Early Morning, March 1st, 1894 — Scrimgeour House, Wales

"Julius Scrimgeour!" Eloise shouted mere seconds after abruptly appearing in his home's floo. After endless hours of pacing, worrying and throwing an ungodly amount of floo powder into her nonfunctional entrance, she had finally worn through the last of her already paper thin patience. Julius had nearly died on the first February 28th. He'd escaped it so narrowly that Eloise had spent the remainder of their afternoon and evening together ensuring every room he entered was nearly suffocating in its heat. She'd tucked him into bed, delighted at the prospect of being married the next day.

And then she awoke to an empty house with no sign of him having ever come at all.

An alarmed butler met her in the hall as Eloise began her search for her would've been husband and was quickly stunned into silence by her venomous glare and demands to find his master. (At once! She shrilly yelled.) A day of wondering whether or not he lived had left her wholly unable to muster any concern for propriety. (He wasn't dead, his staff would be dressed in mourning clothes if he was, and the footman now stationed with her in the echoing foyer appeared more frightened of her than anything else.)

When he finally entered the foyer, Eloise met him with a furious glare. "You're alive then. Am I to presume your epiphany is to be forgotten?" She spat in lieu of a happier greeting.

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Julius Scrimgeour / Aldous Crouch

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   Philomena Sprout

He had been having such a lovely dream.

As soon as the apologetic knock came at his door, waking him, the details of it fled his memory, leaving a groggy Julius with a vague feeling of delight snatched away. The servant seemed flustered enough that Julius sensed something amiss, jolting him into full wakefulness (perks of a career in law enforcement, he supposed), but it was the mention of Mrs. Manwaring that properly got the wizard's attention. He hopped from bed and passed his arms through the sleeves of his dressing gown, leaving it untied in his haste to find out just what was going on.

She was angry.

He could see that before she even opened her mouth.

"Of course I am alive," he answered carefully, not sure what battlefield he had found himself upon. Now that he knew she was not in any danger, Julius regained the presnce of mind to tie his dressing gown over his naked chest. "Eloise, what is going on?"

@"Eloise Manwaring"

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   Eloise Scrimgeour

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Not even the sight of his bare chest was enough to distract Eloise from her warpath. She'd agonized over his wellbeing for hours, her thoughts rarely straying from the heavy widow's dress she wouldn't be permitted to wear. And yet - here he stood. Alive, breathing and playing the part of the queen's fool.

"Leave us," she demanded of the scared footman still loitering at the edge of her peripherals. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest, yesterday's gown remained creased and wrinkled from her endless fidgeting. "That is the question I had hoped you might answer."

It was then that Eloise began to question whether she dreamt the entire encounter, for surely Julius would remember the significance of a marriage proposal? Her nails dug cresent moons into her palms, the pain a sharp reminder that this was real. "You abruptly arrived at my home the day before last and insisted upon eloping immediately. You said you very nearly died. So please, Julius, do enlighten me as to what is going on?!"

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Julius Scrimgeour

  

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stunning set by lady <3

To say Julius was confused was something of an understatement. He hadn't proposed to Eloise for more than a decade, hadn't had a brush with death any time in recent months.

"Two days ago," he offered, concern in his tone, "I went to work at the Ministry. I was in office all day, took my supper at Black's, and returned home shortly before midnight. No danger, and I did not visit you."

Julius did not owe her any details of his day, but Eloise seemed so certain, and he had loved her for far too long to simply dismiss her, however agitated she was. Were it not for her mourning, his sister's need to find a husband, it was altogether possible that Julius would have insisted she elope with him—likely when he had first seen her at the beach of the Sanditon. Everything that had kept them apart for the past fourteen years was either dead or irrelevant, but new hinderances had bloomed in their wake.

And Julius was very certain he would remember both a near-death experience and a proposal.

@"Eloise Manwaring"

  

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She frowned at him, more frustrated than before by both his tone and denial. "Do you mean to say there was no incident in your dining room?" The kisses stolen in her parlor were real, Eloise was certain of it. The desperation in his tone and actions had frozen her in terror with the realization of how close she'd come to losing him. It was real and yet -

Eloise folded her arms across her chest and stared at him expectantly.

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"The window broke," he allowed. "One of the footmen had a bit of a scare, but will be right as rain in a day or so."

Fortunately not the one that Eloise had summarily banished; poor bloke had endured enough without also being on the receiving edge of whatever version of Eloise this was. Indeed, Julius had not seen her this way before, and he had seen her at a great number of points throughout her life. That fact was not at all reassuring.

"Eloise," Julius began, but stopped. There was not a kind or gentle way to ask one if they'd hit their head, not really.

@"Eloise Manwaring"

  

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"The window broke." Eloise echoed, utterly confused as to how Julius was so calm about his near death experience. A lesser woman would've exclaimed see! The window broke! I was right! but Eloise could see how near Julius was to committing her to an asylum. She could hear the pitying tone in his voice, the unasked questions in his tone. He had no such authority, of course, and he'd never betray her by writing to her uncle (besides, then he'd have to answer questions as to how he could be so intimately familiar with her to be bold enough to make such suggestions).

"Julius - you came to my house in a frenzy." Eloise then explained once more. "Your fingernails were still blue, you said you were trapped in the room when the window broke. Are you suggesting that I dreamt it all?" As if his death wasn't her worst nightmare, as if she wouldn't follow the second he left this Earth. "I understand if you have rethought your proposal, as neither of us were thinking beyond ourselves, but you could at least have the decency to acknowledge it." To own breaking her heart again.

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Julius Scrimgeour

  

"Eloise, I have wanted to marry you since we were children," he reminded her swiftly, the words tumbling from his lips before he had a chance to consider them, "before I was able to appreciate the depth of such a thing."

Julius Scrimgeour had always been a man of his word, and if he had proposed to Eloise—proposed in the last ten years, at any rate—he not only would stand by it but would actually remember doing so. But she was so certain, knew so many specific details, that even though it should sound like utter madness, should leave the wizard feeling deeply concerned for her well-being, Julius was still seeking any sign that he might be wrong. Somehow.

Thus far, his quest had borne no fruit.

"That has not changed."

@"Eloise Manwaring"

  

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Eloise stared into his blue eyes — the same eyes she dreamt of nightly for more than a decade — for any hint of dishonesty, any subtle shift that might alert her to a lie, and found none. Julius truly believed he hadn't proposed only two days ago, swore that such a proposal was something he dreamt of too, and yet Eloise could still feel the slight irritation on her cheeks from his beard. From the kisses shared in the parlor before they both came to their senses.

"I - I think something is amiss here." Eloise admitted after a long pause, her defensive posture softening somewhat. "You proposed and I agreed, I know it happened, but I believe you that you think it didn't."

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She believed him—but did Julius believe her?

He studied her again, this time not with the reverence he had in the past or the concern he had thus far in their conversation, but with curiosity. He had, Julius decided, ruled out madness, and some sort of strange amnesia on his part was not even going to be entertained. That just left the general peculiarity of the world around them as an excuse. Were they in a novel, it would have been so painfully convenient as to drive the reader mad, but this was not a novel. It was their life.

"Perhaps," the wizard allowed at last, "we might chalk this... confusion up to the oddities brought about by the unnatural storm." An apparition, a failure of memory, confusions of time and space, that sort of thing. Something for the Unspeakables to puzzle out, not you or I.

Julius reached out a hand to squeeze her own.

@"Eloise Manwaring"

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   Eloise Scrimgeour

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Ordinarily, all of Eloise's hard edges would have immediately softened through his touch. Her defensiveness and frustration would have ebbed into a more gentler understanding, and she may have even been able to stomach an apology for the intrusion. This was, however, no ordinary circumstance, and Eloise was far too exhausted to even consider arguing his stance of forgetting.

(As if she would ever forget that proposal or the promise she had felt. As if she would ever forget the delight knowing that come morning she would be Mrs. Scrimgeour.)

"Of course." Eloise agreed before slipping her hand from his. The past twenty-four hours of anxiety and stress was now beginning to fully take its toll, causing her normally perfect posture to droop and expression to fall. "The Unspeakables will have the cause determined within days, I'm sure." Others had to have experienced what she did. Eloise couldn't be alone in remembering an entire day that he did not. Then, with a tight smile, she added, "I am relieved to see that you are well."

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He felt the loss of contact far more keenly than he ought to have, and even with the years between them, could tell she was not as satisfied with this as she would pretend.

"Are you?" he asked. "Well?

@"Eloise Manwaring"

  

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The standard lie was poised at the tip of her tongue. She'd spent the entirety of her life being taught never to discuss anything beyond a surface emotion with those she wasn't intimately connected to. And even then, she was to use caution with how much she divulged. Julius was, of course, someone she felt confident and safe with, someone she knew would hold her secrets as near and dear as his own, but still Eloise found herself hesitating to confess her extreme disappointment with the situation. She wasn't a desperate debutante, she didn't even need to marry again to keep her station in life.

But she had been so excited to marry Julius.

(And yes, they would still presumably wed at some point in their future. However, the idea of continuing to wait curdled her stomach.)

"I will be." She answered, a compromise between the truth she wished to bury deep and the lie her mother would have saw her speak.

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Would be—but wasn't.

"I am not going to die, Eloise," Julius reiterated, "certainly not in my dining room. Though if it is not that that concerns you—tell me."

The last was less reassurance, more direction, hands to either side as though inviting a blow, criticism. She had come here concerned (to say the least); Julius would not have her leave the same way.

@"Eloise Manwaring"

  

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No, he wasn't going to die as the version of him from two days ago nearly had. But, a whole list of tragedies could occur between now and the end of this summer when she was finally out of mourning. How many horrors had the wizarding community borne witness to throughout the past decade? How many members of her family had she lost each time another occurred?

"You can never know when you are going to die. Linford was strong and well until he wasn't. Neither my sister nor my mother would have had reason to suspect buildings would collapse or a dragon attack. You may die tomorrow and I will never have known what it was like to be your wife." By the time she concluded, Eloise's voice had dropped to a mere hopeless whisper. "I was excited to marry you, is all."

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Julius Scrimgeour

  

"If it were only me to think about—and you, of course," Julius ammended, "we would already be married."

A sigh, and then, "But that is not the world we are in. We are in a world where people die and unmarried sisters cannot bear the weight of any scandal and we must serve as the backbone, foundation, and rudder for our respective families all at once."

@"Eloise Manwaring"

  

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