| Bio: |
Name: Chance James Lafayette
Birthdate: 6-15-79
Birthplace: Syracuse, Sicily, Italia
Age: 18
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 140 lbs.
Hair colour: Black
Eye colour: Blue
Body type: Slender; toned
Nationality: Italian/French
Blood type: AB-/Pureblood
Specialty: Legilimency/Occlumency/Imperius
Out of the tangle of influential, ancient Pureblood families linked to the Dark Lord's regime, the Lafayettes were a strong line headed by an archaic old Sicilian man with an ugly mouth and a bad temper. His eldest son had an ugly mouth and a bad temper, and his grandson, the next in line to inherit the riches, the influence, the pure respect and glory of the Lafayette family, was supposed to be the exact same way.
Chance Lafayette was not the firstborn that his father anticipated. On June 15th, 1979, along with the brand new baby boy his seventeen year old unmarried mother gave birth to, a little girl came along three minutes before him. They were twins, he and Noemi, something the entire family blamed on the Protestant French girl his father had knocked up because such a thing did not run in [i]their[/i] line, had never even occured before, and the girl that James Lafayette had been so infatuated with was an orphan straight out of Aurillac. Normally, the head of the family would have had their mother exiled and the children would have grown up without her influence, but James had protested so hard that he'd punish the woman himself, the rest of the family stepped out of it and begrudgingly attended their Catholic wedding eight months later.
The bride, pale and bruised and so ashamed of herself that she wasn't weeping out of happiness at the altar, was pregnant a second time.
This was the home in which Noemi and Chance were raised. In fact, the twins would have turned out perfectly functional, uninhibited human beings should the slew of maids and staff that tended to them throughout infancy and early childhood never have turned into tutors and imported professors; for five years, the youngest heir in line to succeed family business was completely unaware that his parents existed, until the day a very tall, distinguished man knelt to his height and asked him if he'd ever heard of 'Legilimency'. Age five was the appropriate time to begin teaching a Lafayette child how to streamline mental prowess before he could even master an [i]accio[/i]; age five was where Chance met his father, an enormous pale statue with cold blue eyes cut out of sapphire and the worst sharp smile that a man could wear.
After that, there was no more time to play parent with the aryan little brother that had come nine months after his parents' wedding day, or the brand new little sister who followed another year later. Gabriel and Sophie stayed in their rooms, or they played barefoot on the beach, or they went out into the street to play with their cousins while their big brother wore himself out concentrating on how to make today's unfortunate maid fall down the stairs or break her own arm or drown herself in the royal marble bathtub in the basement. Chance had tiny nail marks in his temples almost every day trying to do it right, praying that the nameless, faceless teacher who oversaw whatever progress he made wouldn't tell daddy that he was useless, because when daddy heard that, he got cut up. He didn't know that his sister got the worst of it because James had been so unfortunate to knock up a woman with the twin gene in her blood, or that Noemi was half purple underneath her clothes because she'd been knocked down so many times. All he ever concentrated on was doing it right, seeing what he was supposed to see in other peoples' heads, because if he didn't, the barely healed cuts on his back or the ugly bruises on his ribs would never go away.
The both of them shared a room for those years, and every morning, Chance woke up to see his sister with her face buried as deeply into her pillow as it would go, red shoulders shaking, body flushed and curled up into as tight of a fist as it would go. She was always naked and his flesh was darker, more purple than it had been, in different spots than it had been when he'd gone to sleep. It was always the headache that was the worst, like a network of cables had been tugged bluntly out of his skull and rearranged before they were put back in. Over the years, Chance started to realize that he rarely slept at all; in the nights he did remember, the handful of them, Noemi kept her scrawny arms locked around his waist and put her head against his chest while a shiver kept her teeth chattering next to him. [i]Lo proteggete, lo proteggete[/i], that was all she ever said to him anymore, and Chance, when he woke up with those bad headaches every morning, he never knew quite what it meant.
The next five years were about the war.
Gabriel was taken because of the war and returned as a grownup, the same way Chance and Noemi were. Gabriel went to bed every night with glassy eyes and a bitter smell around him; when he was like that, he stumbled so much that he threw up foul smelling bile and what looked like his mother's fine wine or James' heavy scotch. He had the same violently bright blue eyes that his older siblings did, Gabriel, but where he was blessed with a pale blonde mane that fell into his face, Chance had become tall and willowy with the same fine black hair his father had, leaving the only thing they had in common at all their mother's smart, sharp features. There remained a gap between those three and the youngest; Sophie had learned to seclude herself in the library, only because it was the single room in the house whose doors were soundproof, so she couldn't hear her sister's screams at the breakfast table or her mother crying into her hands, the same way she did every day. Sophie read until she forgot she even had a family, and when she had to leave her thousands and thousands of books, she made no stops on the way to her very own room.
By the time Chance left Italy and moved to England with all but the youngest sibling to enroll in Hogwarts, he was the perfectly poised switchknife of his family. Six years of training in the same subject, the only subject important to them, and he could split apart the naked human mind with all the attention to detail of an artist, and Chance was so deft, so self-assured, so sickeningly anti-social and twisted after his first eleven years on earth that he nearly found expulsion in the first month for attacking other children. In Slytherin, Auror families are the subject of bullying, bruising, jeering and violence - they were outcasts in the eyes of their house. But the Lafayettes were not a perfect network of justice serving law enforcers, as the public and the Ministry had been so expertly led to believe; they were spies, liars, prodigies at espionage, and now that the Dark Lord was beginning his slow climb to power, the information Chance's family brought in was more crucial than ever.
Because it was not public knowledge, because no self-respecting soldier would tell their pre-teen that the boy they were bullying was actually one of them, Chance was forced to learn to defend himself in the most shockingly brutal way he knew how. The only thing that kept him in school after seven different incidents was Severus Snape's judicious fine tuning of the occlumency in him, to cull the violent temper he'd grown at home. For the rest of the year, the eleven year old mimicked his sister and retreated into the solace of books, becoming nearly mute with any being not Noemi or Snape himself, and that isolation he could shut up with a fictional story started to leech and bleed him dry.
Second year, Chance joined the quidditch team. Third year, he'd built himself a charming personality and grown into a body he used on boys and girls as frequently as he could get them onto their backs. Fourth year, he was banned from the pitch and betrayed by his confidant; Noemi was expelled, and he had a girlfriend, but she didn't like him because he'd put his hand up other girls' skirts right in front of her. Fifth year, Chance disappeared, and so did she.
It was sixth year that bred a six three smilingly cruel adult whose grades were excellent and whose social status was even cleaner. He had his respect and he had his pack, he had addictions that could be satisfied on a bed or in a needle or with a cigarette, and nothing, no year, had ever been higher than [i]this[/i].
Until Chance met Jame Devir.
Jame became the catalyst to the adulthood that all those beatings, all the training, all the lying had been a precursor to. Jame, as innocent as he had been the day he'd dropped right down into Chance's lap and struck up another empty, physical interest, he indirectly introduced Chance to Nicholas Sparrow, who introduced him to Jack Purdue. The following years effectively debunked his father's grand scheme and gave light to things that what could have been a perfectly reasonable sociopath had never seen. Jame Devir was the match that burned every neatly arranged thing in the ex-heir's life straight down, and began the strangest turn of events that any unfortunate group of human beings would ever fall prey to. |
