May, 1891 — Hogwarts Coming Out Ball

Prior to arrival tonight Ezra had been involved in high-stakes negotiation with his mother. Dance with people, she had exhorted him initially, and had not been satisfied by his half-hearted response of oh, I'm sure I'll dance with someone. Someone (singular) was not people (plural), so there had been a bit of back and forth over what was the appropriate number of girls to dance with at a general debut. Ezra had made the mistake of saying well, it isn't as though I'm seriously looking for anyone in his defense. Well, why not? his mother wanted to know. It had been over a year since Miss Hunniford had called off their engagement. It wasn't as though she was dead, and even if she had been, he was long since passed the 'appropriate' grieving period for a relationship that had never even reached the stage of legal recognition.

You know why not, he shot back. His mother quirked an eyebrow at him, and he wasn't sure whether the curse had garbled his words somehow or whether she was only pretending they had, because she didn't want to engage in the conversation past that point. His mother stirred her tea and carried on as though he hadn't said anything, and Ezra had been left to stew in his thoughts, turning over the past again and again. He had done a lot of work lately to leave the fatalistic thinking behind, but even now he had trouble imagining he would ever fall in love again. If he hadn't gotten things to work with Rosalie, who had been his perfect complement in so many ways, who had seemed to understand him so well up until the moment when she could understand him no longer, what chance did he have of being happy with anyone else?

A minimum of three dances, they had decided — but five, his mother added in an inscrutable tone, was quite an achievable goal. Of course it wasn't the dances she cared about; they were only the most easily quantifiable metric of his having made an effort, and the effort involved in talking to people long enough to ask them to dance in the first place was precisely what he would have preferred to avoid. But he dreaded the upcoming review from his mother more than he dreaded conversation with nervous eighteen-year-olds, so he was soldiering through. He'd danced twice, and had avoided even coincidental eye contact with Rosalie Hunniford — which was quite a feat, since he had to make a concerted effort not to look her direction every two seconds since he'd noticed her at the ball. He was just starting a conversation with another young woman in white, who seemed to have dances to spare if the white space visible on the dance card dangling from her wrist was at all accurate — when he spotted Rosie moving towards him and his conversation partner, with some sense of purpose. She might have been going somewhere else, of course — there were plenty of people around, and the doors to the terrace were off to one side of them, so if she'd been in pursuit of air she might have been walking this way — but after the disaster he'd made of their last conversation he didn't think he wanted to risk it.

"Sorry, I think I need to step out," he told the young woman, cutting her off mid-sentence, which she (understandably) did not look particularly pleased by. "Perhaps our paths will cross again later in the evening, Miss — uh —" Had she told him her name? He couldn't remember — he just wanted to get out of there with his dignity intact.

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