Meddle About

Sloane Cressida Rosier | Outfit

The cold outside was as unforgiving as the warm bodies within it. Charlotte had experienced how unforgiving this world was many times, and because of it, she had learned to be unforgiving in return. She had always been called stubborn and headstrong growing up, which was not what most people wanted out of a proper pureblood… Luckily for her, she had grown into it, and so had Harrison when they had been married. Charlotte had always feared, simply because she never wanted a marriage like her parents had. But arranged marriages were customary. She was just lucky enough to find love in her own. Many weren’t as lucky as her. Harrison accepted her hardened heart, and he had even managed to soften it a bit. But her response to the rest of the world was not so kind.

Most pureblood marriages didn’t have happy endings like hers, but she was unsurprised by this. Still, it didn’t mean she liked the outcomes. After all, she had seen it unfold not too long ago with Genevieve. Charlotte had qualms with almost everybody in some way being as stubborn as she was, but Genevieve was family, and she had quite a grudge against Rosier and the bitch he had left her sister for for what they had done to her. The bitch was a homewrecker, and Carlisle was unfaithful and weak for any pretty face he saw. She knew Death Eaters were notorious for being unfaithful, and sometimes it could be forgiven if people were in the right mindset...Charlotte was not. And she certainly was not about to forgive Sloane or Carlisle for what they did. Surely enough shit was happening in the world that they could have at least made it easier on themselves and the people around them by not complicating the families with influence and power, but apparently they couldn’t keep their shit together enough for even that.

Charlotte was still unsurprised by this, she supposed. No one would say Death Eaters were good, but some of them were at least honorable. She was. Harrison was. Was it so hard to be? She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t care to understand their petty ways. As Charlotte headed out through the Alley, she planned on heading to the hospital to see if Harrison needed anything. He didn’t often work weekends, and she knew he didn’t prefer to, especially since she was more likely to be at the estate on the weekends, but sometimes it had to be done. SHe went to the entrance of the alley where the light somehow shown a little bit brighter in Diagon than over Knockturn even through the cloudy skies of London. As she made her way towards it, she saw another person walking into the Alley, the only other soul she had seen here besides Mellie, though the person she realized it was was much to her displeasure. “Lady Yaxley,” Charlotte said, an edge to her voice that was hard to prevent. Harrison always told her she was poor at not speaking her mind. “What are you doing around these parts today?”

MEDDLE ABOUT

OUTFIT

She was feeling… pretty damn massive these days, she could admit it. Sloane knew that she wasn’t, really. She was small to begin with, and being pregnant had suited her decently enough. But as the weeks went on, it was hard not to feel massive compared to how she had looked before. She was frustrated by the sheer existence of maternity clothes. When she was at home, they were fine. Comfortable. Carlisle’s shirts were still more comfortable, but it was fine when she was home. But when she had to go out in public, she missed being able to wear whatever the hell she wanted. She missed the corsets in her closet that she couldn’t wear, and the dresses that she couldn’t even attempt to fit into these days. She knew that it wouldn’t be too long until she’d be back in them, particularly with how fast that time seemed to be moving, but it was still just… annoying when she had to be around other people, because she was a Death Eater. She was dangerous. For a woman, she was decent at being intimidating—hell, she’d intimidated men before. It wasn’t that hard.

But she didn’t feel particularly intimidating in a maternity dress. She didn’t think that was a feat that she was all that capable of pulling off. There was just very little that she could do about that. She wasn’t going to go out in public in sweatpants, and nothing else fit her. Sloane would have to deal with maternity dresses until April, and then she would be able to fit back in her old clothes. If Brenna wasn’t worth it, she would be more annoyed, but she was. All of this was… more than she ever could have expected. It wasn’t what she had planned. Sleeping with Carlisle had just sort of happened. One time. She had thought that it would just be the one time, and then it had become a regular thing and… getting pregnant had also not been a part of the plan. But she had been prepared to tell everyone that the father was someone else. She’d been ready to find some pureblood that wasn’t married and con him into thinking the child was his. But Carlisle had been impossible, and he said that no one was good enough to be his child’s pretend father anyhow. When she had asked who was good enough, he had said that he was.

Of course, she hadn’t seen that as a particularly good solution. He was still married. Until he hadn’t been. Sloane hadn’t expected him to get divorced for her. It wasn’t… what she had expected, and now they were here. She had thought that it was just another pureblood marriage for him, just him doing what was right by her since she had gotten pregnant and he didn’t care for Genevieve that much. But now she… well… loved him, and that wasn’t something that she ever thought that she would be able to say. Sloane had never been one for love or sappiness or anything like that, and somehow it had smacked her in the face when she hadn’t been paying attention. She didn’t say that sort of thing out loud or anything, but she still felt it regardless. It was an odd feeling for her, admittedly. Sloane just knew better than to think about it when she was in Knockturn Alley. She just had a few things to pick up, and she’d be on her way back to Westerlies. What she hadn’t thought she’d have to deal with was Charlotte Burke. She couldn’t think of a more unpleasant person to run into. “Shopping, Lady Burke. It’s what one does here, so I hear…” She said, with a polite smile.

The world had come back to a proper order, thank Merlin. Charlotte still revelled each day in the freedom she had in England now that Durant’s sorry ass was in the grave, yet she still resented all the years she had lost under him, years she would never get back. There had been days where it felt like it would never end. She had raised Jonathon under a oppression she would have never wanted for her son, but he couldn’t reclaim those years. Yet he had become such a good man regardless, and for that, she was more than proud of them. It proved to her that the pure blood that ran within his veins was stronger than any damnation this world could put on them.

Charlotte was very proud of her family. She had a loving husband and a darling son, and they had been able to stay together through fire and brimstone. Pureblood families were...complicated. She knew it, as she had grown up in a less than functional family due to the politics of it all. But Charlotte didn’t know why people couldn’t put politics aside to put their families first...it seemed like the most logical thing to do. After all, how were they supposed to be the superior class if they couldn’t even keep themselves together? With the way some families functioned in her class, it was no wonder to her sometimes that the lesser breeds tried to rip them apart. It was a shame, really.

Charlotte knew better. She knew not to repeat her parents’ mistakes, and she knew that she was a better breed than them anyway. Charlotte couldn’t help but think she was staring at a lesser breed before her. The bloody Yaxley couldn’t keep her hands to herself, and it had cost the Burke family. Charlotte thought it was such foolishness, and Genevieve was suffering for it now. It was hard not to look at Yaxley with some amount of distaste, but she hoped she was keeping it out of her expression. She smiled at the other woman. “The alley seems a lot more empty these days, doesn’t it?” she said, scanning the area briefly before turning her gaze back to Sloane. “How are you feeling?” she asked her, nodding to her evidently pregnant stomach. She didn’t care much for the woman herself, but she certainly wouldn’t fault the child for Yaxley and Rosier’s idiocy.

She knew what people thought--they weren’t subtle about it. They were more than just thinking it, even… they were saying it. If not to her, at least to each other, and she knew that probably wasn’t ever going to change. At least not for a long time. Men cheating on their wives was something that happened plenty in their society. Pureblood men were just accustomed to getting whatever they wanted. If they wanted something, they figured out how to get it and if that meant cheating on a wife with multiple lovers, then they would do it and no one would bat an eye or think anything of it. That was just the way that it worked. She had never thought that she was going to be somebody’s mistress, though. Sloane wasn’t even sure if she could call herself that. She knew that she wasn’t the only person that Carlisle was sleeping with other than his wife. They couldn’t all be the mistress. So really, she was just one of women that he was sleeping with. There hadn’t been any kind of label on it, as far as she knew anyway.

But still. Mistress or not, she had gotten pregnant, and even that was probably not completely unheard of. She knew that there were likely bastard children around from affairs that never came to light--because that was usually what happened. No one ever found out who the father was, and she had been ready to do that. Well… maybe not entirely. But she had been ready to find some other man to shag and then tell him that he’d knocked her up. She had been ready to walk away from Carlisle because she hadn’t thought that he would want to deal with the complications of her being pregnant. But that hadn’t been what had happened. Instead, he had left her wife, and now people wouldn’t stop talking. And she knew who she was in stories like those. She knew that she was the loose one, she was the slag that spread her legs for a married man and then got herself knocked up in the process. She was the one that had stolen someone’s husband and ruined a family. People weren’t going to stop saying that anytime soon. She knew that. Sloane just also knew that it was in her best interest to ignore it. It hadn’t been her intention to get Carlisle to leave Genevieve. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant at all, but now that it had all happened… she was happy.

She was with somebody who loved her, and she loved him and that just wasn’t something that she had ever expected for herself. She had never even wanted kids, had never liked kids--but she loved Brenna more than anything and she wasn’t even here yet. She wasn’t going to let anyone ruin that, or let their words get to her when she was actually happy for the first time in her life. Their opinions didn’t matter anyway. The only opinions that she cared about were her family’s… and Carlisle’s too, of course, and she was still working on that. She thought that most of them liked her, but she wouldn’t go so far as to say that every single one of them was completely won over already. But that was what mattered to her. What Charlotte Burke thought was completely unimportant to her. “I suppose so.” She’d never been forced to live down here, since she’d been gone obviously, but she knew that plenty of people had. Now that they had their fortunes back, most people were back to coming here only to shop. “I’m… fine. Thank you.” That was probably not the answer that the woman even wanted to hear, but she was. Taking potions had helped with her rather extreme nausea and other than that they were both doing well.

Politics was, unfortunately, a necessary evil. Sometimes Charlotte thought it was rubbish simply because she thought it was clear how the world should be ordered, but for some reason, not everyone was that bright. It was evident that she and her kind should be on top in this society. It was only logical, really, that people with greater powers should be on top, and the lesser ones should be at the bottom. Magic, like everything else in this world, was a hierarchy. It was how nature was. There was a hierarchy and a food chain, and no animal ever went against it. It was simply unnatural.

It was sometimes a shame that people could think for themselves, but Charlotte would never fault that as an educator. She had seen students blossom in Herbology simply because they weren’t thinking like everybody else. It was easy to go along with everyone else… She knew that herd mentality was natural in humans. They liked to conform. But Charlotte also knew something amazing happened when conformity didn’t occur.

Of course, that wasn’t always the case, and she thought hierarchies were one of them. They were so effortless, and she didn’t know why people tried so hard to push against them. It was because they were unhappy, clearly, but fate had already decided things for them. It was a shame nonetheless, how messy the necessary evil got. People fighting over this and that, and worse than the spatters, was when public life mixed with personal life.

It was a common occurrence in the wizarding world, and she was looking at evidence of it right in front of her. It took her all not to just scoff at Sloane and say some...less than kind words, but she knew how to hold her tongue. She knew well, actually, so she certainly wouldn’t say anything blatant to the other woman. But it was no secret that she and Carlisle had hurt her family with their little ordeal. “I’m glad you’re fairing all right,” she said with a smile. Really, she didn’t care much how Sloane was doing as much as she cared for the child. His or her unfortunate circumstances were not their own fault. “Have you a name picked out?” she asked. She figured this was the most...civil way to make conversation. Charlotte did like children, and if there was one thing that would keep her from absolutely despising Sloane, it was the fact that she was carrying another human life.