Post by Emily Marsdon on Jul 4, 2012 19:22:09 GMT -5
| [atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, width: 460px; background-image: url(http://i44.tinypic.com/34fb0ns.jpg);-moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; -webkit-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; border: 4px ridge #9c5f5b, bTable][tr][cs=2] suzanne violet stanley. 21. business owner. darla baker. | |
[rs=2] | Suzanne Violet Stanley was born on December 28th 2001, a late Christmas present for her parents, Clive and Dora Stanley. She was their second child; Tobias, the oldest, was three years old at the time, and they really meant to stick with that – one boy, one girl, nice and neat like the rest of their lives. Backtracking a little, let's look at the lives of Clive and Dora. Clive is a halfblood wizard; his mother is a pureblood, but without an ounce of pureblood prejudice in her, while his father was a Muggleborn who was killed in the Second Wizarding War after refusing to give up his wand. His mother has never remarried, but she has a longterm partner whom she lives with, and insists on referring to as her 'boyfriend', to Clive's embarrassment. He is an only child, and his mother dotes on him, whilst also criticising everything he does, something that has left Clive feeling that he constantly needs to prove himself. Dora is a Muggle, from a very ordinary, relatively well-off, conventional Middle Class family, who valued education and intellect. Dora thinks with her head not her heart, and always has done; 'stoic' would be a good word to describe her. It's not that she doesn't have emotions, and it's not that she's been taught to suppress them or anything unhealthy; if anything, it's more that she was a shy child who didn't like to draw attention to herself by expressing extreme emotions. The emotions are still there, but she expresses them quietly or privately, and when her 'law student' boyfriend informed her that he was a wizard, she blinked, stared for a moment, and said, “Oh... what exactly do you mean by 'wizard'?” Her shock, when he showed her what he meant, was expressed more in how quiet she went than anything else. 'Law student' was not really very far from the truth, as at the time, Clive had just entered the Department for Magical Law Enforcement in a junior position. Dora herself was studying for her undergraduate degree in English Literature, which she followed with a PGCE, and got a job as an English teacher in a high school in Derbyshire. Both Clive and Dora were clever, hard working and ambitious; Clive quickly moved up through the department, and then sideways onto the Wizengamot, where he has been ever since. Dora also won promotion, becoming Head of the English Department. They married when they were both 24, and when Toby came along a year later, Dora took six months' maternity leave, then found a good childminder and returned to work. She repeated this process three years later with Suzanne, and then focussed on her career. Not that she was a bad mother; around work, she was a good one. Although her emotions were quiet, she had no problem with showing affection to her children, and although balancing work and personal life was not always easy, on the whole, Clive and Dora managed quite well. They ordered their lives well; whichever of them would finish work first would pick the children up from the childminder (where they would go after school, once they were old enough for that), and they took turns to cook dinner, which the whole family would eat together, round the table, with no exceptions. They made sure that the conversations were rarely dumbed down; simplified, perhaps, but Toby and Suzanne were included in all adult conversations and vice versa (with anything really inappropriate kept until after the children's bedtime). Bed time was fixed, as were all the evening routines. Clive usually worked on Saturdays, so Dora would take the children, and they would always find something nice to do, often with other parents and children once the kids were at school and starting to have friends. Sundays were family day; church in the morning (Clive was not religious, but he went for Dora), followed by family activities and a traditional Sunday Lunch. Suzanne, therefore, had what appeared to be the model of a well-ordered childhood, but however hard they tried, Clive and Dora could not control everything. Suzanne was always the difficult one of the two children; wilful and rebellious from a young age, and with a tendency to throw tantrums when she didn't get her way. She rebelled against their neat order, refused to go to bed at the proper time, refused to eat the good roast meat her parents put in front of her, misbehaved in church, and constantly fought with Toby, who knew that he must not hit a girl and therefore had to put up with being punched and kicked whenever his parents weren't looking (not that Toby was an angel, just an ordinary small boy, but in his parents' eyes, he was always the easy child, because he was good humoured and cheerful and helpful). Her favourite people were, without doubt, her paternal grandmother, who found it amusing to encourage her 'independent spirit' and often her mischief as well, and her maternal aunt, Lauren (whose name had been used for Suzanne's middle name), who was always off travelling the world and always brought wonderful presents home with her, as well as a breath of disorder and untidiness whenever she visited. Then, when Suzanne was nearly four, Dora fell pregnant again, something entirely unplanned. The result was Sam, and although they feared that his arrival might make Suzanne's behaviour worse, it actually had the opposite effect. Suzanne was at first simply fascinated by the baby, and had to be stopped from poking and prodding at him, but as he grew, she was devoted to him. Like Suzanne, Sam was a bit of a rebel; a mischief maker who never took anything seriously. But although the two of them frequently misbehaved together as Sam got older, Suzanne's tantrums and refusals to co-operate disappeared, at least for the time being. Many years later, when Suzanne learned that her parents had only intended to have her and Toby, she made the quip that for two educated adults, Clive and Dora can't have been very good at remembering contraception (Clive and Dora did not find the joke particularly funny), because two years after Sam, Faye arrived. With four children in the house, the well-ordered routine was impossible to keep to, but Clive and Dora did their very best, and anyway, when Faye was two, Toby left for Hogwarts. Three years later, Suzanne followed him, and was sorted into Slytherin, as her paternal grandmother had been (her father had been a Ravenclaw). The same year, the family moved house, from Derbyshire to Lancashire, because Dora had successfully applied for a new job as the headteacher of a small private school. Having always chafed against the boundaries set out by her parents, Suzanne continued along her line of rebellion. In Slytherin, she quickly learnt more subtlety, and began to use manipulation and clever words to get her way, rather than displays of temper. She had always been a book lover (in her parents' house, books were everywhere) but during her Hogwarts years, she developed the ambition to be a writer, and idea that worried her parents because of the instability of writing as a career choice. A bit of a cynic, Suzanne tended to deliberately set herself against whatever the most popular opinion was on anything, and would argue her corner against anyone. She gained a reputation for arrogance – which she deserved – and although she had plenty of people she termed friends, she always set herself slightly apart. She prided herself on being able to work out very quickly what made people tick, something which she would then use to manipulate them if it suited her. She remained aloof out of choice, apparently unmoved by things which excited or destroyed her friends, and never realising how similar she was to her mother in this way. She wore black and white almost exclusively, usually in an old-fashioned style – silks and velvets and lace – along with heavy black make up, and from the moment she started drinking, it was hard liquor she preferred. She renamed herself; her family had always called her Suzie if they shortened her name to anything – Suzanne chose to be known as Zanna. At home, she isolated herself more and more from her family, with the exception of Sam. She chose to stay in her room, reading and writing, a lot of the time, and spoke as little as possible. There was no real reason for this; it wasn't that she didn't love them, or was angry with them; it was simply a case that she did not feel that she fit in with their careful routines, their handsome Georgian house all fitted with the best mod cons and spotlessly clean. Ever since she had been tiny, she had refused to eat meat; she now declared herself a vegan and refused cheese, milk, butter and eggs, to her mother's dismay. When she was fourteen, her mother found a volume of graphic erotic literature in her room, and attempted to talk to her about it, but Zanna laughed in the face of Dora's awkward embarrassment and told her mother that as Dora had never told her anything 'real' about sex, she had had to find out somewhere. Dora was hurt; she had thought she'd covered things pretty well, with her calm, clinical explanation, using perfectly correct anatomical terms. Zanna simply went on her way and ignored her mother. Her parents hoped that it was a phase she'd grow out of, and in a way, it was. She certainly did some growing up during her later school years, and rediscovered the softer side of her nature. She became less selfish, and several of her friendships grew deeper. At the end of her sixth year, there was an incident involving a large amount of firewhisky and rum, the loss of her carefully guarded virginity, and a subsequent panicky few weeks during which she thought she might be pregnant – during this time, Zanna discovered that she needed her friends more than she'd realised before. By the time she finished school, she'd matured considerably, and learned quite a lot about how to get on with people. Her sense of humour still tended (and still tends) to be biting though, and she'd discovered the art of satire, which she had started to put to use in her writing. She still found her home environment stifling, however, and when she left school, although she had no job and no idea what to do with herself, she couldn't stand the thought of staying with her parents, although they pressured her to. Her father tried to get her to take a job at the Ministry; her mother suggested training to be a teacher. Horrified by both ideas, Zanna fled the family home (not quite literally, but very close to it) and installed herself in a fairly horrible bedsit in Bristol, funded only by the small wage she could get working in a grimy all-night café. Her flat furnishings consisted of a small gas cooker, a single table, a bookshelf Sam helped her construct out of old crates, a desk chair and a mattress. She attempted to top up her income with her writing, and sent a couple of poems and a short story to a literary magazine, and a comment article to the Prophet; the magazine told her that her work was too dark, and the Prophet said her article was too controversial. Zanna was furious; she believes in the saying from George Orwell: “journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” Her response was to start her own paper. It took her three years after her refusals to save up enough to get started, but Zanna never let go of her ambitions. She found another young witch to help her, and between them, they produced their first issue, six months from when they started. It is a comment paper; yes, it prints news, but more importantly, it prints satirical (bordering on cruel) comment on current affairs, public bodies and individuals – Zanna likes to compare it to the Muggle Private Eye, and it is intended to be subversive. People seemed to like the first issue, so Zanna and her friend are on the look out for a few more writers and editors to help out. Suzanne Stanley's come a long way from the scornful, antisocial goth girl she was at fifteen. She's kept her cynical sense of humour, but she's learnt a lot about people; she even likes a lot of them now. Her style these days depends on a lot of things; where she is going, what mood she's in, how drunk she was the night before, and what she has clean. She still lives in her Bristol bedsit (though she has a few more pieces of furniture than she did) and works in her all-night café to survive, so she's not exactly made, but she's certainly poised, though there are times when she still has to live off baked beans for a few days; she's still working on that great novel, whilst scribbling poetry in between. She sees as little of her family as possible, with the exception of her brother Sam, who is still her favourite (and she is his), although she has nothing against Toby or Faye, or even against her parents; it's just that Dora and Clive are horrified by her way of life and keep trying to persuade her to try a more stable career. With her friends, though, she's fun and lively most of the time, and she knows how to charm people; you need to watch out for her though, because the silk glove covers iron, and you don't even have to do anything to her to get hurt by it. Romance-wise, she takes things as they come. She takes a cynical view of the whole thing (her mother told her that sex should always be with someone you love; Zanna lost her virginity in a drunken mistake she can hardly remember). She likes messing around with people and is quite adventurous (rumour has it she keeps handcuffs and a whip under her bed; she's never confirmed or denied it) but she's not expecting to fall in love any time soon. |
salazar slytherin. 1230. 657 years roleplaying. |
