Challenge

Or "the vaguely Regency AU". XD


Anne was a well educated woman from a free school in the country, she met him at a ball she snuck into and proceeded to explain to him how wrong his opinion was.

He doesn't know what to think of her when he first meets her – she is nothing like the women of his own social class, proper and polished and powdered, delicate and demure and meant to be revered from a safe distance, even if they are wife or family. But Anne de Breuil is a vivid contrast to all he's known, intelligent and educated and not afraid to show it, a crackling bonfire to the safe warm glow of those around him, and he has all the self-preservation of a moth and finds himself drawn in despite his best interests, perhaps precisely because he knows he shouldn't, knows she's nothing safe or sane or allowed.

"And that," she concludes, tapping her fan emphatically against his chest to emphasise her point, "is why you're wrong, monsieur – because there is nothing different between your people and mine except some accident of birth, nothing of divine provenance or worth or anything of the sort, and those who do have fortune should do what they can to help those who do not." Her cheeks are flushed, her dark hair escaping from its intricate braids, her cornflower-blue skirts bright in the light that seeps from the ballroom out to where they stand; it is improper, for her to be out here with him, but she cares nothing for propriety (that is his world, not hers) and he can see little right now but her.

She makes him question everything he knows, with nothing more than a dance and a stroll and an impassioned diatribe on a shadowed balcony, and he throws himself willingly into her flame.