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--- backstory [2026/03/07 15:07] – created harryh
+++ backstory [2026/03/08 03:11] (current) – [At a Glance] harryh
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-====== Harrison 'Harry' Hargreeves-Green: Character History (aka Backstory) ======
+====== Harrison 'Harry' Hargreeves — Character History ======
+//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."
+----
+===== 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.
+----
+===== Origins =====
+Harrison Green was not born into ordinary circumstances, but then none
+of them were. That was the point.
+He came into the world sometime in the early hours of a single
+impossible day shared by a handful of children born across the globe
+under conditions that defied medical explanation. His birth mother was
+a young woman from Nottingham — a practical, quietly frightened person
+who kept him for barely a month before making a phone call she didn't
+fully understand to a number she couldn't explain how she'd found. She
+was not cruel. She simply did not know what to do with a child in whom
+the air pressure shifted when he was upset, in whose room things
+drifted toward his hands in the night. She made the call. Someone
+answered.
+The man who came to collect him wore a suit that cost more than her
+annual salary. He was polite, precise, and entirely uninterested in
+pretending the exchange was anything other than what it was.
+He was not told he was one of several.
+----
+===== The Early Years (Infancy–Age 10) =====
+It was the largest building Harrison had ever seen, and for the first
+few years he assumed this was true of all buildings — that they were
+all this large on the inside, all ceilings that felt like weather and
+corridors that went further than they needed to. He learned otherwise
+at seven, on a public appearance, standing on a pavement outside a
+building with a ceiling you could touch.
+The mansion became his world. He learned its geography the way
+children learn the geography of places that feel like theirs:
+obsessively, through exploration, through the particular joy of a
+house that kept revealing itself in pieces. He found rooms he hadn't
+known about years after moving in. The house gave itself to him
+slowly, and he found this comforting.
+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 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.
+His power expressed itself early and unreliably. Things moved —
+sometimes deliberately, usually not. He broke two windows and a mirror
+before his ninth birthday. The father's team documented everything.
+Harry's job, as he understood it, was to be interesting enough to keep
+being studied.
+He was very good at that part.
+**Mom** — the household's robotic caretaker — was a constant. She
+cooked, cleaned, maintained the house, and was present in the same
+ways every day in a building where almost everything else was
+variable. Harrison found this deeply comforting without being able to
+articulate why. She made soup every night. The same soup, the same
+bowl, the same time. He ate every bowl she put in front of him.
+**Rhys Aldermen** — the father's man, present in the house for
+reasons he never explained — was the only adult in the building who
+operated outside the clinical framework. He left small things: a
+biscuit outside a door, a book with no explanation, a brief word in a
+corridor after something had gone badly. He gave Harrison a journal at
+age twelve, saying only that everyone should have somewhere to put
+things that don't go anywhere else. Harrison has been writing in
+variations of that journal ever since.
+----
+===== The Training Years (Ages 11–14) =====
+When Harry was cleared for field deployment at eleven, something
+shifted — not in his power, which remained what it had always been,
+but in him. The missions meant he was counted. He sat at briefings
+with the others and felt, for the first time, fully present in the
+household rather than adjacent to it.
+He worked at the training with the focused desperation of someone who
+has identified exactly what they want and is unwilling to jeopardise
+it by not trying hard enough. The approval was there — he could feel
+it in the quality of the father's attention, the particular way he was
+watched during exercises when something went right. He chased that
+feeling with everything he had.
+The power did not cooperate.
+The problem was not effort. Harrison's telekinesis was emotionally
+keyed in a way that resisted every technical approach the team tried.
+The trainers called it instability. One of them, not unkindly, called
+him a wild stallion. When his power worked, it worked enormously —
+objects moved with precision and force, energies pushed and pulled
+with surgical accuracy. When it didn't, it didn't in ways that had
+consequences.
+Collateral damage on a mission. A near-miss with a civilian. A failed
+objective that could be laid directly at the door of a surge he
+couldn't contain at the critical moment.
+The other siblings said nothing to his face. They didn't need to.
+What stung most was not the consequences themselves. It was the
+father. The quality of the attention changed — that focused, hungry
+interest became something more measured, more careful, more like how
+you watched a variable you were no longer sure was useful. Harrison
+noticed immediately. He could not unfeel it no matter how he tried.
+He told himself it was temporary. He told himself he'd earn it back.
+He kept believing this for longer than was good for him.
+----
+===== The Conditioning =====
+The father's approach to Harry's instability was methodical. Each
+intervention was framed as developmental. None of them were.
+**The water chamber** came first. Harry would be sat in a room filled
+with glasses of water and told to hold them still. While he did, the
+father's staff would insult him, demean him, strike him — anything
+designed to produce a reaction. If anything moved, he started over.
+The explicit lesson was emotional regulation. The real lesson was
+simpler: noise produces consequences. Stillness is survival. Harry
+learned it thoroughly, in the worst way available, and never fully
+unlearned it. The quietness that people read as passivity now has its
+roots here.
+**The collateral reviews** followed every mission that went wrong. No
+physical pain — just Harry, a table, and a ledger. He was required to
+calculate the precise cost of everything he had broken: repair times,
+materials, contractor fees, disruption to operations. If he got a
+figure wrong, the father would list every expense again from the
+beginning and Harry would start over. It was accountability dressed as
+humility, humility dressed as education. What it actually installed
+was a precise internal ledger he still carries — a habit of
+calculating, automatically and exhaustively, the cost of every mistake
+he makes.
+**Standing down** was the cruellest instrument because it cost him
+nothing physically and everything else. After a significant failure,
+Harry would be deployed to a mission and ordered not to act. Not sent
+home — present, watching, hands at his sides, while his siblings
+faced situations he could have helped with. He watched people get
+hurt. He did not move. His siblings did not know why. They knew only
+that he was there and did nothing, and that knowledge settled into
+some of them as something they have never fully named but have also
+never entirely let go.
+He has thought about those moments more than almost anything else from
+that period. Not because of what they did to him — but because of what
+they must have looked like from the outside, and what conclusions the
+siblings standing in his eyeline would have been reasonable to draw.
+----
+===== Being Left Behind (Ages 14–16) =====
+The medication was increased when Harrison was fourteen. The father's
+team presented this plainly: the regulation wasn't working at the
+current dosage, so they were adjusting. Harry accepted without
+argument. He had been taking something since his early years in the
+house — described initially as general health support, later as a
+psychokinetic stabilisation compound. If increasing it would fix the
+problem, he wanted it fixed.
+It helped. The surges became less frequent. His control, in clinical
+settings, measurably improved. He was more predictable, more
+containable, less likely to shatter things by accident.
+The approval did not return. Not in the same way. Not with the same
+quality.
+He has spent years trying to understand why this — rather than the
+missions, the damage, the failure — was the thing that broke him open.
+The logical part of him knows that the father was a scientist managing
+a liability, and that a stabilised liability is not the same as a
+successful asset. But Harry had worked so hard. Had done everything
+asked. Had taken the medication and steadied himself and shown up, and
+the warmth — such as it was, only ever technical warmth, he
+understands this now — did not come back.
+The sidelining was gradual. Mission rosters first, then briefings,
+then group sessions he found out about after the fact. After a while
+he stopped checking for notifications. The testing continued — became
+more regular and more intensive, if anything, which he found confusing
+and would not understand until much later. Chemical compounds were
+introduced during sessions that made the telekinesis surge violently
+beyond anything he could contain. The father's team documented what
+happened. Harry was not shown the documentation.
+What he didn't know: the chemicals weren't just pushing the
+telekinesis. They were stressing the whole underlying mechanism — the
+same root faculty that, in a Changeling, governs both the shifting of
+form and the extension of that malleability outward into the world.
+The suppression that had held since infancy began to crack under the
+pressure of those sessions. Something was coming loose that the
+medication could no longer fully contain. The father saw it happening.
+He wrote it down. He said nothing to Harry.
+When everyone else was elsewhere, Harry walked the mansion alone.
+He knew it better than any of them by the end. Third floor east side:
+a room behind a wardrobe not pushed flush to the wall. East corridor:
+a panel that gave slightly under pressure, covering a storage space.
+The rear garden wall: a crack half a metre long, wide enough to pass
+through sideways.
+He noted these things and told himself he had no intention of using
+them.
+His moods began swinging harder — a side effect of the gap between how
+much effort he was expending and how little it was landing. The power
+tracked his moods faithfully, which meant low periods were also
+periods of greatest unpredictability, which gave the team more to
+document and the other siblings more reason to keep their distance. A
+cycle with no obvious exit point.
+He spent more time in the library. He read everything. By sixteen he
+was very well-read and very lonely and very good at not showing either.
+**The discovery** came when he was rearranging his room — one of his
+few acts of autonomy, moving furniture simply for the satisfaction of
+change. Behind the skirting board beneath the window: a small piece of
+hardware, no larger than a matchbox, warm to the touch. He
+photographed it. He spent three weeks in the library researching
+before he found a name for what it did.
+A dampener. A suppressor of psychokinetic activity, built into the
+room where he slept.
+He put it back exactly where he found it.
+He lay awake for a long time that night thinking about the pencil that
+had never moved in sessions. Thinking about the gap between what
+happened in his room and what happened everywhere else. Thinking about
+the possibility that the problem had never been him — that the ceiling
+he'd been hitting for years had been engineered.
+He didn't confront the father. He was sixteen and had spent two years
+being told, in every implicit register available, that he was
+dangerous. Some part of him was almost grateful for the device.
+He has spent eight years unpicking that gratitude.
+At some point — he cannot place the exact date, which is its own kind
+of cruelty — he stopped being called in for tests. Stopped being made
+to join his siblings in combat training. There was no conversation
+about it. No explanation offered. His father ignored any questions his
+siblings asked. He had simply been removed from the equation, the way
+you remove a variable that is no longer producing useful data.
+The father never gave up on any of the others.
+----
+===== The Night He Left (Age 17) =====
+Something snapped at seventeen. Not a single event, not a final straw
+— more like the cumulative weight of years reaching a threshold and
+the realisation, arriving quietly one evening, that he was not going
+to get what he needed from this house. Not now. Possibly not ever.
+He packed with care. The journal. The family photograph — all of them
+together, taken early enough that the dynamics hadn't calcified.
+Clothes. The money he had saved in small amounts over three years
+against no specific plan. He waited until the house was quiet.
+He went through the crack in the rear wall. Sideways, in the dark,
+pack held ahead of him. He had known he would need it.
+He did not say goodbye to anyone.
+He has thought about this decision many times in the years since.
+Whether it was cowardice. Whether it was the only thing available to
+him at that particular moment. He has arrived at a conclusion that is
+probably both, which he finds he can live with more easily than a
+cleaner answer would allow.
+He did not look back at the house.
+----
+===== The Years Away (Ages 17–24) =====
+The first two years were not clean. He had no formal documentation of
+his life between adoption and departure, a power he couldn't explain,
+and a name that belonged to no paper trail. He took cash work, moved
+often, kept himself contained.
+The medication had run out within months. He couldn't replicate the
+prescription — it had been bespoke, administered through the
+household. Without it, the stabilisation he'd built during the
+sidelining years began to shift. Not catastrophically. Gradually. He
+discovered that his power, outside the mansion's management, was
+different — more present, more responsive, reaching further than it
+ever had in sessions.
+The first morning he noticed, he had gone to use a hostel bathroom and
+stopped in the doorway because he didn't immediately recognise the
+person in the mirror. His hair was shorter. Darker. He touched it. It
+felt like hair. He looked at his hands and they looked like his hands,
+and then for a moment they didn't, and then they did again. He had no
+explanation. He had been running through them and didn't have one.
+And then, on the way back to the bunk to get his boots, they slid
+across the floor to meet him.
+Two things, the same morning. Two things the house had never let
+happen. He stood there and thought about the pencil. About the
+dampener. About the crack in the suppression that the chemical
+sessions must have opened, and which the medication running out had
+finished. He wrote in his journal that he didn't know what he was yet.
+He still doesn't, entirely. He is working on it.
+He learned to manage the power differently: through understanding his
+own emotional triggers, through building a life that minimised them,
+through the slow unglamorous work of a person who has had their
+stabilisers removed and has to find out what they're made of
+underneath.
+He was not unhappy. That is worth saying plainly. He had difficult
+periods and steadier ones. He found a flat at nineteen that was his —
+genuinely, unambiguously his, paid for with money he'd earned — and
+watched the morning light cross the eastern wall every day for years.
+He had people around him, a small circle, who didn't ask about his
+history. He had routines that worked. He had a door that locked from
+the inside.
+At twenty-one he heard a Crystal Nova track on someone's phone at work
+and didn't know it was her until he looked up the name afterwards. He
+listened to most of the album. She sang about being used, about the
+family that wasn't one, about the gap between what you were told you
+were and what you actually were. He didn't write to her. She'd made
+clear she wasn't inviting contact, and that was hers to decide.
+At twenty-two he learned about the father's health through a news item
+on a screen in a pub. Not a phone call. He sat with this for a long
+time and found he could not arrive at a clean feeling — not anger, not
+relief, not grief in any recognisable shape. Just the tangle: the
+sessions, the look that meant he'd said something worth noting, the
+sidelining, the device. The fact that for years he'd woken up wanting
+to show the father something he could do. All of it at once, no
+hierarchy, no resolution.
+He changed his surname at twenty-three. Harrison Green became Harrison
+Hargreeves on a Tuesday morning at a registrar's office, quietly and
+without announcement. He told the few people who asked that it was a
+family name, which was not untrue.
+It felt honest. Whatever the father was, that was what he was made of.
+It seemed wrong to carry a different surname to the thing that had
+shaped him. Whether it was also grief, also love, also something
+without a clean word — he stopped trying to find the right answer for
+it and let it be what it was.
+----
+===== The Letter (Age 24) =====
+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 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.
+The pull was immediate and he did not pretend otherwise to himself. He
+had built a life. It was a good enough life. He could ignore this.
+He is not ignoring it.
+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 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.
+----
+===== Secrets =====
+==== What Harry Knows ====
+He found the suppression device at sixteen. He replaced it, said
+nothing, and spent the following year thinking about what it meant
+before leaving. He doesn't know whether it was still there when he
+went. He doesn't know if there were others.
+He left without saying goodbye to anyone. He doesn't know how that
+landed for each of them. For at least one sibling he suspects it
+landed badly.
+He knows the mansion's hidden geography better than any of his
+siblings — the false panel, the crawlspace behind the linen cupboard,
+the crack in the rear wall. He knows the layout of every floor, the
+rooms used and unused, the places people go when they want to be alone.
+He knows the medication was doing more than it claimed. He doesn't
+know the full extent of it.
+==== What Harry Suspects ====
+The medication compound was suppressing more than surges. He has
+watched what his power does without it for seven years and the gap
+between those two states is larger than any stabilisation protocol
+requires. Something was being held back. He doesn't know what.
+The increased testing during the sidelining years was not
+coincidental. The father's interest in him didn't diminish — it
+changed shape. What Harry represented to him changed. He hasn't
+arrived at what he thinks that means.
+==== What Harry Doesn't Know ====
+The medication included a secondary inhibitor specifically targeting
+psychokinetic expression, administered at doses far beyond any
+stabilisation requirement. The father was not trying to regulate his
+power. He was suppressing it deliberately — limiting the ceiling,
+keeping the output predictable, maintaining control over a variable he
+found too large to aim.
+The chemical testing sessions were also cracking the suppression of
+his Changeling nature. The father documented this. He watched it
+happen and said nothing. The abandonment was not because Harry had
+become a lost cause — it was because what Harry was becoming no longer
+fit the framework the father had built to contain him.
+Harry's power has been growing since he stopped taking the medication
+at seventeen, and continues to grow. The ceiling he spent his training
+years hitting was engineered.
+The father's documentation of this exists in the mansion. Those files
+are one of the things the will is keeping in play.
+One sibling knows more about the circumstances of Harry's sidelining
+than they have ever said. They have been sitting on this information
+for years.
+----
+===== People =====
+==== 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 conditioning, 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.
+==== Mom ====
+The constant. She was there when Harry arrived and she was there when
+he left and she was there, semi-functional, when he came back. She sat
+with him in the library at three in the morning without asking why.
+She made soup every night for twenty years. She said his name
+correctly on arrival without additional interpretation. By Harry's
+measure, that's functional enough.
+==== Rhys Aldermen ====
+The father's man. The biscuit outside the door. The book with no
+author. The journal, handed over at twelve with the observation that
+everyone should have somewhere to put things. Harry has written in
+variations of that journal for twelve years. Rhys doesn't know this.
+Harry is all right with that.
+----
+===== At a Glance =====
+^ Full name    | Harrison Hargreeves (born Harrison Green)   |
+^ Known as     | Harry, Number 5                             |
+^ Age          | 24                                          |
+^ Pronouns     | he / they                                   |
+^ Gender       | Genderfluid, male                           |
+^ Number       | Five (5).                                   |
+^ Alignment    | Neutral Good. 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                                 |
+^ Class        | Wild Magic Sorcerer, Level 3                |
+^ Ability      | Molecular malleability — shape-changing and telekinesis (high ceiling, emotionally volatile) |
+^ 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. |
+^ Fears        | That the answer to those two things are connected and equally bad. |
+^ Carries      | His journal. A family photo. The name he chose. 77gp 5sp. |

The Journal of Harrison Hargreeves-Green

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