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| User: | walkalonelyroad (200276) |
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| Name: | Theo Nott | |||||||||
| E-mail: | steppin_razor3@yahoo.com | |||||||||
| Bio: |  About the Character Full Name: Theodore Nicomedes Nott Nicknames: Theo Age: 27 Date of Birth: March 14, 1980. Place of Birth/Current Residence: Born in Gloucestershire, Theo currently resides in Muggle London, specifically Brixton. House: Alumni of House Slytherin. Wand: Cedar and Chimaera Scale, 10 1/2 inches, flexible. Bloodline: Pureblood, eldest son of a family rivalling the Malfoys in age and prestige. Theo's mother was Italian and Greek, raised in Greece, his father English. . Profession: Jack of all trades and intern at the Refugee Council in Brixton. Physical Description: Eye Colour: Blue Hair Colour: Dark, brown-toned black, usually worn long and somewhat unkempt. Height: 5'10" Weight: 11 stone (150 lbs) Distinguishing Marks: Spell scars on right hip, knife scars (defensive) on left hand, Dark Mark on left forearm. General: Theo's skin has olive tones to it from his Greek ancestry. He is something of a throwback to his mother's family (they were of Greek descent), a fact that displeased his father. He was never sure if it pleased his mother to see her line carried on that dramatically, or if it pleased her because it became a weapon in his parents' constant fight. His brother looks rather more like their father - there is no more family unity in appearance, in the Nott family, than there is verbal unity. He prefers Muggle clothing, primarily suits. Very expensive suits. An affectation that dates to the early days of the war, Theo chose to assume Muggle clothing, as it was a lot easier to hide in plain sight in; he could drop into a crowd of Muggles and pass unnoticed under the Light's eyes. Over the course of time, Theo found that he preferred such to robes, and it has eased his transition into the Muggle world. Theo tends not to swear, tends to choose contractions based on who he's speaking to - speaking casually to a friend he's more likely to use them, but speaking to an enemy or someone he doesn't care about knowing that he doesn't trust he tends not to. He will lie with his word choices as much as with his words. Personality General: A misogynist (this tends to be shown with his extremely courtly-to-the-extent-of-patronising behaviour towards most women) with a degree of paranoia, Theo doesn't trust women or Muggles as general categories at all, though he is able to form close friendships with both groups on an individual level. He also dislikes inferior (by his standards) wizards. He is friendly to his peers and his superiors, but dislikes intensely having to deal with women who do legitimately hold power over him. He is a bit adventurous, but more of a pragmatist and definitely searches for the return for him before taking an action in a long term plan. On a short-term level, Theo will often take risks that make little sense at the time. As a Slytherin, Theo is an opportunist on the look out for his own chance at all times. He will play both ends against the middle without making any more of an overt commitment to either side than required; his commitment to the Dark is legitimate, but not because he cared a great deal for Voldemort's ideology, or what he sees as the excesses of the war - indiscriminate slaughter would be one of those - but because of his belief that the Muggles will, when they have the ability to, try to wipe out the Wizarding world as they historically have tried to do. He studies Muggles intensely, even as he works with them (the stories he hears in the course of his job are not exactly reassuring) both out of interest in them and out of fear of them. He's rather glad that Voldemort is dead; the man was a mongrel idiot obsessed with blood, power, and death, which is no better than one could expect from the Riddle line, and really rather beneath anyone with any intelligence. Theo is an ideological purist, preferring that there be a black and white answer to all questions, but well aware that this is often not the case. That doesn't mean that this delights him. He believes in both "do unto others before they do unto you" and that the dead cannot betray you, and sees all ideal solutions in terms of someone's death in the long run. Theo is an amoral little thug wrapped in very expensive clothing, refined manners, and a whole lot of breeding. He maintains an extreme dedication to his father's lessons on honour, humility, pain, intelligence, and loyalty - his father was the person who shaped him, and the antagonistic relationship that existed between Aram Nott and his heir taught Theo what it meant to be a man and to be a person, not always successfully. Theo generally hides his caring under several layers of nastiness and apparent dislike, because vulnerability is asking for trouble, and caring is private, needing to be known only to yourself and the person you care about. Theo is not the type to send flowers to his beloved; he'd be far more likely to ridicule them accurately, yet oddly more gently than someone he disliked, in a public place. Although the war made him grow up in many senses, the death of his father was an extremely destructive event in Theo's life, and in some ways he is a stunted young man who will always be receptive to father figures, always in search of the love that he was never certain he had, and one who pigeonholes people into the ways he expects them to interact with him and to be. He has very few pigeonholes available and seeks situations where he can make people fit one of his existing definitions. Strengths: Intellectual rigor, strength of his convictions, charming when needed, wealth and the ability to use it, a supple and inquisitive mind that is willing on occasion to admit that he is wrong, a good education, particularly pre-Hogwarts. Weaknesses: Anything pertaining to his father, particularly negative reactions. Theo has a tendency to flay people verbally, is intolerant of idiots, concomitant belief that most of the world is composed of idiots, great (possibly justified) egoism, paranoia regarding Muggle incursions into wizarding society. Magical Strengths: Very, very good at charms and curses, decent at most magic. Magical Weaknesses: Not capable of Occlumency or Legilimency, not even a little bit. It is widely considered to be the tradeoff for oneiromantic ability. Weak at transfigurations. Decent at potions (canonical that Theo was in the sixth year class) but not superb, primarily because he doesn't like them. Theo is fairly crap at wandless magic, but can manage it; it has to be fairly dire need. Other Skills: Oneiromant (see wiki). Complete Muggle skillset as a result of his chosen life. Quirks/Habits: Theo tends to fidget with his hands when he's not actively got them occupied. He smokes occasionally, and tends to have not mastered conventions of touching - if he touches someone, he will probably do something like stroke their face. However, he tends to only touch people he knows well. He touches his Mark very often, usually by just placing his hand over it. He has lived his life in enough comfort from money and blood status that Theo tends to have not understood conventions and may very well choose to show someone his Mark even if that would be the dumbest possible decision at the time. He may also decide to kill them afterwards, however, so it probably evens out. Family: Father, Aram Nott, deceased. Mother, Alida Nott, nee Petalas, resident in Italy. Brother, Matthias Nott, also resident in Italy. Theo has no contact with his mother or her side of his family, and his father's side is, for the most part, deceased, unless you count the extreme inbreeding of Pureblood society as family. He has, occasionally, considered contacting his brother, but has never got far with that. His mother left when she was pregnant with Matthias, so Theo has no idea what sort of person he is, and is afraid to find out that he is not honourable, not a good man nor one deserving of the Nott name. Background History: Despite believing that Voldemort did not know what he was doing, both in conduct of the war and in his efforts to gain power, Theo felt that his manifesto was preferable to the increasing contact with the Muggle world that he felt the Light side (and specifically Albus Dumbledore) propounded. He was raised to the Dark - his father was one of Voldemort's first followers, marked in 1955 and those beliefs were passed on to Theo, who gave them his own spin and accepted them as a substitute and an expression of love that his father was unable to express in other ways. Because his mother left his father, Theo found himself alone in a house with a man capable of towering rage who searched for the weakness in himself that had allowed him to let his wife leave, rather than killing her as the family beliefs would have dictated. Alida Petalas was a wealthy young Italian of Greek extraction when Aram Nott met her in 1958; their courtship was a whirlwind, and one that her family disapproved of. She was always headstrong, and always determined, however, and decided that she preferred Aram to them. When she left Italy, it was after a fight of such magnitude that she never contacted her family again, not even when she returned to Italy with Theo's younger brother, Matthias. Her family lives near a small town in Valle d'Aosta, a province that has French as a co-official language, reflection of its close ties to both France and Switzerland; she currently resides in Brunico, a town not far from the Austrian border. Theo has chosen no contact with her (or his grandparents) since she left, not even at the times he has been resident in Italy since the war ended, largely because he is unsure how he feels about seeing her. His childhood was a difficult time after she left his father when Theo was six. It is not a pleasant experience to grow up with a man who has such doubt about his own strength and his own will, and who believes that his son, someone who reminds him constantly of his failure, could be the weapon to right the world. Theo grew up with a man who was not truly abusive, in recognised (ie, Muggle) senses, but who was alternatively distant and close, who believed that the bruises one received learning something taught one to do it right the next time, and who wanted his son to know what it felt like to receive every single curse or spell he learned, because such was the nature of responsibility and honour in the Nott family. Aram gave all this to Theo, along with a complex sense of honour. Theo has never learned to question any of it, and generally accepts his upbringing as being correct - he believes that he would not be a man of honour had his father not taught him so well what honour and duty were. School was a difficult time for him, thrust into a situation not of his own making and not under his control. He felt that Dumbledore was a divider rather than the uniter he professed to be, and it did not take Theo long to decide that he intended to be on the winning side rather than continue to take quasi-official abuse. Theo was completely unsurprised at the change in House Cup status at the end of his first year, but he chose to save the social-lion role of the House for Draco and, to an extent, Pansy. Instead, Theo played the joker, capitalising on his long friendship with Draco to be the one in the background who watched and waited and planned, yet was heard by those with power. There was never any question that he would take the Dark Mark, and he took it willingly, as soon as he could. Even as a teenager, Theo thought there were things wrong with Voldemort's ideals - for one, they centred on his power, not Theo's - but he felt they were infinitely preferable to those espoused by Dumbledore and his lap dogs. Until he could control his own fate, he was happy enough to follow Voldemort. It was during the war that the reason Theo had never been able to learn Occlumency or Legilimency no matter how hard his father tried to convince him to became apparent, as his oneiromancy developed, a throwback trait in his mother's family. It had been relatively well known in the Middle Ages, but as magic increasingly civilised and the schools came to regulate it, oneiromancy was seen as dangerous and unfashionable. Families chose to stop breeding for it, and the trait has become rare; rarer still is it admitted to. Voldemort was, predictably, delighted to find that he had an oneiromant, and set Theo to work, using him as much as possible to solve some very specific problems for him, though it was never as much as the Dark Lord would have liked, and Theo always felt shame that his war was fought at night, asleep, rather than in honesty, awake, on a battlefield, adrenaline shocking through him and death in his hands, openly, where any might see. After the war, it became an element in Theo's relative safety, that there were few reliable witnesses to his acts on battlefields, but Theo did take every chance to fight an actual war, rebelling against his sworn lord rather than the father he could not dream of turning from, rather than a war of the mind, and was present at a number of the battles. Theo uses his skill more for amusement now than murder - it's easier to kill with your dreams, and that makes it less a challenge. On September 30, 1998, Theo murdered his father at their home. As the reports of the Siege of Knockturn Alley came in - and as Voldemort upped the madness that had been building in him since the Fight at the Crossroads - Aram suggested, in a rather roundabout way, that Theo and he take their chance to escape. It was quite clear that the remains in the Alley complex would take a very long time to fully identify - long enough to escape and set up new lives. Theo, though he did not support Voldemort's cause with any particular fervor and never had been a devoted ideologue, as his father had been, took the suggestion as a personal betrayal, as his father's statement that the way he had raised his son was wrong, and that honour was not what he had taught Theo. It was not to stop his father escaping that Theo killed him, it was to stop him from destroying all the foundations of Theo's life, and to remind Aram of what honour and love were. It came with a heavy price. Theo fought on, unwilling to take the time to understand how the murder affected him and how much that changed his world. He has spent the years since the end of the war forging a life free of that at once controlling and loved hand and, at least to look at, is doing well at the task. He loved his father very much, and his father loved him, and no one needs to understand their relationship. Closer than lovers, more distant than enemies, all things at different times, Theo walked into it with his eyes open, his head held high, aware. He never felt anything for his father that he did not choose to. However, the joker in that deck was that by the time of the Battle of Louth it was fairly obvious that the Death Eaters were going to lose, and Theo had no intention whatsoever of going down hard for someone he didn't support. He claims, to himself at least, that the difference is that his father was suggesting they betray a viable cause, and that if he had waited to suggest it until spring of 1999, Theo would have gone willingly, for it is ever a Slytherin's perogative to save themselves at the cost of anyone else when the price of failure is as high as it was at the end of the war. Even after the siege, the Death Eaters were still in the war; after the Battle of Louth there was no telling where betrayal lay, and Theo chose to leave the war before he could be captured or killed by people with as little honour as Aram had at the end. He has never said whether those people were his enemies or his nominal allies. On May 20th, only a few days before Macnair's surrender, Theo Apparated from England, going to Berlin at first, watching the fall of everything he ever knew in an obscure wizarding tea shop, heart in his mouth that he would be named as a suspect, even more afraid that he would not be. It was in that shop, in the wizarding strip of Berlin that runs alongside the former Berlin Wall, that he learned of the disposition of the confiscated properties, such as the Nott estate, vacant, both members of the family presumed dead in some engagement or other. Theo spent the next several days drunk and very, very mean. He did not watch the trials; he told himself it was to avoid attracting attention, in the event he was named, but he did not trust that he could watch them without betraying himself. Instead, he started moving. Theo stuck primarily to Eastern Europe and Russia - places where the Dark was, if not welcomed with open arms, at least not feared and hunted as it was in Western Europe - and learned to lie, to not be English, to not be Dark, to act the role of the idle rich making the rounds of the great centres of the world. He rarely left Europe - Theo would have been happy had he never left his house - but passed the next seven years as a transient, living for days or weeks or months in one city, moving on when he felt tired of a place. It was in 2006 that Theo came back to England. He intended, originally, when he left Florence, to resume his place in Wizarding society, even if there was no place for him, and he intended to walk through Knockturn Alley again, but found that the thought of entering the Alley complex made him physically ill when he arrived in London, and he turned away, to think. Theo took a room in a small hotel in Muggle London and did nothing but think (and smoke) for several days. The problem was obvious: even with the war crimes near or past their date of expiration, Theo couldn't face going into that world again, and the problem was specifically local to England; he'd been living as a wizard the entire time since he'd fled England, and had no problem. On one level the problem was the Siege; on another level, the problem was fear. On yet another level, the problem was loss. The solution that he came to, in the end, was unorthodox, and was not embarked on with good intentions, but eventually Theo chose to live as a Muggle, in Muggle London, with a job and everything. If he could not be a wizard in the country he chose, he could be a Muggle. And it would, he thought, give him some leverage when people came looking for him. He disappeared on the streets of London. He did not take the step of breaking his wand, but he did set it aside and learn to live as a Muggle, a population he'd had contact with since the war. And then he understood that he, personally, owed the Muggles he lived among something, partly for the abuses his world had traditionally heaped upon theirs, and partly for the fact that they did so much with what he saw as such limited lives. And slowly he came to have respect for them, as well. That was the week he took the job at the Refugee Council, where he has worked ever since, wanting to help people displaced by war, wanting to extend to them the hand that was, or was not, extended to him. It made a good cover - but it also made a difference, and the pleasure that thought brought him surprised him, every time he realised it. Present Day: Theo has resided now in a terrace house in Brixton, in one of the worst parts of Brixton, in fact, for nearly a year now. He has stopped making some of the more obvious faux pas that got him in trouble in the past, and is used to being openly asked if he wants - or has - drugs and worse. He has started seeing the prostitutes and the drug addicts as people he could help; though Theo will never consider taking someone into his home to assist them, he does occasionally offer official help to people who seem like they need it, and seem like he can give it to them reasonably. He is not truly a charitable person, but he has learned well enough the debt that he has - honour would require no less - that he gives with pleasure, if not with joy. He doesn't exactly live a straitened life in Brixton - Theo owns the house he has, and several others on the street - but he feels that keeping his head down in that sense is also a good survival strategy; he lives simply, in a thorougly Muggle home. If he tried to recreate his Glastonbury life in Brixton, or anywhere else, it would destroy him; simplicity allows for the possibility of return where imitiation would say that he could not try. Despite his experiences during and after the war, and the work he does every day at the Council, Theo still feels the end of the war keenly. He doesn't know if there is anyone else who feels as he does, but he takes the destruction of the Dark very, very personally - as a risk to the people he is related to. Though he sympathises with Muggles, Theo has not learned not to fear what they would do if they knew of his real world, and living where he does has only convinced him that his world will only be safe if it separates from Muggles as much as possible. The stories he heard, growing up, were clearly remnants of the Spanish Inquisition and the witch trials; what a handgun would do in his world doesn't even bear thinking on. Muggles have not gotten less dangerous in the centuries of Wizard isolation. He would like to see a resumption of the war, if this time with the goal of securing their world; he does not believe that the Light's ideology would even recognise the need for protection, let alone enact it, and he is willing to fight to scorched ground to protect his people. Theo does not know the meaning of a pyrrhic victory. But he does not want to lead the war effort - that is a task better reserved for someone who can die easily. He would prefer to be the power behind the throne - always remembering that the person on the throne bleeds as prettily as any other human being. Disclaimers: The picture used for my icons is of Norman Reedus. I am not him, nor do I claim to be him. This character has been created for the Regulation RPG, a roleplaying game set post-Hogwarts. The books are the property of JK Rowling and I am not affiliated with her, her publishers or their associates. | |||||||||
| Memories: | 8 entries | |||||||||
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