VARMA, Honey Satheesh

Post by honey satheesh varma on Oct 5, 2017 20:33:53 GMT -7

hello there, my name is Honey Varma but you can call me Honey. i'm 27, so that makes me a home-educated adult, but I would have resided in Hufflepuff house. You could say I'm hard-working, patient, and loyal, but I personally think that I am fun-loving, offbeat, and kind. People say I look a lot like Parvathy, but I don't really see it...

Honey Satheesh Varma

nickname:

Just Honey (and, yes, that is really her name)

age:

27

date of birth:

November 19, 1996

gender:

Witch

blood status:

Half-blood

sexuality:

Bisexual

house:

Home-educated, but would have been in Hufflepuff

occupation:

St. Mungo's tearoom owner

wand:

11 inches, dogwood, dragon heartstring core, reasonably supple

playby:

Parvathy

appearance:

Honey is 5'4" tall and has an average build. She is of Malayali descent and has dark brown hair and eyes. Her hair, which is naturally curly and rather bushy, reaches just past her shoulders.

Due to far-sightedness, Honey wears thick, black eyeglasses nearly all of the time. She has dimples that are noticeable when she smiles, and she has some residual scarring from having had Spattergroit as a child. Both of her earlobes are pierced once, and she also has a piercing in her left nostril, in which she usually opts to wear a larger piece of jewelry.

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personality

likes:

Adults who don't think they're above using their imaginations, supporting Puddlemere United, creating things, helping others, being around children, cats, St. Mungo's, a good cup of tea, photography, medical magic

dislikes:

People who take themselves too seriously, feeling as though she missed out on her adolescence, when her glasses fog up, reading the news lately, mathematics, partying, when she feels other women are trying too hard, death, cigarette smoke, Dark magic

erised:

If she could, she would find a cure for every magical ailment possible. Barring that, she'll settle for knowing that she's helped someone enough that they remember her someday.

amortentia:

Basil, wet paint, and English breakfast tea

boggart:

She would see herself, in a duel and unable to dodge flashes of green light

overall personality:

admiration - Honey most admires those who are willing to work hard for a good cause. She values selflessness, especially towards children, and donates to the orphanage when when she can.

adoration - Although she tries not to get too distracted by celebrities because she tells herself that she's an adult who should have outgrown that, she does still occasionally have a fangirlish nature about her. For the most part, it's Quidditch players, and she secretly owns a collection of autographs from some of the biggest names in the sport.

aesthetic appreciation - From what she's heard of the Hufflepuff basement, Honey feels that she would have been right at home there. Her flat is shared by three people—herself and two others—so her living space comes at a premium. She finds treating her space like a museum to be too sterile for her tastes, so she doesn't. Mostly, she has photos up on her walls and a few art projects that she swears she'll get around to finishing someday.

amusement - Having a very good sense of humor, Honey enjoys making others laugh. While she grasps intellectual humor, she is something of a child at heart and still enjoys joke products every now and again.

anger - Honey doesn't find herself prone to anger, but hearing about Hogwarts students who have turned to murder to solve their problems frustrates her. People who hurt children or animals are especially awful, in her book, and she wouldn't think twice about hexing someone for trying to harm either one.

anxiety - Because she never went to Hogwarts and spent much of what would have been her first year hospitalized in St. Mungo's, Honey does worry that her magical abilities aren't up to the same standards as most of the rest of the community. She's had nightmares over the years about not being able to find her way out of a duel.

awe - Seeing patients who are able to make a full recovery always gives Honey a feeling of awe, particularly when the odds are stacked against them.

awkwardness - Honey will be the first to admit that she isn't always the greatest at handling large gatherings or going clubbing, for example. She can't really hold her liquor, and—even when sober—she has a tendency to be a bit clumsy. Add alcohol to the mix, and it might as well be Veritaserum; she'll say everything on her mind.

boredom - Boredom, for Honey, is most likely to come when she's forced to behave like a “proper” adult. She doesn't think that she would have enjoyed lectures at Hogwarts much; she couldn't pay attention to her mother's lessons for very long, either. She's very kinesthetic and is always bouncing around on the job when she doesn't have anything else to keep her busy.

calmness - Art and photography are Honey's means of calming down and de-stressing after a long day. She tried pottery for a while but ultimately decided that it wasn't for her because everything she made turned out “too lumpy” for her liking.

confusion - Anything to do with numbers has a tendency to go over Honey's head. She can perform the arithmetic necessary for her job, but anything in the realm of Arithmancy is worlds too complex, and Honey wonders why people even bother.

contempt - Honey tries not to hold herself in contempt of others, though she's still trying to break herself of her habit of looking down on others (women, especially) for trivial things, like wearing too much makeup or going from partner to partner.

craving - Although her name is Honey, Honey outgrew the sweet tooth that she had as a child. Mostly, she craves her mother's home cooking, which—try as she might—she can't seem to replicate.

disappointment - Honey's greatest disappointment in life so far has been her inability to attend Hogwarts due to her having contracted Spattergroit. She still feels slightly left out when she hears people talking about how great their experiences were at school.

disgust - A lifelong vegetarian, Honey does feel disgusted by others' eating meat. She isn't vocal about it, but she couldn't fathom eating meat.

empathic pain - Honey feels for all of the patients at St. Mungo's, particularly the children and teenagers who are treated there. She knows what it's like to be hospitalized without anything to do, and she knows that the people who visit the tearoom are usually looking for an escape from their circumstances.

entrancement - Although the only Quidditch match she's attended in person was through tickets donated by Puddlemere United to St. Mungo's, Honey finds Quidditch absolutely enrapturing. Her memory of that match and of watching the players is what allows her to conjure a Patronus.

envy - Honey is most envious of people who are outgoing and sociable and appear as though they don't care what anyone else thinks of them. She also wishes that she could get up the courage to come out as bisexual and is thus envious of those who are out.

excitement - Listening to Quidditch matches on the WWN has always given Honey a feeling of excitement. Because Spattergroit is highly contagious, she spent most of her time in isolation while being treated. Getting to hear what was going on in the world outside of St. Mungo's was one of the few highlights of being stuck there.

fear - At the back of her mind, Honey does fear falling ill and being hospitalized again. She knows how miserable she was when she had Spattergroit, and she doesn't want to repeat that.

guilt - When she finds out about patients who weren't able to be saved, Honey does feel guilt that she survived while they did not. Over time, she has gotten better about it, but it's bad enough that she knows she could never be a Healer because she wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it all.

horror - Nothing horrifies Honey more than hearing about those who have deliberately injured or killed someone else. Because illness was what kept her at St. Mungo's and not injury, she can't imagine how it would feel to know that what happened could have been prevented.

interest - What piques Honey's interest is hearing others' stories—and sharing her own experiences of having been a patient at St. Mungo's in return. Because she does work in the tearoom, she recognizes that she is sometimes one of the few people outside of the ward with whom visitors can share their concerns.

joy - As silly as she thinks it would sound to admit to it aloud, Honey does take great joy in seeing other people happy. Days off of work when she's free to explore Muggle London don't hurt, either.

nostalgia - Just walking into work every day fills Honey with a feeling of nostalgia. She can put herself in the patients' shoes, and she's grown to be very comfortable at the hospital, in the same way that she imagines most people would be at Hogwarts.

pride - Honey feels a sense of pride in her identity as a British Indian woman and speaks Malayalam at home with her parents.

relief - Relief comes to Honey most often when she learns that a patient has improved. She feels relief in knowing that she isn't unwell, and she also feels relief in knowing that she hasn't accidentally left something on that could have set her flat on fire.

romance - Honey has been in a few relationships over the years, all of them with men. None of those relationships have been terribly long, though, and the longest was six months. Her idea of romance wouldn't even be something out of a fairytale—just someone around whom she could be herself would be fine by her.

sadness - Losing those to whom she's closest—to death or simply to their busy schedules—makes Honey the saddest. She might not spend ages around other people, but she values their company.

satisfaction - Honey feels most satisfied when she's complimented on something, whether that's while she's at work or related to the artwork that she makes in her spare time, particularly when she knows that it's something into which she has put a lot of effort.

sexual desire - While still closeted, Honey is bisexual and experiences slightly more attraction to women than she does to men.

surprise - Honey is most often surprised by herself, rather than by other people. Usually, it's a pleasant surprise, because she tends to doubt her own abilities as a witch. She's never been put in a situation outside of her ordinary life, so she has no idea how she would deal with it if she had to use more advanced magic in practice.

sympathy - Sympathy, for Honey, usually manifests itself in her dealings with the visitors at the hospital. She's learned how to be a shoulder to cry on, and she is touched by others' experiences.

triumph - Honey experiences triumph vicariously through the wins of her favorite professional Quidditch team, Puddlemere United. Even though she hasn't gone to a match in years, she follows the team almost religiously.

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personal history

mother:

Anuradha Brahmaniyamma Varma, 58, homemaker, half-blood witch

father:

Satheesh Bhaskaran Varma, 62, Muggle Liaison Office employee, half-blood wizard

siblings:

N/A

pets:

Knickerbocker, unknown, male full Kneazle

history:

Born a few weeks earlier than planned—on November 19, 1996—Honey was the daughter they had always hoped to have. She was a good baby, their first, though they tried in vain to conceive another after her. Her first few years of life were uneventful, from her standpoint, in spite of the war from which her parents sheltered her. Too young to know of Voldemort or anything but her family's small home near Leicester, all that Honey can recall of that time is of making occasional trips into places like Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley with her parents.

Honey attended a Muggle school for her primary education, though she always knew that she was a witch and that she couldn't discuss it with her peers. She didn't get close to many of them, on the whole. If having huge glasses wasn't enough of a deterrent for possible friendships, fearing that her classmates would find out about her magic and report her—somehow—to the Ministry, was. (The latter, in particular, came about once her parents explained to her that some of the things she was doing that the other children found so strange were actually the result of accidental magic.)

She didn't have to worry, though, her parents told her. She would receive her letter for Hogwarts soon enough, and then she would be able to make plenty of friends who were magical—just like her! It was a thrilling prospect, and it was one to which Honey clung for years.

Every day was one day closer to boarding the train to Hogwarts, and it became even more real when the letter about which her parents had spoken was in her very hands. It was really there. It was real; it was happening, and she couldn't wait! She began marking the days off on her calendar at once. She wanted to bring a pet cat to Hogwarts—never mind that she didn't actually own a cat to bring.

More months of excited preparations passed by, but, in the early days of that following summer, Honey became ill. Her parents took her to St. Mungo's, where she was diagnosed with Cerebrumous Spattergroit. Being hospitalized was bad enough, but being hospitalized with a condition that was highly contagious was even worse. Her parents weren't able to spend much time around her, and the Healers who were responsible for treating her—while nice—weren't exactly fun. Still, Honey remained grateful to them; they took every measure possible to ensure that the permanent memory loss she would suffer as a result of the Spattergroit would be kept to a minimum, extracting and storing what they could before the infection took hold.

Unable to speak because of the pustules that had reached her uvula after that first week in St. Mungo's, Honey had to learn how to adapt. There wasn't much that she could eat, and it was painful to swallow the potions that she had to be given. As a result, she became very weak, spending most of her time asleep.

Warned that their daughter would not be able to make a full recovery in time to attend Hogwarts, Honey's parents made the decision that, once she was well, her mother would educate her at home, following the Ministry's guidelines. It would keep her from falling too far behind the other children her own age. As it was, they knew that she was almost twelve and didn't want to hold her back for another year.

As time passed, Honey's condition improved. The pustules began to heal, and the cognitive symptoms faded. The Healers began to give her some of her saved memories back, beginning with some inconsequential ones to test whether or not it was safe to provide her with the rest. Those first memories responded well, and—little by little—the Healers increased the number, until she had all of the saved memories returned to her.

Still contagious as she waited for the remainder of her pustules to clear, Honey was dismayed to discover that it was already nearing the end of the summer. She pleaded with the Healers to let her go to Hogwarts that September, but they informed her that she was still too ill. She wasn't going to Hogwarts, even though she had been looking forward to it for years!

Although she was devastated when she found out that she wouldn't be going to Hogwarts, the Healers reminded Honey that her health was more important. She didn't believe them at first and became quite down on herself, taking to listening to Quidditch matches as a form of escapism. Quidditch, though, the Healers reminded her, wasn't going to help her to get better.

Reluctantly, Honey began to agree with them and decided to try even harder at getting her strength back. Once she was deemed not to be contagious, she would take short walks around the ward with the aid of her mother or a nurse to build up her stamina. She would work with other Healers to make sure that her memories were still intact, and she began to get used to the way that her skin was pockmarked all over.

It was, all in all, a very long process, but, eventually, Honey was discharged from the hospital and free to return home. There, she began her schooling, writing occasional letters to the other children her age—until they got too busy with school and stopped responding. She went about her life, celebrating her twelfth birthday with a small party thrown by her parents. The present they gave her was her first pet, a half-Kneazle cat she called Teeny.

Honey was nearly inseparable from the cat, who became her constant companion and like a sibling to her. Teeny kept her motivated to finish her schoolwork every day so that she could go and spend more time with him. Wherever she would go, the cat would follow, and it remained that way for years.

While others her age were busy deciding upon their elective classes, Honey was sitting at her kitchen table with a mug of tea, trying—and failing—to grasp how anyone could ever see an omen of death in it. When she ran into some students on a Hogsmeade visit while running errands with her mother, they assumed that she must have been a Squib. As she began to see girls her own age who were giggling over boys years older than they were, Honey remained at a loss.

For her, the most excitement she had in a week came from getting to listen to Puddlemere United's matches on the Wizarding Wireless Network. The team had always been strong supporters of St. Mungo's—the main reason why she liked them so much—though she knew her chances were slim of ever seeing them play in person. Her father was too busy, her mother always told her, and it simply wasn't feasible for her to take her alone.

Resigning herself to the reality that the radio was as close as she would ever get to her favorite team, Honey continued to listen in as often as she could, usually with Teeny curled on her lap. One day, however, she heard that the team had donated two pairs of tickets to an upcoming match to St. Mungo's. She was hopeful, for a brief moment, but guessed she probably didn't stand a chance. It was actually one of her former Healers who reached out to her parents with the offer of one pair of tickets, and she would get to meet the players beforehand.

Honey's father agreed to take her to the match. At barely fifteen, getting to meet some of the same players she'd followed for years was nothing short of a dream come true. The whole event, by Honey's recollection, was a blur. She found herself shaking hands with people she had only ever seen in pictures yet recognized them all by name, stumbling over her words as she tried to explain how much they meant to her.

She held onto her memories of that day, writing it all down in one of the notebooks that she was supposed to be using for her Transfiguration notes. She wanted—nay, needed—a permanent record of it, even if that record was surrounded by schoolwork.

At age sixteen, when she would have been in her fifth year of schooling, Honey sat her Ordinary Wizarding Level examinations under the supervision of a Ministry examiner. She achieved passing grades in all seven core subjects plus Divination and Ancient Runes but ultimately chose to continue on to N.E.W.T. level with only Charms, History of Magic, and Transfiguration.

Once she finished her schooling at age eighteen, with three passes at N.E.W.T. level to her name, Honey knew that she needed to get a job. Anything was alright with her, she thought; she knew that she wasn't exactly going to get into Auror training. (At that time—peacetime—there hadn't been much point in taking Defence Against the Dark Arts, anyway, she had thought.)

So she applied to a few jobs where they were available, practicing her interview skills in front of her parents and cat, for lack of a better audience. After everywhere to which she had applied turned her down, Honey began to get discouraged. She would hear about others her own age—most of them children of her father's colleagues—who had recently left school and had begun internships at the Ministry. Others, she knew, were taking gap years, volunteering with dragonologists on dragon reserves and that sort of thing. It was all enough to make her feel left out, and it made her drive to find work that much stronger.

It was when she read a job posting in the Daily Prophet that Honey realized that her misfortunes in job-hunting might have come for a reason: She hadn't been looking in the right place. St. Mungo's needed someone to work part-time in their tearoom, and she promptly applied.

Citing her own experiences of having been a patient there in her interview, she ended up getting the job. That part-time work soon became full-time. Honey moved out of her parents' home a few years later, taking Teeny with her as she began an independent life.

A year later, when she was twenty-three, Teeny died unexpectedly, and Honey vowed that she wouldn't get another cat. A few months more, and she found herself the owner of a full Kneazle left behind by a former flatmate, for which Honey got the proper license and decided to call Knickerbocker.

As time passed, Honey grew accustomed to her little life and got into a routine existence. She had never been one to seek out a challenge, though she readily accepted when asked if she wanted to take over the tearoom from its then owner and manager. It was a lot of work at first, but it was enjoyable and a nice change of pace.

A few days into her promotion, Honey went out to a Muggle bar to celebrate with her flatmates, upon their insistence. They ended up at a gay bar—her first real experience with the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. It hadn't ever crossed her mind to go to such a place, but, once there, she felt surprisingly… comfortable.

Having always identified as straight, Honey came away from that night beginning to wonder if, maybe, she wasn't. She knew that she had always admired other women, but she had always understood her admiration to be the same as anyone else's, not that she had ever had anyone with whom to compare herself, either.

Alongside her uncertainty about her sexuality, though, things began to change in the world around her. The mood around the hospital shifted with the headlines in the copies of the Daily Prophet that got scattered about. Two Ministers for Magic died, as did even more Hogwarts students.

If students weren't murdered, they were kidnapped, and neither did it seem as though the general public was safe. King's Cross was attacked, and even more changes came to the Ministry. Hermione Granger was instated as Minister, following her own niece, Victoire Weasley. Professor Minerva McGonagall returned to Hogwarts as their Headmistress, taking over for the ill Neville Longbottom—all while the Ministry and the school were in the process of balancing the Triwizard Tournament.

From her perspective, like most of the public, Honey doesn't know much about the goings-on. She follows what the Prophet has to say and is able to pick up additional pieces here and there, but patient confidentiality rules get mixed with hearsay enough that she's never quite sure what to believe, other than that danger seems to be around the corner. She is afraid of what might come—and what that means for her and for the Healers and nurses around whom she works every day—but she knows that St. Mungo's will have to keep running.