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.
With the same account, complete eight different threads where your character interacts with eight different usergroups. At least one must be a non-human, and one a student.
Did You Know?
Braces, or suspenders, were almost universally worn due to the high cut of men's trousers. Belts did not become common until the 1920s. — MJ
Did her head hurt, or was she just frustrated? It had taken her the rest of the day, closed in her office and working through her paperwork, to decide that it was the former. She took the floo home instead of apparating, only to find that her husband and son were off on some adventure. She made an effort to water the tomatoes with Carina, but her daughter's happy babbling was digging deeper into her brain, and after the plants were set Zelda sent her back to the care of the nanny.
She asked the cook to push dinner back an hour, because mostly she did not want to have dinner and Alfred was not home to ask about it. Maybe by the time eight o'clock rolled around and both their children were long in bed, she would start to feel differently.
She didn't know what to do, was the thing. She was not entirely sure what she had revealed, in the thick of her own thoughts, even though stubbornness had been her main motivator in going through with it — should she talk to her father about it? Should she tell Ari? All of it felt like it would be overkill, but — there was so much chance.
Finally, exasperated by her own thinking, she asked the housekeeper to draw a bath. Zelda sank into it. By the time she heard the distant sounds of someone struggling with bedtime, half an hour had passed, she'd used her wand to reheat the water, and she was fervently scrubbing at her arms.
When Alfred and Orion returned from their adventure they were late for dinner and Orion was over-tired, and it was with a sympathetic wince that Alfred handed him over to the nurse. Actually it would have been more precise to say Orion was late for dinner; Alfred had either missed it entirely or Zelda had pushed it back. It took him nearly fifteen minutes to discover which it was, with the nurse embroiled in a battle against the toddlers and Zelda having disappeared somewhere or other. There was food in the kitchen, and it looked to not have been served yet, but if the housekeeper was sticking around to serve it later she was nowhere to be found at the moment. He stood in the kitchen for a moment, hemming and hawing over the idea of making himself a plate and eating it alone. What eventually prevented him was mostly that it seemed a difficult decision to defend, or to walk back; a degree of finality they'd been dancing around and avoiding for months.
So he went upstairs. He took his boots off first, because otherwise he would inevitably have trudged. He poked his head tentatively into the bedroom, the dressing room, and even the closet before it occurred to him to check the bath.
There she was. He didn't say anything, but raised an eyebrow inquisitively from where he'd stopped just inside the doorway. He felt (absurdly, perhaps) as though he was trespassing, even though he hadn't crossed the threshold into the room.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
And there was her husband in the doorway, raising an eyebrow at her. Zelda had been annoyed with him earlier, when he wasn't here, but now she found herself stopping her scrubbing and sinking into the bathtub until the water came up to her collarbones. "I'm not feeling well," she managed, and her voice sounded slightly raspy to her own ears — not because she'd been talking, but because it was swollen with either nerves or emotional tension.
If he'd felt like he was trespassing before, the fact that she suddenly stopped what she was doing and sank into the water only amplified the feeling. She didn't look well. Or rather she looked physically fine, at least at first glance, and that made the entire thing stranger. This was unusual behavior for her, delaying dinner and taking an early bath. Her voice sounded different and he couldn't tell if it was because she was angry with him and trying to tamp it down or whether she'd been crying and didn't want to show it or something else entirely. Whatever was going on here was strange.
She had retreated down into the water, pulling away from him.
She could have locked the bathroom door and she hadn't.
One day she had found her brother bleeding in their bathroom and had described it as acting strange, and now he was gone.
"Okay," he said. He took a step back and shut the door gently between them. Five minutes later he opened it again, carrying a peace offering of hot tea mixed with brandy.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
For the five minutes that Alfred was gone, Zelda stayed sunk in the bathtub with her eyes squeezed shut, trying to tamp down the feeling of exasperation that swelled up in her. Sometimes it seemed to her that her husband was always leaving — on adventures with Orion, turning over in their bed as if there was a wall between them, going on long trips on the Voyager. She shouldn't be surprised that he left her now, when she could not sort out what to do next, and was not sure how to describe what had happened.
When he came back, when the door opened, she was surprised. Zelda moved upwards in the bath, effectively un-sinking herself. The air smelled like tea and a little bit like brandy, and a small smile came onto her face. "Oh," she said, still in that rasping tone, "Thank you."
Alfred bit his lip as he handed the mug to her, unsure how to respond to the thanks. In one respect it seemed like the absolute least he could do, and still entirely insufficient. On the other hand it had been the only thing he could think to do. He didn't have words to ask anything that was on his mind. Not when he'd first found her this way, and not now that he'd had five minutes to think it through.
"Yeah. 'Course," he mumbled, then moved rather awkwardly to sit on the floor next to the bath.
(He'd looked down just for a second before he moved to sit. Not at her, but at the water. Checking for any sign of blood. Not that he thought Zelda would, but once the parallel had occurred to him it was impossible to shake without at least a glance.)
He pulled his legs up loosely in front of him and rested one elbow on his knee. He let out a heavy breath. He should have been relieved, but it still seemed they were in the thick of things.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Zelda grasped the tea and inhaled, closing her eyes for the familiar jolt of her English breakfast blend and the bitter fruitiness of brandy. She took a lingering sip of the tea, hoping for the same warming effect she was trying to get from her bath. She kept her eyes closed and tried to find the words for the feeling in her brain, or to describe the interview, or to ask what she ought to do next.
There was ostensibly nothing to be afraid of, but Alfred thought he knew what she meant. He didn't feel fear, exactly, but trepidation. This moment felt like a precipice. She had canceled dinner in order to skulk in the bath. Something was happening — maybe had even been happening for a while beneath the surface and this was the culminating event. Whatever it was, cresting this peak meant they would be on the other side of it, in the uncharted territory of strange lands. And he was on uncertain footing here; one wrong step could start a rockslide and irrevocably change the landscape of whatever was to come.
He thought for a long moment about the possibility of holding her hand. It would have been awkward to do, given the edge of the tub between them and the angle of their bodies and the mug of tea she was holding. Maybe if things had been warmer between them at the moment none of those things would have mattered, but right now it felt like the very act of offering his hand meant something, and doing it in spite of obstacles meant something more. There was a danger of doing too much in a situation like this, like stepping too confidently out onto ice that might crack.
He brushed his fingers against her upper arm briefly, just to establish some kind of physical contact. It was time to peek over the summit. "Tell me."
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Zelda swallowed and blinked her eyes shut, the brush of fingers acting as a soft form of anchor. "The Chief Warlock is a legilimens," she said, tone quiet. "Are you — have you ever experienced legilimency?"
She would be surprised, very surprised, if he had — but Alfred had a long and strange life before they knew each other, so nothing is ever impossible from him.
Alfred's brow furrowed. He had not quite connected the dots on why this was relevant. "No." What the Chief Warlock did with his free time could not possibly have much bearing on Zelda's life... and why on earth would he ever have had any experience with mind-reading magic?
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
"Well," she said, and pressed her lips together. She took a sip of the tea; she wished the bourbon would hit her faster, take some of the edge off of things. "The interview involved legilimency."
The moment the dots connected, Alfred stiffened. "On you?" he said, though that much was obvious now. She was the one who'd been interviewed, so it hardly made any sense for the Chief Warlock to have been using mind-reading magic on someone else. To say this was a violation of privacy was a gross understatement, though. Who had signed off on this? If it was a matter of procedure, more than one person would have needed to agreed it was a sound idea. If it wasn't a standardized procedure, on the other hand — if Lestrange had just gone off-script to do something so entirely out of bounds — then there were more important things to do in the wake of it than drink tea in the bath. "You let him?"
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
Her husband was clearly horrified, and Zelda felt some resonance in it, because she was horrified, too. She thought she was horrified. Under the layer of ice that had descended over her mind in the past few hours, it would make sense if she was horrified. She swallowed, wishing she had taken another sip of tea, but she felt too — watched, right now. "The Wizengamot wants to be sure," she said, voice quiet.
![[Image: xXXD462.png]](https://i.imgur.com/xXXD462.png)
