it's all meaningless now

TIMELINE ONE : 

without the shadow of war hanging over the burke family, nate’s father was a little more lenient with his son. the extent of the leniency was that when nate spent summers in louisiana with his mother’s family, he wasn’t expected to owl a rundown of what happened to his father every other week, and was allowed to owl those family members throughout the rest of the year. 

but it’s fine  ---  nate had no trouble finding ways to have fun around his father’s expectations. so he’d have to take over the shop one day, fine. but without any real trouble on the wizarding world’s horizons, that one day wasn’t in danger of cramping nate’s style any time soon. between hogwarts and louisiana, nate wasn’t home with his father that much, and was able to find friends from different backgrounds than his. it was easy to forget sometimes that he was a burke; that there were things that would always be expected of him. he still clung to the dream of one day breaking free from the burke legacy and becoming a metal charmer. 

TIMELINE TWO :  

nate still had his time in louisiana with his mother’s family: her metal charmer father and wealthy muggleborn mother, his cousins, aunts and uncles and the rest of the eccentric, extended, american family. but those freeing summers came to a halt when he was fifteen and the looming war stopped right at the burke’s doorstep. nate was never asked to fight, not outright. his father has always held contempt for nate but he never wanted his only child and only son out on the dangerous front-lines. instead, homer burke pulled his son into the underground borgin & burke’s ruled  ---  nate learned how to procure objects that could become weapons, objects that could become tools, anything and everything that could help in the war efforts. 

nate kept his metal charming a tightly-held secret, and so he was never asked to turn his art into something dark. but the work crushed him, especially since nate had always had half-blood friends and those from different backgrounds than him. he tried to pass along useful information to those it could serve, but since his father’s side won, nate was never sure if his hundred small betrayals ever helped anyone. 

TIMELINE THREE :      his actual timeline

nate’s father never pulled a full stop to his time spent in america, but he was always wary of the affect they had on nate. because as much as homer burke loved aurelia beauvais, genuinely and completely, her family was a lot. they had somewhat radical ideologies for an old pureblood family, enjoyed practicing and mastering obscure forms of magic. it was hard for him to accept that they had influence over his son; hell, nate’s wand was made by one of his wandmaking american uncles. what could be more influential than that? 

nathaniel’s life had always been carefully planned. he could trace roots of his future all the way back to before his parents first meeting, see hints of the planning in generations before any of them. that’s the way things worked for him, though, the way they’d always existed in the world he knew. life was an inescapable thing. he was son of their heir to borgin & burkes and the prettiest daughter of an old pureblood line in america’s south. he was Nathaniel Aristotle Beauvais Burke  ---  his name had always been a mouthful, too much, but the long string of syllables was never negotiable. it meant something. 

he needed the two surnames; one to declare him important in his mother’s america, the other to give him credibility in his father’s britain. the first name was his father’s choice, and his middle name his mother’s. he was always meant to be a mix, the PERFECT child, their biggest stroke of luck. no one could say his parents weren’t lucky people, just like no one would ever call nate himself unlucky. life worked like that. happy or unhappy or downright miserable, luck was something black and white. 

looking at homer burke and aurelia beauvais on paper, it was hard to believe they’d chosen each other in a sweeping romance, not a betrothal turned business transaction. maybe that’s where the luck began: they happened upon each other when they were young and beautiful and both a touch too vicious, and the end result was a son and heir for both dynasties on the very first go. no need for more children; just champagne toasts all around, patting each other on the back in congratulations on how much the world loved them. 

nate’s parents were never the parenting type, anyway. had their first child been a girl, they’d have had another, of course. but they were the PERFECT couple, and so they got nathaniel and the rest of their lives to live the way they always had  ---  reckless in the way of the wealthy and beloved, freedom within a thousand confines. now, they turned a disapproving eye on nate’s antics, but he knows the hypocrisy exists only because he doesn’t care enough to hide his bad habits like they did. he sees no use in sweeping the truth under a rug, and when he has a say in the matter, he’d rather be seen honestly.

nathaniel was always intended to be both a beauvais and a burke. his mother wouldn’t let her family go so easily, and his father adored her enough to allow the influence. she’d charmed his whole family, in fact, despite the technical mar of her blood-status: what money and influence were good enough to fix in america, england was willing to hide. to anyone that mattered, she was a pureblood, muggleborn mother or not. to anyone that cared, nate was too. 

he didn’t care himself, but no one ever asked. they only told him to tell no one  …  as if he ever would. a rowdy childhood and alcohol-hazed adolescence didn’t mean he’d go spilling family secrets right and left. people expected the worst of him. or rather, they expected nothing at all, and so that’s what he gave them. 

nathaniel’s mother looked at him and saw so much WASTED potential. nate wondered when he came to realize this  ---  but soon after, he reached an even more important realization: that the when of it didn’t matter. nothing did, really, because seeing all he could be in the lines of his face didn’t stop his mother from loving him. his mother loving him didn’t stop his father from hating him. his father hating him didn’t stop the his grandfather from considering him heir to the shop. oh, there was something so sweet in the nihilism. nothing mattered; why hadn’t anyone said something years ago? 

so he had this, his knowledge that nothing he did meant anything to his world, and he had his hatred of the father that hated him. he had what his granddad had given him, when he was twelve and spending his first summer in america with a wand: a way to be something entirely OTHER than a burke. 

the shop and the sanctity of blood made the burkes in the wizarding world nate knew from school and growing up. but he’d spent summers, always, in the louisiana estate his mother grew up in, and that world was built on metal-charming. not a job people were jumping on, nowadays, given its difficulty and a million peculiarities, the way the work only called to certain hands. nate possessed those hands, and a hungry need to do something with them, to be anything other than what his father, and his father’s father, needed of him. his granddad, of course, understood: he considered it a universal desire to carve a life out for yourself from the mountain of shoulds you’d been handed. 

his mother knew. but it was the one true secret she kept from her husband, who she did genuinely love after all this time. the story was always that homer loved his wife’s family ( never mind that that was a lie, he hated her father, could sense, somehow, that he’d been the cause of his son’s corruption ) but thought america had turned nathaniel too rough. given him the dreams of being a cursebreaker that nate created when his father found the books on runes and advanced charms. it didn’t matter. let his father hate his aspirations, so long as they’re aspirations assumed and not the ones held close in nate’s heart. let him despise nate so long as he never KNOWS him. and who does know him? nate has two talents, the way he sees it; his metal-charming and his intangibility. he’s always been good at being whatever the world asks of him, because it’s easy, this unbecoming. 

sometimes, though, the world wants him to be a viper. that’s harder, he’d admit; the cruelties of his father’s society, of his birthright name, they don’t come easy to nate. he can’t adopt hypocrisy with ease. but he can pretend that his youth was the only thing to blame. his granddad drilled the idea of superiority of mind and of skill into his head, so despite not caring about blood supremacy he’s still an arrogant little shit who’s resigned himself to being an asshole, because no one’s ever TOLD him he could be anything else 

if asked, nate would admit that he’s always thought his bad habits would make him self destruct, one day. his father has told him a thousand times to stop, but could it only be out of worry of the family image? the boozing and the partying, the drugs and sex and flying while intoxicated, the sneaking around after hours and climbing over rooftops  ---  it’s fun, but fleeting, and nate knows that. he wishes he could live in the moment but he’s too cerebral. it pisses off his father and sometimes makes him forget who he is, but it’s not enough. nathaniel’s a melancholy person, and suspects that nothing’s ever going to be enough for him.

nate cares little for anything, knowing that little cares about him  ---  but his fierce need to be a person separate from being a burke is enough to drive him. he’ll booze and smoke and party, wreck reputations and end up being weekend gossip. that’s NOW. his future may be rooted in the past but nate hopes he’s strong enough to rip it out into new soil. 

as sorry as nate has always been with the cards he’s been dealt and the restrictions they place on him, he’s grateful he’s the nate of this world and not one of the other ones, where his father would either have too much time to focus on him or too much reason to.