June 1st - June 19th
It's almost summer! The last few weeks of school have come, and students will need to study hard for their final exams! Don't let up yet, or your grades won't be what you want them to. Of course, the weather is almost perfect and pristine, in attempts to lure students away from their studies.
Name: Cole William McCade Nickname(s): Just known as Cole DOB: July 27, 1975 Blood: Halfblood Previous School/House: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Slytherin Occupation: Death Eater, Healer at St. Mungo's
Physical Appearance:
Cole stands at a formidable 6'2". Cole was never very tall when he was growing up, but during his final growth spurt in his fifth year he managed to shoot up nearly seven inches in a matter of months. Despite his height, he does not appear particularly lanky because of his weight. Cole weighs 185 pounds. While this may seem abnormally heavy, it is not unusual for his height and build. His shoulders are wide-set, giving him a sort of upright and almost triangle look when observing him from his shoulders to his waist. His torso is slightly longer than his legs, making him appear a little shorter than he is. Most of Cole's weight comes from the toned muscle in his chest, arms, and legs. Cole has always taken pride in his body, and has never let himself digress to over eating and not exercising. He is a firm believer in exercising daily just in case he needs to use his physical strength instead of his magic to get his way. Of course there is also a personal pride issue. If he ever gets too much "flab" around his middle, he instantly becomes more aware of exercise because he believes that any extra flab will make him less appealing.
After 34 years of becoming accustomed to his body, Cole is quite adept at handling himself when it comes to situations that require balance and grace. Despite the fact that he sometimes feels rather lunky and clumsy, he usually has complete control over everything he does. He always felt like a bit of an oaf when he was young, due to the fact that hge had large hands, which are now scarred from duels and improper medical attention. Of course now he is perfectly at ease in his body, and is rather skilled with his hands at whatever he may be called to do. Whether it is handling a spell or writing an beautiful hand script, Cole can accomplish it.
Cole's eyes are the most expressive and most deceptive features about him. Their very color is somewhat unreadable at a first glance. A glimpse of them makes them appear to be a gray-green color, but upon a close investigation the viewer will find them to be an ashy blue. There is a gold circlet tint around the iris of the eye, giving the edges the deceptive green appearance that they are generally assumed to have. Cole's eyes rarely ever portray what he is usually feeling to the general public. Only during moments of true vulnerability will his true intent be reflected in his eyes. Generally, his smiles reach his eyes even when he feels quite insidious on the inside. He can appear charming and jovial when he is in fact feeling quite the opposite. It is safer not to trust anything about Cole's face; his smiles and his eyes are simply too disarming. One crooked smile he tends to get in particular is very disarming, especially when Cole is doing his best to charm whoever he is talking to.
Cole's eyes are lined by a pair of eyelids that can be described as heavy. To the outward sides of the eye, his eyelids turn down slightly giving him a sort of saddened look when his eyes and mouth become expressionless. Because of his turned down heavy eyelids, his eyelashes, which are a light brown to begin with, are not a particularly prominent feature on his face. The most prominent feature are a pair of straight-lined heavy eyebrows, existing just above his eyes. They are straight across his brow, ending just after his eyelids end, with a slight turn down. His eyebrows tend to give him a serious look, unless he is of course attempting to appear goofy or kind. As far as facial hair goes, depending on whether or not he is lazy, he may or may not shave in the morning. If he has a bit of scruff, he shapes it so that it does not appear as though he has just rolled out of bed. He wears scruff well, but facial hair is something that looked absolutely terrible on him. This is because his light colored lips are somewhat thin. His top lip in particular is rather thin, and can be almost completely hidden, especially when he smiles. His bottom lip is a little fuller than his top lip, but is not particularly large.
Just as his eyebrows and facial hair are dark brown, his hair sports a dark brown that can lighten depending on how much sun Cole gets. When he was first born, his hair was blonde, but by the time he hit the age of ten, his hair had already begun to darken. When he was fifteen, his hair had reached it's normal dark tree brown. He keeps his hair trimmed short and neat. The sides are cut short, but the top is generally about an inch or an inch and a half longer than the sides, so that he has something to style. Naturally his hair can appear rather curly, but if it were longer it would be wavy in appearance.
As far as clothing is concerned, when Cole isn't wearing his healer uniform for Mungo's, he wears sleek clothing. He usually sticks to classy looking suits, jackets, shirts, and pants. He tries to look as though he is always completely put together. He was never one of those scruffy students who fails to appear anything less than perfectly presentable during his years at Hogwarts. He was never the type to mess with his uniform or wear it incorrectly, if only because he thought it made him look rather slick. Over the years, his tendency to dress up and appear as groomed and as kept as possible have not changed. Though he prefers black jackets and pants, it is not unusual to see him wearing khaki colors. He is frequently seen in sleek and form fitting sweater turtlenecks, and is very attune with which colors go with what. While he usually attempts to stay dressed-up, Cole is not afraid of dressing down. When he is lounging around the house or doing menial tasks, he usually pulls on a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and his tan colored coat.
Personality:
Cole is a very hard man to decode, because he wears many faces. There haven't been many people who have ever seen Cole's true personality, because he plays a front for both sides. He is, however, disillusioned enough to think that his true side is his cruel and evil side, but that is not the case.
Usually Cole keeps up a front, especially at Mungo's or dealing with 'average' human beings. To the general public, he plays off a personality of being extremely good-natured and cheerful. More often than not, he can be seen laughing and enjoying himself. He has a very active sense of humor, and is usually sort of goofy when it comes to women. In his public personality, he never knows when to say the right thing, and usually messes up his words when he is attempting to speak with them. In many past confrontations with females, his awkward and 'good boy' attitude are looked upon as cute, which he always plays to his advantage. Public-Cole is fairly social when it comes to meeting new people. He never has had much difficult with making friends, which is mostly because of the infectious public personality that he portrays himself with. Keeping friends is also not a challenge for Cole, because he always maintains his friendships carefully (mostly because he never knows when they might come in handy). Enemies are something that Cole rarely makes for his public self, because they would only get in his way and have to be disposed of later. If he does consider someone to be an enemy or a rival, Cole keeps this information to himself. Generally he thinks of his enemies or rivals as the moronic 'do-gooders' that he often finds in his line of work.
To normal witches, wizards, and even muggles, Cole is as forgiving as can be. He never holds a grudge and his temper is very rarely sparked. The only time his temper appears to rise in the eyes of normal wizards and witches is when something unjust or absolutely devastating occurs. There are times when Cole's mask slips, and he appears as cold and calculating as he truly is. In reality he has a wild temper, but he struggles to keep it under control in domestic settings to keep his public mask on. Because of the fact that he truly has a horrible temper, if he becomes actually angry in a public situation, he can not help but take out his anger on those around them. Sometimes he slips up and makes remarks that can be interpreted as threatening. Usually during these weak moments where he slips up, his words hold rather dark connotations. While he tries to control himself physically, mentally he is openly threatening them and hexing them into oblivion.
This is Cole's first mask. The mask to everyone who doesn't know that he is a Death Eater.
To his Death Eater and pureblood allies, Cole always appears calm, and controlled. He is always cruel and calculating, and never fails to contribute to whatever insidious plan is being set. As a Death Eater, he is extremely efficient at what he does. One key point of Cole's career as a Death Eater is that he does not discriminate. Pureblood, Halfblood, Mudblood, Muggle, Witch, or Wizard, he will not hesitate bring pain and suffering upon whoever it is that he is ordered to destroy. He jumps at the chance to act as an instrument for the death eaters, if only because he believes wholeheartedly in their cause. He is known as one of the best Death Eaters, because nothing stops him from making his kill or acting out the plan. He is a bit of a legend as far as average death eaters go, but that is partially because he descends from a long line of Death Eaters. The other reason he can be thought to be a well-known Death Eater among Death Eaters, is because of how efficient he is.
With this personality, he never trusts and he never makes friends. Cole only permits himself to make allies, which he never truly trusts with anything anyway. The only person he relatively trusts is Pan, which is also the person that he distrusts the most. He trusts Pan out of the fact that Pan wants to do what is best for Death Eaters, but he distrusts Pan because he is one of the most powerful Death Eaters around. The more powerful you become, Cole believes, the more dangerous you become to your allies. The more infamous you become, and the more your name circulates among the dumb masses, the more likely you are to make enemies that masquerade as friends. Being as skilled as he is, Cole has a lot of people appealing to him on a regular basis, feigning friendship when all they want is to either assassinate them to fill his spot or to gain something from being his friend. Cole responds to this, and all acts of friendship, by returning them with fabricated friendship. He may act as though he considers someone his own brother, when he is really waiting for them to stab him in the back so that he can stab them first.
The Death Eaters know of Cole's public personality, and have even had to dealt with it when they are walking around as innocent wizards and witches. Of course if they threaten him when he is acting goofy and jovial, he only threatens them back. He gets a boyish pleasure out of discovering weaknesses in others, especially when the people he is analyzing are trying to do him in or make him their friend. Though the Death Eaters know that Cole's public personality is just a mask, in reality he is a mix of both his Death Eater personality and his public personality. Occasionally he is just as goofy and playful with his Death Eaters (though it is in more of an insidious manner than when he is with his work friends), which proves in a manner of speaking that he is not strictly one personality or the other. Though he has no drive to act as a good just citizen when he is not being observed in public, one cannot be sure where the fake personalities end and the real personalities begin.
Regardless of whatever personality Cole is wearing at the time, Cole always tries to keep people at an arm's length. This is partially because of not wanting to get hurt by keeping someone too close, but it is also because he does not want to be completely consumed by either side. He guards his heart and his values carefully, because if he allows himself to become too influenced by the Death Eaters or the public friends he has, he feels that he will become significantly weakened. Cole keeps himself in a figurative fortress when he deals with others, even his public friends. He acts as though he is perfectly open and caring when he is in fact just adding to the facade. Cole has learned from past experiences that if he allows himself to become too influenced by one side or the other, he begins to trust those sides, which only proves to push him in the direction of his potential downfall. Along with this, Cole tends to be rather vague regardless of which side he is addressing at any point in time.
Just as keeping people at an arm length transcends the fuzzy division between Death Eater Cole and Healer Cole, his analytical and precise nature is a characteristic shared between both masks. As a Death Eater, he always gets his job done as cleanly as possible, and as a healer he does the same. Of course one refers to spreading terror and the other refers to healing others, but either way Cole does not accept failure or error. He is an extreme perfectionist when he wants to be, but he can become very ruled by his emotions. By nature he is a very emotional human being. Years of being a Death Eater has numbed his emotions to a certain extent, but if he is feeling particularly vulnerable (for whatever reason) his emotions take complete control of him. Anger, frustration, sorrow, happiness, he is ruled by all of these and more if he lets his logical and precise nature slip.
A major weakness of Cole's that few know of lies in his relationship with his father. Cole's loss of his father at a young age left him horribly scarred. Though he does his best to act as though the death of his father did not phase him, even during Cole's ears at Hogwarts he found it difficult to hear of other students speak of his father. Nowadays, the only reoccurring clues to his weakness are a slight falter in his smile or an insignificant glint in his eye. The relationship between father and son is very hard for Cole to observe, especially now that all of his co-workers and even his Death Eater allies are bearing children of their own. Secretly, Cole wishes more than anything to settle down with someone and have a child. He wishes to fill in the places that his father couldn't, and is subconsciously seeking out a relationship that will bring forth the family atmosphere that was snatched from him when he was a child. To the world, however, Cole acts as though he is almost completely unphased by children, parents, and family units in general.
History:
Cole William McCade was born into a long line of McCades. The McCades originated in Scotland in 1799, but they have since then dispersed to countries ranging from America to Britain. The McCades were a muggle family that generally went into the judicial line of work. Most of the McCades either acted as judges or lawyers, devoting their lives to protecting the innocent by sentencing the guilty. Alistair McCade was Cole's father, an innocent man that followed his ancestor's line of business. He was a lawyer when Cole was growing up, and as a child Cole heard countless tales of cases. Up until Cole was six, all he ever wanted to do was follow in his father's footsteps. More than anything he wanted to live up to his namesake, either with a job as a lawyer or as the muggle prime minister. Cole was very aware of politics, even at a young age because of his father. Being raised in England, Cole knew mostly about the British system of government, but spent lots of time with his father's family in Scotland.
On the other side, Cole's mother descends from a long and well-known line of Avery. The Avery family is a well-known pureblood family (A/N: it is speculated that they are pureblood but it is not outright said by J.K.R.). The Avery family dates back to, and before, the days when Tom Riddle himself was in school. Cole's mother is a distant relative of both the Avery that attended Hogwarts during Tom Riddle's school days, and of the Avery that was enrolled when Snape was a student. Aubrey herself was never a Death Eater, though the Averys were one of the oldest Death Eater Families. She was, during her life, a timid and gnarled woman who never really lived up to family expectations. She was sorted into Ravenclaw, much to the disappointment of her family members. Regardless of this, she was full of arrogant pureblood pride, and was extremely proud of the fact that she was a Death Eater. She was several years older than Snape, but was still aware of him and the dark arts that he dabbled in with her cousin. Aubrey was always distant from her family, and was just one step above being a Squib (too much inbreeding, people speculated). Because of her lack of skill at magic, Aubrey never really amounted to much and was never particularly impressive.
It was because of the fact that Aubrey was not flourishing in the magical world that she was forced into the muggle style of life. It wasn't until she was in her early twenties that she happened to run into Alistair. Alistair fell quickly for Aubrey, and he was as head over heels as a person could be. Aubrey was merely made content by the fact that he was willing to satisfy her every whim and desire. She was used to being neglected, but Alistair seemed to get a natural high out of pleasing her and spending as much time and money on her as she wanted. Being a well-known lawyer, and coming from a rich Pureblooded family, the two were very well off, and had a good start and a quick marriage. The two got married months after they met each other, partially because Aubrey was addicted to indulgence, and Alistair was completely infatuated.
Alistair was completely ignorant of Aubrey's magical blood, and he married her without knowing she was a witch. Aubrey couldn't perform any major spells, and could barely manage to make a single potion, so it wasn't as though she really had anything to hide. Of course her money supply from her family became limited once she married a muggle, because she had soiled the good and noble blood of Avery. Deep down, Aubrey felt shamed for marrying a muggle, but she was so used to being taken care of by Alistair that she couldn't imagine life without him. Aubrey felt more accepted than she had ever felt before in her entire life, because of Alistair's large Scottish family. However it wasn't until she became pregnant with Cole several years later than she began to rethink her decision. Her child would have tainted blood, which meant that it wouldn't be accepted by her family anymore than she had.
Cole was born on a sweltering July day nine months later, and Alistair was completely oblivious to the fact that his son had strong magical blood flowing to his veins. He was merely content with having his own family now. With Aubrey, the two had been an inseparable duo, but now they were an actual family unit. Alistair doted on his son as much as he had doted on Aubrey, which made her resent her son slightly. She remained as listless as ever, even after Cole was born. She spent her time buying frivolous and useless things. Aubrey had never held a job, and never planned on holding one, so all she ever did all day was spend money or sit. Cole never felt close to his mother, because she hardly ever interacted with him. More often than not, his father would even sneak him into work so that someone would watch him. They could easily have hired several nannies, but Alistair disapproved of having a stranger raise his child.
Cole's childhood was a happy one. Birthdays and friends came and went as quickly as the years did. He was still completely oblivious to his magical origins, until he was six years old. Aubrey had been trying to force her son into the car so that they could go on a shopping day, and Cole had been completely uninterested. He had wanted to go into his father's work all morning, but had been unloaded into his mother's arms because his father was working on an important case. He struggled and squirmed in his mother's arms as she tried to force him into the car, when he suddenly shouted. As he shouted, a shock was sent from the tips of his fingers into his mother, causing her to drop him and jump back as an automatic chain reaction of being sparked. She had rubbed her arms vigorously, staring at her son as though he were some sort of demon until she realized that her son was destined to be a wizard.
Cole never understood why his mother suddenly started acting kinder to him on that day, but it had all been because she had formulated a plan. From one tiny electric shock that she now recognized to be a magic jolt, Aubrey knew that her son was more magical than she ever had been. Aubrey had never really been intelligent enough to reach the conclusion that she might give birth to a powerful son, but now that she had she found her way back into the Avery family. If she presented her powerful son to her family, she would be almost immediately accepted and congratulated as the bearer of such a powerful young wizard. This would give her the attention that she had longed for as a child when she herself had not been a powerful wizard. The problem of being married to a muggle still remained, and Aubrey knew that she would never be able to bring him into her wizarding family. Obviously they would no longer to be able to live as muggles with Cole in the family, and Alistair would never leave his law-firm.
Aubrey thus made the quick and rash decision to have her husband killed. She regained contact with her family, lamenting ardently her mistake in marrying a muggle, and letting news of her powerful tainted child slip. Her grandparents immediately recognized the significance of a powerful wizarding child, even though he wasn't a pureblood, and were all too eager to "free Aubrey from her mistake" as she had put it, which meant killing Alistair.
Cole was six and a half at this time, and he never got over the death of his father. He remembered seeing his father off to work, only hearing later that his father had been jumped by a group of attackers and killed almost instantly as he walked from the parking garage under his law firm to the elevator. The act of killing Alistair was not a collective act of Death Eaters, it was merely a family intervention. The Avery family wanted to do everything they could to free their daughter and bring her child up right, in the ways of magic and in the atmosphere of renowned purebloods. After the death of her husband, Aubrey immediately severed all ties with the McCade family and returned to her maiden name of Avery. Cole, on the other hand, refused to change his name to Avery, and kept it McCade. To this day he refuses to change it, despite the fact that he has not had contact with his father's side of the family since he was six.
By the time Cole was eleven, he knew everything there was to know about his family and their role as Death Eaters. He understood that purebloods were better than others (though he did not necessarily care for prejudice based on blood). He was not as carefree and happy as he had been when his father was around, but that was due to the infectious nature of the pureblood family that he was almost constantly in contact with. Cole knew by then that he was a wizard, and could barely remember a time when he hadn't known he was one. His mother often retold him the story of him shocking her as she forced him into their family car (omitting of course the fact that she had schemed to kill his father). She lived as vicariously through him as she could, and ensured him often that there was no way that he would not be the best student at Hogwarts.
Cole therefore entered the school with a big head and a broad knowledge of all things wizard. He did not know subjects intimately, but he knew their overall basic meaning and the traditions of wizarding. He, like his family members before him, were ambitious and extremely astute. As soon as the sorting cap was placed on his head, he was sorted into Slytherin. Cole had absolutely no trouble making friends, though he remained a lot more open than his housemates. In general, Cole was more friendly and playful, and didn't really mind associating himself with other house members. He appreciated working together (as long as he got credit), and had not yet begun work on his masks. He always understood that it was important to appear less than what you really were, so that whenever people underestimated you, you could use it against them to take advantage of them. Cole's first year flew by, as years often do, and he managed to ace most of his classes with little effort. He was an extremely quick learner, and could pick concepts up without really struggling.
Cole's second year was much the same as his first. Nothing of particular significance happened, other than Cole became more and more disconnected to his family and more connected to his friends at Hogwarts. Cole now grasped the importance of having people you could count on in case you got in a jam, but even at an early age he was afraid of becoming too close to people. He knew it was because he was afraid of them being snatched away from him, just as his father had been when he was six. He was afraid of really opening up and truly relying on people because of the abrupt death of his father. It didn't help that Cole still had no idea who had really killed his father, and always assumed that it was a convicted felon having their revenge on his father.
Much like his first and second years, Cole's year raced by at the speed of light. This was the year he became more methodical and analytical in his dealings with both people and subjects. He began to excel in Potions in particular, but he was very adept in almost all areas of magic. He had absolutely no patience for Divination, but he still managed to pass the class. His two electives were Care of Magical Creatures, which he loved because he could charm an animal into almost anything, and Divinations. Obviously he preferred potions over everything, but that was because he had not yet dabbled in the dark arts. Ever since he and his mother had moved back to the Avery estate, he had been surrounded by dark magic, but he had not been able to recognize it for what it really was until his pureblood Slytherin friends informed him of the dark arts on a more intimate level. Cole had always previously assumed that the dark arts were normal and natural, and didn't think them 'dark' at all.
Cole's fourth year was spent mostly on broadening his horizons by looking into the dark arts. By now he was fully ingrained into the Avery family, and it would be impossible for him to get out. It was now that the Avery family revealed to Cole that they had been the ones to kill his father. By now, Cole was too entrenched among them to pull away from them. It didn't help that the Avery family was trying to high light the good reasons why they had had to do away with Alistair. They reasoned that if he had not been killed. Cole would have never come to Hogwarts. This was a rather depressing idea for the young Cole, so he had to make due. He tries to force his depressions about his father into the back of his mind, but his grades suffered. He knew, by now, of Death Eaters and the like, but did not hold them accountable for his father's death. Instead he held the Avery family responsible, because it was them and not the DEs that had conspired against his father.
By his fifth year, the innocence that Cole had retained up until this point was almost washed away. His cold and indifferent mask had been formed after years of living with the Avery family and having to pretend that he was thankful for his father's death. More than anything, his father's death tore him up inside, but he refused to let them know that. To be vulnerable was to be weak, and Cole refused to expose anything to his family now that he knew they were a nest full of poisonous snakes waiting to strike when you least expected it. Instead of despising them outwardly, Cole learned from them. He learned the importance of trusting and relying on no one now. He couldn't rely on his family, and he couldn't rely on his friends because he didn't know when they would turn either. Cole took up the practice of having allies and not friends. However he did allow himself several girlfriends during the school year, if only because he was very into the whole prospect of having a girlfriend.
Despite everything that Cole had learned about not being able to trust people, he fell into the habits that he had observed in his father. He doted on his girlfriends, but when they proved to be too shallow or too out of touch he would dump them. Cole went through several girls before the year was out, but it didn't distract him from his grades. He became even more wound up in the dark arts, not because of fascination with them but because it was expected of him. He couldn't do anything that the Avery family did not want him to do, and if they wanted him to be a Death Eater then he had to be. Cole knew by now that he was supposed to be a Death Eater, because he was one of the strongest wizards that the watered down an inbred Avery family had seen in a few generations. Cole wasn't sure why he had been blessed, but he took full advantage on both them and his quick mind. Of course Cole knew that he could not be JUST a Death Eater, but he could not become a lawyer for muggles either. Instead Cole took the next appealing job course: Healing. Cole always enjoyed the prospect of being in a position of enough power where you held the entirety of a human life in the palms of your hands. As a healer he could control whether someone lived or died. He did well (as expected) on his OWLs, and advanced into his sixth year.
When Cole's sixth year rolled around, and he got into all of the NEWT classes that he needed to to become a Healer. Where Cole had normally skated by in his classes, he was absolutely slammed with work his sixth year and became completely overwhelmed. He was doing poorly in all of his classes because of the sudden excess of work that his teachers were pushing upon him. Having never really had to work hard to get good grades, Cole floundered for the first several months of school, getting barely above passing grades and below. Over Christmas break, Cole stayed at Hogwarts to get his act together. He worked hard at what he had struggled at all year because he would not tolerate failure. Failing would be a huge blow to his ego, especially when he had been in the top of his class just last year. By the end of Christmas Break, Cole managed to relearn everything that he hadn't learned in the first half of the year, so he was set to pick up where he left off once Classes began. For the second half of the year, he did better than he had but not as good as he could do. Cole knew his full potential, and he needed to find out how to tap into it through hard work and not just through ability.
This was also the year that Harry Potter joined Hogwarts as a first year. Being a sixth year, Cole never really took notice of Harry Potter. Unlike some of his juvenile housemates, he didn't take to tormenting the firsty. A lot of the Slytherins were bitter because Harry had lead to the downfall of Voldemort. That just told Cole that it would be useless to try anything against him. Though Harry couldn't use his magic fully, he was destined to become more powerful than Cole was. If they was ever a time to get rid of Harry it would have been before he attended Hogwarts... But if Harry could have been crushed, he would have been. Cole was very aware that Harry was a Dumbledore favorite, and it would be useless to even pick on him the way his friends all took to doing. By now Cole was well-versed in the history of Death Eaters and Voldemort, but he still felt no real loyalty to him. Cole had never really felt loyal to anybody after his father was killed, and had especially revolted against ideals of "loyalty" after he found out it was his family that killed his father. Cole mostly kept to himself and didn't partake in abusing the young boy for being on the Quidditch team or for picking fights with first year Slytherins.
Cole focused more on graduating from his sixth year to his Seventh. By the end of the year, Cole had his act completely together. He passed his newts with excellent marks and was in a good position to start his seventh year. By now, the Avery family decided that he was old enough to handle more information about the dark arts. Over the summer, they pushed him to study volumes full of dark magic. Cole was drawn to the magic out of sheer fascination of the subject. It was a forbidden and condemned magic that existed in the wizarding world, but it held the potential for great power. Cole knew that he had no choice but to become a Death Eater because his family would most likely kill him if he did not because they had shared so much Death Eater information with him. He figured that he might as well allow himself to take interest in the subject. As the summer passed, Cole studied up for his seventh year and practiced Dark Arts. He got a job at Mungo's as an assistant to a nurse. His job consisted of performing menial tasks such as cleaning the rooms of patients and holding potions and medicines for the doctors and the nurses along with helping the patients with their feeding schedules.
Cole found himself frighteningly attracted to the hospital, and he wasn't sure why he was so drawn to a job where he could help people when he came from a horribly dark family. Cole knew that he could not escape his destiny however, and he knew that eventually his family would try to do something to turn him. It was inevitable that Cole would eventually become just as dark and twisted as they were, because their blood ran through his veins. Cole felt like he had absolutely no control over anything he did, but as the summer months passed and the school year began, his family made no move. He realized that they believed him turned enough to become a Death Eater without them having to take action. Without ever having any belief that he could change his fate, Cole only wrapped himself more and more in the Dark Arts. In the end, it was the act of surrounding himself in dark magic and twisted classmates that turned him. He became so used to their rhythms of life that Cole found himself falling in league with them. He drifted toward them like a moth to the flame, and soon began to act just as cold and calculating as they did.
This was where Cole's personality break became final. In his past years he had been building up two personalities, two masks, for school and for home. At school he acted cheerful and friendly, and at home he acted as his family did: as though he were made of stone. Eventually, do to the nurturing of the latter mask, Cole began wearing that one at school as well. He was forgetting how to switch between personalities depending on what group he was with. Now he had two distinct masks, and he was wearing his "slytherin" mask more than the other now because he was losing his ability to call upon it if he needed it.
During the summer between Cole's sixth and seventh year, he continued along life with business as usual. He regained his part time job at Mungo's and kept carrying on as he had for the past few years. He was drawn to power, being like most Slytherins, so the only reason he was actively drawn to support the dark lord who was now attempting to rise again, was because of how powerful Voldemort had once been. Of course the fact that Voldemort had been overthrown by a child initially made him want to ally himself with Harry, until he realized that the young Gryffindor could never appreciate dark magic. Cole loved dark magic by now, partially because it set him above the rest of his peers. Most of his nonSlytherin acquaintances feared dark magic more than anything, and becoming involved in it lifted him above them. Aside from getting a paycheck from Mungo's, Cole was also receiving a monthly allowance from the Avery family. He knew that the money they sent would be for him to launch his Death Eater career and in doing so buy his own manor, but he instead put the money toward buying more dark books and forbidden objects from Knockturn alley.
Returning to Hogwarts as a seventh year was rather thrilling for Cole. He could now walk the halls without any student superiors, and Cole certainly enjoyed the feeling of sauntering through the halls knowing that he could wipe out nearly anyone he wanted to. He wasn't sure about Harry Potter, of course, but he wasn't interested in taking the boy who lived on just yet. Cole continued to work hard as far as his classes were concerned. He excelled mostly in Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts. He figured his skill in the latter class was mostly due to the fact that he knew the Dark Arts intimately, so he could easily repel them. Of all of the classes he took, he struggled in Herbology the most. Where he had done fine in Care of Magical Creatures, Herbology was more difficult. The advanced plant-life was difficult for Cole to deal with, especially because the plants generally weren't as easy to charm as animals were. Transfigurations and Charms weren't particularly difficult for him, now that he had mastered the use of his wand.
Cole graduated from Hogwarts with high enough marks to pursue Healing. Because of his job in previous summers at Mungo's, Cole was able to be considered rather quickly for the job of healer. To become a healer, one usually has to take a test (much like aurors), to make sure they are up to the job. Cole's tasks ranged from creating a correct werewolf potion all the way to healing a muggle who's head had been turned into a teapot. He did well, as expected, and was excepted into Mungo's a year after he graduated from Hogwarts. During the time before he got the job, he stayed at home with the Avery family, using their library of dark magical books to his advantage. Being in the Avery family, Cole was very aware of the attempts of the dark lord to return to power through destroying Harry Potter. He, like others in his family, were shocked and horrified at the escape of Sirius Black. The rest of his family, after the initial horror, seemed to believe that he was of no threat. Cole, thanking his lucky stars that he had thought enough to ally himself with younger years heard about what was going on at Hogwarts now that he had graduated.
In beginning his work at Mungo's, Cole knew it would be unwise to allow himself to act as cold and calculating as he had become, so he called upon the Cheerful mask that he always wore around Hogwarts. Using it on an every day basis was good to keep up Cole's reputation as a 'nice guy', but also became very confusing for him. Cole assured himself that he wasn't the nice guy that goofed around with others, but he couldn't deny that it was far too natural to him to act playful and friendly. Now, Cole tries not to think about where the two masks end and the real personality begins, but he knows that spending seven years as an actor has confused him as to who he really is. His sense of an individual has been almost completely destroyed by masquerading as both a nice guy and a cold hearted snake.
At this time, Cole decided to ally himself to the now rising Dark Lord through the Avery family. He chose to do this mostly because he knew that if he didn't, he would be killed by the Avery family, and perhaps by other Death Eaters that knew of him. By this time, Cole had no objection to joining the Death Eaters because he was completely involved in the Dark Arts. He did not accept the Dark Mark under the name of the Averys, and instead kept his father's surname. Cole did not receive his dark mark until the next year, when the triwizard tournament was being held at Hogwarts. It wasn't until summer that he was accepted into the Death Eater family. Priding himself in efficiency, just as he had in his younger years, Cole took on large jobs and executed them as close to perfection as possible. In the meantime, Cole remained working at St. Mungo's as a Fourth Floor Healer, specializing in Spell Damage.
The years sped by, and Cole left his room at the Avery mansion to buy his own manor with the funds he had accumulated through working at Mungo's. He never employed any house elves, because he was the only one living in his home. His mother died soon after he left the manor, and Cole still isn't sure whether it was by natural causes or if the Averys killed her. Either way, Cole had no objections. After all, she was the one responsible for her father's death, and it was only suitable for her to die too.
It appeared as though Cole was playing both sides, acting as a healer and a Death Eater. This way, he reasoned to his Death Eater comrades, he could act as a mole and whatever victims weren't finished off, he could finish off in the hospital by giving them incorrect dosages of potions. This seemed to please the Death Eaters well enough, so Cole continued work at St. Mungo's. Generally, he didn't kill while he worked, because he found himself finding the same thrill he got in saving a life as he got in taking one. Occasionally, if he had a powerful Auror marked in the hospital, he would conveniently arrange a murder that was left unsolved. All the while, Cole was remaining truly allied to neither side. He trusted no one, because the closer people are to you, the more likely they are to betray you. Cole knew that the closer you were to them, the more secrets they knew about you. The more weaknesses they knew about you. To prevent his own downfall, he kept up his practice of keeping people at an arm's length.
The second rise of the Dark Lord was extremely important for Cole. He found himself doing a lot of the grunt work. He took orders from Death Eaters with seniority, but generally despised them for ordering him around. He shot to the top of Death Eaters as quickly as he could to avoid getting orders from anyone other than the Dark Lord. Cole never managed to breech the close circle of confidants that Voldemort kept, but he wasn't interested in becoming one of Voldemort's most trusted Death Eaters, he was merely interested in doing his job correctly. The Second war began, and Cole continued his job at Mungo's, and remained a devoted Death Eater. Despite all of the murders that occurred at St. Mungo's, Cole was only briefly suspected. Others, however, were convicted for his crimes, though they were perfectly innocent. No one had reason to suspect that the friendly and honorable Cole would ever kill someone. Even when they briefly inspected him, Cole was charming and innocent enough to disperse any doubts that he was otherwise. However when the Dark Lord fell for a final time after the second war, Cole returned no his normal wizarding life. He still kept up with his practice of dark magic, but had no need for killing. The mark on his arm no longer burned, and he had presumed it to be completely useless until it began to burn again. He immediately went to the call of Lucifer Maleham.
Personally, Cole found Maleham to be a bit of a foolish idiot, but he had no objection to rising to a position of power among the powerful. Death Eaters, no matter who they served, managed to strike fear into the hearts of many. Cole got pleasure out of this, and so he joined Maleham and Pan in their cause to put Lucifer in Voldemort's shoes. Cole was completely unaware of Pan's ulterior motives, and had no idea that Maleham had been tricked into concocting a faulty potion. He merely served in any way he could, killing and spreading devastation wherever he was called to do so. Now, he continues to serve the new Dark Lord, and has taken part in the recent acts at Hogwarts when needed.
Cole's main job was taking care of the comatose McGonagall. He was the one to suggest that she was in a coma due to a jinx rather than a potion. Since all magical remedies on the potion related poisoning on the third floor had been attempted, she was moved into his care. By now, Cole was a well-known healer at Mungo's, with several nurses working under him. McGonagall was moved to private quarters, where he could deal with her on a more singular and intimate level. This was where he continued poisoning her and keeping her in her drugged state. He didn't kill McGonagall off immediately, and kept convincing his co-workers that he was close in discovering what exactly had jinxed McGonagall. To help convince his co-workers of this, he would allow McGonagall to awaken slightly from her sleep, under the Imperius curse so that her every move would be controlled, only to put her back into the potion induced coma when his co-workers left the room. Occasionally, Cole lets her awaken from her drugged and poisoned state so that he can interrogate her both about Hogwarts and the remnants Order of the Phoenix.
During his life as an adult, Cole never really attempted to reconnect with his Scottish blood. Doing so would result in far too many questions—way more than he was willing to answer. Part of him longs to reconnect with the innocent and trusting muggle family, because it would give him someone who he could protect and love. But doing so would only leave them more open for Death Eater attacks. After all, if any of the Death Eaters ever had reason to suspect that he had turned, their first move would be to “pull a Macbeth” and do away with the only family he had left.
Roleplay Sample:
Cole was seated at his desk, with stacks of papers and open books strewn in front of him. He was supposed to be researching the long-term effects of a complicated jinx that had arisen at work. There was one patient who was stuck with an unliftable jinx, and he couldn't find a way around it. Generally, Cole didn't struggle with such things, but now he just couldn't concentrate. Instead of reading the notes on unliftable jinxes in front of him, he was staring out through the large window placed right in front of his desk. It was merely midnight, and his view was a mix of his small backyard and the fence separating his house from his neighbor's. Though Cole's eyes were fixed on the outdoors, he wasn't really looking at anything in particular. He was staring, transfixed at the glistening stars in the sky, but he wasn't really looking at them. Instead, he was trying to ignore the fact that his Dark Mark was beginning to tingle again. That meant Maleham wanted him.
Great... Cole thought as he stared blankly at the stars, Calling on me whenever he pleases. Does he not realize that I have work to do? Cole stared at the stars for a moment longer before turning his eyes down to his arm. He rolled up his sleeve carefully and looked at the Dark Arm, that had darkened long ago and was just beginning to burn. He knew that he should probably apparate to the Death Eater headquarters, but right how he had a more important task to attend to. Figuring out how to lift the unliftable jinx was proving more difficult than he had anticipated, and if there was one thing he hated, it was failure. Cole's eyes lingered on his dark mark for a moment before they drifted over to the papers in front of him. If he didn't heal the person soon, they would die. The young man afflicted had nurses attending him twenty four hours a day, but Cole felt that if his condition carried on the way it was much longer that he wouldn't pull out. That meant that he would have to deal with another sobbing widow. The woman was practically there all day anyway, and the wizard hadn't even died yet!
Cole didn't even want to imagine what it would be like to deal with a clingy woman like the young man's wife. The only times he could be rid of her were when he specifically kicked her out because he needed to take the young man into a magically protected room to perform his spells and, and when he told her that visiting hours were over. On the outside he appeared just as concerned and mournful as she was, but he was really just sick of the woman and would do whatever he could to get rid of her. Cole sighed slightly, sending one last look at his papers before pushing himself away from his desk, his chair rolling backwards on unsteady wheels. If there was one part he despised about his job, it was the widows. It only reminded Cole that if he died, no one would grieve for him. If he died, his tombstone would read 'Here lies Cole, he worked hard', because he had no loved ones. He hated thinking about the fact that he had no one to rely on, but he could not get rid of his fear of getting hurt. He was always torn between wanting someone close to him, and wanting to remain an island, so he hated displays of love, especially when lives were lost.
Cole's mind was ripped from his morose thoughts by the burning of the dark mark in his arm. The Dark Mark was becoming more and more irritating for Cole, and he could ignore it no longer. He would just have to give up and apparate to Maleham's side. Cole hadn't really minded working for Voldemort much, because at least he was competent. He struck fear into the hearts and minds of everyone: magic and muggle. Maleham couldn't even pretend to be competent. I'll get back to you later.. Cole thought as he glanced at the desk, before apparating to the Death Eater Headquarters.
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