Salt drips from her brow
No more days without
Makes me feel so right
I can do no wrong
We'll keep going strong
June 26th, 1890 — Ballroom, this event
Alfred thought he might die before the evening was over, and not from happiness. The curse that had hovered over his head for most of spring may have been contained and neutralized, but tonight he was pursued by a very different sort of danger, and one that felt far more real. He just had to keep telling himself that this party wouldn't last, and once it was over, things would be better. That was the whole point, after all. He was getting what he'd wanted for the past year and change. After tonight, he'd be publicly courting Zelda, and able to spend (chaperoned) time with her in public without having to worry about ruining her reputation or running afoul of her family.
Except that he'd already run afoul of her family, and the events of tonight were not likely to ingratiate him to any of them. He'd been counting the number of Fisks in attendance since he'd arrived, and now he felt like he was constantly aware of them even when he was doing his best not to track them through the ballroom. Of course, them being there was sort of the point — Alfred and Zelda needed people to recognize that they were courting in a venue that no one from the family could readily dispute in order to have any hope of success here — but it did seem as though it increased the risk, too. Any one of them could have decided to make a scene at any moment, and what would he and Zelda do then?
So far, Zelda had done most of the work when it came to disseminating the news; from arrival, she had been flitting about from acquaintance to acquaintance letting them know that he was accompanying her tonight, which conveyed the degree of formality they were going for without being, at least in his opinion, technically a lie. Alfred ought to have been doing that, too, but the idea of trying to strike up a conversation with someone he didn't know well and then somehow direct it towards the subject of his love life was... mortifying, to say the least. Besides, this was a Ministry party, with Ministry guests — it wasn't like he actually even knew that many people here, except as distant connections through old school friends. So mostly he'd just stood around feeling awkward and drinking, until it was time to start dancing.
They'd agreed to dance together a rather absurd amount of times that evening. It would be noticeable to anyone who was paying attention, whether they'd heard Zelda's news through the grapevine or not, and the rumor mill would handle the rest after the event had concluded. It was all simple in theory. They'd done two dances together already, and Alfred had just focused on his footwork and tried to push his anxiety that this was all going to crash and burn before the night was over to the side. It wasn't like there was an option for them to back out, now — in for a penny, in for a pound, as the Muggles said.
"Do you think any of your family have heard yet?" he asked Zelda just as the dance was finishing, with unconcealed anxiety in his tone.
(OOC: @"Zelda Fisk"; open to anyone who might be at this party; invitational Konstantin Fisk Roslyn Ross Evander Darrow)
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER