C. Dearborn (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cariadus) wrote,@ 2007-12-08 22:55:00 |
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Caradoc Dearborn.
>>> basics NAME: Caradoc Daniel Dearborn. NICKNAMES: Popular choices include Carrot, Cary, Doc, and Welshie. He tends to go by Caradoc, though. BIRTHDATE: 26 May 1960. 25 years old. ALUMNUS: Hogwarts, Ravenclaw House, 1971-1978. BLOODLINE: Half-blood (child of two half-bloods). WAND: 11-1/2 inches, made of Hawthorn wood with an Augurey feather core. Obviously, it wasn't made by Ollivander; Caradoc's wand was made in the late '60s by a friend of the Dearborn family. HOME: A flat in Carshalton. Additionally, his family's old home in Adamsdown, Cardiff, is half in his name, half in his sister's. OCCUPATION: Unspeakable, Department of Mysteries. ALLIANCE: A member of the Order of the Phoenix since leaving Hogwarts in 1978. PB: Bruno Langley ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY: Caradoc is smart and enthusiastic, and though he doesn't have much of a backbone, he does have a lot of heart. >>> family history / childhood history: 1960-1971 Owain Dearborn and Eleanor Cyncad were friends throughout their Hogwarts years, both being from fairly established (though certainly not of the pureblood elite) Welsh wizarding families. It took a series of mishaps--culminating in the two of them being thrown out of St. Mungo's healer training program--that the two bonded even more and took their relationship to the next level; soon afterward they married. Their first years of marriage were dominated by problems trying to conceive, but in 1960, Eleanor gave birth to a son, Caradoc; a daughter, Gwyneth, was born two years later. When Caradoc was five, Owain started his own private security ward company, based in Aberaeron, using his unique synthesis of magic security techniques. After a few years of financial struggles, the company started to find its feet, and the Dearborns were able to live a comfortably middle-class existence. While Owain and Eleanor's marriage was strained at best, the two weren't bad parents at all. Barring a handful of incidents, the Dearborn children had a fairly normal, trauma-free childhood, and the family, though not exceptionally Disney-ish, was very functional. From an early age, both children were encouraged to be curious, helpful, responsible, and self-sufficient, and both received plenty of love and attention. They lived in a calm Muggle neighbourhood in Adamsdown, Cardiff, but with their father Floo-ing out to Aberaeron daily, the family also had strong connections to the Ceredigion Coast. In fact, after Owain and Eleanor pulled Caradoc out of the local Catholic school after only half a term (following a fairly benign incident involving five-year-old Carrot's questioning of the divinity of Jesus Christ by demonstrating how he too could turn water into wine and therefore frightening his classmates half to death--or half to atheism, perhaps), father and son took the daily commute to Aberaeron together so that Caradoc could attend a Welsh-medium school there. The Dearborns reckoned that attending a school taught in a language he didn't speak would prevent Caradoc from chattering away about his wizarding roots, but this had the unintended side effect of fostering a life-long love of languages and linguistics in young Caradoc. Two years later, Gwyneth began attending the same school, and by the time they reached the age for Hogwarts, both children were comfortably bilingual and often spoke Welsh to one another in order to not be understood by their parents (neither of whom had achieved fluency in Welsh). Neither Owain nor Eleanor approved of the Ministry of Magic, and barring their extended families and some family friends, the Dearborn children weren't really exposed to the large part of wizarding society. They knew there were other wizarding families out there, and they knew a few other wizarding children beyond their cousins, but they had no idea of the existence of an entire wizarding society at large. There were no childhood trips to Diagon Alley, no Quidditch match excursions, and certainly and especially no stays at St. Mungo's--not only were Owain and Eleanor in fact banned from setting foot on the hospital's premises, but they both professed skepticism and even disgust at medical magic. The practice of magic in the Dearborn family, however, was a different story. As Owain and Eleanor arrogantly had no qualms about breaking Ministry laws, they had their children using wands, performing spells, and helping prepare potions from a very early age. Both parents, however, were extremely skilled and fairly good teachers, not to mention exceptionally careful, and the practice of underage magic didn't seem to bring harm to either Caradoc or Gwyn. In short, Caradoc's childhood set him up to be both overprepared and underprepared for entering Hogwarts and, in essence, entering wizarding society. >>> hogwarts-era history: 1971-1978 The Sorting Hat hesitated, but only barely: after passing mentions of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, Caradoc was sent to Ravenclaw. His first year was a bit rocky; he was adjusting to a myriad of different things, from switching abruptly from a formal Muggle education to a formal wizarding education, to exposure to real wizarding culture for the first time, to living away from home and his family and having to negotiate life at school, to even just lessons in English. However, being energetic, easy-going, and generally good-natured, he did make more than a few friends, and within a few months, he did feel comfortable at school. Education-wise, Caradoc's performance was across the spectrum. He was intelligent, and he knew at least a little bit about almost anything and everything, but he inherited his parents' stubborn arrogance and independent approach to interacting with the wizarding world: when a subject or topic or class didn't interest him, he simply didn't bother with it. Marks were less important to him than actual learning and being able to craft his own education, and his parents backed him up on this matter, much to his teachers' dismay. He worked hard in the classes he enjoyed and found useful--DADA, Charms, Transfiguration, and Arithmancy in particular--and ended up with above-average marks in those subjects. In his early years at Hogwarts, Caradoc hadn't considered the possibility of his marks being important for post-Hogwarts life, as his parents certainly didn't intend for him to live a (stereo)typically wizarding life, and it was only at the urging of his Head of House--and his pushover-y nature to not upset someone he respected--that Caradoc continued on in a fairly rigorous schedule of courses that set him on the career path that was, in fact, Caradoc's calling. It was at school that Caradoc was first exposed to the concept of blood purity and the divide between the Muggle and the wizarding world. "Muggle" wasn't a term used in the Dearborn household, nor did Caradoc ever entertain the idea that there was some fundamental difference between his family and his non-magically inclined neighbours--all he had understood was that he was supposed to keep the magic thing a secret. The growing tensions at Hogwarts--and in the surrounding wizarding world--revealed the harsher truth to young Carrot, however. He was instantly resentful of anyone who considered him less worthy because of his lineage (or lack thereof), and when it came to arguments over the merits and dangers of Muggles, Caradoc tended to find himself at the forefront of defending non-wizards and non-wizarding life. Some of his arguments were more successful than others; "The Doctor so would have kicked Grindelwald's arse if Dumbledore hadn't gotten there before him!" was probably met with blank stares from everyone but Caradoc's partner-in-nerdiness, Charlotte Fenwick, but above all, Carrot's heart was in the right place when it came to conflicts over blood and Muggles. It had been assumed (both by his parents and, for a long time, by himself) that Caradoc would work with his father's company upon leaving Hogwarts. He was as surprised as anyone when he started thinking seriously about the Unspeakable path, but the Department of Mysteries was like the mothership calling Caradoc Dearborn home. As he went through the process of taking his NEWTs, interviewing, testing, going through background checks, all of that, Caradoc was falling in love with the idea of being an Unspeakable. The choice between working for his father or joining the Department of Mysteries wasn't, in essence, that difficult to make, but accepting the consequences of that decision--namely, his parents', particularly his father's, lukewarm support--was difficult. >>> post-hogwarts history: 1978-1982 Being an Unspeakable was EVERYTHING HE DREAMT OF AND MORE (i.e., cake!). Actually, while it's an ideal job for Caradoc, he did have to put in his dues and prove himself, initially being bounced back and forth between projects and between rooms, not getting to do anything very interesting, but he eventually settled into a permanent position in the Time Room. Time is a fascinating concept at the philosophical, mathematical, scientific, and magical levels, and so while Caradoc geeks out over just about anything and everything, he is particularly obsessed by the concept of time. He's much more of a theorist and researcher than one who's out in the field, so to speak, but his work is dangerous and interesting enough for him, thank you very much. While he works on various projects at various times, his personal special project of doom (a.k.a. his pride and joy) involves temporal suspension in ward manipulation. Additionally, upon leaving Hogwarts, Caradoc accepted Dumbledore's offer to join the Order of the Phoenix. Talented, idealistic, and unafraid to speak about the idiocy of blood superiority, he was probably a natural choice for the Order. Deciding to join--to volunteer to put himself on the frontlines, so to speak--took more courage than Caradoc was used to expending, and he actually agonised over it quite a bit. His parents unofficially separated, amicably, in late 1978. This didn't directly change family dynamics too much, as both Eleanor and Owain managed to keep their separation (and Eleanor's subsequent move to Toronto in January of 1979) a secret from their children for approximately six months. Both Caradoc and Gwyn felt betrayed when they discovered their parents' secret, and after some initial tensions, Caradoc did his typically Caradoc-ish thing and accepted it all with grace. It was harder for Gwyneth to deal with, giving that she was yet to enter her final year at Hogwarts at the time, and the parental separation and lies left a more significant mark on her psyche than it did on Caradoc's. Caradoc, however, remained close to and supportive of both his parents, and he spent many weekends with his father, helping with his security work. It was around this time that Caradoc fell into his first--and well, only--romantic relationship. Fiona Rowley was an Irish linguist, spending a research year at the London Ministry of Magic, and Caradoc fell head over heels in puppy love, having found someone who was a good match for him emotionally, intellectually, sexually, etc. However, they kept their relationship fairly quiet and private. Caradoc's reasons for this were fairly innocent; he hates being teased, he hates when other people turn their attention to these sorts of things, and he's fiercely protective of his privacy. It felt natural for him not to tell others that he was in a relationship and in fact in love, and not having been in a relationship before, he didn't grasp how peculiar and suspicious it was to keep an otherwise normal-seeming relationship so private. Things got pretty serious, culminating in a long-distance relationship after she moved out of London and a subsequent engagement (and, yes, she was the one to propose--Caradoc, for his part, swore and drove the car off the road when she popped the question). In December of 1980, Gwyneth--one of the few people who was aware that Caradoc was even in a relationship--accidentally uncovered Fiona's secret. Fiona was already engaged to another man, and she had been engaged to this man long before she had even met Caradoc. Fiona, in her defense, hadn't expected her relationship with Caradoc to be anything more than a fling while she was away from home, and she hadn't expected to fall in love with him and have him be the one with whom she wanted to be in a relationship. Gwyn, naturally, railed on Fiona for turning the poor, unsuspecting Caradoc into something of a dirty mistress (heh), and forced her to tell Carrot the truth. In a particularly wise decision, Carrot broke it off completely, refusing to allow their relationship--and their friendship, even--to go on any further. And as emotionally wracking as this was, Caradoc was still able to keep it a secret, because barely 48 hours later, he got that stereotypical midnight phone call. The week before Christmas, 1980, Owain Dearborn was found dead in his company office in Aberaeron. The Muggle authorities investigating his death were mystified, as there were was no evidence of a struggle, and the autopsy report showed no evidence of natural or unnatural causes of death--meaning that Owain had found himself at the wrong end of an Avada Kedavra. The MLE officials who arrived on the scene had nothing to go off either: no Dark Mark in the sky, no Death Eater-y thumbing of the nose--Owain's death had nothing to do with the war. He was killed over some work-related grudge, most likely, but there was no evidence, no suspects, no possibility for justice. Caradoc, as to be expected, took his father's death hard, and his grief was compounded (though privately), by the Fiona debacle. For the next few months, he was fairly scattered emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually, and was quite uncharacteristically directionless for one of the few times of his life. He swung back and forth between withdrawing and relying too much on his friends and loved ones, his quality of work varied wildly, he had a bad rebound relationship, and above all, he threw himself into his work with the Order as a form of escape, a desperate attempt at feeling productive, useful, in control. It was in summer of 1981 that he went missing for two weeks while on an Order mission in Gaziantep, and he very nearly achieved canon. >>> sien finn history: 1982-1983 Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale About an ultimately useless trip. Caradoc went to the Vatican but the plot was just a gyp. 'Twas taken by some Death Eater goons and beaten up and kicked. Surely he would now be dead were it not for Charlotte Fenwick, for Charlotte Fenwick... I don't have the attention span to continue filking, so: shortly after narrowly escaping Latin Nerd Central (Vatican City) with his life, Caradoc cheerfully volunteered to go back in time with the doomed Time Team, and while he'll now say that it worked out for the best, more or less, he's not all that interested in rehashing what happened and the world he got a glimpse into. The rest of summer 1982 was spent doing some traveling of the non-temporal variety, and he came back to Britain only at the tail-end of the Mystery Illness of Doom. Autumn's overarching theme was a growing disillusionment about the Order and the increasingly sucky political situation, and it culminated with Caradoc temporarily transferring out to Canada. This was a mistake, as he only grew more depressed, and under Moody's Order-ly orders, he returned to Britain only to be sent off to Salisbury in the relocation camp debacle. Surprisingly, this was a happy turning point for Caradoc, because it was at Salisbury that he crossed paths with someone from the past: Fiona. The two reconnected, and naturally, this sent him spiralling into some existential overanalytical abyss, but after his involvement with the Canon Island prison breakout, Caradoc came to the conclusion that, as imperfect as his and Fiona's thing is and would be, it was better than nothing, and it made him happy, so...so. Unsurprisingly, he's kept most of this to himself. This time around, while he's not hiding or denying the fact he's kindasorta back with Fiona, he's still very private about this relationship--particularly because he's not considering it a relationship, although that game of semantics is really just his half-assed attempt at trying to protect himself from the inevitable crash and burn. And, yes, he realises that the chances of him once again emotionally burned are very, very high, but he's decided the risk is worth it. And so, at the moment, Caradoc has his quiet, fragile happiness, and life is proceeding as normally as it usually proceeds. >>> family FATHER: Owain Dearborn. Ravenclaw alum [1951]. Owned private security company. Died in 1980. RELATIONSHIP WITH: Caradoc worshipped his father. Personality-wise, the two were quite similar and so were very often on the same page and got along well. Despite the sometimes morally questionable and often illegal nature of Owain's work, Caradoc has and had nothing but respect, and if anyone does question either Owain or his work, prepare to deal with The Rarely Seen Wrath of Carrot. MOTHER: Eleanor (Cyncad) Dearborn. Hufflepuff alum [1951]. Magical acoustics physicist. Currently works with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. RELATIONSHIP WITH: Caradoc's relationship with his mother has always been decent. Her motheringness has been and can be overbearing at times, but the geogrpahical distance has done its part to ease that and the tension it often created. SISTER: Gwyneth Dearborn. Gryffindor alum [1980]. Floo Network traffic analyst with the Department of Magical Transportation. Amateur survivalism enthusiast. RELATIONSHIP WITH: Caradoc and Gwyn have always had a good relationship, both of them being creative, enthusiastic, and fairly idealistic. While they've done their share of sibling-ly bickering and still engage in that from time to time, they have each other's back, and most importantly, they trust each other implicitly. As siblings, they've been witnesses to the weirdness and the particular, definitive traumas of each other's early life, and that means an awful lot. Which, of course, doesn't mean they don't resent the other's interference at times--Caradoc abandoning Gwyn and refusing to let her come back to England during the Magical Mystery Plague and therefore preventing her from seeing her best friend/fiancé Ezra before his death, and Gwyn very loudly passing judgment on Carrot's admittedly poor choice in relationship matters. OTHERS: Practically speaking, Caradoc's most likely somehow related to people from most other Welsh wizarding families, but he does not want to know about it. Really, he doesn't. From the Dearborn side of the family, he's related to a lot of Craddocks, Joneses, Lloyds, and Powells; from the Cyncad side of the family, there's yet more Joneses, Morgans, Maddocks, and Davieses. Caradoc doesn't have too much to do with his extended family, but his paternal grandmother, Jestina Craddock Dearborn, the last actual pureblood in his family's lineage, is alive and well in Betws Ifan, but she lives alone purposely and likes it that way, thank you very much. His mother's family has more or less emigrated to Canada over the past few decades, and Eleanor followed in 1979. She remarried in spring of 1983--her husband, Richard, is also an ex-pat widower with two adult children, and he works with the local wizarding government, specializing in Muggle relations. While Caradoc approves of him and is happy for his mother, he tends to tread carefully with this aspect of his family life--to be fair and honest, Eleanor and Richard did start seeing each other before Eleanor was actually a widow, a fact Caradoc doesn't really wish to discuss. >>> personality Caradoc is intelligent, and he knows it. Trust me, while he usually comes across as shy, sweet-natured, skittish, and perpetually nervous, he has a not insignificant arrogance streak, and he takes pride in the fact he knows more than you do. His tendency toward haplessness isn't exactly a front--he's not bumbling in order to hide the fact he has nerves of steel--because, well, there's very little steely about Caradoc Dearborn, particularly his nerves--but it's just not the whole picture. His arrogance rears its head if he's feeling threatened or that he's being undermined or not respected, but he's acutely conscious of power games and politics--he plays up the haplessness when he knows it'll take any suspicion or attention off of him. He doesn't rush into things. He digs in his heels, stalls, and overanalyzes and mulls things over until he feels safe enough to proceed. He prefers having his options open and his possibilities varied, taking his time to come to the truth or to his final opinion. This can come across as an irresponsible and undependable of him, and his friends probably find frustrating his wandering mind and his inability to come to a decision or conclusion. He's friendly, open-minded, and enthusiastic, but at his core, he's not entirely people-oriented. He loves the people he does love, whole-heartedly and sincerely, and most of the time, he'll do anything to make them happy or safe, and he's nice to everyone who he thinks deserves it, but he doesn't have a lot of patience for people who can't keep up with his thoughts, and his tendency to live within his own head causes a severe disconnect between himself and the rest of the world. His reliance on his ability to think and reason is at the expense of his ability to feel, and he often forgets that he and other people have emotions that matter just as much as thoughts. He also has a tendency to over-invest himself in his work; he can be a workaholic, but what's more, he tends to obsess over his work, to the detriment of the other aspects of his life. He has a knack for overattributing moral significance in just about any situation. He's driven by his curiosity and his firm belief in the beauty and joy of the truth, and he's driven by his desire to be accepted, to be liked and respected by people. >>> random--and possibly fun--facts
>>> the abridged caradoc dearborn mix The Weakerthans - Left and Leaving Peter Mayer - World of Dreams Ella Fitzgerald - Accentuate the Positive Kris Delmhorst - Moscow Song Amos Lee - Love in the Lies Elvis Costello - (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding Late Tuesday - Looking Through Rosy Glasses Dar Williams - This Was Pompeii Michael W. Smith - The Giving Monty Python - The Galaxy Song Josh Ritter - Kathleen Tom Waits - I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You The Byrds - Turn Turn Turn Missy Higgins - Drowning Billy Bragg - Tank Park Salute Barenaked Ladies - What a Good Boy Dar Williams - After All Anna Ternheim - Shoreline Ben Folds Five - Alice Childress The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee - My Friend, the Dictionary Grey Eye Glances - Snow The Pipettes - ABC The Weakerthans - Reconstruction Site Girlyman - The Shape I Found You In |
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