* ╰ benjamin wardsworth ; eighteen ; he/him —— wow, gideon prewett sure has changed. i guess he is feeling isolated from the other gryffindor members. guess you can’t really blame them. i still remember them being so allocentric & skilful now they just seem desolate & destructive. guess being a pureblood isn’t helping matters much either. i’m hopeful though. they’ll be just fine.
gideon prewett is used to getting everything he wants. from the moment he slipped out of the womb, he was the golden child. he was calm, collected, and charming on the verge of manipulative — he knew how to get what he wanted, you see, even in a home that had only so much money to give. but he was a good kid. a good friend, a good brother, a good son. he was charming through his kindness, through his three times too big heart which cared for others far before it cared for him.
but gideon’s care for others was far different to that of his twin’s. when fabian was outside, picket signs stabbed into the unruly front lawn, gideon was inside helping his mother prepare for dinner, or helping molly understand the difference between left and right. because you see, for gideon, it was always family first. while fabian concentrated on the greater wellbeing of the outside world, gideon slaved over his family and friends, always making sure they were happy. fabian had the outside world covered, anyway — and he trusted his brother more than anyone else in this world.
starting at hogwarts only solidified gideon’s place as the golden boy. almost immediately he was popular, and beloved by all. he excelled in all his classes, enrolled in as many extracurriculars as possible, tried out for the quidditch team where he earned his spot as keeper in his fifth year and just generally flourished. of course, things were slightly different for fabian, but that never changed their dynamic — no matter how different, fabian and gideon were always going to be best friends.
the war tried to change that, though — it really tried to hurt them. as tensions in the wizarding world started to bubble, fabian started to scream, and gideon wished he would shut his mouth. it’s not that gideon didn’t care about muggleborns and their rights to the magical world he was blessed to live in — it was more the fear of what might happen if they dug their fingers in too deep. he hated what the purists were trying to spread, but it wasn’t the prewett’s fight to have. the prewett’s had long been a pureblood family, and if they spoke too loud, they were bound to put a target on their backs. just as when they were kids, fabian cared about the world but gideon cared about his world. about his family.
they fought for months over who was ‘right’. fabian said gideon was too casual — gideon said fabian was too loud. they didn’t have to get involved, they didn’t they didn’t they didn’t.
and then they were.
gideon doesn’t remember anything before he woke up in a dark and damp room one late august evening. one minute he was saying good night to his brother after a particularly nasty argument — the next he was alone, terrified, a bruise forming above his eye. he thought it was temporary, he’d be home soon, it was a nightmare. but the bruises kept coming, the scars kept forming, and slowly gideon’s mind was turned from a bright and tight space to a dark, empty void. the days were a blur, the faces masked and the voices muffled. he wasn’t tortured for information, he was just tortured. maybe it was payback for fabian’s loud mouth — maybe they didn’t even know who he was. but he was damaged beyond repair in that small little basement.
and then once again, it goes blank. one minute he’s screaming for mercy, the next he’s awoken on his doorstep at home to the sound of his mother screaming. authorities swarm their home, dumbledore sweeps in to whisk him away to hogwarts, his parents follow his every move. it’s all just another blur. they ask what happened, but the truth is he doesn’t know. he thought he was going to die, that is the only truth he knows.
the real truth is this — the death eaters kept him for months in that basement, using physical and psychological torture to tear down the once untouchable boy. they relished in his pain for months before recognising just how much they broke him — and realising that he could act as the perfect example to what could happen to anyone who step out of line, as long as they returned him. but of course, he’d seen a lot — and so they wiped his memory of everything except the trauma, they allowed him to tell the story of the hell he’d endured, but he’d be useless to any investigation they might’ve had. perfect.
they were right, of course. gideon is useless, and he’s broken. he is a hollowed form of the boy that used to be. he is paranoid and filled with rage and unable to talk to anyone without the incredible urge to snap their head off. he craves that empty feeling now — better to be empty than to feel all that has brought him so much pain.
for all the bad change that has occurred now, there is one good that the death eaters had never accounted for — gideon is ready to fight. where once he didn’t care about the war, now he has no choice. he will never let anyone endure what he had to, especially not his family. he’s been broken, but that has somehow only made him stronger — he’s invincible because he doesn’t care anymore if he gets hurt. he’s been hurt. he would rather die fighting than sit back now.
tl;dr gideon was perfect until he wasn’t. he was a golden boy who had everything, and the death eaters tore him down to nothing. he has distanced himself from everyone and everything with the intent to fight for a better world. he is not the same person he was, and don’t expect him to be. war changes you.
