Post by Scorpius Malfoy on Sept 15, 2012 20:42:56 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 #7a9aa9, bTable][tr][cs=2] leighton thomas robards. twentyone. shop employee/artist. steven r. mcqueen. | |
[rs=2] | Until the age of ten, Leighton Thomas Robards was a relatively normal little boy. He was never a very talkative child – he talked late, and was always shy – but what he lacked in conversation, he made up for with his sunny and frequent smile. From his babyhood onwards, Leighton was always smiling. He was a curious child, fascinated by the world around him, by his senses, by the little day-to-day miracles of the world, by colour. He was easily amused as a baby, and found his three older sisters a source of endless entertainment, even when they weren’t doing anything special. However, he would also quite happily spend ages staring mesmerised at a beetle crawling in the bushes, or a flickering fire or the like. His attention would be caught by the oddest of things, and he would make his family laugh with the random things that would suddenly make him dissolve into giggles. Leighton lived in a world of smiles and sunshine; a little bubble of complete innocence. He never minded that his sisters played together without him; he was always quite happy doing his own thing, and usually had some private and complicated game that he was in the middle of. From very early on, the things he loved best were animals and painting. When his sister Lavinia started to ride, Leighton surprised everyone by walking fearlessly in among the horses, because he was usually the timid one; the one who cried in thunder storms and couldn’t sleep with the light off. Horses, however, never scared him, and he quickly joined Lavinia in her lessons. As a toddler, his paintings were the usual messy, splashy things all small children produce, but he soon began to show, above all else, a real sense of colour. Not for Leighton the usual childish mixing of all the colours on the palette to make a sludgy brown; even before his pictures looked like anything, they were glorious riots of rich colours, all carefully chosen and placed. In the Autumn, he collected coloured leaves and arranged them in patterns on the ground, and at the age of four, he got into terrible trouble for painting rainbow people all over his bedroom walls. He took the telling-off with solemn stoicism; it wasn’t until his mother went to rub the paint off that he dissolved into hysterical tears. Nothing would comfort him, and in the end, his parents gave in and let him keep them. They are still there, on the walls of his old bedroom in his parents’ house, and he likes to look at them when he goes home, even though they only go as far up the walls as a four-year-old’s shoulder. Sylvie was always the sister Leighton felt closest to, because she was the kindest. Lavinia was the closest to him in age; they bonded over their riding, and Leighton found her fun, but it was Sylvie who mothered him; Sylvie who he would run to if his mother wasn’t around (and sometimes even if she was). Florence was another matter entirely. Leighton loved his oldest sister, but she was also unpredictable and slightly frightening. She seemed to cause his parents a lot of grief and worry, and he didn’t know why that was, but it made him uneasy around her. All he knew was that the house seemed more peaceful when Florence wasn’t in it. When he was eight years old, Esme arrived. Where Esme came from was a mystery to Leighton for some years. He was fascinated by her at first, in much the same way he was fascinated by watching beetles in the undergrowth, but also in a way repulsed. He just didn’t know what to make of her. She was suddenly the centre of everyone’s world, and he felt cast adrift by the new arrival whose existence he did not fully understand. Leighton didn’t particularly like events he couldn’t understand, and as nobody bothered to explain anything to him, all he had to go on were overheard snatches of conversation, which only really added to his confusion. Unlike most children, Leighton did not ask many questions; he liked to find things out for himself and work them out in his own head; he never felt the need to verbalise them. When he could not work things out for himself, however, he found that he didn’t really know how to find it out, and so he tended to remain lost in those situations. He still isn’t sure when he actually did work out who Esme was and where she had come from; it was more of a gradual realisation than anything, that Esme was Florence’s child, born when his sister was just fifteen. He isn’t sure, either, when he managed to piece together the story of what happened that terrible night, a couple of years later, when Florence disappeared and Esme ended up in hospital and his whole family seemed to fall to pieces. He slept through it all at the time, and nobody ever told him the full story, but somehow he worked it out anyway, eventually. At least, he thinks he did, because he’s never actually talked to anyone about it. All he knew at the time was that Florence had done something terrible and wouldn’t be coming back. Things disappearing was always Leighton’s greatest fear. It seemed a mysterious and terrible thing that something wonderful and beautiful could exist one day and be gone the next, from his rainbow people and the autumn leaves that turned dry and brown, to the snowman who melted overnight, to the death of his goldfish when he was six – it was beyond his understanding; all he had was an overwhelming feeling that it wasn’t right, and his nightmares were all permeated with a feeling of grief and loss for something nameless that he had lost. Nightmares that came true with the disappearance of Florence. When the news came, not all that long afterwards, that Florence was dead, it seemed like the last straw. Being too young to be told the full story (that Florence had killed herself with an overdose), Leighton simply felt himself simply lost and adrift in a sea of confusion and grief, helplessness and fear, treading water with nothing solid to catch hold of. The people he had relied on – particularly his parents and Sylvie – were suddenly too busy dealing with their own sorrow and shock to help Leighton deal with his. His world had stopped making any sense, and his reaction was to withdraw from it. Having always been quiet, he stopped talking altogether, finding his own thoughts easier to deal with the conversation of other people. He stopped smiling too, and the once bright, sunny little boy turned into a ghost child, living in his own world inside his head as everything outside fell to pieces. That was how Leighton entered Hogwarts, so it was no wonder that he did not find friends quickly. Many of his classmates either teased or ignored him; those who tried to be friendly met with blank stares. It wasn’t that Leighton didn’t want friends; sometimes, sitting by himself in the common room and looking at the happy groups of students chatting and laughing, he felt so desperately lonely that he’d have given almost anything to join in with them, but the longer he went without talking, the harder it felt. He thought that something had gone wrong with him, with his brain or his voice or both. He’d lost the ability to talk; whatever muscles he’d used for it before simply didn’t work any more, and Leighton was quite sure that he would never be able to talk again. Occasionally, in those early days, he would try; someone would say something to him and he’d struggle to reply, but generally they were too impatient to wait, and turned away before he managed to get any words out. Eventually, he stopped trying. His teachers and parents were aware of the problem, of course, but nothing they did made any difference. His teachers tried various approaches, but eventually had to accept that no amount of gentle coaxing or telling off, no earnest talks, no offers of one-to-one tuition, were going to get Leighton Robards to utter a word. His parents tried taking him to St Mungo’s, and they even forked out the money to take him to private healers, but this simply caused Leighton to shut down further. He didn’t like hospitals, not that he’d ever spent much time in them himself, but the whole atmosphere stifled him. With the healers, he wouldn’t even try to talk. His sisters were going through their own problems, all ‘coping’ in their own ways, but although Always perceptive and sensitive, Leighton could see what was happening to them, particularly to Sylvie, as her eating disorder consumed her, but he felt powerless to do anything, even to reach out to them. He was too young to be aware of exactly what was wrong with his sister, or the implications of it, but he could not miss the change in her, as marked as the change in himself. Helpless to do anything, and unable to fully comprehend what had happened, he felt frozen, terrified that he might lose either Lavinia or Sylvie too. He focussed on the few things he felt he could control; his schoolwork and his painting (although he never showed his paintings to anyone, so nobody was really aware that Leighton’s childish splashes of colour had turned into splashes of colour that were definitely something other than childish). In class, he struggled terribly at first, and fell a long way behind his peers, because spells require speaking and Leighton could not or would not speak; however, as they say blind or deaf people develop their other senses to a higher level, he showed an unusually early aptitude for nonverbal spells. With extra help from patient teachers, he developed this talent, and was able to more or less keep up, although his best subjects were those such as History of Magic and Potions, that required no talking. By nature, he was a good student; his interest in everything, and his fascination with new knowledge made him a quick and keen learner, and anyone who had been inclined to treat him as stupid for his silence, and his slow start, was soon forced to realise their mistake. He might still struggle with spells sometimes, but there was nothing wrong with his brain. In the end, it was Sylvie who saved him from the place he’d got himself into. With help, she had got her eating disorder under control, and once more turned her attention to her little brother. It took time, and Leighton held back at first, having lost his instinctive trust in people. Florence and Sylvie had been the strongest people he had known, and he had watched one of them go under and the other one almost go under, and the lesson Leighton had learnt was that it was dangerous to lean on people, however strong they seemed. Gradually, however, he came to trust her again, and together they worked on ways for him to communicate. Through her, Leighton began to rejoin the world, and to find it slightly less of a confusing, scary, alien place. He even found it possible to begin to communicate with others, and to make connections with people (he was too wary at that point to call them friends), and encouraged by this, he began to try again to do the thing he had believed impossible; to speak. Sylvie encouraged him, and unknown to her, he practiced in secret, speaking to the owls in the owlery and the insects outside. The words started out in his head; he simply imagined what he would say, and then imagined himself saying it. Then one day, he managed a whisper, and after that it got easier. It was much harder speaking to an actual person; he was holding full whispered conversations with the owls before he had managed a single word to Sylvie. But he knew he was getting there, and the thought of his sister’s face when he surprised her with a proper word kept him fighting on. In the end, it was easy. One day, in the middle of his third year, he wanted to get her attention, so he just looked up and her name came out of his mouth, surprising himself almost as much as her. He’d never been so proud of anything before. It wasn’t the end of the struggle. It was even harder to expand into talking to other people, and proper conversations were beyond him for a while – he’d just get overwhelmed, and the words would get lost in his throat and wouldn’t come out. He is still quiet; he tends not to talk unnecessarily, and won’t talk much if he’s in a big group, but by his Sixth Year, he was able to speak normally with people, and the times when the words ‘stuck’ came less and less often. He had friends; not a huge group of them, but enough, and many things that had seemed completely out of reach before were becoming possible. His smile returned; not quite as indiscriminately as before, but it came easily again, and his classmates discovered to their surprise that Leighton Robards had a good and irreverent (if quiet) sense of humour. He graduated, with perhaps not the results he might have had if other things hadn’t held him back, but decently nonetheless, with Potions his best grade. However, he was never particularly interested in a magical career. After finishing school, he went and worked for a while at the livery stables where he and Lavinia had always boarded their horses; it wasn’t what he had in mind for a long term career, but he enjoyed it for a while; he loved horses, and being outside, and it didn’t require a lot of talking. After that, he took off to the continent for a time, finding temporary jobs here and there. He ended up in Germany, and stayed there for a while. At the same time as working, he was also developing his art and selling a few paintings, setting up little market stalls on streets and selling for very small sums of money. However, gradually, he managed to build up something small in the way of a name for himself, and these days his paintings are starting to sell for a little more, although definitely not enough for him to live on. He’s back in England now, and has grown a lot in confidence. He’s still a quiet guy, and shy at times, but it no longer cripples him. He’s perfectly capable of functioning completely normally in most social situations, and enjoys spending time with his friends and having fun. His relationship with Sylvie has always been close, and especially so since she helped him speak again. Lavinia, he is less close to, although very fond of her, and of his two small nephews too. His relationship with his niece is the most complex one. To be honest, he’s never really had a conversation with her; as a child he resented her, and as a teenager he ignored her. And yet she has been an integral part of his life, and he would certainly hate to lose her from it. He is beginning to regret his lack of a relationship with her; as a little boy, he was curious about her, and some of that curiosity is coming back; he’d like to know her, to find out what kind of person that mysterious little baby who turned out to be his niece has turned into. He rents a flat he can’t really afford in London, and spends his days painting when he can. He sells a fair number, and works the rest of the time at Slug and Jigger’s Apothecary in Diagon Alley. He enjoys watching the world go by, and finds a lot of quiet amusement and interest in apparently mundane things. He likes trying out new things, and would quite like to try out having a proper girlfriend at some point, though he’s not in any huge hurry for that – there was a girl when he was in Germany, which was his first dip into anything romantic, and it wasn’t very serious. That’s been the extent of his experience with girls, which makes him uneasy sometimes, as if there must be something deeply wrong with him to have reached twenty one and never had a real relationship. Generally though, he’s fairly content most of the time, although underneath it all, there is still a lost boy trying to find his way. During his early teenage years, when he should have been discovering things and working out the ways the world worked, Leighton was shut away inside his own head, and he sometimes things he missed something crucial in those years. There are still times when he feels adrift, like he doesn’t quite belong to the world, as if there is no place for him, and everyone else is two steps ahead of him. Little things can affect him more than they should, and knock his confidence, and he still worries about something happening to the people he loves, to the extent that he sometimes floos Sylvie in the middle of the night, just to check she’s okay (he’s a night owl himself, so doesn’t always know what time it is). Despite liking his independence and being very happy with his own company (he needs his privacy at times; he doesn’t like other people being on top of him), he is still very dependent on the people he’s close to. All in all, Leighton is still a mess of insecurities whose greatest fear is that the little bit of stability he's managed to build up for himself is going to be taken away again, but (in some ways very like his sisters), he's on the road to getting himself sorted out. |
becca. 24. two or something. gmt. |
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