Nicknames:
Birthdate: February 25th, 1862
Current Age: 31 Years
Gender: Male, perceived male
Occupation: Unspeakable
Reputation: 9 — mostly respectable. In 1890 his fiancee suddenly and inexplicably ended their engagement and those close to him would have known he took it very poorly, but he's since pulled himself together. Keeps to himself, mostly. A little odd, but not loudly so.
Residence: Family estate in the Cotswolds
Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff
Wand: 13 1/2" Hazel and dragon heartstring, whippy
Blood Status: Pureblood
Social Class: Middle class
Family: What's noteworthy:
— Ezra's mother is alive and emotionally distant.
— Ezra is the oldest surviving son.
— Outsiders would not deem Ezra "close" with any of his siblings, but they understand each other in their own peculiar way.
Appearance:
General | Tall, lean body. Dusky skin tone. Dark hair that he prefers to wear long. It is not unusual to catch him somewhere in the process of growing a beard, but it is unusual for him to keep a fully realized beard in peace very long.History:
Expressions | Ezra's expressions are severe and sincere, and the authenticity only serves to make them all the more dramatic to observers. When he's up his smiles are wide and blinding. When he's down, his furrowed brow could very easily manifest its own thundercloud. When he forces himself to put on an expression contrary to how he's feeling (which he does more and more frequently, these days) it's usually fairly obvious that he's masking; it slips every few seconds and his real feelings shine through.
Deportment | When they're close, he's tense. These days he's wound tighter than a spring. He carries most of it in his shoulders.
Fashion | When things are going well, Ezra dresses neatly enough and takes care of himself; when things are not going well that's one of the first things to go. He'll stop paying attention to whether he's wearing all the proper accessories before he leaves a house — in some dire cases even going out in winter without even his coat. He'll also lose things throughout the day, and if he loses something when things are bad it's unlikely he'll replace it soon. Fortunately his Ministry robes mask a lot of this — there's not so much to think about, and it's less telling if they're wrinkled. Wizard robes in general are sometimes a sign that things are going poorly — far less work than suits, aren't they?
Scent | When he can be bothered to follow a proper hygiene routine: sage and rosemary.
Face Claim | Justin Baldoni
Beginnings1862 — Ezra is born in a comfortable estate in the Cotswolds. In subsequent years he is joined by siblings and has a fairly standard upbringing. His father is involved in his mentorship and upbringing moreso than his mother, at least initially. By the time Ezra was approaching Hogwarts age, his father had already begun to veer a little off-course, mentally. He was never formally diagnosed with anything in particular, but in the decade or so that followed his ability to say anything relevant to the conversation at hand steadily deteriorated.
1873 — At Hogwarts Ezra became a Hufflepuff, and a fast friend to a handful of other boys in his year. He was interested in everything, initially; inquisitive and endlessly enthusiastic for anything new, so long as it didn't seem dangerous or illegal. By his third year he was already deeply entrenched in a few student clubs and would probably have gone on to become president of all of them if Hogwarts didn't disallow students from holding multiple club presidencies. He did reasonably well on his OWLs, though not spectacularly. Anyone who might have worried about his having missed excellence in his OWL marks could easily have attributed it to his father's situation; by the middle of his fifth year Mr. Applegate had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer keep his usual job. Fortunately the family was rather financially comfortable and can afford to maintain their quality of life and continue putting the children through Hogwarts, particularly since a family friend was able to keep him "semi-employed" for several years following with the sort of work that could be done at home and on no particularly urgent timeline during his more lucid moments.
1880 — Ezra graduates with the grades (barely) necessary to begin the auror training programme and starts it the autumn following his departure from Hogwarts. Which is where things begin to go a bit wrong.
Shadows1880 — At first, Ezra has no trouble with the coursework bit of the program, but by winter of his first year he has begun to be a bit distracted. Not all the time, and not to the point where he fails any exams, but it's noted by his peers in the training programme that he sometimes isn't able to fully apply himself in their day to day classes. The instructors don't seem to take note until the problem worsens in his second year. He makes it through the first practical exam but badly mangles the second of the year. When the people who knew him in the training program discuss his decision to drop out in the spring and join the Department of Mysteries, they cannot claim to be surprised, though he had mentioned it not once to anyone prior to that. He really didn't have the constitution for it, people say. He likely feared no mentor would take him on and was merely cutting the cord before it was cut for him. Ezra doesn't contest any of these rumors, nor does he give the slightest indication that he is even aware of them. But none of them are true, either.
1883 — The truth is that the shadows are closing in. When he'd first seen them he'd dismissed them — they had been vague enough, fleeting enough, distant enough that it was easy to believe they were normal shadows, or figments of his imagination. But when they grew and gathered and drew near, it became impossible to dismiss them — and impossible to believe he could ever be successful in any career that involved fieldwork. He hopes that the Department of Mysteries will prove equally interesting, but that the (theoretically) tamer office environment will reduce the... distractions he's been suffering. It sort of works — for a few months. It's his mother that finally sets him on the right track, in a roundabout way. An offhand comment about how his father used to love to hunt, and hasn't had the mental fortitude in it in years — and he knows, somehow, that the two are connected.
1884 — In the span of a year Ezra has picked up a dozen different passion projects — each of which drive back the shadows for a time, but then quickly lose their efficacy. During this time he realizes that this strangeness isn't limited to him or his father, either — his younger sister becomes shifty-eyed and suspicious when she'd gone too long without painting. She never talks about it — even if he asks her directly, she only replies with jumbled nonsense — but he knows she seems them too, and that painting drives them off, for her. And he knows that's what drove his father out of coherency, in the end. Ezra just needs to find his thing, like his sister has painting — and eventually he does. It's an exotic and not exceptionally popular board game, originally from somewhere in east Asia, which involves laying tiles with different symbols out in strategic patterns. Why this and not anything else that he's tried? Who knows — but when Ezra is playing this game his focus is singular, in a way that it hasn't been in any other pursuit. The rest of the world — including the shadows — falls away, and by the time the world comes back, when he's clearing the tiles at the end of a match, the shadows are much farther away.
Ezra begins aggressively teaching everyone he knows how to play his little tile game.
Sunshine1886 — For the next several years his life progresses in cycles — a game clears his head, and then the shadows slowly but surely march in. His mood and cognitive abilities decline when they get unbearably close... but a game sets him back to rights. He focuses on his career and does reasonably well at it, despite his "moodiness." While he still isn't able to get anyone in his family to admit to their shared experience, he becomes increasingly convinced of it as he begins noticing the familiar patterns in all of his adult siblings and family members. He begins to suspect that not being able to speak openly about what's happening to them might be part of it — and of course his father, who would presumably have the most information to share on the subject, is in no state to be helpful. But now that Ezra has found his game the condition is manageable, so he goes on managing it.
1889 — Ezra is having a run of good days when he's introduced to a young woman named Rosalie Hunniford. They make pleasant enough conversation during the party at which they're introduced. Ezra even manages to flirt with her a little, because she's pretty and he's feeling up for it, which isn't always the case (a budding acquaintance or two with other young women had been truncated by the onset of one of his "moods"; he at first assumes this will ultimately be no different). By their second interaction he's brought up teaching her how to play his game — standard fare for everyone new that he meets, by this point, because he has exhausted the patience of many of his recurring circle who no longer want to play when they know he's only letting them win. He needs the fresh blood wherever he can get it; there's no single-player version of the game. But there isn't an opportunity to teach her how to play then, nor does one arise the third or fourth time they interact. And that's when he begins to suspect that something is different about Miss Hunniford.
He enjoys her company, sure, but that's not it. What's different about her is that when he talks to her she draws him in — the same way that his game does. The party noises die down, the rest of the world doesn't matter so much — and the shadows recede. Of course, from the moment he suspects he can't stop himself from seeking her out on every possible occasion. What is it about her? Is it the words themselves, or something about her eyes? The tilt of her chin when she meets his gaze? At first he approaches her like a conundrum to be solved, something to be researched and analyzed — the same way he might approach a task at the Department of Mysteries. He realizes the too-obvious answer after an embarrassingly long while: he's in love with her.
Once he realizes it, things progress quickly. Why have a lengthy courtship when he knew there was nothing that could dissuade him from marrying her? He proposes, she accepts. The shadows seem as though they might even dissipate for good, with how few and far between they have become. Despite his family's remaining trepidations (none of them say anything specific, obviously, but none can bring themselves to express anything stronger than cautious optimism about the idea of the match), Ezra is ecstatic. And he tells her so, in a dozen little comments and then finally in an impromptu confession. I think I was dying up until the day I met you, he tells her in a stolen moment after dinner in his home. Unfortunately, that isn't what she hears.
After1891 — To society at large, it could be said that Ezra withdrew after Miss Hunniford suddenly ended their engagement. To his friends, family, and coworkers, it was apparent that withered was the more appropriate verb. For several weeks following it he was too wrapped up in the pain of having lost her to think about much else, and when he pulled his head up again and looked around there were shadows everywhere. He found it harder and harder to sleep, and as the strain on his body grew larger he also found it harder and harder to care about how he presented to anyone else. He made a dark joke to a coworker once about his family's curse and they reacted as though he had just spouted nonsense and he realized with sudden certainty, but no particular alarm, that this was what had happened to his father. By this point in his spiral it simply seemed inevitable. Rosalie had deserted him; he would go mad. The sun would rise and set each day.
Eventually, a sibling staged an intervention. They cornered him with a bag of his tiles and forced him to sit down to a game, even though by that point he was nearly delirious from sleep loss and could barely play; he was practically seeing double any time he put a tile down. The gameplay lasted hours, because his partner refused to let him up from the table until they were sure it had worked. Afterwards, Ezra looked around the room and literally cried from relief to find it empty except the two of them. He hadn't realized when he was in the thick of it how much mental and emotional stress he'd been in, but having it suddenly removed made it obvious. Things had been bad. Without that intervention, Ezra is sure that he wouldn't have made it much longer.
He promises his sibling not to get back to that place, if he can help it. He starts sleeping again, and eating properly, though it's still several more months before he's fully recovered from the strain of his ordeal. But from outside appearances it's clear that he's making an effort again, seems to have found himself again, and is even playing that silly little tile game he likes so much again — finally, it appears, he is over Miss Hunniford and can move on. Maybe he'll even look to marry again...?
In reality, he's far from over Miss Hunniford. The tiles work to drive back the shadows, but they aren't as effortless as conversation with Rosalie was — and as time wears on, they seem to be working less and less. An average game doesn't drive the shadows back quite so far, for quite so long. Ezra has the feeling that he's burning them out, and that if he wants to stay sane and stay alive he'll need something to replace them — but it isn't quite so easy as just fall in love again, is it?
Personality:
Ezra is perceived as moody and changeable by most people in his life; prone to bouts of melancholy that last for days or weeks and then disappear without any fanfare. If someone asked directly, they might get as much acknowledgement as "oh, yes, sorry about that" before Ezra bustles along to another topic. When he's up it's almost as though he's making up for lost time and lost smiles; glowingly positive and indefatigable. He acquires new interests easily and works his way through them voraciously, with the potential to become a subject-matter expert in a matter of a day or two when something has grabbed him — but with the potential to abandon it with just as little ado. He cares about people close to him, but anyone who wants to occupy those positions has to tolerate these quirks as well as the fact that sometimes he says things which make very little sense and is incapable of offering any explanation for them. He's lost an acquaintance or two throughout the years because what he's said has offended or hurt someone and he offers no apology — does not even seem aware that there is something to apologize for.
Ezra