Prefect timing! [Nathaniel] on Sonora Lounges

Evelyn Stones

July 28, 2020 8:27 AM

Prefect timing! [Nathaniel] by Evelyn Stones

One of the first duty nights of the term saw Evelyn and Nathaniel working together. Evelyn was tired but feeling better than she'd been before break. She still had very little hope that anything was going to go well at all for her, but at least she had amazing friends and an amazing boyfriend to keep her aloft while she worked through it all. One of those amazing friends wasn't really someone she was close to, but someone she thought she'd rather like to be, and he seemed confused by the idea of anyone wanting to be friends with him. Naturally, that meant it was Evelyn's job to dispel that misconception.

Since Evelyn had very little access to money of her own, she'd become more and more adept at handmade Christmas presents over the years. She drew particular inspiration this break from CJ's craft collection and from ideas she found for more crafts they could do together. The combination of muggle and magical seemed so perfect to Evelyn, who considered herself a failed arts and crafts project of the same ilk, that she couldn't help going that route for Nathaniel's gift. Of course, she also had to recognise that he was a Mordue and thus probably more than a bit racist. There was every chance he would hate it. In which case, he was being a jerk and she would tell him so. But only if he hated it because he was racist; he was allowed to hate it because it was lame.

She carried the item in her bookbag, stashed between the books she intended to study for the night and wrapped in a T-shirt. When she sat down for duty, Nathaniel was already there, and she grinned at him. Normally, she might have gone for small talk first, but she wanted this to be done so she could see how this was going to go. It maybe was a bit rude because if he was a jerk about it and then had to sit there with her for the next several hours, interspersed with occasional patrols, that seemed rude. Still, she didn't want to weight.

Retrieving the gift, still wrapped in a t-shirt, Evelyn set it on the table in front of the subject of her budding friendship. Checking that the bottom was on the hard surface and steady, she held on to it with one hand and whipped the t-shirt away with the other, tucking it back inside her bag and grinning at Nathaniel.

"Merry Christmas!" she announced as her gift was revealed. In all its Pinterest glory stood an upside-down mason jar, with bits glued on to the lid and water inside, surrounding a picture of people flying by on broomsticks: a DIY snowglobe. It was one that Evelyn had clipped from a magical newspaper, so the figures moved, but it wasn't as fancy as some of the portraits, so it could be shaken up to move the snow around without it shaking up the players. "The picture is replaceable," she explained. "It's in plastic and if you turn it upside down and unscrew the bottom, you can stick a different picture in. I thought you could put one of yours in it!"

Not wanting to pressure him to like it, to react, or to hug her, Evelyn took the seat beside him and brought out the first of the textbooks she'd be diving into for the evening. "I hope you had a good break," she added with another smile.

22 Evelyn Stones Prefect timing! [Nathaniel] 1422 1 5

Nathaniel Mordue

July 28, 2020 4:02 PM

Think we're up for the challenge? by Nathaniel Mordue

Christmas had not, perhaps, been as bad as the year before. There was that. It had still been horrible – sitting about among a group of people he was increasingly sure had never actually cared about anyone in their entire lives, feeling utterly alone while surrounded by his nominal surviving family, feeling particularly melancholy that he couldn’t even confide in Sylvia, nor attempt to keep even the purely unobjectionable bits of their own family’s traditions alive with Jeremy, for fear that Jeremy would (accurately, but still) somehow read disloyalty to their uncle into pancakes, assuming Nathaniel was even able to procure them – but it could have been much, much worse. So there was that.

For almost as long as he could really remember, he had envied Sylvia and Simon for having an intact household, but he wasn’t even really sure that Dad was that much worse than Uncle Alexander or Aunt Avery. He could only assume that they had stayed together out of sheer apathy. At the Pierce-Brockert wedding, he had felt almost like cheering on the band of apparently poorly brought up small children who had taken a swipe at the wedding cake: Go on! Wreak chaos! Save your idiot relatives from marrying each other, and save however many people they’ll breed from having to live!

Technically, he supposed, he should tell Dr. Greene about that thought, but he wasn’t sure he would. It was best to say as little as possible. This was also why he hadn’t approached that woman – Winston’s aunt-who-wasn’t-his-aunt – and asked what the hell she had wanted to seduce and drug her way into their world for, really. Well, that, and the fact that he’d realized who he was looking at only a moment before he had realized that he also recognized, far more clearly, a wizard at the open bar, and that the reason he recognized that wizard was because that wizard was his headmaster; it had taken a real effort not to attempt to have some fun at that point. But it was best not to speak, at least with adults.

He smiled politely to Evelyn when she joined him on duty, wondering why she was carrying what looked like a small bundle wrapped in a shirt, but deciding to apply the principle of silence to a colleague in this case…until, at least, she whipped off the t-shirt and presented him with its contents, removing the need.

“Thank you, Evelyn,” he said quietly, once she had explained what it was supposed to be and he had moved past the bit of being too surprised to think of anything to say in response. He flipped it upside down and then back the other way, watching the ‘snow’ swirl around the little picture. Quidditch in the snow; that would be an interesting sight. “This was very kind of you.”

Contrary to assumptions that could have been made about him, Nathaniel didn’t mind homemade gifts. When he thought of lavish bought gifts, he thought of his father. This, by contrast, reminded him of something Sylvia might have given him, like the albums illustrated with her paintings that she gave him to put his photographs in. He turned it over and upright again, wondering whether to address the comment about the holidays at all.

“It could have been worse,” he said finally. “Christmas and New Year’s are – ah – not my favorite times of year,” he admitted. It wasn’t as if she of all people was in any position to judge anyone from coming from an unhappy family, and this was one more sideways bit of insurance, to potentially stop any threat that someone would start to suspect him of ideological infidelity before the threat could really form. If anyone asked, he not only stuck to the party line, he behaved as if it was true even when there was no reason to do so. “We…lost my mother over the holidays, a few years ago,” he explained. “Which is a very cheerful topic I know,” he added with the ghost of a grin. “I’m sorry – hope I didn’t depress you. Did you have a good holiday?”

16 Nathaniel Mordue Think we're up for the challenge? 1412 0 5

Evelyn Stones

July 29, 2020 9:39 PM

No doubt about it. by Evelyn Stones

Evelyn stifled a smirk at Nathaniel's thanks. It was polite of him, but it was still so formal. She wondered what would happen if she turned him upside down and shook him. He did exactly that almost right away and she chuckled softly at that. He was, for all his stuffiness, a bit like a little kid. Shame, really, that they hadn't gotten to know each other until later into both their Sonora careers, and that they'd met under such ridiculous circumstances at that. She thought she'd rather like to be his friend and she wasn't sure he was about to let anyone in that close at this point.

She nodded understandingly when he said that the holidays were a rough time, but her eyes widened with shock when he said he had lost his mother. She'd had no idea and immediately felt like a jerk for ever talking about her own family the way she did. "I'm so sorry to hear that," she said, frowning. "I can't imagine what that must be like to go through." She meant it in the way that people meant it when they said such things, but she also really really meant it. She couldn't imagine having a parent worth being sad over when something like that happened, although she'd been a bit of a mess when her own mother had left. Evelyn had 'lost' her mother, but not anything like people meant when they said it like that. "Not too depressing," she promised. He seemed to be playing for a joke though (she probably shouldn't have been surprised that dark humor was up his alley) so she tried for one back. "Depressing me would be really hard I think, right?" she pointed out, raising an eyebrow and smirking.

Everyone always asked about her breaks when she asked about theirs and she thought it was stupid. She probably should stop asking about theirs, but that seemed rude, too. "This one was . . . mostly pretty good," she decided, trying to consciously focus on the good. There had been rather a lot of good and the only actual bad was stuff that was sitting in the back of her mind, rotating while it waited for a burial sometime in February. She thought that perhaps it was her own body she was waiting to bury, but preferred to believe it was something more conceptual. "Got together with some friends and Heinrich, so that was really nice. It's sort of bittersweet to be back." Being back meant the countdown had begun. Being back meant there was only work and responsibility to distract her, in between bouts of connecting with Ness or Heinrich. Or maybe now Nathaniel. "Do you have a favorite holiday food?" she asked, figuring that was something that almost everyone could get behind.

22 Evelyn Stones No doubt about it. 1422 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

July 30, 2020 10:49 AM

Ah, you're an optimist, then? by Nathaniel Mordue

“I’m glad,” said Nathaniel, sincerely, when Evelyn said she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like, losing his mother. Even if his mother wasn’t really dead – even if he didn’t really pretend that his mother was dead the way he was supposed to – the things that had happened were still experiences he would hardly wish on his worst enemies. “That was easily the worst year of my life, and I’d had some…unpleasant ones, before that.”

His hands, he noticed in a rather detached way, had a slight tremor in them as he said that – he could see the disruption in the pattern of the falling ‘snow’ inside the jar.

“Still, it could always be worse,” he added. “I still have my brother, and my aunt and uncle were – “ a spasm of distaste crossed his face involuntarily, without him even noticing – “kind enough to take us in. I suppose that’s why I wanted to help Alexander, though, you know – I could imagine what it would be like, not having anyone.”

He was getting too close, he thought, to real things there, real injuries that had never quite healed all the way over, even after all this time and over a year of therapy. Perhaps he had never been literally homeless, or not even known his own last name, but he didn’t have to imagine what it would be like not to have anyone. He could remember the experience in vivid detail, and sometimes still did, entirely against his will. How many mornings had he woken up gasping for air, out of dreams about the morning he’d written those letters –

No. Gone. That’s over.

And it was, though it still didn’t stop him from wanting sometimes to speak to Montoir – Montoir, who wasn’t even half so alone as Nathaniel had been, as he still had his…accomplice, and most of his friends. He was beginning to wonder if his fourth year hadn’t broken something inside him that would never be really fixed, and having thoughts like that was among the reasons why he worried about this. Still, he had to go over this enough with Dr. Greene, without confessing his darkest secrets to people who weren’t legally bound to keep them.

“Fair point,” he said with half a return smirk, glad she had gone along with humor. “We children of ridiculous families do have the most fun conversations, don’t we? And strong constitutions.”

Getting together with friends and her boyfriend. That sounded like a pleasant time. Perhaps a bit depressing anyway, since the holidays were supposed to be about family and hers was a disaster too, but better than mealtimes at Uncle Alexander’s family. “That sounds nice,” he said noncommittally.

He grinned, though, when asked about holiday foods. “This is going to sound strange,” he said apologetically, “but – bananas and pancakes. My parents used to – and we kept on with Mother, until, well – but you know, normally, it wasn’t that common for my parents to have breakfast with me and Jeremy – Mother would still be lying down, and Father…I suppose he was at work,” he said vaguely. “And when we all ate together, normally, everyone was supposed to be dressed, right. But on Christmas, we’d all get up in our pyjamas and slippers and dressing gowns, and have these absurd breakfasts, no nutritional value at all, with all the pancakes we wanted, and whatnot – and Mother’s grandparents were, well, old even when she was born, so they were from back in the day when tropical fruit was a luxury, so Mother always would have bananas and pineapples and oranges for us on Christmas too, because that was what her parents and grandparents had done, you know. And we’d get a present before we went to Aunt and Uncle’s for the family Christmas lunch – Uncle was older than Father, so he was already head of the family, even before…everything else.” He cleared his throat, uncomfortable at the territory he had just inadvertently talked his way into. Evelyn was alarmingly easy to talk to sometimes; he needed to be more on guard. “So that’s mine. What’s yours?”

16 Nathaniel Mordue Ah, you're an optimist, then? 1412 0 5

Evelyn Stones

July 30, 2020 11:53 AM

Hardly. by Evelyn Stones

Evelyn found herself more and more curious about Nathaniel's family dynamic as he spoke, in part because it sounded okay but looked awful. She doubted anyone was about to say that Nathaniel struck them as a well-adjusted person, except maybe other members of pureblood society. Talking to him could be like playing with sand or something, when you're trying to spread it out all even so there's no holes, but your fingers poke through and you get big streaks. Nathaniel was a streak. But the Nathaniel that he wanted others to see was just a boring bit of level sand. Evelyn thought she'd rather prefer to be a windy day than a poking finger, though.

She grinned at him as he explained his favorite holiday food and silently patted herself on the back for asking a question that got Nathaniel talking about something easy while also revealing quite a bit about himself. "Pancakes are the best," she agreed, "no need to apologise there." She couldn't quite imagine having a feast of tropical fruits for Christmas, but it made her smile nonetheless and she loved to imagine Nathaniel and Jeremy popping out of bed in very different states of excitement (somehow she could never picture Jeremy as excited . . . or happy . . . or human) and deciding on principle to wear their pajamas to breakfast. "I love that," she told him. "That's great. I love . . . like, even when family stuff is hard, and even when things aren't perfect, there are little things that are nice anyway."

The question was harder to answer than to ask and she realised she didn't really have any Christmas traditions. She'd had some at one point, but things had been rather upside down for a while and there wasn't anything set. For a long time, it had just been mom and dad and Evelyn, or the three of them and some of dad's coworkers for Christmas dinner. Then CJ had been born, but Evelyn had only spent one Christmas at home with the four of them before her mother left, and then she'd spent the holidays at Ness'. Ness' family had some great Christmas foods, but it wasn't the same as something she'd grown up with.

"My mom used to pretend that she could make potions," Evelyn began, remembering what seemed like a very long time ago. "Obviously Muggles can't make potions, but she knew about them from her parents and my dad, so she'd pretend to make them. I think she was probably trying to make me feel more confident for school. But we'd make like . . . soup, or hot cider, or mashed potatoes in a pot that looked like a cauldron. Sometimes my dad would help if it really did require some magic but usually he was busy. We only did it a couple times, but my mom and I would make hot apple cider in a cauldron for the holidays, and I loved it because I felt like a real potions master, or a mad scientist, adding a little of one spice, throwing in a bit of another, shaking a little more cinnamon in . . . it was really good. It had oranges," she added, addressing the last bit more specifically to Nathaniel than to her own memory. "That's the key to good hot apple cider, is add oranges."

She paused, considering something. "Do you think about being an adult? Like when we're all done here and stuff? I wonder sometimes if I'd rather keep some of the traditions I know, or make new ones." Whatever 'family' was going to look like for her after graduation, it certainly wouldn't look traditional. That alone meant she was going to have to be paddling an unfamiliar boat upstream, but she was happy knowing that she wouldn't be paddling it alone. "I think friends have become my family, so there would be new traditions because of that. Maybe we can all bring a holiday food that we like a lot," she smiled. "Christmas three years from now - you're invited. But you'll have to learn how to play DnD," she grinned.

22 Evelyn Stones Hardly. 1422 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

August 01, 2020 1:28 PM

Highly confident, then? by Nathaniel Mordue

OOC: Nathaniel reminisces on his major depressive episode in his head. BIC:

Nathaniel smiled, a little wistfully, at the idea that it was good to have the pleasant memories even if everything else was wrong. “Yes,” he said agreeably. “Better than no good bits at all, I suppose.”

He privately wasn’t sure he agreed. When he had been very ill, it hadn’t been the thoughts about the then-immediate situation which had been the worst. Those had just made him angry, and anger had been the most positive emotion he had been capable of at that time. It had felt good, being angry; when he had been angry, he had been able to somewhat look forward to the future, after a fashion, as he fantasized about what he would do, when he had the chance – mostly, killing his stepfather and uncle. There had been times when he had mildly unsettled himself with just how vicious his own imagination could get, even in the state he’d been in, though not enough to make him stop thinking like that. The bad times, though – those had been when he thought about the gaping holes that were going to be left in his life after those single moments of satisfaction, and when he thought about how things had been before everything went wrong. Having good memories then had felt like a knife to the gut, each and every time he’d had one, and there were days when they still hurt, if he thought about them too long, or – if the experience itself was a pleasant one – after he had one….

One of the things that made him think he might be getting better was that he no longer clearly remembered the exact feeling of the emotions which had driven him to the point of wishing he was dead, to looking between his writing desk and his potions kit that morning he’d ended up writing those damned letters to Sylvia and Jeremy. He knew what had happened, for the most part – there were a few hazy gaps in his recollections – and he knew he had been in an unbearable amount of pain, but he could no longer summon the exact feeling to mind when he went over those memories. On one hand, he didn’t miss those feelings. On the other, he still didn’t feel like he thought he had before he’d gotten ill, which made him worry he might never get all the way better, which was not a good thought. He did not want to be a semi-invalid for the rest of his life. He loved his mother, but he did not want to become her.

For now, at least, he had something to focus on other than those thoughts, so he did, smiling again as Evelyn talked about her mother. A Squib, then, by the sounds of it. That could explain some things, albeit in an appalling way, and one which did not exonerate her father at all for whatever he had done – many people were cruel to children they thought might be Squibs, but Nathaniel didn’t see the purpose of that, as the children in question had hardly asked to be born that way, and it was even worse if her father had knowingly married someone with Squib genes and had children with that woman and then took it out on his child.

“That sounds lovely,” he said sincerely about her memory. “And fun. And don’t oranges make everything a little better? Except mint. Oranges do not go with mint.”

He became more somber again, however, at her question. “I’m not sure I think about much other than being an adult these days,” he admitted. “Though I hadn’t really thought about the holidays part of it yet. I suppose it will get complicated, when Sylvia and Simon and Jeremy all have their own families, probably…” He trailed off with a shrug. “We’ll have to figure it out as we go along, I guess.”

Evelyn, as a Pecari, was probably far more comfortable with that idea that he was. He was surprised but not entirely displeased with what he assumed was a joke about inviting him in a few years. It was an absurd idea – he and Heinrich had always gotten along well enough, but he suspected that Ness McLeod would try to hex him on sight at a social occasion – but it was nice of her to say that anyway. “You’ll have to tell me what that is first,” he observed of the requirement that he learn to play what he assumed from context was a new game, dee-andy. "Is it cards?" he asked, thinking that sounded like it could be the name of a card game, the sort women played during their teas to pass the time, or whatever it was women did at their parties - he had seen them at it, of course, when he was very young and his mother had hosted such events, but that had been quite a long time ago now.

16 Nathaniel Mordue Highly confident, then? 1412 0 5

Evelyn Stones

August 17, 2020 3:50 PM

Always. :D by Evelyn Stones

"Oranges do not go with mint," Evelyn agreed with a grimace. "Toothpaste and orange juice was a hard lesson to learn." She cocked her head at his phrasing about his cousin and brother though. "You don't think you'll have a family, too?" she asked softly, aware that she was treading into conversation that was not appropriate with high society types. Yolo.

She grinned when he said he didn't know what DnD was though. Of course he didn't! But there was time! Perhaps she could get him to come play with them all sometime and then he would relax and then he could help them overthrow the racist patriarchy he had grown up in. It would be great. He had a winning personality if not for the highly entrenched beliefs that came with his upbringing in many cases after all. "It's . . . did you ever play make-believe when you were a kid?" she asked, trying to imagine Nathaniel pretending to be a knight. Perhaps he hadn't figured out it was make-believe and that's why he was anxious; he was still trying to be a knight. "You play make-believe at a table. So like, one person will tell a story and we all have characters in the story and we get to control their actions. It's a roleplay game, so you're pretending to be somebody in the story and you can fight monsters and go on adventures to save princes and stuff. It's great. We play in the library. You should definitely come! We would love to have you," she added, in case that wasn't clear. "Then, when we're all graduated, you can play with us and you won't be starting from the beginning then. Better late than never if that does happen, but it would be fun to try now."

22 Evelyn Stones Always. :D 1422 0 5

Nathaniel Mordue

August 21, 2020 6:20 PM

There are worse things, I suppose. by Nathaniel Mordue

He had said too much. He hadn’t even really thought about it when he said it – it was as unremarkable to him now as the color of the sky; even if someone was foolish enough to settle for him, he couldn’t in good conscience allow such a thing – but Evelyn wasn’t really someone who was supposed to know it.

On the other hand, though – it hardly mattered that she did know, did it? What was she going to do with that, anyway? It was hardly a secret that he wasn’t engaged or even anywhere near it, and nobody in the school seemed particularly disappointed by that fact. In fact, he thought Sylvia might much prefer it this way – he rather suspected she’d make any girl who was so unfortunate as to end up married to him live life on edge, never knowing which way the wind would blow his cousin’s moods. She had never liked sharing, especially when it came to him; he wasn’t entirely sure, on a bad day, how much difference Sylvia really, practically saw between Nathaniel and one of her china dolls….

That was on bad days, though. On good days he knew better, and even on bad days, he knew that he knew differently on good days – one of the most confusing things about his nervous condition was the ability to sometimes hold two completely contradictory beliefs in his mind at the same time. It was better than when he had been really out of touch with reality, at the worst of it, but still…baffling.

“I’ll have Sylvia and Jeremy,” he said. “And Simon I suppose – my older cousin, Sylvia’s brother. I don’t really think of…marriage and that sort of thing. I suppose it’s not impossible,” he said, hoping to deflect a bit. “Maybe once the others are more settled, I won’t have to worry about them so much…” He suspected that didn’t sound better, and that he should just stop talking about that.

He grinned, animated by a flash of pleasant emotions, when asked if he had ever played make-believe growing up. “All the time,” he said. “I mean – we had toys and games and such, of course,” he added, wondering what odd beliefs she might have about people like him – he had gathered over the past six years that Other People weren’t quite as strange and foreign as he’d imagined, at least not all the time, but with that had come the thought that those who weren’t born observers might not have observed his sort of people closely enough to realize that they were not completely alien, either. “But we made up our own games, too, a lot of the time. It was fun.”

From the sounds of it, this game was rather similar to playing make-believe, so he didn’t quite understand why they didn’t just…call it that. Maybe there were too many people, or maybe it had something to do with them all being older – maybe they thought it sounded better. The basics, though, seemed very similar – you got to escape being yourself for a while, and imagine a world where problems were monsters and everyone came home happy in the end after slaying them. It was a pleasant thing to pretend.

“Perhaps I’ll come watch sometime,” he said, thinking he could explain that as taking pictures for the school paper. “It certainly sounds interesting.”

16 Nathaniel Mordue There are worse things, I suppose. 1412 0 5