The cool air already did her a world of good – sort of? It certainly made her clearer headed, in how not-sober and dizzy she felt. It was like all the blood in her brain decided to rush to her face or jittery fingers or clumsy lead feet. Ballerinas don’t like lead feet, her mind nastily pointed out. Then a voice quite unlike her own, but certainly hers, quipped but that won’t matter, perhaps she’ll find it an endearing quality. And sure as the air felt cold, Ida got the sense that love will tell her what to say in the moment. It simply had to happen that way, because Ida was sure she would die with any other outcome. (Which was quite unlike her at all. Surely one can’t die from not professing their love, poets go on unrequited all the time. Besides that, her anaemic and generally bizarre conversational skills were quite irritating to her etiquette teacher.)

This is all really odd, wasn’t it. That she felt so out of sorts after only one drink, with all kinds of odd ideas planted in her brain. Well, one and a little-more-than-half drinks. Now speaking of, where had her gin drink gone? Oh, her left hand. Goodness gracious, maybe that was enough to drink for now. Because now she awkwardly had a drink in one hand and a cigarette case in the other; had she been in private she would’ve just nosed her way into her case and grabbed a cigarette by her teeth like a niffler finds shiny things or drained her drink like medicine. Fortunately, she had enough wits left to know this boorish display would be bad for Misters of any kind to observe. So Ida set her drink aside on the railing like one sets aside a scalding kettle.

Because she was feeling unbearably self-conscious now, Ida let a sheath of her dark hair hide her face as she procured two cigarettes. The first she passed to Mister Greengrass without really looking at him, and the second she put between her lips and lit it with a practiced swish of her wand. She didn’t notice what Mister Greengrass did, turning her eyes instead to the gardens ahead of them. Which looked… ostentatious, like everything else on this estate. Then Mister Greengrass was talking again, and Ida was too distracted to really clock what he said, not until a full seven seconds after she nodded along politely.

“...Well,” she stilted, a bit aghast. Drat it all to fucking hell had he been flirting the entire time? Wait. Or was this… like an odd big brother joke that digs at her? Trained enough in the latter to not feed into it, she took a puff of her cigarette before she clarified, “That's comparing apples and oranges. It is not a very high bar to be prettier than a spirit of chaos and destruction.”

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