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Benjamin Avery is a sixty-seven year old water elemental who has attended Hogwarts during his school days, having married Margret Yaxley, aged eighteen at the time, at the age of forty-six, just because he needed a heir to pass the family name and the Avery legacy to. He never loved his wife - nor did he have to, according to the definition of arranged marriages - but she reminded him of youth and, at first, it wasn’t as bad. Though an emotionally closed off, pragmatic person who put too much heart into reading, finding out as much about the world as possible and none at all in human interactions, at first, he didn’t feel pure repulsion: she was of a good family and wasn’t lazy or disagreeable, too simple to bother with anything but exactly that and pure at heart. Yet, as soon as the child she gave birth to turned out to be a girl, the already fragile acceptance vanished into thin air. In that household, Benjamin felt like suffocating. He no longer cared about the legacies he would have left on the earth after his death, now knowing he had to make the best out of his time alive instead of planning what comes after. After all, he had a spectacular brain, which couldn’t be said about his wife and possibly their children. Thus, he didn’t try again, in hopes for a boy, but simply left them for the love of his life: knowledge. It was like he just needed to know everything, else it wouldn’t feel right. If his mediocre wife and child didn’t understand that eagerness to know, it was strictly their problem.
Yet, his daughter understood, and though her being sorted in Hufflepuff wasn’t a reason of joy any more than her birth was, she couldn’t not appreciate her thirst for the very things he craved, so he fed it to some extent, telling her about the wars, about the more interesting parts of history and even teaching her muggle Latin terms. Therefore, everything Lara Avery knows best is what he taught her - and she blindly listened to him, feeling so much admiration, so much respect for the absent father figure who only saw her for a couple of weeks a year if she was the one to visit him in Germany, where he’d isolated himself. Although not wanting to do her any harm though, Benjamin remains a hermit, a deep introvert and even interaction with his own daughter is consuming - let alone time wasting to some extent, in his opinion - so he ended up ignoring most of her owls. He is a busy man, after all, and can’t focus on the teenage girl’s every insignificant thought when his thoughts were shining like stars and burning to be put on paper and written about.
Being a young man seemed to have happened in another life, for nobody quite remembers the time when he didn’t look weary and experienced, but he used to care about more than just his books and studies. He used to have light in his eyes and he used to use his silver tongue to spit venom - something he was very much still able to do but rarely did, since he encountered with humans too little for any kind of elaboration. However, now he seemes to have completely forgotten youth in favor of intellect and is fading away just to take in as much knowledge as possible, which is, in his opinion, the minimum price to pay to begin with, so it hardly matters.