I've made up my mind. The evening after Winston’s graduation party had quite possibly been one of the worst of Alicia’s life, and certainly one of the worst of the past decade. She had remained composed, of course - she had been in objectively worse fixes and kept smiling, and she was not going to be the member of her family who gave the Marcuses the satisfaction of seeing one of the Thesiuses flinch - but aside from reassuring Thesius and Katrina that of course they were welcome to stay in her home as long as they wanted, she had found it difficult to even look at the family, sure they were all thinking the same thing, and agreeing wholeheartedly with that thing: that this was her fault.
Knowing she was unlikely to sleep, and worrying that she was the last person her husband wanted to see right now anyway, she had briefly calmed herself by deciding that she would spend the hours ahead planning instead of staring up at the dark. She had spent most of the night locked in her gymnasium, swinging on rings or turning cartwheels on her balancing beams, trying to think.
Her instinct was to take her sons and get as far away from New Hampshire as possible before anyone even knew she was gone. That she didn’t want to go, for reasons both related to her pride - Alicia had never run from a challenge in her life, and while she always felt young after full-family gatherings, she still thought she was too old to break her streak now - and reasons purely sentimental, was irrelevant; she had to protect her children, and their extended family had a history which suggested they could pose actual as well as social danger to said children now.
However, that plan had a problem, and that problem was named Thad.
She had always kept her own affairs in order so that if things fell apart, she could take care of all four of them on her own, and certainly could take care of herself and the twins. However, she had never really discussed this with Thad, hoping they would never come to a point where those plans became relevant, not wanting to admit that failure was an option. If he wasn’t willing to go with the rest of them or to allow her to take the boys and disappear....And it would be terrible for the children to be separated from their father, anyway, even if he was willing to let them go. She had also spent an awful lot of time and effort trying to make theirs a happy, loving, functional family unit, so none of them ever ended up like poor Uncle Derwent, trailing along after Druscella like a lapdog after the party no matter how she abused him because what else did he have? He'd let his wife go, let his sons be taken from him...what else did he have?
Aside, of course, from pure blood, the name Derwent Pierce, and a personal fortune Alicia doubted was much to sneeze at. Aside from those trivial things. Alicia could only assume there were conditions on his access to the last one, though, because why else would he have allowed them to take away his children?
Her sons, she had sworn to herself, again and again, would not be like that. For one thing, she was going to make sure they knew that complacency was not an option, no matter what your last name was or what was between your legs. They would know that they should always, always have a backup plan for the worst situation they could think of - and that once they developed said plan, they should then come up with a backup plan for their backup plan. That wasn’t the only thing she wanted them to know, though. She wanted them to know they had firm allies, in their parents an in each other. It was only now that she was seeing possible advantages to not having a functional family. The boys would be heartbroken if she took them away from their father and grandparents. It might impact their development. The books said these things were important, and while she didn't want her sons to turn out soft, she didn't want them to - well - be too much like her, either, which was why she had all the books.
Finally, she dropped down from the rings and just paced, trying to think of a solution other than trying to sneak into the grounds around the Heir’s House and waiting for a chance to push Wesley off the mountain. Which was not a very good plan.
In the small hours of the morning, she showered in the gymnasium and then looked around, her head aching slightly. Her serums and tinted moisturizers and lip balms were all in her dressing room upstairs, along with her good clothes, so she went up to the nursery as she was - completely bare-faced, in the spare workout clothes she’d had in the gymnasium - and sat for a while, watching her sons sleep, before going down to the breakfast room. She was slumped inelegantly at the table, sipping a cup of tea with her feet pulled up under her in her favorite wicker chair, when she spotted movement in the corner of her eye.
“If you’re thinking about saying that I’m a stupid half-blood et cetera et cetera and how this is all my fault,” she said dully, without looking, “Then feel free.” She took a sip of tea, flipped her hair over her shoulder - a characteristic gesture when she was setting her mind to something - and then did look at her husband. “Then we need to talk.”
She wanted to say she had had a revelation, this morning with the twins, but the truth was that she thought she had known what she had realized all along. She had kept it to herself at times because there were simply topics that were best left alone, or because things had pushed her back into her own self-loathing at times, or because it simply hadn't seemed necessary - but things had changed, now. The game was afoot. It was time to lay her cards on the table.