If they just talked about the curse, then Zelda could pretend that this was all just about work, that they had no baggage at all. Now that she no longer had to navigate any ladderwells, she was scrawling all his words down in her notebook. As long as the object began spilling a curse once it was opened, and not before - that was manageable. If it had happened before, well, the boat was probably doomed.

Her quill skittered to a halt at his next words.

"Oh," Zelda said. "Yes, I know where that is. Um. Shall we?"

The last time they had been there she had been - well, she had not been in love with him. She had a complicated nest of feelings and a desperate need to kiss him, and now she had a complicated nest of feelings but the feeling was mostly hurt. Zelda did not understand why she had never been enough for him - nor did she understand why he had been unable or unwilling to let her figure things out with her family. She didn't get it. They had been talking about making things work, she had tacitly turned down elopement, and now they were just nothing and he was going to leave her.

Her shoulders curled in; she had shrunk, somewhat. She finished writing the word cabin.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred had been trying to plan out how to stall as long as possible. Surely there was plenty they could talk about down here, wasn't there? And she would have some sort of test to run or spell to cast, some sort of diagnostic, which would eat up some time. It wasn't as though they were just going to trudge up there right this moment, just the two of them. Except apparently that wasn't what they were doing. Shall we? she'd asked, and he didn't have any real reason why not, if she didn't have any reason to stay down in the cargo hold.

"Uh. Sure," he said with a half-shrug. He couldn't exactly lead the way, because the aisles down here weren't wide enough for him to get back on the other side of her — she was between him and the door. "If you want to, uh, start up that way. Right behind you."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"All - alright," Zelda said. Self conscious, she muttered the tracking spell again, and held her wand loosely in her hand as it pivoted furiously before she broke the spell. If her wand was 'pulled' more in this room than the cabin, then - well, then she had found where the curse was thickest.

She pocketed her notebook and started up the ladderwell. "How long was it in - your rooms?" she asked. Saying the word 'cabin' felt incriminating somehow, more intimate - if she knew nothing about boats, then maybe she knew nothing about him, and it wouldn't have to matter.

She stopped after the ladderwell. "Which way now?"

She had never come to the cabin from the bowels of the ship; she had only ever come from the main deck of the ship or apparated.

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The following 1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post:1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post
   J. Alfred Darrow

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AMAZING set by MJ

"Two days," Alfred answered as he followed doggedly behind her. "Just the time it took to get us back to port. I didn't want anyone to mess around with it in the meantime," he explained, not because he thought she'd care, particularly, but because he was tired of people from the Ministry getting all judgemental about the decisions he'd made in relation to this chest. It wasn't as though they'd put out and sort of guidance on how best to handle strange magical objects, if they turned up, and he didn't think he'd done the wrong thing by getting it away from the rest of the crew. How was he supposed to know it was leaking magic all over the place?

When they got back into the slightly wider hallway outside the hold and she asked which direction to go next, he merely angled his way past her and started off in the direction of the cabin. It was a short walk — nothing on a ship was really very far, as long as you didn't get lost along the way — and he was soon standing in front of his cabin door, fishing a key out of his pocket. He unlocked it and swung the door open, then stood back to let her lead the way.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"Makes sense," Zelda said, following him down the hallway. She couldn't really blame Alfred for anything to do with the object itself; he had acted by using the information he had at the time. She could blame him for coming to a locked down boat, but that was a separate issue.

Zelda steeled herself and stepped into the cabin. Was it better to pretend that nothing had ever happened here, or what?

She muttered her tracking spell again. Her wand started moving left to right, furiously, in her hand - and before she could break the spell, it launched from her hand and shot forwards.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred had ceded the right of way to her in case there was any sort of de-cursing she wanted to do before she went in, or something. Not that he had experienced anything in the cabin that would lead him to believe it was cursed, but he hadn't experienced anything on the ship in general, either (aside from the initial incident when he'd tried to open the chest), and the Ministry had more or less condemned the whole thing, so. There was no telling where they drew the lines, exactly.

Nothing happened when she walked in, but her wand launching itself across the room after she cast that twitching spell didn't seem particularly optimistic.

"What's that mean?" Alfred asked, shuffling in to stand just inside the doorway. Hopefully the answer was relatively tame and not something like it means you've got magical Spanish flu now, because this place is super-cursed.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda watched in shock as her wand hit the wall and clattered to the floor. Her eyes stayed wide after, and she made no move to retrieve her wand - frozen.

"It means this is where the curse is thickest," she said, staring at her wand. "I don't - I don't know."

She wasn't a cursebreaker. She was an expert, but she was not a cursebreaker. And suddenly this seemed like it may be over her head - and even if it wasn't, it was going to be really fucking difficult to fix. And besides that - this curse had rooted itself in Alfred's bedroom. Zelda shivered.

She was worried for him.

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The following 1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post:1 user Likes Zelda Darrow's post
   Jupiter Smith

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AMAZING set by MJ

There was something the matter; that much was clear before she even answered. Alfred may not have spoken to Zelda in months, but he knew her, and he could read her body language — not that it was difficult to interpret the tension that kept her from moving any farther into the room. This had her spooked. If he was being honest, he wasn't particularly thrilled about the news himself. The last thing he wanted to do was to end up quarantined in a hospital bed while someone tried to get an ancient Pictish curse out of his system. It was bad enough having a cursed ship without having the effects leech into other aspects of his life, as well.

But at the moment, he reminded himself, there was no reason to suspect they had. He'd been here for two days with the cursed chest, yes, but that had been over a month ago, and he hadn't died (or had any sudden symptoms) yet. He'd been spending a significant portion of his days here for the rest of January, too, since the room they were standing in now served as his office when he was at sea, and he hadn't noticed anything amiss. Even now, aside from her wand, there wasn't anything wrong with the room; it was just his cabin, and he could no more be afraid of it than he could be afraid of his childhood bedroom.

Besides, only one of them could be scared at a time, he decided. If Zelda was worried — which she quite obviously seemed to be — then he was going to have to be brave.

Taking a small breath, Alfred strode forward into the room and plucked her wand up from the floor where it had fallen, then turned back to her. Taking a step towards her, he reached out to put the wand directly in her hand, which gave him a chance to touch her briefly but reassuringly. "I'm alright," he said, meeting her eyes.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

It was rare for Zelda to be so utterly at a loss when she was at work. She had seen dead bodies, broken spells, stopped buildings from tearing themselves apart, been thrown down the street by a troll - she was good at her job. But curses did not pull her wand out of her hand, curses did not seep into an entire boat - curses were not supposed to be this old, and this nasty.

What if she was too late to save him?

She didn't move, still stuck, while Alfred got her wand. Nor did she really move when he slid it back into her hand and his fingers grazed against her - she wanted to reach out and grab him. She wanted for things to be as they had been that afternoon she went to his flat - when he just held her, and for that moment Zelda had believed that things would be alright. It was really his eyes meeting hers that broke her from her shock; she had not actually looked him in the eyes the entire time they had been on the boat.

Zelda swallowed.

"I need - I need you to be alright," she said, and immediately wished that she had not, eyes widening again. If he didn't care about her anymore, if he was just doing this because he felt bad - then, well, she had just come up with another new way to embarrass herself. But his boat was extremely fucking cursed, and it was the truth.

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The following 2 users Like Zelda Darrow's post:2 users Like Zelda Darrow's post
   J. Alfred Darrow, Jupiter Smith

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred's stomach did a little flip, but he wasn't sure whether it was due to her words or the look in her eyes as she said them. He had an immediate instinct to reach out and hold her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close, but obviously he couldn't do that. Not with the way things stood between them, no matter what she'd said.

There was a part of him, small but distinct, that wanted to protest that this wasn't fair. Zelda couldn't just not return his letter and then be on his boat saying things like that, or looking at him that way. She was making it seem as though she cared, really cared, and that shouldn't be allowed, given the circumstances. A part of him wanted to tell her that: to point out that he was supposed to be halfway to India by now because she didn't care. He'd done his part. He tried and failed to get things moving forward between them, and then he'd waited and worked and put money away so that he could eventually convince her father to let him see her. He'd waited for her, and then she hadn't even returned his letter, and she didn't get to do this now, when he'd decided to move on and wasn't even supposed to be in England anymore.

He wasn't going to say any of that to her, though. Not when she looked so suddenly fragile.

"I'm alright," he assured her again, instead. "I'm going to be alright."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

What she could not tell him - both because she could not bear it and because she did not know how - was that he might not be. And if there was already some damage wrought upon him, then it was too late for her to help. Employees of Magical Accidents & Catastrophes did not prevent things from occurring, most of the time - they came in once the damage was already done, once the wreck was already in motion. If Alfred wasn't okay, and it seemed distinctly likely that he wasn't, then there was almost nothing she could do about it.

She couldn't fix him and she couldn't stop him from leaving, and she had thought that she was over it, but she wasn't. Zelda swallowed again as if it would clear the lump in her throat. She didn't know what to say, but knew that she ought to say something. She had never been good at silence, and now she was here in Alfred's cabin and the facts of the curse were combating with the fact that she missed him.

She slipped her wand into her pocket.

"I'm sorry - I just -" she did not know what to say. She didn't know how to fix any of this, she didn't know why Alfred didn't like her anymore, looking at him like this was overwhelming but she did not want to break away, either. "I didn't expect this." Not the extent of the curse, not the sight of him, certainly not that she would be standing in the same cabin where everything had changed. She didn't know how to pretend that none of it mattered to her.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred didn't know what she was referring to when she said she didn't expect this, but it had to have something to do with him. She'd been cool and collected out on the deck and in the cargo hold, so it wasn't as though the curse itself had her rattled — just the fact that it was here, and possibly affecting him.

"Hey, hey," he said with a somewhat hollow chuckle. "I haven't had anything strange happen to me yet, so don't go planning my funeral, or anything. Maybe it doesn't even affect people. Just chests and ships." He wanted to keep his tone light, but it was a bit challenging when what they were talking about was his possibly-impending doom.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda's lips twitched upwards wryly, in what may have been a smile if it had not faded so quickly. "You do have a tendency to - I don't know, skirt past utter disaster," she said. It wasn't that Alfred was accident-prone; it was that accidents and wreckage seemed to follow in his wake. A person could only be lucky so many times, though - and Zelda did not even know what this curse did yet, just that it was a curse and it was Pictish and therefor probably very bad.

Please, she thought, although she was not much the praying type. Please let him be alright.

She had spent a lot of time worrying about Alfred; she was not about to stop now.

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AMAZING set by MJ

She was joking, too, so this was progress. It might have still been a bit weak, but it was certainly an improvement on doom and gloom and those things she'd been saying that said very little but implied so much that made his chest sting.

"That's right," he said with a sad sort of smile. "I'm invincible, just about. But you're not," he pointed out. "So maybe we should get out of here. Just in case."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"Alright," Zelda said, making the same almost-smile expression a second time. "We should maybe um - talk about what this might mean, for the boat, too." That wasn't going to be an easy conversation, either - but at least if they left this room, she might feel a little less trapped. Zelda backed out towards the door, as if she wanted to keep an eye on the curse lest it nab her wand again.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Ugh. The boat. Alfred had been too busy convincing himself that he wasn't about to die a painful death to spare a thought for the poor Voyager, but it wasn't looking good. If the Ministry had wanted to quarantine the ship before they'd even been onboard to see it, and whatever had just happened had Zelda this shaken — well, he couldn't imagine he'd be getting anyone's blessing to sail to India any time soon, that was certain.

"Alright," he agreed, weariness creeping into his tone once again. "Let's go down to the pier."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER