for attheclose Player Information Name: Cori Age: A good decade over 18! E-mail: joly6598 AT hotmail DOT com AIM: disciplediscidi Timezone | Availability: US CST (-6 GMT); I'm pretty widely available right now, seeing how I had open heart surgery a couple months ago, and have not yet been cleared to work again. D: (Granted, my meds make me very drowsy, but I LOOOVE to write, and will make myself stay awake for it!) CDJ (or Previous Experience):My resume
Character Basics Name: Matthew Benjamin Selwyn Played By:JosephFiennes Age: 43, come 8 February Journal: lost_cause_ Full or Part Time: Part-time
Character Stats School House: Ravenclaw Profession: French and Hebrew interpreter for the Ministry, working out of the Department of International Co-operation Other Interests: Catechism, Arithmancy, recreational mathematics, languages (French holds a special place in his heart, being that it's the tongue his father once spoke to him in), philosophy, general nerdery in any Magical subject you could name – save of course for Muggle Studies Loyalties: His God, his family, and his Dark Lord, in that order. (Sorry, Voldemort!) Sexuality | Relationship Status: Very straight, bordering on asexual | Married to Rosemary Selwyn Residence: A modest house in West Sussex. Blood Status: Pureblood Family: Frederick Selwyn (Father | 1911-1984 | Ravenclaw 1929) Catherine Selwyn nee Shaw (Mother | 1914-1981 | Ravenclaw 1932) Diana Selwyn (Sister | 1959-1978 | Slytherin 1977) Rosemary Selwyn (Wife | 19??- ) Dolores Diana Selwyn (Daughter | 1981- | Slytherin 1999) [I would welcome the opportunity to have his daughter in play! Player's choice whether she goes by Dolores or Diana. XD]
Personal History: The Selwyns are a family of advisors, and Matthew's father Frederick was no exception; a bright and eager worker for the Ministry of Magic's International Co-operation department, Frederick Selwyn had earned a liaison position in post-war France at the tender age of thirty-four. (Of course, that had as much to do with his pretty face and even prettier wife, which Britain correctly assumed would be a good accompaniment to a diplomatic word, after abandoning wizarding France during the early stages of the Second World War.) Relations with France were very much improved very quickly, but the Selwyns, ever the rational and conscientious planners, waited out almost a decade in Chalons sur Marne before declaring themselves ready for their first child, Matthew Benjamin.
Matthew was from the beginning a quiet and precocious child, valuing his solitude before he was even old enough to be left alone. He was, as a baby, content to flip through books-- even ones without pictures-- while his mother observed him at a distance. No doubt she would have complained that her son shared his father's aversion to snuggling, if she were not herself averse to embarrassing either one of them. He remained reticent as he grew, which suited both his parents admirably. They made some small effort to draw him out of his shell, but were unconcerned when he held back. Frederick, after all, had been the same way at his age.
The boy learned to read at four, and by that time Catherine was heavy with her second child. Diana Marie was born 23 June, 1959, and unlike her brother, she was a challenge to her prim family from the beginning. Matthew had some difficulty bonding with his baby sister, for as clever as he was, he could not make the connection between the warm impressions he had of being a big brother, and the colicky crying alien before him. Matters little improved as Diana became mobile. She was clingy and needy, and boisterous and whiny in turns, as was any normal toddler. The Selwyn elders, whose only experience with children was Matthew, were duly embarrassed, and tried to ignore her into submission. To her credit, Diana was clever enough to cave inward at a very young age, bringing an artificial peace to the household.
By the time that had happened, however, Matthew had already made a habit of escaping to a local parish for some peace. It had a quiet ambiance, and a very nice book underneath his seat. At nine Matthew felt a deep and profound pull toward the Catholic faith.
His sister had taken to following him to the parish occasionally, in an attempt to be close to her big brother in any form allowed, but after a disturbingly precocious conversation with him about his intentions, they both laid off each other.
Matthew was by now coming close to schooling age, but he made it clear he did not want to go to Beauxbatons. His peers in France were so loud, so nosy, and so critical of him for being English by birth, though he learned both languages natively. Frederick assured his son that Hogwarts back in Britain would be nothing like that. And so Matthew acquiesced to a good British education, and Frederick began making arrangements to transfer back to the home office; he was not about to send his boy overseas alone.
Frederick had, of course, clearly forgotten his own school days in the intervening thirty-odd years. Children were children wherever they were, but fortunately for Matthew, there was at least one house of like-minded people at Hogwarts: Ravenclaw. His housemates understood him, and understood very quickly when he needed space, which was often. He had but one close friend, Benjy Fenwick – an earnest and kind boy who was a perfect foil to his own awkward reticence.
When his sister came to school four years behind him, Matthew fell over himself trying to be a kind of awkward father figure to her. Granted, she rather did need one; their parents had already considered the parenting mission accomplished when she settled, in her own peculiar way. Still, he was aware that he could not do enough for her; there was a wedge between them, with her always pushing for more validation, more affection, and he unable to comfortably give it. As she grew at school, she did find other outlets for her neediness – outlets Matthew would no doubt have disapproved of, had he been aware of them.
And then, just before his seventh year, Matthew lost his best friend; Benjy had developed a fetish for Muggles, a proclivity Matthew strongly disapproved of, for reasons of “morality.” (It seemed to escape his notice that his own Church was full of righteous Muggles.) Benjy's parents, it turned out, also disapproved; when they were told that Benjy was dating a Muggle Jewess, they threw him out of the house. Benjy went to Matthew for help, but Matthew, reluctant to expose his sister to such a lack of moral fibre, turned him away. Benjy remained hopeful throughout their last year of Hogwarts – hopeful that Matthew would remember all the good times they'd had, perhaps, or just that he would get off his high horse. Still, when Matthew left Hogwarts, he also left Benjy behind.
Matthew left Hogwarts at the top of his class, so it was a surprise to everyone when instead of utilising his numerous talents in some elite occupation, he instead applied for an interpreter post in the Ministry. He was fluent in French, having been raised abroad, but to outsiders it seemed he was squandering his entire education. Neither Matthew nor his family saw it that way, however, valuing education for scholarship itself.
And make no mistake, Matthew was continuing his education. He was learning much about statesmanship and politics as he acted as a mediator between monolingual diplomatic staff. At the end of the day he pored over his own books into the wee hours-- books on arithmancy, magical theory, philosophy.
Though they approved of his pursuits-- or, some might say, lack thereof – his ageing parents were gradually leaving more and more of the household responsibilities in Matthew's hands. He was not deterred by this, however; he was young, and there were many hours in the day for him. Indefatigable, he continued to read by lamplight and tinker with arithmantic proofs.
By the age of twenty-one, he was stretched rather thin, but he still seemed tireless. On top of his day job, his domestic responsibilities, and his own swotting, he had pledged his service to Lord Voldemort. The self-styled “dark lord” seemed to Matthew a ray of light in an intolerably corrupt world, and Voldemort's well-supported campaign made it easy to make a target of Muggles and their questionable mores seeping into wizarding society via “Mudbloods.” Don Quixote: alive and well, and still charging at windmills!
In addition to the expectation to take up arms for the cause-- fighting fire with fire-- Matthew took it upon himself to pave the way for peace after their victory. Under the pen name Demetrius Patron he wrote a manifesto propounding the idea that Muggle values were cheapening those of wizards. His thesis held that only by making clearer divisions between the worthy classes and the Muggle-loving heretics could wizards establish a righteous society. “Revolution, but civilisation.” Matthew's good intentions fell flat here; so loaded were racial politics by this stage of the war, that only those already converted saw sense in his work.
Things were not much better on the home front. Diana was sitting N.E.W.T.s, and though Matthew was eager to help her revise, he was not so keen to help usher her into the Auror training programme she was bound for. He believed he was fighting a war akin to a crusade, and she was flippantly declaring that more doors would be open to her if she fought for the Ministry. He tried in vain to convince her that she didn't want to take such risks, that she could gain enough attention going straight into politics, that it was bellicose and unseemly to take up fighting as a career, however temporary.
Again the loaded words failed him, and Diana extricated herself from the family home as soon as she was able. She told Matthew there was no acrimony intended in the move, that she simply needed her space-- but Matthew wondered how much solitude she'd have in her flat if, as he suspected, she was sharing it with a boy. He did not press the issue, however, or air his suspicions, as he was already on thin ice after the debacle over her occupation.
As the year wore on, however, he began to feel that something was amiss, something he was no longer close enough to her to gauge. She was withdrawing even further from her family – even from Matthew himself, who had always, in some small way, been there for her. It hurt him personally, but it was also an ill omen. If she was placing her trust in someone else, or worse, allowing Auror Moody's paranoia to influence her, and he no longer had any sway over her... there was no way he could mitigate the damage she would do as an Auror.
He allowed his paranoia to fester until he couldn't handle the weight of it anymore. He lacked sufficient courage to deal with his sister as an enemy, but he had to know where he stood with her. He visited her on the evening of 4 March 1978, to sit her down for a conversation that passed the point of no return when, after he had cajoled, pleaded, proselytised, and even argued with her about her life choices, she correctly guessed that he was a Death Eater. He had no other choice but to silence her, now...
Matthew always carried a knife as a practical tool, but rarely used it as a weapon. In such close quarters, however, it made a far more practical weapon than his wand-- in theory. In reality his hesitation with the blade made it worse, and Diana's death was more painful than he would have had it. When the deed was finally done, he allowed himself another kind of hesitation altogether: stopping to pray over his victim, before he staged the scene as a break-in gone awry.
His comrades-in-arms were, for the most part, less than sympathetic; the girl had taken a flat in Muggle Brixton, after all, and was clearly a blood traitor who deserved to die – even if only by the hand of a Muggle burglar. Matthew dealt gamely with all this, and with the apparent respect he gained once word had gotten out about Diana's true cause of death. Only one person among Voldemort's ranks was at all understanding of the guilt he harboured for this act: Rosemary [Prewett?]. By the end of 1979, he had decided that this sort of camaraderie was the closest he would ever feel to love, and asked Rosemary to be his wife. After taking several days to think about it, she accepted.
Meanwhile, his old friend Benjy, now an Auror, showed Matthew far more sympathy than he felt he deserved. Benjy investigated Di's death as if it were his own sister who had been murdered, and slowly came to the conclusion that a wizard, not some random Muggle burglar, had done her in. By now, of course, Matthew's guilt was overwhelming, and he would have admitted to anything if confronted by it – but penance for this act was not in the cards for him; on the evening of 4 March, 1980, drunk and morose, he attempted to owl a confession to Benjy, who was, at the time, being blown up by his own eldest brother, a fellow Death Eater. The next day Bacchus Fenwick returned his owl to him, with a gentle warning not to be so... foolish in future.
Matthew entered into his marriage in a state of positive despair; he had, after all, lost his only true friend in Benjy, and still had yet to atone for Diana's death. Rosemary kept him going, with a shoulder to cry on, and the promise of a future for the family; she was pregnant with their first (and only) child within a few short months of their banns. Dolores Diana (Matthew's choices, both) was born on 29 August, 1981 (Rosemary induced labour with cohosh, in order to prevent her entering Hogwarts a year 'late'.)
Unfortunately, Catherine Selwyn was not to meet her granddaughter; sad and tired over the loss of her own daughter, she finally passed away in the spring of 1981. Matthew was devastated by her death, and blamed himself. His hapless wife had to deal with his tears, rather than the normal state of affairs wherein a man comforted the woman carrying his child. She bore it with dignity, however.
And then, shortly after the birth of Dolores, their life as they knew it came to a crashing halt, with the apparent death of their Dark Lord. The war was suddenly over, and their comrades-in-arms were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. In the Selwyn household, at least, cooler heads prevailed; while Matthew wanted to turn himself in, to spend a life sentence in Azkaban for killing Diana alone, Rosemary knew that if they kept to their day jobs and acted naturally, they would escape suspicion, and she heaped a fresh dose of guilt on him for wanting to leave their daughter.
Still, in the wake of the war, Matthew found new doubts to add to his guilt; when the Longbottoms were tortured, for example, he wondered if Bellatrix was really fighting for a good cause, or if she was just a mad and sadistic woman – which led him to question the motivations of his other comrades – even Rosemary's. He found it difficult to speak to her about it, however, and for a time, things were tense in the Selwyn household-- so tense in fact, that Grand-pere Frederick was often sick with stress, in spite of his retirement from the Ministry shortly before his wife's death.
Frederick finally passed away from scrofungulus in 1984, leaving Matthew legally in charge of the house at last. He took no pleasure in owning the deed, however; he missed his father dearly, in spite of the mistakes he had made with Diana's upbringing. Still, though, he had the opportunity to avoid those mistakes with Dolores, and he threw himself into bringing up his own daughter. Matthew was not a particularly sentimental man, much less one who could be twisted around a small child's finger like a sap, but he made an effort to be more open to Dolores, and to Rosemary. If either of them wanted a hug, he would suck up his aversion to touch, and give it to them. If they had a hurt that needed to be kissed away, he would do it. His relationship with Rosemary strengthened under this new resolve, and it very possibly saved their marriage.
Dolores went to Hogwarts in 1992, and was sorted into Slytherin – a decision on the Hat's part that naturally worried Matthew; Diana, too, had been a Slytherin. Still, it didn't really mean anything; lots of fine politicians and such came out of Slytherin, after all – though on the other hand, the Head of Slytherin in Matthew's day had been a wheedling, harmless old man – not one of his fellow ex-Death Eaters. He was afraid that Snape was recruiting for a new Purist army, but after a few meetings with him at the school, Matthew's doubts and fears were allayed; Snape was just trying to live his life, post-bellum, just like Matthew.
And then, just when Matthew finally thought he'd found peace at last, his Mark began to burn black again; Rosemary's was, as well. The Dark Lord was returning, against all odds – and when he finally did return, he was most displeased with his followers who hadn't taken Bellatrix's mad example. Selwyn experienced guilt – and penance – like he had never known before. Now too fearful to abandon his post, he could only fervently pray for death – if not the sort of death meted out to traitors within Lord Voldemort's ranks; he was too cowardly to face such a thing.
Still, though, Matthew did believe that Muggles were dragging down wizarding kind, and was concerned about the evil influence of Muggle-borns on his daughter – and if it were anyone but the Dark Lord, who inspired such fear, hatred, and even violence in people, he would have followed under the Purists' banner gladly. The only problem was, it was the Dark Lord leading the march, and Matthew was growing more and more squeamish about what they had to do to please him. The man became obsessed with his wand and Harry Potter's, and had clearly lost sight of the Cause he had formerly championed. He was just a megalomaniac, making everyone ask how high their jumps for him ought to be.
Question 1: We use calendars here to set up both backstory and an outline of where we'd like to go in the future too. The backstory helps give players an idea of what their characters have been doing (and with whom) the last six months. Which slot would you like to fill? If there are none that appeal to you, please provide at least two for the mods to choose from. Also, are there any other significant events in your character's backstory that you would like added to the backstory calendar?
Tuesday, 14 September - In Diagon Alley, ________ begs [Matthew Selwyn] to speak for them at their upcoming Magical Heritage trial.
I'd also enjoy torturing my man a bit with:
Sunday, 19 December - Attempting to learn what's happened to Luna as well as what You-Know-Who is doing, five Order Members (________, ________, ________, ________, and ________) kidnap a Death Eater [Matthew Selwyn].
...But only if the Order's going to give up on him and let him go by Christmas, because, well, it's CHRISTMAS. XD Also, because he's due to be involved in the skirmish at the Lovegood house around the 27th or 28th, right? He'll need time to be debriefed from this experience before he's back on the job...!
Question 2: Wars have many 'sides,' not just good or bad warriors fighting passionately for a cause. Where does your character currently stand in regards to the conflict, and what is their ideal course of action?
During the first war, Selwyn had been passionate about the Cause, but now his enthusiasm has greatly ebbed. Let's let him speak for himself, from a previous game (admittedly a first-war game itself, albeit horribly AU):
I am bound to these madmen who are devolving so rapidly, and even I am in too deep to ever claim a moral life again. How did I come to this point? I've forgotten what I'm fighting for. Certainly nothing righteous anymore. I have seen firsthand how some of my comrades can turn around from a mission, to indulge in their own sadistic gratification. These are perversions I cannot blame on Muggles; they're a sickness of the mind, rather, and when "we" can claim victory... it will not be order but chaos they establish. I've helped to build the foundations not for Elysium, but for Hell on earth.
As for his ideal course of action through the remainder of this war – he can only hope Harry Potter will succeed in stopping the Dark Lord, because otherwise, there's no stopping his comrades-in-arms. He's sick to death of the carnage, but hasn't the courage to put a stop to it himself. And so – he waits, awaiting the Dark Lord's judgment (and his own, of course...)
Question 3: What regrets, if any, has your character had in the past year or two? These may be about the war or about a particularly poor haircut; anything is fair game.
Well, since you mention it, he does regret cropping his hair so short; until a couple of months ago, he wore it just long enough to lay flat on its own, that he didn't have to grease it down with pomade, and now, he has to use the ruddy stuff all the damned time.
But seriously, his regrets include answering the call of the Mark when it came, two years ago, rather than running, or even killing himself, to avoid returning to the Dark Lord's service. (Alternately, he regrets those suicidal thoughts, on account of his wife and child as well as the general Catholic distaste for such an act.) He regrets every death he's caused – or been witness to, without stopping. He regrets that twenty years after his sister's death, he's still involved in the same things that got her killed for knowing of them.
Writing Sample: “..we'll see if we can spare a bit of your daughter for you to bury.”
Dear Lord, had he actually said that? To a terrified father, who only wanted his hapless daughter home for the holidays? What had made him snap that way? Didn't he, after all, have his own daughter – Luna Lovegood's age, even – whom he was so terribly grateful to have spent Christmas with this year? Particularly after he was tortured by members of Dumbledore's old Order of the Phoenix for a week straight, just prior to the holiday?
He was sick for the second time in a row at the thought of that week -- and though he wanted to blame that horrible week for his lack of temper with old Lovegood – he couldn't. He knew in his heart that he had already recovered sufficiently from that terrible ordeal, and what really bothered him was that Lovegood was doing so damned little to save his daughter. Yes, that must be it. If the Dark Lord threatened Dolores, Matthew would hunt Potter down himself, not sit around tinkering with a printing press! Not to mention the Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw, for Merlin's sake. Even if Matthew had been interested in such a clearly fabricated thing, he didn't have the authority or the power to release the girl. He knew, as well, that his comrades – mostly Slytherin alumni – would not be so intrigued.
No, Matthew Selwyn told himself, the man was gambling with his daughter's life – and that made him sick. And he was sick, for a third time, into the basin he was sitting in front of. His stomach was surely empty by now, but he still felt queasy.