Post by Stefano De Luca on Oct 21, 2012 15:05:31 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] iseabail mhairi lamont. twenty three. ministry employee. kristin kreuk. | |
[rs=2] | Iseabail Mhairi Lamont (pronounced Ish-bel Mah-ree Lam’nt) was born in a bleak, run-down, isolated village in the Scottish Highlands, north west of Inverness, and not really all that far from Hogwarts, the school her parents (both halfbloods) had attended. Some people might have called the place idyllic, and it certainly had beautiful scenery; to people with plenty of money and a pleasant lifestyle, it probably would have been a lovely place to live. Iseabail’s family never had any money, or anything approaching a pleasant lifestyle. They were miles from anywhere and anything; the nearest town was twenty miles away, and even that was small. Her father ran a mail order Potions business, which never really did very well, and her mother was an artist who thought more about her clay sculptures than her children. Douglas Lamont, had grown up in the Highlands, but his wife, Ruby, was from Glasgow, from a mixed-race Scottish-Chinese family, and had grown up in the city. Although Ruby loved the Highlands from an aesthetic point of view, she hated living there, and spent the whole of Iseabail’s childhood in and out of depression. Iseabail, known to her friends and family as Isha or Ish, is the elder of the Lamont sisters. Her younger sister, Catriona, was born two years after her. Her mother cried for three months after Catriona was born, leaving all the care of the two children to Douglas, who coped as best he could, which was quite well, considering. It helped that Douglas’s family lived not that far away, and his parents were able to give a hand, but Ruby hated them being in the house, and was so resistant to it that Douglas didn’t insist often. Of course, Douglas was aware that his wife needed help, but she refused it completely, preferring to shut herself in her room for days at a time. Iseabail became a quiet, abstracted child, often engrossed in things like jigsaw puzzles as a way of blocking out the unhappiness. Not that she was unhappy herself; her father made sure that she was fed and clothed and loved, and Iseabail had no idea that having a mum who cried all the time wasn’t normal. Her mother slowly recovered, but things were not the same in her and Douglas’s marriage. She had closed off from her husband, and would not let him in, and Douglas in the meantime had discovered some things about himself, the most important being that he was gay. He had always had uncertainties about his sexuality, never feeling that he was 100% one thing or the other (he still doesn’t), but he gradually came to the realisation that he was more gay than straight. For a few years, until Catriona was three and Iseabail five, they struggled on. They weren’t desperately poor, just a bit strapped for cash. The girls always had enough to wear and eat, but their carpets were threadbare and worn, the walls needed redecorating, and nothing they had was new or smart. Iseabail attended the village Primary School, but as a good half of the school (about twenty children, in other words) were in similar financial circumstances, any teasing was minimal – as far as Iseabail was concerned, everything was normal. She was best friends with a little girl whose father had a croft, and loved to go round there and ‘help out’ with the animals; she was old enough to know she mustn’t mention magic, and mature enough to be trusted to stick to that. In fact, Iseabail had a bit of an old head on young shoulders – an ‘old soul’ as her Granny Lamont said. It was probably as a result of her mother’s illness and her own coping strategies, but Iseabail was certainly quite a serious, thoughtful little girl. People were frequently telling her to stop frowning, or to ‘cheer up, it might never happen!’ which she hated, since she wasn’t frowning deliberately, or because she was cross or upset – it was just the position her face settled into when she wasn’t actually smiling. Catriona was more or less the opposite of her, being a sunny, cheerful little thing, but also quite wilful and mischievous. Even when she was doing better, Ruby was not the best of mothers. Having her children around her would inevitably bring on a migraine, or a down period, or both. She preferred Iseabail, as she was quieter, but really, what she liked best was her clay. She spent her days down in the shed, where she sculpted, and her nights in her room, ‘resting’ (and sipping gin), and Iseabail felt almost as if her mother was a stranger in the house, like a ghost who came and went every now and again, but never really talked or became part of the family. Finally, when she was five years old, her parents decided to call it a day and split. It was not nearly as simple or good-natured as that sounds though. Having never shown any interest in her daughters, suddenly Ruby changed her attitude altogether and declared that they must come with her, that they were too young to do without their mother. Douglas argued; he didn’t consider Ruby a fit person to care for them, and he wanted them himself. Ruby dug her toes in, so Douglas went to the Ministry, certain that the ruling would be in his favour. And it would have been, except that Ruby realised the same thing. One night, she crept into the room the girls shared, woke them, and told them that they needed to be very quiet. She had packed some of their things up in a bag, and they were going on an adventure. Catriona was excited about the adventure and agreed happily. Iseabail, older and more cautious, was worried, and said shouldn’t they tell Daddy? Ruby’s answer was that Daddy was sleeping – she wouldn’t want to wake him up, would she? And Iseabail, being only five, allowed herself to be convinced. Looking back, she wishes that she had run to her father’s room, screamed and shouted, anything, but she was a child, sleepy and confused, and she allowed her mother to take them out of the house, bundled up in her coat, and clutching her scruffy old toy dog. She wouldn’t see her father again for over a year. Ruby took them on the run. Never stopping in one place for more than a few days, they kept on the move, and always a few steps ahead for those searching for them. Of course, a full scale search was launched, since it was believed that the girls’ mother was mentally unstable. Douglas was frantic, and made frequent heartfelt media appeals to Ruby to bring them back. But of course, as with all missing person searches, when there was no success, it gradually died off. Meanwhile, Iseabail and Catriona were living a nomadic lifestyle. They didn’t stay in the UK – they travelled throughout Europe, but not in the glamorous way people imagine travelling in Europe. They stayed in small, dead end towns, in seedy hotels and freezing rooms in poor rate guest houses. They never stayed long enough to make any real connections with anyone, always on the road again before anyone caught up with them. Iseabail remembers it as a time of confusion and fear. She never did work out why they had left home or who they were running from, not until long afterwards. Catriona was too little even to wonder about it (although not too little to cry when they had to sleep in yet another unheated room in the dead of winter, having only had a sandwich for dinner), but Iseabail was not, and desperately searched for answers in her small head. She learnt early that there was no use asking her mother anything – her replies were always vague and evasive, if there was a reply at all. Her mother was still her mother – although their flight seemed to have galvanised her slightly, she still ignored them a large part of the time, and would still retreat to her bed and cry every now and again. It was a grim life for two little girls, but they adapted, as children do. Iseabail became very self-sufficient and resourceful, and the two girls developed a strong bond thanks to relying almost solely on each other. She thought about her father often, with a pang of grief, and she clung to the hope that somehow, one day, he would find them and rescue them. He did, or rather some people from the Ministry did. Just over a year after they had fled in the night from their home, detectives caught up with them, and the nightmare was over. Iseabail and Catriona were found to be underweight and unkempt, but with no lasting damage, except perhaps mentally. Their case hit the Prophet headlines, for they’d been given up for as good as dead. Now they were reunited with their father. Ruby was arrested for kidnap and neglect, but in the end was not sentenced to prison, on the grounds that she was of unsound mind. Instead, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital, and forbidden from any contact with her daughters. Iseabail and Catriona returned to live with Douglas, who in the meantime had acquired a boyfriend, Jonathon Campbell. It took some adjusting to, but the girls settled into their new life. Jonathon moved in and became their second parent; at just six and four, they adapted quickly in the new, loving environment. That was the happiest time of Iseabail’s life. She blossomed, and although always inclined to be a little serious at times, she learnt how to be a child, how to laugh and have fun and put the bad time behind her. It took Iseabail a little longer to forget than Catriona, being older, but gradually it became part of the past. Their father was almost like a different person, he was so much happier. Jonathon was a bit younger than him, and loved children, so he treated Iseabail and Catriona as his own, playing with them and doing things with them, and generally behaving like a second father, or a fun uncle. Both girls adored him, and for the first time, they were a truly happy family. They didn’t see their mother; she had disappeared from their lives entirely. A year after Douglas got his daughters back, he and Jonathon decided to adopt, and Archie arrived in their lives. Both girls were delighted with their baby brother, and although there were people in their community who were judgemental about their non-conventional family, the girls were too young to be aware of most of it. There was the odd unpleasant comment at school, particularly for Iseabail as the older of the two, but her friends were all completely fine with it, and in fact loved coming round to see baby Archie. Jonathon was a Muggle, but Douglas had, after they’d been together a while, told him about magic and explained what he was. They adopted Archie through a wizarding agency; they aren’t sure of his blood status, since it was all kept very confidential who his biological parents were, but it was clear from an early age that he was definitely magical too. In another couple of years, it was time for Iseabail to go to Hogwarts. She was nervous; one of the long term effects of her early childhood was that she had a fear of the unknown, of going away from home without knowing exactly what she was going to, and afraid of leaving her family behind. In fact, in the weeks building up to her departure, Iseabail became utterly miserable, withdrawing into herself again, unable to sleep at night, and crying frequently. In the end, it was Jonathon who talked her through it. Despite knowing nothing about Hogwarts, despite having his own doubts about the rightness of sending an eleven-year-old girl away from home (which he never really voiced, since obviously it was Douglas’s decision what he did with his own children), he sat down with Iseabail one day and had a long chat with her. Iseabail has never told anyone exactly what was said in that conversation, but by the end of it, although still not entirely happy, she was ready to face going away, and she also loved Jonathon Campbell almost as much as she loved her father. On arrival at Hogwarts, Iseabail was in for a shock in her sorting. Her parents had both been Hufflepuffs, and she herself had rather assumed that she’d either be a Hufflepuff like them, or perhaps a Ravenclaw; she had been hoping for Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat, however, disagreed, and put her firmly in Slytherin. It took quite a while for Iseabail, ever the over-analyser, to work out exactly why she had been placed there (though she was never unhappy there), but in the end she realised that she did fit a lot of the Slytherin traits. After her early experiences, she was cautious, wary of committing herself, finding it difficult to trust people fully, and having a strong sense of independence (for a long time, she’d had nobody to depend on but herself and her little sister) and self-preservation. She’d learnt to look out for herself, and to take what opportunities life gives you, because you’ll never know when you might get another. And yes, she was ambitious, although at eleven she hadn’t decided what she wanted to do – she just knew she didn’t want to be unimportant for her whole life. Once she had realised these things about herself, Iseabail flourished in her new house. She missed her father, Jonathon, and her brother and sister, but she continued to gain in confidence. She had never been a high achiever at Muggle school, because she had missed a lot of schooling in the year she had spent with her mother, and that had set her back. At Hogwarts, however, everyone was starting more or less at the beginning, and she did quite well. She still had a tendency to overthink things and she would never be loud, but she had friends, she lost a lot of her over-seriousness, and was generally very happy. When she was in Third Year, Catriona also started Hogwarts, and was sorted into Gryffindor, no surprise to Iseabail. She and her sister still had a close bond, forged during the time when they had nobody but each other, and rarely fought. Catriona and Archie squabbled sometimes, but Iseabail was not confrontational, and Archie was so much younger than her that fighting with him seemed ridiculous anyway. She developed into a fairly typical teenage girl – no special talents at anything (although she wished she did), but she enjoyed shopping and clothes and make up (not to an obsessive level, but she liked to look good), had crushes, experimented with flirting, and had her first boyfriend at fourteen; it didn’t last long, but it was nice while it did last. However, it was in Fourth Year, towards the end of the year, that disaster struck again, the worst blow Iseabail had had to deal with yet. Douglas, despite having shown no signs of illness and being relatively young, suffered a massive stroke, and died in hospital. The family was devastated. The girls were summoned home from Hogwarts for the funeral, but nobody knew how to deal with this, the worst thing that could happen to any of them. Jonathon was heartbroken himself, but also now had three children to care for, only one of which was legally (if not biologically) his. His care of the girls, however, did not last long. Ever since the kidnapping event, the girls had been under supervision from the authorities; it had been eased off when it was seen that Douglas and Jonathon were more than adequate carers, but once on the radar, always on the radar. The Child Protection Authorities stepped in again, and Jonathon was told that since he had no legal responsibility or familial claim on the girls (he and Douglas had never had any sort of legal partnership), he could not legally assume care of them. Ruby was obviously out of the question, and anyway had apparently disappeared out of the country, and the only other living relative the girls had was Douglas’s father (his mother, their beloved Granny Lamont, had died the previous year), who was physically frail and in the early stages of dementia. As a result, Iseabail and Catriona were taken into care, despite Jonathon’s best attempts to keep them with him, and their own protestations that Jonathon was as good as a father to them. It took Jonathon two years to battle through the system; although there were many people in the authorities who were very sympathetic to him, there were others who made things much harder because both he and his dead partner were men, and there were automatic assumptions made about whether a single man (especially as he was a Muggle) was an appropriate guardian for two girls, one a teenager and one moving into her teens. It was a long, hard struggle, and by the time they finally managed to push it through and Jonathon was able to legally adopt them, Iseabail had already turned seventeen. In the meantime, the girls had been placed in foster care during the holidays. Jonathon had impressed it on them that they needed to be patient and accept the way things were, and that he would try and see them as often as he could. He was given visiting rights, as a friend of the family (both girls thought this was ridiculous; Jonathon was family) and kept his promise, and Iseabail did her best to work with things the way they were, and to concentrate on school work and doing the best she could for herself. Catriona was different; always more rebellious, she found it hard to accept, and became quite badly behaved and difficult, especially with the foster family (who were perfectly pleasant, but neither girl ever really bonded with them). A lot of their grief for their father went undealt with, as they put all their energy into coping with their current situation. At school, their teachers offered help and support; Iseabail actually grew quite close to some of her teachers during this time. School was at least something that could be relied on, and her grades were something she could control, so she came to depend on it slightly. Catriona went the other way, and was badly behaved at school as well as at home, although Iseabail was still able to communicate with her, as was Jonathon when they saw him, and she never went completely off the rails – she just had a bad few years as an early teenager. As soon as she was seventeen, Iseabail was no longer the responsibility of the authorities, and could no longer stay in her foster placement. Of course, where she chose to go was straight back to Jonathon and Archie. This left Catriona alone, something that worried all of them, but in fact it was not long afterwards that Jonathon was finally approved to adopt both girls as his own daughters, finally fast-tracked by the fact that Iseabail was now an adult, and although not in a position to take legal responsibility for her sister herself, would at least by living in the house with them. The day that they were all united as one family again was one of celebration. With the worry about her sister lifted, and their home life so much better, Iseabail was finally free to be a teenager again, and she made the most of her Seventh Year. She had grown up too fast and too young, and couldn’t altogether go backwards and enjoy exactly the same carefree fun as a lot of her classmates; she was too cautious, and thought too much about consequences. But have fun she could and did. She partied, she discovered alcohol (she’d drunk it before that, but she’d never actually been drunk) and she fell in love for the first time with a boy in her year. She graduated with good results in her NEWTs, and then realised that she needed to decide what she actually wanted to do. Despite her negative experiences with travel as a child, she realised that she wanted to see a bit of the world from a different vantage point. It scared her, but Jonathon encouraged her, as he always did, and so she went off, to travel parts of the world she’d never been to, and to revisit some of the places she’d been with her mother, to see them in a different light. She travelled for a year, after which her confidence had increased hugely, and she knew that she wanted her job to include travel and working with people of different cultures. She still considers it strange and slightly ironic that this should be the case, given the introduction she had to foreign travel, and how scared she was of travelling into the unknown as a child, but perhaps she has more of her mother in her than she likes to think. She taught herself bits of several common European languages, made friends in various countries, and returned with a new sense of purpose to apply for work in the Ministry Department for International Magical Co-operation. She got a job, in a very junior post, but applied herself determinedly to it, and after two year, earned herself promotion. She is still more or less a junior in the Department, but she is working her way up, and believes that she’s doing quite well at it. She may not be the most outgoing person in the world, but her people skills and communication skills are good, and she knows how to win people over, which is useful when it comes to international negotiation, as well as when it comes to getting on in your department. In terms of personality, Iseabail is generally pleasant and easy to get on with. Most of the time, she is reasonably sociable, and in her personal life is quite easygoing. In her work, however, she is really quite driven and passionate; she likes to do the very best she can and is never satisfied with less. However, she can also become quite abstracted at times; she needs some time to herself each day and gets quite stressed if she doesn’t get it. She rarely leaps into anything, but thinks it through and analyses all options before making any decisions; she sees this as a form of self-preservation, because leaping into things is risky; if Iseabail takes risks, she likes to know she’s thought about the risk at least, and done her best to minimise it. In that way, she is quite cautious, and that’s in all areas of life, from work to relationships. She can be quite a perfectionist too; she likes things to be nice to look at, and thinks that if she hadn’t gone in for the Ministry, she might have been an interior designer, because she loves arranging rooms and making them beautiful, as much as she likes picking out beautiful outfits. Everything needs to be just right and well-ordered, and she dislikes mess and dirt, at least in the house. She doesn’t follow fashion for the sake of it, but she loves clothes and has an extensive wardrobe. Even when she’s just chilling out at home, she still chooses what she wears quite carefully; she’s not dressing up for anyone, merely for herself. She also enjoys taking photographs, a habit she developed when she was on her travels, and keeps what amounts to a photographic journal, documenting her life in pictures. She does like to pose some shots quite carefully, and has some photos she’s quite proud of, but generally what she takes are just snapshots, records of what she saw or did, whether interesting or dull. She still keeps up with her friends from school; she is quite good at keeping in touch with people. Her first love from school lasted nearly two years; they managed to stay officially ‘together’ throughout her travels, but the time apart changed both of them, and when she returned, things just weren’t the same, and they eventually parted on good terms. She does feel that having had two such great men in her life, in her father and Jonathon, it’s given her slightly high expectations when it comes to men, meaning that she can never settle for a compromise. She has had one boyfriend since, but that ended badly and she doesn’t like to talk about it, mostly because it was largely her fault (she knows she treated him badly). Her relationship with her siblings is good. Catriona is twenty one now, and Archie sixteen. Both still live at home with Jonathon, and Iseabail still has her bedroom there too, although she shares a flat with a friend most of the time (and Catriona is not there all the time either). Recently, Jonathon has met someone new, something that disturbed the little family again for a while. Both Catriona and Archie were the most upset by it, but for almost the first time, Iseabail got really angry with her siblings, and told them not to be so selfish; Jonathon had been there for them all the way through, it was completely unfair not to want him to have some happiness in his life too. It was no betrayal of their father; in fact, it was what Douglas would have wanted. They’ve more or less got used to it now, and things have settled down again. Iseabail is as close to Jonathon as she would be to a biological parent, and although she and Catriona have kept their father’s name despite being adopted, they are proud to call Jonathon their father too. They have no contact with their mother. Ruby tried to contact Iseabail two years ago, but Iseabail did not even read the letter – she burnt it unopened. That’s a chapter of her life she has no wish to revisit; her life has moved on, and she has no need of her mother in it. |
becca. 104. -5. gmt. |
ROLEPLAY SAMPLE HERE. DO NOT FORGET.
