Part Three: Returns and Exchanges OOC: Again co-authored with wilde_at_heart.
As far as Jeremy was concerned, things had been wrong since he stepped off the wagon. This had very little to do with any particular circumstance individual to this variation of returning home, and everything to do with the fact of simply seeing their lopsided families, out on display, and of the weeks ahead that were always the absolute worst of the year. Being told to sit down for a serious chat had not improved the situation any, especially when it became obvious that it was about his mother. Given that she was categorically incapable of doing anything right, unless you were Nathaniel, he was fully expecting to be told something awful.
Or, at least, he thought he was. He was not sure he could have fully prepared for what he had just heard because it was so far beyond the pail. Had she not done enough to them already? First, she had driven out father with all her griping and complaining - father, who as far as Jeremy had been concerned, had always been the better parent. Had it not been enough to deprive them of him? Now she had to do this?
"What the hell is wrong with you?" he snapped.
You cannot be serious, Nathaniel thought about saying to his aunt. Then, Mama, you cannot possibly do that. But nothing came out of his mouth. He knew he should say something, but felt unable to maneuver his own jaw, to control his own throat. It was as if he was watching everything from far away, outside his own body, as if he were in a dream - at least until he heard his brother’s voice.
“Shut up, Jeremy,” he snapped in turn, talking over his mother’s attempt to reprimand Jeremy for his language without even noticing she had been trying to speak, or noticing that she gave up the attempt. “Just shut up until we fix this!” His voice was rising to a shout near the end, but he couldn’t help it. Everything was wrong. He’d apologize to Jeremy later, once he - they - had fixed this. Because he wasn’t supposed to shout at Jeremy. He wasn’t supposed to shout at all, ever. He had to be good.
Fix it. They were going to fix this? That was a laugh. Firstly, there was no 'we' - there hadn't been for a very, very long time. Unless Nathaniel meant the perfect dream team of him and Sylvia - it hadn't escaped Jeremy's notice that she was the one Nathaniel was looking to constantly for advice and comfort. Or maybe 'we' meant Nathaniel and mother. They were another pair, after all. Funny, how Nathaniel only ever had room for one person to interact with at a time, and it was never Jeremy. Well, screw him. Screw him, and screw mother. He noticed that Aunt Avery and Uncle Alexander hadn't rebuked him for his language or his tone. They were on his side. He was allowed to say whatever he wanted.
"You can't fix this," he snapped at Nathaniel, before turning back to mother. "How can you be this selfish?" he glared her.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jeremy,” said Cynthia, and knew at once that she should not have put it like that - but the child was impossible, and Alexander and Avery were impossible, and even Nathaniel was talking as though she wasn’t even here, now - “Mr. Elphwick is a wonderful man. You’ll have a father again,” she said, her voice rising, as though she were offering him cookies in exchange for cooperating during a health check-up when he was small.
"I am not being ridiculous! You're the one who seems to have taken leave of your senses. You are talking about marrying a halfblood! As if our position wasn't bad enough already. You want to ruin your own stupid life? Fine. I don't care. But what gives you the right to ruin ours too?"
Alexander could see that this could easily devolve into everyone simply yelling, and so he cut across them before that had a chance to happen. His own voice was clipped and controlled, with the kind of well measured authority that gained its audience's attention not by shouting the loudest but by providing a marked contrast to the chaos around it.
"Jeremy has a point," he said quietly, and it was a mark of how strange this whole day was that that remark didn’t stand out as the most unusual thing anyone had said. There was, he supposed, a first time for everything… "You have taken the notion to ruin yourself," he stated to Cynthia, "But they," he gestured to Nathaniel and Jeremy, "have not asked to be a part of it, nor done anything to deserve it. And they are still Mordues. By blood," he added, giving the final word all the weighty emphasis that cleaved open the division between Cynthia and them. "If you want to run off and live with your shopkeeper," he said, his lip curling on the last word as if it was a slur, "you go ahead,” he invited, because that was never really what this fight had been about. Cynthia was a wreck and they would be well shot of her. If she followed through. After all, there was still one thing she seemed to be banking on, something he and Avery had discussed in private but not yet let her in on. And now it was time for her to know. “But they don't have to go with you."