Nov 25th, 1891 — Tycho's House, Wellingtonshire

Macnair was taking a long time to end things. Ford wasn't sure how he felt about it. Partly he was inclined to treat the extra time like a gift. Merlin knew that he had enough on his plate at the moment, with Verity's upcoming wedding, without having to languish in the same aimless despair he'd been experiencing the last time they'd separated. On the other hand, it was hard to take as much comfort in the other man's company as he had earlier this fall, knowing that the end was nigh. Every moment he spent with Macnair was now laced with an underlying anxiety: was this going to be the day that he finally broke things off? Was that particular heavy sigh going to be the heavy sigh at the start of a conversation neither of them wanted to have?

Occasionally he'd thought about pulling the trigger on it himself. Would it be better to end things on his own terms, rather than keep getting wrapped up in it? He was too much of a coward to follow through with it, though — and besides, how much deeper could he get? Ford had already told Macnair he loved him.

(He regretted doing that now).

"Have you ever been to the Chisselfield Horse Races?" he asked Tycho in a tone that sounded almost bored. He was lounging in Tycho's parlor avoiding going home, because when he did there would only be more wedding planning to greet him. "I'm supposed to go with a friend tomorrow. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do." The 'friend' being Macnair, who had sent along the invitation. He was making good on his earlier promise of wanting to take Ford places and show him things... maybe trying to tick off all the boxes on things he'd earlier promised before calling things off. Was this relationship going to end in the middle of a horse race? There was something rather depressing about that.

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Tycho Dodonus Clarissa Cosgrove

  

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Set by Lady!

Tycho was gradually settling back into his usual routine after the death of his father. Miss Greengrass had also been returned which had been a relief. Granted, he did not know the woman personally but his friend had been in a great deal of distress. Besides, he wasn't a monster. He would hope nothing bad happened to anyone. Still, he was more easily distracted than usual though only Williams had noticed thus far. He also found that he was weirdly relieved when Ford didn't ask about Cleon. He was not sure what he could have said about him.

"A horse race? How fun!" Tycho said, almost absent-mindedly as he set up a canvas. Attending the portrait gallery had put him in such a mood to paint. Whether or not he was good at it, he would find out during the process. "You put money on horses if you wish and then watch a bunch of men on horses race in a circuit."

He honestly wasn't sure if there was more to it than that. At least, there had not been for him who was usually flirting with someone in his box. "I ought to take you somewhere," he said without really thinking on it as he mixed his paints together. "I have an extra couple of tickets to the new Gallerys ball but I cannot go. I did attend the lectures and showing the other day though." 

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   Fortitude Greengrass

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Ford surveyed the ceiling glumly at Tycho's description of the event. It didn't sound particularly appealing for someone without any spare money to spend. He did understand horse races as a concept, he just didn't see the appeal. Maybe if he had extra galleons to part with at will, or if he cared about horses beyond the very basics of being able to ride one around the park, or if he'd had any tendencies towards athleticism. None of those things were true, though, so it seemed there wouldn't be much to hold his interest — or, more to the point, there wouldn't be much to distract him from the possibility that Macnair was sitting a few feet away just trying to find the right words to finally call things off.

He perked up at the suggestion that Tycho ought to take him somewhere — not just metaphorically, but physically: he had been laying back on one of the sofas and now climbed into a sitting position so that he could peer over the top of the furniture at Tycho, with one eyebrow raised. "If you can't go, you could hardly take me, could you?" he pointed out. Not that he was particularly dying to go to yet another ballroom dance, whether it had interesting artwork or not, but now that his friend that brought up the prospect he was curious if he'd had anything else in mind.

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Set by Lady!

Ford didn't sound particularly enthused about this planned outting that he had with a friend. He had some curiosity surrounding who this person was and whether he also knew them. However, something kept him from being his usual forward self and simply asking who this person was. Besides, Ford had friends besides him just as he had friends besides Ford.

"You don't seem particularly interested in going to a horse race," Tycho commented idly as he set his mixed paints to the side and took up one of his brushes. "Not to the ball specifically, no, but we could still go and badger portraits together." He smeared purple paint onto his canvas as he thought on things more. "I could take you to the theatre. My family has a box there. Have you ever watched ballet? Or opera? What things do you like to do that I don't already know about?" Genuinely interested in the answer, he stopped his fiddling with being a painter and looked over at the other man.

  

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Going to an art gallery to badger portraits was a novel idea. Ford could have protested that generally he liked portraits, but he wasn't sure that was entirely true. During his early Hogwarts years he'd gotten a bit of a reputation for being the sort of boy who talked to the castle ghosts and paintings more often than he talked to other children, but that didn't mean he'd continue to get on with them outside of Hogwarts. One of the things he'd liked so much about the paintings at Hogwarts was that they seemed to know so much; every conversation with them was an outpouring of wisdom, invaluable to an eleven-year-old trying to find his way in a strange new world. Portraits outside of the Hogwarts Castle wouldn't necessarily have that same knowledge. Saying he liked portraits was probably as broad as saying he liked ghosts, or that he liked people. There were certainly some that he liked, but maybe some deserved to be badgered a bit. Besides, badgering was very much in character for Tycho; he badgered people even when he liked them.

The conversation seemed to be turning without his having to say anything about cajoling portraits, anyway; Tycho was asking him about ballets and operas now. Ford had been to operas before, but he hadn't particularly enjoyed the ones he'd seen. What did Ford like to do? He had been captivated by the Sonata in the spring — but that didn't feel like the sort of thing one could casually bring up to a friend, so he didn't mention it. Instead, he laid back down on the sofa and let out a melodramatic sigh. "I don't know. I don't get to do anything except chaperone my sisters around."

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Set by Lady!

Tycho chuckled in response to his friends melodramatic sigh. He set aside his painting for now and wiped his hands as he stood up to go over to the other man. He leaned over the back of the sofa so that he was looking down at the other man. "Then we'll just have to find out what things you might like, won't we? We know you like tinkering with things just as I do," he pointed out. Though that was hardly something they could go out and do somewhere. Well, actually he supposed they could but he had nothing that fit the bill among his projects.

"As lovely as your sisters are, I don't think it would be much of a fun outing for us both if I were to join you in chaperoning them around." Not to mention, he would probably just give them a reputation for hanging around weird Seers. He knew his own reputation was a bit that of an eccentric.

  

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"Oh, that's fair," Ford admitted in response to Tycho's comment about tinkering. He'd neglected to think about anything he currently did when contemplating the possible answers to Tycho's question of what he would like to do. Why was that? The general dreariness he felt about his relationship with Macnair seemed to be seeping into all of the other aspects of his life, coloring them with grey. At the beginning of the summer he'd been quite thrilled by the prospect of spending the occasional evening helping Tycho come up with new tricks for his seance show, but by now some of the luster and newness had worn off; it had ceased to be excited and just become something he did, and now when he was feeling otherwise glum it hardly even registered.

"I think part of the problem is whenever I'm not with them I feel a little guilty about it," he admitted. The tinge of guilt he felt at excluding his sisters from a potential social event had been bearable when he was at the height of things with Macnair. Leaving his sisters in the lurch for an evening in order to feel wildly happy and in love was one thing; abandoning them for a mediocre evening where he constantly worried about a looming awkward conversation was something else. "Maybe that will get a little better when Verity's married, but I don't know. Clementine is going to come out this year. And Grace is —" he drifted off, unable to say anything particularly charitable about her marriage prospects but also unwilling to malign her.

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Set by Lady!

"You're entitled to your own life but hey. What do I know? I'm an only child. And now a patriarch, technically," Tycho said, thinking about that fact for a moment. With his father passed on, he was now 'head' of the family. That was so weird to him considering how young he still was. "But if you're not enjoying life, how are they meant to realize that they can, too?" Not that anyone in the Dodonus family was enjoying life very much at the moment but Tycho still found his ways even now, he was finding.

"Tis a shame that I would make for a very poor brother in law, probably," Tycho said jokingly when Ford spoke about his sisters. The idea of marrying one of Ford's sisters felt off in a way he couldn't quite explain. Some reason that had nothing to do with the fact that he was only twenty two or that he had poetic notions of marrying either for love or not at all. "Before you bore the cross of 'head of the Greengrass family', what did you do with your time?" He doubted Ford had spent his teenhood being a shepherd of sisters.

  

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Ford wasn't at all sure about this notion that in order to lead happy and successful lives, his sisters first needed to see him doing the same. Maybe that held some merit for parents, because children had no urgency to their futures. They could afford to take things in at leisure. The girls, Ford hoped, were rather past that stage; they'd already learned anything they were going to learn by example, and now what most needed to happen in order to ensure their future happiness was that the looming deadline of spinsterhood needed to be avoided.

"You're too young for them, anyway," Ford responded, deciding to avoid the first topic altogether. This was easier to dismiss out of hand, and less likely to poke at any nerves for either of them, because of course it was ridiculous to imagine Tycho with any of Ford's sisters. It wasn't actually that he was too young, or at least not entirely. He was Noble's age, which was a respectable enough age difference for Clementine. The idea of Clementine even talking to Tycho made Ford want to laugh, though; he couldn't imagine them doing anything more than talking. "But it's not that you'd make a poor brother-in-law, only a poor husband. Merlin knows you'd be better than Swann," Ford said with a shrug. He had nothing against Swann; or at least, nothing specific. He had a vague sense of unease about this whole thing, and the suspicion that Swann was either sinister or stupid or maybe both. In any case, Ford was hardly hanging around Everett Swann's parlor while he lazily painted in the corner, so.

He took a deep breath and consider Tycho's question. Before I was head of the Greengrass family, I had money. That probably wasn't exactly true, but at least he'd never known he was penniless before, and that made a world of difference in how one spent leisure time. He couldn't go gallivanting around taking weekend trips to random parts of the English countryside and buy himself new poetry books and go see a play on a whim now. Not without the guilt eating him alive first, anyway.

"I don't remember," he lied, and covered his eyes with one arm.

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Set by Lady!

Tycho chuckled as Ford pointed out that he was too young for his sisters. He honestly had no idea how old they were. He was more familiar with Noble Greengrass due to their shared proximity in school and continued friendly acquaintanceship than he was with the Greengrass girls.

"Not connecting well with your sisters beau?" He asked sympathetically. Thank goodness he had no sisters. He had no idea what he would do if he had to think about the things Ford had to think about.

Coming closer to Ford, he tickled his arm a bit before plopping down beside him. "Well. As it stands, you can always come here to escape it all for a bit. Even if it's just to rant about Swann. And while you're here maybe you can dabble in the sort of hobbies one does at home." To illustrate his point as well as to try and distract Ford from his melancholy, he dabbed a bit of paint on the mans cheek.

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   Fortitude Greengrass

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Ford wasn't aware that Dodonus was moving until he tickled his arm, at which point Ford reflexively tucked it back down by his side and used his other arm to shield his chest from further attack. By that point Tycho was sitting on the sofa just inches away. Ford had to crane his neck to look up at him because of the angle. He had an impulse to scoot up a bit and lay his head in Tycho's lap.

He must be missing Macnair more than he'd realized, because this was new. Ford and Tycho were friends, but they were not the sort of friends who cuddled on the couch on a casual Thursday afternoon.

Fortunately before he could think too hard about it Tycho interrupted his train of thought by dabbing paint on his cheek. "Stop that," he said with a laugh, reaching up to try and rub it off and only succeeding in rubbing color all over his cheek and hand. "You'll ruin my suit."

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Set by Lady!

At least his distraction seemed to have worked. Ford was now more focused on his suit at the moment than the other things that he had been fretting about. He laughed as Ford just managed to rub color all over his cheek and hand. "A well brewed cleansing potion would fix it right up," he teased as he set the brush to the side. "I take it being a model for body painting is one hobby we can cross of the list. Though one of these days, I want to roll around in paint and then the canvas. Just to see what the outcome might be."

  

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"Probably a resignation notice from your housekeeper," Ford joked, pulling himself up to sit so that he could try and clean off his cheek more effectively. On the other hand, any housekeeper who had put up with Tycho's antics for this long might not be phased by a room with paint splashed around the floors and a body-printed canvas in the middle. "Is body painting a real thing?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. It seemed rather ridiculous to him, but knowing Tycho as he did Ford thought it was equally likely that he would have made it up, or that he'd come across some obscure hobby from a far-flung country and decided to become passionately involved in it.

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Set by Lady!

"It must be," Tycho said. "It certainly will be once I have done so at least." After all, all great things once started from nothing. All inventions were once nothing more than the whim of some person in the world. "Everything worth doing was once nothing more than the idea in someones mind." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief that he offered to Ford to help clean off his cheek.

  

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Ford should have been used to comments like that by now, but he wasn't. He was still periodically struck by how different the pair of them were when it came to things like this. Tycho was never afraid to be the first to do something, and never spared a second thought for what people might think. Was that a freedom afforded by being rich and living alone, or was it something else? Maybe Dodonus was half Gryffindor, deep down?

"Yeah, but so was everything that ever led to someone's untimely death," Ford pointed out as he accepted the handkerchief and rubbed at his cheek. It took a second to realize this probably hadn't been the best joke, given that Tycho was still in mourning for his father.

"But, I mean," he fumbled. "Paint isn't life-threatening at least, so there's that."

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Set by Lady!

Tycho was silent for a moment, briefly in agreement as he thought of his late father. Who would be alive if he had decided to not go to the Sanditon. Or had been in a different area when the disaster hit. But there was no changing the past so best not to dwell on it. Sadness did not suit Tycho and the brief appearance of it flickered into his usual look of mischief. "If I lived my life worrying that my next adventure could be my last, I would not be Tycho Dodonus. But don't worry, I plan to live a very long time. It is my aspiration to grow to be a wizard with a long white beard and staff just like Merlin."

  

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