Full Name: Arseni Tsankova
Age: 45
Birthdate: March 12, 1961
Height/build: 5'11", lean and fit
Hair/eye colour: Dark brown, kept neat and a touch formal, greying just slightly at the temples in a way that suits him / Dark brown
Any unusual or interesting physical attributes: Impeccably, almost old-fashionedly dressed — waistcoats, clean lines, nothing out of place; the composure extends to how he carries and presents himself. A faint, old scar on his forearm from the night he disarmed Alexei, which he never explains and tends to keep covered
Parents: Nikolai and Irina Tsankova (Deceased)
Siblings: Ruslan Ivan Tsankova, deceased, brother, Dragon Keeper
Blood Status: Pureblood
Relationship Status: Married
Profession: Healer specializing in psychiatric and trauma care (mind-Healing)
Wand: Cedar, dragon heartstring core, 12 inches, unyielding
Patronus: Wolf
Boggart: Failing to stop Alexei — Iliana dead at his feet.
Certifications/skills:
- Healer certification — mind-Healing / psychiatric specialty
Legilimency — highly skilled; his core tool, professionally and personally. He could read far more than he does and deliberately doesn't, especially with family — the restraint is a matter of ethics, not ability
Occlumency — the natural counterpart; the literal magical form of the leash he keeps on himself
Apparition
Nonverbal magic — proficient; understated by preference, never showy
The standoffishness Iliana is said to have caught from him is real, but it isn't coldness — it's a leash. Arseni is the most composed person in almost any room precisely because what runs underneath is not calm at all, and long ago he decided that control was the only dignified way to carry it. He is courtly, deliberate, and precise; he chooses his words carefully and means all of them, and his particular kind of power is stillness rather than force — he de-escalates a room; he doesn't dominate it. As a Legilimens, he reads people effortlessly and reveals almost nothing in return, which makes him excellent with patients and quietly maddening to live with.
Beneath the reserve is fierce, old-fashioned loyalty and the instincts of a fixer — the one who holds the family together and swallows the guilt when he can't. The leash is tightest exactly where the feeling runs deepest, which is why he can sit calmly with a stranger's worst night and cannot bring himself to sit in his own. Marya is the single exception to all of it, and always was — she was the first person he could simply talk to, the first the wall never came up around, and that ease was the whole of why he chose her. The control was never something he performed for her. She is not something he relaxes into so much as the place he never had to hold himself together in the first place. He is not a warm man, but he is unguarded with her in a way no one else will ever witness: quieter, easier, off-duty. She is where he sets the leash down. Threaten the people he loves, though, and the stillness becomes something formidable — he simply does not yield, and he has, exactly once, proven he'll do whatever it takes.
History:
Arseni was the younger of the two Tsankova sons, born seven years behind Ruslan into an old pureblood family in St Petersburg. Where Ruslan followed the family's love of dangerous, physical work and became a Dragon Keeper, Arseni was the watchful one — composed, self-contained, and quietly contrary from boyhood. He went to Durmstrang like every Tsankova before him, but afterward turned away from the family's traditions and toward Healing, specifically the mind. It was the first time he defied his family's expectations. It would not be the last.
Arseni met Marya during winter break in his Healer training, in a snow-covered park where neither of them had planned to be. She was eighteen and just finishing school; he was twenty-eight. What undid him wasn't beauty or charm so much as ease — she was, impossibly, easy to talk to, and for a man who'd kept a wall up since boyhood, the discovery that it simply didn't come up around her was its own kind of falling. But she was a student, and he was a decade older and a grown man besides, and Arseni was not about to be that. So he did nothing. He let her go and finish becoming an adult, and he waited.
When she'd graduated and found her own feet, he began — carefully, patiently — to court her, and this time he let himself. He proposed when she was twenty-three, unwilling to rush her into a life before she'd built one of her own, and they married when she was twenty-five, in 1995. The two years between were spent planning a wedding and, just as much, bringing his parents around. They were old-school Tsankovas, and the trouble was her blood: Marya was half-blood, and to an old pureblood house that was hurdle enough on its own, never mind that she hadn't grown up in Russia or in their world either. Arseni did not argue with them so much as simply refuse to yield — he never raised his voice, and he never bent — and Marya won them over on her own terms, completely, over the long slow years he'd already given her. By the time catastrophe came, she was fully a Tsankova, doubted by no one.
The Yule season of 1997 broke everything. Arseni and Marya had taken ten-year-old Iliana out for last-minute shopping, and the three of them returned to Ruslan and Sonia's home to walk into a nightmare. Alexei — long since fallen to the Death Eaters, disowned, kept away for the family's safety — had murdered his parents and turned on his little sister. Arseni was the one who stopped him. He saved Iliana's life. He could not save his brother's, or Sonia's, and he had been one room and a handful of minutes too late to do so. He and Marya took guardianship of Iliana and, at her request, left Russia entirely. Durmstrang was out of the question after what it had done to Alexei; between France and England they chose London, and eventually Hogwarts.
In London he rebuilt his practice into something the post-war years had made bitterly necessary — seven years on, the demand for Healers who understand trauma and curse-damage has never been higher, and Arseni specializes in exactly the kind of harm a Death Eater does to his own family. It's steady, meaningful work, and it lets him do for strangers what he has never quite managed to do for himself. That blind spot surfaced early: it was Marya, not Arseni, who insisted Iliana go to therapy, overruling both the girl and her mind-Healer uncle. She was right. He knows she was right. He has still never fully forgiven himself for being the kind of man who had to be told.
Face claim: Daniel Gillies
OOC username: Nova
Preferred means of contact: Discord