Post by Casimir Elias Karkaroff on Sept 4, 2020 4:05:36 GMT -7
31 October 2025
Cas had never understood the desire for revenge. It was a thing born of passion, not logic, and there was nothing that Cas prized more than his frozen heart. It kept him detached, protected from the danger of commitment. Because there was nothing more dangerous than the moment you began to care, when something (some cause or some person) began to matter more than your own self-preservation. He had been young, so young, when he had learned the valuable lesson that there was nobody that mattered so much as oneself, and that there was nobody worth being hurt for.
So his father had taught him. During his father’s foul moods, when he needed to teach his boys a lesson. (So? Who will it be today, Casimir? You or your brother?). Every sick encounter had been a lesson – you were better off alone. Look what protecting others got you. Look what your attachment has done to you. He had reinforced that lesson every day from the first time he beat Casimir. In the late night, the dark moments where the night held its breath just before dawn, Cas remembered. He remembered, from his earliest memories, remaining curled up on the floor long after his father grew tired of watching his boy cry and making himself look as small as possible. Every time that he raised his arm, or his wand on those particularly bad days Cas dreaded….yes, he remembered those with perfect clarity, the sharp taste of iron and salt in his mouth.
His departure to Azkaban hadn’t been the end. How could it be – how would he ever forget the ghost of burns on his arms or sharp blows to his back? How would he ever forget the precious lessons he’d learned that love could only bring you pain? Because it had not been his father who had given him that pain. It had been the impulse that it was better him receive it than his brothers. So he’d built his armor. Sharp detachment, cold observation, anything that created the distance he so needed. And so he became. Casimir Karkaroff was a bastard with no loyalty and no heart. It suited him well, that he was untouchable – perception always became reality. It was easy to rise through Durmstrang, and Gringotts, and Knockturn if he appeared enigmatic and solitary. Yes, he had done well to cultivate that opinion of himself, the one that protected him from everything.
But he knew what a hypocrite he was. He began to suspect when he met Titus. When the other boy’s company became less of a tolerance and something Cas began to look forward to. When it became less of a business partnership and more of a friendship. But he didn’t love Titus, no – how could he? It was well known that Casimir Karkaroff didn’t have a heart.
It became clearer after he joined the Order. Oh, it was a calculated move. He’d covered his bases well – pureblood society continued to accept him within its ranks, but he had this new insurance policy once their defeat became a matter of when and not if. He would not allow his uncle’s fate to become his own – Casimir Karkaroff was far too clever to be caught in any sort of attachment or devotion to a cause. He knew better than to become inundated as his weak uncle had. At least until the moment he began to commit. Until the moment their defeats became his defeats, and he slowly found himself more and more attached until he realized he cared. When had Titus learned all his secrets? When had people slipped through his guard?
These changes did not suit him. They were not him. Casimir Karkaroff was not an angel, an agent of the good and pure forces of the world. But he could use his thawing heart to his advantage. Because with the influx of commitment and attachment came other emotions. The passion of anger, and indignation, towards the secrets and pain that choked Cas into silence. He could no longer view the world with cold detachment. Now, as he considered the injustice of his life, he felt his blood sing with need – to take control.
Revenge. It could only be a recipe for his eventual ruin. But he finally understood it, the way it consumed one from inside out like a raging fire that needed nothing more to survive than hate. It couldn’t be smothered anymore – there was no point in smothering it anymore. Someone needed to pay for why he had become this thing, this thing that was not good but did not allow him to sink into the evil that existed in the world. A thing that would never be able to belong anywhere.
It took months to find him. But his father was old, and Azkaban had ruined him, and he could not hide himself from Cas’s ruthless search. He chose his location carefully, because as far gone as he was Cas would never stop being careful. The duel had been short, painfully short, until his father – old, a shadow of what he had once been -- collapsed on the ground in front of him. Cas twirled his wand thoughtfully around his fingers – the same wand his father had once wielded, had once wielded against him. Oskar Karkaroff was trying to speak. Cas leaned over his father, the difference in their age and height staggering at this angle, before crouching to stare into his face. He looked into his father’s eyes (the same eyes as his, the ones that had never removed their gaze during all those agonizing hours) – and Cas saw only emptiness. “It’s not time to speak yet. Time to listen,” Cas said coldly, cutting his father off. He felt a flash of rage consume him as he stared into the face of the man who had ruined him. His voice did not shake, but was sharp as the edge of a blade and filled with venom.
“Is this it? You were my nightmare. Every day. And now..I look at you and see something less than a man. Nothing at all.” He straightened and let the anger rush through him as he kicked his father, once, twice, watching him double over from the pain. There was no sympathy, no regret. Just a feeling that it would soon be over. “How?” Cas asked, the single word as sharp as a dagger as it cut through the air. He watched his father flinch, watched the man croak out that he didn’t understand. Cas gave a cold laugh, devoid of humor. “Oh, don’t you?” He didn’t need to use magic for this interrogation – no, that would be too kind to the old man. A spell was here one moment and gone the next, and any lingering effects with it. Cas wanted to watch him suffer, needed to watch him feel and suffer every hit. He had the scars on his own body to prove that sometimes Muggles had it right –sometimes the most lingering trauma didn’t come from magic at all.
“Azkaban.” Cas enunciated every syllable, watching the old man’s face intently. He listened without interest as Oskar Karkaroff began to recount in a stumbling, jagged voice what had happened that night. Oh, but then he said those words. “…there was fighting…got our magic back...” Cas’s grin was wolfish, predatory. He crouched down beside him. “So you were good for something after all.” His eyes flashed. “You thought you were teaching me something. That doing this to me would mold me into the kind of man you were. Well, I want you to know something. I have dedicated my life to destroying your legacy. To destroying this godforsaken society I grew up in. When I’m done, the way of life you sought to preserve…pureblood supremacy…our blood status…will be rubble. In the end, what did you do? Created your worst enemy. Created your downfall.”
A flash of green filled the room. Cas didn’t look behind him as he slammed the door shut and exited the dirty hovel in the grimy town. They’d find him in the morning – a washed-up Azkaban escapee consumed by his own failures in life. Undoubtedly the victim of his own past. Did Cas feel different? No, not yet. He would never be a new man, or a good one. It wasn’t in his future. But he was more than what he had been, certainly more than what his father had attempted to mold him into. Was this a sign of future things to come? Maybe. Cas didn’t care. He was tired of living a shadow of the life he could have been. And his father had finally given him the one thing that always seemed to elude him – the truth of what had happened that night. Now it was time to use it.
