Millicent Bulstrode had a perfectly normal, healthy childhood. She was completely doted on by both of her parents, the apple of her older brothers’ eyes, and the fact that she was, in fact, quite large for her size, never played into how people treated her or how she treated others at all. In fact, nobody ever realized how much space she took up in a room ever! She’d practically blend in with the wall if it weren’t for how loud and extroverted she was all the time. She won countless amounts of beauty pageants for young pureblood girls and every summer, her family would vacation in exotic places, even letting her choose from her hundreds of friends for a companion or two to bring along just so she wouldn’t get bored. Her life was most definitely a charmed one.
Except not a single word of that was true.
In her dreams, maybe, but dreams weren’t reality. Reality was that Millicent was a mistake. An accidental pregnancy ten years after her youngest older brother had been born that convinced her father, Bertram, that she was the result of an affair her mother Cecily had with their solicitor. The affair hadn’t existed, but Bertram was a jealous and insecure man, so had decided that if he believed it to be true, it was, and when Millicent was born, had her registered as a halfblood rather than her true status as a pureblood and refused to sign his name on the birth certificate. Thankfully, St. Mungos did keep genuine records of magical births, so later on in life Millie was able to get her records sorted, but that’s not important right now.
The one thing Bertram couldn’t account for was that his sons, Edward, Henry and Richard, would actually like their sister enough to not obey his orders to pretend she didn’t exist. When Cecily brought her home, all three boys doted on Millicent, and as she grew older, it was her brothers and mother that helped her learn the basics of how to be a functional human being.
Her magic manifested when she was eight years old and flying on the back of her mother’s broom with her while the family played a pick up game of quidditch. Cecily was a chaser (she’d been one for Ravenclaw back in the day) and somebody had hit a bludger straight at her right. Millie had screamed and a defensive shield had gone up, obstructing the bludger’s path, but unfortunately knocking Millie and her mother off of their broom. Everything happened so fast after that, she remembered watching her brothers fly towards her and reaching out, but they all flew past to try and catch Cecily. Millicent was caught halfway to the ground by her cousin Marcus and carried to safety. Cecily hadn’t been so lucky. Most of her injuries had been able to be healed, but she’d been knocked into some sort of coma and even the best team at St. Mungos couldn’t figure out how to bring her out of it.
Bertram blamed Millicent, of course, and her brothers, who had once been her protectors, took his side this time. She blamed herself as well, visiting her mother daily and doing everything she could to help maintain the household as best as she could, taking care of her family despite them not really wanting anything to do with her. With nobody to talk to save for her comatose mother, Millicent ate the majority of her feelings, and when her brothers started bullying her for the weight she’d gained, started fighting back. She focused on good things in her life, like her cousin Marcus, who helped her build her flying and quidditch skills before she was able to use her own magic to do so herself, and the stray cat, Desdemona, that she’d found as a kitten and decided would be her best friend.
Her mother woke up from her coma just before Millie’s tenth birthday and things got a little better. She was allowed to join the WWWS and for the first time in her life she made actual friends, even if she constantly felt like she stuck out like a sore thumb among them all. For almost an entire year, everything was good and she got to genuinely enjoy the excitement of being the Pureblood Society girl she was meant to be.
The Bulstrode’s house elf Twinkie found Cecily Bulstrode dead in the bathtub just two weeks before Millicent was supposed to leave for Hogwarts.
Hogwarts was supposed to be a new beginning for Millicent, a place to reinvent herself. Instead, it became fuel for every detrimental aspect of her tween life. She was reclusive and aggressive. The girls she’d met through WWWS took her under their protective wing and in return, Millie protected them like her life depended on it. She hadn’t saved her mother, but if somebody said something bad about Pansy Parkinson’s pug face, they’d be answering to Millicent’s fist. She was overly aggressive to the point that once Marcus made quidditch captain and was afforded extra privileges, he used to take her to the pitch during down time to beat bludgers to deal with her anger so she wouldn’t get any more points docked from Slytherin. It helped to even her temper out quite a bit, and transform a lot of her bulk into muscle, so by the time she made it to fifth year, Millie had more confidence not just in her quidditch abilities, but in herself.
The confidence was noticeable too. She didn’t hide behind Pansy and Daphne anymore when hanging out in groups and she didn’t keep to herself in dark corners when she was alone anymore. She started seeing her curves as an asset instead of something to be ashamed of and while she didn’t start dressing scandalously or anything, she dressed to show them off rather than to hide them in the potato-sack like styles she used to wear. On a roll, she tried out for quidditch despite knowing the unlikeliness of her making the traditionally all-male house team, and even though she was only brought on as a second string beater as a back-up to Crabbe and Goyle at first, she counted it as a victory and knew it was the in that she needed.
She wasn’t used to being the center of attention, but Millicent definitely liked it, especially when it meant that for the first time ever, some of that attention came from boys. She first heard that Miles Bletchley, a seventh year, had a crush on her after she’d gotten to play for a whole twenty minutes in their game against Hufflepuff and she’d put one of their chasers in the hospital wing. Millie, who’d been told shortly after her mother passed that she should forget all the delusions she might have of being married off because nobody would want her, allowed herself to actually be optimistic for once. They went on a date to Hogsmeade and he convinced her to go back to his room with him, Millie accepted, thinking she’d be finally getting her first kiss, only to get her… well. She got her first everything else but the kiss, but when she left his room she had a boyfriend and she thought that was better than nothing. It wasn’t the romanticized relationship she’d expected after hearing stories of Pansy & Draco’s exploits together, but not everybody was the same. The ‘relationship’ lasted a month before Pansy called her out and confronted her about how utterly miserable she was and forced her to call it off. After that, Millie hooked up with a few other upperclassmen, not realizing they all seemed to want the same thing, to fuck her in private and basically ignore her existence in public. It hurt, and she was ashamed of herself for being that desperate for love that she would settle for something so mediocre as a substitute.
It’s what made her say yes when Vincent Crabbe asked her out at the end of fifth year, confessing a crush (that had probably been the reason she’d been able to get so much playing time on the quidditch pitch that year) that he’d apparently harbored for quite some time. He wasn’t afraid to flaunt it, and even though Millie wasn’t supremely attracted to him, he’d held her hand on the Hogwarts Express ride home and he kissed her before he ever tried anything else. He tasted like salami and Millie had needed to vomit shortly after, but that was beside the point. They’d dated for a few weeks of that summer, but Millie eventually broke things off because every owl she received from him was written in crayon and talk about Malfoy and Goyle and not once even asking about her, and she could just hear Pansy’s voice in her head saying that she deserved better than that. They decided to just be friends and he thankfully harbored no ill will towards her, which Millicent suspected was due to him being secretly in love with both of his besties and not realizing it yet.
Sixth year started the thing with Blaise Zabini that’s had more impact on who she is today than Millicent will ever admit to anybody ever. They didn’t have a torrid love affair or anything like that, but he’d shown interest in her at the start of the year and Millie had talked to him one on one for the first time and found him to be quite entertaining, not to mention ridiculously easy on the eyes. He ended up being her first real snog, and though she’d lost her virginity the year before, she likes to remember Blaise as being her first. He was the only one who cared to find out what she liked and who helped guide her through things, not so much critiquing her methods, but offering suggestions as to what would make something more enjoyable for her. It was easy to fall for him, and to fall into a relationship with him for a bit. It lasted a few months before they both got distracted by quidditch responsibilities and massive amounts of work and went their separate ways. Millicent may have gone through a bit of a regression and turned back into the angry and overly aggressive version of herself when Blaise started dating Daphne, but after a weekend visit to her cousin where she got to fly with some of the actual Falmouth Falcons, she set her goals on her career rather than finding a good match for herself and being able to potentially get married and start a family of her own one day. She’d get famous instead, make her own money, and if somebody decided to love her on the way, so be it.
It turned out to be a good goal to have, and once Blaise and Daphne were over, he and Millie went back to what they were doing, except this time without a title. It’s lasted since then as well. Through the war, and as each of them started their respective quidditch careers. There have been plenty of other men in Millicent’s life and she’s sure Blaise has a list a mile long of women he’s wooed, but they’re one of the public’s favorite ‘will they or won’t they’ pairings and Millie secretly loves it.
Currently, Millie is playing quidditch professionally as a beater and is one of the best in the league, ranked number seven on the list of both male AND female beaters combined and second on the list of females. She’s just been traded to the Holyhead Harpies from the Falmouth Falcons and is getting used to playing alongside women instead of men. Outside of her comfort zone for the first time, she’s having to depend on people she’d normally never associate with in order to get a leg up and is under pressure to live up to the hype that’s currently surrounding her career. She’s predicted to be the best female beater in the league in the next year or so, and break the top five for the list of best beaters of any sex and she doesn’t want to disappoint.
She has little to no contact with her father and brothers anymore. She sends them tickets to all of her games but they’ve never shown up, but Millie still tries, showing up to events that are important to them like the Hippogriff Derby to try and support them as best as she can in hopes that one day they’ll realize she’s not that bad. She’s lonelier than she likes to let on, but thankful that her friends are still around and still there to hold her up whenever she’s down.
