𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗧𝗼 𝗦𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘄 𝗔 𝗦𝗹𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻 | 𝗗.𝗠.

53 | ﴾ Tectonic Panic ﴿

Stop chewing your nails, it's so unlady like. You keep on this track and you'll cut glass with those razor blades.

Eloise Bellarose's voice wriggled it's unwanted way through Audette's brain as she chomped down on her right hand; a habit developed as a coping mechanism when left with no physical escape from aristocratic nightmare situations.

This would count as one of those nightmares ten-thousand fold.

She was stood before a gaudy floor to ceiling mirror in Draco's gigantic bedroom. Correction; their gigantic bedroom.

"Draco..." she murmured in a weary voice, wringing her fingers together to avoid chewing off anymore precious nails in anxious terror. Audette inspected herself top to bottom, a long frown growing at the edges of her mouth akin to one worn by a frog.

"Well aren't you just first class," Draco placed his lanky, veiny hands on her shoulders and melted down into an absolute riot of mocking snickering, bowing his white swath of hair behind her, "I can't look."

"Well I can, and I'll tell you right now; I look like a disoriented member of the Adam's Family. I refuse to entertain your mother like this, it's an outright abomination," Audette's eyes widened into the mirror in positive revulsion of the situation they were in, twisting her hips in appall. No matter what angle she inspected the outfit it only seemed to get worse.

Draco's rude laughing trilled through her ears as she tugged at the only attire he had managed to delve out of the woodworks from his younger years, when he was perhaps tinier but not by much.

It was a tight fitting black suit she'd spotted him in many times in their fourth year, tie and all, and if Audette's nose dared to shrivel any more it would surely turn inside out.

The clothing - albeit fine in material - was built for a slender male and clung to her tiny skeleton like a boxy refrigerator.

Audette allowed the ends of the long sleeves to flop down in demonstration of just how hindering it was, "Draco, I would rather die being eaten alive by dementors. Could you not have mentioned in any of your letters regarding the Yule Ball that I aught to prepare my household for an extended stay at your estate afterwards?"

He wrapped his arms around her collarbones to sneer at her in the reflection, "Blame yourself, Wonderland. If I'd known in advance you were actually going to attend, much less with a positive attitude, than I would have asked you about staying here in advance."

His hot minty breath blew her hair everywhere as he failed to contain his amusement, sniggering loudly directly in her ear, "Allow this to be a lesson against stubbornness. Then perhaps you would have something to wear that doesn't make you look like a female version of me."

He was right about one thing: all she needed was a serious hair cut and they'd might as well be brothers. She'd never felt so out of place and inappropriate, "No...I will not do this, tell your mother I am elsewhere."

"Lie to her in her own house?" he scoffed.

"Says the lying imp himself," she turned around to face him sporting a frumpy glower, stomping but a mere inch from his shoe, "I'll put on my ballgown again, or I shall not go to this stupid tea time. Why, I'd sooner fashion myself a dress out of those dusty drapes before I darn this."

He clapped both hands on either side of her face and leaned back with an authoritative smile that bore no give, and Audette stared right back into those cosmic forget-me-not glaciers that held so much power over her nervous system, "No, you will come as I instruct you to like a good little wife in practice. Each second you waste in this room she grows increasingly irate."