Arden Patricks

[Arden Patricks]

and now we're grown up orphans
that never knew their names.

full name; Arden Melinda Patricks
nicknames; none, really
age; 27
house; Hufflepuff
gender; female
sexuality; straight
blood; pure, unfortunately

mirror mirror on the wall, have i got it?
i'm finding it's not easy to be perfect.

eye colour; brown
hair colour; brown
height; 5’5”

other physical traits;
Fairly petite and thin with something of a young and innocent-looking face, Arden has changed (in appearance) hardly at all since she was about twelve, though she’d like to think she now looks at least eighteen. Her hair is usually worn either loose or clipped up, and she doesn’t like to smile very widely if she can help it because she doesn’t like the way it looks. Luckily for her she isn’t usually amused enough to smile more than slightly anyway.

clothing style;
Arden’s main concern in choosing clothing is that it is comfortable, modest, and fairly plain, usually long-sleeved shirts in one solid color (often black) and dark jeans. She does, however, like to feel pretty by emphasizing her thinness, and has a vague sort of ‘elegance’ in her clothing choices, such as not wearing things like t-shirts.

what i really meant to say
is that i'm sorry for the way i am.

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good traits;
Just about all of Arden’s personality traits, good or bad, were ingrained very early and haven’t changed much since, though she’d like to think she does make some progress on occasion. She is, for example, much more confident and less self-conscious now than she used to be, largely due to a need to be motherly and firm with people as she tries to solve their problems – she can’t do that if she doubts herself too much. She does try to ‘fix’ people if she possibly can, being very compassionate and empathetic, and despises having to admit that she can’t be of help. This compassion and empathy also make her try to see all sides of an issue if she can and get each person’s point of view, leading usually to tolerance and easy forgiveness.

flaws;
This tolerance, unfortunately, paired with a lot of self-doubt, can also make her rather flighty, indecisive, and incapable of taking sides. She sees the merits and flaws of each course of action or of each person, so she changes her mind a lot and may inadvertently betray. To complicate the problem is the fact that there are a handful of beliefs she is or has been sure of, and she stubbornly will cling to these for as long as she can get away with it, even to the point of irrationality and prejudice. She will, for example, automatically dislike someone if she hears they were a Slytherin or Death Eater, despite long since realizing that neither group is all bad. At one point she thought that they were, so this is her fallback position until given reason to change it.

Arden’s other good traits also come with their bad sides, such as confidence sometimes tipping over into arrogance, and her need to try and help people sometimes causing her to beat herself up at perceived ‘failures.’ She also can be very nosy as well as overly candid, as she hates secrets and lies and has difficulty holding her tongue – especially when she has something witty to say. Granted, she usually tries not to offend (to the point where she may apologize excessively) and will absorb blows and insults for a fair while before exploding, but when she finally does she can be extremely cutting and would probably have been better off protesting earlier rather than letting it build.

Finally, Arden can still be quite self-critical and self-absorbed, though she’s been working to change that for years, and she does still undergo periods of depression though it’s been many years since she resorted to self-harm or planned to off herself.

habits;
Whenever something goes horribly wrong – usually a death or some sort of fight that’s been blown out of proportion – Arden tends to fold in on and blame herself repeatedly, withdrawing from friends and family until the point she has a meltdown of sorts and finally seeks out help again while resolving to become an indefinably ‘better’ person. This has happened less and less frequently over the years, but is still a possibility. On a more day to day basis… she is rather obsessive-compulsive, liking to keep things neat and orderly, and will even straighten other people’s collars or tuck their hair back without realizing she’s doing it. She very slightly exaggerates many of her expressions and body movements, as if to make sure there can be no doubt what she’s intending to get across, and fidgets a lot if there is something within reach to fidget with.

three words to sum up your character;

• contradictory
  
• compassionate
  
• self-aware
  

in our family portrait
we look pretty happy.

biological mother; Michelle Hannah (Anderson) Patricks (54)
‘real’ mother; Meredith Rosemary Anderson-Effertz (52)

biological father; Samuel Thelonius Patricks (58)
‘real’ father; Gregory Bryce Effertz (48)

siblings;
Trisha Marilyn Patricks (deceased; four years older)
Fitzwilliam Maximilian Patricks (28)
Lilith Marie (Anderson) Stewart (24)

cousins; none… other than Lilith, technically

other relatives;
brother-in-law: Leo Jason Stewart (26)
nephew: Micheal Maximus Stewart (5)
niece: Isobel Meredith Stewart (2)
niece: Melody Anne Patricks (ten months)
aunt: Margot Dionne Anderson (56)
grandmother: Quella Davies Anderson (78)
significant other: Travis James Elliot (deceased)

it's in my past, it's in my path
and i can't go there.

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place of birth; England somewhere

date of birth; April 5th

brief history;
Doted on by her mother and favored by her father up until she started having views they didn’t like, Arden was a stubborn and unfriendly child convinced that everything she said was pretty clever and that it was normal to get her own way. She was, by nature, compassionate at the same time, and apparently did not find it contradictory to threaten her peers with violent death, then go home and comfort the family house elf after he was treated in much the way she treated others. Her childhood best friends matched this contradiction; one being her fragile, beaten-down Squib sister, while the other was the biggest pureblood bully in the neighborhood. Unfortunately Arden lost both these friends a bit earlier than she would have liked, and quickly came to the conclusion that all relationships are finite and anyone you count on will soon leave you – a conclusion that has haunted her ever since and accounts for much of her behavior when things go wrong.

Surprisingly, considering she grew up mainly with a pack of wild boys who all turned out to be Slytherins and Death Eaters, Arden was Sorted into Hufflepuff upon arrival at Hogwarts, due mainly to her fierce loyalty to friends and ‘tolerant’ ability to rationalize anything given the individual circumstances. Life after that was pretty uneventful and quiet, consisting mainly of clinging to arrogance and her status as the ‘teacher’s pet’ sort to try and stave off loneliness. During this time the only people she really spoke to were her brother (more so hurling insults and hexes than actually speaking), his friends, and one overly friendly Gryffindor girl who refused to leave the loner alone.

Then, just at the end of her fifth year, Arden accidentally stumbled upon her old best friend in the process of killing someone. Apparently unwilling to kill her too, he instead did a very poor job of erasing her memory, leaving it splotchy and a little bit confused, though this may have been because she too was attempting to forget things at the same time – because who wants to remember their childhood hero as a murderer?
For the next few months, Arden did little but ‘mope,’ self-absorbedly, over her lost memory, before finally concluding it was all for the best and launching her first ‘be a better person’ campaign based on the idea that she had been an awful one and should try to make amends by attempting to fix people. Unfortunately this launch didn’t go quite as planned, as the first person she ran into was her murderous childhood friend. She spent the next few months after that trying to decide the nature of right and wrong, and finding out a lot of things about herself that she’d rather not have known – that she’s capable of torture, for example, or that she tends to rely very much on her friendships, and turns into quite a wreck when they fall apart.

During this time, Arden also became reacquainted with the idea of family – something she’d always thought of before as just a stupid convention, linking people together and telling them to care about each other just because they share DNA. She had been hounded, pre-amnesia, by pressure from her parents and brother to join the Death Eaters, and so the memory loss really did turn out to be a good thing in that it gave her the chance to cut ties and be disowned.
So she wasn’t especially pleased when Fitzy followed in her footsteps, got disowned, and tried to be friends with her again like they had been as young children – or even when he helped her rediscover their older Squib sister, blood traitor aunt, and illegitimate half-sister. She pushed them away for a while, only grudgingly letting in Lilith as kind of a younger tagalong friend, until Trisha was murdered, presumably by their brother, and she realized how much she cared. After that, she slowly began to accept her new family, complete with her aunt’s Muggle boyfriend, and eventually began to consider them her parents and full sister.
Her relationship with Fitzy was harder to make right, due to flaws on both their parts, but after many years of feuding and despite the aforementioned murder, they did eventually reconcile just before the war drew to a close, and the rest of the family was more or less willing to include him as well.

So by the time she finished school , things were looking up for Arden, and she wound up working for the Ministry for a while doing clerical sorts of things for the auror office as her way of helping in the war. She also spent increasing time in the Muggle world, and despite swearing repeatedly that ‘love-stuff’ isn’t for people like her, managed to fall for a man she met while volunteering at a soup kitchen – assuming, as he did about her, that he was a Muggle rather than, say, a Death Eater. It took a little while for her to accept being wrong about that, but they stuck together through the last year of the war and for quite a while afterward… up until he was, in Arden’s mind, murdered. In one of their occasional sweeps for ex-Death Eaters who may have escaped ‘justice,’ a pair of aurors ambushed him three years ago. Not knowing what was going on, Travis fought back, and was killed resisting arrest.

One of Arden’s darker periods followed, and she still hasn’t really gotten over it and doesn’t want to. She works now in a Muggle library, liking the solitude, and keeps to herself.


((Ta-da! I am triumphant! And I’m sorry for the length but it took me all day, so… ))