A Place Just For Us (tag Nate) on Magical Arts Room and Sports

Sylvia Mordue

February 29, 2020 7:09 AM

A Place Just For Us (tag Nate) by Sylvia Mordue

Christmas had been a little odd. At school, nothing had really changed, except she had to worry that Nate sometimes looked more vacant than she would have wished when he thought she, or no one else, was looking. Every time they went home though, it was obviously going to be different. The normal rhythms and routines of them seeing each other, all four children in the same house, all the familiar activities and get togethers were sharply punctuated by no one ever leaving. You could almost ignore or forget it, at times, if you imagined Ex-Aunt Cynthia was just lying upstairs with a bad head. It wasn’t as if her physical absence was so unusual. But then whatever it was wound towards a close, and nobody left. They just… dispersed. Back to their own rooms, on to the next thing.

She knew it had to be difficult for him. The whole Christmas break had felt odd and off-kilter to her, and she was more of a spectator than a participant in the differences. Alright, she’d had to make room for Nate and Jeremy in her life, but the former was scarcely a hardship.

When she was little, Sylvia thought that she had often wished that Nate could simply move in and never have to leave. Her wishes were granted often enough that it had sometimes felt that way. She could usually wheedle a sleepover or staying for lunch if she wanted it - Daddy never objected, and in fact it was usually Nate himself who called it to a close, if it was something to which his mother and Jeremy hadn’t been invited. Or Mother would sometimes send him home on that pretext, just to share him fairly.

She had always read the cautionary tales of being careful what you wished for and took from them never to seek the dead returned, or to be careful how you were going to get great riches, or to not wish for eternal life without eternal youth… There were pit falls in wishes, and it was usually wiser not to attempt them. She was not sure whether she had thought herself wise enough to get caught, or just that the universe would never consider her childish whims made over cake candles to be a serious request. Not that she thought that to be literally true or blamed her sixth, seventh and eight birthdays - or whatever numbers they had been, she could not recall precisely, only that she had wished it several times - for the current scenario. But she had never considered that to be a wish that could go wrong. She wondered what the universe would have twisted out of her alternating request, and any number of Christmas letters, that she wanted a unicorn.

It was cruel of it, and she would have been very tempted to get a lawyer and set it on the universe had such a thing been possible, because it had not delivered Nate - her childhood and ever-present companion. The methods employed in granting the wish had clearly deprived him of some of the essential Nate-ness that had been, to her understanding, part of the bargain, and therefore it could not be said to have upheld its end of the deal.

She wasn’t sure whether it had just been Christmas that had been tough, or whether – even if it had been – it would go away by itself now they were back. Nate didn’t say much about it, of course. Nate didn’t say much, really. And he had always been the quieter of them, but she thought it was different now. He could brush it aside and turn on normality when she came into his orbit, but the person she knew and loved was not suppose to be something he could summon up at will – he was supposed to be there all the time. In an effort to get him back, she had asked her cousin to meet her in MARS, and when he arrived, she smiled, trying for normality.

“Close your eyes,” she requested, pulling him towards the water room. She remembered their first year, when he had surprised her with a picnic in a variation on her own garden. He’d been trying for something else, but had not quite managed it. Though the trick was the same as it had been for anything else – imagine it with water.

Sylvia wasn’t sure how Nate would react, on opening the door and finding – surrounded by a moat, with little stepping stones that would vanish behind them – their treehouse. The symbol of the joined together worlds they’d had. Maybe that would hurt. But it was the place they’d always gone to talk. Really talk.

“I brought us a picnic,” Sylvia added, gesturing casually to the small pink purse that hung on a chain across her body. “I thought it would be good to go somewhere we can just be us for a bit,” she added, very much meaning both of those definitions.

13 Sylvia Mordue A Place Just For Us (tag Nate) 1413 1 5

Nathaniel Mordue

March 01, 2020 7:37 PM

The way we used to be. by Nathaniel Mordue

The holidays, Nathaniel knew, could have been far worse. In fact, given the position he had been put in this time last year, he knew the holidays had probably gone as well as they possibly could have. Intellectually, he knew that, and even mustered some academic gratitude for how things hadn't been worse. Because they definitely could have been worse. Much worse.

This knowledge, however, had only done so much to help him get through any given day. He had given entirely too much into the temptation to withdraw into himself and his books and notebooks, but even so - there had been enough times when he had had to make the effort to appear normal in company, or when he had had to try to force down the overwhelming anxiety about Jeremy and his own failure to know what to say, that he had been exhausted by the time he'd gotten back to school. Getting through the Feast had been an accomplishment, and then he had overslept the next morning, turning up late to his first class and only getting around to handling the post at the end of lunch.

These errors had, of course - so predictably that it was almost tiresome, even to him - sent him into a tight, rapid spiral of thought, freezing him in place on his bed in the face of the barrage: if he couldn't even make it to class on time, how could he ever expect to be any real help to Jeremy? And if he couldn't help his little brother, how could he ever expect to muster the skills and resources to take care of his whole family?

Dr. Greene called this process 'catastrophizing' and insisted it was not rational. She emphasized that many of the things he had, in his less guarded moments, admitted he had on his mind were not things within his sphere of responsibility. She said he needed to work on his desire to control everything around himself and his family life, because it was impossible to do so and therefore self-defeating, something that just trapped him where he was, despite that not being where he wanted to be. Nathaniel supposed it must have been nice, coming from what had to be a storybook-perfect - storybook-perfect before the plot began, anyway; those families might begin well and end well, but in the middle, he found it almost comforting that even the best of them seemed to go bad for a while - family; there was no other explanation for how she could really believe that it mattered if something was supposed to be his responsibility or not.

He was torn when it came to Sylvia's request to meet in MARS. On one hand, being at school gave him a legitimate reason to give into the seductive pull of solitude. He was worried about his CATS. When he thought about them, or about the semester of fourth year during which he had absorbed and retained virtually nothing, he caught himself peeling away the skin around his fingernails sometimes. On the other hand, however, family came before everything else, and had done even before he had put this specific member of it through all he had put her through. So he went to the meeting and smiled slightly, bemused, when told to close his eyes.

"What are you up to?" he asked.

Inside the water room, he saw very quickly what she was up to. For a moment he just looked around, taking it in, and then felt his face automatically, of its own accord, moving into a recently quite rare expression - a natural smile.

"You're brilliant." he said simply.

He took a few steps forward. "Think we should go up, or stay down here?" he asked, slipping with relief into the role of second place, taking his lead from her instead of trying to stay in control. Sylvia had threatened to stab him in the back, but had never actually properly done it - even if it had taken extreme measures on his part to prevent it. Plus, he had been following Sylvia his whole life. It was as natural to ask her for direction as it was to worry about Jeremy and their mother, and far more comfortable.

16 Nathaniel Mordue The way we used to be. 1412 0 5

Sylvia Mordue

March 02, 2020 6:01 AM

Perfect by Sylvia Mordue

Nate had smiled. One and a half times even. Sylvia felt the doubt melting away as she found she had chosen right, that she still had that power to bring him back. She felt immensely relieved, one question answered already - the old Nate had not vanished entirely.

“Thank you,” she beamed, as he declared her brilliant. “Up, of course,” she answered, stepping lightly onto the first of the stepping stones, “What’s the point of a secret hide away if we only sit and look at it?” she asked.

She switched positions as they got to the ladder, allowing him to go up first. Obviously Nate would never do anything so ungentlemanly as to look, but Sylvia would also not do anything so unladylike as to climb up in such a fashion as to produce an impolite vantage point. ‘Ladies first’ only applied to climbing down, and the rule was long established from their childhood. Even though the purpose of the treehouse had been to connect their separate homes, they’d spent plenty of time climbing back into each other’s gardens, and then back into the treehouse afterwards. Nate going up first also meant he was free to offer a hand in (not that she needed it) and clear out any pirates or other dangers that might be lurking.

She followed close on his heels, and settled in by the window.

“The moat view is rather nice. That would have been an excellent addition,” she commented. “Which view do you want?” she offered, “The one where you look out there and it’s a little different to how it was, or turning in this way,” she nodded to the unchanged interior of the treehouse, “and pretending it’s all the same?”

13 Sylvia Mordue Perfect 1413 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

March 02, 2020 5:08 PM

Can we really go back to what we were, though? Or just act that way? by Nathaniel Mordue

Nathaniel could, of course, have answered Sylvia’s question about why have a hideaway if they could only look at it. The truth was that they didn’t really have one. Right here, right now, it looked like the place where they had once felt they had one – but anyone else could walk into this room and intrude on them at any time. Anyone could do that at home, too, in the real treehouse, at least for a given value of ‘anyone’. At home, they could still retreat there, to a point, stealthily, but he could just imagine Aunt Avery’s expression if they were found doing so….

He wondered if Jeremy felt it – this constant steady awareness that they were being judged. That, given what they came from, it was quite possible that they too would slip and falter, or be bad influences on the real children of the house. He hoped that his brother was too dim to notice, honestly. Jeremy had never been good at controlling himself, really; put him under strain like that and he might crack at the most inopportune time – unless Nathaniel was just projecting his own weakness onto his brother, of course. He didn’t think he was, though. He didn’t know if that was good or bad, and chose not to think about it anymore right now, instead preceding Sylvia into the mock-treehouse.

It was not, now that they were both most likely near to their adult heights, the most comfortable thing in the world, but Nathaniel was secretly glad that the interior seemed virtually identical to the real treehouse. Before he could compliment Sylvia on that, though, she began talking, and he half-smiled again, reconsidering the decision to comment and thinking – in a way that almost felt as though someone else were thinking it; surely he never would think such a thing - you’re not as smart as you think you are.

“It’s usually considered polite to spend more time looking at the person you’re talking to than you do on the scenery,” he said lightly. “Though a moat is a really good addition,” he acknowledged. Nathaniel wished he could surround his house with a moat, then fill the moat with crocodiles. Crocodiles somehow changed so that they could not be enchanted out of the way and would eat anyone who came near him and the tiny band of people he needed to take care of. “There’s no such thing as too much security. You never know when pirates will try to invade your fortress,” he added, as though it were a joke, thinking back too to their childhood games. Metaphor was, it seemed, one of the lessons he’d sat through when he was younger which was actually surprisingly useful out here in the big world.

16 Nathaniel Mordue Can we really go back to what we were, though? Or just act that way? 1412 0 5

Sylvia Mordue

March 15, 2020 7:00 AM

You Tell Me by Sylvia Mordue

“Alright,” Sylvia acknowledged with a smile, turning her eyes from the view to Nate as he suggested that might be more polite. “I’m more than happy to do that,” she stated. That was certainly a perfectly valid alternative to worrying about the world around them, after all.

“Here, I brought us snacks,” she added. “I thought if we were coming up here, we ought to do the thing properly,” she added, unclipping the small pink purse and pulling out a small gingham bundle, which she unrolled to reveal crisp, green-skinned apples slices, a bowl of cashew nuts, and a small bar of chocolate. “There’s some lemonade in my purse too, if you get thirsty.

She considered asking whether there were any pirates, either on the immediate horizon, or that he’d heard rumours about. Nate seemed to be quite happy to talk, almost like his old self. However, she wasn’t quite sure how far they could stretch this metaphor before it became ridiculous, and she sensed they were nearing that point. What was he supposed to do? Name the pirates ‘Worrying about Jeremy’ and ‘Missing Mother.’ At some point, it was either going to fall apart or they were going to cease knowing what they were talking about. Or lapse into actually playing a childhood game, and Sylvia was too grown up for that.

And anyway, they had never really needed it. Not up here. They’d had the two extremes - total make-believe, and bare-faced truth.

“What was Christmas like for you?” she asked.

13 Sylvia Mordue You Tell Me 1413 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

March 15, 2020 5:14 PM

I don't know yet. by Nathaniel Mordue

Nathaniel almost instantly felt badly about the way he was dodging Sylvia's questions, but could see no way around it. Sylvia wouldn't understand; she had as good said so last year.

It was almost funny, he thought. All his life, he had assumed that he and Sylvia were in perfect sympathy and mutual understanding, and yet here he sat, thinking that if only they could speak honestly to each other, it was possible that Jeremy might be the one who - somewhere, deep down - might understand something of how he felt. Jeremy couldn't understand how complicated it all was, of course, or the burden of having had the family dropped on his shoulders - but Jeremy might well understand the one thing even Mama never had, which was why they were both so angry.

He did not reach up to touch his collar - he had mostly broken that habit now - but he was still extra aware of the locket beneath it anyway as his thoughts wandered down these avenues. He thought Mama understood some things now, at least, and he...well, he thought he understood why she had never worn this thing from the time his father left, or even, as far as he knew, taken it out of her jewelry box until she had sent it to him last year after that last real face-to-face conversation in Professor Xavier's fireplace. The damn thing was heavier than a mountain.

"Of course," he said seriously when Sylvia said they ought to do the thing properly. "It's the only way to do anything, isn't it?"

His tone was serious, but his eyes had a rare spark of humor, at least until Sylvia moved away from speaking as though they were playing a game. He toyed with an apple slice as he considered what to say.

"It wasn't easy," he said finally, and then dropped his eyes to the floor, not wanting to see disappointment or anger or frustration or - worst of all - hurt on her face. "I'm sorry," he added. "It's not your fault. And I did try - but I think it was sort of...inevitable. That it would be difficult this year." He risked a look up at his cousin. "How was it for you?"

16 Nathaniel Mordue I don't know yet. 1412 0 5