Benjamin Dover
OOC
| Game | Journal | Portrayed By |
|---|---|---|
| Operation: Oddjob | bendingover | James Franco |
Basic Stats
Full Name: Benjamin James Dover
Nickname(s): Ben, Ben Dover, Bendover
Gender: Male
Age: 31
Date of Birth: April 1, 1979
Zodiac: Aries
Sexuality: Straight
Relationship Status: Dating Melissa Lynch
Bloodline: Muggleborn
Hometown: Falmouth, Cornwall, England
Current Residence: Residential area of the Diagon Area in London, England
House & Year: Ravenclaw 1997
Occupation: Hitwizard
Wand: 9 in, rowan, dragon heartstring
Pet: None
Family
Father: Verne Dover (muggle; bank manager; b. November 30, 1945)
Mother: Stella Dover (née Layton; muggle; interior decorator; b. June 8, 1948)
Brother: Alexander Dover (wizard; Gryffindor 1996; bartender; b. October 23, 1997)
Sister: Colleen Dover (witch; Hufflepuff 1999; b. January 16, 1981; d. January 24, 1998)
History
Benjamin Dover was born the middle child of Verne and Stella Dover (a bank manager and an interior decorator, respectively), coming around two years after older brother Alexander and two years before younger sister Colleen. His childhood always seemed almost as normal as could be expected, aside from a few instances of inexplicable happenings around the children that were explained away as the kids being kids. Ben suffered a bit from middle-child syndrome: Alex was the golden child, the eldest, while Colleen was the baby, the youngest. Ben was stuck in the middle, striving to do what he could to gain his parents' attention and affections and to stand out from his siblings. He did so by acting out a bit, doing all sorts of crazy and stupid stunts, ranging from jumping off the roof of the house (and breaking his leg) to trying to jump his bicycle over a parked car (and breaking his arm) to painting the cat blue (and getting scratches all over his arms). His best friend and partner in crime in many of his stunts was his neighbour, Jonathan Cross. Ben and Jon were the same age, only a couple months apart, and they grew up together like brothers. It was more unusual to see one boy without the other than it was to see the two of them together. Together, they got into all sorts of hijinks around the neighbourhood, from frying ants with magnifying glasses in the park to pulling elaborate pranks on unsuspecting neighbours. The Twin Terrors, they were called.
It came as a shock to the Dover family when, in the summer of 1989, a representative from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry came to their house and informed the family that Alex was a wizard, and he was invited to attend school at Hogwarts to learn about his new heritage and how to use his magic. A few demonstrations on behalf of the representative — as well as answers to all the inexplicable instances surrounding the children — had the Dovers convinced, and the representative also pointed out that it was highly likely that both Ben and Colleen would be attending, as well. So on 1 September, the family went to King's Cross, where they had assistance in crossing over onto Platform 9 3/4 to see Alex off to school. Around the neighbourhood, and with the kids' friends, it was explained away as sending the children off to a private boarding school. Verne and Stella, very accepting of their children's new magical heritage, bought an owl to be able to send letters to the kids at school, and letters to and from friends were to be sent to the house, then to the friend, so as to avoid explaining why they were sent via owl.
When the time was drawing near for Ben to go off to Hogwarts with his brother (he got his letter in the summer of 1990), he wasn't sure if he even really wanted to go. Of course, he was excited about learning to be a wizard, and getting to go to this really cool school that Alex came home on the hols going on and on about (the staircases moved! The suits of armour moved! The paintings talked!), but at the same time, he didn't like lying to Jon about where he was going, and he'd really been looking forward to joining their school's football team with him when they were old enough. But the lure of new and interesting knowledge (and new and interesting ways to get into trouble) was simply too much to resist, and so off Ben went to Hogwarts with Alex. Once at Hogwarts, he was sorted almost immediately into Ravenclaw. The Sorting Hat briefly considered putting him in Gryffindor with Alex, but decided that Ravenclaw was better-suited for Ben. He fell in easily among the other Ravenclaws, though he would hardly consider himself particularly studious or "smart," he just simply loved experiments and gaining knowledge.
School was more or less a blur for Ben for his first few years. He joined the Ravenclaw quidditch team in his third year as a beater (the same year that Colleen joined her brothers at school, being sorted into Hufflepuff), and the changing Defense teachers didn't make much of an impact on him (except Lockhart, who was possibly the most annoying teacher Ben had ever had). The threat of the Heir of Slytherin being after muggleborns worried him a little that year, and for the first time he was unenthused by the fact that he and his siblings were spread out over three different houses, because it simply made him more worried about Alex and Colleen when they were so widely spread apart. All three survived the Heir, but not without Ben realising just how much this new world of his disliked "people like him" — muggleborns (or "mudbloods" as he was referred to by some of his more purist schoolmates).
When the Tri-Wizard Tournament came to Hogwarts in his fifth year, Ben wanted desperately to be part of it, and even tried a few different tricks to cross the age line around the goblet with no luck. Naturally he didn't think it fair that some fourth year (growing up muggle, Ben hadn't heard of THE Harry Potter until after he'd started Hogwarts, and even then not until the kid had shown up a year after Ben started) had managed to work his way past the age line and not only get his name in, but somehow trick the goblet into choosing two Hogwarts champions. Ben mostly just cheered for the Hogwarts champions throughout the tournament, figuring that at least they had a 50% chance of their school being victorious this way. The death at the end of the tournament of sixth-year Cedric Diggory was shocking, as were the Headmaster's claims of You-Know-Who's return — Ben had learned enough about the wizarding world to know how Very Bad that would be. But he tried to put it out of his mind as he returned home that summer with his siblings.
As he awaited his scores on the O.W.L. exams, he and Jon found all sorts of new ways to have fun now that Jon had a car and could drive. They went on day-trips to just about anywhere they could get to from Falmouth: buying leather wristbands from a hippie at the beach and picking up girls in bikinis one afternoon and seeing how fast they could get the car to go down abandoned streets the next night. Jon also took it upon himself to teach Ben how to drive that summer. Of course, someone who had only just learned to do it himself wasn't necessarily the best teacher. It was a hot night in late July when Ben found himself behind the wheel of Jon's car, careening too fast down a road that had a sudden curve. He jerked the wheel, but he was going too fast to make the turn, and the car left the road, rolling over several times before coming to a rest on its roof. Ben had whacked his head on the doorframe and was knocked out, and when he came to, he found himself alone in the upside-down car. Carefully freeing himself from his seatbelt, Ben crawled out of the car's wreckage, his head spinning as he tried to call out for Jon. He found his best friend lying several yards away. Jon hadn't been wearing a seatbelt, and he'd been thrown from the car. It was hours before someone else happened to be driving by and could hear Ben's cries for help. He was checked into the hospital with a concussion while Jon was checked into the morgue with a broken neck from when he hit the ground. It was chalked up as pure dumb luck that Ben had survived with only a concussion and a few cuts and bruises, but he thinks he might have accidentally used magic to protect himself.
Ben blamed himself endlessly. He was charged as a minor for reckless accidental death, but the charges were dropped at Jon's parents' request. Because he was a minor, the record was sealed. The Crosses moved away from Falmouth that October, after Ben had returned to Hogwarts for his sixth year, a changed young man. He had missed out on all the wizarding world drama that summer, with the Ministry decrying the Headmaster and the Potter boy as lying about You-Know-Who. Even though it had barely been months since the death of Cedric Diggory, it felt like decades to Ben, and he couldn't bring himself to care. He reverted to his old methods of dealing: he acted out for the attention, which landed him in more detentions that year than in all his previous five years combined, particularly with Professor Umbridge. He just couldn't bring himself to care about much of anything at school outside of quidditch (in which he became even more dangerous as a beater, putting all of his anger at himself into each swing of the bat). He refused to talk about the incidents of the summer, even with his closer friends at school. He completely shut down that part of his memory, cordoning it off from everything else. But he did always wear the leather wristband, never taking it off, not even to shower.
By the time he was drawing near the end of his seventh year, Ben had more or less managed to regain his jokester side, but he was still clearly haunted. He was just glad to be nearly done with school. He had no idea what he wanted to do with himself after finishing Hogwarts, just that he wanted to stay in the wizarding world and away from the muggle world, in part because he'd developed a phobia of cars and driving after the accident, and travel in the wizarding world didn't require any kinds of explanations as to why you weren't using a car. He did end up staying in the wizarding world, but not in the manner he'd wanted: the summer after his seventh year, a Muggleborn Registry was started up. Not particularly knowing better at the time, Ben and his siblings all reported to the Ministry to be registered, and they were all accused of stealing magic, found guilty, and sentenced to Azkaban. Ben clearly saw the irony in being locked up for the charge he wasn't guilty of, while he'd gotten away free and clear on the charge that he was guilty of two years previous. And the Dementors at Azkaban certainly didn't let him forget it: every day and every night, he was haunted by memories and nightmares of that fateful July night when he killed his best friend.
While he was in Azkaban, he completely lost track of time and everything. Because he had been separated from his siblings, he had no idea that Colleen succumbed to a cold that had bloomed into pneumonia and died a week after her seventeenth birthday. He didn't know that as he took to digging his ragged fingernails into his palms to remind himself that he could still feel, Alex had begun to do the same thing by biting himself. When Alex and Ben were finally released from Azkaban after the war ended, they returned to their parents' home, hollow shells of who they'd been. Together, the Dovers mourned the loss of Colleen, whose body was never returned to them for a proper burial. Alex slowly got his feet back under himself and got a steady job as a bartender, but it took longer for Ben, tormented as he had been by the past. He bounced from job to job, not knowing what he could do. And then he found a picture of himself and Jon from that summer, mugging for the camera and flexing their biceps, and he remembered. Jon had told him that he had decided that year that he wanted to be a cop. And that did it for Ben, he knew what he needed to do. He didn't have the marks for the Auror programme, but he did have the requirements for the Hitwizard programme (which was more like muggle cops, anyway). He applied and was honestly surprised when he was accepted. But it gave him something new to focus on, and he threw himself into his training.
He also found himself drawn to one Melissa Lynch, a fellow trainee. He'd known her before training, though, as the little sister of one of his friends and roommates from school, Pádraig Lynch. That connection, as well as both of them wanting to hold off on real relationships during training, kept them from doing much about their mutual attraction until after they were through with training. Of course, once they had finished their training in 2002 and were full members of the Magical Law Enforcement Squad, it didn't take long before they went out for dinner together, and then started dating. After nearly eight years of dating, they finally got a flat together in 2010, and of course Ben was supportive of Melissa going for Brigade Team Leader … so long as she wasn't going to end up being his leader. His mum has been making "wedding bells" and "grandchildren" not-so-subtle comments to Ben for at least six years now, but Ben is wary of changing the dynamics of his relationship with Melissa. They're happy as they are, so why should they change it?
Where he could use a change is in his job, though. Although he doesn't aspire to leadership like his girlfriend, he would like to get out into the field more and do more. But his superiors (rightly) don't feel that he's suited to much field-work, or at least not in terms of actually hunting down and capturing criminals. In terms of physicality, he's well-capable of it, they are more concerned about his mental capabilities and his tendency to somewhat shut down in the face of extreme danger (and his equally worrisome completely opposite tendency to react foolhardily in the face of extreme danger and put himself and others at risk). He is very skilled at what he does do as a Hitwizard, which is to take in the physical evidence at the crime scene and mentally replay the scene, figuring out what must have happened based upon the evidence. He's done so well at it that he has been "tested" to see if he might actually be a Seer, but such tests have always come back negative: he's just very observant and very good at it.
Personality
Ben is full of life. Wild, crazy, loud, outgoing, prone to doing things just for the attention. Like the time he wore a sparkly pineapple bra over his suit to the Department Christmas Party last year. It's classic middle-child syndrome showing up, combined with a desire to just feel alive after his stretch of time in Azkaban. He won't do anything to put his job or anyone else in the DMLE in jeopardy, of course, but harmless pranks and just being wild and loud and crazy have never hurt anybody, right? Such as always insisting on being referred to as Bendover, or giving silly and random nicknames to those around him, he's like a harmless puppy on too much sugar.
Of course, Ben isn't without his serious times. But usually, if he's getting serious, then you've either touched a nerve, or you're about to be very very hurt. Wild and crazy as he is, he is still very physically capable. Years of being a quidditch beater, combined with physical training for work, have made him a force to be recokoned with when he's using his fists, and he's just as good with a wand. He has a remarkably long fuse, so there's plenty of warning before he explodes, but when he does, it's bad. He almost goes into a blind rage when he snaps, fighting on through anything, and then when he's gotten everything out, he's just flat-out exhausted. On the flip side, if the right nerve is touched, or if he's suddenly placed in a highly dangerous situation where he or others are in imminent danger of serious injury or death, he just completely shuts down and gets very very quiet. It's for these two reasons that Ben isn't considered entirely "suitable" to spend much time out in the field.
He still wakes up sometimes from nightmares. Nightmares of the crash that killed his best friend, nightmares of his time in Azkaban, nightmares of people he may have failed to save in his job, or people who don't really exist, he just couldn't save them in the dream. He dreads ever facing a boggart, simply because he knows exactly what shape it would take, and as much as he doesn't want to see it again, he also doesn't want to have to avoid the questions that inevitably would arise from it, particularly from his girlfriend. He doens't like talking about that part of his life, and he deliberately avoids it. He shoves it into the back of his mind and tries to forget about it. And speaking of his girlfriend, Ben loves her, but he's afraid of taking their relationship to the next level and proposing. In part, he doesn't want to upset the status quo of their relationship, but he also worries that he doesn't deserve happiness, that he'll somehow mess it up and completely ruin things instead.