Junior Year

[butterbear]

GENERAL

NAME: Thaddeus Butterfield
NICKNAMES: Most people call him Teddy, even his family.
AGE/DOB: 16/June 30th
BLOOD STATUS: Pureblood
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Male, he/him
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual
HOMETOWN: Boston, Massachusetts

CONCEPT: Hopeful curse breaker wrestles with heavy family legacy and duty.

PHYSICAL

APPEARANCE: Teddy lives in v-neck shirts, sloppy jackets, flannels, and loose jeans. His manner of dress can best be described as ‘hopefully it’s clean’ and ‘I listen to music on vinyl’. He prizes comfort over style every day of the week. When he does wear his uniform, his tie is almost always loose, his shirt untucked, and a lace or two undone. The only time this changes is when PTC come around or he visits back home, where his appearance has to be back in line with his family’s expectations. He also wears his hair long and loose, and can be convinced to put it in a ponytail if he needs to do something hands on. He figures someone has to take over Kim’s mantle of Best Hair when the senior graduates. Because he grew tall pretty quickly, he hasn’t yet mastered the best way to dress his frame. He still has serious baby face and it drives him nuts to be tall and yet have baby cheeks. Like what is that about?

HEIGHT: 6’ 1”

PB: Alex Saxon

PERSONALITY

LIKES: Boating, swimming, having an entirely different library at his disposal, all kinds of music, coffee with cream and sugar (i.e. a ‘regular’), Shakespeare, wood fires, joking with friends, traveling, sightseeing, sunrises, rain, arachnids and snakes, exotic foods, lipstick on girls, art, Converse, snow, pretentious books, archery, flannels, the Red Sox, and jewelry.

DISLIKES: Excessive wood paneling, people who ask him to say “Parked the car in Harvard Yard”, complaints about snow, beer snobs, rudeness, Cubism, bad poetry, country music, teachers who make their subject matter boring, the Yankees, the 1986 World Series, turn signals, fog, fake positive attitudes, cigarettes, picnics (boooring), people who call his hometown ‘Beantown’.


PERSONALITY:

Teddy wants to be a quintessential tortured poet. It’s hard to be as emo as he would like, considering he looks like a football player, his hair has far too many glorious curls, and his nickname is Teddy. There’s also the fact that he can be a bit of a teddy bear; he will listen to anyone’s problems, he gives hugs freely, and he could be voted ‘Most Likely to Own a Yoga Mat’ out of anyone in his class. If he has a temper, no one has ever found it. On the surface, it appears that he should be a Ribbonfin for his even keel and calm approach to issues.

However, that all overlooks Teddy’s inborn tenacity and intensity. When he finds an issue, he doesn’t chat about it or mull the outcomes, he handles it. Teddy is unflappable, and doesn’t flinch at conflict; in any confrontation, the first thing he does is plant his feet. He isn’t a brawler and isn’t interested in fighting, but he will end a fight with certainty and a cool demeanor. In fact, anyone spoiling for a drawn out match will deflate when they see Teddy coming, as he has no patience for posturing and nonsense. He’ll cut someone off if he thinks they are carrying on without any substance to their words. Any misconception that he belongs in Ribbonfin is dispersed the first time he ends an argument with a cold rhetorical observation rather than understanding. He’s fine with debating worthy ideas. He has little to no patience for bullshit.

That is not to say Teddy doesn’t know how to have fun. He loves music (even though he doesn’t play any instruments), he’s has a lot of wanderlust, and he’s got a deep grab bag of witticisms and jokes that he uses judiciously. His family is extremely well-off and he doesn’t think twice about treating his friends whenever the mood strikes him. In his opinion, money is just something you can make more of, so it should be spent freely on those he loves. He’s no casanova by any stretch and has only had a few semi-serious relationships, but he isn’t remotely shy around any girls and participates freely in any kissing games. He doesn’t flirt but he does give his full attention when talking to a girl, which can be intense. He was a little too well-trained by his older sisters in this regard, and will happily indulge any of the women in his life.

Inwardly, Teddy wishes he were more inclined towards the arts, but he has little to no talent at anything artistic. He is middling at poetry and writing, can’t paint to save his life, and while he has decent enough rhythm to dance, he has never been able to do much with music. It frustrates him because he really does love anything artistic. With his mother and sisters, he regularly attended the theatre, concerts, poetry slams, Shakespeare in the Park, and anything else that caught their fancy. Teddy has resigned himself to being a supporter of the arts and nothing more. Oftentimes, he wonders at his inadequacy with this, and still makes attempts to find an artistic outlet, but to this day has had no success. He had picked up very odd skills in this pursuit, like the ability to throw knives pretty accurately. He’s not vain enough to show that off, but it may come in handy.

Relatively secure in his position in life as the only Butterfield heir, Teddy nonetheless craves a challenging job far away from the responsibilities of his family name. He loves his parents, but he’s wanted to become a Curse-Breaker since he first learned of the profession. He’s worried that guilt and a sense of honor may hobble him, instead being forced into the more traditional path of settling down and marrying another pureblood to keep the family name going. He wrestles with this need to do something with his life against the passive position his parents would prefer. At the same time, he cannot help but understand their reasoning. Considering what they’ve all gone through, if he can make them happy by doing what they want….shouldn’t he?

For now, he puts that out of his mind and lives in a bit of a fantasy life at school, where he doesn’t have that difficult choice awaiting him.

SKILLS

LANGUAGES SPOKEN: English and Russian, and because of a short lived crush, American Sign Language.

PATRONUS: Teddy cannot cast a Patronus, but if/when he can, it will be a sable, which makes him think of his mother.

SKILLS: Teddy has a lovely host of what he deems useful but entertaining skills, which include:

Knife throwing: When traditional paths to arts didn't reveal any talent, Teddy branched out, never judgmental. He has several friends who are on the Ren Faire and circus circuit, and he took them up on the offer to learn this and a few other showy skills. Of all of them, he's most adept at knives, and while he's not competition worthy, he can hit a target fast and from a good distance. This has come in handy exactly zero times so far, unless one counts impressing a girlfriend or two.

Juggling: Along with knife throwing, Teddy found this came rather easily, but he suspects it's because he's good with complicated work with his hands. He can juggle very well and often does so with small items he carries whenever he is bored or he wants to distract himself from an unproductive path of thought. When he's been working hard enough on a project that he feels he is going in circles, this helps him step back and relax.

Lockpicking: This last one came about because he thought it might be something a curse-breaker needs and he taught himself out of a Muggle book he checked out from the library. He has found this extremely useful from time to time.

Curse-breaking: Although he has been studying this for years, Teddy considers himself still an amateur at this (others might disagree). As with his potions work, he does much better at identifying and unweaving spells rather than making them; he finds it compelling to peel back each layer of a charm until he has it down to it's beginnings. He can remove mild curses and bad luck charms mostly. He has tried more complicated ones, but he rarely has the chance to really practice, considering cursed items aren't exactly common enough for a high school student to lay his hands on often. His sisters do like to mail items out for him to play with. Most of Teddy's friends have learned to not be nearby when he opens his mail.

Gardening: Although he doesn’t really study it, Teddy has a green thumb and does like growing things.

HISTORY

FAMILY MEMBERS:

William Thaddeus Butterfield the Third (pureblood): The senior patriarch of the Butterfield clan, William did his best with what he had, a common refrain from his generation on down. He is a kind but tough as nails gentleman, working almost single-handedly from his youth to restore the family fortune after his predecessors nearly bankrupted them. His life is a series of tragedies and setbacks despite all this: he found success with his uncanny real estate investments and acted very much a philanthropist to give back, but he lost two wives he loved to a blood malediction and accident respectively, and is the only survivor of sickness among his siblings, after they all lost their parents at a young age. He dotes on his daughters but by the time Teddy came along, William’s attention was divided a bit too far. He is still as much as guiding figure in Teddy’s life, but can’t devote the time he really wants to his son’s raising. He leaves most of child raising to Liliya’s care. William also suffers from some dementia in his older age that has not responded well to magical cures. He worries incessantly that the blood curse that brought about Annabelle’s death may still appear in one of his daughters.

Liliya Dolohov (pureblood): A very pretty younger woman, barely into her forties, Liliya is William’s third wife. Her family is Russian-English; when Liliya was in her teens, her family emigrated to the States to distance themselves from Death Eater relatives in England. An extremely shy and intelligent woman, Liliya is very motherly and treats all of William’s daughters as her own, even though the oldest are close to her in age. She is a healer and met William when she was assisting treating Clementine with dragon pox. She currently works at a wizarding hospital in Boston.

Anna, Berete, Hyacinth, Acacia, and Clementine Butterfield (purebloods): Teddy’s five older sisters! He is the only boy (and the only child of Liliya). Anna, Berete, and Hyacinth are from William’s first wife, Annabelle Wright (deceased) and Acacia and Clementine, who are twins, are the daughters of William’s second wife, Elizabeth Clarke (also deceased). They are basically a Girl Gang. Three of them (Anna, Hyacinth, and Clementine) are married but it hasn’t slowed them down one iota in messing with Teddy’s life. Any holiday, they descend on the family home and take over, bringing two husbands (Anna and Clem), one wife (Hyacinth), random children, pets, and whatever gossip they can muster.

HISTORY:

When William Butterfield was born, the oldest of what was to become three brothers and two sisters, there was little left of the once-massive Butterfield estates in Massachusetts other than the name. Although they had a pure wizarding line traced back to the first settlers in the country, William’s grandfather and then father had gambled, lost, or mismanaged away anything that was left. The manor house was decrepit, the furniture bare, and any coffers empty. William grew up attempting to provide for his younger brothers and sisters, with his frail mother’s help, anything from scouring for wood for the fireplaces in the winter to doing any side jobs he could to cover creditors. It was only luck that their home wasn’t taken away by the time William came of age, and he immediately and neatly cut out his father from any business they had left to take it over himself. Both parents died before he hit his mid-twenties, and he assumed sole custody of his siblings.

William married young to Annabelle Wright, a pureblood debutante from a southern charm school with a hefty inheritance, which she and William invested into lands around the state. After their third daughter was born, Annabelle sickened and died too quickly from a blood curse. William was devastated but persevered; a few years later he remarried to Elizabeth Clarke, a witch from a prominent New York family. Sadly, again they were struck with tragedy, as Elizabeth perished in a fire at a building they were renovating, leaving him now with five daughters and a struggling business in the wake of the destruction. By the time he met Liliya, he had all but given up on love although he had finally brought prosperity back to the Butterfield name through sheer determination after the last fire.

Teddy only knows most of this through stories. For as long as he has been alive, his parents have been loving, albeit serious and quiet, maintainers of the ancient-but-restored Butterfield estate just outside Boston. His sisters regaled him enough with stories about their mothers that he feels in some ways that Annabelle and Elizabeth are kindly ghosts haunting the place, a sensation neither William or Liliya bothers to dispel. Growing up, he was indulged but taught strict manners, how to comport himself, and exposed to as much culture as any child could stand. Thankfully, Teddy never balked at any of it. As his mother is Russian, he speaks it fluently, and his sisters less so. He’s attempted to learn other languages, but other than a passing familiarity with Latin, nothing else has stuck.

A sad side effect of the tragedies in his family’s past is that his parents are reluctant to allow him to go anywhere without supervision. This contrasts with Teddy’s innate need to wander. He explored every inch of the Butterfield estate by the time he was five, giving his parents the equivalent of a heart attack each time he disappeared. He loves to investigate and he can be a magpie, collecting unusual items and trinkets that he finds. It was this propensity to end up with talismans and medallions that led him to look into curse-breaking, when he was turned away from an astrolabe at a wizarding shop because of a persistent curse on the scope. His tutors attempted to steer him away from the study, but he’s been caught ever since.

Home-schooled by tutors until he was ten, Teddy was sent to Ilvermorny, practically in his backyard, once his parents felt secure enough to let him too far away from home. He took to the relative freedom like a fish to water, and when he got wind of the remote oasis of Gooseberry, he enlisted all five of his sisters in the campaign to secure his parent’s permission to attend when he was old enough. His oldest sister, the delightfully underhanded Anna, sent so many owls extolling her baby brother’s virtues to any professor that she knew that Teddy is pretty sure he was let into the school as a truce. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that he already has a deft hand with dismantling charms and other spells. His teachers from Ilvermorny sent glowing (if also cautiously warning) recommendations about his talents in this field. Mostly the caveats were to not allow him to touch anything that they wanted to remain properly charmed.

Happily settled right into Ebonhide, Teddy had an uneventful freshman year as a gangly young kid, then shot up seemingly overnight between his first and second year at the school. Because of that, he got a little more into some sports, in a vague sort of way, and passingly tried Quidditch during his sophomore year (and subsequently left the team, not that deft of a flier). He’s much happier on the ground and delving into whatever mysterious trinkets his sisters like to send for practice (he’s ended up with a lot of randomly cursed earrings, which perplexes him). He sticks to his fellow Ebonhide boys, and has struck up the weirdest friendship with Todd, which causes a lot of Toddy and Teddy jokes.

SCHOOL

YEAR: Junior (Grade 11)

HOUSE: Ebonhide

SORTING: Teddy’s waters run a little deep even for Ribbonfins. He listened with a silent patience that literally wore out Coppertale and Azurcrest; and although that left the Trout and the Bear, it was clear he gravitated towards Ebonhide’s calm dedication, the reflection he could see in himself. He didn’t even notice when Ribbonfin swam away, leaving him with his house mascot after just a minute or so.

WAND: Teddy’s wand is actually Annabelle’s wand. It’s very small for him, a rosewood wand, just a bit over eight and three quarters inches long. The core consists of veela hair. Although it was an heirloom passed to Berete, she found one day that it took to young Teddy immediately, and she gifted it to him when he left for Ilvermorny.

FAMILIAR: Teddy has a small Chilean rose hair tarantula named Felicia whom he pretty much treats like a baby sister. He is a sucker for Felicia.

CLASSES:

Core:
Charms
Hermeticism
History of Magic
Potions
Transfiguration

Electives:
DADA

ADVANCED STUDY: Occlumency: Teddy has a set career in mind as a Curse Breaker, and anything he can take to help advance that goal is something he dedicates himself towards utterly. Ms. Lilywhite is one of the few teachers he first told about this goal, afraid it would get back to his over-protective parents. Teddy takes direction very well and never shirks work in this class.

SENIOR PROJECT: Teddy says he’ll jump off that bridge when he gets to it. Honestly, though, it will be something curse-related.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: Teddy gets good grades because he works hard; effort is easily eighty to ninety percent of how he accomplishes what he does. If he doesn’t know something, he bends his mind to figuring it out, learning it, or finding someone to teach him. He doesn’t understand the concept of giving up. He excels mostly in Charms and Transfiguration. He seems to have some difficulty in making potions, but he’s very clever at identifying or counteracting them. It’s a conundrum that does frustrate him, the disparity in that class.

EXTRACURRICULARS:

Boating: No self-respecting Boston boy wouldn’t know how to sail. Teddy excels at this.

Archery: Another physical outlet for him, and he has briefly considered trying this out on a more professional level, but he’s got a better idea for his future. Still, he uses a pretty heavy duty bow.

Event Committee: If he can’t be a part of the arts, Teddy figures he can support them. He’s the heavy-lifter, put-this-over-there, big gopher of the crew.

Gardening: The one fulfilling thing that Teddy feels passionate about outside of classes. He took Herbology as a freshman and sophomore, but feels he needed to concentrate on other areas in school. This is more of a hobby.

OOC

NAME: Mel
EMAIL: setsunaluna@gmail.com
TIME ZONE: EST