Nick Dolohov

Nikita Antonovich Dolohov
Biographical Information
Born	9 May 1975, 42
City of Birth	Leningrad, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Blood status	Pure-blood
Also known as	Nick
Physical Information
Gender	Male
Hair Colour	Dark
Marks/Tattoos	Droopy moustache and goatee. On his left arm, surrounding and partially masking his Dark Mark, is a tattoo sleeve, made of simply outlined animal skeletons, insects, and the occasional staring eye. Whether it’s cool or creepy, it’s rarely seen.
Relationships
Father	Antonin Dolohov
Mother	Yulia Dolohov
Magical Characteristics
Wand(s)
fir; dragon heartstring; 10.5" (Made by Ollivander)
Education
School	Hogwarts
House	Slytherin
Class of	1993
Classes Included
Occupation
Title: Agriculturist 2012 -
Character Information
Biography
Lee

Nikita Dolohov is his father's son, obsessed with death and animals, always on edge, and not coping well with his release from Azkaban. He resents the Dark Lord's ideology and violent methods, but he equally resents the Ministry's treatment of its followers; he perceives himself as a perpetual victim and scapegoat. Since his release from Azkaban, twelve years after the Battle of Hogwarts, he has been trying to rebuild his life with low to middling success.

Physical Description:

Nick has a long, narrow face; his nose is off-centre, like it’s been broken, but he was born like that. His hair is dark and sleek. He looks a little like his father, and would look even more like him if he didn’t insist on growing a droopy moustache and goatee.

Nick is not very tall, and he lost weight in Azkaban, which gives him an unhealthy, gangling look. On his left arm, surrounding and partially masking his Dark Mark, is a tattoo sleeve, made of simply outlined animal skeletons, insects, and the occasional staring eye. Whether it’s cool or creepy, it’s rarely seen. Nick prefers to wear black robes with long, loose sleeves and little ornamentation. He does not wear jewellery. He stands with good posture, but is jumpy and easily startled. His eyes are in near-constant motion, but his hands are remarkably steady.

Personality Description:

Most noticeable, when one first meets Nikita Dolohov, is his guarded air. He is defensive to a fault, often holding himself with precarious restraint, as though at any moment his fight-or-flight instinct might win him over and cause problems. He has a short temper, which he works hard to control, with middling success. Nick is deliberate and reserved with his movements and his words, and seldom wastes them – indeed, his favourite response to a question he doesn’t want to answer is a blank stare, when he can get away with it.

Perhaps this is a trait borne of long-standing distrust and anxiety about authority. Nick has felt wronged, betrayed, abandoned, and persecuted by every authority he’s ever trusted, quite a few he didn’t trust, and several that have done absolutely nothing of the sort to him. Nick is deeply frustrated and resentful of his life’s circumstances and struggles to cope with the idea that he might have something to do with them. He deflects blame and dodges responsibility whenever possible, preferring to view himself as a victim. This also comes with a strong sense of paranoia. Nick carries a hexed knife with him since his release from Azkaban, for self-defense, and although he’s gotten better at judging when he should (and, more importantly, shouldn’t) pull it out, he tends to panic and make rash decisions under pressure, which has gotten him into a couple of minor scrapes.

Nick’s worldview has always been on somewhat shaky territory. He has a lot of cognitive dissonance where violence and hatred are concerned. His sense of pride and self-worth are tied so closely to his pure blood that he has never and probably will never critically examine his sense of superiority toward half-blood and Muggleborn wizards. He has little else to be proud of, as it stands. Despite, or perhaps because of, this insecurity, Nick is extremely susceptible to confirmation bias. He has little faith in his own convictions, and he fortifies them with anything he can – cyclical logic, broad generalisations, and outright lies – rather than confront them. He is not self-obsessed necessarily, but he is self-interested and self-serving.

Despite his prejudiced views, Nick doesn’t consider himself a hateful person. His opinions developed independently from his father, when he was at school, and he has never liked the way his father speaks of and treats others. He is not squeamish about death or injury, but he is uncomfortable with cruelty. Sometimes this makes him seem callous; though he has occasionally nursed a malnourished or injured creature to full health, he is likely to cull an entire population of beetles or fairies if just a few of them turn up with parasites, and start fresh. When he was a Death Eater he occasionally made the same kind of judgment on a victim’s quality of life; if he deemed someone past saving, he felt little guilt about killing them painlessly rather than let one of his more torture-happy peers do it.

Upon meeting him for the first time, and with no knowledge of his background, a first impression of Nick might be that he is immature. His sense of humour leans heavily toward lewdness and toilet humour, and he can behave childishly when he’s scared or he getting his way. It’s as though he hasn’t matured a day since his father first resurfaced when Nick was twenty years old. This doesn’t generally present a problem. Nick is irresponsible and careless with money, and can be rash and impulsive, but he doesn’t work a high-stakes or dangerous job anymore. The primary way this has affected him is in interactions with law enforcement or Ministry officials, who frequently perceive him as not understanding the gravity of a situation – which in many cases may very well be true.

To those people Nick considers his equals, he is a decent and generous person, willing to overextend himself and go out of his way to help others. He has opened his home to a number of less fortunate ex-Azzies, usually without asking for anything but peace and quiet. To people Nick considers inferior, he is polite but dismissive, and markedly less generous.

History:

CONTENT NOTES: violence, physical abuse, animal abuse

Antonin Dolohov was a very young man when he moved with his wife and infant son to a secluded cottage in England, following rumours of a Dark Lord beginning a movement to restore magic to society. It wasn’t difficult for Antonin to rise through the ranks of the Death Eaters – he had graduated from Durmstrang Institute of Magic with low marks and few connections, but what he lacked in prestige or experience, he more than made up for in youthful energy, ruthlessness, and magical skill. Soon he was acting as an enforcer within the Dark Lord’s ranks, and had a reputation as a brute even among outsiders.

At home he could be a brute too. His son Nikita was both fascinated and terrified by him – he was always curious about the souvenirs and pets his father brought home from his exploits – usually Antonin brought him a present, but on the rare occasion he returned empty-handed, he was likely to lash out at his son when he saw him. The only thing Nikita really enjoyed doing with his father was playing with their pets, a ragtag collection of creatures Antonin had taken from his victims’ houses or found off the streets. Antonin was fascinated by animals – their behaviour in the wild, their inner biology, and the way they worked in potions – and he described everything he knew to Nikita, even though most of it was far too complicated for a toddler to understand. Once, he vivisected a rabbit on the kitchen table to show Nikita its beating heart as his horrified wife, Yulia, watched from the doorway. She made up her mind to take Nikita and return to Russia, but Antonin came home too soon and found her preparing to leave. He reacted violently, and in the ensuing struggle killed his wife. The next morning, when Nikita asked where his mother was, Antonin told him she had gone back to the Soviet Union without them.

Eventually Antonin’s crimes caught up to him, and he was apprehended by Aurors and imprisoned in Azkaban. The Ministry found Nikita playing with his animals later that evening, and when they were unable to locate Yulia, Nikita was taken in as a ward of the state and put in foster care. Though he seemed to deal with the total upheaval of his life rather well at first, he was inconsolable when he realised he would never see his little menagerie again.

Nikita was a strange boy. He didn’t speak English well, and though he picked it up quickly, he didn’t say much anyway. He was happy to play with the other children, but he preferred to play with bugs or worms he picked out of the dirt. On the whole he got along well with others, but he reacted so badly to teasing about his name that his first foster family started calling him Nick instead. When he was very young he had no concept of his own background, but he started to pick up on his foster families’ unspoken anxieties about him as he grew older, and when he was ten years old, he demanded to be told about his parents. The adults danced around the topic, but Nick remembered enough of his father’s abuse and cruelty to understand the gist. At first he was very disturbed by the revelation of who his father was, but it soon gave way to anger: it wasn’t his fault his dad was nuts, and he didn’t deserve to be treated with so much suspicion because of it.

Though he probably would have attended Durmstrang if Antonin had still been in charge, Nick was sent to Hogwarts when he was eleven, where he was Sorted into Slytherin. There, his nascent persecution complex was allowed to flourish – the other members of his House seemed to understand completely how it felt to be blamed and mistrusted and unpopular for no reason. He and his friends were conservative, but none of them were violent criminals, and he didn’t think their opinions were hateful, just true in a way nobody wanted to admit. He got into frequent arguments with various foster parents and siblings about politics; he came away from most of these fights feeling even more vindicated, both in his beliefs and in his feelings of injustice. He moved out as soon as he was seventeen, going back to the little hovel his parents had shared, which had sat empty for thirteen years. His authority issues extended to his relations with his professors as well; the only classes he flourished in were Potions (to nobody’s surprise) and Care of Magical Creatures (also to nobody’s surprise.) Upon graduating, a friend’s father referred him to the Ministry of Magic, where he got a job on the Pest Advisory Board.

As an Apprentice Exterminator, Nick had a good life. Many of his friends from school worked with him at the Ministry, so they met up for lunch or went out for drinks frequently. He moved out, first with a roommate and then on his own, and dated casually. For the first time since he was a very young child, he collected pets again – mostly rodents, reptiles, and insects. He was looking forward to his twenty-first birthday when everything came crashing down around him.

It started with an innocent knock on the door. As soon as Nick opened it he had a wand at his throat. He hadn’t heard yet of the breakout – his father had come straight to him, and was clearly expecting to be put up for a while. Nick hadn’t been Nikita in a long time, but he remembered his childhood fear of Antonin. He hated himself for his compliance, but what could he do? He made dinner – even went out to buy cigarettes and whisky for him – and let him rant for hours about the last fifteen years, sitting numbly beside him on the settee and staring at his own glass. Occasionally Antonin cupped his face with one hand and promised that they could finally have a relationship, but he was manic and moved on quickly from these brief bursts of affection. Nick was glad for it.

His friends noticed something was wrong, of course, but Nick couldn’t go around telling people his sadistic escaped murderer dad was sleeping on his sofa, and didn’t know who to turn to. Any option was going to get somebody killed, and he was afraid it wouldn’t be Antonin. He claimed he was sick – a believable lie once the stress started to affect him physically – and stopped talking to his friends. He tried to distract himself with his work, but killing small animals made him think of his father, who reminisced with relish about their menagerie during the first war. It was too much for him, so he quit. He didn’t tell Antonin, still leaving every day with his briefcase and uniform only to sit all day in a pub. He survived on his savings. Luckily, he’d never paid a day of rent in his life.

Living with his father was strange. Antonin had been profoundly affected by his years in Azkaban; he was even more unstable than Nick remembered. At times he even seemed nice – he was gentle with Nick’s pets when Nick requested timidly that he not kill any of them, and tried constantly to give Nick money. (At first Nick refused it, but soon he had to accept, and if Antonin was suspicious of his change of heart, he was pleased enough to ignore it.) On the flip side was Antonin’s volatile temper and paranoia. He frequently accused Nick of spying or conspiring against him, and attacked him, pressing him to tell the truth. One night Nick broke down and confessed to quitting his job, and it was like a switch flipped in his father. He apologised for lashing out and scaring him, and even tended to his wounds. They spent the rest of the night drinking silently on the sofa.

The next day, Antonin promised to find Nick a new job. Nick caught onto what kind of job it would be immediately and tried to turn him down, but he was easily persuaded – by now he knew his father was willing to hurt him to get his way. He received the Dark Mark just after his birthday, a month before his father was arrested and imprisoned again in an attack on the Ministry.

With his father out of the picture again, Nick considered quietly leaving the Death Eaters, but Igor Karkaroff’s death a month later disillusioned him of the notion that he would get away with it. Fortunately, the first few months of his tenure as a Death Eater were uneventful. The Dark Lord had zeroed in on some poor kid – Lucius Malfoy’s son – as his pet project, leaving Nick and the other new recruits to perform run-of-the-mill killings and kidnappings of persons less crucial to the opposition than Albus Dumbledore. Nick lacked the stomach for torture or intimidation, preferring cleaner tools like the Imperius Curse. He only killed with the Killing Curse, telling himself that swift, painless death was a kindness many of his father’s friends wouldn’t have extended to their victims. As an exterminator he had tried to be humane, and he reasoned that Muggles deserved the same consideration he’d give a nest of doxies or a bundimun infestation.

Nick felt out of his depth among most of the Death Eaters, and when his father was finally released from Azkaban again, he was deeply grateful that Antonin at once took it upon himself to defend his son to any detractors, although he told Nick in private that he could seriously stand to man up and actually scare people once in a while. In return, Nick defended Antonin when he somehow lost Harry Potter at a cafe in London. He knew that he was more loyal to his father than to Voldemort, but never dared to consciously think about it. Nothing scared him more than the Dark Lord’s wrath, which had been terrible in the aftermath of the Tottenham Court debacle. Nick counted himself lucky that, so far, the only person who’d ever Cruciated him was his own father.

After the coup in the Ministry, Antonin asked Nick if he wanted his old job back – or even, he suggested, a new job at the head of the whole department – but Nick declined it, unable to face his old friends as a Death Eater. Instead, he worked in the DMLE, processing truants and runaways the Snatchers brought in for trial. It was dull, bureaucratic work; Nick automated it with a few jerry-rigged Quick-Quotes Quills and an enchanted rubber seal, and spent most of his days surreptitiously drinking at his desk. He was summoned to the Battle of Hogwarts with his father, but they were separated quickly. The Dark Lord was already dead when Nick finally found his father again, crumpled lifeless at the foot of a stairwell. He sat by the body for a long time, unsure how to feel, and put up no fight when the Aurors found him and, upon seeing his Dark Mark, arrested him.

Nick spent his twenty-third birthday in prison awaiting trial. The proceedings were quick and unexciting – the Ministry had dozens of Death Eaters and their collaborators to convict. His use of Unforgivable Curses would have netted him a life sentence, but he attributed everything he could to his father – he thought this was the least Antonin could do for him post-humously. He was given twenty years. Though he privately rankled at the injustice of being sentenced to prison for crimes he’d committed at wandpoint, he didn’t care to publicly discuss the way his father had treated him. It was a family matter, and nobody’s business.

Antonin had spent about sixteen years in Azkaban in toto. Nick served twelve years before he was released on good behaviour – it might have been ten, but his first cellmate didn’t like him, and they got into multiple physical fights early on. Aside from this, the twelve years were uneventful and passed very slowly. Nick occupied himself learning tattoo art, and started covering up the rest of his left arm piece by piece, though he couldn’t reach his shoulder or elbow. It was a painful and slow process, but all he had was time, and though he knew the guards had caught onto what he was doing, none of them bothered to confiscate his tools. His skill in tattooing was good social currency, too; he made many a friend tattooing somebody in a secluded corner of the yard, talking about either his ink or theirs, and sometimes he could score some contraband out of it.

Though Nick hadn’t liked Azkaban, he hated the Bridge House. In prison he had grown used to the lack of privacy, but living in a house, it was harder to accept frequent inspections and searches of his things. He didn’t get along with the Ministry officials who ran the place, finding them condescending and clueless, so Nick spent as little time at the house as he could, looking for a job. He had no luck, as most people realised quickly what he was and wanted nothing to do with him. By the time his stay in the Bridge House was up, he still had no job and no money. He went back to the Dolohov home, which was fortunately secluded enough to fulfil the Ministry’s requirements, but he lost his temper the first time an Auror came calling to inspect, and was sent back to the Bridge House for another year.

When he was released for the second time in the summer of 2012, he was more careful, and had been practising grounding exercises. Some of his friends from prison (a number of whom he’d tattooed, and two of whom he let live with him at his old house) mocked him for it, but most of them had known for years that Nick wasn’t truly one of them, just unlucky, and if they thought less of him for it, they at least didn’t like him less. If Nick’s feelings about the Dark Lord and his cause hadn’t been genuine, they all knew his feelings about the Ministry were, and those bitter feelings of injustice and persecution made up the bulk of their common ground. He and his friends had no interest in reoffending – they were biding their time until they had their wands returned.

Nick operates a modest potion ingredients mill out of his house, selling mainly to unlicensed potioneers or anybody else preferring to avoid mainstream suppliers. He keeps beetles, mites, chizpurfles, glow bugs, doxies, fairies, lacewing flies, and spiders by the dozens in tanks and small enclosures out back, where he also has a shed eith a workbench for processing their dried bodies, eggs, venom, and so on. He has to do much of this manually, as he’s not allowed a wand, but he does have a few enchanted tools to make things easier, including a charmed knife and an adjustable magnifying glass.

Though he’s cognizant of the risk of selling to who he knows he’s selling to, he reasons that, as a supplier, he’s not liable for what potioneers do with his materials, and he insists that none of his customers make small talk about their work, giving him a thin barrier of deniability.

In his free time he occasionally does tattoos as well, and enjoys it.

Since he was a child, Nick has had a fervent admiration and fascination with animals, particularly insects; he was barely five when he witnessed his first animal dissections from his father’s lap. His work as an exterminator in his youth also lent itself to his ability to observe and understand the beasts he cultivates, allowing him to respond quickly to illnesses or other misfortunes that might befall his collection. Finally, he has a good eye for detail and steady hands, allowing him to process his ingredients even without benefit of a wand.

He learned to tattoo in prison, where he practised mostly on himself.