The Heiress of Slytherin

Ballgowns and Schemes

The next week passed in a blur of preparations. Theo had only brought his clothes from school, and asking his father to send the rest was a laughable suggestion, so he had to be fitted for new dress robes.

It probably wasn't necessary to go to London early for this reason, but it was a perfectly convenient excuse for Kyria and Ivy to go ballgown dress shopping.

Ivy had never been the type of girl to hate shopping, although she understood why others might. She adored clothes, and as she walked down the aisles of silk, tulle and velvet, she felt pure elation.

She managed to limit herself to only getting three, with the hope that there may be more invitations later in the summer.

When they got back to the hotel suite they were staying in, even Ivy was exhausted from their long day. Kyria kissed them both goodnight and fled to the solitude of her room, and Ivy and Theo scrambled into their comfortable clothes before throwing themselves on their bed with their headphones and walkmans.

They exchanged devices regularly when they found songs that they thought the other might like, and danced around the room goofily, singing into the spoons that came with their room-service dinner.

As they collapsed back onto the pillows laughing breathlessly, Ivy smiled and reached out to hold Theo's hand. As fun as shopping for an outfit had been, she wasn't naive enough to think that the actual ball would be.

She was sure that she, Pansy, Draco, Blaise and Theo would find ways to enjoy themselves, but from what she'd been told, it was mainly a socializing event for aristocratic and pureblood parents to show off their children as viable options for future marriage contract agreements.

She tried to push the negative thoughts out of her head, and before long she had drifted to sleep, still surrounded by CD cases and mixtapes, dreaming of waltzing along to rock n roll.

——🐍——

The next morning came and was surprisingly calm and composed. Kyria woke Ivy and Theo early and they ate breakfast together in the drawing-room of their massive suit, then they each loitered about for half the morning, talking, reading and listening to music at various intervals.

Kyria fixed her hair before lunch, letting it fall in gorgeous curls down her back with half held back in a pearl clip. Ivy had sat on the floor and watched her work while she chattered away about stories from school and what new music she liked. Her mother listened patiently to the ceaseless stream of words with a smile on her face.

When she was finished, Ivy asked her to do her hair in the same way, and so she set her up on a stool in front of the mirror, with Kyria curling and forming her glossy black hair into tidy curls that mirrored her own style. After she had completed the look, she gently rested her chin on her daughter's shoulder and looked at them together in the mirror. She planted a kiss on Ivy's cheek, making her daughter squeal over the red lipstick mark it had left behind.

The trio ate lunch, Kyria with decorum, Theo and Ivy with the ferocity of starved wolves, then went to their rooms to put on their clothes. Ivy was obsessed with her dress. It had a velvet top that held a silver flower broach in the middle. The skirt was made of dark green silk with black tulle cascading over it. Her jewellery was picked to match, with a three-strand pearl necklace that held an emerald in the middle, which a tear-drop shaped pearl hung from. Her headband was simple; just a gold band with a silver chain woven around it, but she thought it worked perfectly with her hairstyle.

She slipped on her ballerina flats and remembered something that Pansy had mentioned one week at tea. They'd been talking about these balls when she'd mentioned that her mum always made her wear the worst heels. Ivy thought that this was odd, as Kyria wasn't allowing her to have a pair higher than her school Mary-Jane's until she was older, but as she looked back on it now, it made sense.