January 27, 2024 – 4:41 PM
It was all for a good cause, this party, the hospital. His sister-in-law was a healer, Endymion appreciated this. He had thought he might see Miss Greyback here, and that might have been nice. As it was – he hadn’t been having a terribly good time. He’d lost at cards, and had had to hear all sorts of political talk in the midst of it, which made things even duller. It had even followed him through to the ballroom portion of the affair, so now the whole evening was a lost cause. Was this the way all next season would be for the Dempseys now? People asking for miraculous insights into Oz’s impenetrable head? (Endymion had prayed this would all end after the election. And if it continued this way interminably, how was he ever going to fall in love with anyone? How was he ever to have an interesting conversation again?)
So he had returned from a set of dances to practise studious avoidance, standing next to a decorative flower display at the fringes and peering at it intently so as to carefully avoid the person on his other side. Until he had noticed someone lurking behind the flowers (which might possibly be more interesting than the flowers), and so he ducked furtively around the display to be quite sure it was her. “Miss Potts,” he said, upon being proven right – and these days it was beginning to feel like she was the only one left of her sisters to be Miss Potts, elopements and engagements coming thick and fast for the florist’s daughters – and anyway he was rather too glad to see her, tonight, to be self-conscious about impinging on her solitude. She was safe: she was not really a debutante, not looking to be marry, and, as far as he knew, probably not much interested in the Ministry. He tilted his head at her, curious but not judging. “Are you hiding?”
Thistle Potts
April 19, 2024 – 12:52 AM
“Ahh,” Endymion murmured curiously, studying the flowers in question intently and then peering back at her. They were out of place indeed. “Well, they intended to give them to someone, I expect, and then – lost their nerve, perhaps,” he suggested. A gentleman who had hoped to press his suit, maybe. Or someone who had received the flowers awkwardly and had tried their best to be rid of them before anyone saw them and read between the lines.
He didn’t know how much he cared for the truth and how much he just liked inventing the story, but it would be interesting to know whose it had been, and whom intended for. (Endymion was as much invested in everyone else’s pursuit of love as he was his own.)
“Is that a blackthorn blossom? For difficulty.”*
*
from here
August 31, 2024 – 1:26 AM
Endymion was trying his level best to rein in his smile, he was – but it was hard to suppress the amusement as she at last gave in to the accusation of hiding, if an accusation it was. Though he liked her alternative explanation better, and was more amused still when Thistle showed it to him, as if to prove it. “Of course: whatever you’d like to call it, Miss Potts,” Endymion said, nodding mock-earnestly, with just a touch of mischief to it.
“Mothers can be that way,” he agreed in sympathy, although he plucked the card out of her hand before she could protest, to examine that space (– and perhaps the names on either side of it, just out of curiosity –) matter-of-factly. As if satisfied with his examination, he handed it back to her. “At wanting you to dance, or to marry?” Her sister had just married, and another was engaged, so she must have come back into focus for it, he imagined; but perhaps the height of Mrs. Potts’ hope nowadays was prodding Miss Potts into being sociable.
September 8, 2024 – 1:51 AM
Thistle Potts — Played by Fawkes
He did a better job at hiding his amusement than she did. Even she could hear the futility in arguing the distinction once she said it and couldn't help the resigned smirk of someone who had talked themselves into a corner. There would be no beating the charge of hiding now. It was okay if he didn't appreciate the subtle difference... she did.
When he indulged her excuse she was struck with an entirely inappropriate urge to playfully shove his arm.
She didn't have time to figure out where that urge came from or whether she'd done a good job hiding it before the dance card was pulled from her gloved hands. She felt frozen where she stood as his eyes roved over the list. It was such an inconsequential thing yet she felt laid bare by his study of it. Most of the names on it she only knew in passing but she could imagine the sorts of men that would find their way onto the card of a spinster with a bruised reputation. In that moment he was no longer a stranger with a familiar face to banter with but a man who had declined to marry her, reading over a list of men who had yet to do the same. A flush crept up around her neckline.
"At most things." she replied with a measured tone and tucked the card back into the pocket it had come from.
![[Image: BJWeo7.png]](https://a.l3n.co/i/BJWeo7.png)
Set by Bee <3
September 29, 2024 – 11:49 PM
He had been eyeing her dance card a little too thoroughly to notice any ill effect it had on her, so by the time she tucked it away he was only surprised by her changed tone (what, no wit for once?) and bemused by the flush at her neckline. (Endymion, as he realised what he was doing, hurriedly stopped looking at her there.)
“You know, I’m sure my mother is just as bad,” he said airily instead, none the wiser as to her altered mood, and supposing that – the room was too warm, or she was trying to temper her exasperation with her mother’s efforts with measuredness. “Worse, maybe. You have – the same number of siblings as I do, don’t you?” Endymion squinted, suddenly remembering facts about the Potts family that had not been remotely relevant to him in – years. Seven daughters in all, if he recalled it right. “Imagine mine, and with only one of us married,” Endymion added, with a hopelessly-amused shake of his head. He was trying to be married much more diligently than his sisters, but his sisters were – close to lost causes, generally. Thistle’s sisters were doing much better, in all (even with or without the scandalous elopement of Miss Zinnia). “She still has her hands quite full.”
Really, Mrs. Potts and Lowri Dempsey would make rather good friends.
October 4, 2024 – 3:00 AM
Thistle Potts — Played by Fawkes
Whatever he made of her list, he kept it to himself. She could feel the heat from her own embarrassment and thought for a moment he might have noticed too but if he did he kept that to himself as well.
"Six sisters." she offered rather than devote much thought to whether she could recall his siblings. His assessment of his mother was… generous, after a fashion. It was not the way things were usually framed but Thistle had to admit - he had a point. Statistically speaking, with five of seven daughters married and settled, her mother was doing quite well. With the dance card still burning a hole in her pocket part of her wondered if he patronizing her by offering his own unmarried siblings as comparison. She watched him closely for a moment and eventually concluded that if he was, she did not care. It would be a small and petty way to win a conversation.
"And with you being no help." she clucked in a tenuous step back towards banter.
Set by Bee <3
