Maren Teague, 28, Hufflepuff Alum, Skyler Samuels FC, CLOSED, original character.
Birthday: January 4
Blood Status: Halfblood
Gender & Pronouns: Cis-female, she/her
Occupation: Mediwitch
Sided with: Neutral
Positive Traits: self-possessed, articulate, hopeful, forthright, brave
Negative Traits: obdurate, single-minded, brusque, willful, disillusioned
Summary: It would be easy to look at Maren, with her soft smile and her airy, white blouses, and see a delicate, timid person, but to do so would be a mistake. There is steel wrapped in that silk, and it doesn’t take long to realize she’s a force to be reckoned with. Her hope has always been a stubborn thing with sharp teeth and hard eyes, and her quiet courage is of the enduring sort that looks on tempests and is not moved. She is unafraid of making her mind known, or bruising feelings while doing so. She is deeply rooted in herself, and she is not the kind of person you can just knock down. Still, for all her strength there is an almost cynical edge to her optimism. She has seen the world for the dark, hard place that it can be and she no longer expects good things to simply happen, but instead of giving up in the face of that, she has decided to bring them about herself.
(tw: death of a parent, injury)
As a small child, Maren thought she was a princess, and her mother a beautiful queen, all part of the happily ever after at the end of a fairytale. In many ways, she wasn’t wrong. Daveth Teague and Viola Sayer married for love, and despite the objections of Daveth’s pureblood family. Viola’s mixed heritage was never a problem for Daveth, he loved her for everything she was that he was not; passionate to his level-headed, gregarious to his reserved, whimsical to his practical. Together they lived in a comfortable house in Falmouth where Daveth managed the Falcons, Viola performed in the local community theatre, and Maren had plenty of children to play with, both muggle and wixen. At night Daveth read her bedtime stories and Viola sang her to sleep. For a while, everything was perfect. Then, it all came tumbling down when Viola died suddenly, leaving behind a devastated daughter and a hollow husband.
With Viola gone and Daveth lost to his grief, Jenifer Teague reluctantly stepped in to raise her granddaughter. This would have gone smoothly, were it not for the one secret Daveth and Viola had kept from their extended family; Maren had yet to show any signs of magic. Horrified that her only grandchild might be a squib, Jenifer was determined to force Maren’s magic to the surface. Thus began a series of tricks, traps, and tests designed to draw out Maren’s magical ability, sometimes with disastrous results. When a particularly fraught incident necessitated a hasty trip to St. Mungo’s and ended with Maren completely deaf in her right ear and hard of hearing in her left, Daveth finally put his foot down. There would be no further attempts to spark Maren’s magic; if she was a squib, she was a squib, and they would just have to deal with it. It was the first time Daveth truly acted like a father since his wife’s death, but it ended up being a moot point. It turned out Maren had been using her magic for years to play Viola’s old records on a gramophone no one realized was broken, and the Hogwarts letter that confirmed Maren’s ability arrived promptly on her eleventh birthday.
For most of Maren’s childhood, even going to Hogwarts seemed like too much to hope for, so when the time came, she told herself that it was enough to simply be attending the school. She tried not to have any expectations, but the truth was she desperately wanted to be sorted into Ravenclaw, like her mother. Of course, the Sorting Hat had its own ideas and, despite Maren’s strenuous objections, promptly placed her in Hufflepuff. At first Maren resented her sorting, but eventually she had to admit that the Hat had been right. In Hufflepuff Maren found friendship and acceptance. Her housemates didn’t mind that she wore a hearing aid or sometimes struggled to follow a conversation, and several even asked her to teach them sign language. An eye on the prize type of person, Maren worked hard to do well in her classes, already knowing what she wanted to do with her life, and climbed respectably high in the rankings.
Socially, Maren had a knack for being on good terms with all but the most disagreeable of her peers. She was well liked across all the houses, and she gathered a tight knit group of friends over the years. While not the kind of person who put on a mask to blend into whatever setting they found themselves in, she was a sort of social chameleon. She could debate lipstick brands with the girliest of the girls and toss a quaffle around with the best of the jocks. Her dedication to her studies impressed the other academics who haunted the library. The people who disliked her generally thought she was too perfect, too golden, or they were people she’d turned down when they asked her out. Because as outgoing and friendly as Maren was, one thing she most certainly was not was interested in romance. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in love, it was that she knew it was dangerous. She’d watched love turn her father into an empty workaholic who ignored the people who needed him, and she would never let that happen to her.
(tw: injury, medical related)
After graduation, Maren moved to London to pursue her dream of becoming a mediwitch. When she was injured as a child, it was the quick thinking of a mediwitch that saved some of her hearing in her left ear, and Maren wanted to pay that forward. In the face of all the hatred and death the war brought out as it raged on, she wanted to make things a little better. She wanted to heal, to put some good back into the world. Maren worked just as hard at her mediwitch training as she had at her classes at Hogwarts. She quickly gained a reputation for remaining level headed in the most stressful of crises, and for handling obstinate or even downright rude patients with a polite smile and a firm hand. By the time she finished her training, Maren was one of the most respected mediwitches at St. Mungo’s, despite her young age.
For the most part, Maren was not interested in fighting in the war. She didn’t agree with the blood purists, but she thought the vigilantes opposing them were making things worse by answering violence with more violence. She didn’t think about how being a mediwitch would bring her face to face with the war’s aftermath. Her job meant she was often one of the first people on the scene after an attack or altercation. Every day at work she saw not only the casualties of the war, but the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. She treated injuries and patched up wounds regardless of what side a patient had chosen, or if they’d even chosen at all. It didn’t stop when she left St. Mungo’s, either. It wasn’t unusual for one or two of her old friends from Hogwarts, often with a new friend in tow, to show up at her flat at odd hours with injuries they didn’t want to take to an on the clock healer. Maren knew, or at least strongly suspected, that she was treating some of the vigilantes who so frustrated her, but they were still her friends, and they were still people in need.
It was on just such a night that Caradoc Dearborn walked into Maren’s life, or was dragged into it, rather, as he’d been in no shape to walk on his own two feet at the time. Still, that didn’t stop him from asking her out as he nearly bled out on her kitchen table. Maren’s response was to tip a sleeping draught down his throat, ostensibly for the pain, but she could still feel his cocksure grin against her hand as she held it over his nose and mouth to force him to swallow. What followed was almost a year of back and forth as Maren gave him the cold shoulder and Caradoc wore her down with that same easy grin on his face. Because although he never stopped asking her out, he never did it while she was working, on or off the clock, and when she told him to follow up on his initial injury with St. Mungo’s he did so without complaint, slipping in and out of the building the next day with her only hearing of it later. He learned sign language, to always walk on her left side, and even how to make proper Cornish fairings. More than anything, he was patient, and willing to give Maren as much time as she needed to make up her mind. So somewhere amidst arguing about his involvement with the Order and her insistence on nonviolence, going for walks along the Thames, and critiquing the London pasty scene, Maren slipped into love so gently that she barely even realized what was happening.
For someone who opposed the war, it touched every part of her life. When she wasn’t working on its front lines or falling in love with one of its soldiers, Maren fought it in her own way. She developed a name for herself as a vocal critic of the Ministry, probably earning a place on some anarchist watchlist in the process. She censured the government’s lack of response when the threat began years ago, attacking the way politicians had ignored the growing warning signs in favor of growing their poll numbers. She condemned the Minister’s neutrality and called it out for what it was, cowardice. The Ministry and its officials were in a position to end the war, could have stopped it before it even started, but were afraid of the backlash from the wealthy elite that aggressive legislation targeting hate groups and blood prejudice would cause. She put the people in charge on trial in the court of public opinion and she made them sweat. Maren was not someone who thought violence was the answer, but she’d never been one to sit down and shut up, either.
Though it might be easy to miss just by looking at her, Maren was no stranger to loss. She’d grown up with it, raised by a mother who was three parts story and only one part memory. As the war took its toll on the people she loved, Maren walked beside them in their pain, carrying their grief with as much grace as she’d always carried hers. It all proved to be a dress rehearsal for her own tragedy when Caradoc went missing only weeks after Maren’s twenty-seventh birthday. It was a cruel subversion of their courtship as the hope slowly drained away. “I’m sure he’ll turn up” became, “we’ll find the body soon,” until it was simply, “missing, presumed dead.” After burying an empty casket, Maren allowed herself one week to grieve. She had one week for sitting on the floor in Caradoc’s old clothes, for breaking down in the kitchen, for standing listless on the other side of her front door while she ignored her friends’ knocking. Then she put her heart back on lockdown. She tied up her hair, put on her lipstick, and went back to work. The world outside hadn’t ended, nor had its war, so neither would she.
In the wake of Caradoc’s disappearance, Maren refused to turn into her father. She would not let her grief eat her alive, making her a barely breathing shell of a person. So she threw herself into her work, she made plans with friends, and she went out on her days off. She did whatever she could to keep herself busy enough that when she fell into bed at night she was too exhausted to cry herself to sleep. Some people say Maren should have hope, that Caradoc might still be out there somewhere, but Maren knows it’s not true. There’s a pit in her stomach, a hollowness in her heart, an ache in her bones that tells her he’s gone. It’s been over a year, and if he could come back to her he would have by now, of that she’s certain. As time goes on, Maren finds that she is crying less and her smiles are slowly becoming more genuine. She knows this means she’s healing, but part of her doesn’t want to. Part of her feels guilty for moving on, as if she’s abandoning the man she loved.
Maren distracts herself with the same things she’s always distracted herself with: her friends, work, politics. She loves that some of her friends are starting to have kids and dotes on each and every little one as if they were her own. She’s learning what it means to be a mediwitch in peace times, when there aren’t rallies turning into riots or terrorist attacks on civilians. Most of all, she’s keeping close tabs on the shiny, new Minister of Magic. She had no opinion on Albus Dumbledore when he was simply the odd and somewhat grandfatherly headmaster of Hogwarts, but learning that he’d founded the Order of the Phoenix was a red flag for Maren, and his smooth ascent to power put her on guard. Coming of age under the looming shadow of war had taught her not to blindly trust the people in power and that hasn’t changed now that the war is over, even if some of the people Dumbledore’s put in power are her friends.
Xenophilius Lovegood: Sure, the individual is a little kooky, but in them and, more importantly, their magazine Maren has found a platform for her anti-ministry opinions. Just like Maren, Xeno isn’t afraid to question those in power and hold them accountable for their actions and she has nothing but respect for that.
Frank Longbottom: Close since their earliest days at Hogwarts, rumors that they were more than friends flew throughout most of their school years, a fact that both amused and baffled Maren. To her, Frank is the sibling she never had, and their role in her life has always been far more important than a mere romantic interest.
Olivia Green: The two were close for a time, with differences becoming apparent once Olivia picked a side for the war. With things having come to an end, there is a chance to reconnect. It’s merely a matter of one of them deciding to offer an olive branch and Olivia proving to be hard to track down.
