Ronnie Jay Beckham
 | ||
| Biographical Information | ||
| Born | 11 October, 1930 | |
|---|---|---|
| Birthplace | Bibury, England | |
| Residence | London, England | |
| Nationality | English | |
| Education | Hogwarts ('44-'49), Gryffindor | |
| Title(s) | Quidditch Co-Captain '46-'47, Prefect '47-48', Senior Nurse '47-'49, Quidditch Captain '47-'49, Head Girl '48-'49 | |
| Physical Information | ||
| Gender | Female | |
| Family Information | ||
| Spouse | Samuel Carter | |
| Children | Samuel Carter, Jr. | |
| Parents | Rupert Beckham, Imogen Davis Beckham | |
| Magical Characteristics | ||
| Wand | Willow wood, Unicorn Hair core | |
| Patronus | Skunk | |
| Special Ability | Seer | |
| Affiliation | ||
| Occupation | Junior Healer, Pediatric Division | |
| Former Occupation(s) | Gryffindor '49 | |
Biography
Age 3:
She planted the spade in the dirt, chopping and jabbing like a crazed axeman at a stubborn tree trunk. Ronnie was crouched over the spot of earth, a dragon poking at its pile of gold, and her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth in her concentration. The child was determined to help the harvest.
A laugh billowed above her like smoke, and Ronnie looked straight up to stare at her father's mud-and-chestnut eyes. They sparkled, and Ronnie wasn't sure if she should be ashamed or if she should laugh too. She stood, offering up the spade in tiny palms. “Daddy, I helwping,” she smiled, and giggled when the large man picked her up and easily placed her on his shoulders.
“I think you can help better this way. Can you tell me where your mother is?”
The child gasped, patted down the top of her father’s head, and pointed a little finger across the fields. “Way way way there. Over where birdies are happy in theiwr wittle houses and the ground smells like laughing. Mummy is there.” Another bronze laugh from the man’s throat, and Ronnie rested her little chin on his crown. They were brown and white and a deep purple that ran like a river through tarnished gold veins. Secrets and the scarlet poppies that burned almost as brightly as the mirth in Rupert Beckham’s eyes. Mended fabric and wooden cups for potions; the little shack with a limping ceiling and her tiny palms wrapped around his thick worker’s fingers: father and daughter.
He was her great blessing, and she was his.
Age 4:
It came soft and strong, like everything else about Ronnie. Magic, its feathery freedom and the way it opened her flesh and soaked her spirit. Her bones felt grounded and light, but Ronnie knew nothing of its source but that she was bright and dark and the world was all suddenly red. Not red like the blood of crying men, or the scrapes on the other childrens’ knees. Not the red of anger that had once pulled Grandpa Davis to his grave, or even the red of August sunsets, crimson webs spun from memory and the briefest of moments. No, this red was the color of the sun on her lap on a warm summer afternoon, the heavy taste of laughter in her lungs, and the thick touch of mud and water. It was warm and soft, a texture-less pressure on her limbs; she prayed to Mummy’s Jesus that she would never lose it.
Rupert Beckham had left his daughter swathed in the wispy emerald grasses of the old meadows, while he blessed the cornfields with his enchanted touch. (Daddy never used real magic on these fields, he had promised Ronnie, but she disagreed. He was the magic of them, and they always grew bigger and brighter between his thumbs.) Ronnie blended into the silky and rough lightness of the sky and earth, and that’s when the green the ground changed.
Magic.
The child giggled, and didn’t dare collect the poppies that suddenly turned up their little faces to hers. Poppies that... hadn’t been there before. But they grew under her eyes, in her eyes, between her fragile fingers. And they smiled, and she did too.
Daddy was shocked when he saw it, on the last pages of the afternoon, and Ronnie felt distant when he placed her— once again— on his broad shoulders, and paraded her about the village. (What’s the big deal?) She clung to his hair and chuckled softly into its warm darkness, but her eyes were on the grass on either sides of the road. They shifted and appeared scarlet— flowers that sprang instantly under her gaze, happiness just out of reach.
And she didn’t know that day what it was— the violet and vibrant blue that slid through her veins, melted into the red and brown of her fingers— but she knew she wanted more of it.
Magic.
Age 10:
“You don’t want to do that,” Mabel said, arms folded across her chest. There was that familiar petty sternness in her gaze, and Ronnie knew that word would get to their parents. More specifically, their mother, because only she couldn’t see through Mabel’s suck-up faces.
“I do,” Ronnie said, voice quiet. She didn’t look away, because she wasn’t scared. She was stuck in her feet— in the tingling of her toes, in the rocking of her heels. There was something comforting in the feel of the wood against her skin, in the anticipation of the splash. And there was stability in the smoothness of the murky waters below them.
Mabel’s eyes narrowed and she stood up straighter; taller than Ronnie (and in her mind’s eye, taller even than the tree that stood behind them). They were all small— the Beckham children— sans Mabel. “I'll tell Dad, and then he won't let you read his healing books tonight.” Smugness didn't suit Mabel's pretty face, yet she wore it like a pearl necklace, expensive— it had no place in towns like theirs. Ronnie Jay offered her a raised eyebrow and the beginnings of a smile, because that was the currency of their fields. But Mabel only huffed, and Ronnie briefly wondered if her sister was meant instead to sleep in the feathered four-posters of governors’ children, and tiptoe through paved streets, soles glued to bronze heels. Not Ronnie.
She jumped.
Cool autumns clung to her skin, and buried her in the easy freedom. This was home, and Mabel could only blame herself for rejecting it. Ronnie would never leave.
Age 13:
But in the end, that’s exactly what she did.
Ronnie was silent while they bid their farewells, and repeated mantras of her presumed success. She let their smoked tears and bitter smiles soak in her skin like a sliver of shimmery sunlight in January. Joy pressed her fire-touch to Ronnie’s arm, and for once in her life she witnessed the sun cry. But no cobalt tear bled from her eye, though she left behind everything she’d ever known. She was strong this morning, and they were eased in her wake— after all, how could she allow them to look upon her despair, when they had sacrificed so much more for this moment? Months and years of scratching the bottoms of barrels, of locking away a few dollars here and there, of selling more crop than they ought to.
And her father was certain that it would all be worth it. That, somewhere under the skin of Ronnie Jay Beckham, was the ticket to a more secure lifestyle. And, misplaced and heavy though the trust was, she was determined not to let them down.
The wagon shuddered, and she along with it. Absent sentences cried from the corners of Dad’s eyes, and his lips pressed together in a straight line. Ronnie tucked her hair behind her ears, and looked straight ahead too. To the future she would trace, to the chance she was to offer her family, to the heavy burden of fate— and away from home.
(Or maybe, it would be home, after all.)
Age 14:
And when the girl— the woman— the Birch Tree— died, so did they all. She scattered bits of herself across the tile floors of the Great Hall, when they gathered, and rubbed her tears into Ra’asiel’s midnight eyes and pale cheeks. She was born again in the confusion and pain of her friend’s concussion, and never again stalled when faced with an urgent state such as this.
- "Elizabeth! You need to...you're going to get hurt!"
They were shaken and shivery for months, years afterward, and even in the freshest breath of Ronnie Beckham, Emma Grace Birch stood in her bloodless serenity. The Gryffindor carried that memory forever, and blessed the wounds of others with the same hands that had clawed for freedom. The same that had pushed themselves away from Professor Oliveroot’s protection, and latched bitterly onto the arm of the Jagged Man, that smoky June afternoon. She stepped now with the same foot that had kicked at his shin, and tripped backward when Liz yanked her back. She spoke with the same voice that had cried and begged and screamed— she was trapped in the past, and had grown from it.
- "You can't take her! You can't hurt her!"
She had been so young then.
Age 15:
The ache that Jasper Kedding stuck to her bloodied soul was wretched and unknown and familiar. She could feel the heavy glances of once-bright eyes, felt the way a room darkened a shade when she named it hers. The tired stutter of Casper Baines, thick in her ears and bold in her blood; Ra’asiel’s crisp sadness, like rain tucked under a woolen quilt. And Caius Thorne, who was just as gray as he was blue, and the blackened look in his eyes on these Mondays when she hardly registered his presence. Their practices on the Pitch had become dull and hesitant, equal parts weary and furious— clenched fists in soft mittens.
Some days she wished they knew her charcoal misery, but she choked before her lips could move, so she clamped them shut— strangled from the inside. Only Icarus Argabright carried her burden, and she carried his. They were the silence of November, and wildflowers pressed between pages. The therapeutic way she wrapped his injuries and smoothed bruise cream into the spaces under his eyes: kindred spirit and familiar tears.
He was her great blessing, and she was his.
But this page was not for Icarus. Its sickly rhythm belonged to Jasper, and its fractured texture would be owned by Ra’asiel’s faded steel fingers, and phantom articles. Her quill bled for invisible eyes alone.
- --
- your fingers press bruises into my paper skin—
- fold and unfold me ‘til i’m wrinkled and thin
- you break my cold bones, and you sew my mouth shut
- i cry silent and solemn, but you leave me to rot
- i’m hid around corners and under your eyes—
- cold and unkind and fixed - dark - on the prize
- redemption is sour and sorrow is free
- you have whispers and secrets that you take out on me
- your words are your weapons, and they tear me apart—
- a disease, a shooting, a sharp poisoned dart
- i forgot who i was and my courage flew south
- and my heart, how it pounds; now i’m drowning in doubt
- --
She felt bitter and raw, drawn and quartered and sunk by the ink that stained the parchment. There were so many words that split her head and begged to drip from her lips— but they did not escape her, even on this wretched page. Her pain was a disgrace, and she was ashamed of it, as there were others who paid a toll far worse. (And the bruises of Icarus Argabright were fresh and real and the words that stung her eyes were nothing compared to them.) But still she wrote the final letters of her downed spirit, and tore her broken wings from their creaky hinges. A shame.
- --
- and i can’t see.
Age 17:
Darius Palomer’s lips were pine green shadows and moss against hers. His skin felt slippery and warm, sometimes soft and sometimes rough and other times something completely unknown. Hands like sandpaper, but smooth against her delicacy. So long, she’d struggled against the chains of her own heart, and bled through the cracks that the Gods and the Monsters had scratched into it. So long she had been crushed against the sharp rocks of Love’s island, washed away and torn to pieces— so close and so far from the safety of its shore.
But he was different.
She had found a home in him, and in the lines of the castle walls, and the serene chaos of the darkened forest floor. This was exactly what she wanted, what she needed and yet (and so?) she left it to die.
(She had never been so stupid in all her life.)
Age 21:
"No, I--" She hesitated, and peered a little too closely into the eyes of her husband. He was hard to refuse. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. Everything's kinda fuzzy and I'd rather..." But Samuel was looking at her with wide eyes and that half-frown she hated, and he handed her their baby, leaving no more room for protest. There never had been room for argument with Slick.
She glanced at the wand resting on the coffee table, and felt sick because she didn't need it.
"Tell me what he thinks about me," Slick said, his mouth twisted up in a suave smirk, like this was a joke, like he was winning. Ronnie felt sick. This wasn't something you could beat, it wasn't a victory. She did not want to be Mum's successor. (But, she supposed, she had earned that title the first moment she uttered a word to Icarus Argabright.)
Ronnie almost corrected him, almost told him that she couldn't choose what she would feel, if anything at all. She just knew things, and slowly turned to stone while strangers hurried on with their business, completely unaware of the things she had Seen. 'Sir, your grandmother..' she often yearned to call after them. But people like her were more danger than help to those they warned, and Ronnie had yet to be sure if they were visions or useless hallucinations. (Please, let them be my imagination.)
She almost told him that there was nothing, that she could not See anything, but then her arms stiffened around the babe, and she was frozen. Eyes wide, she stared at Samuel beside her on the couch, and his smile grew while fear gripped her every muscle. In that moment, she prayed to her mother's God, the gods of Caius, and even Icarus' late mother, to stop the prophesy before it touched her. She did not want to know.
Her mouth clamped shut out of necessity, and she hunched and squinted her eyes closed to contain the knowledge. Merlin help them all if Samuel learned anything of his son's future. (Given Ronnie's history, it would not be pleasant.) Snippets of one scene flashed behind her eyes, thoughts and colors-- they weren't visions, not exactly, but flickers of knowledge that bombarded her bulging skull. If only she could block them out completely.
In her mind, Slick shouted and glass broke. A little boy fought an older man, and black mixed sharply with blue. Tension and anger, and a hazardous connection between the babe in her arms and the man who had offered him. Then, she felt her husband's presence no longer.
Sam began to cry.
"So?" Slick urged, eagerly leaning closer to her when she opened her eyes. "What did you find out?"
Find out, such a gentle term for what she had witnessed, what she'd experienced. She smiled thinly back at him, smoothed the babe's hair, and lied through her teeth. "He... loves his father." Samuel's smile churned her insides, and she quickly bid him goodnight and escaped to the nursery, amidst claims that little Sammy was tired and needed his rest.
The door shut behind her and she slid to the floor, cradling the bawling child who, in fact, would not love his father.
