Alfred's cheeks flushed at the criticism, and his eyes slid to the side so he wouldn't have to look at either of them for a moment. Roslyn was right, was the thing. He was mangling this and Zelda didn't know what he was talking about, and if she wasn't going to understand it then what was the point of slogging through and trying to tell her? There was no one who was more frustrated by his inability to come right out and say what he meant than he was himself, but what was he meant to do about it?
The easy answer would have been to just give up and write her a letter, but while he could get his meaning across much more clearly on paper than he could here, he would be entirely at Zelda's mercy when it came to her response. She might say nothing at all, and leave him to wonder (or nothing at all of meaning; she might say
it's fine, we're fine, when they weren't). She might write one thing and mean another, or she might write something because she felt it ought to be how she responded without really feeling it. And he couldn't ask her to marry him if she still harbored doubts, and had only forgiven him because she felt as though she ought to. He knew that when she thought this through rationally she would forgive him, because there wasn't even really a
thing to forgive, but he cared less what was
reasonable and more how she felt about it, which wouldn't come across on paper.
"No, she's right," he admitted sheepishly, still not looking at either of them. "This is silly."
He looked down at his champagne glass. There was a bit of dirt under the edge of the nail on his thumb. This was entirely unsurprising; he had rough hands from years of handling line and sail and even with his position of authority on the ship his hands were often dirty. In the moment, though, this little snapshot seemed to perfectly sum up how entirely out of his depth he was: his calloused hand, with dirt under the nail, holding this delicate champagne flute with the crystal clear stem and the gently bubbling golden liquid. Maybe that was why Roslyn hated him so much, and why Zelda's father still wouldn't talk to him — maybe it had less to do with anything he'd ever actually said or done and more to do with what he represented. He was of a different world than they were — with the Minister of Magic at family dinners and visiting the House of Lytton for bridesmaids dresses and sipping champagne at receptions in ballrooms — and his very existence represented a threat that he might lure Zelda away from their world and into his.
At the moment, he didn't feel like much of a threat. What would happen if he just came right out and said it? Roslyn would die of shock, probably — she did not strike him much as the type of person that might have ever found themselves having a heated conversation with a member of the opposite sex while alone and unsupervised. Zelda would have one more thing to be angry at him about, beyond the facts of what had happened Thursday — he'd have to somehow convince her to forgive him for admitting to it in the middle of a ballroom, in front of her sister. Not advisable, then, no matter how desperately he wished this conversation was over. He might have abandoned it entirely, at least for the moment, and tried again either later that night or at a different event, but now that he'd brought it up he couldn't think of a way to safely segue away from the topic.
"So I told you before it wasn't anything to worry about," he said, forging on only because he could think of no way to move backwards or side-step at this point. He may or may not have used those exact words (probably not), but that had been the sentiment underlying their letter exchange, at least from his perspective. Zelda was worried about his relationship with Jo, and he'd told her it wasn't like that at all, and he was only realizing a month later that she'd been quite justified in her concern. "But something was different on Thursday. Which is why it's over," he explained. Not that Jo knew that, of course — she would have said she'd walked out of her own accord, and that she'd decided to do so long before Alfred had even clued in that there was a conflict, which was true — but the only reason he hadn't stopped her was because of that impulse that had hit him in the final moments of their fight. That was why he hadn't written to her, in the days since, and why he wouldn't write to her moving forward. If it weren't for that moment, he would have assumed they'd eventually sort things out and be friends again, but now... Now he couldn't trust himself to make up, no matter what happened moving forward. Even if he never felt that impulse again, it wasn't worth the risk to be around her knowing that he could only be a few minutes away from ruining one of the best things that had ever happened to him.
He glanced up at Zelda briefly, then back to his champagne glass. "That's all I wanted to say," he concluded, feeling small.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER
![[Image: xXXD462.png]](https://i.imgur.com/xXXD462.png)
