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He can't keep much from his mother.
He told her he liked boys the moment he realised himself. (She'd had her own suspicions. A boy can only talk about Jonathan Crombie being the perfect Gilbert Blythe so many times....) He told her he accidentally broke the two hundred year old vase his grandmother had gifted them the minute she came home from work. (She laughed it off and kissed his forehead. She hadn't liked it much anyway and now she had an excuse to not put it up in the hallway like her mother-in-law expected her to.) There were, of course, things he had managed to keep under wraps (a certain dead relative, their rocky relationship and his reappearance) but their rapport was such that he found it hard to do so.
"You therapized your therapist?" she asks, incredulous and mouth full of spaghetti.
"Shrinks have feelings too!" he argues, a bit embarrassed.
"Then they should go see a shrink about it," she says and narrows her eyes at him. "Darling, I know this may come as a shock to you, but your therapy session is about you."
"Look, it wasn't anything preposterous. It's just that her brother used to teach her piano like dad taught me, which I had mentioned earlier. And then, you know, I might have probed her about it, just a bit." She shakes her head, disappointed. "Turns out he passed away in the Janus Thickey ward, last year, from the prolonged action of a heart-slowing curse and all she could do was sit there. Now the guilt just consumes her day and night and what was I supposed to do? Tell her to hold our tongue? " His mother does not react. "I promise there will be no mutual therapizing here on out. It was just this once."
She rolls her eyes, amused. "Okay, sweetie. If you say so." She twirls her fork into the pasta. "Or, y'know. If you're going to be shit at therapy, be a normal teenager and don't tell me about it."
He's well-versed with the concern hidden behind jokes like this. "It does help. These sessions. They've helped." He hopes he sounds genuine. "Thank you." She squeezes his hand from across the table. "How was your day?"
"We just scratched the surface with yours!" she says, annoyed. She knows too well how much he loves to deflect.
"Honestly, this was the only notable event of the day. I didn't do much else." Besides researching ghosts for the fifteenth time this week because did I mention I think father's phantom is haunting me?
She sighs. "Well, we had a focus group sort of thing. Talked about the werewolf assimilation proposal to see how the public feels about it."
"How'd that transpire?"
She sighs louder this time. "There were some positive responses." He raises an eyebrow. "By some, I mean two. And the rest, unsurprisingly, was a lot of filthy half breeds and they needed to be rounded up and taken care of."
"Rounded up and taken care of?" he repeats angrily.
"Yeah. I just...." She massages her temples. "Then Emily told me nobody's ready for this and I asked if we're supposed to wait until everybody magically becomes warm, loving and open minded to change. That kind of went into a whole thing which ended up in her telling me to cut a bunch of the clauses and I laughed because she's already made me cut about fifteen from the first draft. Then Perseus tells me that we have to compromise and I might've screamed at him. He told me to go home and now I'm home."
