Old Man
(a special 3.5x drabble)
This is Greyson Lovegood. He is a studious man, not altogether funny or particularly charming. At first people never quite believe him when he tells them that he is that Lovegood, because he doesn't seem as jovial as they'd imagined, and is hardly as gregarious as his child. His largish eyes are set almost abnormally in a face that is not pixie-like and small, but in fact round and awkwardly constructed. His nose is too long, and his mouth is too wide. Yet this amalgamation of fumbling genetics somehow creates a visage that's not entirely unbecoming, and when combined with hair that goes perpetually untended to he manages at moments to still appear the hermit-like university student he hasn't been in over 20 years. He's always told his daughter not to worry too much when people teased her appearance, because she would look like a queen when they were old and crinkly. Lovegood genes, he reminded her in his thoughtful, even voice, may not be glitzy, but they were tenacious.
Aging among wizards was a capricious and curious process… some did it normally, some barely did it all. Some went with no change for decades, then all of a sudden the years would catch up to them like a railroad train bearing down. The majority of wizards lived average life spans comparable to muggles, and most of those that did slow down for a while did so they were old men and women, not unlike that famous headmaster of Hogwart's. Every once in a while there was the odd wizard or witch that got the process skewed due to a poorly prepared potion or leftover magic, and it was generally assumed that people like Luna's father's family had an ancestor in their line guilty of the same. No one asked however, because as with most intelligencia cultures, wizardfolk could be unpredictably sensitive about the issue. Youth and beauty did not always make up for the embarrassment that it had happened at all.
Greyson Lovegood was fifty-two and looked in his late-thirties. Some days he would stare at the bathroom mirror, think about his dead wife, and wonder why the reflection did not look a hundred.
