GREYBACK, phaedra iris

[phaedra iris greyback]

PHAEDRAIRISGREYBACK



RAVENCLAW - 19 - CARETAKER – JUNO TEMPLE

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Do you know the story of Phaedra?

Phaedra was a goddess; one of the greek ones, you know? Funny, considering that little old bright eyes here couldn’t be considered greek by any stretch of the imagination. But maybe that’s the price you pay for being a dreamer. Phaedra was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. You remember Minos, right? King of Crete that sacrificed fourteen young people (seven boys, seven girls) to the Minotaur in his labyrinth every nine months? Yeah, that guy. When he died, he ended up judging the dead; lovely reward for all that evil, don’t you think? Pasiphae on the other hand was the daughter of Helios, the sun god. Unfortunately for her, she got a little bit used, kind of cursed and ended up making the Minotaur. Sucks to be her, don’t you think? On the mainland though, she was an oracular goddess, which is…a seer, if you will. Phaedra was married to a man called Theseus, founder of Athens and slayer of said minotaur, but lusted after another by the name of Hippolytus. You know what the really twisted part is though? Poor old Hippolytus was Theseus’s son by Antiope…or Hippolyte. Nobody is entirely sure any more. To cut long story short, Greek cannon likes to keep it in the family and it all gets really confusing if you don’t have the concentration span for it. God knows I never did much beyond the basics. I suppose I should get back to the point though, right? Hi, my name is Phaedra and I’m an alcoholic.

I forgot that doesn’t work in the wizarding world. Muggles have these groups that get together, it’s something they do a lot. You know, they’re surprisingly social creatures, these muggles. Any how, one of these groups get together and it’s called alcoholics anonymous and…explaining it isn’t going to make it funny, is it? I know, I know…leave muggle concepts in the muggle world. You think I’d know how by now, right? My mother hid us there for long enough. I think she was hoping that the wolf would cancel out the magic and somehow I wouldn’t get much more than a temper on me. Guess we can’t have everything the way we want it though, right? I think we needed to rewind everything though, and I swear the little lesson on Greek mythology will be tied in eventually. Talking about things can be kind of awkward though, I’m just…gonna tell it like it’s someone else’s story, is that okay? I mean, even if it’s not I’m still doing it that way. I never was too good at following rules.

I guess…I guess the story of bright eyes starts with a pretty young woman. They always are though, right? People always think of their mothers as beautiful, but this one was purely superficial. Under all that glamour, she was an ugly hag really. Growing up in a broken home isn’t easy; with an absent mother and a father who wasn’t too sure how to answer the big questions like what Hogwarts was, why she kept dreaming things that came true or why she never got hurt, no matter how hard she fell…Phaedra didn’t stand much of a chance in life. She wasn’t a muggleborn, but a half blood with a scared mother who ran out on the family out of fear of retribution from parents who had neither noticed nor cared that their daughter was pregnant. But as soon as she’d had the child, Phaedra’s mother up and left. No explanations or way of contacting her, just…gone.

The man left to raise her was not her natural father; he was no relation. He had dated the pregnant woman for a number of months before the birth; they had been happy, so far as he knew. The thought of giving her up had crossed his mind on a few occasions, but every time he found himself staring in to her eyes, questioning how anyone could ever give up so precious a gift. A life was a life was a life in his eyes, no matter the circumstance. Things were not perfect, they were not easy either; growing up in the wrong part of London didn’t exactly give you the best chance in life. High rise apartments were not as glamorous as you’d think. They were smelly, loud and you do not want to know what you walked past most mornings on the way to school. Despite how much was set against them; the poor housing, the offensive neighbours and working every hour god sent just to make rent…that man and the child he took on made it through. She was his world, even if she bared so little resemblance to her mother half the time. He could only guess at the sort of man who had left the mother in the first place.

For lack of any other name, she took his. She would be a Kennedy; Phaedra was the name her mother had picked out (which he found rather odd) and Iris was his grandmother’s name. Phaedra Iris Kennedy. That was how she was registered, but what else could he do?

Phaedra was an intelligent, talented girl…all her teachers said so. Her only problem was her consistently foul temper. No-one ever really figured out the connection between these peaks in her outbursts and just how full the moon was at the time. They had her labelled as a troubled case; too much space in her head and not enough attention to focus her. It was a terrible shame that the father raised her on his own. Such a terrible shame…what did men know of raising little girls? It wasn’t fair at all that he worked so hard. She would be first to arrive at a breakfast club (at least they knew she was eating) and the last to be picked up from the after school group. As she grew older, she began to leave earlier, once she was considered old enough to walk herself home. She was a latchkey kid from nine, younger if she hadn’t had the safety net of that school club to hold her. From nine though, she took over all the things a mother should have done if she had been around; she would cook, clean, do all the laundry, the dusting and polishing, shopping at weekends…Phaedra became self sufficient from a young age.

The one thing Phaedra never learnt though, despite reading everything she could understand, was how to get her temper in check. She would often lash out and do some actually quite notable physical damage when she wanted to. For someone so small, she certainly packed a punch and a half. She tried all the normal suggestions; she counted to ten, walked away, avoided hose she knew would start trouble…everything. Hell, she even tried hypnotherapy on herself. None of it worked.

When the letter from Hogwarts first arrived, they had assumed it some sort of practical joke; though really, it was all far too intelligent for the kids on the estate at a later moment of reflection. They came every day for two weeks until someone turned up. A teacher, apparently, at this so called school, one who had taught her mother and had had…dealings with her father. Poor little Phaedra, it was all too much for her little head to take and so badly timed. Maybe they should have tried asking what her temper was like before dropping the mother of all bombshells.

Hey Phaedra, I’m from a building full of crazy people and we all think you’re a witch with a werewolf for a father. Congratulations! You’ve just won the worst gene pool in existence prize! Now come along so we can play dress up in an imaginary alley.

Can you spell freak out? It wasn’t worded like that, but for a child of just eleven, it pretty much sounded that way. It took another three visits (and twice as many broken plates) to convince her to just try and go with them. Diagon Alley was…terrifying for the young girl. There were people everywhere, talk she didn’t understand…the only place she found solace in was the pet shop among the soft sounds of hooting owls, the scrabble of rats and cats purring contentedly in their cages. It took an hour to get her out and just half an hour to have her back in there; if she could have slept on the floor there instead of leaving to go home, she probably would have. It would later turn out that, despite having lived her entire life in a concrete jungle and never having seen an actual live tree before, Phaedra was exceptional in subjects that involved handling anything living or green; potions, herbology, care of magical creatures…just not the people side of it. She never really got used to the people side of things, far too used to living on the defensive.

Maybe that was why she ended up in Ravenclaw at the end of the day. She may not have been good with people, but she was (as had been said so many times before) exceptionally bright and had the most fantastic wit on her with a real weakness for sarcastic remarks and well rounded arguments. Phaedra was many things, but wrong was not one of them. Argumentative, stubborn, headstrong…things that should have had her put in other houses, but at the end of the day, it was her sharp eyes and father’s wisdom that put her over the edge and in to that wonderful house. You can imagine just how thrilled everyone was when they connected the dots and the rumours started going. Who wanted a wolf in their house after all? It was almost no surprise that she passed through the entire of her education able to count the number of friends she made on one hand. By the end of her time there, she had even managed to drive them away. They didn’t understand it though; she may not have been the one chained in a dungeon, she may not have changed each month and she didn’t have to consume that potion the others did…but that still played on her mind. Knowing she was one of them underneath it all…do you know what it’s like to spend three nights a month, forcing yourself to stay wake just so everyone else can sleep? All of the backlash and none of the reasoning; she wasn’t one of them and she never would be if she could avoid it.

The thing is…life doesn’t like to let you have your own way for too long. The year she changed for good…she was sixteen, just. It was over the summer actually, the one time she had to abandon all things magical and simply be again. Can you imagine what it’s like to be walking back one night from seeing a movie (it’s another muggle thing, don’t worry your pretty little heads too much) with your favourite person in the whole world one minute…and the next to be aware of a ringing in your ears, blinding pain all over and somewhere not too far off screaming? Not just oh no, I fell over screaming, but full blown oh god, I think I’m dying make it stop screaming. They made her watch; to this day she has no idea who it was, but she can remember the smell of dog breath. No…not dog, dog would have been welcome. This was a millions times worse and teeth kept her firmly in pace, watching them quite literally…never mind. I think you can guess from the screaming and the oversized werewolf pinning her down. Without the wolfsbane they are meant to be wild and unreachable, with it docile little puppies…but these were somewhere in between. To this day she can’t figure out how…but those wolves had targeted her, she was so sure of it. Why else kill the muggle and leave the girl merely infected? It was all too convenient.

She spent her first two transformations at St. Mungos in a secure ward, mostly out of choice. She didn’t want to go back to Hogwarts at all…but needs must. By the start of November, she was falling behind and fast, and it wasn’t like they didn’t know how to handle her kind there. She had her newts to start preparing for after all; despite the trauma she had suffered and the new stresses her state would bring, she was still expected to perform like a ravenclaw and excel. Keeping your head under the radar when you spend your full moons tied up in the dungeons is a little on the difficult side. In the end, she passed. She didn’t do badly, but not as well as people had been expecting…though was it really her fault?

It was then she took on the name Greyback; it wasn’t really like she could keep up the charade. On that summer night, Phaedra Kennedy died along with the man who raised her. What came from the ashes…Phaedra Greyback was even more antisocial than her previous incarnation.

Phaedra disappeared from the wizarding world, though she was never distant enough to not have a vague idea of what was going on. She had been happy, living and working out in the middle of nowhere. Herbology had been her specialist subject and so she found herself in a position that had her researching plants people weren’t sure about. She would be gone for months at a time, up in the Scottish highlands or crossing vast moors across England, diving in to lakes and rivers in Wales…anywhere she needed to be. One of his pack approached her; Fenrir, that is. They made her an offer and she turned them down. She had no desire to join his cause. She had lived both as a fairly normal witch and as a werewolf and she knew which she preferred. She would not force this on anyone, not even if they begged her. She chose solitude for a reason; around people, she was too unpredictable, too dangerous. With just her and the plants, she knew her own mind. They didn’t like that very much. No was clearly a word the weren’t that used to hearing.

That is where Phaedra’s story officially ends. If you believe the party line, she vanished off to the continent shortly after. Somewhere in Romania if I remember rightly. Let’s go back a little though…remember that rather calculated attack that saw her infected and the man who raised her dead? It never added up and the more research she did the more and more inconsistencies she came across. It was little things really; people not being where they should be, income versus outgoings not adding up, connections between unrelated people and companies were cropping up. Call her paranoid, but when something stinks like that, there’s usually a reason. Reason enough to go back to Hogwarts and take over as caretaker; people can’t keep going forever after all. Make all the assumptions you want about her, but she’s not weak. She can more than handle the role she’s been given.

And as for the little story at the start of all this…see, if you think about what made up the elements of the goddess Phaedra’s story, you can begin to understand what I mean. She was the daughter of people who couldn’t stay loyal; one a monster who took pleasure in causing the deaths of countless children, the other so easily swayed in to desire for something so taboo. Phaedra on the other hand wanted one thing she could never really have, not without drastic consequences. What I crave in life is…balance. I want true freedom and peace, I want to see other people safe and happy and I want to be happy myself. I know it’s impossible and I know it’s painful, but it’s a desire that burns in me. It burns brighter than any fire and hurts more than any curse you could lay on me. It feels like something is on the horizon and I’ll be waiting for it when it does come.

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ALIAS: murder
AGE: 20
TIMEZONE: gmt
EXPERIENCE: 5 years
OTHER CHARRIES:

none

ROLEPLAY SAMPLE:

The first time Honey had been talked in to going to a club, she had been beyond uncomfortable and damn had it shown; constantly tugging her clothes, standing in the darkest corner she could find and refusing to get in to the crowds. As she had grown more comfortable though, the clothes had shrunk, her heels had grown and she really didn't mind having all eyes on her. It wasn't like it was hard though; she knew she was hot, she owned it and everyone else brought it. Besides, how many didn't love blonde, foreign girls? Sometimes her genetics weren't all bad. She couldn't pull this off otherwise.

Leaving the now empty glass on the bar, she left the quieter area heading for the odd arrangement of people. From what she could tell as she approached, they were surrounding someone, most of them read as entertained more than impressed. It didn't take much to get to the source of it; something about being that beautiful and confident carving a crowd up with little effort. It was fantastic being her most of the time.

And it turned out that the reason for this group of giggling fools was a rather unique dancer, if she was being polite. If she was being honest, he was a pretty awful dancer, though not hopeless. Shaking her head, she knew someone needed to say something to stop him embarrassing himself any further. Or before someone got hurt. There was a lull in the music that she used to grab at their wrist ad get their attention."Hey, whoever taught you to dance should be out of a job."

Right now she was Hannah Sterling, American tourist brat...she could get away with murder on grounds of ignorance. What was a little skin contact?