Melted: A MaxTul AU story

Forty-Seven: A Mother and Her "Sons"

Plustor was fuming. He went up to his father's office like his mother asked him to, but he knew even before he entered how it would go. His father loved Tul and would not see any problem with the arrangement that Hongtai Farms wanted to make and would also probably praise Tul for pulling off this partnership. Why didn't his mother stop this? Didn't she see how giving Tul anything was too much and a threat to them? How could she not see that they needed to protect what was theirs?

Metinee knew why her son was so frustrated, but his frustration didn't compare to hers. Over the years, Metinee had become increasingly concerned about Plustor's inability to lead properly. She thought that by providing him with the best education, with every advantage that she could, and with a belief in Shilapath as his destinty, that he would become the leader she wanted him to be.

However, part of the problem was that these lessons were never about Plustor but were still about her love for her husband. She wanted Plustor to be the worthy heir to Channarong. It was Channarong's glory, not Plustor's personal development, that was at the center of everything she did.

Metinee loved her son, but she would never deny to herself that he had repeatedly disappointed her. She wanted him to be shrewd but instead he had become petty. She wanted him to be a strong, calculating leader, and instead he was a weak boss who repeatedly miscalculated. She wanted him to be a person that people admired, but she knew that he didn't really have that many true friends and followers.

People did what he said because he was a Pakorn not because he was Plustor. In fact, the only reason why she had approved of his marriage to Taina (whose family was not in the tier she had originally planned for her son) was because she was the first (and only) woman she had met who seemed to actually admire Plustor. She had arranged that marriage quickly before Taina changed her mind.

Ironically, it was her stepson that seemed to embody all the traits she had tried to embed in her own son. Tul had the potential to be all the things that her son wasn't. Initially, Metinee had hated Tul on sight because he looked so much like his mother, and she hated the way Channarong looked at him. But as he grew up, she watched his potential grow and knew that he, if left unchecked, would outshine her own son.

She had always seen his mother as her husband's nearly fatal flaw, so it never occurred to her that Tul's talents were gifts that had been nurtured by a mother who had truly loved him—who had poured all her hopes into figuring out how to best raise him with his own strengths and weaknesses. Metinee had just seen him as a nine or ten-year-old fully formed threat.

Thus, it had also never occurred to her that Plustor might have improved if she had encouraged a brotherly bond between them rather than a competition. It never occurred to her that the starved for a mother's love Tul might be a benefit to her and her son, that Tul might have become devoted to her if she had shown him a quarter of the motherly affection he had lost.

The only benefit she saw was in Channarong's gratefulness to her for letting him stay with them, and even that was laced with resentfulness. Why was Channarong so thankful to her for this when instead she really wanted him to recognize how she was setting him up to get all the power he deserved?

As she sat in her husband's office waiting for Tul to arrive and looking at how her husband chuckled while reading through the Hongtai Farms documents, she knew that Tul, somehow, had achieved a major win. She was going to let this go ahead despite Plustor's feelings because this was going to be good for Shilapath and good for her husband. However, she was going to have to think of a way to keep Tul's wings clipped. Much of what she would plan going forward was going to depend on what she found out in this meeting.

Metinee had been behind the scandal with Pimnachouk because she saw that the woman had the power to make Tul shine even brighter. Tul was always an excellent student. Even when he was rebelling and getting into fights in high school, he still got top marks. There were times she had wondered if he did well just to spite her. She knew Plustor felt that way, especially when all the tutors and special classes he had still couldn't help him to get the kind of grades that Tul got.