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conception
Although it was never proven, it was commonly believed that your mother brutally murdered her father at the age of fourteen, inheriting the entirety of her family's estate before she had even begun her monthly bleeding. She took her circumstances, however shadowed, and decidedly switched them in her favor. She needed no one but herself.
Devout in her principles, she vowed never to marry. From a young age, she knew her destiny well. She knew it would include your father, even if he did not. Somehow, she was always able to get what she wanted, even if it was not packaged the way she expected it.
He was not made for marriage either- his fancies were as flighty as they were fierce. He could not focus; he had no tangible desire. It was whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, a rabid and blundering crusade to his field of vision ever bereft of a peripheral or sense of legitimate wonder. She loved this in him, he so different than she. She claimed she was impenetrable, and she truly seemed to be, but he had pierced her from a young age, and his sword was branded against her heart before the faintest trace of her armor began to form around it. It left room for no one else.
He was just as much a part of her as she was a part of herself.
Their peers were paired and placed on the path expected of them. They attended weddings, births, christenings, and birthdays, but they had no occasion for themselves. It would be false to pretend there was. Their bond was deeper than a duty. It was an assurance of power. It was an elimination of obligation. It was freedom from society.
It was them against the world- at least your mother liked to think so.
You were conceived among the carnage of a fight in your father's kitchen, his back bleeding from the shattered wine glasses serrating his back against the marble floor, your mother's fingers crushing the veins in his throat as she screamed curses to her worst enemy, her one true love. As the hours following passed, the knives weeped from their fresh sheathes in the wall, hitting the ground one by one, an inconsistent heartbeat that foreshadowed your own.
When you were discovered, your mother wept. She hadn't wept since she was fourteen years old.
birth
You claim to remember your birth.
You often dream of the crisp white splitting the lids of your eyes, accompanied by the prickly sensation of being submerged in water or surfacing from it- you can't be sure because it is neither wet nor dry.
The first beginning of your many beginnings to come.
name
Valentino is derived from the Roman martyr Saint Valentine, his title meaning
vigorous. Magnus is of latin origin, given to you for your maternal grandfather, meaning
great. Tarquin was chosen out of spite- it has no known meaning, other than its mere frivolity infuriating your father.
Not Rowle...Rosier-Rowle, your mother said in the wake of your father slamming the door behind him.
We cannot forget that he has a father, now, can we?It was the moment she knew you were pristinely to her advantage.
It was the moment she fell in love with you.
father
His presence in your life was just as inconsistent as his affection for you.
At your ripe age, it did not cross your mind that your parents could have been married, or even live together. You had very few friends in youth- your mother despised the majority of your cousins' parents, and she hardly trusted the children of those she knew otherwise. Many assumed you were the child of a broken home, a leftover from that terrible word
divorce. When it was eventually discovered that you were simply the lovechild from an intensely passionate, strange, and life-long affair, most chose to discontinue opinion from confusion.
His visits were never planned. They simply occurred, much like an earthquake from considerable depth. He would storm through the door to your room and, without hello, tell you to go outside (much to the dismay of whatever governess was overseeing your activities at the time, they were swapped so often due to the snap judgments of your mother).
Sometimes he would just instruct, as if he was struck by the inspiration to be the father he'd always thought he'd be, firing off lessons at you that had no cohesive structure or point, other than they were things he wanted you to know.
Never turn your back on your enemy, boy, he said to you at age three.
You might think that you should put your hand between her legs, but only if she does it to you first, he barked to you at age four. At age five, he put a rifle in your hand and yelled
Shoot!Sometimes, he would just watch, as if you were the teacher and he was the student, compelled to tilt his head every time you did something the least bit surprising. He was fascinated by the wonder of you, a being that he could not yet predict because you were not yet a
you to understand. You could sense your mother's hovering just outside the doorway, heartwrenched by the sight of the man who decided to come that day, the man she craved would stay forever.
This was the extent of your relationship with your father- little vignettes that you could not discern nor place, but were branded into your memory. For years, you sought some deeper meaning for their poignancy in your mind. It took you until past your second decade to decide that they meant nothing. They simply were.
He died in the Battle of Hogwarts in 1998. You were six years old.
hat
That hat means nothing!Your mother had never yelled at you before, and despite being well into boyhood, you felt tears burst from your eyes as if they'd been clubbed out of you from the back of your head, merely from the shock of her shrill scream.
You had merely posed a question, something that even you, known for the impossible puzzles you would sweat to solve and the infallible logic you used to discover the solutions, could never fold your mind about.
How
did it work, you asked, dropping your fork with a clatter to your china plate in your earnest. Your mind whirled around a slew of possibilities, and you were sure that your mother, who you revered unquestionably, would know the answer.
Could it read your conscience? Understand what you have done to be deserving of such specific placement? Did it consult your desires, to best discern the person that you truly wanted to be? Or was it clairvoyant, capable of seeing past the natural realm and to a place of the future, to see the person that you were destined to be?
Your mother flew to your side, turning your chair to kneel the feet that could finally touch the ground from the height of the dining room chairs.
My son, she cooed, in the syrupy tone that she only ever reserved for you. The ruby ring shone about her finger, the only thing she'd ever marry being her secrets and her own resolve.
Do not cry my love.
Your mother came from Slytherins. The Regal House of Rowle had only green and silver in her wake- she was the garnet fire that would burn her family tree, and you were her only son.
That hat means nothing, she repeated to you softly, her final words on the subject on the evening before your first year. She knew you were not so fearless as she, but she knew well the terror of sitting beneath a bit of fabric that chose to tell you what you were, what you wanted to be, and who you would become.
She chose to ignore it.
You did too.
studies
You amazed your professors with how incredibly awful you were in school.
Charms class was an habitual nightmare. Your professor only made the mistake of asking you to demonstrate twice. The first time, you lit Maisie Owen's hair on fire. You were meant to be levitating a feather. The second time, your wand took to
the consistency of butter and nearly melted all over your hand. You were meant to be turning the color of your textbook from red to green.
Transfiguration, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and even Potions were met with similar travesty. At first, they were convinced that something was amiss with your wand. After practicing with multiple others, you sullenly returned to yours- twelve inches of ironwood with a geometric design, the edges of which were almost sharp enough to cut your fingers. It was questioned for a time if you were a squib, but even the executive director of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries could not deny your obvious magical nature, despite your truly terrible medium of its manifestation.
Your third year brought an extreme feeling of relief, now that you were able to fully participate in classes that did not rely on any semblance of wand control. Herbology had never appealed to you, and while you were consistently at rapt attention during History of Magic, you were itching to try something new.
letter
Maureen McLaggen was the most beautiful girl you'd ever seen, not that it matters very much, because there was very little chance that you'd ever talk to her anyways.
You were a fifth year Gryffindor. There was a polite circle of friends that you'd found, all equally as dismal as you in some way or another, not as much
friends as forced partners in a society that had cast you all away in equal measure. For your many shortcomings in the classroom, a swollen topic of bullying that students from every house chose to bruise both behind your back and to your face, you were still considered a friendly and highly unassuming person, at least to the few people that pitied you enough to try talking to you. You were a formidable challenger in chess and you had an uncanny ability to remember Quidditch statistics. You were the tallest student in your year by a mile, almost as tall as many seventh years found themselves to be, but this would not be to your advantage for some time, as you were mostly gangly extremities that seemed to tie themselves up as you walked.
She was a seventh year Hufflepuff. She seemed, at every given moment, to be positively surrounded by people. She had no visible shortcomings, besides the fact that her laugh was much louder than her normal speaking voice; it seemed to echo throughout a room as she did. With the yellow color of her hair and the bright choices of blouse that radiated off the black of her school robes, she glowed, as did the skin above her breasts when she unbuttoned an extra clasp on her shirt for air at mealtimes. She seemed to like everyone and everyone seemed to like her.
You were pretty sure you would never know what this feels like.
You found yourself dreaming about her mixing in a maze of gold sheets- two butterbeers could make you very tired. None of you, the misfits, were explicitly invited to social events, but the Gryffindor Common Room had no choice but to allow you access to liquor and young women you would never otherwise have, even if the latter were merely observed from a distance. You hated all of it, preferring to be in bed than to be face-to-face with the rejection from your classmates that you so often were able to avoid.
Though they arrived later, your friends heard her name muttered in the middle of the night, and it was by the grace of liquor that they wrote her a love letter signed with your name. They didn't send it immediately, not until they read and re-read it by the light of a moon reaching midnight, chortling away the muffled breaths of firewhiskey laughter that coated their throats.
It was the most mortifying feeling in the world, waking up to their stifled guffaws, now full belly-laughs of mischief. She'd know it was a joke, they said. The owl can't even get to the Hufflepuff Commons at night, they said. It's not like she knows who you are, they said. Though you wished it was not, just a little bit more than you wished to die of embarrassment, it was true, you thought.
You thought. That was, until she wrote back.
tradition
It was with extreme displeasure that your mother discovered you were willingly participating in Muggle Studies. The fact that it took her three years to learn this was both a mark of her poor parenting
and her blind trust in you. Her composure was, of course, impenetrable, but you could feel the disappointment fueled by dismay seething from between her teeth with every word she so particularly selected.
If your father only knew about the- but the rest of the sentence was lost on you, as was the content of any sentence that had to do with manipulating you into regret with the ghost of a man you barely knew or understood.
Your mother knew nothing of the muggle world, and you could not understand her disgust toward it. This thinking was ancient, barbaric, nearly pre-historic. Muggles invented telephones, and aeroplanes, and atomic bombs. They mastered mass production, big business, and incorporating. They handled economic depression, fed their impoverished, and campaigned for social change. The makeup of their society was of a completely different mindset. It was of the potential of the future, not the glory of the past.
Wizards of all kinds were so caught up in the sincere belief in their superiority that they refused to entertain the idea that, perhaps, a muggle could teach
them something magical.
Defiantly (as your fists shook), you told her that you would be continuing. She had no choice but to allow you to.
love
You wrote back and forth for months without ever breathing a word to one another face to face.
They were innocent, to begin with, as she inquired after the sloppy penmanship of the original letter and why you had chosen to send it in the first place. Your disbelief at a reply begged honesty- you admitted to your friends' choices and apologized on their behalf. You admitted to being the punchline of a drunken joke, and you were sorry she'd gotten looped in.
You passed so close to her in the entrance hall that you could smell faint lavender. Neither of you acknowledged the other.
She commended your friends' creativity and also your truthfulness, but she complimented your reserve most of all. Not many people could withstand the terror of having a love letter sent on their behalf, she noted; not many people could stand to have falsehoods written in their name. You were relieved by her entertainment, that she could find humor in so ghastly executed a boyish prank. You said that you never read the original, but that it would be difficult to believe any praise to her was false.
You happen upon her between two library stacks. You see into her eyes for the first time. And then she is gone.
She is touched by your compliment- she doesn't understand what makes her deserving, as the two of you have never truly spoken. She wonders why you do not say much to anyone, for you are well spoken in your writing and seemingly quite intelligent. How could you approach her, you say, when she is otherwise preoccupied with the attention of people she already knows? Who would you be to disturb her circles? You thank her for her candor, but you've never been much of a socialite. Intelligence is subjective, you decree.
She lingers near the entrance to the Quidditch Pitch with her friends on Sunday mornings before matches; they like to see the players before the start. As your friends turn the group about the corner to the stairs, her hands reaches out, a whisper of a motion, and electrifies the bend in your torso. Though you continue walking, you do not dare look back. You feel as though you have been punched in the gut...and you love it.
June has arrived too soon- you cannot bear the pace of this development, half due to impatience and half due to disbelief at its mere occurrence. She cannot write after graduation, she pens. Her parents would not like the idea of her writing to a boy they do not know (though she says it not, you do not doubt that your parents' reputation will tarnish yours wherever you choose to go). She wishes you a happy summer, and thanks you for your inked companionship. It was lovely to her. You were lovely to her.
These confessions stabbed at you menacingly. You were convinced the ground that had been traversed would be dug up and turned, that every step you'd taken in a direction toward her heart would be ricocheted into the endless distance.
You conceded that you have lost her, and all because of the return address on an owl.
idea
Advancements in Muggle Communication
Valentino Rosier-Rowle
Muggle Studies - Sixth Year
June 22nd, 2008Your term paper is certainly deserving of an O, if only due to the amount of work and research you've put into it. Without question, you are functioning at a skill level fart surpassing that of seveth year students with the topics you are choosing to examine. Your professor, a burly Muggleborn man of nearly seventy, has rarely seen a pureblooded wizard so interested in the functions of Muggle society. You are a student who does not participate for learning about doo-dads and whirly-gigs, as so many of his classmates resign to, but rather a student who is fascinated by the effect on society that muggle inventions have. You are a student who sees the true potential in muggle innovation.
But, you ask, after your professor has returned to you a paper met with full marks, why have wizards never created a
network? The secure transportation of information? Leaving everything up to codes penned inside owls, things that can still be broken?
Why haven't they? he counters. He is looking at you expectantly.
change
You are laughed out of every dinner meeting you bring your concepts to.
We have no use for such a ridiculous device- we have owls, young man.
It's too dangerous. Codes continue to be the safest way for our government to communicate.
But that's just it, I don't need to be in constant communication with others. I like it this way.
You want to throw each ignorant accuser through the tables they invited you to sit at. The repugnancy of innovation makes you doubt your ideas- you start to think that there is no path to change, that the Wizarding World exists in stagnancy. You shelve your plans for almost a year- you'd already spent two designing and finessing them. You take a government job in the Muggle Liason Office, and spend a significant amount of time in government relations, specifically between the Minister for Magic and Muggle Prime Minister's offices (you would never have made it as an Obliviator, your abysmal wandwork is considered a sincere liability).
Every day, you watch the thousands of memos fly above the heads of every official, too often derailing from slight bends in their paper or getting caught in elevator doors. The owl post feels like an eternity. You cannot believe there are still people who floo to work.
You see the Prime Minister's daughter with something called a mobile, her thumbs dancing across its glass face with the speed and grace of someone with high expertise. Even among your coworkers, these devices are laughed off. You retain your silence, as you always have. No one seems to covet your opinion anyway. You know you're the only one who understands.
You cannot recall the exact moment it dawns on you, but you know it was sometime around your twenty-second year. It may have been the many times you saw muggle parents roll their eyes at their savvy children every time they reached for their little hub. Perhaps it was during a nostalgic daydream about Marlene McLaggen, and your desire to have had a chance to say something more to her. It didn't matter, because you did not linger on its conception.
You would never turn those set it their ways. Change would only ever come from youths.
You, for the first time in your life, took full advantage of the blood money at your fingertips. You rejected the necessity for approval or backing. You took action, and you took it by yourself.
quivs
[
The original Quiv, though at the time being the cutting edge of Wizarding Technology (a new term), was incredibly basic. It was a small, palm sized disc, about a centimeter in depth and four inches in diameter, with both faces of matte brass. It was to be held in an open palm, facing upward, the forefinger of the opposite hand pressed to the center of the circle. This would activate the device for use- it would only respond to its owner's active touch.
At the time, the Quiv was exclusively for messaging. Taken from the Muggle derived 'text message', it could send "Hexts", short messages between two Quivs that had, at some previous time, been stacked on top of one another (the act of which was called Registry). Quivs registered to one another would remember their partners, and through the touch of a forefinger, could transmit a thought from the user's conscious to the Quiv's face. The user would see it, and when satisfied with its content, could squeeze the fingers of their open palm around the circumference of the device to send.
Although it took a few months to distribute, once placed in the hands of some adventurous teenagers, the use of the first Quiv spread like wildfire.
With humble beginnings in sending messages to students in different places, or friends across towns, parents' mistrust of the device turned into cautious inquiry. What parent would not want a direct line to the child tucked away in a large castle? Quiv sales began to leak into a wider demographic.
You could not produce them fast enough.
You had the capital for the expense, but manpower became the problem.
On December 29th, 2015, you incorporated under a name of your own design. Another beginning.
You became the sole founder of Hextra, Incorporated.
development
The year is 2021, and it is the sixth anniversary of your company. At the head table, you are flanked by comrades, consultants, and constituents, all key elements of the success that you've gathered through your years of innovation.
Your mother- a shareholder, who made an early investment in your products as you began your ascent. Though displeased, success is all she has wanted for you, and she cannot deny the marks you have made to further wizarding society. You are the son that others want theirs to admire, the social outcast who made their move with their brain and not their charm. You love her, as she loves you.
Your technical director, and first partner- a wizard twice your age who saw the potential in what a Quiv could be and took you to new heights. He enabled you to establish 'The Network', a secure server through which government entities, large corporations, and privately held liabilities (ex: Gringotts) could communicate confidential information safely and without fear of hacks. He made it possible to capture wizarding images on your devices, and made them Pensieve-compatible. He is smarter than you, and you know it, but trusts your drive.
Your creative director- a mouse of a witch with large eyes and even larger imagination, whose vision made possible the modern designs of each new version. The newest Quivs remain circular, but are thinner, more durable, and come in a variety of colors. Their faces now have a holographic sheen, small buttons on the side for certain shortcuts, and customizable enamels that allow the user a level of personalization to make their Quiv truly individual. She was also the only one that originally agreed with you that Quivs
must be made to send picture hexts, perhaps the largest and most controversial draw of the device to date.
Your administrative manager- a bright, young wizard nearly fresh out of school, whose ability to quell disagreements matches his conviction to process and organization. He oversees the entirety of your company's employees, handling their salaries, benefits, pensions, and supervisors. He seems to know the answers to your questions before you pose them, and you rely on him for the majority of your day to day activities. He is capable, brilliants, and compassionate, and never forgets to give you time to rest, eat, or merely breathe.
Government officials- a group of officers from the Ministry of Magic who have been tasked with collecting any assets that could be useful to government intelligence.
Private shareholders- witches and wizards from across Britain who mostly want to say they attend these sorts of things for posterity as well as their egos.
An endless slew of Maureen McLaggens- women you fall in love with in moment as fleeting as a blink.
A handful of close friends- your misfits have made their own way, but throughout your trials and tests, somehow, they actually became your friends.
You are standing, and they cease their applause.
They're all just waiting to see what happens next.
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