Finale: The Price OOC: Co-written with wilde_at_heart.
In many ways, Nathaniel was actually quite a credible young man. Far more so than one would have expected parents such as Nicholas and Cynthia to turn out - so much so, in fact, that Alexander was wondering quite how that had happened. Nathaniel was undoubtedly loyal and determined, both of which were admirable qualities. Ones which Alexander wouldn’t in any way object to taking in under his roof and turning to his own agenda. He was much more of an asset than his brother, who seemed almost guaranteed to come and live with them, and to be a potential further problem down the line. However, getting Nathaniel here appeared to be the sticking point. His good qualities were amongst the reasons that Alexander was willing to have this meeting, as well as essentially being the reason why it was necessary. There was also Sylvia. This was no small factor in his willingness to entertain Nathaniel’s ramblings a second time - judging by his daughter’s report, not much about them had shifted, but it would be necessary to ensure that Nathaniel understood the honest truth of the situation. He could also see that that was fair, and he aimed to be fair - Nathaniel could not be expected to make an informed decision if he had hold of completely the wrong set of facts.
This had led to him, Sylvia, Nathaniel and Cynthia sitting in his office. He had considered inviting Simon, so he could learn how to handle difficult situations, but at that point it was practically another family meeting, and he wasn’t sure he could reasonably exclude Avery and Jeremy, but nor did he want more voices piling in on this than was strictly necessary.
“Nathaniel has taken it into his head that your engagement is the symptom of some form of illness or magical interference,” Alexander stated levely. It wasn’t a bad excuse. In other circumstances, it might have worked. Declaring relatives insane and secluding them was a reasonable way of dealing with certain problems, and again, he might have admired Nathaniel’s perspicacity if that was what he was suggesting. Unfortunately, he seemed genuinely to believe it, and there was a very big difference between knowing what excuses you could throw out and falling for your own propaganda. “Obviously, under such circumstances, he would feel compelled to take care of you - as would we,” stated Alexander. This part, though important for Nathaniel to believe, so that he knew they were not the villains here, was also true. If Cynthia really had gone off the deep end, he would have happily committed her to the finest secure rest home he could find. The main thing stopping that being a viable option was that no one would take her. Of all the ironic problems to have, after years of complaining about her unhinged behaviour, Cynthia was simply not mad enough. “Loyalty is a valuable and admirable trait, and not one I would take lightly to the thought of being abused,” he stated, looking at Cynthia. “I don’t see that you could allow Nathaniel to follow you with a clean conscience knowing this to be the reason he is doing so.” It was an odd tactic, trying to appeal to the better nature of someone he wasn’t sure had had a consistent or logical thought in her lifetime, let alone made a decent or principled decision, but he wasn’t sure he had many other options. And Nathaniel, he hoped, set enough store by his own sense of chivalry that he was not open to having it abused.
“We’re perfectly willing to have this issue investigated. But to make that happen, we need two things. First, your mother,” he addressed Nathaniel, “needs to be willing. Additionally, we need to know that you will accept the truth of what you’re told. Otherwise, what is the point of the exercise?”
Nathaniel should have been in a triumphant mood. Sylvia had done it! She had convinced Uncle Alexander to listen to reason, or at least to her, and that had been the greatest part of the battle. Now that he was listening, everything was going to go back to normal. It had to.
Why, then, did he still feel as though he were walking into a trap?
“I - “ Nathaniel glanced at Sylvia, remembering how she had snapped at him for being cross with Uncle Alexander before. “Of course,” he began. “I have to believe - “
“This is ridiculous!” exclaimed Cynthia. “This is a farce Alexander, and you know it!”
“Mama,” said Nathaniel anxiously, reaching to pat her arm, hoping to calm her down before she said something that might make Uncle Alexander change his mind about listening.
“Whatever you may think of the exercise,” Alexander stated to Cynthia, “clearly Nathaniel is stressed by the present situation. As his parent, I would think you would want to do what you could to alleviate that. If Nathaniel is convinced that you are unwell, and his conscience won’t rest until that is investigated, what else do you suggest for putting his mind at ease?”
“I would suggest that you stop trying to turn my children against me! Nathaniel’s mind wouldn’t need easing if you weren’t throwing him in the middle of all this - “
“Mother!” snapped Nathaniel, more forcefully this time, and she looked at him. “Yes it would. You can’t believe there’s any situation where I would just let you marry a half-blood! It’s not decent, it’s not right!”
“And marrying a man like your father was?”
Silence, it turned out, could be extremely loud.
“Father was sick,” said Nathaniel stiffly. “He lost his mind. There’s no other reason why he would do what he did to us.”
“And now I’ve gone mad too,” said Cynthia bitterly. “And I suppose Jeremy and your uncle must have as well, too, hm? They’re so willing to see the backs of both of us.” She reached out to stroke his cheek. “Don’t you see, darling? I know that’s what we tell you when you’re little, but that’s not how things really are.”
Nathaniel’s view of the world contracted, expanded, wavered at the edges, threatened to collapse completely as many parts of him tried to acknowledge that she was telling the truth. He forced this thought out of his head, stabilizing his reality by sheer force of will - for the most part. It continued to spasm at the edges, shaking, foundations groaning….
“Jeremy’s just being a brat,” he said forcefully, dismissing his brother’s thoughts and feelings with a single motion of his hand. “No one is going to see the back of anyone.” Anger flashed up again, breaking out of its cell for the second time in as many days, and he jerked away from his mother abruptly to look around at the whole group. “We’re supposed to be a family. What is wrong with you all? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!”
The words felt a bit dramatic as soon as they left his mouth, but he refused to back down from them. Maybe, he thought, a good dramatic speech was what was needed - something without the sarcasm or good manners or any of the other things they hid behind, something that might shock them out what they were doing. It worked that way in books, sometimes. Who said it wouldn’t work now?
"That is quite enough, young man!" said Alexander. The tone was familiar, one step up from his usual quiet authority, and one which suggested an actual line had been crossed. It was most often deployed in Jeremy's direction. "You requested a meeting - a discussion. If you want that, you will need to behave like a civilised person and not rant and rave at people - regardless of what examples you may have been set in your childhood," he added, looking pointedly at Cynthia. "We are indeed a family, and I do not want to see that threatened. However, we are a family with standards, ones which will not permit a halfblood joining our ranks. That is something you at least still seem to accept as insupportable," he added to Nathaniel, "By that token, your mother is choosing to break ties with us. She knows, and always has known, the consequences of such a liaison. She is no longer interested in the values which make this family what it is. I can offer an examination to see if she has taken leave of her senses but beyond that, I cannot force her to want to be part of this family."
“So you’re just going to allow some halfblood to take advantage of her?” asked Nathaniel.
“No one is taking advantage of me,” said his mother. “And I don’t want anyone - “ the look she gave his uncle made it clear who she thought might do so - “taking advantage of you and Jeremy. That’s why we are leaving.”
“I see,” Alexander stated, narrowing his eyes at Cynthia, “So, this marriage of yours… It’s a noble sacrifice for the sake of your children, is it? To get them away from people like us? Funny, that doesn’t seem to be working out too well for you. I utterly fail to see how you can sit there and make that claim. And I have already warned you about speaking like that,” he added to Nathaniel, “Understandably, you dislike your mother’s choice. I am offering to do everything in my power to help with that situation, including having her head examined. Your mother is refusing to engage with anything we have to say to her, and as you have seen, is quite determined to walk away, and to lie in the process of trying to persuade you to come with her. I do not need to be lectured on morality or the concept of family and my duty by either of you. I need to know whether you have any reasonable, practical solutions, other than the ones already offered - and refused by your mother.”
Nathaniel’s face burned, anger warring with embarrassment. Being rebuked was embarrassing even when, as now, he felt he had done nothing wrong. Anger, however, had its fuel in Uncle Alexander’s speech - first in being talked down to, then in how his mother had been spoken to. No matter how wrong she was, there was no need to mock her, humiliate her….
“Just keep her here,” he said finally, reluctantly. “Until she comes to her senses.” He tried to ignore the offended gasp from his right. “If there isn’t another way, it’s still better than....”
He didn’t say what ‘than’ was. He couldn’t. It was unthinkable.
"You are asking me to use forceful magic to illegally detain someone against their will," Alexander stated bluntly. Because 'keep her here' sounded so gentle and euphemistic, and he felt they really needed to deal in blunt black and white if they had any hope of snapping Nathaniel to his senses. "I'm not sure that anyone advocating kidnap can claim the moral high ground," he said dryly. It would almost have been humorous if the whole thing hadn't been so ghastly. "You cannot just go around declaring everyone is mad because they no longer behave how you want them to, and I am not going to forcibly restrain anyone," he added, surprised to find himself almost echoing Cynthia. "Of course, the trace more applies to locations than people,” he stated, fairly sure he could win this game of bluff or at least reasonably cover up any mess if Nathaniel was more insane than he thought (a state which he was, throughout this conversation, consistently re-evaluating). “If you think this is the right thing to do, turn your wand on her yourself," he invited.
“That’s enough!” exclaimed Cynthia. From the look on Nathaniel’s face, he was at least considering Alexander’s proposal. Or else considering hexing Alexander. Neither seemed like a good idea. “It’s enough. Nathaniel, stop all this foolishness right now!” It was strange, alien, to try to give a proper order to Nathaniel, but she tried to sound as commanding as possible. “I wouldn’t ask you to choose between me and the rest of the family, but your uncle would, and that’s all there is to it,” she continued. Nathaniel stared at her. “You can’t fix this, darling,” she added more gently. “There’s nothing else to say.”
For a long moment, Nathaniel continued to look at her. “I’m never going to accept this,” he told her. “I’m going to keep trying to get rid of him until one of us is gone.”
"Unfortunately,” said Alexander, “even if you succeed, there is a point at which the damage will have been done, and your mother will not have a life or a reputation to come back to. You know that's the truth, Nathaniel. I cannot influence what everyone thinks, and as soon as this becomes public, she's done for. Her plan is to announce the engagement in the New Year. That's why we're having to act now. There's a time limit."
Nathaniel looked off into the middle distance, hoping one last time to wake up and find that this had all been a nightmare, or a trick, or anything other than reality. He squeezed his eyes shut - and then opened them to the exact same scenario which had been there before he closed them.
“I do know that’s the truth,” said Nathaniel dully.. “And I know you can’t control what everyone thinks - if you could, we probably wouldn’t be in this position at all,” he acknowledged. Because he knew, really, that his uncle could not have been happy about the situation all those years ago. However much of a liability Dad had been, and even if his recent angry suspicion that Uncle Alexander cared for nothing but appearances was accurate and Uncle Alexander had therefore not minded losing his brother as a normal person would, it had still been a scandal. That was why Mama had spent so much time in seclusion these past few years, why Nathaniel had to try twice as hard as anyone else to do everything perfectly, why he worried so about Jeremy’s temperament…. “But when we lost Father, I didn’t promise that I’d take care of her and Jeremy only as long as everyone thought it was a good idea,” he added, his lip curling slightly at the idea.
Sylvia, for the most part, had sat back. She could not have said this was going well. In spite of all his promises to listen, nothing seemed to make him willing to see reason. He was just throwing out all the same arguments as before and refusing to listen to anyone else. But Sylvia thought it was obvious to anyone in the room who the real villain was here. Her father was doing everything possible, offering every solution, and it was Aunt Cynthia who was refusing to budge an inch. Aunt Cynthia and Nate. She had expected, at the very worst, for Nate to break to pieces as the awful truth of this hit him. She hadn’t wanted that but saw it as a necessary evil, and happily had been able to let it be Father’s job - to tell Nate the cold hard truths that broke him, rather than forcing her to do it. But Nate wasn’t listening. Nate was still concerned about his precious mother and, to add insult to injury, Jeremy was now being listed as a priority.
“What about me?” she huffed, when he seemed prepared to just walk away. “You promised me too. You promised you’d listen to us. You said if she wasn’t crazy, you’d change your mind!” she reminded him.
Nathaniel looked at Sylvia, then had to look away. “I promised I’d believe you,” he said. “I never said I’d abandon her either way.” The urge to laugh, of all things, bubbled up in his chest, but he managed to abstain from that at least. “You’re both right,” he said. “She isn’t acting enchanted - but that doesn’t matter. She’s my mother. I can’t just let her go.” He looked back at Sylvia. “But you’re my Sylvia, too,” he said. “I’m not the one saying it has to be one or the other.”
“Thank you for finally remembering I exist!” Sylvia snapped. It should have pulled on her heart to hear Nate call her his, and it did, but it felt like too little too late. He was so busy pandering to his mother, to what she needed and wanted, it felt like he couldn’t even spare a second of thought for what might matter to Sylvia. “I’m not the one making you to choose either, so why are you punishing me? And nor is my father,” she added, because she could easily see how the words falling from Father’s mouth could be misconstrued. He was merely pointing out the truth of an unpleasant situation. He was not the one creating it. She knew exactly who was, and Nate was still acting as if his sainted freaking mother could do no wrong. “She is!” she stated bluntly, an accusatory finger pointing at Cynthia. “Mordues do not mix with Elphwicks,” she stated the name with a curled lip as if it was something dirty, “We didn’t make that happen. I didn’t, and father didn’t, it’s just the natural order of things - an order which you still believe in,” she added. Nate was clearly rightly and properly repulsed by his mother’s choice. “She’s the one asking you to choose between remaining a Mordue or becoming an Elphwick!”
Nathaniel automatically started to put out his arm as though to bar the path to his mother when Sylvia pointed at her, though he caught himself short of finishing the gesture. “From the way you’re talking, I should lose my name for being on the wrong challenge team at school,” he said, with more heat than he thought he had ever directed at Sylvia before in their lives. “It’s no different, Sylvia. I already told - that man - that he’s not to speak to me. I’m not mixing with Elphwicks. I’m trying to protect her, and to keep a damn half-blood from from running us out of our own home!” He ignored the frustrated noise and movement his mother made in his peripheral vision. She wasn’t going to say much, he knew - she thought she might push him into walking away.
He never would have believed she would think that, he decided, before the past two days. He never would have believed that she and Uncle Alexander could be so petty and selfish and small as to put him in this position, or that Mama would be so perverse as to - he couldn’t even think of it. Of her allowing someone like that to live in their house, to - ugh, he couldn’t think about that, it was repellant. At this point, though, after this flying horse stampede of a conversation, he had to admit that he had been wrong about them. They both slightly disgusted him at the moment, for different reasons. But they were still his family.
Sylvia, though, was more than that. Sylvia wouldn’t actually go along with this. Sylvia, he was sure, would understand.
Sylvia did not understand.
"How dare you!” she cried, “It is nothing, nothing like that - and I've done nothing but support you there! You might not want anything to do with him, but you will be associating with her," Sylvia pointed out, trying to be emphatic rather than accusatory, though her tone was still stung, "She'll be one Nate. An Elphwick. That's what she's going to become. She wants to be a new family, with that man, and if you go with her, you are agreeing to be part of it. Whatever your reasons. Whether you hate him. That is what you are agreeing to be."
“The last time I checked,” said Nathaniel, “it was supposed to be our blood that made us different. That can’t change for any of us. Even if she - lowers herself - to that - “ his mouth twisted too at the idea - “she’s still the same, and so am I!”
Blood is just blood, Sylvia wanted to say, but that sounded like a dangerously liberal notion. Wasn’t that their propaganda, after all? That the same red, sticky substance flowed in everyone’s veins - that we all bled if cut? They were, as usual, missing the point. As it now seemed, was Nate. The blood was a metaphor. It wasn’t the physical stuff of the body, but the history that was attached to it. The behaviour that went with it. Yes, there was of course biological superiority in their line, and that was why they needed to keep it Pure. But it was so much more than that.
“She isn’t the same if she stops behaving the same!” she pointed out. “She’s a blood traitor, Nate!” she stated, wondering why that simple bit of information, that thing they had always been taught to know was a basic wrong was not penetrating. Beyond that, and because logic, it seemed, was not the way to win the argument, she resorted to what Nate was thinking with - if it came down to feelings instead, why didn’t hers matter? Her feelings had always mattered to Nate, and she wouldn’t have asked him to choose between her and his mother but that was the very point - given that Sylvia wasn’t the one behaving badly here, why didn’t that elevate her? Why didn’t Cynthia’s behaviour degrade her? Why didn’t she matter at least as much, and why not more? It was utterly alien for anyone to make her feel that way, much less the one person she’d always treasured. “Don’t you care about me?” she asked, tears flowing down her cheeks, “She’s the one making there be a choice. She’s the one breaking everything apart! I need you too! You can’t leave me!” she declared. Because if they were boiling this down to the most basic problems involved - blood matters, family matters - then this was the most blatant truth of all. Nate could not abandon her. “I love you,” she both told and accused him in a single breath, tears running down her cheeks.
Nathaniel had thought he had broken when he had realized the situation was unfixable and full of liars. He realized he had been wrong when Sylvia made her declaration. His face crumpled and his throat tried to close itself off as tears welled up in his eyes. He dashed them away, but they were just as quickly replaced and multiplied upon, until he had to give up and resign himself to the indignity of letting them run down his face as he struggled to reply.
“I’m right where I’ve always been, Sylvia,” he croaked. “I need you too - I love you too - and I’d never pretend you were dead, either, not over - not over - one mistake. No matter how bad it was. And if you think for one second that I ever would, then it’s not me you needed at all.”
His mother put a hand on his elbow. “This isn’t helping,” she whispered. “Let’s go home.”
Nathaniel glared at his mother through the water still obscuring his vision. “She’s right, you know,” he said coldly, or as coldly as he could given his emotional state. “I’m never forgiving you for this, either,” he swore. “I wouldn’t forgive you completely even if you stopped this right now. Never!” And then he all but ran from the room before it got worse and he gave into the urge to fall to the floor and just start screaming.
There was a level, of course, on which this impulse arose from terror - terror that Sylvia was right, terror that his mother would actually somehow become something different, terror that he was going to actually ruin his own life and still not really accomplish anything. This, however, was not the set of feelings which seemed most convincing to him. More convincing was his certainty that - however Uncle Alexander and his mother had disappointed him, how even Sylvia was disappointing him - blood was still blood. Blood was more important than the individuals who had it.
Deep down, however, he was terrified on a completely different level, one which he wasn’t even consciously aware of. Deep down, he was just petrified by the thought of losing the only parent he had left as abruptly, finally, and senselessly as he had lost the first, all those years ago.