Late Fall, 1887 — Morning of Oz & Sina's Wedding — Dempsey Estate, Ireland

Oz wasn't nervous, but to anyone who didn't know him and some of those who did he probably seemed to be. He wouldn't have been surprised if his bride-to-be was nervous; the ceremony was bigger than she had initially wanted, catering to the Dempsey's position in society rather than the Pomfrey's. She likely wasn't used to being the center of so much attention, at least in this capacity. She would probably be fine — or if she did make some mistake, it would be something innocuous. The sort of thing he would notice and bring up later in one of their arguments, but anyone else would forget by the time they left the wedding. He would be fine. He was used to (and bored of) society, so there was nothing new there. There were no surprises in the plan for the event; he and his fiancee had been through all of them (and argued about all of them) in great detail. He wasn't nervous. He was distracted — distracted with imagining what tonight would bring. He'd wanted her over a year. He could not recall ever wanting anything as long — he was generally quite efficient at finding ways to meet his needs, or convincing himself he didn't want whatever it was he couldn't have.

So this was, perhaps, the most anticipation he'd ever felt in his life, and consequently he was pacing a bit. She was here in the house somewhere, but he hadn't even gotten a clear answer on where (perhaps a tactic to prevent him from tracking her down for one last-minute argument that might call the entire event into question). He'd dressed for the ceremony, but his room was too hot and he'd subsequently undone his tie and rolled up his sleeves, which someone (his fiancee) would probably berate him for later when he arrived to the ceremony wrinkled. The door opened and he looked up, expecting Dash to be returning with a strong drink or two. That it was only Endymion was a disappointment. That he appeared to be empty-handed was salt on the wound.

"Everything coming along alright downstairs?" he asked as he went back to pacing. "Mother mentioned there was a delay with the florist."

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Endymion Dempsey Elias Grimstone

  

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Endymion, meanwhile, was very nervous. It wasn’t his wedding, so he really oughtn’t be; and for that matter, he wasn’t used to ever being nervous at all. Nevertheless: today he was hot and itchy underneath his collar, something racketing about in his ribs and making him queasy in his gut, and try as he might, he couldn’t seem to manage sitting still. Not when his brother was about to sacrifice himself on the altar of... well, that was just it. He couldn’t understand why Oz was doing this. Honour? Intransigence? Spite?

He had missed the beginning of their courtship, so maybe he was missing something, but no one else had been able to explain it to him either. Dymion had been counting quite fervently on Dashwood to say something to Ozymandias, from the candidness of friendship – but now they were down to hours and minutes and the wedding hadn’t been called off, so Dashwood had either lost his mind and come around to this whole endeavour, or, even worse, he’d tried and failed and Oz hadn’t listened.

And Endymion didn’t make a habit of giving unwanted advice or opening his mouth for the sake of argument – argument was not his forte in the family – but he had paused on the stairs, heard the pacing from the floor above, and decided that someone really had to rescue his brother before it was too late.

If no one else would do it, then it would just have to be him. He let himself in, proving himself right about the pacing. “Ah, no – the flowers are all there –” Endymion said distractedly. Their mother had evidently had higher standards than the florist, so it had been touch-and-go for a while, but the flowers, now in place, were exquisite. The flowers were very much not the problem here. But there was a deep crinkle of concern on Endymion’s brow as he pulled the door up behind him and tried to work out how to put it delicately. He cleared his throat, fidgeted with his collar. “...Is everything coming along alright with you?”

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Oz glanced back at his brother, perplexed by the question. What could possibly have caused the answer to that question to be no? There was hardly anything he needed to do at this point to prepare for the ceremony, except look the part. It wasn't as though he was likely to forget how to dress himself (whatever remarks Miss Pomfrey would make later on about the wrinkles on his sleeves). On the other hand, it seemed unlikely that Endymion might have marched himself all the way up to Ozymandias' room to ask a rhetorical question. Probably he had been dispatched here by someone, Oz figured. That seemed like a reasonable course of events: Endymion trying to be helpful but really just being in the way, and one of the women orchestrating the arrival and departure of vendors needed him out of the way but feeling useful, so they had invented some groomsman-appropriate tasking for him. Go check on Ozymandias, make sure he's coming along alright. Endymion's question might have even recycled the exact phrasing they'd used.

Oz stopped walking and moved to the open window, where he perched on the sill. "It's too hot, isn't it? I'd have thought this late in the year it would be colder." He didn't bother answering the question. "Maybe we should have gotten tents for the reception. I imagine the sun might wreak havoc on the cake and the punch both."

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MJ is the light of my life <3

He had been trying to feign a small, sympathetic smile at the stricken way his brother looked at him, but as Ozymandias moved away Endymion’s mouth pulled into a proper grimace. Oh, no. He was going for the window. Looking for an escape.

He resisted the urge to sweep over and tug his brother back off the sill by force. The temptation was there, though, but felt as though this conversation was best treated with the caution of entering a yet-unscouted-tomb, full of unknown traps and curses: nothing hasty, no sudden movements.

One step closer, then, was all he allowed himself; just in case Oz made some abrupt motion, threw himself out... instead, he merely listened to his brother making excuses about the weather and the lack of tents and swallowed, feeling every bit of that excruciating desperation in his own skin. And they were family; Oz didn’t have to keep lying to save face here, in private, with Miss Pomfrey out of earshot!

“It’s not too late,” he suggested with uncharacteristic seriousness, obviously not just talking about the time of year. “And no one would think the worse of you if you changed your mind.” Well, people might think some such things about him – but it would still be far better for him and Miss Pomfrey (and their families both) if they called it off now, than actually went through with it and were miserable forever.

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Change his mind? It took half a second to realize he was talking about more than just the tents (it probably was far too late to change his mind about that). Oz looked back at Endymion, incredulous. What would possess his brother to say such a thing? Ozymandias' courtship of Miss Pomfrey was certainly not traditional, and Oz knew there were rumors that they didn't even like each other. Still, he'd proposed to her, and she'd accepted. He'd been of sound mind at the time and so had she. He'd had months to dissolve it, if his resolve had ever wavered. Oz could perhaps understand why someone might try and convince Miss Pomfrey to change her mind since women generally had less choice in these matters, but he really could have walked away at any point unscathed except for a fine if she sued for breach of promise, which she might not even do.

"Don't be absurd," he said, looking out the window again. He wished he had something to smoke, or drink, but going to retrieve something at the moment might give Endymion ideas about his mental fortitude, or lack thereof.

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MJ is the light of my life <3

He couldn’t understand the way his brother was looking at him. Like he’d lost his mind. “Me? Absurd?!” he spluttered, gaping. He was literally the one speaking sense. Obviously no one else had tried to at all.

And perhaps it was true that calling things off at this late stage would make people think worse (just a little) of Miss Pomfrey, if not of Ozymandias – Endymion would never have dreamed of doing such a thing as breaking an engagement off this late – but Oz 1) obviously did not care in the slightest about Miss Pomfrey or her feelings and 2) had always been more selfish than selfless. So why wasn’t he being more selfish now?

Endymion swallowed, swiftly stepping over to grasp Oz’s upper arm – either to pull him back off the ledge or to forcibly shake some sense into him, he hadn’t quite decided. (Had Oz already come to the conclusion that he couldn’t possibly sustain this farce of a marriage, and was merely keeping tight-lipped about it so that he could dramatically flounce off at the altar in front of everyone, just to make a scene? Dymion was so worried he almost hoped so.) “People will forget the scandal soon enough. You don’t need to – to – be unhappy forever just to make a point.” Endymion didn’t actually know what point was being made here, but he had to assume there was one.

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   Ozymandias Dempsey

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Oz scoffed. Make a point to whom? Who did Endymion think was waiting in the wings whose opinion Ozymandias valued so much he would be willing to sacrifice his future happiness for? And precisely what point would be made in marrying her? She wasn't a particularly prestigious bride, for someone like him; she was a working woman from a considerably less wealthy background. There was no incentive for him to marry her except the obvious. If he'd been trying to prove that he could get her to say yes, or something ego-centric like that, he could have accomplished the task with just a proposal; he need hardly have planned a wedding to prove the point, much less go through with the vows.

He rolled his shoulder back from his brother's grasp, but lazily. Oz's attitude was not that of a man struggling to free himself, but of someone brushing off a fly that had landed on their arm. "Endymion, just because you don't understand what I'm doing doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing. I intend to marry Miss Pomfrey," he said levelly. "And I intend to remain married to her the rest of my life, or hers. Now — if that's all you wanted to say, you can go. If you're staying, pour me a drink."

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Ugh. Endymion huffed and let go, because if Oz was going to be that condescending to him at a time like this, he could bloody well toss himself right out of the window. Endymion would have tried.

So he pulled a face and stalked off to the door, summoned a bottle and a glass – set aside ready for the reception, probably, but Endymion didn’t really care – and remained in Oz’s room with them. He put the glass down, poured out a drink, snatched up the glass and downed it himself. (He deserved that much for bothering to try.)

It had at least curbed his frustration for a minute or two, so Endymion turned back to his brother, folding his arms in loose disapproval. “Then tell me what you’re doing,” he demanded, because if no one else in this family took the thought of marriage seriously, he did, and he was offended by Oz’s – all this. He hadn’t witnessed everything in their courtship for himself, but he’d heard enough stories to be fairly confident of this next: “Because you clearly don’t love her.”

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Endymion's declaration that Oz didn't love Thomasina — more specifically, the confidence with which he declared it — gave Oz a rush of adrenaline, similar to if he'd just won a point in a duel. The pair of them were a match made in heaven, and this was proof of it; without even once having an explicit conversation about it, they'd been able to play their parts to perfection, never faltering once over the past months of their engagement. They had the whole world fooled.

Ozymandias wouldn't correct him. Even if they didn't have the facade to keep up, he wasn't ready to commit to saying he was in love; he didn't know yet whether he believed in love. But he was quite sure that no one else could make him as happy as Thomasina Pomfrey made him every time they argued.

He crossed to get himself one of the glasses and dropped into an armchair near his brother. He was smiling, wider and with more teeth than was his habit. He tilted his glass and watched the sunlight glint off the surface of it as he considered what to say. "She's the only woman who interests me," he responded cryptically. He'd given Dash that much already, so it wasn't too much of a tell.

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MJ is the light of my life <3

He threw up his hands in an open shrug, as if the heavens might look down and tell him what going on, because so far he was utterly nonplussed. Oz’s behaviour was – disconcerting, to say the least. Endymion had never been so perturbed by someone smiling.

His eyebrows knitted in continued, unchallenged consternation. “Interests you?” Dymion repeated. “Is interest the best you can do?” Interest was the sort of thing one ascribed to a thought-provoking book or a diverting puzzle or an enlightening museum exhibit or a pastime, not a person; particularly not a woman one was making their wife. Perhaps he meant attracted to her, but surely that was a fleeting fancy too, not strong enough a lasting feeling. And fine, everyone knew Ozymandias was the intellectual one in the family, thought him cool and caustic and clever – but had he really never had one honest flash of emotion in his life?

He presumed Miss Pomfrey knew what she was getting into as well – but if she did, Endymion didn’t understand her. He didn’t understand either of them, in fact. He was still quite incredulous. “And she’ll interest you forever, you suppose?”

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Endymion seemed to be getting riled over this, which amused Ozymandias. Why his brother had such strong opinions about who he married was anyone's guess — Oz certainly didn't think he would care a whit who Endymion married when the time came [author's note: this is a superb bit of self-deception as Ozymandias will have opinions falling out his ears if Endymion so much as buys chocolates for a lady].

"There's only one way to know, isn't there?" he replied, intentionally provoking. If Dymion wanted to level the accusation (implied or explicit) that Ozymandias wasn't taking this commitment seriously, the most entertaining response seemed to be playing in to his fears. He wondered if someone was similarly trying to talk Miss Pomfrey out of this at this exact moment, and if so what strategies she was employing to ward them off. Although, come to think of it, maybe no one was taking the trouble. He was an heir to a wealthy family, after all, and he was young and attractive and intelligent; she ought to have been thrilled with the arrangement, regardless of her feelings on him as a person. And anyway, she would be ruined forever if she called things off now, so maybe her family had already given up trying to save her from herself.

"Interests is good enough," he insisted. "Not all of us have the leisure to laze about in gardens waiting for veela to happen by." Meaning: finding someone interesting was more than his brother had done, whose most notable past relationship had not even been human.

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   Endymion Dempsey

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Endymion’s mouth opened and closed without any further success at speech at that counter and Oz’s impassable nature – taking marriage as some grand experiment was very him, but it was also surely bound to blow up in his face.

And what did Endymion get for trying to help save his brother from himself? Just mockery, it seemed! Indeed, it worked very well to derail his train of thought, because there was a familiar hot flush creeping down past his ears at that memory, and the mortifying realisation that Oz obviously thought himself superior here because he was getting married, at least. 

At first, he only offered a stunted mumble of outrage; it didn’t quite make it to anything intelligible. “Well, when I marry I won’t make the same mistakes as you,” he managed finally, cowed enough by the veela comment to call this a lost cause, and certain enough that when he married it would be for love and nothing less to sound confidently self-righteous about it. “And when you’re – trapped and discontented in – ten years, I won’t have any sympathy for you,” he warned. It was still a lost cause: Oz obviously didn’t care what he thought.

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At the noise Endymion made Ozymandias' mouth twisted in amusement. He waited for his brother to find words, leaning back in the armchair and trying to relax some of the anticipation-driven tension out of his shoulders. "No, I wouldn't expect you to," he replied. Make the same mistakes or have any sympathy, he did not bother to specify.

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Nothing. Absolutely nothing! If Ozymandias had a single fear of a future of torturous discontent, he was hiding it spectacularly. All he was doing was being a high-and-mighty, bloody smarmy know-it-all, even though it was supposed to be Endymion’s turn to be that here, and forevermore, til death did they part and whatnot.

There was nothing he could say to get a rise out of him, or to beat some sense into his head. Dymion scanned the room hopelessly, picking out a variety of objects within reach he could very well aim at Oz’s head – his glass, the bottle, the rest of the liquid in it, a stray shoe – and he even considered casting a spell to tip up the chair Oz was sitting in and upending his brother with it, but he swallowed the urge and his frustration as best he could, because his temper had always been tamer than most of the family’s.

His mouth twitched unhappily downward again though: if he was giving up, he could still be miserable about it. “The flowers look very nice,” he muttered a little churlishly, returning to the first question Oz had posed upon his coming upstairs.

After that, he shrugged and turned towards the door again to go back down and grumble his way through the preparations with everyone else – but, at a sudden thought, grasped the doorway and looked back. “Please tell me somebody else tried,” he demanded, sure that someone else in the family – their sisters, their mother – or one of Oz’s close friends or even one of the Pomfreys must have tried to reason him out of this before now. “Is there no one you’ll listen to?” (Dym thought he knew the answer already, though: as ever, Oz refused to heed anyone’s opinion but his own.)

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Ozymandias thought he had finally put an end to the conversation, and when Endymion lingered in the doorway he was more annoyed than he might have been had the question simply followed from the rest of the conversation. He set his glass down on the nearest end table with enough force that it made an audible thunk. "Endymion, really," he started in. "Do you think I'm daft? Do you suppose I proposed to her on a whim, without any forethought whatsoever, and then failed to think through the consequences for seven months? You thought you'd waltz in here and say it's not too late to change your mind and I'd go oh, goodness, I never thought of that — how lucky I am to have a brother like you!" Ozy used a mild falsetto for both of their voices in his rendition, sparing no snark.

At this point he rose from the chair, abandoning his drink on the table, and threw one hand in front of himself in a flippant gesture. "Did you honestly think I'd allow myself to be trapped — as you put it — in a marriage I hadn't chosen? As though I were stupid." This implication was what had riled him; Ozymandias' pride could not contend with anyone thinking him anything less than clever. "And even then, you thought Thomasina Pomfrey would be up to the task of entrapping me? I'm insulted. I know you've been gone, but Merlin, don't you know me at all?" He let out a breath and crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm marrying her. I decided to and I shall and no one is going to talk me out of it," he said, trying not to notice how petulant this declaration sounded even to his own ears. "And if no one else has tried, maybe it's because everyone else trusts me to make decisions for myself."

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MJ is the light of my life <3

Endymion swallowed as his brother spoke again: his last ditch plea had obviously been one attempt too far. The fuse of patience had been lit and fizzling, and he’d stayed in the vicinity too long – he’d set Oz off like a stick of dynamite.

And now his face was blackened by ash and soot for his troubles – metaphorically, that was. In literal fact, there was a mortified flush of pink across his cheeks, and a frozen sort of flinch in the tensed set of his shoulders, because his brother’s whole tirade was making it very clear which of them was the stupid one here. Right. Oz was right, maybe: Endymion had neglected to think all this through. And if no one else in the family had raised the issue with him, it was because he was the only one idiot enough to try. On a whim. Without any forethought whatsoever. Oh, goodness, I never thought of that. Dymion scrunched up his face, shrinking in the doorway, any sense of self-righteousness he’d been holding onto shrivelling away to guilt and embarrassment and regret in the face of that high-pitched mockery. Every word of it seemed to strike him in the chest. Oz didn’t even need to try.

He’s going to remember I ruined his wedding day forever, Endymion considered, already winded enough by that point – but apparently Oz was only halfway through. He swallowed again, swaying a little where he stood to force himself to stick it through until his older brother was done, though his head was already bowed in defeat. It had been a lost cause from the start and maybe Endymion had been entirely wrong to get involved. It had been none of his business to begin with. I’m sorry that I cared, he might have snapped if he still had the energy left to protest, but any resolve he’d had about rescuing Oz from a bad decision had already withered to nothing. “Alright,” Endymion said, in a helpless tone of enough, I get it, you can stop already. He rather wished he could undo this whole conversation, go back in time and erase the idea from his mind before it could ever occur to him. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m happy for you, then. Just – forget I said anything.” He couldn’t think of what else to do – he’d have distracted Oz with something new and interesting if he could think of anything, but the day’s preparations were a blur now. All Dymion could do now was make a hasty retreat, turn tail and go, and just it wouldn’t mar the rest of the day. And if Oz was truly happy with his decision, then, well: Endymion would just have to witness it for the rest of his life, because although he’d asked him to forget this failed little intervention, he doubted Oz would ever let him live it down.

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   Ozymandias Dempsey

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