Welcome to Charming, where swirling petticoats, the language of flowers, and old-fashioned duels are only the beginning of what is lying underneath…
After a magical attempt on her life in 1877, Queen Victoria launched a crusade against magic that, while tidied up by the Ministry of Magic, saw the Wizarding community exiled to Hogsmeade, previously little more than a crossroad near the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the years that have passed since, Hogsmeade has suffered plagues, fires, and Victorian hypocrisy but is still standing firm.
Thethe year is now 1895. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.
Complete five threads of five posts or more where your character experiences bad luck, such as stepping in a chamberpot, losing the rings for a wedding, etc...
Did You Know?
One of the cheapest homeless shelters in Victorian London charged four pennies to sleep in a coffin. Which was... still better than sleeping upright against a rope? — Jordan / Lynn
If he was being completely honest, the situation didn't look good, but Sylvano was not in the habit of being completely honest about anything. No reason to start now.
— Sylvano Capobiancoinyou & me & the war of the endtimes
Zelda reached up one of her hands to fidget with the end of her braid. "Anything," she said, after a beat, because the thing you're clearly mad at me about was a fairly provocative answer. She had not come to London today to fight with her husband, for all that it was starting to seem inevitable.
Anything, by which she presumably meant nothing. He had tried to talk to her and she wasn't interested in engaging. He'd asked questions and she'd changed the subject and sent him more toddler artwork. She'd ended three sequential sentences with exclamation marks and then underlined the word please when she asked him for a normal letter. She didn't actually want to talk, she just wanted him to get over it.
He shrugged at her. He didn't want to be the first person to broach the subject so that she could just tell him, again, that he was being alarmist and melodramatic. He also had little inclination to talk about anything else. Even if he was clearly disinterested in the conversation it felt like admitting defeat to sit here making small talk about the dog or jelly donuts and letting Zelda pretend everything was fine. "It's been a long day."
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Zelda's mouth twisted, frustration getting the better of her. She couldn't talk to him without him trying to talk back, and she was worried that anything she said would be like setting off a bombard spell in the middle of their conversation. She kept playing with the end of her braid. "Really?" she said, tone gentle for all that she was leaning in on that potential explosion. "Because it seems more that you just don't want to talk to me."
Alfred frowned at her. "I've been up since two hours before dawn," he said, which was true, and filled the air enough that he didn't feel conspicuous about not denying her assertion. She was right. He didn't want to talk to her. Not unless she was willing to actually talk to him instead of diverting to a safer topic while telling him he was overreacting.
He glanced at the glass in his hand and tried to calculate how much longer he could drag it out, if he took small sips. He hadn't poured much. He could, of course, always pour more... but that might be egregious enough to chase Zelda off the ship entirely, which he didn't think was his aim. He didn't really know exactly what his aim was right now, except to get her to stop pretending there was nothing to discuss.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
"So have I," Zelda said, before she could think any better of it. He hadn't said no, so she couldn't resist the urge to point out that she hadn't gotten much more sleep than he had. And even though the Voyager had more moving parts than baby Carina did, Zelda also felt confident that Alfred hadn't had to change any nappies before dawn.
"Then maybe the best use of our afternoon is for us both to have a nap," he snapped. He hadn't exactly meant to snap and he didn't care how long either of them had been awake. He certainly wasn't tired at the moment. None of this was getting them closer towards and sort of resolution. He was beginning to wish he'd had another day at sea — not because another day would have given him much more clarity on how to handle this conversation, but because if he'd returned on Monday there would have been the forcing function of her Ministry schedule to limit how long they could torment each other like this.
"If you don't have anything you want to talk about?" he continued, tone somewhere between leading and challenging.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Zelda blinked her astonishment; Alfred didn't usually snap at her. Of the two of them, she was often the one that had trouble holding her temper in check. A beat passed where she watched him, trying to keep her own temper, before she said, "Is this about Ari?" in a confused tone. She couldn't think of another reason that Alfred would be cross with her, but — she had spent some time being bamboozled by Alfred's reaction to Ari's care plan already.
The fact that she could use that tone when she said it made him feel as though he were the one heading for the madhouse. Of course it was about Ari, except that now it was also about everything. It was that he'd gone underway and the earth had shifted beneath them while he was gone, and now he didn't know what he was coming back to. A house collapsed? A crater dividing him from his loved ones? Irreparable damage, wounds that would never heal? The only thing he could be certain of was that his wife was determined to not talk about it, because she would rather discuss the menu at Hanukah and Orion's drawing of the dog.
If someone had asked him before he'd departed whether Zelda would consider shipping one of her siblings off to an institution, never to be heard from or seen in polite society again, he wouldn't just have said no. He would have been offended on her behalf, and on behalf of this whole stupid family that he had spent so long fighting to become a part of. They had made his life difficult for years because they wanted to protect Zelda — if someone had tried to convince him they were capable of this he would have taken it as an insult to their character or his intelligence or both.
His jaw had clenched at her question and he had the sense that if he pried it open now he could only possibly say something he would later regret. Did he need to say anything? Could Zelda's question possibly have been asked in good faith? She had not become so entirely removed from the person she had been three months ago that she didn't even realize there was something to talk about, surely. "Yes," he eventually ground out. "It's about Ari."
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Zelda blinked, still surprised by this — because Alfred was not known as an avid defender of Ari, because she had not anticipated Ari being the first thing they actually talked about today, because she did not understand why her husband seemed so convinced that someone had sent Ari away.
"I know you're concerned," Zelda said, speaking carefully and quietly, "But Ari's a healer. He wouldn't go somewhere that wasn't going to help him." Ari was a medical professional, and had been one for most of Zelda's life — surely if there were options that would have allowed him to stay at home, with Dionisia and Elliott, he would have taken them.
The fact that she had lowered her voice as though he were a wild animal who might be startled into violence was maddening. It nearly made him want to do something violent, too. Not directed at her, or at anyone, but it was as though she'd shrunk back and left a gap between them that was waiting to be filled with something explosive. A shattered glass or a book shoved off the desk and onto the floor. Something loud might at least provoke her into acknowledging that this was a large and thorny issue, rather than pretending to be befuddled when she mentioned Ari's name.
He squeezed the glass, making a vein stand out on the back of his hand, but didn't move otherwise. "We don't trust Ari to be with his family," he said, with the deliberate enunciation of someone illustrating a point they felt should have been obvious already. "But on this point we trust his judgement implicitly."
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Zelda's eyebrows narrowed; it felt like they were arguing past each other, because she did not understand the points that Alfred was trying to make. "I never said we don't trust him," she protested, "He was running a hospital department. He's not mad." Alfred kept trying to make this as if Ari was sick, as if they were shutting him away - the hospital he was at was his choice, and surely he would not have chosen it if he had other, better options.
He's not mad, she said, as though this had been Alfred's contention — as though he hadn't written that same thing already when she'd originally told him the news. He set his glass down heavily on the desk and shifted forward in his chair, feeling poised to explode. "You sent him to an institution."
Surely Zelda didn't need him to explain the disconnect between that fact and her assertion that Ari wasn't mad. She wasn't stupid, and he didn't think she was that naive. She had to know what institutions were for — and even if she somehow hadn't, he'd already explained in his first letter that no one ever left them. If she was still ignorant of the reality, it could only be willfully so.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Zelda's hand clapped down onto her lap, an exasperated motion. "Why are you acting like there's a conspiracy?" she said, because she did not understand why her husband was so willfully misunderstanding her about this — why he so wanted to believe the worst of her, and of her family.
She was talking fast, her own temper finally boiling over in the way that it often did — talking too much. "He told us he was going, that he had to go. And how would I ever have the authority to send him?"
She was younger; she wasn't a healer; she was a woman.
She was picking apart his phrasing in a way that missed the point, which Alfred could only assume meant she knew she had no defense against the underlying argument, on the merits. This was why she'd been so steadfastly avoiding the conversation. The best retort she had was that she had not been the singular person responsible for sending him, as though that was at all the point.
"This isn't what family does, Zelda," he shot back. "Don't you think it would have been easier for Evander to send me away when I came back from the expedition?" Merlin knew he would have had the grounds to do so, given the rumors about what had happened during the expedition. Alfred hadn't been in much of a position to defend his sanity for the first few months on returning, constantly shifting under the discomfort of a regular shirt. But being family meant taking care of one another, even when it wasn't the easy thing, even when you didn't want to, even when they didn't deserve it. He had expected Zelda — the woman he was building a family with — to understand that.
He stood up abruptly. The conversation felt unsustainable, and nevermind that they'd only actually started talking thirty seconds ago. He wanted out.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
This wasn't the same, and Zelda would have protested as much had Alfred not stood up. She mirrored him, and stood up, even though doing so had her feeling even more poorly-footed in this conversation than she had when she was sitting.
"I found him bleeding in our bathroom," Zelda said, unsure as to what she wanted to express but unable to articulate it otherwise.
That was an unexpected revelation, and in his current state of mind the most prominent thought he had in response was to wonder why she had kept that to herself until now. He had been writing to her, trying to understand what was happening and why anyone had agreed to this, and she had stubbornly refused to talk about anything other than the pictures of the dog. Bleeding in the bathroom. Alfred didn't know what to make of that. How it pertinent to the conversation at hand was also unclear to him. If it had been something strictly mundane, she wouldn't be bringing it up now — but if she thought Ari had — done something drastic in their bathroom, presumably in the house with their children only a few rooms over, then it was inconceivable that she wouldn't have said something about it, or done something about it prior to now. Alfred had never been in this sort of situation before — never anything even remotely like it — but he imagined if he were, he wouldn't have let his brother leave the room until they'd achieved some sort of closure on the subject.
"When?" he demanded.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
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