11 November, 1893 — the Dempsey household, Mayfair, London

Sina made it clear immediately that she didn't want to be near him, but Oz still followed her half a step on instinct when she pulled away. He was glad that she asked him to pour her a drink, because it gave him something to do with himself rather than hovering uncertainly on the periphery of her storm cloud. He took a step towards the door, because that was where the sideboard with the drinks had been in the parlor back home in Galway, then remembered that in this house it had been set up by the windows and had to change course. Off balance at every step tonight, he thought bitterly. But no one to blame for any of it but himself. Even being in an unfamiliar house was his fault, if one traced it all the way back to the source.

He grabbed a glass from the top of the sideboard and threw open both cabinet doors, surveying the liquor collection critically. There was a bottle of red wine, but perhaps tonight called for something stronger. Or perhaps it just called for the entire bottle of red wine. After a beat of indecision he pulled out a bottle of brandy and poured his wife a healthy glass of that, but then took the bottle with him when he walked back to her and left it on the nearest end table to where she was standing. He held the glass out to her, staying at about arm's length — he suspected that if he intruded on her personal space too much or too quickly she might end up hitting him.

Start talking, she had said, but Oz didn't know what she wanted to hear. How it had started, how long it had been going? Whether or not he was in love with her? What he'd been trying to accomplish tonight? He was willing to tell her what she needed to know in order to get them through to the other side of this confrontation, but he didn't want to launch in on a subject she didn't want to hear about and burn through what remaining patience she had for him.

"I never intended things to end up this way," he began tentatively. This way was a phrase doing plenty of heavy lifting, encompassing the things that Thomasina knew or could guess — his behavior tonight, leaving her at home to go stare at the prima ballerina during the performance — and what she hopefully would never know about — the pregnancy. It included more, too: he had never intended for her to know about Sophia, full stop. But he had known he was playing with fire there; they'd talked about it after the first time that Oz and Sophia had seen each other at a party, when he'd realized she hadn't always run in the same working class circles she did now. They'd nearly broken things off that night, but hadn't managed it. He'd known things ought to have ended half a dozen times since then, too, particularly as their relationship approached and passed its first anniversary — but it had never felt like the right time to let go.

"This whole thing has gotten out of hand, but I'm putting it to rights," he continued, hoping this was true — because if he had to come back to Sina in a few weeks and tell her that Sophia Voss was visibly pregnant and refusing to hide her condition, he wasn't sure what she would do to him. "I'm handling it. That's what I was — trying to do tonight."

---

Her question could have meant how long was it going on before this or how long will it be before the matter is put to bed, and Oz wasn't sure how to answer right away. He knew the answer to the first question would win him no points with his wife, because his affair with Sophia had been entirely too long, and he'd known that — probably Sophia had, too. But he couldn't answer the second question with even the slightest degree of honesty, because he didn't actually know that it was going to be handled, and could not even definitively say that he'd made any progress in that direction tonight. The whole scene at the ballet might have done more harm than good, depending on how Soph had read it... and after how unpredictable she'd been in their last argument, he couldn't pretend to guess her mind on the subject. She was being irrational, emotional — as women often were, he had heard, during pregnancies. He would attribute it to that, because the alternative was admitting that he had never known her quite so well as he had believed, and even now — even when things were almost certainly over between them — the idea still chafed.

"I barely saw her at all during the campaign," he said, which was sidestepping Thomasina's direct question but trying to answer what he supposed might have been at the heart of it. He wanted to convey that he had not been avoiding Thomasina at any point in order to run off to the ballet — though in fact that had happened once, the last time he'd seen Soph — and again tonight, technically — but it was hardly a habit. When he and Sophia were not in the midst of crisis, he didn't prioritize her over Thomasina, and he wanted his wife to understand that — that if he had neglected her in the past few weeks or months, it was because he was genuinely busy, not because he had pretended to be busy and then gone off to seduce Sophia.

"I've never bought her rubies," he offered (rubies being his Christmas gift to Thomasina, last year) — he did not volunteer that he had been more than willing to shower her in expensive gifts and had only refrained because she had seemed offended at the idea of her affections being purchased, nor that he had sent along chocolates for her children last Christmas (this on its own did not seem particularly incriminating to him; he also sent chocolates to Locke's children, and Sina was hardly jealous of him). "I've never taken her to a dinner party or a dance. I've never been with her, as far as anyone in society knows."

In short: he'd played by all the rules he'd established for himself, when he married Thomasina. He'd done a mental inventory of the things he thought were necessary to keep his promise to her — to keep from embarrassing her the way Locke would have embarrassed his future wife, while he was openly cavorting with his mistress and keeping her in a flat in Pennyworth and helping raise her children. All the rules except the most important one — he'd gotten her pregnant, and if he couldn't resolve that without Thomasina finding out about it she was probably never going to forgive him... but everything else, he thought, was forgivable — even if she was not in a particularly forgiving mood at the moment.

"I met her last summer," he finally admitted, to the actual question she had asked.

---

Oz had expected her to be displeased by his answer, which was why he'd buried the lede so significantly, but seeing the way she tensed still made him anxious. She was clutching her glass hard enough he was worried she might crack it if he said even one more thing to anger her.

"Well, it's not as though I planned for her child to be ill," he pointed out — probably not very helpfully, but he did think it was a little unfair of her to hold that against him when he'd had nothing to do with any of it. He hadn't been there when the incident had happened with Sophia's daughter, or when she'd been taken to the hospital, and he'd had no say in having Thomasina assigned to the case. He hadn't even known about it until days or maybe even weeks later, when Soph had eventually brought up that her child was sick — but she hadn't wanted to dwell on it, so he didn't know all of the details. And what was he supposed to have done at that point, suggested she come up with an excuse to switch to another healer? Ozymandias might not have been a healer himself, but he fully believed that his wife was the best artifacts incident healer England had to offer. He couldn't, in good conscious, have suggested Sophia transfer her daughter into the care of someone less capable, just to make himself feel a little less uneasy about the ordeal. And he hadn't known then that it would be a months-long hospital stay, either.

"I was going to break things off this summer," he said — because the thought had at least occurred to him a handful of times, so he'd might as well take credit for it. "But —" he shrugged helplessly at her, assuming the but would be obvious. But her child had been hospitalized — but he'd been starting the political race — but he'd been so busy with the campaign events — but the dragons had attacked — and then, of course, the final nail in the coffin: but she'd been pregnant.

---

She had raised her voice and called him a weasel, and Oz had not expected either of these things — he was visibly taken aback for a beat before his brow lowered in a cross between confusion and irritation. "I know," he said emphatically (so emphatically that he might have also raised his voice a touch, not quite matching hers but louder than he'd been a moment ago). There was not a day that went by that he forgot the promises she'd solicited from him before she had agreed to his proposal: she would be allowed to work, she would not do 'society nonsense', and he was not to embarrass her the way Locke would embarrass his future wife. She had phrased the last very specifically, and he'd picked apart her words precisely to understand what she meant, and he'd carved out a space for his antics neatly within the letter of her law — running right up to the borders of what was allowed, but never crossing the lines. Until tonight, of course.

Going to the ballet tonight had been a mistake; he'd been thinking about Sophia too much and not enough about his commitments elsewhere, and he could see that now. He'd been sloppy, and that was what had led to this unfortunate predicament and this confrontation and Thomasina sloshing brandy over her fingers. But the original sin was the pregnancy; he'd only been so careless tonight because he was distracted by the overwhelming catastrophe in the future, the train he was trying to divert before it ended in a spectacular wreck from which there was no recovery.

"Why did you have to follow me to the ballet tonight?" he snapped, though of course he was irritated with himself, not with her. He raised one hand to run it through his hair. "I was handling it. I wasn't going to let — agh," he broke off, because he could not say anything else without saying too much — but Merlin, if he'd just been able to pull off this bit of negotiation, this never would have happened. Sophia Voss would have been out of the country, and Sina would never have known about it — or the pregnancy would be gone, and Sina never would have known about it. Either way.

---

The useless weasel comment had irritated him, but this one really got under his skin — because it was true, and because up until this moment he hadn't been entirely certain how much of the ballet Thomasina had seen, only that she'd seen enough to draw conclusions. It was mortifying to think that she'd been watching him the whole first act, while he stewed and pouted and begged Sophia for her attention. Heat and color rose up his neck; he was embarrassed, which was not an emotion he was subjected to often, and he did not enjoy it.

"Oh, was that what it looked like, while you were spying on me," he spat back, before spinning on his heels to return to the sideboard. He pulled out a bottle of liquor without looking to see what it was and poured a haphazard shot into one of the glasses. "I suppose you would have handled it all so much better. Should I ask your advice on it next time?"

He had given up, for the moment, on trying to earn her forgiveness or trying to reconcile. Thomasina was clearly in no mood to entertain either. And now he was embarrassed, and wanted the conversation over as quickly as possible — so this question was flailing with the intent to hurt, hoping she'd withdraw and lock herself in her room for a few hours while he composed himself and tried to find some route forward that allowed him to keep his dignity intact.

(But Thomasina probably would have handled it better, in his shoes, because he was wildly out of his depth ever since the announcement of the pregnancy. The whole effort tonight had been born mostly out of his need to be doing something, not from a conviction that it was the right thing to do. And it had blown up in everyone's face rather spectacularly).

---

"I hope you're very happy together," Oz shot back, with a withering look that said I dare you. He did not seriously think Thomasina would try to sleep with anyone else, because most people out in the world were boring and tiresome. Certainly she would be hard pressed to find someone who could hold a candle to him — and this wasn't merely arrogance informing his thinking, it was experience. He'd had affairs nearly the whole time they'd been married, and he'd had his fair share before they'd been married as well. Sophia was the first who meant anything beyond sex. The rest of them — the women he found for evenings out mostly so his party with Locke wouldn't look unbalanced — were tedious before, after, and sometimes even during the sex. He was quite skilled at being charming even while he was inwardly rolling his eyes, but he didn't think Thomasina could stomach it. Though if anything was going to propel her to power through all of that, it would probably have been to spite him — maybe she was up for it after all. They'd have to see how tonight ended.

He took the shot he'd poured. "What do you want to hear?" he asked as he poured another. When he'd finished he took the glass in his hand and turned to face her, leaning on the sideboard. "That she meant nothing? That I didn't love her? That it's over? That I'm sorry?"

Oz would tell Thomasina any of those things, if she wanted to hear them. Some of them might even be true, but he hadn't done a close enough self-inventory to know; he hadn't expected to have this conversation, so he hadn't thought through what questions she would ask and how he might answer them. But he would tell her anything, because as long as she didn't catch him lying, it wouldn't make any difference. That was what she was angry about tonight: that she had to have this conversation at all. She wasn't angry that Sophia existed, she was angry that she had caught him and now had to know about it.

---

Oz might have reacted to that first remark if he'd thought there was even the slightest chance she meant it. She was angry, yes, and if he'd put himself within easy striking distance she might have been angry enough to hit him, but she wouldn't leave him over this. There was no chance of it, none at all. And she didn't want to castrate him, because she enjoyed their bedroom antics too much to be married to someone who couldn't keep up. (If he'd thought she was angry enough to leave him he would have been approaching this whole conversation differently; his ego would have factored into it significantly less).

The second thing she'd said was interesting. He hadn't earned lying to her yet — meaning it was a matter of time and effort, not necessarily of content. It was probably a cardinal sin to be reminded of Sophia, but he was. When they'd first connected he'd started out bluntly offering terms: I'll treat you well, I'll shower you in lovely things. She'd rejected that out of hand, claiming she didn't want to be treated like a common whore; she didn't want to be bought. But she had never rejected any of the gifts he'd sent her, or been displeased, even when they were patently gifts to cover a lapse in attention. She wanted plausible deniability; she wanted to believe the gifts were spurred entirely by devotion. She wanted to be seduced, rather than bargained with. That was what Thomasina wanted, too, in not so many words. She didn't care if he lied to her, so long as he put in the work before he did to make her believe him.

So: how to seduce a woman who had just threatened to castrate him?

Oz took the second shot and put his glass down heavily on the tabletop. "You," he began, making the word itself sound like an accusation. "— are insufferable. You act so superior because your whole self worth is based around being better than other people — better than the ballerina, better than those women, better than society ladies, better than everyone. You put yourself up on this pedestal, a goddess looking down on all these mortals, because deep down you know if you ever deigned to consider them as equals you'd crumple in the first comparison." Insults were not the best route to seduce most women, but they might work on Thomasina. They would certainly be a better bet than quoting sonnets at her. If he could push her hard enough that their argument spilled over into physicality, he thought he would have won; he could lie to her tomorrow morning.

---

Oz sneered; an easy, practiced expression. "That's not what society is saying," he said. Maybe a missed strike, because he did not know how much, if at all, she cared about what society was saying. He had always cared, but never in the way people expected him to. He didn't care when what people was saying was wrong, because people were largely stupid; he only cared when what they were saying was glancingly close to the truth, and he tried his best to give them plenty to talk about in other areas so that this never happened. So yes, while it was true that there had been rumors and whispers about Thomasina's fitness, or lack thereof, to be the Minister's wife, he didn't know whether this would matter to her. They were unavoidable, really; anyone married to the Minister of Magic who also worked, who did not delight in hosting parties, who was not the darling of society, would have had all the same things said about them. But maybe she cared; maybe this would make her angry enough to distract her from everything else.

"Is that what this is about?" he asked, as though he did not already know what it was about; as though she had not caught him on the verge of diving through the door to the catwalks in pursuit of a ballerina. "You never wanted to be the Minister's wife, and now you're so self-conscious you can't stand it. Does it just eat you up, having people really pay attention to you for the first time? Knowing that they won't be terribly impressed?"

---