Application for Hogwarts School
→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.Name: Icarus Argabright
Birthday: March 18, 1934
Hometown: Oxford, England
Bloodline: Halfblood
Magical Strength (pick one): Transfiguration
Magical Weakness (pick one): Divination
Year (pick two): 3, 4
Biography: Yvadne was a solitary witch who had left the family when she left for Hogwarts, her Muggle parents having forbid her return out of fear. She had always spooked them with her nonsense, odd words that came true, and the piles of trinkets she collected in her room that sometimes jibbered in the night when she snored. Her older sister Yvonne had always been amused with her oddness, teased her in good fun about her "prophecies" except when they were about Yvonne's bad luck. It wasn't too much of a shock to learn her sister was a witch, and it probably wasn't the worst thing that it meant she could escape the harshness of their parents. She could handle it. If Yvadne was anything, she was resilient. If she was anything else, she was "eccentric." And that's if they were being polite.
In the middle of Divination in her third year, Yvadne saw in her sister's belly an egg made of feathers. Yvonne denied even having a boyfriend, much less a baby, and the issue was put to bed. But Yvadne could not sleep. She saw feathers like signs in her tea and her bath water. The summer after her sixth year, she attended a local festival in Oxford with Yvonne where she saw a feather at the glass bottom of a pint. Before the mug slammed back to the bar to command a refill, Yvadne was there to learn the name of one Julian Argabright. She had seen him before.
Julian was a twenty-something owner of a failing brewery nearby (if she had been older she might have recognized Nox Ales as one of the strongest scotch ales in wizarding Britain), and had no interest in girls of fifteen. She asked him what he knew about birds. This finally drew a side-eye, and he stared at her for a moment as if to remark on the oddness of her aura - it was as if, somehow, he had known her for years. Yvonne ran to her as soon as she saw that look about her that she got just moments before she began to spew riddles - and quickly interrupted by making a scene of her own of false fainting from the heat. Anything to save herself and this handsome and completely normal young man the embarrassment of a teenage girl's uncommon "talents."
"Witch," Julian mouthed silently to the girl over Yvonne's head as she dramatically swooned.
"Squib," the accused smiled back at him while Yvonne glanced back at Julian in response to the odd look on her sister's face. Julian hid his discomfort with by offering Yvonne a drink. Yvadne's entranced, scrutinizing eyes did not leave him until he took Yvonne away when the sun went down. She would see him again.
Yvadne went back to her childhood home for the last time to collect the rest of her belongings, ignoring the screams of her parents. Yvadne did not return to Hogwarts that year, or any other. She rented a cottage from a kindly old wizarding couple, and slowly began to build her fortress of
things. He would need Things.
On March 18th, 1972, her vision of the egg returned, and the feathers fell away.
Yvadne rushed to the hospital -- which hospital she still has no recollection of, she only knew she had to get there -- and found the room where Yvonne lay asleep, alone with a newborn. It had hatched before she got there, but has not yet opened its eyes. She crept in to pick it out of the little hospital crib when the room seemed to morph and change. Yvonne disappeared from the bed. A magpie called her attention from the crib. Yvadne picked up the baby, who grew to nearly four years old clinging to her with lanky limbs. She turned to call for help. Julian spoke, suddenly appearing in the doorway, silencing the bird. The room was righted, and Yvonne again lay napping off a twelve hour labor. The infant was seven pounds in her arms, and looked up at her with a calm smile. The bird was gone.
"I wasn't ready for this. Haven't had the nerve to hold it," Julian told her. "It looked so odd when it came out. I swear the thing was born -- "
"With feathers," she affirmed. Her eyes seemed to glaze over as she approached him. "They're gone now. And I don't give you much longer either. Hold your son, Daedalus. I'll be expecting you." She handed the baby to his father, and left them as the magpie began to cry.
The new parents were more interested in the life they had carved for themselves than the new one they created. Yvonne suffered from post partum depression until their next house party. And Julian -- well, she never could figure him out. As the apparent need to host functions increased, Yvadne was often enlisted to babysit despite the clutter of her little home... And so, she raised the child, tipped by the spectral magpie. She held her arms out for his first steps, cried at his first word. When the working day or dinner party or long weekend in Nice was through, Yvonne always returned to pick up the boy. If the child had another name, neither he nor Yvadne learned it. He was always and only Icarus.
Yvadne came down with an odd illness on New Year's Eve of 1973. Everything was the same, but it looked different. There were fewer names, even fewer faces. When her sister came to the door, she saw no one except Icarus standing on her doorstep with his little red luggage. Yvonne's voice was even further away with this pulsing, blinding headache. For the first time had to refuse to care for the boy. Although it ruined Yvonne's plans, she didn't argue, simply grateful for all the help Yvadne had given them in babysitting Icarus. But that meant the little boy was coming along to the adult party. It didn't go so well.
It was Julian who arrived at Yvadne's cottage the next morning with a sleeping three-year-old in one trembling arm and a small red luggage in the other. His eyes bleary from hours of weeping, he could do little more than shake his head when the witch answered the door and asked him where Yvonne was. Confused and desperate, she tried to placate him, but she was a Seer, not a soothe-sayer.
"Hold your son, Daedalus," he told Yvadne through his furor, forcing the child into her arms. Still shaking violently, he left, weeping in controlled silence. Icarus stirred awake in his guardian's embrace, and hugged her tight. Julian was gone, and the magpie called after him.
Yvadne learned of the time warp later that week, after checking herself in to St. Mungo's, and never spoke of it again. Icarus accompanied her happily, and never left her side. There were plenty of things around to collect, and so many odd people to look at. They stayed at the hospital for several days, and made a few trips back. It was a different sort of stay with her now, but he enjoyed it nonetheless.
Yvadne, who he called Mum, cleared out the 'spare' room for the boy as he got bigger. She still couldn't help the stacks of books and letters spilling into the new little bed sometimes, but even less could she control the accumulation. He brought more trinkets as gifts when he found them, wherever he found them. It started as daisies and snails from the garden, coins and bottlecaps off the street. The gifts got bigger as he got older, and it all became part of the place. It was crowded in their tiny cottage, but Icarus didn't mind. She was his mom, of course, and he would love her no matter what. He only wanted to see her happy. Slowly, steadily, happily, they built a little empire in the flowers.
The overwhelming presence of vision and clutter - an amalgam of old things, found things, strange things, nameless things - fostered great strength of creativity and conscious in young Icarus. Through play and necessity, he learned to organize, sort, and arrange; to plan and engineer; to visualize and to imagine. Icarus spent much of his time watching or reading to figure a way to do or create something new and different. His little inventions always brightened his Mum's day as her health grew steadily worse. The time Mum had to spend at St. Mungo's flew by as he sopped up information on injections and incantations just watching them, repeating under his breath. They only had to tell him once, and the nurses could all be sure that his mum was in good hands at home.
He was seven when she had another vision, and it took a particularly heavy toll. It seemed like she had suddenly become paranoid, keeping a closer eye on her "son" when he left the cottage. She had previously allowed him to wander the neighborhood and park as he pleased, and these new limitations felt very different than the confines of their crowded home. Sit for your lessons, Yvadne insisted. Don't touch that. Don't run ahead. I can't lose you too. Yvadne never said a word about the nature of it, and it was difficult for Icarus to figure what it might have been. He trusted her so implicitly and loved her so dearly that he never wished to upset her by asking. They visited the hospital every now and again, and he helped out if he could. Most of the time, Icarus just watched.
When Icarus received his Hogwarts letter, Yvadne tried to keep it from him. She had her reasons. One being that she couldn't afford to send him (she was still paying off her own education). The other was the vision. Everything he needed to know he could learn from her. But she couldn't hide anything from him. A red envelope in the garbage? You'll have to try harder than that.
She was in the street with a man Icarus did not recognize. There was an exchange of a package. Mum just nodded, and then shook her head as she pushed the package back toward him. When the man put his hand on her shoulder,
as if somehow he had known her for years, she began to cry, and nodded again. Icarus ran back to his little room in the labyrinth to pretend he'd been working on his owl trap before she came back. The man followed her in. He listened in through the stacks of books and boxes and the wall in between.
"--had known that Julian had a child, it is my understanding that they would have sent more sooner," he said gently, insistently. The latch clicked shut behind him.
"We don't need their money, Mr. Finch, we're doing just fine. We're quite happy."
"And the Argabrights are quite happy to provide for his education. Nox Ales is no longer the peddler of such, ah, swill, as it was under Julian's direction... since his, ah, disappearance."
"He's disappeared? Him too? But some squibs were... "
"I'm sorry, Miss Yvadne. I'm sure your husband loved you very much, but he, ah -- "
Icarus dropped the owl trap, and scuttled out of the path of total structural collapse of the eastern wall before it caved in over his little bed. Mum grabbed him as he tried to run out, and took him by the shoulders in the middle of the kitchen. Mr. Finch looked on with hopeful eyes as she explained in defeat that it was time for Icarus to attend Hogwarts. As expected, he was resistant. As expected, he asked questions. Yvadne only had time to answer one of them before she fainted and was rushed to St. Mungo's by some men Mr. Finch called.
Mr. Finch sent him to Camp Loki with his red suitcase full of Things before the term began, and every summer since, to get acquainted with the other children. Icarus wept for home the whole way. He wasn't given a choice, but he was provided a barn owl named Janus to keep in contact with his Mum during the school year. Since the other students he met seemed not to covet the role of his best friend (relentless, they called him Icky), the honor belonged to Janus.
She doesn't respond often from St. Mungo's. Mr. Finch is kind and caring, and sends most of the owls with updates about her worsening condition. The letters Icarus does get back from his Mum are hard to read, but he keeps trying.
→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.House Request: Ravenclaw
Personality: Inventive. Collector. Awkward. Rational. Understanding. Stutters.
Appearance: Short for his age, awaiting a growth spurt to balance out his lanky limbs. Much of his clothing is a little too small, and none of it is coordinated; wears things he finds.
→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.Please reply to one of the Sample Roleplays below.Movement through the flowers caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, and Icarus looked up from his book just in time to see the rat scamper toward him. It wasn't long before the rat was followed by his human. Icarus arched a brow at the accusation the boy threw his way as the rat hid in his robes. The wriggle of the critter against his skin tickled, and he smiled until the boy approached.
"That's n-no way to address someone who just c-caught your runaway, you know," he said gently. He lifted the rat to allow it to perch on his shoulder. It was a cute, gentle thing. Every time he handled a rat, he wished he could have owned one, but his owl Janus would never allow it. Icarus relished the moment with the creature, giving it a stroke on the head as he lifted his voice again to the boy. "And, as long as I'm uh-honest, that's an even w-worse way to speak to an animal from which you seem to expect l-loyalty. It's n-no wonder he's trying to g-get away from you. Be gentle, they're s-small."
Icarus wasn't even quite sure if the rat belonged to this little bully, and he didn't want to hand it over unless he was sure the little thing was safe.
→ ABOUT YOU.Please list any characters you have on the site (current and previous): Chase Àleifson
How did you find us?: Other
