The breaking point (tag Professor Xavier). on Teppenpaw Commons

An Owl For Professor Xavier

October 11, 2019 5:03 PM

The breaking point (tag Professor Xavier). by An Owl For Professor Xavier

Sending the owl was not a decision Cynthia came to lightly. Indeed, in the very moment the owl left her window, she felt a brief impulse to try to call it back. In the end, however, she stifled it, for the same reason she had stifled so many other impulses in the course of her life: because she didn't see that she really had any better options.

She had not expected either of her sons to take the news of her engagement well, but just as she had also not expected Alexander to be cruel enough to try to take them from her, she had not at all foreseen the violence of Nathaniel's reaction to the news. Her son had told her to her face that the only reason he didn't try to hold her against her will was because his uncle was unwilling to maintain the spells while he was at school. He had tried to drop out of school at the age of fourteen, and when she had prevented that, he had started sending Howlers every day - first one, then two, now three. And now, finally, he had sent one to Elphwick's Department Store.

The situation was intolerable. She had always relied on Nathaniel to be her good boy - and in truth, she knew that in his view of things, he was doing that. He probably really did think he was doing what was best for her by trying to torture her into breaking her engagement and living the rest of her life in a sort of twilight world, existing to no-one, even more isolated than she had been since his father had abandoned her. Knowing that, however, only helped her so much. Her nerves, which had been improving ever since she had finally decided to marry Franklin and leave society, had begun to deteriorate again from the stress of being screamed at during every meal. She couldn't stand this anymore, and there was no-one in any position to help her except Nathaniel's head of house.

Professor Xavier, she had written, her handwriting shaky from the upset of the latest angry red letter which had exploded in her face.

I am the mother of one of your Teppenpaws, and I have a favor to ask. Could you please ask my son Nathaniel to stop sending Howlers to me and my fiance?

I don't want Nathaniel punished at all, she had added after some more agonizing - she had no idea how to control Nathaniel, who had never needed controlling before, and so it was tempting to have the teachers do it and hopefully get him back on the narrow way before summer, but somehow she couldn't imagine it would really make things better. Hopefully, just being told what to do by an authority figure he was used to obeying differently than he did her would do the trick. He's a good boy, as I'm sure you know - he's just having a difficult time adjusting to the idea of having a stepfather. His father abandoned him when he was just a little boy, and he's been used to thinking of himself as the man of our family. I don't fault him for how he feels, but I would like to eat breakfast in peace at least occasionally, and sending screaming messages to my fiance's place of business is out of line. If you could please tell him this. You may show him this letter.

Thank you,

Cynthia Mordue.

Hopefully, that would be the last time she ever signed her name that way - and hopefully, something would give in the ongoing battle with her son.

16 An Owl For Professor Xavier The breaking point (tag Professor Xavier). 1412 An Owl For Professor Xavier 1 5

Nathan Xavier

November 07, 2019 11:16 AM

Oh. Oh dear. by Nathan Xavier

Nathan was sitting in his office when the owl found him. He had a pile of graded essays to one side of him and a (thankfully smaller) pile of ungraded ones to the other side. One more ungraded one sat in the middle in front of him, and his quill rested in its bottle of ink. Despite these indications that he was in the process of grading the intermediates’ latest homework, what actually had his attention was the little girl in his lap and the story book in his hand.

“It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry,” Nathan read to his daughter and lowered the book for a moment to add, “You never know what might be in a potion, so don’t go drinking anything unless Mama or I say it’s okay, alright, Dora?”

“‘Kay, Dada,” the little girl promised.

Nathan smiled at her and gave her a quick hug. “You’re such a smart little cookie.”

She giggled and jabbed at the book to show she wanted him to keep reading. “No, I’ll look first,” Nathan continued the story in his best Alice-voice, but that was when the owl arrived, tapping at the closed window. “Hang on a second, sweetie, Daddy’s gotta let the nice owl in. Can you find the owl treats?”

“Yah!” she declared happily, jumping down off his lap to go digging through the desk drawer where he kept them. He stood and opened the window to let the bird in. It landed on the perch he kept in his office for just that purpose. It was adjusted to a low enough height that the one and a half year old could run over and feed the owl his treat herself while Nathan bent over (way over) to unfasten the letter.

Dora was very generous with the treats, so while she doled them out one at a time (he’d warned her last time that an owl might choke if she shoved them all down its throat at once and so she was being very careful today not to do that) he opened the letter and read it quickly.

Oh. Oh dear.

He had noticed, of course, that Nathaniel Mordue was not his normal self since returning from midterm, and he had received the paperwork about his change of contact information, but he had not realized it was this bad. Isis and Nevaeh had what could, at best, be described as a strained mother-child relationship, if it could be called a relationship at all, and Nevaeh had not been entirely happy about Isis’s decision to marry him either, but he couldn’t imagine her sending Isis persistent howlers about it.

He would not have expected that from Nathaniel either, though the supposed the circumstances were somewhat different. From what he had gathered of his student’s family, Nathaniel had been on good terms with his mother prior to this.

“Dora, hun, can you go in and find Mama? I need to talk to a student. We’ll read some more about Alice later, I promise.”

He penned out a quick note summoning Nathaniel to his office and sent it off with the overfed owl. Dora pouted a little but went through the door leading into their small Sonora apartment with only a small amount of encouragement and bribery.

He returned to grading until the student in question arrived. Nathan invited him to take a seat and then asked, as neutrally and non-accusatively as he could manage, “Do you believe howlers are a nice or productive way to resolve a conflict, Mr. Mordue?”

1 Nathan Xavier Oh. Oh dear. 28 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

November 07, 2019 11:34 AM

I apologize for my mother dragging you into this. by Nathaniel Mordue

Professor Xavier was a difficult person to avoid. Not only was he was he a professor whose class Nathaniel could not drop yet, but he also seemed to enjoy spending a great deal of time in the Teppenpaw Common Room, him and his little daughter. Nathaniel, perfectly aware that he was rapidly becoming both a physical and academic wreck, had felt obliged to try to avoid him since his reluctant return to school, and with a little effort - effort it took energy he did not have to make, but which he made anyway - he had mostly succeeded in that goal. On one occasion this had involved some stunts with the spaces behind sofas on the very brink of curfew which had almost made Nathaniel laugh just at the absurdity of the situation, despite everything, but he had done it. The professor did not know, as far as he knew, about the untidy state of his room, or the fact that he slept only sporadically, or anything except that he looked like an Inferius in class and that his homework was always poorly done - neither of which were things he had thought he could be actively punished for.

Getting a note summoning him to the teacher's office, however, made him wonder if he had miscalculated, or else if Xavier was just determined to stick his nose where it didn't belong, like a typical meddling adult (Nathaniel's grudge having rapidly spread from 'Nicholas Mordue and Franklin Elphwick' to 'all adult men' after some deliberation). Either way, he tried to hastily comb his hair into some kind of order - he still had some pride - and then approached the interior entrance to his Head of House's office with the expression of one approaching the gallows.

His face went momentarily blank with surprise when he heard the question, but then a muscle twitched in his cheek as he read into it. So. Xavier knew about that, somehow. How had he....

Well, it didn't matter. Nathaniel was not going to be put off his duty just because Nathan Xavier found his methods 'not nice'. He hated the measures he had been forced to resort to, he was sure, more than anyone else could possibly hate someone else resorting to them, but he was out of better options.

"I don't think they're very nice," he said honestly. "Productive is...I guess it depends on what you want to achieve."

He stopped talking. If Xavier wanted him to admit something, he wasn't going to. At least, he wasn't going to just hand anyone anything. He had learned his lesson about trusting anyone. It was a bad idea and he was not going to do it again. If he didn't trust anyone again, he reasoned, they wouldn't be able to hurt him the way his mother and Uncle Alexander had; they wouldn't have the power to. He was going to fix the outside of the situation, but inside, he had already acknowledged that things wouldn't be the same again. He was never going to allow anyone to make him feel like this, and have to resort to desperation tactics like this, ever again, as long as he lived.

16 Nathaniel Mordue I apologize for my mother dragging you into this. 1412 0 5

Nathan Xavier

November 07, 2019 12:24 PM

Being rational by Nathan Xavier

Nathaniel looked terrible. He had gone to the effort of combing his hair, but that could not hide the effects of exhaustion that had been evident for most of this term so far. Nathan wondered if he ought to recommend a visit to the hospital wing for some sleeping draught.

That could wait though. First they needed to get through the present issue of the howlers. Nathaniel did admit they were not nice, which Nathan saw as an opening for further argument, but his next statement offered a much larger one so that was the one Nathan went for.

“What are you trying to achieve?” he asked, remaining calm and reasonable in hopes that Nathaniel would mimic the attitude. He had learned the hard way with Dora that this, unfortunately, did not always (or even usually) work, but in counterpoint, acting upset was absolutely guaranteed to make her more upset, too, and he didn’t think older kids would respond much differently either. Best try to keep to rational arguments for now even if he suspected that Nathaniel was not thinking entirely rationally himself.

With any luck, maybe Nathaniel would apply logic to the problem a little more readily than a toddler in a snit. Nathan probably shouldn’t count on it though.

1 Nathan Xavier Being rational 28 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

November 07, 2019 1:22 PM

Not cooperating. by Nathaniel Mordue

Nathaniel had to bite the inside of his mouth to prevent a quick, snappy retort from exiting it when the professor continued to play dumb, as though he just wanted to have a random conversation with a random fourth year about the ethics of sending Howlers. He knew. Nathaniel knew he knew. He almost certainly knew Nathaniel knew he knew. Why not just get to the point?

Snapping, however, would not serve any purpose, other than forcing him to spend more time here being yelled at or punished or whatever when all he wanted to was to be left alone. Instead, then, he said, "It's a family matter."

Translation: none of your business. But gentler. Politer. A gentleman's reply.

The nausea always struck at the oddest moments. Nathaniel ran a hand over his mouth to suppress a grimace as he fought it down, then slumped in his chair, his elbows coming to rest on his knees. He looked up, then, at the professor before wearily saying, "Professor, with all due respect, sir - if you're going to punish me for something, could you just go ahead and do that?"

Unspoken: not that it's going to change anything. Unless Xavier somehow impeded him from sending mail. That was...was that possible? He was reasonably sure the school didn't go through their mail. Wasn't he? He thought he was. But how did Xavier know?

It didn't matter, though. Not at all. Not unless it allowed the professor to stop him, of course - otherwise, he'd sit detention every night if he had to. The only possible way left was for him to either convince Elphwick that Cynthia wasn't worth the trouble or - as much as it pained him - to wear his mother down to the point where she gave up - or, in extremis, until her nerves went bad. His main hope in life was that something worked; his second one was that it was Elphwick, and not his mother, who got hurt, but he'd rather see her need to spend some time in a rest home than never see her again, or choose between never seeing her again and never seeing Sylvia again.

16 Nathaniel Mordue Not cooperating. 1412 0 5

Nathan Xavier

November 12, 2019 8:26 AM

I trust there will be no more howlers by Nathan Xavier

Nathan had been hoping to get through this meeting without showing Nathaniel his mother’s letter. He wasn’t quite sure why he was trying to shield that information. She had specifically said he could show her son the letter. He just worried it might widen the current rift further and he would much rather help them make the first steps toward mending it instead.

Nathaniel did not seem to be ready for that yet though. Or at the very least, he seemed unwilling to discuss it with Nathan if his dismissive non-answer of ‘it’s a family matter’ was anything to go by. Nathan was privy to at least some of the details, thanks to his mother’s letter, but Nathaniel didn’t know that and apparently did not want to share with an impartial outside party.

“I am not going to punish you for anything,” he stated. That part was the easy reassurance. Nathaniel was under a great deal of stress currently, that was clear, and Nathan had no intention of adding to it. “In fact, if you need some sleeping draught and a few days off classes to rest, I can write you a note. And of course, if you ever want someone to talk to or even yell your frustrations at, who is not your mother, my door is always open. But.”

With a sigh, Nathan handed him Cynthia Mordue’s letter.

“I trust there will be no more howlers,” he said.

1 Nathan Xavier I trust there will be no more howlers 28 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

November 12, 2019 11:52 AM

Trust is a fool's game. by Nathaniel Mordue

For a moment, Nathaniel almost relaxed. His eyes widened in surprise, and his hands moved to the arms of his chair. He studied the professor's face, looking for the lie - because there had to be one, of course. Nobody would just offer him what he -

Well, what he needed, nobody could offer him, because it involved undoing the past. He needed his family back. He needed his mother and his brother and his cousins. He needed his life back. His life the way it was supposed to be. Xavier couldn't give him that. But if he had to choose one other thing, short of that...sleep. A whole night of dreamless sleep. And solitude. A break from the endless routine of shuffling through classes in a daze, trying to do his homework, trying to catch glimpses of Sylvia and Jeremy, trying to stand in places where they could see him, where they would at least have the option to speak to him without anyone else seeing....

"But"

There it was. The catch. He sat back in his seat, releasing the arms of his chair, his expression returning to a blank wall of resistance - for a moment, anyway. Then he recognized the handwriting on the paper he was handed.

His hands tried to close around the paper, crumpling it. He restrained them, folded it in two, then in fourths, then in eighths, each slowly, precisely - and then abruptly closed around the whole thing, smashing it into a ball.

"I can't believe this." His hands smoothed the paper back into a rough square, then back into fourths, and then twisted it between his hands. He never looked at it, or even noticed his own actions. "Does she really think that I...or is this just for you?" He gave it another twist, still not noticing, and it tore in two.

"You want to know why I'm trying to stop her from doing this? It has nothing to do with that miserable, pathetic excuse for a man she used to be married to." He couldn't even bring himself to say my father without an effort - an effort he felt no inclination right now to make. He also made no effort to keep the anger out of his voice. If Xavier wanted to call him disrespectful, he could do so with Nathaniel's compliments. He didn't care. "If she wanted to marry again - if that was all she wanted to do - then - maybe I wouldn't like it, but I wouldn't try to stop her. I'd be glad for someone to help me look after her, since my uncle's a worthless time-server just like his brother! But if I let her do this, if I let her marry some - some half-blood shopkeeper! - then I have to choose between never seeing her again or losing the rest of my family. My family. My brother, my cousins, my aunt - my uncle can burn in hell for all I care, he and my father can share a pyre, but the rest of them - the rest of them - " He struggled for air. "I can't lose them," he said finally, now without the anger. "I can't. So I have to stop her, and I'm out of better ideas. So no, you can't trust that. Not until I fix this."

16 Nathaniel Mordue Trust is a fool's game. 1412 0 5

Nathan Xavier

November 13, 2019 1:09 PM

Yes, release your anger. Wait, is that the Dark Side’s line? by Nathan Xavier

Nathan let Nathaniel talk. Some of the questions he assumed were rhetorical so he didn’t keep track of them as the dam seemingly burst free and Nathaniel let out what needed to be let out. He felt a momentary startle of defensiveness at the word half-blood, but this wasn’t about Nathan. Nathaniel probably didn’t even realize he was striking his Head of House with the same broad stroke that hit his step-father to be. Still, it was an underlying prejudice Nathan wasn’t too happy to see.

But it wasn’t actually Nathaniel’s prejudice that seemed to be the root of the problem but his family’s. The fact that it meant he needed to make an impossible, unfair choice between people he shouldn’t have to chose between.

Nathan never had to make that choice. But his mother had. But even in his mother’s case, the choice had been between her family and the muggle man she loved. She’d known even talking to Nathan’s father would meet with their disapproval and she’d done it anyway, setting up a situation of her own making.

Nathaniel’s situation was not of his own doing. It was his mother making the same choice Dorothea Xavier had, except in this case, there were children from a prior marriage pulled along for the uncomfortable ride. Children who had been given no say in the upheaval of all they’d known, other than the cruel choice of which side to take: their mother or their world.

Jeremy, Nathan gathered, had chosen the world. And for Nathaniel, the world also most significantly included Sylvia, who Nathan had believed was his twin for most of their first year.

It wasn’t a choice Nathan would wish on anybody and he wished he could do something about the social ills of the world that demanded such a choice just because a woman fell in love with someone with fewer witches and wizards in his family tree than hers.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t something even the Head of Teppenpaw House could fix.

And, as badly as he clearly wanted to, neither could Nathaniel.

“I’m sorry,” Nathan said with genuine sorrow. “But I don’t think you can. What you’re doing, sending Howlers, it isn’t changing anything. It’s just making a hard situation harder for all of you. Your mother already made up her mind. She would not have made this choice lightly. She must have deemed the benefits worth the cost. Have you listened to her side of the story? Has she told you why she thinks this man, above all others, is so special to her?”

1 Nathan Xavier Yes, release your anger. Wait, is that the Dark Side’s line? 28 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

November 13, 2019 2:26 PM

I think it was, yes. by Nathaniel Mordue

If he had given any thought to what the probable results of his rant might be, Nathaniel would have assumed it would have involved Xavier going back on his comments about not punishing him. He had just shouted at a teacher, after all. He had been openly disrespectful about both his father and Uncle Alexander, who were other adults, and therefore by definition, he thought, more sympathetic from the professor's point of view than he was. He had used the word 'hell' to describe a place, not to swear, but that was not a detail he expected a teacher to appreciate. As he recovered his composure, then, he resigned himself to whatever came - it wasn't, after all, as if the school could do anything worse to him than what his own family and his own mind did every day now. Torture was technically illegal, after all, and these technicalities mattered more outside the family unit.

"I'm sorry."

It wasn't the words which caught him off-guard. Lots of people said they were sorry, after all, before they did things they weren't actually remorseful about at all. It was just a way of twisting a knife a little further, that - Nathaniel might have done that himself, in the other chair. The tone, though, that caught him off-guard - enough that he actually listened to what the professor was saying.

His mother had thought about this. It had gone on in secret for who knew how long. She had been faced with worse than anything Nathaniel could - or would, anyway - do to her. And she had still done this. She had still been so carried away with her passion for Elphwick that she, just like his father, had decided that she loved those - things that adults did together - more than she loved her own sons. She was willing to take them with her, which was a bit better than his father, he supposed - they hadn't heard a word from his father in years, he didn't even know if the man was still alive - but she could have undone it all with one word when she had found out that Uncle Alexander was willing to take Nathaniel and Jeremy away from her. And she hadn't. His own mother didn't love him or his brother enough to restrain herself.

It was all lies. All of it. There was nothing that meant anything. They had lied to him, and he had been stupid enough to let them turn him into a freak - into someone who had actually thought that family meant something. It didn't. Nothing did.

And yet, he couldn't go back. He couldn't crawl to Uncle Alexander and beg for forgiveness - not least because he was sure he would get it. For now. Until. Sooner or later, it would all fall apart, and when that happened, and he was left without the Mordues and without his mother - without the Braun inheritance - he would be left penniless as well as familyless, because his uncle didn't actually care about him, either. Nobody did. And then there was the other thing - that he still cared about them.

His lip curled slightly, involuntarily, at the notion that his mother could possibly explain this in a way that made sense. "My mother's opinions aren't worth much, Professor," he said matter-of-factly. "She's not well. It wouldn't be hard for someone to take advantage of her. My uncle promised to look after her while I was here, but apparently he just left her to her own devices until a gold digger managed to flatter her into a compromising position." His whole body felt heavy. So very heavy. His skin felt like rock. The closest thing to sensation he could really feel was a strange sense that he was cold, somehow, except for his head, which felt hot, even though the temperature of the room didn't support either of those phenomena. "He's a liar, you see. Uncle Alexander, I mean. Just as much as my father. And Elphwick's taking advantage of a woman who's spent half my life taking rest cures because of her nerves - who hasn't been competent enough to take care of herself since my father left us. I'm beginning to suspect that I've had a very incorrect idea of what it means to be a man," he said, with audible contempt for himself and for the people who'd misled him. He didn't feel anything, though. Why didn't he feel anything? He ought to feel something, if only because that would make him stop talking...He stopped looking at the point off to the left where he had been staring for the duration of his monologue. He looked back at the professor. "She wanted you to show me this," he said wearily, making the enormous effort to half-lift half of the letter to indicate what he was talking about. "You did that. I understand. Thank you. May I go now?"

16 Nathaniel Mordue I think it was, yes. 1412 0 5