[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/fp2QHJH.png[/img]
[color=#4C93C2]Location:[/color] Grand Ballroom
[color=#4C93C2]Time:[/color] Evening
[color=#4C93C2]Interactions:[/color] Olivia [@potter], Charlotte [@princess]
[color=#4C93C2]Mentions:[/color] Kazumin [@samreaper]
[color=#4C93C2]Outfit:[/color] [url=https://i.imgur.com/Mr1xTEl.png]Bro Be Looking SO DAMN GOOD oh maw gawd[/url][/center]

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[color=silver]
[color=#D0B4EC]“Oh yes… I’m feeling quite lovely, actually.”[/color]

Cassius wanted to believe her.

Gods, he wanted to believe her so badly that the [i]wanting itself[/i] almost felt like an act of faith from a faithless man. Charlotte stood there with bread in her hand and starlight on her dress, smiling as if the answer should have been simple, as if [i]lovely[/i] was the truth. She leaned there with all the soft composure of a woman enjoying her evening. He had done it himself often enough to recognize the shape of it on another face, even one as beautiful and beloved and impossible as hers.


Yet there was something different about her tonight that made the word settle wrong in him. It was not only the gown, though gods knew the gown was making a valiant attempt to ruin every last shred of composure he had ever pretended to possess. It was the absence of ribbons, the wine-dark curve of her mouth, the way her eyes met his without darting away quickly like they sometimes did when she was feeling timid, the way she had crossed the ballroom and touched him as though she wanted people there to feel as though he belonged to her. It was all stunning. It was everything some foolish, greedy part of him wanted for her. But there was a brightness to it that frightened him too, a shine too close to flame. That fire had always been there, but what caused it to come to such a blaze tonight? 

[color=D0B4EC]"If this is about the dress, I only thought it rude not to dress on theme,"[/color] she added, and the soft giggle that followed was so perfectly Charlotte that Cassius almost abandoned his concern out of convenience.

But he could not.

His mouth curved into that patented smile of his, because that was all his mouth knew how to do when his heart was busy making a mess of itself. [color=lightsteelblue]“Ah, I see.”[/color] His gaze moved over her again despite his better judgment, not with the earlier stunned hunger that had nearly left him useless, but with something a bit more careful now. [color=lightsteelblue]“Well if the theme was to show up an entire room of people who [i]live[/i] for the type of entrance you just had… Then I would say you nailed it.”[/color]

It was a flirtation, because of course it was. It was easier to be charming than frightened, easier to let his words wear a smile while the rest of him took inventory of every troubling little detail. Charlotte took her tidy bite of bread, and Cassius watched the small, ordinary motion with an ache he could not name. It had to do with the fact that she should have been allowed ordinary things. Bread and music and soft laughter with a friend. A night where a dress was only a dress and a ballroom was only a ballroom, but after everything they had discovered about one another of the past few days... After everything he now knew she was facing, his heart broke with the knowledge that she wasn’t just a pretty girl in a stunning dress living her best life. She was coping with the weight of troubles on the horizon that no one should have to face. Especially her. 

[color=lightsteelblue][i]Why her?[/i][/color] 

Then she licked the butter from her finger, and Cassius forgot, for one shamefully vivid second, that they were standing in public. His eyes caught on her mouth before he could stop them. On the dark wine of her lips. On the slow, careless sweep of her tongue against her skin. He wanted to look away but he did not...[b]could not.[/b]


A dangerous heat moved through him, low and immediate, and Cassius had to tighten his hand around his glass to remind himself that there were people around them. And still, for one reckless heartbeat, all he could think was that he wanted that same careless mouth turned toward him.

Gods help him... His gaze lifted back to her eyes, slower than it should have, his smile crooked but no longer entirely safe.

She had to know what she was doing to him. And if she did not, that might be even more dangerous.

Then Charlotte’s attention drifted across the room, and Cassius saw the moment she noticed what everyone else had been trying very badly to pretend was not there.

[color=#D0B4EC]“There’s a strange demeanor about everyone tonight, don’t you think? As if there’s a storm cloud looming over the room and nobody wishes to point it out.”[/color]

It was in that instant that he realized that she didn’t know about this morning… About the Queen and her execution. 

She had been condemned at trial and made into a spectacle where most of the city had seen a woman’s flesh melt and ashes hit the ground just to come here tonight like none of it had happened, and somehow that seemed to be the way of things in Sorian. There was always enough bullshit to cover rot if one could afford to, and these fuckers could afford to. There always seemed to be enough music to drown out the sound of the screams of someone burning alive, always enough wine to turn a public execution into gossip by sundown.

And Charlotte did not know about what happened, that much was clear to him. Somehow, mercifully, impossibly, she had avoided the news. Cassius wondered if he should tell her before she found out in a worse way, but when he looked at her now, bright-eyed and glorious in whatever powerful confidence she had found, he could not bring himself to be the man who told her.

At least not yet. 

His eyes flicked briefly to Olivia. It was just a glance, quick and quiet, carrying more of plea than command. His eyes begged Liv not to say anything either.

Thankfully her reaction to Kazu’s whimsical entrance shifted the topic. 

[color=#D0B4EC]“Oh—he’s spectacular,”[/color] she breathed, and Cassius let out a quiet, helpless breath of laughter.

[color=lightsteelblue]“Spectacular is an understatement.”[/color] He jested as his eyes followed her delight for a moment before sliding toward Olivia, where a very different sort of spectacle seemed to be taking place. 

Olivia had gone bright enough in the face that Cassius would have needed to be an idiot not to notice. Her hair made a poor hiding place, the food an even poorer one, and the bouncing of her leg practically announced that Kazumin had done more than entertain the ballroom. 

Then Charlotte began asking Olivia about music, and for a moment the conversation felt truly normal. Do you dance as well? Sing? Play an instrument? Such simple questions yet refreshing giving the weight on his mind. 

[color=#8FBC8B]”Yeah… I played the violin for a bit with my mom but I did not sing.”[/color]

Cassius recognized what the woman was carrying in her eyes as she answered, and he looked down into his glass because staring at another person’s grief while it passed through them had always struck him as a particular sort of indecency. There was a mercy in pretending not to notice every second of it.

But the word mother had already gone through him.

Music always brought his mother back to him. That was the mercy and the cruelty of it. He did not first remember her illness…the coughing, nor the shrinking of her body, nor the way she had tried to smile through pain. It was her voice under open sky, her fingers moving over piano keys, her joy when she finally convinced him to sing along with her. 

[color=#8FBC8B]”Life is real fuckin boring without music, you’re right.”[/color]

Cassius smiled faintly, and this time the expression was not entirely a performance.

[color=lightsteelblue]“My mother would have agreed with you.”[/color]

His gaze returned to Charlotte then, and softened more than he even realized as he wondered if maybe it was her he heard singing the other day outside his window. And then Charlotte looked back at him, and whatever fragile balance he had recovered began to slip.

[color=#D0B4EC]“Are you alright, darling?”[/color] She asked him. 

Darling.

The word settled into him with absurd force, slipping past what charm and armor he had left and sliding beneath all his practiced little ways of making himself untouchable. Cassius could have laughed from the sheer injustice of it. He had been stabbed, beaten, cursed at, literally cursed, desired, praised, hated, and called things far worse than Scourge in his time. None of it had undone him as efficiently as that one gentle word from Charlotte Vikena.

[color=#D0B4EC]“You…”[/color] Her smile faltered, only slightly, and those honest blue eyes stayed on him with a care that made his defenses feel ridiculous. [color=#D0B4EC]“…seemed a little… off, when I came over.”[/color]

Of course she would ask that. Of course she would walk into the ballroom transformed, dodge concern with buttered bread and pretty laughter, and then look at him as though he was the mystery worth solving. It was almost cruel, but it was even more humorous. 

[color=lightsteelblue]“I seemed off because you walked in looking like that, love.”[/color] he said, leaning just a little closer so the words belonged more to her than to anyone else. Before he could decide how much more truth to risk, Olivia struck directly at the elephant in the room with all the grace of a brick through stained glass. Cassius appreciated the bluntness. 

[color=#8FBC8B]"What the hell is going on with you?"[/color]

Cassius turned his head toward her, and for a moment he simply looked at Olivia with a kind of startled admiration. He set his glass down with care, moved closer to the both of them as he waited with bated breath to hear what Charlotte might say in response. [/color]