Post by Lexie Fleming on Oct 15, 2012 15:50:48 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] calixta penelope fleming. twentyeight. business employee. natalya vodianova. | |
[rs=2] | Calixta Penelope Fleming was born on the 21st of July 2005, to Clive and Helena Fleming. Clive was a busy airline pilot, and Helena, despite being a halfblood witch, taught English at Oxford University, a job she loved. Although her parents loved her, they were both career-minded people. Clive was barely around right from day one, and Helena returned to work when Calixta was still a baby, leaving her daughter with a Nanny the majority of the time. For her first eight years, Calixta was an only child, and believed herself to be completely happy. She was an intelligent and precocious child. She loved books and read profusely – something she had inherited from her mother – but she was no quiet bookworm. She was strong-willed and opinionated and determined, from a very early age. When her father was at home, he tended to make up for being there so rarely by spoiling her, and it was he who began to call her Lexie – he’d never much liked fancy names. To this day, however, Helena insists on using her full name, the only person who ever does, and Lexie hates it. Despite this, Lexie was surprisingly attached to her mother. Unlike most children, she never really appreciated the spoiling her father gave her – he was at home too rarely, and she was suspicious of his gifts, and resentful of the fact that he treated her like a baby. Her mother never did this; Helena talked to her daughter almost as if she was an adult, even when she was a young child, and this was the sort of treatment Lexie liked. She hated people who would not respect her, who treated her like a child, and yet she was also a kid who needed a firm hand. She had her own ideas about everything, and resented being told what to do by anyone who wasn’t her mother. As a result, she led her Nanny a complete dance, always difficult and non-co-operative. She insisted on choosing her own – generally outrageous – clothes, casually broke any rules set down for her (often purely for the sake of breaking them), and argued over everything. Despite being an only child, she had plenty of socialisation. Even before she began school, her Nanny had instructions to make sure she led a healthy, active life, frequently taking her out to the park or the swimming pool, where she met other children. Lexie liked playing with other kids, but she also liked being the one in charge, and she was a natural leader. Her extensive reading (much of which was books quite unsuitable for a child) and the fact that at home she only talked to adults, meant that intellectually she was more advanced than most children her age, and being also loud and outgoing, with a decidedly rebellious streak, she was generally the leader of the gang, even more so as she started school. Lexie was sent to a small Muggle private school, where she thrived. To be sure, she quite often got into trouble for being cheeky, or arguing with the teachers, but she loved learning, and quickly became a high achiever. She had a quick wit and a ready imagination, and although the other kids sometimes resented her ‘bossiness’, she was generally popular. By this time, though, she was already showing signs of magic, although she was also showing a precocious ability to control her magic – not completely, by any means, but she did have some control, which made it easier to hide it from her teachers. Although nobody specifically told her, at some point, Lexie became aware that the special things she could do were unusual, in much the same way she realised (at quite a young age) that Santa Claus couldn’t be real. One day, when she was seven years old, she asked her mother, demanding with great seriousness that Helena ‘tell her the truth’. Helena, recognising that a story would not satisfy her daughter, told her the truth. After that, Lexie never referred to it again, simply storing the information up for herself. Although her mother worked a lot, Lexie accepted that as normal, and loved to visit Helena at work and go for lunch in Oxford and the like. Her favourite place in the world was the Bodleian Library. When she was eight years old, a bombshell in the form of a baby brother appeared in Lexie’s life. She wasn’t altogether pleased. Lexie was quite happy with the routine of her life, and a baby would disturb it. She found it quite interesting, though, from an intellectual point of view. She quietly read her mother’s pregnancy and birth book, and educated herself on how babies came into the world, and when Ian arrived, she took charge of him. Her mother returned to work as soon as possible, and Lexie considered the Nanny an extremely inadequate person to take care of her little brother. Again, she read books on how to care for babies, and would always be there at her Nanny’s elbow, telling her exactly what she was doing wrong. Lexie believed that no job was done well unless it was done by her. In exasperation, one day, the woman handed her the changing things and told her that if she was such an expert, she could try changing the baby’s nappy herself. Inwardly dismayed but outwardly taking it completely in her stride, Lexie took the challenge (their Nanny did not, of course, leave her to do it unsupervised) and with great determination, did not make a bad job of it. After that, she did more and more, becoming quite the expert on babies (in her own opinion) and considering herself Ian’s main carer. She also took charge of his education, reading him endless stories – some suitable, some less so. This lasted until Lexie was eleven, and the time came for her to depart for Hogwarts. She had never told Ian about magic; she never talked about it at all, it was just there, in the background. She allowed him to believe that she was going to a Muggle boarding school, with the same grudging acceptance that she allowed him to believe in Santa Claus. After that, her life diverged from her brother’s. She was still very fond of him, and very protective over him, but she saw much less of him. She became preoccupied with her own life, and when she was at home, preferred to spend time with her mother, talking about books and doing things they both enjoyed, like going to see arty films and visiting galleries, while her father – when he was at home - did different things with Ian. Meanwhile, she was developing a separate life at Hogwarts. Her love for books and learning, and her innate grasp of logic, had seen her sorted into Ravenclaw. In the school environment, she began to improve her social skills, learning when to keep her mouth shut (at least sometimes; she still tended to speak her mind, to students and teachers alike) and how to make friends without having to boss them around constantly. She still to this day has difficulty allowing other people to do jobs she knows she could do better, but she learnt to at least let people try without constant criticism (most of the time). However, her rebellious streak was developing into full blow bolshy-teenager-syndrome. She challenged everything, especially rules and boundaries. This became much worse after the day, when she was thirteen, that her parents announced that they were splitting. Her home life had always been fragmented; she could not remember the last time when they had all spent time together as a family, but it was still a huge shock. She had taken it for granted that both her parents would always be there, together, maybe not always in the same physical place, but coming as a unit nonetheless. And one thing Lexie had never dealt very well with was the idea of change. Then came the whole custody battle, which made Lexie furious. Ian was only five, too young to understand what was happening, but Lexie could not believe that this decision was being made for her. She was old enough to choose her own life, and, being Lexie, voiced this loudly. She also believed that Ian too should be given a choice. In the end, it went all the way to court, and although the result (her mother was given custody) was the one Lexie wanted, the damage was done. The unfairness of the way she’d been treated – as a child whose opinion didn’t matter - filled her with an anger against the world, and especially against her parents. Lexie’s behaviour deteriorated dramatically. She fell in with a group of older kids, whose main social activities centred round alcohol and drugs, and she adopted their habits. Her high grades dropped off as she stopped doing her work or reading, and she spent all her spare time smoking, drinking and partying, her way of hitting back at the adult world of authority. She lost her virginity at the age of fourteen, with a boy of nineteen, both so drunk she only vaguely remembers it, and she spent her holidays sneaking out of the house to go to wild parties. Meanwhile, home life had changed again. To Lexie’s disgust, Roger Knightley and his daughter moved in with them almost as soon as the court case was over. Lexie was quite old enough to work out what this meant, or what she thought it meant – it was surely too soon for Helena to have met Roger after she split with Clive. Outwardly, she dismissed this knowledge with a careless shrug and a ‘whatever floats your boat’ attitude, but inwardly, she lost a lot of her respect for her mother. Her father visited at first, but slowly his visits declined, and the lesson Lexie took from this was that adults always disappoint you. In fact, she was more upset for Ian than for herself. She’d never been that close to her father, but Ian had been much more so, and he was much younger. If their father could not visit for her, surely the least he could do was visit for Ian. The fact that he didn’t only increased her anger with the whole situation. The Knightleys were simply an annoyance. It wasn’t that there was anything especially offensive about them, but as far as Lexie was concerned, they were strangers, usurpers, living in her house. She refused to open up to either of them, and merely resented their presence. Roger was treated to rude silences and stares, and the odd sarcastic comment. She was slightly nicer to the little girl, Honour, because after all, none of it was her fault, but she would not treat her like a little sister. For the most part Lexie ignored the girl, except when she got on her nerves, and then she would snap at her. She looked forward to the term times, when she could go back to Hogwarts and her friends and the destructive ‘fun’ they had there. Things continued in this vein for most of the rest of Lexie’s years at school. She was vaguely aware that Ian wasn’t very happy at home, and that he and the Knightley kid fought constantly, but there wasn’t much she could do, away at Hogwarts most of the time. Anyway, the things happening in her own life consumed her so that she hardly thought about her family any more. She was living life her own way, and she was determined to go on doing that. She no longer cared about her school work, and did quite badly on her OWLs, a drastic change from the girl who had once been a high flier. The birth of her little half-brother, Atticus, less than a year after Roger moved in, hardly registered with her. He was part of the crowd of strangers her family had become, and she showed none of the interest she had had when Ian was born. Instead, she dismissed Atticus as an irrelevance, and hardly looked at him when she was home. All she noticed, with a certain amount of bitterness, was how much more time Helena spent at home with Atticus and Roger than she ever had with Lexie. It was towards the end of her 7th Year that the worst thing yet happened to Lexie. Still caught up in her whirlpool of destructive behaviour, she was out at a party. She had sneaked out of school to go to it, with some friends, and had met up with some other people there, people she knew but had been several years ahead of her at Hogwarts. One of them was a boy she had flirted with quite a lot, and who had made no secret of his interest in her. Lexie didn’t return the interest, but had found him difficult to get rid of. On this occasion, she was drunk and high. They’d all been taking drugs, and everything had gone slow and hazy. He came onto her, and she told him no. He followed her to the toilets, pinned her against the wall, and raped her. At some point during the experience, Lexie passed out. She came to alone, slumped against the wall outside the toilets, her clothes torn and her dress round her waist. Somehow, she managed to get herself straightened out a little, and made it back to her friends, a few of whom were still sober enough to get them all back to school. Unfortunately, they had been found out, and the teachers were waiting for them. With the state they were in, they were sent straight to bed, with the promise that they would be dealt with in the morning. The telling off and the detentions they received next day hardly registered with Lexie. For once in her life, she did not even try to argue, only sat in blank silence. She was in no doubt as to what had happened. Her memories were vague, but not that vague, and she knew that she had not given her consent. She was in shock, and she remained in shock for the whole day, uncharacteristically quiet and withdrawn. It was the following evening when, in the dorm with her friends, she finally blurted out what had happened. Their reactions were shock and, to her dismay, disbelief. The words on everyone’s lips were ‘are you sure?’, and nobody seemed to believe her when she said yes. She had been drunk, she had been stoned, he might be a bit wild but he wasn’t a bad guy really, she must be remembering wrong, she must have forgotten saying yes, she must have given the wrong impression, she must have led him on. Lexie stuck to her guns at first, and swore she’d been raped, but everything seemed to count against her – her intoxication, her lack of concrete memories, her reputation for sleeping round consensually, the clothes she’d been wearing, the fact that she had flirted with him in the past... They treated her like a culprit, not a victim, and for once, Lexie’s self-belief was shaken. She began to believe what they told her – that she had asked for it, that it was all her fault. There were those who believed her, of course, but not enough. She tried to speak out, the way she always had done, but the reaction was always doubt, and eventually she retracted her accusation, unable to take the judgements. The outgoing, abrasive, self-confident girl turned into a quiet, pale thing, who kept her head down, ashamed to lift it and see people judging her. She sat her NEWTs in a daze, and failed all but one of them. During the summer holidays after finishing Hogwarts, Lexie overdosed on a cocktail of drugs in an attempt to end her own life. The shame, the confusion, the memories, and the helplessness of the life she’d got herself into, all combined to push her over the edge. She ended up in St Mungo’s, and they saved her life, but she was told she had to get off the drugs. Her mother, horribly shaken by the revelation of what her daughter’s life was really like, sent her to a rehab centre. Lexie hated it there, but gradually, she recovered. Ian – now in his first year at Hogwarts - wrote to her, and they re-established their connection. Once off the drugs, something of her old confidence began to return. Counselling helped her to get over what had happened to her, to some extent, and when she emerged from rehab, there was a new, quieter strength about her. Having done so badly on her NEWTs, she turned her attention elsewhere. With support from her mother, the university lecturer, she instead took a selection of Muggle qualifications, using a distance learning course. It took her some time to get back into the way of studying, but she was intelligent enough to make it, and came out with three good A-Levels. She attended Muggle university, studying Literature like her mother, and hardly used her magic during that time. It was a break she needed, to re-gather her strength and confidence. After graduating, she returned to the Wizarding World recognisable as the old Calixta Fleming, and it was at that point that she once more told the story of what had happened to her than night at the party. It wasn’t easy, and she was still faced with many of the same attitudes she had faced at the time, but this time she stuck to it. So long afterwards, there has never been the evidence to convict the man who raped her, something Lexie has resigned herself to, although that doesn’t mean that she is prepared to give up. She has come through too much to give up because the cause is lost. However, there isn’t much she can do about, other than talk about it, so talk about it she does. Lexie doesn’t care if it makes people uncomfortable, if it’s not what they want to hear – she refuses to be silenced, because her silence is what they want, the people who would like to cast her as the villain. Not that she talks all the time about how she was attacked, but she never tries to hide what happened to her. Sometimes, it’s hard; sometimes she still feels ashamed when people look at her with shocked eyes, but she carries on, because that shame is what she wants to change. She is a woman now, not a girl, and she has an adult’s strength, which she wants to use to help other girls, girls who need the support she herself never really got. Having got her degree, she felt that she had more or less proved herself (to herself mainly – she had needed to prove that she still had brains she could use), she went to work in the area she had always loved – books. Beginning as a sales assistant in Flourish and Blotts, she quickly moved into their department that dealt with secondhand books. She showed a lot of natural talent in what she did – perhaps from all the time she had spent in the Bodleian as a child, Lexie found that she was extremely good at tracking down and recognising old, valuable and rare books, as well as the delicate spells needed to restore and conserve them, and with her strength of mind and determination, was also good at managing to acquire them for the shop. Soon she was working full time in that area, and is now recognised as something of an expert book dealer. She spends her days poring over parchment, surrounded by dusty old tomes, and talking about ancient wizarding literature, and she is very happy with her life. It hasn’t been completely empty romantically either. Out of work, Lexie is still a sociable person with a wide circle of friends, and there have been men in her life; one boyfriend in particular lasted for three years, and even lived with her for a while. Most of her other relationships have been short but fun, and she regrets none of them. She is still something of a control freak, and tends to speak her mind, but she also likes to laugh and flirt, and can be a lot of fun to be around. She still enjoys a good party and a drink, although she never, ever, touches drugs any more. The shadow of what happened to her still lingers, but Lexie has worked through it, not avoiding any of her issues, and has more or less come to terms with her experiences. She maintains a good relationship with her mother, although she gets exasperated with her at times, and she had reached a quiet state of truce with her stepfather, Roger, in which she says as little as possible to him when they’re together, and bitches about him when they’re not. She rarely sees her father, and barely knows her stepsister, although she knows that Ian gets on much better with her these days. Ian is the family member she remains closest to; he will always be her baby brother, and she treats him as such – she firmly believes that he is a completely incompetent child, and probably always will. She feels that now, finally, at the age of twenty eight, she’s finally at peace with who she is, and happy with where she’s at, and perhaps might even be ready to settle down, if the right person came along. She’d like children one day, but she’s not counting on it; at the moment, she’s quite happy living in her shabby but pleasant flat with her two dogs, a chocolate Labrador called Tennyson, and a mad little black, curly-haired mongrel called Byron, whom she takes for a jog every morning before work. |
gina. 22. 5+. gmt. |
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