InsaneJournal

Alastor doesn’t know how to sit still. He can’t ever seem to concentrate on any one thing at a time, and if forced to stay inside for too long he tends to blow up. He’s often restless and has left class more than once if he felt the teachers weren’t moving fast enough. In fact, there are only two things that Alastor is willing to sit still for, playing music and talking to his sister. Morrigan is one of the only people who can get him to calm down at all, and for her he tries his best to pay attention. When he’s singing, playing his guitar, or listening to his LP’s he’s almost a different person. Intensely focused and wildly passionate, he could spend the rest of his life surrounded by music and die happy.

Strangely, though Alastor is constantly in motion, he is also rather shy. He can be a truly charming bastard when he wishes, and has no problems with being the center of attention, but he also rarely knows what to say to people. He tends to let his physicality speak for him, using smiles and outlandish outfits to express himself. But when it comes to one on one interaction he gets strangely tongue-tied and relies on his sister to speak for him. The only time he feels completely confident and outgoing is when he’s dressed in drag. His drag persona, Anita Bang, is able to say all the things he only thinks about when he’s himself. He’s been performing as Anita in clubs around muggle London since he was fourteen and has several steady gigs over the summer. He hasn’t brought her out at Hogwarts yet, but he would like too.

Alastor was born with ants under his skin. Or at least that was what it felt like. His whole life he’s felt this urgent need to run, to get up and go and get away. As a child this manifested itself as a series of violent temper tantrums and some very destructive behavior that had his parents baffled. He could be sitting calmly one moment, playing nicely with his twin sister, and suddenly he’d be throwing his toys and screaming for absolutely no reason. He was as gentle as a lamb with Morrigan, but his parents were often the victim of tiny fists and teeth when he got into one of his ‘moods’ as they called them.

They tried everything to calm him down, but all their efforts were useless. Alastor was a loose cannon, and he threw their little family into chaos. If it hadn’t been for one small discovery his parents might have resorted to truly drastic measures to keep their son under control. They had gone so far as to look into magical means for suppressing energy or creating calm when it happened. It was such a small incident, and so insignificant that it was almost laughable how important it was. His mother turned on some music. It had been a truly wretched day, and Natalie had been at her wits end. Alastor had been screaming for the last four hours almost without stop and she knew that this was it, she couldn’t take any more, it was time for drastic action. She picked up Morrigan and carried her to the childrens bedroom, leaving her in her crib and putting one of her old Jazz albums on so the little girl wouldn’t hear anything, before getting her wand and looking for her son. When she couldn’t immediately find him she began to panic, just knowing he was getting into serious trouble. Then she realized she could no longer hear the screaming. The house was silent except for the gentle strains of Ella Fitzgerald floating out of her childrens room. What she found in there will remain with her forever. Alastor, sitting perfectly still, staring up at the record player with an utterly rapt expression his face while his sister played happily in the crib beside him. He remained calm throughout the entire record, and when it was over he calmly went down for a nap for the first time in his life. It was a the miracle they’d been waiting for.

Alastor grew up devouring music like most people devour food. By the time he was nine he could play the guitar, bass, piano, violin, and clarinet. He quickly became obsessed with rock stars and had dedicated his life to become a ‘legend’ early on. The music helped with his moods, but they didn’t stop them completely. Alastor could go days riding high, gleeful and full of life and energy, only to plunge into black despair and bitterness overnight. Morrigan was the only person who could talk to him when he got like that, and his tendancy toward self-harm when at his lowest kept her constantly on alert.

When Alastor was ten he ran away from home for the first time. He was riding a week long high and had decided that he needed to go to London if he ever wanted to be a star. He packed a bag, convinced his sister to come with him, and hit the road. They managed to somehow get tickets and board a muggle train heading for England, charming the hostess and getting smiles out of every passenger on board. He struck up an impromptu concert in the dining car, playing his half sized guitar while Morrigan sang, and managed to even collect some tips. The whole way there Alastor regaled Morrigan with tales of famous rockers and the brilliant life they were going to have once they arrived

Things would have worked out very differently if Alastor hadn’t crashed an hour before arriving at Kings Cross, but crash he did. It was one of his most violent swings to date, and he was completely unable to control himself. He screamed, he cried, he swore at everyone. When a passenger tried to calm him down by touching his shoulder he hyperventilated so badly he passed out. Morrigan, who had nearly screamed herself hoarse at the woman who dared touch her brother, stood guard over him until they arrived at the station. She tried to get them off, but the steward refused to let them leave without an adult present. When no one could be found the two were handed off to the station police. Their parents had contacted the muggle authorities about their children and they were called immediately. Their father apparated to London right away and took both his wayward, and very much in trouble, children home.

After that incident Alastors parents decided that had no choice but to find some way of controlling their son. They took him to specialists all over the wizarding world, but the best they could find was a potion that made him feel numb to almost everything. He hated it, when he had the energy to hate anything, and he spent many nights curled up in Morrigans bed, wishing he remembered how to be sad. But worst of all the potion made him almost incapable of playing music. The notes were still there, but the passion was gone. His guitar gathered dust in a corner.

Their first year at Hogwarts began that way. He knew he should be excited, and tried to let his sisters excitement become his own. He was quiet most of the time now, content to wander around in Morrigans shadow, and was accepted by the people she called friends simply by virtue of always being there. He did alright in his classes, kept his head down, and barely lived.

The summer of their first year Alastor stopped taking the potion. Morrigan, knowing how miserable it made him, helped him hide the evidence. The change was almost immediate. Colors were bright again, music spoke to him again, he was alive. But the feeling of ants under his skin came back as well, and it was almost torture trying to hide it from his parents.

Morrigan had always been an avid reader and she dedicated everything she had to solving her brothers problem. She read every book she could get her hands on before turning to muggle literature. It was in those books that she finally found the answer. She realized that muggle medicine could help him where spells and potions never could, and practically forced their parents to take him to a muggle psychiatrist. The result was a small bottle of pills the took the edge off his moods without destroying him.

The next two years went relatively well. Alastor still had swings, but they were never as violent and he was much better able to control them, especially with Morrigans help. He quickly lost interest in school, ,getting fed up with most of the teachers for their slow pace, but he only stormed out on the really bad days. He liked Professor McGonnagal, she was smart and didn’t waste time, and she had a strange affinity for him. His grades plummeted, but he never failed anything.

The return of his humanity meant the return on his music, and he quickly became obsessed with Glam Rock. He stole a David Bowie T-Shirt and wore it under his robes every day. He couldn’t understand why all these idiot wizards didn’t idolize him as he deserved, and he got in more than one fist fight about it.

But on the whole life was pretty good. Until the summer before fourth year. Their parents were going out of town for a week and left one of their elderly aunts in charge of the four children. Alastor terrorised her, running almost wild and bringing the poor woman to tears more than once. Worst of all, she didn’t understand how to get Alastor’s medicine from the muggle clinic, and after the first week they ran out.

He hadn’t gone without his pills in almost two years, and it nearly broke him. The intensity of his emotions, the oppressive feeling of his own skin, the way even the smallest sounds echoed in his head. He snapped, and he ran. He left in the middle of the night without a word to anyone, and he kept running.

He hitched rides, he snuck onto trains, he followed old ladies onto busses and stole money out of unattended pockets and bags. He made it to London, and quickly found his way to the seediest parts of the city. He would most certainly have been killed within the first day if he hadn’t met Bianca. Bianca was an aging Drag Queen and she smelled like cigarettes and cheap vodka. She found him huddling in an alley outside a club one night and took him home. She noticed the way to twitched, pulled at his hair and spoke quietly under his breath, but she didn’t say anything. When the dress came off she was a tired, middle aged man with a beer gut and a comb over. He didn’t make Alastor do anything, he just gave him a pack of cigarettes and said he could sleep on the couch.

Bianca put him in drag for the first time a week after he started staying with her. She performed at a local dive and they were always looking for fresh meat. He liked the way drag made him feel, liked the way the costume let him be himself without fear. He sang three songs that night and the crowd went crazy. He went back every day after that.

He stayed with Bianca for two and a half months. Some days were terrible, and he felt so despondent he didn’t even get out of bed. Bianca seemed to understand, she just left water and crackers on the couch and left him alone. Some days he was so restless he tried to scratch his skin off. On those days he ran around the city, getting into fights with tweakers and drinking insane amounts of bottom shelf jack. He collapsed more than once, shivering on the side of the road and letting his mind drift. Somehow someone always found him though. The Queens from the club were a tight family, and they looked out for their youngest child when he couldn’t look out for himself.

Except for the one night they didn’t.

He doesn’t think about that night. He doesn’t talk about that night. He’s never even told his sister. Bianca found him the next day when he’d managed to stagger nearly back to her little flat above the club. He stayed in bed for three days and blocked every moment of it from his mind. Something bad happened, but he refuses to remember what it was.

By the end of the summer he had found a new home with the drag queens. But he missed his sister terribly, and Bianca convinced him that this wasn’t the life he wanted to leave. He cried when he left her, then got onto the Hogwarts Express. He walked down the aisle, skinny, dirty, and reeking of smoke, and found his sister. She didn’t scream at him, like he thought she might. She didn’t cry, or hit him, or anything that would be a normal response to your twin brother vanishing off the face of the earth. Instead, she hugged him. He hugged her back, not realizing until that moment how empty he’d felt without her. He cried into her hair and promised over and over that he would never leave her again.

His parents were furious, of course, but they were not as harsh on him as he expected. The sent one Howler, his mother sobbing in the background as his father yelled, and a package with his medicine in it. After that they never spoke of it again.

Alastor managed to find a rhythm to his life after that. He tries his best not to fail all his classes. He played music and sang with his sister. That summer he took her to get her first tattoo and introduced her to Bianca and the other Queens. He performed in drag shows and told his parents he had joined a soccer team. Life was alright.