Post by Emily Marsdon on Sept 30, 2012 8:27:51 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] stefano maxim de luca. twentythree. gringotts curse breaker. jon kortajarena. | |
[rs=2] | Stefano Maxim de Luca was born on the 1st of January 2000, in a St Mungo’s running on a skeleton staff, while the majority of the population slept off their hangovers from the Millennium celebrations the night before. It was a happy family that Stef was born into. They were only half Italian, but they were Italian-style – noisy, close-knit and very family-orientated. His brother Federico was three years old at the time of his birth, and the family were delighted to welcome another little boy into the family – apart from Federico. Having been the spoilt darling of the family for three years, Fede was furious to be supplanted, and took it out in being as uninterested in and as unpleasant to the new baby as possible. He grew slightly more interested as Stef grew and could do more things, but Federico was a tough, dominating kind of child, who liked to push others around, and his small brother was the obvious candidate. Their parents didn’t see it; they saw Fede as a high-spirited, strong-willed, strong-bodied little boy, who occasionally got carried away or ‘didn’t know his own strength.’ In truth, Fede learnt to know his own strength very early on, and to use it. It wasn’t that the boys didn’t love each other (deep down), or that they never had fun together, because they actually enjoyed many of the same things. Both were active, bright boys, but because Federico was older, stronger and louder, he was the leader, the one everyone always noticed, their father’s favourite. Stef was constantly in his shadow, the loser of every fight and the butt of every joke, and came to resent this hugely; by nature he was competitive, and spent his days trying and failing to be better than his brother. When Stef was six, his little sister was born, and he and Federico instantly had something new to compete over – being the better brother. And for the first time, Stefano had found something he was better at than Federico; Fede was too impatient to be good with a baby, whereas Stef loved to carry and play with his little sister, despite the facts that he occasionally dropped her on her head and that he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t as fascinated by his collection of toy cars as he was. Federico quickly gave up on the baby, as he gave up on anything he wasn’t good at, and scornfully dismissed her as ‘just a girl’. Despite this, and much to Stef’s desolation, it was Federico that Anna ran after and looked up to, perhaps for the very reason that Fede treated her so casually; she never had to try for Stefano’s attention, it was given freely. The fourth and final De Luca child was born just a year later, by which time Stefano was seven and Federico ten. The new baby was greatly adored by the adults in the family of course, and got a lot of attention. Stef loved his new baby brother, but he also noticed that Anna, only a baby herself still, was suffering a little from a lack of attention. With a childish sense of fairness, he devoted himself to his little sister, trying to make sure that she got as much attention as the new baby. A year later, Federico left for Hogwarts, something that changed the dynamics of the De Luca siblings somewhat. Always before, the way the age gaps worked had meant that Stef and Fede got paired off as ‘the older ones’; it wasn’t an altogether easy pairing, and had always been unequal, but the two boys had still spent a lot of time together, sharing a room (often with disastrous results) and many of the same activities. Now Federico was gone, and when he came back for the holidays, was uninterested in his little brothers and sister, taken up with new friends and excelling at his school work and at quidditch. His parents, however, were deeply proud of him and held him up as a great example for the others to look up to. Federico played on this; always polite, sensible and mature when there were adults present, and throwing his weight around whenever there weren’t. The two younger ones were less aware of this, tending to see Fede as the young hero he acted. Stefano’s resentment for his brother, however, grew all the time. He felt that he was always in Fede’s shadow; the things he was good at were always overlooked because Federico was better at them. However, one thing that did happen during the next three years was that the bond between Stefano and Anna strengthened greatly with Fede out of the picture. Chris was still very much the baby, but Stef and Anna grew extremely close and have stayed that way. Even when he started Hogwarts, Stefano found himself having to live up to his brother. Federico was a large character – loud, outgoing, popular and good-looking – and Stef was inevitably known as ‘Federico’s brother.’ Sorted into Hufflepuff, a house often overlooked, Stefano felt that he had no chance to be his own person. And under the guise of friendly teasing, his brother found endless ways to put him down and undermine his confidence. To Federico, it was just a bit of fun, but Stefano found himself wishing that he did not have an older brother; he’d lie awake at night wondering what life would be like if Federico did not exist. That’s something that will haunt him forever... Stefano was twelve when his brother was killed in a car accident; it was nobody’s fault, the car skidded on black ice and went off the road. Federico was killed instantly, and his family fell apart. Stef’s main memories of the time are his parents sobbing (he’d never seen his father cry before), the confusion of his younger siblings, and a huge horrible gaping black hole where Fede had been. He himself struggled to comprehend it – that his brother, whom he had loved and hated in equal measures, was really gone forever. As the oldest remaining son, Stef somehow felt that it was his responsibility to hold things together, but he had no idea how. He tried to take care of his brother and sister, but he was just a child himself and didn’t know what to do. He tried to comfort his mother, but nothing he did made any difference to the sadness in her eyes, or her tears at night. And so instead, he began to pour his energy into becoming the son he knew his father wanted; the son Federico had been. With his grief for his brother coupled with the guilt he felt over having wished Fede out of his life, it was easy to push aside his less happy memories of his brother, and to remember him the way his parents and the rest of the family remembered him; the perfect son, the perfect brother, the ideal boy who would have grown into the ideal man. He saw it as a fault in himself that he had never been able to be as good as his brother. His teenage years were somewhat wild. He drank, he smoked, he slept around, although at the same time he strove to get good grades, to be the best, to make his parents proud. He developed an arrogant, macho persona, which he still cultivates. He’s now 23, five years out of Hogwarts, and working as a Gringotts curse breaker, a tough job he takes quite seriously, so when he gets off work, he does like to enjoy himself as much as possible, and tends to be a fun person to be around. His relationship with Anna has remained relatively close, although they bicker in the usual way for siblings, and they ran in different circles of friends at school. However, she is one of the few people he will actually take a telling from if he’s out of line. With Chris, things are more complicated. Stefano is very fond of his little brother, and has always been protective over him (after Federico died he saw it as his role to protect both Anna and Chris), but he finds it difficult to show it. He doesn’t feel that he’s ever really got to know Chris – he knows that he likes football, like Federico, and that’s about as far as he can get in terms of his brother’s interests. He never feels like they’re quite on the same wavelength – with Stef, it’s all about being strong and tough (something that developed right from his early days, trying to compete with Federico’s superior strength). Life is a competition; who can down the most shots, get the most girls, drive the fastest car... He’s spent so long looking to those things as the ultimate ideals of being a man, that he finds it hard to understand any other way of looking at things. In fact, in general, he’s a bit of a dick – very much a man’s man, he sees girls and women in three categories: the innocent ones to be protected, the ones who say no to be respected, and the ones who say yes, who are fair game to be objectified. He’s not the kind of guy who would actively bully people for not living up to his ideals, but he is the kind of guy who would thoughtlessly use ‘gay’ as a general insult, and cheerfully dismiss a girl as a slag because she sleeps around. Underneath that, though, there is still a decent person who has simply got buried by his need to prove himself and show off, blinding him and making him thoughtless. Inside him somewhere is the little boy who knew what it was like to be pushed around and mocked and never to be good enough; the seven-year-old whose sense of fairness was so strong that he made a pet of his little sister so she wouldn’t be neglected in the presence of a new baby; the twelve-year-old who gave his mother cups of tea and hugs to try and fill the gap of her missing son; the teenager who sometimes wondered in the night whether his father would rather he had died and his brother lived. He still has his Hufflepuff traits – his sense of justice is very strong, as is his loyalty; he would never desert a friend and always does his best to be there for his family. He’s just spent so long trying to live up to Federico, he doesn’t even realise that he’s become many of the things he disliked most in his brother. |
becca. old. two. gmt. |
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