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pcrkiss · 3 years

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A BRAMBLE ROSE.

name: doris arcine purkiss age: twenty four birthdate: december 8th. (☼ sagittarius) gender & pronouns: cis-female. she & her. blood type: halfblood house: ravenclaw sided with: neutral occupation. experimental spagyric alchemist

aesthetics — plant mom™, mad scientist but make it hippie, gold jewelry, alchemy periodicals stacked high, color coded notebooks, golden hour, dusky rose palleted macaroons, gel pen hearts drawn around portraits of paracelsus, multipage astrology charts, honey & lemons, standing with heart shaped glasses on infront of a 'no loitering sign', flower fields, shelves full of brightly colored glass bottles, midnight sidestreet kisses, sky writing, ex-boyfriend exit surveys, apology letters for “how i behaved during scrabble”

A SUMMARY.

+ Open Minded. Studious. Imaginative. Reliable. Audacious. - Tactless. Overly Romantic. Bad Judge of Character. Extravagant. Biased. Doris is a force of nature. Not like a hurricane — more like the sun: usually warm and relaxing, but under certain concentrated conditions fires start. Passing glances imprints the perception of a girl gentle, fanciful, easygoing — sometimes this impression is right on ( Doris is indeed a girl who loves sugar frosting and pink roses, who takes astrology too seriously, who falls in love often and to typically disastrous results). And other times... it's not.

She is the friend you call when you feel like you have been treated unfairly by higher powers ( Doris is notoriously known among her year-mates for the time a lazy investigation of performance altering potions usage got a friend of hers kicked off the Ravenclaw quidditch team and she retaliated by storming into the Headmaster's office armed with League bylaws and writing the Daily Prophet to report the school's negligent handling of a case related to a handicapped muggleborn seeker ). The one you take with you to buy a car because even if she knew nothing about automobiles the night before, come afternoon at the dealership she's a walking issue of Motor Trend magazine and isn't having any of the car dealer's bullshit about considering the Lexus over the Honda because of "what great transmission it has".

She is not the friend you call to help paint your kitchen, because what would begin as a simple change from dark blue walls to robin's egg will turn into a reorganizing of cabinet space, inclusion of an aesthetic gallery wall, and eight hours buying all new storage containers to match the changed color scheme. In short, Doris is intense, she is dedicated, she is idealistic. She is by no means an activist, too laser focused on her own ecosystem to worry about the world at large, but she has very firm ideals about how her world and the worlds of those she loves ought be and is relentless in ensuring that it be so.

A BACKSTORY.

growing up ...

Her father, long-time hence a smoky wisp of wistfulness and a handful of sense-memories to her mother, managed to be a great and long shadow to live in for the entirety of the Purkiss life-span by virtue of possessing magic. Wealthy debutante Rebecca Purkiss did not - muggle born, muggle bred, magic had stole in silver-quick and taken away any possible happiness in normality with a man in possession of extremely long fingers and distant-dark eyes and a tread silent enough for him to slip out of bed and leave in the night without even waking her from sound, sound sleep. He left behind a daughter, Doris, who was thereafter reared on romantic stories about her father, whose disappearance Rebecca attributed to some grand inescapable responsibility that called out from that secret otherworld.

Only the good remained in her idealized retrospection. Memories of walls washed in starlight with just a wand and a word. Of a bird whose plumage was pure flame before it flared and died and returned a chick inside it's mother of pearl cage. Of drinking a tincture that let her wear another woman's face and running through the night in Monte-Carlo right under the noses of her controlling parents. Those unbearably beautiful moments were best friend and dark lover and horrible influence all three: the woman sought out magic with the greedy, needy hunger of the desperate, for the gates of that glimpsed-at world to swing open once again. Magic frittered the money through her fingers; the mundane muggle kind of magic, rather than the real stuff: crystals and palm readers and spirit healers. The clatter-sway of too-heavy gypsy charmed amulets around her neck was the counterbalance to Doris learning to walk and learning to run and learning to believe and imagine and hold tight to beautiful unrealistic things even in the face of opposition. She learned from mother to give her heart away recklessly, to love what she liked and scowl at what she did not, to romanticize mystery.

Later comes a bigger tragedy than father's leaving: illness takes Rebecca when Doris is nine years old. So close, just two years shy of the day mother had always been dreaming of. Doris is placed into the care of her Uncle and Aunt, slotted in amongst their brood of five, displaced and feeling more like an orbiting satellite than system body to a family that is hers but not really. ‘Orphan’, her cousins' old money aristocratic playmates called her — although somewhere out there there’s a father, one who didn’t even leave a surname shucked behind him like abandoned snakeskin, only a daughter skidding and drifting in his wake. She is not like her prep school relatives, all champagne charm and pressed proper; too head in the clouds, too enthusiasm inventive, too blunt truth opinionated.

“What are we going to do with that girl?” her Uncle wonders after the third time an instructor sends a letter home from boarding school extolling on her sin of being bright but unrealistic and resistant to correction. Doris was her mother's daughter in the straightness of her spine, how her shoulders were thrown back, her chin raised as if daring anyone to try and tell her "no". Her aunt, at least, is more flexible: “Let her be. The world will have enough to say about who she ought to be without us getting involved.” Uncle and Aunt don't know she is well equipped for the world that finally comes knocking when she's eleven years old. The long awaited birthright folded into a letter with no postage pressed to the corner. It is addressed to Doris Purkiss, witch.

She likes Divination and Magical Theory, chocolate frogs and exploding snap, the taste of pumpkin juice as a young girl and a little later the warm bite of fire whiskey. She falls deeply in love with Alchemy and Herbology and often is found napping near the mandrakes on warm afternoons. Despite her blunt and brusque nature and a lack of finesse in Defense Against The Dark Arts, she was dearly loved by the bulk of the Hogwarts faculty. She had, of course, her detractors. Slughorn despised her from the time when she turned down his repeatedly insistent invitations to join the Slug Club by calling him "a flaccid yes-man coated with so much jaded self-worth". Argus Filch considered her, quite frankly, a menace and would have instated corporal punishment for her alone if not for the constraint of the Headmaster. And she became her own Head of House's archnemesis after the Quidditch debacle.

during the war ...

Out of Hogwarts she settled into a townhouse in Little Norton, paid for with her portion of Purkiss inheritance. A French style abode; high ceilings and skylights to let in the light and black iron spiral staircases and cozy greenhouse in the garden. Doris found initial gainful employ with the Wizarding Examinations Authority, drafting test questions for the Magical Theory and Alchemy portions of the N.E.W.T.s. The only ones whose dissatisfaction with her choice of career outpaced the academy 7th years who had to answer her essay queries was the Department of Intoxicating Substances, who in the years immediately following her leaving Hogwarts, had issued her no fewer than eight citations for new alcoholic substances developed as a byproduct of her experimentations with alchemic fermentation. The W.E.A. was an unburdensome job, which left her ample free time to engage in magical research and development, the nature of which was not always mundane enough for the Ministry's peace of mind.

Of course her transgressions became a comparative drop in the bucket as The Dark Lord's stranglehold of terror continued to tighten about the beating heart of Britain's Wizarding World. Fear was everywhere and though Doris wasn’t an exception, she claimed no allegiance anywhere. Vehemently rejected the doctrine espoused by the Dark Lord's followers, but hadn't the discipline and temperament to invite induction into the Order's clandestine ranks. Even the Ministry was a leery lukewarm enemy, courtesy long held tendency to buck against authority and those ever increasing reprimands from regulatory arms of the DMLE.

She channeled her efforts not into cause or country, but into those (good or ill) who claimed corners of her honeyed heart. And if she recognized the tell-tale signs of under eye weariness and old wounds on precious friends like the Potters, she did not waste time asking questions she knew they couldn't answer but continued turning up at door arms full of board games for best friend dinners and kept things-as-normal track of birthdays and anniversaries rather than letting them fall to the wayside behind the prioritization of war waging and perhaps she slipped a few extra herbs to heal and sooth into the home brewed wine she handed out amongst her social circle.

in the present ...

When the war ends and Voldemort falls at Dumbledore's feet and the flames of open war were doused it should be, it seems like, it sounds like victory. But Doris knows there's no such thing as equilibrium and change is constant, inescapable bedfellow. Battles may have no longer been wholescale, all consuming, at yet it seemed like conflict continued to creep. For Doris, this moreso than fires in fields and blood letting pricks her sense of danger, for the tensions that eased into everyday like by inches (small but inexorable) feels like the tide before a tidal wave. She had sneered and bit at institutionalized systems often enough to understand that more than grand cowled evil, it's the attrition of bloodless bureaucracy that can shred the fabric of a society.

#𝖉𝖊𝖛 : info & headcanon

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