Nathaniel Mordue
November 01, 2019 10:15 AM
Asking for a favor (Professor Skies). by Nathaniel Mordue
It’s all over.That was the only coherent thought Nathaniel could form the morning after he discovered that his mother had dragged his Head of House into their private family matters. He tried to suppress it - tried to fight it - it couldn’t be over! It just couldn’t. It was unacceptable! - but as hard as he tried, it wouldn’t go away.
It’s all over.
Hoping to distract himself, he got out of bed and went to his solitary dorm bathroom. Slowly, deliberately - he took special pains to be careful not to pull on the buttons of his pyjama top - he got undressed and into the shower, where he stood immobile under the water until it ran cold, icy drops flattening his brown curls and plastering them to his forehead and neck and beating a rhythm into his skull, one that sounded too much like, over and over again:
It’s all over.
He was shivering when he emerged from the water, but ignored his towel and instead dripped his way over to the mirror, to stare at his reflection. The color and texture of his hair came from his mother, and the shape of his nose, but the rest of the features - the angle of his cheekbones, the line of his jaw, the height and breadth of his forehead, his green eyes - all came from his father. The only reason he couldn’t hate them entirely was because they were so similar to Sylvia’s, but the older they got, the more his coarsened and began to look, unmistakably, less like his cousin’s and more like those of the person he had, until recently, hated more than anyone else alive. His body, too, was starting to betray him - it was not yet a man’s, but it would be, with all the horrors that went with that. He wanted to run as far and as fast as he could from that, to flee the slightest possibility that he would inherit his father’s weaknesses and be unable to think clearly and decide rightly once he was trapped in a man’s body with all its...urges, but he couldn’t seem to control even his own person. Why, then, had he ever thought he could control anything else?
He dried himself off and went back into his room. Got dressed meticulously, with scrupulous care to not straining one stitch of his buttons. He began to tidy his room - in addition to losing his composure again the evening before, he had also put no effort into such things generally over the past weeks, and so the only semblance of order had been the removal of used clothing and bath towels by the prairie elves. Now, though, he attended to every detail, as though somehow making sure that his inkwells were all clean around the edges and precisely lined up could somehow change anything. He even spent ten minutes trying to pull every tiny crease out of his comforter, only, in the end, to sit back down on the bed and stare at the canopy and consider his options, which he had put on top of his trunk at the foot of his bed.
Finally, he floated his writing desk over to his side, opened it, and took out what he needed.
Dear Sylvia, he began.
Are you well? You don’t look well, but are you really unwell, or just looking that way because you’re angry with me? I know you don’t want to talk to me, but I wish you would at least let me know if you are in good health. I’m so sorry even for making you so upset. I never wanted that to happen. I never wanted any of this to happen.
I tried, Sylvia. Believe me - I tried everything I could think of. It was too late before I ever started, though. I guess I might as well admit that now.
All I want is for this to be over. I’ve been able to sleep again a little the past few nights, because the nightmares I have when I’m asleep aren’t nearly as bad as this one that goes on all the time when I’m awake. I miss you. I don’t know how to do this without you. I just want it all to be over.
I don’t understand anything anymore, Sylvia. We were always taught these things, and I had all these ideas about how a man should be, how to be one who wasn’t like my father - but it turns out that everyone else is almost as base as him. I don’t know what to do with the world while it’s like this, except keep trying to be better than it - even though I don’t want to do anything at all anymore but go hide in our treehouse. Things made sense there.
I don’t know what else to say - this was not a very good letter. I’m not used to writing you letters, though. I’m used to talking to you. So I’m sorry this isn’t a very good letter, and that you are sad. I don’t blame you for anything. You tried too. It’s not your fault.
Love always, Nathaniel
He had to take a few moments to collect himself before he could go on after he wrote that. Soon enough, though, he got out another sheet of parchment and began another letter.
Dear Jeremy,
For once, I don’t know exactly what to say - except that I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for how I’ve treated you, and I’m especially sorry that I’ve spent all these years lying to you. Most of the time, I didn’t know I was lying to you. About one thing, I did know I was lying, and I wonder if I should keep lying about that - but what does it matter now?
The reason we don’t have a father is because Dad did the exact same thing Mama is doing now - except that he didn’t have the guts to tell anyone about it to their faces. He just ran away with his secretary like a coward, and Mama told me I had to be good, and everyone thought it would be better if we didn’t tell you what he was, since you weren’t old enough to figure it out then.
Everything we did tell you was just as much of a lie, though. It’s all lies Jeremy. Everything they told us - family, honor, blood, duty - it was all a lie. None of them care about anything but appearances. They certainly don’t care about you - though you probably don’t believe me right now. That’s okay. Just believe this - If you ever want to come home, then you can come home, no questions asked. I don’t give a damn how it looks. You’re the only brother I’ve ever had and I will never turn my back on you. I won’t make you talk to me, but you can any time you want. No hard feelings about right now.
If they were going to do this to you instead of Mama, I would do the same thing for you. As it is, I’ll try to save as much of our inheritance as I can from that half-breed and his influence over our mother, so you’ll have a home to come back to if you need to. And don’t trust anyone in that house except for Sylvia.
Nathaniel
There was one more letter he needed to write, but he couldn’t think about that now. Instead, he carefully sealed up those two, labelled them with the names of their intended recipients, left his room, and went to Professor Skies’ office and knocked on her door.
“Hi, Professor,” he said. “I need to ask you for a favor.” He took a deep breath and gave into the impulse not to make eye contact, struggling as he was to find a way to explain what it was he needed without that extra burden on him. “You probably know that my family has - um - had problems recently,” he said, eyes on a point over her left shoulder. “I need these letters to get to my brother and my cousin Sylvia, but I don’t think they would be allowed to have them if I just...sent owls to them, or if my cousin Simon found out about it at all. You’re their Head of House, though, so I thought you might be able to get them to them for me, discreetly, if you would.”
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Nathaniel Mordue
Asking for a favor (Professor Skies).
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