LONELY GLORY

the player  —

name: Iris

age: 23

preferred pronouns: She/her

timezone: GMT+1

triggers: //**removed**//

ships and anti-ships: Emma/chemistry, Emma/interesting plot lines, Emma/bad ideas. No relevant anti-ships.

preferred method of contact: Discord, but I’m reachable by Tumblr IM as well. 

the tale  —

There was a time when all she knew was a perpetual feeling of happiness. There are some who would try to rationalize away what little they know of you — a cruel childhood perhaps, jealousy of her sister, lack of love—but it was all laughable and untrue, and you would be the first to point that out. Born as the first child to affluent parents, you were raised in between worlds. Your father, pureblood, an only child, somewhat eccentric especially by pureblood standards, more interested in spells and scrolls until he met your mother, a muggle of no lesser aristocratic bearing. Privately, you think there must be a Squib somewhere, for some of the heirlooms of your mother are too interesting to be non-magical, but it’s not something you’re looking to pursue at this point. Yours is a childhood filled with delight in a world of turmoil, untouched by changes and opinions in society. The first change is good. The birth of your sister, nine years after your own, was like Christmas came early. You grew up with loving parents unafraid to defy expectations, and you too can love freely. The latter, you can not. You love Olivia with all your heart, and it’s with a feeling of homesickness you board the Hogwarts Express for the first time.

That’s the first time things truly are different from your expectations. You thought Ravenclaw, maybe, not a Hufflepuff like your father, but you were sorted in Slytherin. Your magical grandparents rejoiced – a granddaughter to reestablish their family as prominent, compared to their in that regard disappointing son. You weren’t quite sure what to expect. The first year, you keep your head down – pay attention in class, pay attention to the dynamics in the Common Room, and know: you’re several feet behind the rest of your housemates. Slytherin was not ignorant to girls like you – young and intrepid and greedy, but there were many of you, and you’re already behind the rest. Your second year, you fight your way to a spot on the Quidditch team. In the open sky, you can leave both your own and others’ expectations behind, and the burning need, the want inside you gets you the position of starting Seeker more than your raw talent.

It’s an armor of sorts. You don’t often talk about your family, your home, and when you do it’s in off-handed remarks that barely skim the surface. The rest of her armor she finds by observing her elder housemates, and learns from them. To be aloof was to leave more to the imagination; to turn your nose up at those who hadn’t had the good sense to be born with your talent and intelligence was to give your lessers a better look at your elegant profile. Perhaps not truly elegant yet, but everything can be imitated, and you carry yourself with a barely restrained ferocity that’s a little too unpolished, but no one remarks on that. At least, not while you’re around. That, you consider a victory. In the classroom, you devour knowledge with the appetite of a starving man. Quidditch is fun, but parts of it come easy to you, and in your lessons, there is enough that does not. You practice until you can do everything perfectly, and on more than one occasion you fall asleep in your canopy bed, curtains drawn and face mushed on a book from the restricted area. Knowledge is power, they say, but there’s pleasure in knowledge for knowledge’s sake as well.

Hogwarts passes all too quickly. Your fourth year cements you as captain; your sixth strikes you with loss. You’ve always known your father enjoys his experiments, the opportunity to look at artifacts others don’t understand, and from what you manage to piece together from professor Slughorn, pale-faced as he interrupts your training, it is with the latter something has gone wrong. Your father is dead, your mother still in the balance. Eventually, she awakens, but not everything is as before. She’s forgetful, has grown frailer, and there’s a gnawing worry in you that she will not survive the winter.

She does, though. And the next and the next and the next. It is no surprise you have an offer from the Montrose Magpies before you have the excellent NEWT results. You find a vicious pleasure in being the better of those who think themselves superior of you by virtue of their birth, but by now, you’ve managed to push that part of yourself away between a pleasant façade. It’s not a climate favorable to those proud of what they are, and it worries you in the same way the bone-rattling coughs of your mother do. Years later, you breathe a secret sigh of relief when Olivia is sorted in Hufflepuff. She will not have to worry about belonging, about losing her tenuous grasp on her position. If you can do anything about it, she won’t have to live in anticipation of the next loss.

For a while, however, that thought takes a backseat to other practical matters. At first, the Quidditch leagues are largely free from the turmoil plaguing the rest of Britain, until there too, people start disappearing. Two muggleborn teammates disappear. Whether they were arrested or saw the writing on the wall, you don’t know. Several muggles are killed in the aftermath of matches, and as you zoom around the field, you look down on the stands and wonder which spectators decked in black and white would gladly kill your mother after cheering your name. When you move into your townhouse in Mayfair, you take the collection of books your father left intact with you, if only to save yourself the trouble of figuring out which ones to keep and which ones to discard at that point. Part of you hopes to find a way to reverse the course of your mother’s illness, but healing has never been your strong suit, and there is as much darkness in magic as there is light.

There are quiet expectations placed upon you. You’ve conformed to the hierarchy of Slytherin while in school, and though never overtly enthusiastic, you’ve never given someone a reason to doubt your logical political leanings. Of course you support the Dark Lord, you say when asked, ignoring the taste of ash it leaves in your mouth, fixing them with your most imperious stare. Your mother worsens. Some days, she does not know who you are. She lives with her own parents now, and though it pains you to do so (losing a child is worse than losing a parent, they say), you can not let her upset the delicate balance, the lie, you’ve created for yourself.

Someone else does it for you, pushes you to action. When the wards around your grandparents’ house are disturbed, you are left with little choice. You still don’t know if it was a deliberate attack or a matter of simply living in the wrong muggle neighborhood, but regardless, you fight. And you win, in more ways than one. The concept of a horcrux is intriguing enough in itself, and for someone with a penchant for plotting, you follow your impulse with a frightening decisiveness. Oh, you have pondered it before, but it is the death of your grandparents – their murder – that creates the circumstances. You are the last healthy family member your sister has, and you will do whatever you can to ensure her safety in this world. When you take on two Death Eaters and win, it’s a vision of startling clarity; your physical hurts are incomparable to the mental anguish of ripping a part of your soul out of your body, but when the dust settles, you know you have done the right thing. Gas leak in central London, the muggle press reports. Several dead, houses destroyed, many more injured. You mentally thank your professor for the elucidating lecture on solid to gaseous transfiguration in your seventh year, and you go home.

the player —

name: Gray

age: 25

preferred pronouns: she/her or they/them

timezone: PST

triggers: //**this information will not be shared**//

ships and anti-ships: My main ships are James/Severus and James with any of the Marauders. I don’t mind James/Lily, but I prefer to make it a little bit complicated and I would like to be able to explore other ships as well, if that’s possible. I think that James and Lily have a very strong connection and that relationship is very important, but I can see it being romantic or platonic and would really like to develop it with the Lily rper before setting things in stone. I don’t have anything that’s a big anti-ship for James, and I’m really willing to just see what works based on chemistry.

preferred method of contact: Discord please!

the tale —

James is a miracle child for his aging parents. They had nearly given up hope on ever having children when he finally came along. Everything is handed to him. He’s their little prince, their perfect prodigy, spoiled sweet and ready for the world to bow before him. It doesn’t. But that’s alright. It wouldn’t be any fun if things were too easy.

Growing up, James wants for nothing. There’s enough money behind both of his parents that he could never work a day in his life. Still, his mother tries to teach him manners. She tells him to keep his chin up, but never look down on someone for the purity of their blood. Their family runs in pureblood circles, but James always knows they’re on the outskirts. Blood traitors. Muggle lovers. It’s not until later he understands just how much poison hides behind the words.

On his first train ride to Hogwarts, James sits next to Sirius Black and introduces himself. Neither of them ever look back. They’re best friends by the end of the feast, already making plans to explore every inch of the castle. Peter is next. He’s small, timid. But there’s a spark in his eye that James takes to immediately. The jinxes he’s been practicing after class prove to be useful when a few older students take to shoving Peter in the halls. Then comes Remus. From the moment he catches sight of Remus, skinny and rumpled, but shoulders steady and strong, James knows they’ll be friends. It takes a bit of convincing for Remus to feel the same.

James is never without friends, but it’s only the three of them that know every inch of him.

Classes are alright, but James wants more. Needs more. The idea of the map begins as a joke, a what if. It doesn’t stay that way long. Months are spent charting every room of the castle. Every secret passage discovered leaves him thrilled for a week. It comes together slowly. James isn’t sure the map will ever be complete. But that’s half the fun of it, always having something new to add, finding a spell that makes it work just a bit better. The more mysteries they find together, the more James needs to find more. Hogwarts is a puzzle he almost doesn’t want to solve.

The next mystery that comes up is another matter entirely.

It doesn’t take long for James to realize there’s something off about Remus. About the way he disappears every full moon. The pieces aren’t hard to put together. James waits for Remus to tell them. Waits. And waits. And waits. Remus never tells. And that hurts, but James makes himself understand it. The talk eventually comes, James sits the other three down and tells Remus that he knows. That it changes nothing. That he still loves him as much as he did before he put the pieces together. And it’s a start, but it’s not enough. There has to be more they can do.

James stumbles on a book about animagi half by accident. He only suspects later that it was left there for him to find. The process is a complicated, difficult one, it almost goes wrong a dozen times and there are a few trips to the hospital wing that require a bit of quick thinking to explain. It takes two years of work, of sneaking around, of ‘borrowing’ items from various store rooms. Finally, it works and James can be at Remus’s side on four legs or two.

It’s good, in a way, having one project after another to keep busy with. Even with classes and Quidditch, ignoring the war raging beyond the walls never gets any easier. Tensions rise to a boil now and then. James has to assume that’s why Sirius does what he does that night in fifth year.

Severus Snape has always been a thorn in James’s side. There’s hardly a week that goes by without them cursing each other in the halls our out on the grounds. He has a dozen reasons, excuses, why he doesn’t stop. Evans still likes the slimy git. He’s jealous. Of course he is. Snape starts it as often as he does. And James can’t let that stand. It’s all easy enough to explain. And yet… there are times James catches himself looking longer than he should. Moments when he notices that, outside of a fume filled potions class, Snape’s hair actually looks rather nice. But he can’t think like that. He likes Lily Evans. So he forces it down, makes himself pretend the hair he runs his fingers through in his dreams is red instead of black. It’s easier to hate Snape, to curse his name than to let himself go down that path.

Still, he never would have agreed to Sirius’s little prank if he had known before. He only hears when they’re back in the common room, planning when to meet with Remus at the shack. Sirius laughs over it, thinks it’s hilarious, the idea of Snape scared out of his mind. Or worse. James barely remember what happens next, but in an instant, he’s on his feet, the collar of Sirius’s shirt balled up in his fist. How could he? What the hell was he thinking? James doesn’t have time to scream at him like he should. He leaves the castle as fast as possible, switching two legs for four as soon as he’s out of sight. It gets him there in time, but only just. James can’t speak to Snape as he drags him away from the Shack. There’s nothing he can think to say. Nothing that would be enough. Sorry my best mate tried to use my other best mate to kill you. Even thinking it makes him sick.

It changes things, that night. Makes everything more real. If his friends are capable of things like that, he can barely imagine what’s waiting for them all once they leave school. So James decides, then and there, that he needs to grow up.

Of course, it doesn’t happen all at once. But he tries. It still doesn’t feel like enough by the time the last year at Hogwarts comes to an end.

Life goes on, even if school doesn’t. James knows what he’s supposed to do. What the right thing to do is. Fighting the good fight, standing with the Order. There was never another option, no matter how much he might want it. In school, he had dreams of flying high, playing Quidditch until he was too old to balance on a broom. Now, it’s impossible, selfish. How can he do anything other than fall in line with the Order? There’s a war on. He can’t afford to have his head in the clouds.

It feels like a trap, the world slowly slipping further and further out of his control. There’s nothing he can do to help Sirius when word of his brother’s death spreads. When the Ministry is devastated, James can only drive his fist into the wall until his knuckles bleed. He lies in bed next to Lily, next to his wife, and feels only hollow, a shell of the boy who had chased her for so long. Nothing is the way it should be. All James can do is push on and hope the next day things will be better.