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Application for Hogwarts School
→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.Name: Anthony Severinus
Birthday: 11th of January 1956
Hometown: Scranton, Pennsylvania
Bloodline: Muggleborn
Magical Strength (pick one): Divination
Magical Weakness (pick one): Transfiguration
Year (pick two): Fourth (Fifth)
Biography:Shirley Rivers had never believed she would be a mother.
The promising witch, raised in the outskirts of Newcastle, didn’t have it in her nature to think of herself. She had been an empath from a young age. Her thoughts and feelings were always tied to others, sensing them as naturally as taking in a breath.
She had been an only child of aging parents. Most of her childhood was spent outside, playing with the other children in the neighborhood who had nothing better to do. Through it all, even at such an early, unformed age, she was touted as being a gifted diviner. Sometimes she thought she dreamed of the future. Other times, she could see the lives of people a world away. It wasn’t until she arrived at Hogwarts, a surprise to her muggle parents, that she was able to understand and apply all that she could not rightly explain.
The older she grew, the more formed her acceptance of this newfound world became. It was straight out of a fairytale and she believed herself saved within the hollowed walls of the magical school. With the liberation and freedom to exercise such things, the more powerful her skills became the harder, ultimately, it would become to control. The floodgates, once opened, proved impossible to seal. Rather than create a strong foundation that would box in her innate gifts, Shirley stretched the boundaries to their breaking points. It slowly ostracized her from the rest of the school. No one wanted to socialize with the girl who could sense their secrets, who could imagine their worries and faults, who could peek into the forefront of their minds and reveal it with a look or a blabbering tongue that would lose control of itself.
The crash, inevitably, came in her sixth year. She would wake in spells of disassociation, thinking of herself to be other people or at a different time. Shirley would begin to do more than just feel emotions without being able to silence them. In her mind, she could swear she heard them too. The more attention she drew to herself, the worse it became.
St. Mungo’s Therapist and Magic Psychologist diagnosed her, once she was admitted for psychiatric help, as a danger to herself. Over time, rather than graduate, she spent her days in isolation as they tried to find a way to regiment her life in a way that could stop the overwhelming ache that came from experiencing those around her uncontrollably.
It helped, little by little. Limiting those she could see, namely her parents who by this point felt so wholesome and simple, or to those trained to hide their thoughts from the intrusion of others, allowed her to at least start to piece the broken parts of herself together. As the years passed, she even got to the point where everything could feel muted. Whether through patience or prescription, she felt better.
Then Hector entered her life.
Hector Severinus never thought he would be a father.
He’d grown the second child and the only son to his parents who were of modest means, which was a nice way of saying they were very, very poor. His father worked as a coal miner for most of his life, though he went without work for some time during the Depression when Hector was only a young boy. The experience of going days without food truly stuck to him. The palpable fear that resided in their small home, ever-present, had left its scars in his formative years and shaped him into the man he would become.
It was why the military had always made sense to him. He enlisted the second he could, and luckily enough there was a war right around the corner where Hector could lose himself.
Now, there was a lot that many men went through during the war. Many horrific, unspeakable things that they would carry to their graves. That could wake them up in the dead of night, a haunting reminder of the inhumanity that killed a part of yourself.
Hector wasn’t like that. He was not the type of person to think in the future or regret the past. Everything was exacting. Everything was in the here and now. He lived life a blink at a time, an impulse at a time, a command at a time. He did not speak much and did not share stories with the other soldiers as they huddled in a dug-up trench hoping to survive bombardment for the night. He spoke in grunts and snarls, on the growing responsibility in the years that came, and the disbelieve that four years in, traveling from northern Africa to Italy to the beaches of France and into the German countryside, he remained alive and as aloof as he had been when he was trying to mute the cries of his sister and the pains in his belly when he was four.
Hell wasn’t on the battlefield for Hector. That came after; when he had money saved and nowhere else to go. While he’d risen some in command and prestige, the wars were over and he had felt as lost as any person could. There was only so much isolation in the moments between a cigarette, or so much willpower he had to stomach barely trying to listen to the mundane things those that knew him would ask when he came back. His mind was forever in the fog, and leaving it behind only made whatever felt in front all the more meaningless.
The only jobs that seemed to fit his skill were in authority and command. However, being a police officer for the few years he tried it was as ill-fitting as a three-fingered glove. There was no focus on sitting in a car, driving around, and faking pleasantries. And, more than that, no one seemed to understand what it felt like to want the fear. To need it. Knowing that every breath could be your last because that’s when it felt like it meant keeping. Being a prison guard was at least somewhat closer to what he yearned for. The silence as he stood watch, believing things could erupt at any moment. Having to hold his focus for minutes at a time.
Korea saved him before the life of a civilian could waste him away beneath debt and the bottle. Except, this didn’t feel like the war he’d already romanticized all these years later. Many of his men didn’t exactly know what they were fighting for. He continued to lead others under the direction of those who also didn’t know what they were trying to accomplish. No one seemed better suited for such a chaotic field, and yet, his demons had come with him halfway across the world. The drink was still heavy on his lips, masked only by cigarette smoke. He only shared orders and commands, his mind eternally focused on the mission at hand.
All of it just so that on the last mission, in his last act of service, he would fall under bombardment and take shrapnel to half his body, severely wounding his leg.
Now, Hector was not unfamiliar with getting hurt in the line of battle. He took a bullet in the shoulder at Normandy and another in the leg when they were freezing in the forests of Belgium. Still, this was a pain that left him debilitated, having to get carted off and evacuated to a hospital where he hung on the brink of death. Consciousness only came in spurts. Two weeks went by before he could ask a clear question of where he was and what had happened. It took a day longer to realize he wasn’t in Korea anymore but at a rehabilitation center in northern France. Another month went by before the wounds he suffered had healed enough to try to put himself back together and rehabilitate himself.
And while his skin burned and his body roiled, he couldn’t be happier. Because he couldn’t feel anything at all.
That’s when he met
her.
Hector had never really associated much with women. There had been the occasional fling, but they ultimately lost interest when he showed very little desire to engage in caring about them, or sharing in the details of their lives. Hector had never rightly fit in anywhere outside a foxhole and, for the first time, as he struggled through regaining the strength in his body, it was as if someone else understood how it felt to be so lost in this world.
He was not a handsome man. Hector had large ears and a freckled face. A slender neck and square head, with shaggy black hair. Even more off-putting was his burly body that didn’t seem to fit the rest of him. She, on the other hand, was rather beautiful, though modest in how she presented herself. Straight brown hair is always tied in a bun. High cheekbones that made her eyes look like gemstones. A wide smile that felt reserved only for him for some reason. While he could honestly say he’d never been taken with anyone in such a way, it still proved to be hidden well below the surface. It existed as a thought, not a feeling. An admission, not a promise. A weight buried beneath decades of repression and the hollow being that existed in his mind and heart.
Despite all of that, despite the crater of a human he always believed himself to be, Shirley was able to see through it. She was funny, in her morbid way. She would tell him that death waited for no one, and if he didn’t take his suffering seriously then death would be right back to take him to that gunned-down hole in Korea where it’d found him and decided to leave him to her care. He got better quicker than he’d hoped. While not handsome, he had always been strong. He had to be, otherwise he never would have made it this far. For the first time ever, as the final planned week of his rehab before being discharged came, Hector felt sad.
Shirley said she felt it too. It didn’t occur to him how she knew or what she meant, but for a time after, he thought he could be someone different, someone worthy of her knowing smile.
Except, those were fantasies. The reality was far crueler, as he would come to realize.
Anthony Severinus wasn’t meant to be born.
Shirley had decided she wouldn’t want to bring a child into this world. It was a cruel one, the more and more she experienced it. Her ultimate fear was that the child would be born like her, unable to live its life without compromise. Always believed that the rug would be pulled from under her and her mind would unravel into nothing more than a terminal for the feelings of those around her.
She was able to overcome the unrelenting nature of her magic, this was true. However, it was always present,
there. She could either stay in isolation or accept the cacophony on her terms. It’s why infirmary care always sounded like a way to deal with it once she was deciding the next steps in her life.
One might believe it’d be the absolute worst place for someone who could feel the pain of those around her. However, pain was far easier an emotion to translate. It was so direct, so one-note. It was not the nuanced struggle of anxious depression, or deep-seeded trauma aching below the surface where only she could see. That, she could understand. That, she could feel and meet with some form of direction.
Not only that but when she fell into the work of therapy and rehabilitation, she was able to see people come out the other side. Could feel their determination, their wants, and their hopes; could work with their plans and guide them into a better tomorrow. She could even understand their struggles, if she listened closely, and tapped into why they were trying to pull out of the fight.
It fit quite well for her. Her days did not seem as chaotic as they once had. She had her patients and moved across the continent, searching for better positions where she could do the most good. And while she could feel others, and see them for who they truly were, Shirley could always stand to gain from the practice of pushing aside and creating a wall between what was hers and theirs.
That was until she ran into a man who didn’t seem to feel at all.
She had braced herself as she always had before seeing a new patient. Her barriers were on high alert, especially when she read his file. A forever soldier, seemingly taking to a fall and arriving here by sheer dumb luck and likely a lot of screwed-up paperwork. She could only wonder what sort of horrors a man like that must tackle each and every day.
And yet, when she met his stern eyes, she felt… nothing.
Well, it wasn’t exactly
nothing. There was never
nothing. It was difficult to put into words how he made her feel, or not feel when she started talking to him. Every word came off contrite, only enough to answer. It left her curious, more so when she even attempted to drop some of her mental wards to see if anything else came through. When nothing did, she went through a quick evaluation and left it at that. The next day, she came in defensive and ready for the same muted, almost deaf reaction. On the third day she could only tell that he was parched, so she made sure to strengthen his intake and lower some of the painkillers. Again, Shirley could not trust that this was normal, that the rug would not get pulled from under her. But the more days that passed, the less defensive she felt until one day she did not feel the need to shield herself at all. It was as if a toothache she’d come to live with had been healed. She did not have to keep herself so isolated as she had to with others and it was in that freedom that she could finally break through the layers that was this mysterious patient.
What she found wasn’t all that surprising, or interesting. There was pain, residually, and a fear of being lost in a world that didn’t seem to make sense. More than that, there was a numbness that she almost found comforting. In the places where others found peace, he found chaos, and where others thought chaos he knew peace. It was a tragedy, in her mind, that someone could live in such a way. She did what she could to relate but, for the first time in her life, Shirley didn’t know how to. Nor did she want to, which more than anything seemed to gravitate her more to him.
She did not know when she noticed it first, or whether it had been something that came from him or something that she had implanted in him, but she was sure to hone in and fixate on it once she had. Pretty soon, she could feel the lightness that came filtering through his eyes at the sight of her, and she relished in it. While she had always been able to get attacked by the heated gaze of the men who looked at her, this was almost a precious thing that existed in Hector, one she cherished and would continue to nurture.
When his time came to leave, she moved first. She had felt his unease heading into that week, the feeling of dread of leaving her behind. Shirley didn’t give him the choice. It had become almost too addicting to be able to have someone whose feelings felt so far and distant that she had to work to get to them, or she actually had to rely on everything but her magic to truly find.
The kiss was warm, even if much of the heat was coming from her. Maybe her magic proved to be manipulative in bringing out a spark in him as well. She couldn’t rightly know. Though, for the next few months that followed, she was truly happy. And when she got pregnant, she thought that things could be different. That there was more to this world than what she had believed there to be.
But, that was a fantasy. Reality was a far crueler thing, as Anthony would come to realize.
April 21st, 1970
The creaky door slammed a lot louder than he’d planned it to, not that it truly mattered.
Anthony threw his shoulder bag aside, leaving it against the stairs as he walked towards the kitchen, already accepting what he thought was waiting for him. Unsurprisingly, his father’s stern eyes found him even before he walked through the opening. They always seemed to, even when he couldn’t rightly see the man. It’d always been that way. Well, as far as always got him whenever he happened to be around.
“You’re late,” came the expected, trite response. The look that was returned, meeting that stale gaze with right indignation said more than anything his mouth could. Especially when any sort of words would likely land him with a smack that would cut his already busted lip.
Anthony took a seat, staring down at a plate of greasy sausages and rice. One of the seven or so recipes his father had in his repertoire. At least when his grandmother had been the one cooking, she would make something that didn’t seem hurried and unthoughtful. Except, Gran was in a nursing home back in the States and he was here on this stupid, dull island.
“Well, it’s not going to eat itself,” his father commanded. For a moment, Anthony thought he’d ask him where he’d been. Or why his sweater smelled of cigarette smoke. Or why his lip has been busted yet again.
Instead, the man sat himself down across the small, round table and started cutting into his plate of sausages. Anthony, in turn, started doing the same.
The silence that existed there was a truce, of sorts. Both seemed like they didn’t want to fight that day, knowing where it would likely lead them. Surprising, he’d thought, but Anthony didn’t was hanging by a thread after a day spent skipping school and getting it to it with some of the older kids in his new neighborhood. Their funny accents aside, it was better than Wyoming had been. Though not as fun as Pennsylvania, even the western bid he’d stayed in last.
This specific brand of shared intimacy was pieced together by the sounds of metal cutlery scraping against cheap plates, the gulps of tap water, and the hurried chews of two people hoping to finish quickly so they could leave the other behind.
The silence was broken by a hoot, a knock, and the sliding of a letter through the bottom of their door.
“What the ‘ell is this?”
→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.House Request: Ravenclaw
Personality: Notably solemn, Anthony enjoys his space.
The boy grew up mastering the art of achieving it. His father was gone for months at a time and his grandmother, while helpful enough, needed more help than he did as a child. He grew up very independent and rather proud, considering everything seemed to rest on his shoulders. His mood would sour more when his father
was around, as the two seldom got along.
He grew up with a short fuse because of it. And now, entering his teenage years, he has developed a nasty rebellious streak. He isn't very friendly. The best you can likely do, at least currently, is leave him be. The worst would be trying to provoke him or, even more stupidly, bully him. He might not get you right away, but the debt will always be paid twofold.
Appearance: He's noticeably tan, as his father is, though a slightly lighter shade. His hair is extremely curly, almost like having a mop on his head. He is slender and shorter than most boys his age but has the piercing, withered gaze of someone aged in the ways of the world. Smiles are a rare occurrence so appreciate them when they are there.
→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.Option 2:That rat of his was in for it now.
The gray little rascal had disappeared from his clutches at breakfast. Again.
Before Hugh even knew what was happening, Merlin had shot across the floor, somehow managing to avoid all the feet walking across the hall and had escaped through the open doors.
Which meant that Hugh was now stomping through rows of flowers and other various flora, searching for the small creature. It was like the rat knew Hugh was allergic to most flowers. Merlin always chose to run to the gardens whenever he got away from Hugh. It was as if the rat did not want to have him for an owner.
Hugh had named his pet Merlin because he had hoped the powerful name would give the rat more incentive to be more than a rat. Not that he expected Merlin to change into a wizard or anything, but rats were just so...useless, for the most part. With a name like Merlin, Hugh thought it might give the rat purpose.
The only purpose Merlin seemed to have was getting away from Hugh as often as possible.
As the fifth year trudged into the second row of flowers, not taking much care to avoid trampling the first row, he felt the first sneeze building up pressure in his nose and behind his eyes.
"You blasted rat! Where are you?"
He pulled apart a section of bright red flowers; he didn't know what they were called because he despised flowers, and ducked his head low to peer into the depths of the flowerbed. It was moving closer in proximity to the flowers that finally did it. Hugh took in three great breaths and then let out an almighty sneeze. It was strong enough to disturb some of the dirt on the ground before him.
Groaning, he stood up again and wiped his nose on his sleeve. It was as he was turning his head, his nose running up and down his arm, that movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. Normally one who preferred to put his best face forward, Hugh was a bit embarrassed to be caught wiping his runny nose on his robes.
Nevertheless, Hugh put on his best haughty voice. albeit a bit thickly with his plugged nose and said, "Can I help you with something? It is not polite to stare."
Roleplay Response:Breakfast wasn't exactly the joy that others made it seem.
Anthony had still to get used to the structure forced upon him by this school. He had to wake up ungodly early just to make sure he could find a private place to sit and hurry to eat his plate before the hall filled up. Friendly eyes might find him, and he preferred the company of eggs and sausage that magically refilled than the idiots who made up his dormitory.
He'd rushed out of the Great Hall in rather quick fashion that morning. Making good time, he carried around his guitar rather than any school bag or books. His father hadn't bothered listening to the person who had arrived at their door to explain, well, all of this to him. Anthony still hadn't received his books and he wasn't about to be the one to speak up about it.
Instead, he settled in the morning glory outside the castle near the entrance to play.
Rather than cover anything of note, not wanting to make this a conversation starter, Anthony practiced his chords first before devolving into simple, catchy rhythms. C, then G, then Amin, then F as he fell off C major. The motion of his right hand increased the pace as his left tried to catch up. And the morning was turning into something productive.
That was until he heard a thunderous sneeze nearby.
The sound cut him off entirely. Narrowing his gaze in annoyance, Anthony quickly stood up and walked over to the source of the sound. The scene he saw made his face sour all the more. Rows of flowers were ripped apart, tossed aside, and left for dead. Standing atop their graves was an older boy with a runny nose looking back at him.
"Can I help you with something? It is not polite to stare."Anthony scoffed. Indignant, he clutched at the wood of his guitar, feeling the tension build along his knuckles. The itch to do something about it. Shaking his head, he decided against saying or doing anything at all and turned away.
However, if they decided to press the issue any further then, well, Anthony might need a new guitar. Or at least learn the spell that would repair it.
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