June 1st, 1894 — before titania's debut

Hanna supposed she was probably not finding her future husband at her cousin's debut. Not a great day for her good luck charm, then. She had been brought here earlier to offer some feminine support, and never mind that Hanna had failed to find a husband in her many seasons. She felt like she was a little too aware of where her cousin had been, as well — they all had that same strange vibration in their skull, didn't they?

But Hanna knew they couldn't talk about it.

They had been left alone by their mothers, while a maid finished preparing Titania's hair for the debut. "Are you excited?" she asked.

Titania Applegate Olive Norris

  

Excited? No. Though Titania wanted more than anything to be excited, though she had dreamed about this day for years, though she had planned every detail a hundred times in the back of her mind through her school years, Titania could not say that she was excited. There was so much more riding on this night than was already inevitable for a society girl. Certainly every debutante suffered a few flutter nerves while they did up their hair and straightened their dress and imagined what the rest of the night would look like, but most did not have the heavy, panting breath of madness dogging over their shoulder. She had to work fast. Who could say how long it would take before she cracked like a robin's egg?

She was already hyper aware of the phantoms clinging to her wrists, the hand gripped tight around her throat and threatening to compress her windpipe. That grip tightened every time the maid tugged a little too hard on one of her lustrous curls. If it weren't such a terribly important night, Titania might have bitten the woman's head off. Run her out of the room and done her hair herself. She ground her teeth, instead.

"A bit nervous," she answered with the flutter of a tight-lipped smile, practiced and polished and entirely forced. She smoothed one gloved hand over the glittering network of silver and crimson jewels they had linked about her throat, admiring the necklace as an excuse to rub at her throat and try to lessen the feeling of choking. "I'm certain they're already gossiping. And why shouldn't they? I would."

---

  

Her cousin was feeling rather dour, wasn't she? Hanna could not blame her — their demons had taken Titania when she was much younger than Hanna had been, and bad enough that she had been removed from Hogwarts in the interim. She was haunted in the way that Byron was haunted.

Hanna pursed her lips, then brightened. "Soon all they'll be talking about is how elegant you look," she offered in a cheerful tone. Titania would be able to dance with as many men as she wanted, and hopefully find a suitor — and Hanna's job was to not come off as someone who was actively a spinster at this party.