Shattered Silver Mask
He'd never done anything like this. Certainly not dressed like
this - no, he had definitely never worn something like this before. He'd intentionally skipped his high school graduation party. No one was going to get him to dress up for that.
He had never worn a tuxedo before at all, and yet here he was, hanging at the edge of the party, feeling like he was hours late and yet things had probably barely begun to pick up. He felt too obvious, wearing this glossy silver jacket and pants. He might as well have been a mirror. It was what he'd been offered though, and the vividly purple tie (which yes, he had had to google in order to tie, and it had still taken seventeen tries to get it satisfactory)
did make his eyes seem violet.
Deep breaths. He had decided he was going to do this, and so he would, regardless of who saw him or recognized him - not that he had been here long enough for anyone to really recognize him. Regardless of who saw him and knew instantly that he wasn't - well, a him. It was a masquerade, though, wasn't it? The point was to dress up, to disguise. Surely dressing up as a man fit within those bounds... right?
Tan skin flushed beneath his nearly-full mask, just fragments of his forehead on the right and his chin on the left clear between the snowflake-scale mirror shards, he swallowed one more time and stepped more decisively.
He could do this. Fire in the heart and all that.
Man, he wasn't one to drink but he might just start tonight.
You know what, no.
No.
He'd had enough, he had.
... but if he walked out of those doors again now, he would know he had wimped out. He'd know that truth. He had to stay, if only for a few more minutes. He dragged his gaze away from the entrance, shifting nervously. Everyone was already talking to someone else. Guys in tuxes, girls in dresses - and one girl in a tux. No, this wasn't going to work. He had to go.
It hadn't even been five minutes, though, had it? His watch, a quietly rugged, loudly purple, and entirely unmagical thing, might not have suited his formal attire but he had refused to go out without some way of measuring the time. It had been, ostensibly, to know when it was getting too late to stay; in reality, it was to know when it was getting late enough to leave.