28 May, 1895 — Hogwarts Corridors, during the Coming Out Ball

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Content WarningVomit, allusions to drug use

Don Juan had left the Great Hall in search of a lavatory, but it had been too many years (full of too many substances that eroded his memory) for him to have any sense of where he might find one. He ought to have gone towards the patio instead; at least then he could be reasonably assured of a bush. Instead he had eventually decided on a white marble statue as the best location available to him. It was sat back in a recess in the hallway wall, which meant he could tuck his head into the dark alcove before he lost the contents of his stomach. He hadn't been feeling nauseated an hour ago, or even twenty minutes ago, but judging solely on the speed and forcefulness of his retching one might have suspected he was on his deathbed. This was the way that the magic from New Year's worked, coming on suddenly after he'd ingested something and getting it out of his system — but it didn't make sense, because he hadn't tried to take anything. He hadn't even been offered any. People did not exchange drugs at the annual Hogwarts Coming Out Ball. He'd had a few cocktails and done a few dances, but that was it.

(Unless it had something to do with Griffith. He was here; he worked here. Thinking about the fact that he was here had almost been enough to keep Don Juan from coming, but he didn't get enough invitations that he could turn many down without arousing suspicion. His parents had been taking a more keen interest in his behavior, with the trial over custody of Kaatjie upcoming; the last thing he needed was for his mother to ask him why he was avoiding someone.)

He finished vomiting and panted to catch his breath. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand with a grimace. The statue he'd picked was a nymph, he thought. Some kind of magical humanoid creature, with feminine features. "Sorry about your skirt," he muttered. The statue was, mercifully, still. It would have been especially mortifying to have vomited on something that was enchanted to react.

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Johanna Applegate

  

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MJ made this <3

The Coming Out Ball was hard, not because of the curse, but because she was old. (The curse did not necessarily help.) The new debutantes looked young and fresh, and Hanna was very aware of a line that had appeared on her forehead since the last Coming Out Ball. Maybe Ezra had not cut off her seasons, but the rest of society would soon.

So she went to take a walk. It was bad to skip a dance during the season, but she needed a little break if she was going to really fight for her future marriage, and she still knew the Hogwarts hallways well.

The sound of vomiting stopped her in the hall, and Hanna pressed her lips together. She didn't recognize him until she came a few paces closer, and then — Dempsey. Hanna hadn't been near him since the time at Hudson's house; it seemed vaguely dangerous for both of them, for many reasons.

"Do you want a water?" Hanna asked, because she couldn't help herself. He'd been kind to her once. They spent a lot of secret time with the same person. She could get him a water, since she was here.

  

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set by Bee

Don Juan startled at the voice. He'd been eyeing the edge of the slick pile behind the statue and trying to determine whether it would stay put after he left or ooze out across the corridor to become a slipping hazard. He hadn't been aware enough of his surroundings to realize someone had approached. The woman looked vaguely familiar, but it took him a second to come up with a name. Applegate. She'd dropped a glass on his feet at the Ministry Ball last December. And maybe he knew her from somewhere else — there was something nagging vaguely at him about her features, or her eyes — but he couldn't determine where.

"No," he said honestly. His stomach was still roiling distantly and he worried if he added anything at all it might revolt again. He might have taken some water just to rinse the taste out of his mouth, but there was nowhere to spit... and he didn't want to spit on the corridor floor in front of a young woman, even if she'd just watched him vomit. "I just needed a second."

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MJ made this <3

Hanna tapped her fingers against her hip, the layers of fancy cloth over it. She wasn't sure she believed him. But she also hadn't really wanted to go back and get the water, so she didn't want to push it. Hanna thought, though, that she owed him — not for Dean, but for how kind he'd been in December.

"I can vanish the sick," she said, "If you'd like."

  

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set by Bee

That he could certainly use help with. Leaving it in the hallway was a terrible idea, when it could be found not just by the partygoers but also by unfortunate schoolchildren the following morning, but he didn't think he was up for magic just yet. His wand had been finicky since he'd abandoned it for a week at the house party he'd fled — still pouting, presumably — and his stomach hadn't settled enough that he wanted to contend with it.

"That would be excellent," he agreed with a grimace. He stepped back from the statue of the nymph to clear the way for her and leaned against the wall. He still felt nauseous, and very conspicuous about it. "Something I ate, maybe," he mumbled, though she hadn't asked for an explanation. Not that he expected her to believe it — he didn't believe it himself — but it felt like the sort of situation in which it was rude not to offer at least some polite diversion from whatever she was probably assuming.

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MJ made this <3

Hanna walked up to join Dempsey by the statue, trying very hard to avoid wrinkling her nose at the smell of sick. "Evanesco," Hanna said carefully, watching as Dempsey's vomit disappeared into the ether of wizard-space. She glanced over at him. They had a strange thing in common, but there was no way to openly discuss it.

"What did you eat?" she asked, tone mild, "I'd like to avoid it."

  

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set by Bee

Don Juan shuffled back a step as she approached and pointedly looked elsewhere while she cast, again because it seemed like the polite thing to do in this situation. She seemed to have no interest in pretending politeness, though; when he glanced back in her direction she was looking at him, and then she called his bluff on the thin lie that it was something he ate. He was once again struck by the impression that her features were more familiar than they should have been, especially now that she was closer.

"Nothing," he admitted with a hapless shrug, as if to say you caught me. "Not a bite to eat since breakfast." He didn't know what to attribute this sudden illness to, really. It couldn't have been mundane, but he hadn't had anything that would have triggered the magic from New Year's. Unless he'd somehow taken something without realizing it? Was it possible the punch was spiked?

He looked from the floor where the sick had been back up to her, trying to formulate a question about whether she was feeling not-herself in any respect since arrival that wouldn't sound terribly invasive — and then he finally connected the dots on why she felt familiar.

"You're Hanna," he said, too surprised by the realization to keep it to himself.

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MJ made this <3

If he had not eaten anything since breakfast, then why had he said it was something he ate? Hanna frowned, just slightly and mostly visible in the lower lip — now that the sick was vanished, maybe she ought to let Mr. Dempsey go back to himself.

She blinked. Thank Merlin that no one else was nearby to hear him use the familiar nickname!

"Yes," she replied, in a tone that made it clear that she had recognized him for several minutes now, "And you're Mr. Dempsey."

  

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set by Bee

He didn't like being on the backfoot here, and he felt very certain that she was not having any late-breaking realizations like he was. Of course not — he had been dressed when they had met in Hudson's parlor, and hadn't been wearing his hair differently, and hadn't only been addressed by a too-familiar nickname. She had every advantage on him when it came to recognition, even if she and Hudson had never had another conversation about the matter, but of course they had. He hadn't asked Dean with any degree of specificity what precisely he had shared; it felt too invasive, like he was trying to peer into their private conversations, even if those conversations happened to be at least partially about him. He felt entirely conspicuous now, knowing essentially nothing about her — nothing except the most damning thing — while entirely unaware of what she knew about him.

If she knew a particular combination of things, this little scene that she had stumbled upon could look very bad. He glanced at the base of the statue where the vomit had disappeared from. "Could you —" he began delicately, "— please not mention this to him?"

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MJ made this <3

Hanna blinked again, feeling owlish. There was some new tension in the air, and she was not sure why. She had clearly missed something. She thought she could figure it out. "Why-ever would I talk to him about it?" she said, tone mild but curious.

  

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set by Bee

The flatness of her tone made the question feel like a trap, but if it was he couldn't guess her endgame. At least she hadn't pretended not to know who Don Juan meant by him... but that meant she wasn't trying to hedge so carefully that someone overhearing them would suspect her entirely innocent of whatever he was talking about. Her question wasn't a performative one for some potential hidden audience, then. It was for him. Was it designed to trick him into over-explaining?

"I don't know," he hedged. He shifted his weight and slid one hand to his opposite arm, ruffling his sleeve. "I don't know what you two talk about."

After he said it he wondered if maybe this hadn't been the trap, and he hadn't wandered directly into it. It placed her in the advantage once again. Through mere silence she might imply that she did know what the two men talked about, that Dean told her quite a bit where he told Don Juan nearly nothing. Was that the game, positioning herself as the closer partner of the pair of them? Don Juan would be hard-pressed to belief it, given his history with Dean... but he didn't really know Hanna's history with Dean, because he hadn't asked, so how could he compare? Perhaps they had been bosom companions from the very moment that Don Juan had walked out of Hudson's house in 1893. When he had discussed this with Hudson back in January, Hudson had volunteered to break things off with Hanna if Don Juan requested it — but that might have been a bluff, or maybe she didn't know that. If she didn't know, Don Juan certainly wasn't going to tell her... but he wished he knew what her game was.

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MJ made this <3

His reply didn't make sense to her. Hanna reached up an smoothed the hair that was tucked behind her ears, because she wanted to tilt her head at him but had been told that tilting her head was alarming behavior in an otherwise normal conversation. (This was not at all a normal conversation. It was the done thing to pretend, though.)

"I shouldn't scare you," she said in that same tone, with a shrug of her shoulders, "I'm a nobody." (Shrugging was unladylike, but he' already seen her in much less ladylike situations.)

She also did not think it was particularly notable for him to get sick for no reason, unless he was often sick, in which case — perhaps Dean would worry?

  

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set by Bee

He had evidently surprised her, and her response surprised him in turn. Maybe she wouldn't have been an especially credible source if she had come out and accused him of something in wider society — he presumed that was what she meant by a nobody — but also that wasn't at all what he was talking about. His reputation spoke to how little he cared about what society said about him, anyway. He did care what Dean thought... especially about this.

"Not to him," he returned, quiet enough that his voice wouldn't carry down the hall.

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MJ made this <3

Hanna's brow furrowed. "If I told him you were sick," she said, matching the quiet of his tone, "He'd run to you in a second."

She had evidence of that, the risk of being dropped at a moment's crisis, from January — it had been made abundantly clear, and she thought she would have known by now if Dean and Dempsey had had some falling out.

  

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set by Bee

"I'm not sick," he insisted immediately. She may have already said she had no intention to talk to Dean about it, but this last comment had him panicky again about the idea that she might. Or maybe not, if she thought Dean would drop everything to rush to his side; maybe that was why she'd said she wouldn't bring it up in the first place, because she didn't stand to gain anything from driving Dean towards him. She was probably right, too. If Dean thought he was using again, or trying to — especially so brazenly as at a public party, and getting caught at it — he would be alarmed enough that he would want to talk about it right away. That wasn't a conversation Don Juan wanted to have. It couldn't possibly end well for him, because he couldn't prove that he hadn't taken anything. He'd only have his word to offer, and that was worthless when it came to this. He'd lied to Dean too many times before.

He swallowed. "Whatever that was, it's over now. I'm not sick."

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MJ made this <3

Hanna wrinkled her nose at him, still sure that something was going on but unable to decipher it. He was talking about his illness the way that Hanna sometimes talked about the symptoms of her curse.

She widened her eyes. "Sometimes odd things just happen to people," Hanna said, her tone blithe rather than curious for the first time in a few moments. But she was curious — maybe Don Juan Dempsey was like her, if not in a blood curse then in some other indecipherable way that led to the pair of them being unable to explain themselves.

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   Don Juan Dempsey

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set by Bee