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backstory [2026/03/07 20:05] – [The Years Away (Ages 17–24)] harryhbackstory [2026/03/07 21:26] (current) – harryh
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-====== Harrison 'Harry' Hargreaves — Character History ======+====== Harrison 'Harry' Hargreeves — Character History ======
 //formerly Harrison Green · he/they · Wild Magic Sorcerer// //formerly Harrison Green · he/they · Wild Magic Sorcerer//
  
 > "The hardest thing about approval is that once you've had it, you spend the rest of your life knowing exactly what you're missing." > "The hardest thing about approval is that once you've had it, you spend the rest of your life knowing exactly what you're missing."
 +
 +----
 +
 +===== Personality =====
 +
 +Harry is quiet in company in a way that reads as passive but isn't. He has spent a long time being talked over and talked around, and he learned early that the most useful thing you can do in a room full of people performing at each other is to stop performing and start listening. He misses very little. He acts on what he notices selectively and without announcement.
 +
 +He is careful with his emotions — not closed off, but deliberate. He grew up in an environment where emotional expression had consequences, where a surge of feeling could move furniture or shatter glass, and where the clinical staff wrote down everything they observed. He learned to keep the volume low. After seven years away he's made peace with the fact that this is simply how he's built, and stopped trying to be louder than he is.
 +
 +Underneath the quietness he is genuinely warm. It takes time to find and he doesn't offer it freely, but it's there — in the way he remembers what people have told him, in the way he notices when something is wrong before anyone has said anything, in the way he stayed curious about the siblings for seven years of absence rather than letting them become abstractions.
 +
 +He has dark humour, deployed sparingly. He is perceptive to the point of being occasionally unsettling. He is not above saying the thing nobody else in the room is willing to say, as long as it's true.
 +
 +----
 +
 +===== Ideals =====
 +
 +**Honesty.** Harry would rather say a hard thing than a comfortable one. Not brutally — he's not interested in honesty as a weapon — but cleanly, because he has spent his life in environments where things were not said plainly and he knows the cost of that. A truth that lands badly is still more useful than a lie that lands well. He applies this to himself too, which is why his journal reads the way it does: no softening, no performance, just the thing as it actually is.
 +
 +**Understanding.** He wants to know why things are the way they are. Why the father made the choices he made. Why the siblings became what they became. Why the house did what it did to each of them. Not to use the information — not primarily — but because not knowing is a specific kind of weight and he has been carrying it for years. The answers in the mansion's files are one of the real reasons he came back.
 +
 +----
 +
 +===== Bonds =====
 +
 +**The siblings.** Complicated, unresolved, and still his regardless. He left without saying goodbye and carried them for seven years anyway — in journal entries, in the family photograph, in the specific ongoing project of trying to understand who they were and what happened to them. They are the people he is most himself around, even now, even after everything. Possibly because they're the only ones who knew him when he was still becoming whoever he is.
 +
 +**The journal.** Rhys gave it to him at twelve — a plain book, no explanation beyond //everyone should have somewhere to put things that don't go anywhere else.// Harry has been putting things there ever since, in variations of that same book, for twelve years. It is the only unbroken record of who he has been. He carried it out through the rear wall at seventeen and it has been with him every day since. If he lost it he would be fine. He would also be, in some way he couldn't fully articulate, significantly less whole.
 +
 +----
 +
 +===== Flaws =====
 +
 +**He waits to be believed rather than asking for it.** This is the wound that runs deepest and expresses itself most quietly. Harry has spent his life noticing things, knowing things, arriving at correct conclusions — and not being believed, or not being asked, or simply not being in the room when the conversation happened. He learned to hold what he knew and wait for the moment it became useful, and he never fully unlearned it. The cost is that people who don't know him well read the waiting as withholding, as coolness, as disinterest. Some of them are not entirely wrong. He is withholding — not manipulatively, but protectively, because offering the thing and being dismissed is worse than not offering it at all.
 +
 +**The seven years are not easily explained.** He left, he was gone, he came back. That's the summary. The middle section — the depots, the warehouse, the farm work, the flat with the east-facing window, the slow process of building a life without any of the context that usually scaffolds one — doesn't compress into a conversation. He doesn't always try to make it. This means people fill the gap with their own interpretation, and their interpretation is sometimes unflattering, and Harry accepts this with a patience that occasionally tips into resignation.
 +
 +He is working on asking for things more directly. Progress is slow.
  
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 The other children were there from the beginning, each of them strange in their own ways. He learned their numbers before he learned their names — the household ran on numbers, names were for public appearances — and memorised the unspoken rules of the group the way you memorise the rules of any institution you depend on for survival. The other children were there from the beginning, each of them strange in their own ways. He learned their numbers before he learned their names — the household ran on numbers, names were for public appearances — and memorised the unspoken rules of the group the way you memorise the rules of any institution you depend on for survival.
  
-**Reginald Hargreaves** — the father — was attentive. Not warmly; Harrison would understand that distinction later, once he had enough context to name it. But with the particular focused intensity of someone who has found something interesting and wants to understand it completely. He asked questions. He listened to the answers. He watched. For a child hungry for that quality of attention, it was close enough to what he needed that he didn't examine the shape of it too closely.+**Reginald Hargreeves** — the father — was attentive. Not warmly; Harrison would understand that distinction later, once he had enough context to name it. But with the particular focused intensity of someone who has found something interesting and wants to understand it completely. He asked questions. He listened to the answers. He watched. For a child hungry for that quality of attention, it was close enough to what he needed that he didn't examine the shape of it too closely.
  
 From early on, Harrison was singled out. Pulled from group activities for individual sessions in the clinical rooms on the east side of the ground floor: white walls, instruments he didn't have names for, staff who wrote things down without explaining what they were writing. He was kept for hours and returned quieter, inclined to keep to himself. He didn't mind. The father was present at those sessions, which meant the father was paying attention, which was the closest thing to good he knew how to name. From early on, Harrison was singled out. Pulled from group activities for individual sessions in the clinical rooms on the east side of the ground floor: white walls, instruments he didn't have names for, staff who wrote things down without explaining what they were writing. He was kept for hours and returned quieter, inclined to keep to himself. He didn't mind. The father was present at those sessions, which meant the father was paying attention, which was the closest thing to good he knew how to name.
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 The solicitor's letter arrived on an ordinary morning and used his new name. The solicitor's letter arrived on an ordinary morning and used his new name.
  
-That was the first thing he noticed. Not the news — which landed heavily and required sitting with — but the name. Harrison Hargreaves. Someone had been paying close enough attention to know he'd changed it, and had ensured the letter found the right person. The father was dead. The will summoned him by name.+That was the first thing he noticed. Not the news — which landed heavily and required sitting with — but the name. Harrison Hargreeves. Someone had been paying close enough attention to know he'd changed it, and had ensured the letter found the right person. The father was dead. The will summoned him by name.
  
 He made two cups of tea. He stood at the window. He read the letter four times. He made two cups of tea. He stood at the window. He read the letter four times.
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 He is going back because the letter used his name. He is going back because there are siblings he has not seen in seven years and some of them he left things unfinished with. He is going back because whatever the father left behind will cause damage in the wrong hands, and he knows this household well enough to know there are several wrong pairs of hands in it. He is going back because the mansion contains documentation he has never had access to — records, notes, observation reports from every session he ever attended — and the father cannot stop him from reading them now. He is going back because the letter used his name. He is going back because there are siblings he has not seen in seven years and some of them he left things unfinished with. He is going back because whatever the father left behind will cause damage in the wrong hands, and he knows this household well enough to know there are several wrong pairs of hands in it. He is going back because the mansion contains documentation he has never had access to — records, notes, observation reports from every session he ever attended — and the father cannot stop him from reading them now.
  
-He is going back because he never stopped being Harrison Hargreaves, even when he was trying to be someone else, and the name he chose is the name on the letter, and when your name is called you answer.+He is going back because he never stopped being Harrison Hargreeves, even when he was trying to be someone else, and the name he chose is the name on the letter, and when your name is called you answer.
  
 ---- ----
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 ===== People ===== ===== People =====
  
-==== Reginald Hargreaves ====+==== Reginald Hargreeves ====
 The father. Dead now, which means the story Harry has been carrying for twenty years has calcified into something that cannot be revised by the subject of it. Harry's feelings about Reginald are not clean and have never been clean and he has stopped expecting them to become so. The man was precise, intensely interested, and in possession of a quality of attention that Harry has spent his adult life not chasing. He was also the architect of the suppression, the sidelining, and a childhood spent believing the problem was the child. Harry holds both things. He took the man's name. That is the most honest thing he has done in his life, and the most complicated. The father. Dead now, which means the story Harry has been carrying for twenty years has calcified into something that cannot be revised by the subject of it. Harry's feelings about Reginald are not clean and have never been clean and he has stopped expecting them to become so. The man was precise, intensely interested, and in possession of a quality of attention that Harry has spent his adult life not chasing. He was also the architect of the suppression, the sidelining, and a childhood spent believing the problem was the child. Harry holds both things. He took the man's name. That is the most honest thing he has done in his life, and the most complicated.
  
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 ===== At a Glance ===== ===== At a Glance =====
  
-^ Full name    | Harrison Hargreaves (born Harrison Green)  | +^ Full name    | Harrison Hargreeves (born Harrison Green)   | 
-^ Known as     | Harry                                       |+^ Known as     | Harry, Number #                             |
 ^ Age          | 24                                          | ^ Age          | 24                                          |
 ^ Pronouns     | he / they                                   | ^ Pronouns     | he / they                                   |
 ^ Gender       | Genderfluid, male                           | ^ Gender       | Genderfluid, male                           |
 ^ Number       | TBC — assigned by DM                        | ^ Number       | TBC — assigned by DM                        |
-^ Species      | Variant Human (Changeling under discussion) |+^ Alignment    | Neutral Good, Harry does what he thinks is right. Institutional authority, family hierarchy, and inherited rules don't factor into that calculus much — the compass is his own and it points where it points. | 
 +^ Species      | Changeling                                  |
 ^ Background   | Haunted One                                 | ^ Background   | Haunted One                                 |
 ^ Class        | Wild Magic Sorcerer, Level 3                | ^ Class        | Wild Magic Sorcerer, Level 3                |
-^ Ability      | Telekinesis — high ceiling, emotionally volatile |+^ Ability      | Molecular malleability, leading to shape-changing and telekinesis (high ceiling, emotionally volatile) |
 ^ Core wound   | He had the approval once. He knows what losing it feels like. | ^ Core wound   | He had the approval once. He knows what losing it feels like. |
 ^ Wants        | To be counted. To understand what the father actually was to him. | ^ Wants        | To be counted. To understand what the father actually was to him. |
 ^ Fears        | That the answer to those two things are connected and equally bad. | ^ Fears        | That the answer to those two things are connected and equally bad. |
 ^ Carries      | His journal. A family photo. The name he chose. 130 gp. | ^ Carries      | His journal. A family photo. The name he chose. 130 gp. |

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