AN: Thank you for the comments and the follows. Here's the next part. Hope you like it. If you spot some place where I'm getting confusing, or you can't work out the plot, let me know and I'll be happy to discuss the needed corrections and apply all that fit :)
Like the day before
"I'm getting suspicious" Elena gulped her coffee and poked the stack of mail in front of her. "No crap happened since last weekend, so it's ten days with absolutely nothing interesting going on around us. I feel like just before the storm."
"I hope there is no storm" Henry applied to his scrambled eggs. "We have a trip today and we are going to spend all day in the park."
"Not this kind of storm, kiddo" Emma fixed his collar and tried to make his hair lay flat. As soon as she finished, he combed them back with his left hand - right still shovelling the eggs into his mouth.
"One day, Henry, you're going to mix up which hand goes where and you're going to end up with the fork stuck into your hair" Elsa remarked from over her tablet. "And then I'll drive you to school like this."
"Mum! Aunt Elsa is being mean!" he stuck a tongue at the offender and then swallowed the last of his eggs and chased them up with a gulp of juice.
"Actually, if she did, you'd look like Ariel."
The juice sprayed from the five-year-old's mouth and nose as he choked in outrage.
By liberal approach to the driving regulations Emma got him to school on time - freshly washed, shirt and jumper changed at the very last second.
"I'm afraid Henry's not going to submit this project" Elsa said very, very calmly, as she looked the teacher in the eye. "I know it's a graded one, but I think I should advise you to rethink the idea of handing this kind of a task to children every again."
The young - younger than Elsa, probably - teacher waved her hands and shuffled the papers in front of her.
"Then Henry's total grade will be much lower than it could be" she started, in slightly condescending tone. "I don't understand, what is so complicated with such a simple assignment. All the children are doing it."
Elsa counted to five in her thoughts.
"And how many of these children are, in fact, coming from partial families? Do all of them even know their grandparents?"
"How can you not know your grandparents?"
The girl was so naively honest. Or honestly naive. Whichever that was, it did not bode well for her future in the education area.
Such a pity Elsa thought. She seemed rather reasonable in September.
"Very easily. If your parents are orphans and came from a group home, never staying in a foster home, then they don't have any traditional family - or foster family - meetings to tell stories about. If your parents are orphans, then there is no family heirloom to hand down the generations. In Henry's case, the family history is "I have a mother and two aunts and they were raised in an orphanage. And then I was born. The end."" Elsa smiled thinly. "Are you sure you want him to read this out loud, in front of everyone?"
"But, but…" the teacher froze up for a moment. "What about the father? He must have some family?"
Elsa rolled her eyes, which she was usually very careful not to do.
"Also, not everyone has a father worth mentioning in a public place. Really, you sure you have only students from full, proper, multi-generational families who retain all relationships? Or maybe half of them lie when writing this stuff and cry quietly because of the way this is asked. Let's hit them a few more times, what do you say? Let's punish the children who won't bring a Daddy for the Father's Day play, hm? Or maybe make them prepare a show and tell with something that belonged to their grandparents? Why don't you throw in some genealogical research and drawing a tree of minimum three generations?" Elsa sniffed and straightened. "I hope, i really hope, you will consider not humiliating a big part of your students any more. Henry will most definitely not be writing any of those, or taking part in them. I'll go to department of education, or whatever that is called, if this affects Henry's grade too much, too."
Henry sighed as he sat in front of his supper and prodded the grilled cheese sandwich with his finger without much interest.
Emma reached to touch his forehead but he ducked his head and frowned.
"'M not sick" he mumbled.
"Why aren't you eating then?"
He shrugged. A five-year-old shrug is an expressive movement, especially if said five-year-old is usually a very talkative fellow.
"Sooo… something at the school?"
He shrugged and nodded, pulling the juice glass closer to himself.
"Sooo… problems with other kids?"
Shrug. Henry sipped some juice and made a great performance of swallowing it.
"So?"
"Not with kids" he finally uttered.
Emma strode around the table and sat next to him.
"What happened?" she asked, rubbing his back. "I'm sure I don't like how this sounds…"
He frowned again, looking angrily at his sandwich.
"It's Miss Tallard. She said…" he thought for a moment. "She said she doesn't know how to talk to me now. She was standing in the corridor and talking to some other teacher and said she's so weirded out she doesn't know what to do with me now, and how to talk, because she's afraid she's going to say something wrong."
"Oh, dear. Elsa must have scared her a bit too much" Emma sighed, closing her eyes and pressing the bridge of her nose for a moment. "OK, next time I'm the one doing the talking. Sorry, Henry. Elsa went to explain to your teacher that some homework you got was not a very good idea, and she probably went all lawyer on her. You know Elsa is a bit scary like this, right?"
He nodded, but still frowned.
"Can we…" he hesitated a bit. "Could aunt Elsa not scare any more of my teachers? I mean, I don't like doing stupid homework, but I think Miss Tallard doesn't like me now very much."
It wasn't as if they had a lot of privacy in their tiny apartment, but at least every personal nook was separated with a curtain to allow each of them some "me time".
Elsa used the fact that her bed was by a large, deep-set window and furnished the sill with a mattress and some pillows. Now she curled in on herself, hugging one of them.
Her stomach hurt. It didn't happen very often, but always after a confrontation in which she let her inner lawyer come to the surface. Which, surprisingly, didn't happen at the office at all. Only when dealing with stressful social situations. And then usually in the cases where she found later she went overboard. Getting Emma out of the hospital and taking the money for the staff's behaviour? Piffle, not even a twinge. Bossing her way into a police station when their car was mixed up for someone else's and impounded? Perfectly ok. Talking to a teacher and apparently scaring her out of her wits? This she paid for. Painfully.
The world seemed to be pressing on her, as if her skin was gone and every movement of the air scraped against her bare nerves. The hairs on her hands seemed to vibrate on their own, Even the hair on her head hurt a bit.
She combed through it furiously, trying to get rid of the feeling that there was electricity gathering around her head.
The blue-and-silver striped curtain moved.
"WHAT?" Elsa blurted, feeling the air movement on her overheated face like a slap.
Emma slipped by the edge of the curtain and silently sat next to her on the window seat. Carefully reaching out she enfolded Elsa in a hug.
Suddenly all the electricity and the tenderness and the rawness feeling was gone. And when the second pair of arms went around her and the third blonde head joined her sisters, the general feel of wrongness in the room dissipated with something like a snap, and Elsa's knotted stomach relaxed enough for her to unravel herself from the pillow.
Unnoticed, the tiny bleeding ulcer she managed to work herself into quietly healed, leaving no sign of ever having been there.
The pirate movie was not exactly targeted at children Henry's age, but Elena's idea to make it a family thing turned out to be a big success. Henry was delighted with the animation, while the sisters left the cinema sniggering about the dodo, the Suspiciously Curvaceous Pirate and discussing the pros and cons of having an animation done with the voices of Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman and David Tennant.
"I do admire the level of performance they gave, as their accents did add a certain something to the movie, but I'm not really getting…" she shrugged "...this. I mean, nice voices, yes. So what?"
"Oh, come on, Elsa. It's like the Puss in Boots done by Banderas. You just love the furry guy some more because of this."
"And that rat in "Flushed Away". The movie itself was fine, but Jackman!"
Elsa rolled her eyes and strode ahead of them, towing Henry along.
"Come on, kid. Let's go and get some ice cream and let them drool over some animated pirates alone. I'm so not taking part in this discussion!"
Emma's days were rather long as she declined - even though they repeatedly offered - to let her sisters wake up early and prepare Henry for school. She knew that Elsa was a night owl and waking at 6:30, although quite possible, was a very very bad thing for her. Even half an hour made a difference. Elena, quite capable of being up and about even at 6, if needed, had absolutely no memory regarding school packing, lunch, proper school dress code and special requirements of specific days, so she could happily get Henry to school with nothing to drink, no sandwich and no pencil case.
At 6:30, in March, it was cold. Not as cold as in January, of course, but still the ceramic floor of their kitchen bit into her soles painfully and she hopped from one foot to the other waiting for the microwave to ping as the milk was getting heated.
Elena drifted by, snagging the orange juice from the fridge and drinking it straight from the bottle, ignoring Emma's sounds of disgust.
"You now drink the whole thing and buy a new bottle for Henry for the afternoon, do you hear me, miss?"
"Yeah, sure. Whatever you say, Mommy."
Emma was very good at throwing small things, so Elena soon found herself pelted with bottlecaps from one of the drawers.
"Mom? Can I have the cocoa now?"
"BLAST IT!" Emma ran to the microwave and opened it only to have the foamy milk splash from the oven onto the counter and her bare feet.
"You're having tea today, I'm afraid" Elena drawled from her spot on the sofa.
Henry was done with his homework and had to make a tough choice between bothering mom and getting something more to do and sitting quietly in the window by himself and finding something to do.
He counted items on the street carefully.
Five sedan cars.
Six vans.
One trash truck.
Seven kids on bicycles.
One motorcycle.
He yawned. Nothing interesting. Even the motorcycle guy looked like absolutely nobody exciting.