NAME: Andrew Cleland Mortimer Kirke
AGE: 15; March 30th, 1981.
HOUSE/YEAR: Gryffindor/11th.
SOCIAL STATUS: The Kirkes are the scions of a baronetcy, meaning that one of their ancestors made some monarch happy, but not too happy. It’s been in the family since the 1700s. Since then, they’ve always lived comfortably, if very modestly, placing a high premium on their children’s education rather than extravagant houses or clothes. Still, they’re extremely well-entrenched and respectable, and end up in government positions. For example, Andrew’s father is a member of the Privy Council and styled the Right Honourable Lord Justice, since he is a Court of Appeal Judge. While not fabulously wealthy, and not exactly aristocracy, they are definitely a moneyed, powerful family, and familiar enough at navigating the treacherous waters of society.
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual.

APPEARANCE: Andrew wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. He’s not tall, but he’s not short. He’s certainly not fat, but he’s not as solidly built as he’d like to be. He’s not deathly-skinny, but he’s not heavy enough to play the rugby without breaking bones. He’s got freckles, which he inherited from his mother, and dark brown hair and eyes. Heavy eyebrows sit expressively above those deep-set eyes; Andrew is an eyebrow raiser and has an unfortunate tendency towards smirking.

PERSONALITY: Primarily, Andrew Kirke is never happy where he is. There’s always something just beyond the horizon that’s calling to him, and he has an irresistible urge to move on, to travel, and to see the unseen and experience the unexperienced. He is hungry for new things, and gets easily frustrated when things become too routine or too familiar. Unfortunately, that happens rather often, resulting in Andrew becoming frustrated and with a tendency towards acting out. Too long in one place and he starts getting restless and thinking of ways to get out—not to anywhere in particular, but to get out out out.

He’s a dreamer, but not in the spacey, day-dreaming kind of way. He’s always thinking of something else, wondering what it would be like to be doing something else. Never quite in the here-and-now, except when he’s playing sports or something of a similar stimulating nature.

Andrew has no ambitions and no idea what he wants to do with his life. He might be a rather temperamental person in other respects, but in regards to his own life, he is rather laidback. Mostly, it is defined by not wanting what his father has, that is, namely, an unhappy marriage and many, many responsibilities. In a way he is rebelling against what is expected of him by going in the complete opposite direction, and part of it is just that he simply doesn’t care. Andrew doesn’t have any desire for money or power or wealth. He just wants—not fun, exactly—but he wants adventure. Other than that, he reckons he can take it as it comes—life doesn’t have anything that would really bother him. He’d probably find being homeless a lark, at least for a little while.

Of course, there is the knowledge that he has a safety net, to some extent, but Andrew is always testing his boundaries with his father. His life seems to be a constant attempt to see how far he can travel and how far he can stretch the people who are closest to him before they snap. Not with friends, so much, but with family and loved ones. He’s a difficult person once you get really close to him—before that, he can be the best friend you’ll ever have, standing up for you, going on adventures with you, etc., but once you start getting close to him, there’s that perverse element to his personality, something childish and stubborn, that he can’t quite vanquish.

Basically, Andrew is simple. Keep him entertained, keep his imagination engaged, and he’ll do very well. He’s not stupid and he thinks well on his feet, and in particular, picks up languages very easily. If he’s bored, he doesn’t care about learning, or paying attention, and can appear rather doltish. He’s certainly not an intellectual and he doesn’t enjoy school. He’s quick to react and generally has good instincts about how to do so, but school doesn’t agree with him at all. His life is a quest of sorts, and the main objects are far-flung places and avoiding being bored.

He resents the power and privilege that comes with his father’s world and subconsciously seeks out people and places who are as far from it as he can get. Essentially, though, Andrew is a fun-loving kid with a loud mouth and a crude, blunt sense of humour.

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS: Andrew is that kid who ran away in 10th year, and who’s constantly fascinated with different countries. And he does pretty well in languages, but he’s barely passing everything else.
LIKES: Football, lacrosse, backpacking, couch surfing, outdoor festivals, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, French, Russian, travel, freedom, back alleys, crumbling streets, bad neighbourhoods, trains, spicy food.
DISLIKES: Bland food, bland people, the same places, being forced to sit still, literature, science, math, school, institutions, being indoors.
INSIDE SCOOP:

01. He’s not as stupid as he acts, but he’s kind of ashamed of that.
02. He’s really embarrassed by the fact that his father’s in the Privy Council, and doesn’t like to talk about his family at all.
03. The first time he ran away from school, it was because he missed his mother. He stopped a few blocks away from Westminster Abbey and cried before collecting himself (he was, after all, only seven).

HISTORY: Although letters addressed to Andrew’s father come to the Right Honourable Lord Justice Kirke, Andrew still calls the old man “Dad” with all of the determined casualness that he can manage, because it rather piques his staidly conservative father when he does so. The Right Honourable has had quite a storied career, having come from a baronetcy, studying at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, before moving onto Brasenose at Oxford. He was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1961, practicing in a wide variety of areas. In 1978, he was appointed Queen’s Council, becoming a Bencher at the Middle Temple in ’85. He was a High Court Judge by ’88, receiving a somewhat redundant knighthood, and by ’95, found himself a Lord Justice of Appeal and earning him a spot in the Privy Council.

At some point in the intervening years, he managed to marry, and his first child and only child was born in 1981 in the midst of his political rise, when he was forty-four and his wife, Isobel Cleland-Mortimer-Kirke, a Hogwarts graduate and a socialite, was a youthful twenty-three. They had been married slightly under a year. Despite the rather large difference in their ages and the fact that Isobel was a very pretty young woman and Alan Kirke was rather older and not terribly good-looking, it seemed that they genuinely loved each other. She even curtailed her social engagements for him, particularly when it seemed that her somewhat wild youth was hurting his reputation. They made a comfortable home for themselves in Allesley in suburban Coventry.

Andrew would be their only living child: around his third birthday, she became pregnant again, but lost the baby a few months before its due date. Complications would prevent her from having more children. Although she lamented to her husband, Isobel was secretly relieved; one child was more than enough for her, perhaps a little too much. However, the guilt of her relief and post-partum depression took its toll. She spent much of her time on various forms of antidepressants and alcohol, turning from a vivacious, outgoing woman into a reclusive wreck. With her husband busy with his work, their child was mostly raised by a nanny and then sent off to boarding school at the tender age of seven.

Perhaps it was this early and unnatural confinement that sparked Andrew’s wanderlust. He originally attended Westminster, but was eventually, at age ten, “asked to leave” after finishing the year, because he was continually running away and turning up in all of the parts of London that he shouldn’t have been, or several miles away by train. Hogwarts was his second and, his father made clear, his last chance. He could make good there, or face the consequences on his own. Reluctantly, Andrew settled down, considering that rural Scotland was probably far away enough from home to satisfy him for the moment. When he entered school, he was placed into Gryffindor, to the dismay of his former-Slytherin mother. She wrote him a slightly incoherent letter splotched with tears, demanding to know why he was determined to spite her.

Nevertheless, although Andrew wasn’t terribly thrilled to be at another boarding school, he liked Hogwarts better than Westminster: there weren’t as many sermons to suffer through, and he liked his housemates better than the ones at Westminster, and he was able to continue fencing, as well as pick up lacrosse and cricket. He's only average at sports; he gets distracted too easily. And although he was planning one great escape for the summer of 1997, Andrew Kirke had, mostly, accepted his fate as a boarder. His coursework was not spectacular, and his teachers complained that he seemed directionless, but he was nowhere near getting expelled.

Still, where most students are starting to look into universities, Andrew is just planning how he’s going to spend his gap year.