Gavin Peter Matthews

1.) Gavin was born on an inconsequential Tuesday evening in the November of 1980, at Children's Hospital in Buffalo, New York. He was a quiet infant, didn't cry or cause the nurses any trouble, and to be brutally honest, there was nothing that separated him from any of the other ten babies in the Maternity Ward. Nothing, that is, except for the unbelievably bright shade of gray of his eyes.

2.) He never knew his father. He grew up living with his No-Mag mother and grandparents in Buffalo, and Erin Matthews always told him that his father was a good man, a brave man, but that he fell in with a "bad crowd." She told him that his father sent her out of England so that she wouldn't get hurt; so that the "Death Eaters", as they called themselves, wouldn't find her and use her against his father as some sort of sick collateral damage. She tells him how he died, avenging his friends, and how she's grateful for every day that she has Gavin in her life, but as much as he loves his mother he wishes that he could have at least known his dad a little before he died.

3.) He grows up with a strange sense of awe surrounding the Magical World. It's this gigantic, humongous universe that seems to cover the entire globe, but it's hidden behind this giant cloak of anonymity and secrecy that makes everyone believe that it doesn't exist. But Gavin knows that it's there, even if his mom and grandparents can't see it. It sounds kind of weird, but it's like he can feel the magic in him, deep in his bones, almost as if he has an extra beating heart, or something.

4.) The day he got his acceptance letter to the Stonewall Academy of Magic, he was thrilled. His mother and his grandparents took him out to dinner that very night to celebrate, which they were doing for his thirteenth birthday, anyways, but it was the first time that it registered for all of the Matthews family that they had a real, live Wizard in their midst, and Gavin was proud of that fact.

5.) Luke Beasley and Holly Filipelli are his best friends all through school, at both No-Mag and Stonewall. Luke is his roommate at Stonewall, much to their mutual glee, and Holly lives in a dorm on the floor above them with some bratty, snobbish girl from Connecticut named Jessica, who constantly claims that she can trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower. Although the dorms themselves aren't co-ed, Holly pretty much lived with Luke and Gavin, considering how much time she spent there.

6.) When he's a kid, he wants to be an accountant, like his mother and his grandfather. When he's at Stonewall, he starts to think that he might want to go into Advocacy and eventually join with the Auror Corps in England, like Luke is always talking about doing, or even become a Healer, like what Holly wants to be. It isn't until he's twenty-four and helping a relief group provided by the Advocate Academy with the rebuilding of New Orleans that he even considers going into magical construction. Even though he misses training right alongside Luke and all the other friends he made at the Academy, Gavin counts the next four years he spends at the Warlock Institute learning the ins and outs of magical architecture as some of the best of his life.

7.) Gavin has only seen a few pictures of his father, and only two of them have been of his parents together. His favorite is the one that hangs in the front hall of his Grandpa Peter's house, where his mom and dad are sitting on a park bench somewhere, and his mother has her head thrown back in laughter. His dad is smiling and has his arm around her shoulders, and neither one are paying any attention to the camera. Gavin likes it because he sees himself in his father's face - he has the same eyes, the same thin, unkempt hair, and he carries the same look of exhaustion underneath the happiness on the surface.

8.) He lives in Buffalo his entire life…save for the time he spent in Canada attending Stonewall, and later the Warlock Institute in Louisiana. He knows that the economy isn't great, and that it has problems with crime and the widening gap between the poor and the rich and the suburbanites, but he loves it. It's his city, and he and Denise raise their son to do the same.

9.) As an adult, Gavin doesn't think about England much, or the father who is dead and buried in an unknown graveyard that he never got the chance to meet. But when Reuben's pen-pal, Scorpius Malfoy, comes to stay with them for a year, it is all Gavin can do to keep from asking Do you know about my father? He fought in your war…is he in your history book? every time he is alone with the young man.

10.) In 1998, when Gavin is seventeen, he wakes up one bright March morning and makes himself breakfast. He eats his cereal on the fire escape of his dorm at Stonewall before writing a letter to his mother, who is living in Toronto at the time. He finishes his essay for his Magical History class and ends up playing cards in his pajamas with Holly for most of the day, at least until Luke and his girl Leah drag them both out for a night of "drinking and debauchery." They drive down towards the Border in Luke's beat-up old Volvo, blasting the Weird Sisters' new album as they head to a bar in Niagara Falls. Luke has a couple of charmed IDs, and Holly has a fistful of No-Mag money that gets them all drink after drink after drink. They end up walking down by the water, Leah continually falling down in the heels she refuses to take off and the rest of them laughing harder than ever before. They sleep in the car, Luke and Leah in the backseat and Holly and Gavin in the trunk, so that they don't get pulled over by cops on their way back to school and have to explain to the cops why their driver's licenses glowed silver.

It is a perfect day, a wonderful day, and the way Holly curls herself up against him to keep out the cold is definitely a nice feeling.

But what Gavin doesn't know, what he can't possibly realize, is that three thousand miles away, in the dark, dirty dungeon of Malfoy Manor, the man that he would have given anything to meet and know and call My Father is dying at his own hand; the result of a hesitation that Peter Pettigrew himself would never fully understand.

To everyone who has read and reviewed over the past twenty chapters: thank you, thank you, thank you a thousand times over. Your reviews have made my day a little brighter, and made me much more eager to get chapters uploaded! :-)

I hope that you all enjoyed this while it lasted, and that you've liked reading it as much as I liked writing it, and I hope that this last chapter wasn't a total disappointment! ;-)