Icarus Argabright
 | ||
| Biographical Information | ||
| Full name | Icarus Michael Argabright | |
|---|---|---|
| Born | 18 March, 1934 | |
| Birthplace | Oxford, England | |
| Residence | London | |
| Nationality | English | |
| Blood Status | Halfblood | |
| Title(s) | Head Boy 1951-52 Ravenclaw Prefect 1950-51 | |
| Physical Information | ||
| Gender | Agender | |
| Hair colour | Brown | |
| Eye colour | Brown | |
| Family Information | ||
| Parents | ||
| Siblings | None | |
| Magical Characteristics | ||
| Wand | 12.5" ebony, unicorn Mum's 9" silver lime, unicorn | |
| Patronus | Eurasian Magpie | |
| Special Ability | Empath | |
| Affiliation | ||
| Occupation | Unspeakable, Medical Researcher, Divination Professor | |
| House | Ravenclaw | |
Contents
Biography
Early Life (1934 - 1945)
Yvadne Bains knew her son years before he was born. She Saw him in the bathwater. She heard his name in the language of the nearest star. She watched his life in flashes and screams that split her head, and she loved him much too hard. It was clear what she needed to do. For a falling fledgling: build a nest.
Book by book and teacup by teacup, boxes and mirrors and books, books, books, she filled an expanded garden shed she named a cottage with everything she could find she knew he would need. He wouldn’t arrive until he was three years old and time slid back, but she built that boy a cradle at the center of it all. And when the sun came through the stained glass window, he would look up with gold in his eyes.
His father, fresh from the new year’s party where his wife disappeared, left him on the make-shift porch with a little red luggage and an apology. His mother, because that was what she had always been despite her sister’s bearing, simply smiled. She had always loved him, that squib, that failure, that coward, but this was how it had to be. This was how it already always had been.
They never spent a moment apart in eight years. They baked blueberry muffins, they enjoyed her guitar, they went to the market with armbands on and came back home in tears. Yvadne taught him herself. She imparted the basics of her muggle primary schooling and more from her five years at Hogwarts, and he quickly exceeded her. It was easy to pull a book from the stacks to satisfy. She’d already gotten him his favorite: Dirac. And while he read of the laws of the universe we cannot see, she wrote what she could in a regular advice column for the Prophet. It just barely afforded the sugar for his muffins. Sometimes, they tasted of dust. Mum never had been good at transfiguration. There was nothing, really, she could change.
She got sick. Not a coughing sneezing fever sick, but a screaming crying fear. She fell in the kitchen. She fainted in the yard. Icarus, all of seven, took her by Knight Bus to their new second home: St. Mungo’s. Often. They knew them on the Fourth Floor a little too well, but there was nothing they could do for a madness induced by the Sight.
And then Icarus turned eleven. Mum threw every letter in the trash.
He’d remember the morning Mr. Finch arrived to steal him from the nest forever. It was September the first, 1945. They took Mum away just hours later, her wailing the sound of a train departing the station. They would not see each other again for several darkened years. She knew.
Education at Hogwarts (1945-1952)
The applause had hardly faded before a name was called. He shrank in the gathered group of children who buzzed with wonder and anticipation, anathema to the crush of longing that silenced the dark-haired boy. Heart in his chest, pulse in his ears, wings against barbed steel trapped him, thundered, thrummed into screaming. He stepped back, barely grazing the arm of a girl who seemed twice his size; her glare was a blade, hot and cold. Recoil backed him into another, who shoved him back. The girl’s glare cut him again, ripped a gasp out of his throat; and while it was raw, a sob took its turn and tore through.
A word was called he did not recognize. An ovation erupted again. From beneath the dour, dying cries of welcome, a chirp of distress. He turned. He pushed through toward the back of the other eleven-year olds, toward the huge, heavy doors that might lead back home, he needed to go back home, when an ancient voice reached through the sea of heads.
“--gabright, Icarus.”
Soft-shoed fast feet had just breached the mob, planted to spring into sprinting, when the color drained from his pale face. Staring with wide mournful eyes at the doors growing further away, the little boy gasped for breath to hold his tears, to hold him upright. Another word he didn’t know. What had she called him? What had he done?
“Argabright, Icarus,” it repeated firmly. A woman of authority and algorithm. The smile in her voice was probably a sine. He ignored it. “Are you trying to fly away, dear? (I don’t think this one belongs to you, Gryffindor!) Come on up, Mister Argabright. That is your name, isn’t it? Let’s see where else you fit.”
The hat had barely touched his head before it shouted “Ravenclaw!”
For the first two years, he barely spoke a word. His genius and ambition were private in that silence, but in public, fully smothered.
Overwhelmed with fear and loneliness, the boy did not fare well in social settings. His struggles with communication limited him, and made of him an unfortunately easy target for other boys. Tormented by Jasper Kedding and Elias Egneus, Icarus forged a friendship with one of the bully’s other victims, Ronnie Jay Beckham. It was with her help he seemed to find the safety to speak shortly after he turned thirteen.
And then he met Ava Adair. He would come to wish, a decade later, that it might have been better he hadn’t. The summer sun lit a crush on fire, and Icarus, as fated, right with it. How could such a smart boy be so foolish in love? It was easier to climb to the top of his class than it was to catch her eye. Eventually, though, he did.
Education became his only comfort from the hopelessness of his doomed romance. Studying alongside his yearmates and best friends Sylvia Renn and Adrian Alric, he particularly excelled in Alchemy, Sonomancy, Potions, and Conjuring and Summoning. Despite his perceptive disabilities— falling somewhere upon the autism spectrum, Icarus is face-blind and seems to lack pareidolic inclination altogether— he was a diligent Divination student throughout his academic career. He took an interest in Spellbound, an echo of his mother’s meager career, and was naturally drawn to volunteering in the Hospital Wing, a familiar sort of place following the greatness of presence St. Mungo’s occupied within his childhood. Participation in Quidditch, however, took a bit more convincing. Although he would become a rather accomplished Seeker, the game was not always glimmer and gold.
In an unfortunate match during the December of this sixth year, a bludger directed by Andromeda Crowley struck Icarus in the side of the face, rendering him comatose for three weeks. To find that his suppressed Empathy had returned was not the worst thing Icarus woke up to. Yvadne Bains was dead. He would not return to Hogwarts the same.
After the winter holidays, when term resumed, Icarus was welcomed back at the doors by Ava Adair. Affected so deeply by the fear of losing him, Ava begged him forgiveness. Weak, he gave in. They spent a few happy months together before he realized how poorly she’d treated him, and he left her shortly before her graduation.
He went into his seventh year as Head Boy rather alone. Serving with Sylvia Renn, but without their perpetual companion Adrian Alric, the two did their best to move onward (despite Sylvia’s own wounds after her own unfortunate fallout with Adrian). Icarus left Quidditch that year, and began again to isolate, going rather quiet once more.
Adult Life (1952 - )
Filling his days to their limits at the Ministry of Magic where he works full time during the week as an Unspeakable, and at St. Mungo's as a medical researcher on the weekends, Icarus has naturally perpetuated his heavily-packed schedules in order to get as much out of learning opportunity as possible.
In 1953, he played a critical part in developing a cure for Magical Mono by alchemically synthesizing the chemical element antimony for pharmacological use in the epidemic.
His magical theory book, Out of Aether, was published in 1957 to limited success due to its relative obscurity. It details theories of individual magical capacities through the lens of muggle quantum physics. Its sequel in in progress.
Following a mysterious incident that left his partner, Évariste Altier, in a magically-influenced coma, Icarus dedicated much of his time to determining the cause of his loss of magical ability following recovery. With designs on data collection on the acquisition and use of magical ability, he returned to Hogwarts to teach Divination in 1960.
He is currently working on developing a Philosopher's Stone in a soup pot on the backburner of his kitchen range.
