Midnight ball, for any character(s) of your choosing? (Any fandom as well, I just love an excuse for a good ball.)
An even 650 words, hopefully satisfactory in atmosphere. The waltz is here, and just for you, I picked this dress for Lucy Preston to wear.
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Lucy Preston fiddles nervously with the gold brocade at her shoulder. What she says aloud is: “It’s past my bedtime.”
Flynn laughs, almost noiselessly. Looking up at him, she wishes it did not still surprise her, to see him at ease, even briefly. She wishes she did not find it so dangerously affecting. Let us survive, she prays to Fate. Let us have a life with laughter. “Sorry, Professor,” says Flynn, still scanning the ballroom. “No one said saving the world was easy.”
“Well,” she says, swallowing her punch, “nudge me if I’m about to do something stupid.”
“Impossible.”
“Flatterer.”
He turns to look at her then. “Lucy.”
She swallows hard. “What?”
He moistens his lips. “Do you know how to waltz?”
“I… had lessons.”
“Good,” says Flynn, and offers one white-gloved hand. Lucy takes a deep breath, and steps into his formal embrace.
The music itself, she finds, is surprisingly graceful: a little hushed, at first, half tentative. The dancers find their rhythm and the waltz’s, and then more instruments join, and it quickens like a pulse.
“It was composed for a wedding,” says Flynn lightly.
“Oh.” They are surrounded by other couples — women in silks and feathers, men in swallow-tail coats — but for once, Lucy isn’t worried about stumbling into them. Flynn moves with the practiced assurance of one for whom awareness of the body has long been a matter of instinct.
Between the heat from the gas lamps and the cognac in the punch, Lucy understands in new and vivid ways why ballrooms in second-rate Victorian novels are said to whirl. Gravity is something outside her. She is not anchored through her feet on the floor; she is held upright by the tension between her palm and her partner’s, by the warmth of his hand at the small of her back. She is weightless, and the world is flecked with gold.
“Lucy?”
She brings her gaze into focus on one mother-of-pearl shirt stud. “Yes,” she says, a little breathlessly. “I’m fine.”
“Good. I have one of them marked.”
“Oh.” She stumbles, out of step with Strauss. Her left hand closes convulsively on his upper arm. “Don’t…”
Flynn smiles. “Challenge him to a duel? I won’t.”
“He might be armed.”
“He is. He’s standing at parade rest and has avoided the eyes of three matrons trying to get dances for debutantes. The gun is in his waistband.”
“Oh,” says Lucy again.
“Come over faint,” says Flynn softly, “and I’ll hand you to a matron. She’ll wax indignant on his bad manners, and I’ll have a word.”
“Good,” says Lucy, and lets her knees buckle.
It seems a long few minutes. Lucy tries to concentrate on making conversation. She perks up when the tallest of the debutantes raises the subject of Mrs. Pankhurst’s latest address. When Flynn returns, she is trying not to be anachronistic about the suffrage question. She flicks her eyes to his sleeve; obeying the look, he refastens his cufflink. He bows to the knot of women, and asks the tallest debutante to dance. The conversation moves from suffrage to Bernard Shaw.
“My dear,” says Lucy, when the dancers return.
“Of course.” They make their goodnights; she leans gratefully on his arm. The night air is bracingly clear, as well as cool. The newly electrified street lamps throw incongruously bright pools of light.
“What happened to the gun?”
“I buried it.” He smiles down at her. “With luck, the rhododendrons and the archaeological record will be undisturbed.”
Lucy swallows. “That’s not what I was most worried about.”
“Ah,” says Flynn. The street around them seems very quiet. “I hope they’ll believe that he broke his neck in a fall.”
“Yes,” says Lucy. “We didn’t,” she adds, “get to finish our waltz.”
Flynn’s eyes on her are dark. “Some other time.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” says Lucy.
