ILGB - Mallory

"Remember, Mallory. You must never let anyone tell you what you can and cannot do. The only one who gets to decide that is you."

To leave everything you've ever known behind is an impossibly hard decision to make, but to live for happiness is worth it. To live for the happiness of someone you love is worth it. To live for your own happiness is the only thing worth living for at all.

Purea Vogel belonged to a loving but tight-knit, protective wizarding family; protective of its members, protective of its honor, protective of its blood. Of those three ideals, Purea held strongly with two. She loved her father, her mother, her little brother; she was proud of her heritage, of their talents, of how far they had come and how earnestly they strove for worthiness. But for their blood, for its purity . . . it never occurred to her how little—and how much—it might matter to her until after she had defiled it. "Defiled it," as if love and affection could defile something as meaningless as blood purity; as if the passion of youth, however short-lived, was something to regret. But whatever her own feelings, it didn't matter. Halfway afraid and halfway defiant of what her family would think, of what they might do, at twenty five years old Purea left everything she had ever known behind.

Mallory was born seven months later, after Purea had secreted herself away from her old life and come to build up a new one. She bought a home in the English countryside where she might raise her son. It was an old, stately English cottage, just outside of a small, cheerful muggle village. It was the ideal location, a place that sang a new song in her heart. It was far from much of the Wizarding world, too inconveniently located and too close to muggles for many other wizards to consider it a priority destination. Raising her son on her own, with only her own resolve for company, would be easier here, out of the way.

For Mallory, it was everything he'd ever known. As he grew up, he had his mother's massive, wild and beautiful gardens to play in, to get lost in; the muggle village a short way away, a world that was different in ways he didn't understand until he'd grown enough to recognize the difference between those cheerful muggles going about their day and the magic he knew at home. He had his mother, smiling and gentle and eccentric and clever, who filled her garden and her life with magic, who sold muggle housewives herbs and charms and 'spells' because that was the kind of magic they believed in. To his mother, it was all real, whether it was real or not.

When Mallory first did magic of his own, he was six years old. He turned the foxgloves in the garden, normally shades of purple, every color of the rainbow. He and his mother were both delighted, and together they spent the rest of the day changing the color of all the flowers in the garden (his mother more than him, of course. After all, it only been an accident, and he couldn't yet control his burgeoning magic).

By the time Mallory was ten years old, he firmly understood the divide that separated his life at home from the life of the nearby village. Magic was everything, and as time went on he found more and more of Muggle life difficult to understand, but nevertheless, he still enjoyed the people there, the things they ate, how hard they worked to do so many simple things. When he wasn't crowding around the small candy shop with the muggle children or accidentally breaking their new CD walkmans by getting too close, he was at home, playing in the gardens that seemed to go on forever, or discovering new nooks and crannies to hide himself in at home.

The day his Hogwarts letter came in was an exciting, anxious day in the Vogel home. It was hardly unexpected, given that he was the son of a witch and had already been showing his own accidental, underage magic for several years, but unexpected does not mean uneventful. Together Mallory and his mother danced around the living room, holding the letter above their heads, passing it between them to read the scrawling message aloud. They talked all night about his mother's time at Hogwarts, her housemates, the homework and the tests and the adventures.

But for Purea, the letter brought with it all the fears and uncertainty she'd been hiding for almost eleven years. It had been so long since she'd last spoken with another witch or wizard or had any interaction with the magical world, and now — how could she avoid it, when her son needed books and supplies, when she had to take him to the train and see him off? She missed the magical world, but the anxiety she felt when she thought that it might mean running into her family again . . . She could bear it if they hated her for running away, but she was afraid of how much she would hate them in return if they hated Mallory.

In the end, though, she had nothing to fear. Even after several trips to Diagon Alley for supplies and trips all over Magical London to show Mallory the world he should have been born into, they never ran into any of the Vogel family. It was both a blessing and a disappointment for Purea. Though she tried to hide it, Mallory sensed his mother's anxiety, even if not its source, and tried to keep her happy to the best of his little eleven year old ability. He asked questions about every single thing they saw, all to keep her occupied, to draw her mind away from demons he couldn't guess at. And the more he asked and the more he learned about this world he should have known all his life, the more curious he became. About all of it. He had known magic in his mother's house and in her garden, but this was a whole world he was only just beginning to understand.

By the time he finally left for Hogwarts, a child who had always been curious had become consumed with a need to know, with a need to discover. It made his mother incredibly proud, and as she watched the train pull out of the station, she felt she no longer had anything to worry about. Her anxieties remained, but they were cushioned by an unshakable resolve; resolve in her love for her son, and resolve in seeing how Mallory had taken so easily to the magical world, that his curiosity and determination would see him through any hardship. That there was no reason to fear her family's reaction, whatever it might be and whenever it might come. In the end, there was no reason to be worried at all.

After that, Mallory's experiences at Hogwarts were largely typical. Being Sorted into Slytherin came as a small shock to his mother, who assumed he was a natural Ravenclaw, but she was no less proud. For Mallory's part, he didn't buy into the reputation of the house, and his motivations and personal expectations remained unchanged. Growing up with magic but largely exposed exclusively to the Muggle world, he dove into the wizarding school headfirst. With so many things to interest him, to capture his attention, he was quick to drop anything that bored him for even a moment, whether it was homework or people or knowledge. As for all of those events around the school, shaking hearts and foundations alike . . . well, maybe he was just too busy with some new idea or other to notice!

Electives:

• Care of Magical Creatures | Divination | Alchemy | Arithmancy

Pet:

Diana | Oriental Longhair Cat [1/4 Kneazle]| Black - Silver Fur | Green Eyes | Female

• A most elegant and nimble cat, Diana has been Mallory's closest companion for most of his life. In fact, she was his mother's cat before he was born, and seemed to have adopted him as her own kitten from much the time that he was born. Owing to her almost 20 years of age and large size, Mallory suspects she has some Kneazle blood in her. She is clever and quick, and makes no pretexts of who she does and does not like when it comes to the people around Mallory. At his laziest, sometimes it is only through Diana's pestering that Mallory gets any work done.