| Bio: |
Imagine a child born in October, a writhing bundle of unscathed innocence with a shock of black hair and disarming blue eyes. Imagine this quiet child cradled in his mother’s arms, then rolling, crawling, standing, and finally tottering through marble-floored massive hallways. Imagine a playroom just for him; a bedroom nearby with an adult-size bed and lots of clothes. Imagine this child as a toddler now; watch his mother chase his little naked soapy body down the hall time and again after his bath time escape. Nothing wrong here. Nothing amiss in this four-year-olds life. Nothing wrong but a father who rarely sees his child, who sleeps in rooms away from where the boy’s mother spends fitful nights. A working man, perhaps. Imagine explaining this to the confused four-year-old who has suddenly found not his mother, but a nanny making lunch and tucking him into bed. Mommy and Daddy work all night, but he feels safe curled in the center of his big bed.
Now, imagine in another October, after another three nannies, the bedroom door creaks open. Always open to let in the hallway light, the gap widens and Daddy emerges. The door clicks shut behind him, locking itself, no longer a portal but a barrier.
It’s within this barrier that Nicholas Sparrow will live his life for the next seven years. That door will open and shut every day, afternoon, night - there is no pattern save for how it happens. Now and then his father, Gerrolt Sparrow, will draw him into another room – his study, usually. There the young, impressionable child would be ordered to stand in one spot, wand shoved into his hand and God forbid he mess up twice. Whether through molestation or beatings, Nicholas spent age five beaten and bruised.
Spells came easy, increased in difficulty every few months. No matter how adept, no matter how accurated, praise never came beyond a single word or not. Time passed, and more and more Nicholas grew to believe that when his father raped him, he did so in both punishment and praise.
Until Gerrolt forgot to lock the door. Perhaps he had not expected Delphine home. Perhaps he had wanted her to see. Whatever the reason, Gerrolt had brought Nicholas to the room, the very bed he shared with his wife, among those satin sheets that pressed to comforting and cool against his cheek. Two years, she had played blind. Two years she had tried to ignore how proud Gerrolt seemed that his – their – Pureblood boy was learning so quickly. The night she found her husband overtop her son was the night Nicholas lost his mother.
Lessons continued still that year. Visits continued, without interruption. Every morning, to Daddy’s bed, where Delphine no longer slep. She had not been to the room since leaving so silently that night months ago.
Such was Nicholas’ childhood. But what of his baby sister, born two year after him and infinitely more self-relient. Atienne lived in her brother’s shadow the first few years of her life, while Delphine and Gerrolt managed work outside of the home. But she would never discover what went on in her daddy’s study, or why her big brother cried at night. Oh, she asked constantly. Every single time, Nicholas would gather her little body into his equally little arms and hold her quite like a delicate bird, whisper in her ear that daddy was teaching him things so he could protect her from the bad in the world.
Such was the life for the Sparrow children. Both pampered, yet aging, growing up without proper parenting, proper attention. While Nicholas began to mature years beyond his physical age, he did his best to shield Atienne from the cruelty, the honesty of their family.
The Sparrow line stretch centuries back, well beyond Hogwarts and into a time where money earned more esteem than power. With Lisson Sparrow, investments in gold around the world laid foundations for years of gain, profit mounting through time; Alessor Sparrow and his work bartering dragons; Meliana Nebree Sparrow, marrying into the line and bringing with her inherited millions; Nieter, Nicholas’ grandfather and first prominent madman in current society with a multitude of shops in Knockturn. Needless to say, Gerrolt had suffered many a beating in his early life. This Sparrow, however, was the first full Death Eater in that particular line, and oh, how money had boosted life.
Money, yes; mental instability, not so much. For every man or woman traceable, 100 years back, there existed proof of some mental crisis, far more devastating than depression or a mood swing here and there. Mania was most prominent; only of the Sparrows of note had died a natural death at the age of 88. Others were far less fortunate. Of course, that could not define the entire family tree. But those most famous, those most prominent, had ended his or her life diagnosably insane. Take Mireille Sparrow, mother of Alexia Duval, daughter of Alessor and Calliope : buried herself alive in the family cemetery in 1894, shortly after the birth of a bastard son. The child cried for hours on end, alerting a couple visiting a nearby grave. The child survived, but Mirielle had swallowed a vial of hemlock the moment digging began.
The morally corrupt and mentally warped members of the Sparrow name had either been captured by authorities or murdered by their own kin to preserve the tarnished name. Such a pattern migiht have continued had Gerrolt not murdered his own father for denying what felt like a very worthwhile cause
So, the Sparrow line was more destined to flounder than flourish. Thus the extreme probability in what eventually happened – when Nicholas was seven and Atienne five, Gerrolt and Delphine were ambushed by a group of Aurors, arrested, and convicted on multiple homiciden charges, conspiracy, supporting the Dark Lord, and every damnation that the latter entailed.
When a special group of Ministry officials and Aurors arrived at the mansion in Chartres to search the building and retrieve the children, Nicholas fought as hard as he could. For all that had happened, for the monster he had been trained to become, no one could convince the seven-year-old of anything but how badly Gerrolt was needed in that one house, to remain as a father figure, perverse though he might be.
Delphine’s sister took both children in. rather, one child, because the way Nicholas began to collapse without his father meant silence from his end of the flat in Surrey. Shut off from the world, lost, forlorn, every emotion new, terrible. For two years neither aunt nor sister could draw their hermit any further out of reclusion. Trips to the park, new toys, vacations around Europe – no bribe served adequate to fill the gap left by vacant parents.
No bribe until age nine, when a stranger found him in the park after dusk, feeding the fattened ducks stalebread. Naivety disappeared at age seven, and so Nicholas accepted the offered ride “home.”
That night, Nicholas Sparrow climbed in through the bedroom window, satiated, bloody. Breakfast the following morning had never been more cheerful.
Those passing beneath his window, along the sidewalk, should they chance to look up, might have been slightly concerned to find the bloody child-sized handprint pressed flat against glass, against his brand new portal. That year, Nicholas found pleasure in death and addiction in sex.
Seven years passed in a blur once the Sparrow set foot on Hogwarts grounds. Just as time developed a family legacy so did it guarantee his reputation. Spoils of way, the way life began to pan out befor him, once the hat threw him into Slytherin among boys that surely recognized his name, had they Death Eater family members, or read the papers at all. Surrounded by these people, supported by his name, adopting the ways his father had adopted, friends began to emerge. Friends…and fucks. The more boys he met, the more boys he slept with, left, the further he built himself upwards.
Boys including Jack Purdue and Chance Lafayette. The former took him in beneath the proverbial wing and honed those sociopathic tendencies; Jack delivered him further into the masses and helped make his name not simply a whisper, but a statement, forming him into a person that girls whispered about in the hallways. Tittering laughter followed should he let on he noticed. Which he did, and normally slept with whichever female should be so bold as to not skitter to the opposite side of the hallway. Thanks to Jack, Nicholas became a staple of perversion in Slytherin.
And Chance…well…that certainly remains to be seen, as the future unfolds. Chance became the only person, aside from one very lengthy love at age 12, to successfully conquer the Sparrow. Well. Not entirely, but close enough, closer than even Jack could have managed. Nicholas owed this to one of the boys he had tortured, apparently; without that fourth year Slytherin, Chance might not have found it necessary to set things in motion. Nevertheless there still exists a very private vulnerability where this particular male is considered, and a much deeper internal history.
After graduating and his father’s escape, Nicholas became what he had always feared. Yes, feared, because, though he had always paid close attention and been the best student for his father, fear resided deeper. Fear for going mad, for siding with Death Eaters, for becoming what he knew he would, but never wanted to. Never until last year when the pressure continued to mount, unrelenting, unforgiving, and finally broke his willpower. Now Nicholas Sparrow sports the Dark Mark on his left forearm like so many before him, including the one that ruined him. |
