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
What did it feel like? Cash huffed out a breath. "Sometimes when I'm doing something that should be natural, should be fine, it's like — there's always fear," he said. He was watching Ford intently, but not making eye contact — once he'd explained the problem, the root of it, it was easier to talk about.
"And then sometimes it's like time falls away from me and — I'm somewhere else. My body isn't mine. Or I'm somewhen else and I can't keep anything straight or tell what's real and what isn't," he said. He swallowed. He looked down at his hand. It had been a longtime since he'd heard something that wasn't there, but he still couldn't always be sure what was real and what wasn't, if he was real. He thought longingly about Theo, even as he was remembering the way that sometimes when Theo would touch him he would half-feel as if he was dunked in a bucket of nerves.
Ford watched Cash; watched his fingers twitch, watched how his neck moved when he swallowed, watched where his eyes were going. His description felt like a nightmare to Ford. Not being able to trust your own senses, not knowing what was real — horrific, but maybe this also explained some of how Cash acted in society. Maybe people thought he was aloof because he took his time responding; trying to sort out what someone should have felt or thought or said in this situation from things inside himself he couldn't trust. Ford wished he'd known Cash better in school, before they'd tried to fix him — he had a sudden pang of grief and longing for this now-dead version of Cash. But there was also a ferocity to the grief; a determination not to let the rest of him go the same way. Earlier tonight, when he'd first been trying to wrap his mind around what Cash might have intended after he left, Ford had wondered if he had any right to stop him when he didn't understand what Cash was going through. He still couldn't understand, but now that he knew more about it — now that he knew it was something done to him, not just something that had happened for reasons no one would ever understand — he was not going to let them win.
"That's only going to make it worse," Ford said, about not eating. He may have never dealt with anything even close to what Cash lived with on a daily basis, but he felt confident saying that nothing was going to be improved if Cash was starving himself while trying to work through it.
"We've got soup in the icebox," he said, business-like. He squeezed Cash's foot. "Back in five minutes. Don't move."
It couldn't be helping. Cash believed that it wasn't helping, because it had not actually made him feel any better for longer than a few hours, just guilty. He wasn't sold on the soup conceptually, but nodded at Ford. If he was still trying to slip out quickly, this would be his opportunity to try to leave — but in the time he was alone, he stayed in the same spot. The only real change was that he kept scratching at his cuticles, and more of them were pink with irritation when Ford returned.
It was the right sort of soup for the task: hearty enough to have mostly solidified in the icebox until Ford scooped it into a bowl and heated it with a spell. Thick cuts of potato and carrot and onions that had gone clear while they cooked. He pulled the sleeve of his pajamas down over the heel of his hand so that he could carry the bowl up the stairs without burning himself. There were extra rolls in the pantry (the housekeeper hadn't gotten into the habit yet of making meals the right size, since Grace had moved out) and Ford balanced two of them in his other hand, barely managing the doorknob.
Before he'd left he'd been sitting at the foot of the bed, cautious, leaving space for fragility, but on entering again he decided he was done with that. It was the sight of Cash alone on his bed still balled up on himself that decided him. The bed was too big for Ford — too big for any one person — but Cash looked especially small at the moment. So after he set the soup bowl in Cash's lap he crawled across the bed instead, into the space next to Cash. He leaned up against the headboard and crossed his legs, letting his knee brush against Cash's thigh. Ford set one of the rolls down on the bedspread in front of Cash and kept the other in his hand as though he might eat it, though he had no intention to. His body language was aggressively casual, as though he could single-handedly make this into a normal interaction between two friends.
"It's nothing fancy, but it's filling," he said with a nod towards the bowl.
The heat from the soup bowl spread into Cash's thighs, and he balanced it carefully with one hand. The smell of the broth floated upwards towards him, the aroma of carrots and sweet onion and earthy potatoes. Cash could tell from looking that it was the sort of soup that a cook made to heat people up on a cold Scottish night.
He was glad to have Ford up by the headboard with him; it felt less like he was invading his friend's space, and more like they were meant to be spending time together here. Cash smiled at Ford, tired, and dunked his soup into the soup's broth, allowing liquid and slices of transparent onion to sink into the bowl. He tried to stave off apprehension — the worst that could happen was that he would be sick again, and he had allowed Ford to see much worse tonight — and started to eat.
The faint shakes in his hands started to fade, the more he ate. Cash had eaten about a third of the soup before he looked back at Ford. Once he had told Ford that he used to be fun, before — Cash was still sure this was true, and that maybe there were moments of it, but he was having a hard time believing it lately. "I don't know what to do," he admitted.
Ford was careful not to watch Cash while he ate. It was the sort of thing that would make anyone self-conscious even at the best of times, and he didn't want Cash to feel overly observed. At the same time, it was hard to truly shift his attention away when his mind was still preoccupied with it. He spent the silence retracing the conversation so far tonight, turning over the things Cash had newly shared and fitting them into the tapestry of how he understood his friend. It was difficult not to steal glances, to see how his new mental image stacked up against the reality of Cash sitting in the bed next to him. Broken.
He exhaled when Cash broke the silence. His shoulders moved in a soft shrug, the sort of small gesture that could have been lost if there was anything else to focus on except each other. "Me, either," he said. He still hadn't looked at Cash, but now it was less a conscious decision and more the inertial of the habit he'd built up during the soup-consuming silence. Ford took a breath; wiggled his toes against the sheets and rubbed the edge of his thumb over the hard crust of the roll in his hand, which he'd made no pretense of eating. "But I'll stick around until we figure it out."
A statement with an unspoken reciprocity; a promise he made, and a reciprocal promise he extracted from Cash without awaiting his deliberation. I'll stick around if you do. Or: You decided to tell me; now you have to let me help.
They were going to figure it out. They were going to figure it out, because neither of them had other options, particularly not Cash. He'd shut off his other options by confessing in Ford. Maybe, Cash thought, he'd decided that he'd been running away for too long.
A shadow of a smile crossed Cash's face. "Oh," he said, "I've been sleeping loads." Too much, maybe. But it wasn't like it had been before the dementor, when he'd been sleeping in stints and waking up screaming. Instead, it was as if Cash had to drag himself out of his bed, because it was much more appealing to stay inside it than it was to leave.
Given that Cash wasn't eating, Ford had expected to hear he wasn't sleeping well either. He should have been relieved by this answer, but something about the way Cash said it made it sound like it wasn't actually a good thing. Ford frowned faintly, not sure what to say about it. He wasn't going to tell Cash to stop sleeping so much. He didn't know what question to ask to try and dig deeper into the thing that seemed vaguely wrong in Cash's tone. He'd just have to move on and hope that if it was something they needed to talk about, it would come up again. But maybe it wouldn't — there was so much they needed to talk about. Cash might have been bottomless, as a person, but sometimes it seemed like his issues were bottomless, too.
"You said before that sometimes things stop feeling real," Ford began. Those weren't the words Cash had used, but that was the impression they had made on Ford; a disconnect from reality. "What do you do, when that happens?"
Cash mulled over that for a beat, and softly moved his spoon in the remaining broth. ”I need to — change the way my body feels, sometimes,” he admitted. He had never thought about it quite like that, but he knew it to be true once he put it into words. ”So that’s — fidgeting with something. Flying. Smoking.”
He had never felt as much like himself as he did when he was in the air.
”Drinking, but only sometimes. Sex.” His mouth twisted at the last word, because he and Ford actually did not talk about this that often, but he wasn’t thinking of sex with Adrienne. The times he’d visited her bedroom off-schedule he’d been chasing the feeling he got when he visited Theo in his office. And even though he and Theo had never quite gone there, it still wasn’t the same.
Ford shifted uncomfortably at the answer. That's not what sex is for, he thought, but he didn't want to say it; he did not particularly want to talk about sex with Cash at all.
"Flying is good," he agreed. It was the only thing on Cash's list he could condone, though the alcohol he at least understood. But obviously there were times when it was not appropriate for Cash to just leave for an hourlong broom ride, so he couldn't just have that. (There were also times when it was not appropriate to engage in any of the other things — presumably this was where fidgeting came in, though it seemed insufficient by comparison).
"How can I help?" he asked, not because he expected Cash to know the answer. Just because he had to say something, and it was the only thing he was thinking. What on earth was he supposed to do about this?
Cash swallowed. His mouth tasted like ash at the two options he could see clearly in front of him — he could tell Ford about the Unbreakable Vow and the inherent trap in seeking help if it may bring scandal and kill him, or he could confess some of the truth of the envelope that was in his coat.
He met Ford’s eyes. ”I’m not sure,” Cash said, still tasting that ash. ”I haven’t really gotten that far. I intended on killing myself tonight, but now I’m — not going to.”
He hadn’t been confident of that until now, but now the future was in front of him, days and days where he had to keep being alive and therefor living with himself.
Ford met Cash's eyes while his breathing went briefly shaky. He had already known this for most of tonight, but it was one thing to know it and another for Cash to have just said it plainly, while holding his gaze. Before it had been in the room with them, but lurking around the edges; a shadow in the corner that was always present but did not necessarily require your acknowledgement. They could talk around it. Now it was here, lying like a dead thing in the space between them, impossible to sidestep.
"No, you're not," Ford agreed. His voice was firm and he was glad of that, because it didn't feel like it had been his conscious choice to speak; like his mouth was far away from his brain and he didn't necessarily have agency over it for a moment. He looked at Cash another moment, but then he felt as though if he kept holding eye contact there was a chance he might cry, and obviously he couldn't do that. So instead he leaned towards Cash and pulled him into an embrace, tight enough that Ford's arms hurt.
"We starved your dementor," he said, tucking his head over Cash's shoulder. There was iron in his tone. "We'll get through this."
Cash nearly startled at the contact, and used one hand to steady the soup bowl so that he didn’t spill any remaining broth into Ford’s bed. His other hand he curled around Ford’s back, returning the embrace. He closed his eyes.
There were a hundred things he could have said then, but what came out was, ”I’d like to be a better friend to you.”
Ford laughed, hollow. A better friend — but how did you know how good a friend you had, except in moments like these? How else were friendships tested except in the moments where they were the only thing that remained?
"Here's hoping I don't give you too many opportunities," he joked.
Cash huffed out a breath that would have been a laugh if they were under brighter circumstances. "Yeah, well," he said, "If you need me, I'll be there."
