Welcome to Charming, where swirling petticoats, the language of flowers, and old-fashioned duels are only the beginning of what is lying underneath…
After a magical attempt on her life in 1877, Queen Victoria launched a crusade against magic that, while tidied up by the Ministry of Magic, saw the Wizarding community exiled to Hogsmeade, previously little more than a crossroad near the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the years that have passed since, Hogsmeade has suffered plagues, fires, and Victorian hypocrisy but is still standing firm.
Thethe year is now 1895. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.
Complete a thread started and set every month for twelve consecutive months. Each thread must have at least ten posts, and at least three must be your own.
Did You Know?
Did you know? Jewelry of jet was the haute jewelry of the Victorian era. — Fallin
The confusion had seized him, was more at the forefront of his mind than the promise of the flask in his hand. “I don’t remember... yesterday. Today.” Magic went haywire from time to time, but if it had, Ari hadn’t noticed it – had he been so focused on dying that it had just passed him by?
“And what – happened?”Last time, he supposed he meant, if he wrapped his head around this, if he chose to believe the man. (It was too far-fetched a tale to have been spun expressly to convince him; that, in the end, was what convinced him.) And Ari didn’t know if he believed in fate or in destiny, in life having meaning at all, but – this was the second February twenty-eighth. A second chance at something. “Did you convince me, yesterday?”
Cash nodded, as if he'd noticed that Ari Fisk hadn't remembered — and in a way he knew it made sense. If Ari Fisk remembered the agony of dying, maybe he would have changed his mind. Or at the very least, Cash supposed that he would have been struck by the improbability of having a second chance. Cash didn't know the other man well, but that was what would have convinced him.
"I was late last time," he said, "But I — found you." The foam around his mouth, the scars on his wrists — the agony in the other room of whoever the constabulary had contacted.
Late. Ari almost smiled, wry. Because you couldn’t be late for something you hadn’t planned – his dying had not been an appointment made and broken – God or the universe had not demanded go save that man yesterday (the past today).
And still the stranger had taken it upon himself to try a second time. Maybe it was clinging to weakness, too, to find a speck of meaning in it – but he wanted to believe it.
Ari pictured it, now, from a new angle. It was worse to know about the aftermath with any certainty. And he knew well what it would look like – he saw these things, from time to time, in his line of work – but he wished the man standing here with him hadn’t learned what it looked like. He wasn’t sure he wanted his family to see him afterwards, either, and imagine it.
His mouth twisted, a little pained. “I’m sorry you had to... see that.” Ari still felt the urge to do it, a needling under the growing numbness in his fingers – but it also felt unspeakably callous to make this man watch it happen twice. (Especially a man who had wanted something like this, once. He ought to spare him that.)
There was something almost-funny about Ari Fisk apologizing to him for this; Cash's mouth twisted in a mirror of the older man's. "I'm sorry it happened to you," Cash offered. "Or — kind of did." It felt as if Ari Fisk was both alive, and not — Cash was either going to get him out of here, or he wasn't.
But he was starting to feel almost-hopeful about it.
He had to grimace-or-smile at that again, and this time there was a faint noise in his throat that might have been a snort. A faint snort of laughter, or some of the cold air caught on the way to his lungs. He wasn’t sure, himself. It had been a... long day. Everything felt a little sideways.
He heard the sigh he let out, though – he saw it, a cloud of cold breath, too. It felt like a bad reason to renege on his promise and all his plans, but he realised he could not do it in front of a witness. Not now. Maybe not even today. Ari tucked the flask of poison away, back in his inside jacket pocket, but once he had, he twisted his hands together, oddly helpless.
“I,” Ari began, gaze flicking to the other man and feeling all of a sudden embarrassed, awkward, ready to laugh. “I have no idea what to do from here.” (He didn’t know how he meant that: in the long term? – he was not deluded enough to think about the long term – but even so, if he was not going to kill himself in the next few moments, then his evening had just unexpectedly opened up.)
Relief bloomed in Cash's chest as the flask went away. No one was dying today. The trouble was that he also didn't know what to do today — he huffed out a breath. "I think The Three Broomsticks is still open," he said, because despite the weather, The Three Broomsticks was always open.
He knew that this was, essentially, what Ford had done for him. But it had worked, hadn't it? Maybe it would work for Ari Fisk.
If the stranger had said something like go tell your family, or go to the hospital, Ari didn’t think he could have done it. Even if he had wanted to, even if he had been given an impossible second chance at the day – it would have been too much to ask of him. He hadn’t worked up the courage, yet.
Instead, the suggestion was bizarrely surreal in its normality. The Three Broomsticks. It would be open, and it would be warm. They were getting cold, standing out here in the snow. That had been the point, of course – and he would not be able to kill himself in Three Broomsticks, which might also be the point of it. (Even if the flask stayed in his pocket, it simply wouldn’t feel right – in front of other people, in such a comfortable place, where he had so many good memories, years upon years of evenings with friends.)
“Alright,” Ari said, in gentle surrender. The interruption had punctured his plans, taken the wind out of them; so at this point it almost, oddly, felt like too much effort to argue. And besides – if Ari thought better of this, and decided to do it after all, there was always tomorrow.
