitying and she had no time for that at all.

"There now, that's quite enough," she advised a child who was becoming a little too ambitious with the decoration of his gingerbread man. "The Lord did not sacrifice his only son so we could indulge in excessive amounts of buttons Cyril," swiftly she took the icing sugar from the table and strode away before he could begin to cry. She seemed to bring it out in so many children.

Dropping the ill-used piping bag in the makeshift kitchen she and the other ladies had created earlier Temperance didn't stop walking until she was in the fresh, chilly air of the sheltered yard at the back of the hall. It smelt pungent, but she had experienced considerably worse and she definitely needed a moment away from the madness - apparently she was not the only one who valued solitude and in all honesty she had expected more than one patron to slip free of the hall to indulge in Christmas cheer of a different kind.

"Fair warning Mr MacKay: if Mrs Collins smells that on your breath she won't let you back in for pudding."

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   Elias Grimstone

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How Conall had found himself here, he could scarcely recall. His niece and nephew seemed to take kindly to the thought of some festive charity, and their housekeeper had been talking of nothing but the upcoming luncheon, it felt like. Conall had only come because one of his few friends in the village had remarked that he should... however, now that he was here, he felt he had been grossly misled. A hearty holiday meal, fine. A function thrown by the bloody Church, with all those strings attached? Not what he had been envisaging.

Frankly, he ought to be applauded for surviving that stuffy room as long as he had before ducking out the back door. The dingy area outside was no Eden, but what it lacked in aspect it more than made up for in those blessed tenets: peace and quiet.

And alcohol.

He unscrewed the hip flask and took an unhurried draught, planning to take as long as he possibly could out here.

He had not had nearly long enough.

“Mrs Collins expects me to survive the rest of that sober, does she?” Conall said dryly, grimacing at Miss Fairchild as she appeared out of the hall before him. He couldn’t remember which one Mrs Collins was; but he supposed he was also a fool to expect any sympathy for his grumbling from Fairchild, a woman he doubted had much sympathy for anything. (He wasn’t sure what she was doing out here, unless she’d sniffed him or the whiskey out like a hunting dog and come to rebuke him for it especially. The only thing that seemed more like her element than all that fuss in there was a serendipitous opportunity for a scolding.)

He clutched at the flask a little more tightly, in case she tried to lunge for it and confiscate it.

(Perhaps it would be a blessing to be thrown out before pudding, after all. Fruitcake, apparently - as if there weren’t enough fruitcakes in there already.)

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“She doesn’t expect – she demands,” Temperance replied dryly, eyes flicking to the bottle for the merest of moments as she considered whether it would make the afternoon go quicker if she had a nip of her own. Though her name implied otherwise Temperance was not a stranger to the medicinal effects of the bottle and getting through a day as tedious as this certainly called for some additional assistance. It wouldn’t be proper of course, and she dismissed the idea as quickly as the longing came, but her devotion to duty was being severely tested today and she saw no signs of it letting up.

Bizarrely she took some solace in the fact that he was clearly as miserable as she was. The Lord worked in mysterious ways and perhaps presenting her with a vision of her own barely hidden contempt for the world was another test – certainly this man’s inability to at least pretend irked her greatly but she supposed their relative standing in the community spoke for how well she played the game by comparison.

And her faith was genuine. She doubted he even gave a passing thought to the Lord and yet here he was eating from the charity He commanded them to give.

“I was surprised to see you here. I didn’t take you for a spiritual man.”

  

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Mrs. Collins could demand all she liked, but unless one of God’s messengers themselves descended with some doozy of a sign, Conall probably wouldn’t listen. He never had been so hot at taking orders.

Fairchild’s lack of faith in him was no particular surprise, either. Not that she could expect any better of him, either, for he had never pretended otherwise... it was with that in mind that he arched an eyebrow at her and swung the drink a little in her direction, in some kind of joking invitation. “Ah, but that depends on the spirit,” he deadpanned, suppressing a snort as best he could.

“No, I was led astray,” he remarked with a roll of his eyes, shortly after. He wasn’t sure how any of the elements of the luncheon inside could be attested as his scene, and he resented everyone who had prodded him along today equally for it. “But I’m surprised to see you out here,” he said suddenly, surveying her anew in slight confusion. Why’d she come outside, then; what was her excuse? “What’re you hiding from?”

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Honestly, were all Americans this upfront with their questions? She had been raised on a system of concealing her feelings until they went away or else sharing a mutual understanding with somebody else that while they were both unhappy it was something so ineffable that it wasn’t worth talking about, it simply was.

She shook her head to refuse the spirit and did not laugh at his jest, concerned it would only encourage him. For all his words she was quite sure that if there was any leading astray to be done he would be the one to do it.

“I simply came out for some fresh air. It is rather stifling inside – so many rely upon the bounty of the Lord these days.” She sniffed briskly. “And unfortunately we do not provide soap and water at the entrance.”

It was sinful, no doubt, to be so judgemental of those they were sworn to help but even Temperance had her limits. She had smelt death that was less pungent than the hall today.

  

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She hadn’t laughed at his joke, but he laughed at her words in return regardless of that, too genuinely amused to suppress it. His amusement had come, he suspected, at the notion that she was very likely not joking. A real skill of hers, wasn’t it, to be offended by everything?

“More toxic than the breath of a Nundu in there, I’m sure,” Conall said, though he was grinning. Privately (though he did agree the hall was stifling), he wasn’t too worried about a few unwashed townsfolk. You’d not experienced such dire necessity of soap and water until you’d been a week deep in the rainforest or the Australian bush without washing - though even then, it was a little too easy to forget how anyone smelled.

(Maybe what these people in the hall needed was a nice cold dunking in the English Channel. Perhaps she could suggest that.)

“What tireless work you do, Fairchild,” he added, hovering somewhere between empathy and satire, pleased that he had discovered someone - and in society, of sorts - who seemed to dislike people in general half as much he did; and more pleased still that Miss Fairchild was, this time, more preoccupied with complaining about other people. Especially refreshing.

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Tireless wasn’t the word. There had been days when her body, a mere construct of skin and bones that she had been taught was nothing but an earthly vessel, long outlasted her spirit when a task became especially draining and Temperance had never had an explanation for the phenomenon. Beyond of course the soul-deep assertion that whatever ills hounded her they were tests of the Lord.

Why he had felt the need to test her patience quite so much she had no answer for, but somehow she thought she had become worse at the discipline as the years had passed.

“You don’t have a single care for your immortal soul do you?” She questioned abruptly though without too much bite. Frankly, she didn’t have the energy for that though she did snatch his flask from his hands, taking a short sip and wrinkling her nose, not so much from the strength – to which she was accustomed – but the lack of quality.

“You think me a joke,” she added, eyes sharp and level on his, hostility bubbling up and longing to come out, willing him to be awful again, to stop being a man that had saved her life and reassured her when she had been more scared than at any time in her life. She hated that he had seen her thus and it galled her to think of how grateful she was even now, hated that a mere physical experience had been the most stimulating of her life.

  

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“Don’t see the point,” Conall said dryly, too astonished to say much more at the fact that she had taken a swig after all, snatched it right out of his hands. The crowd inside must truly be wearing on her, then, if she was submitting herself to all this. He didn’t think he had quite managed to goad her into it, himself.

The next words out of her mouth caught him by just as much surprise, and a crease appeared in his brow at her accusation. He thought the Church was a joke, he supposed; but if pressed, Conall would find most things a joke. And he found Fairchild supremely funny, maybe, but few had her icy commitment to her causes, and even fewer had quite so wounding a slap. (He hadn’t forgotten.)

“Do I?” Conall countered, the faint curl of a smirk lingering on his face as he returned her look, although he was laughing no longer. “Because if I had to hazard it, I’d say I think much better of you than you do of me.” Entirely in spite of himself, of course. Whereas she clearly didn’t like him. (Which was stating the obvious - if not putting it too kindly.)

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   Elladora Black

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Torn between annoyance at being caught of guard and curiously flattered by his omission, unsought though it was, Temperance felt a most peculiar sensation coming over her. Her lips twitched into a bemused smile and for a moment she stared at his face, utterly unnerved by the honestly there. Soon enough her brain began to work properly and she realised what she was doing and what it would look like if anybody should come outside in pursuit, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling of being rattled.

It took Temperance a moment to realise the sensation was not dissimilar to what she had felt after Mr MacKay had pulled her out of the ocean and she quickly looked away, her face taut with discontent.

“Well, it’s a fairly low bar to overcome I suppose,” she muttered darkly, though not without some dryness that suggested, in Temperance’s own small way, that she might be joking.

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   Conall MacKay

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God knew why he’d said it. Or at least Conall hoped God knew, because he didn’t.

Still, the thought had been ludicrous enough to make her smile, and that was such uncharted territory - believe it or not, she was smiling at him - that he stared back, slightly transfixed. Had something in the air changed? Or some impulse in him, if not the air; something he hadn’t quite managed to formally acknowledge to himself before she looked away and he let it go.

Tried to, anyway.

The retreat into irony was some comfort, then, and he abruptly found himself suppressing a smile of his own at how little it had taken to surprise her. “Oh, that’s what I’m counting on,” Conall replied of the low bar of her opinion, more amused than offended again. Besides, as long as she didn’t think too well of him, whatever he’d said was safely throwaway, nothing much to hold him to. “I expect I’ve not run out of ways to vex you yet.” After all, she thought him a lout and a lost cause, and - ignoring the drowning incident, maybe - there was a certain diversion in proving her right. (Not that she was especially hard to irritate.)

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   Elladora Black

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“I expect you never will Mr MacKay,” she replied, though with more reigned weariness than any real bite. For better or worse he seemed to be a soul as ill-at-ease with the general pleasantries of society as she was and it felt much more natural to be here in the cold air trading barbs than it did to tend to those inside.

She was a Christian first, a nurse second and a woman third, yet somehow the third instinct was beginning to shove its way to the surface at the most inconvenient times and it always seemed to be around this man. Clearly he was dangerous.

“Though I try to find the good in most people if I can,” she said with as much conviction as she could muster, straightening out her skirts. “When you come back inside it would be prudent to have an empty flask, just in case Mrs Collins does catch you. She has no compunction about confiscation of contraband.”

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No. No, she was probably right.

He did his best not to affect a look of theatrical surprise at her next remark - although in fairness to her she had said try, hadn’t she? He didn’t expect Fairchild often went hunting particularly hard for the bright sides.

But she deserved the benefit of the doubt on this occasion purely for choosing not to turn him in directly. Mrs. Collins did seem to be the quickest path to being thrown out, but the fresh air - it had to be that, and no other factor - had evidently had a slight restorative effect on him, because the terrible time he’d been having abruptly did not seem... quite as terrible.

“Thanks for the advice,” Conall said solemnly, toasting to her as she made a move to go back inside. “I’ll drink to that,” he joked, tipping up the flask to rid himself of the evidence before he went back in. He’d give it a minute longer before he followed; he could just picture, in that nosy, holier-than-thou crowd, minds whirring and tongues wagging at what Miss Fairchild could possibly have been doing out back with a heathen like him.

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Of course he would. Temperance suspected he would drink to anything given half the chance.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew that she ought to put a stop to his behaviour – his blasphemy and indifference to the Lord’s good work might well tempt others towards sin and their eternal damnation. Temperance certainly had no intention of being responsible for the decimation of their flock at the hands of an (occasionally useful) devil in disguise and after she returned inside she quietly removed her wand and locked the door behind her.

Better to be safe than sorry.

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