✇ headcanon;; and i just really like these kid icons, okay
Since Charmed absolutely, positively suuuuuuuuucksssssssss so hard on fleshing out secondary characters besides its chosen few, I'm making a placeholder to fill in shit that IN AN IDEAL SERIES would have been addressed. But whatever. It's not like I'm bitter about what those pricks did to my favorite demonic douche. Pfft. Noooooo.
- His mother, Elizabeth, raised him in one of the more isolated planes of the Underworld from the age of three until he hit about twenty-something, around the time he stopped aging. She was a full demon of substantial age and to say she enjoyed her privacy was a massive understatement. She never talked about her life before Bel came along... Ever. She didn't even go by her original demonic name by the time Belthazor could understand, only answering to Elizabeth. Not that they spent much time in the company of other demons until well into Belthazor's adolescence, and by that time, the memo re: her new name seemed to have been widely received. It was only after Bel was well into living on his own that he began to get any sort of picture of her, and all from overheard whispers and eavesdropping in the right places. Even decades after the fact they knew to call her by the right name - apparently the ill-informed few had been made example of enough to impress the point upon the rest. She was only really known among the oldest, most powerful circles of hell, and the general gist of what Bel heard made his mother out to be, like he'd himself become, an assassin, though she hadn't cultivated the same kind of reputation that Belthazor had. But then he had cultivated it - apparently "Elizabeth" hadn't had the same need for infamy.
- While she did raise him, and kept him as safe as any one demon can be in a hell dimension, Elizabeth was most definitely not the maternal type. Bel never called her Mom or Mother, just Elizabeth (he could only manage Lissbet at first, but she always mildly corrected him). She taught him the various demonic languages, the use of his powers, and the basic points of assassination. She was a relentless tutor, but as this was all key to his survival she had damned good reason to be. At all other times she was polite, almost distant unless he'd truly crossed a line - then she would become positively frigid and her eyes would flash coldly until he'd rectified whatever he'd done. But she never raised a hand against him, which he supposes must have meant something.
- Bel knew he was half-human from a relatively young age - she'd mentioned it in passing as the cause of his inability to shimmer without leaving a trace and immediately moved onto how to compensate for it. But the first time he learned what a difference it made was around the time he was eleven or so. He was practicing his extra-planar shimmering, and ended up in the midst of a good half-dozen other demons. They immediately sensed the difference in him, and started in on him. Overpowered and outnumbered, he got well beat up ("he bleeds so damn pretty" "red's really your color, kid") before Elizabeth appeared, looking for him when he hadn't come back right away. To her credit, they barely had time to scream before they were all dealt with and she was shimmering away with her son. As she bound his wounds and laid the spells upon the bandages, she said nothing to comfort or soothe. Instead all she told him was, "They won't be the last. You'll have to be ready for it." ...She was never one for sugarcoating things.
- He only learned his human name as part and parcel of his lessons in blending in with mortals, should the opportunity ever arise. If Elizabeth was guarded about her life before Belthazor came along, the subject and circumstances of her son's begetting were Fort Knox.
Bel didn't learn the origins of "Cole Turner" until after the Triad and Source had set him up at UCLA in order to obtain a law degree, the first steps in the plan to infiltrate the Charmed Ones. After his first semester ended and he was left with an inordinate amount of free time, he shimmered to the Census Bureau's regional office in Los Angeles and started with the names "Elizabeth", "Cole", and "Turner" circa 1900 (demons didn't really celebrate birthdays, so he had to ballpark the year). It took a couple of days of wrestling with the facility's database and a considerable amount of sieving through report after report, but he found it. He spent the next day printing and copying everything related to Assemblyman Benjamin Coleridge Turner and spent the rest of his holiday from school reading everything.
He told himself it was just background information, so he could blend in more, understand humans better. But it was an attempt to understand his mother more - to try and figure out what it was about this man that had made Elizabeth pick him out, court him, wed and bed him, and then wait three years before killing him. After the assignment regarding the sisters blew up the way it did, Bel thinks even his mother doesn't know the answer to those questions.
- Last Belthazor heard, Elizabeth was still alive. After they parted ways back a few years before World War I, they'd meet from time to time. Sometimes it would be a few years would pass before they saw each other, sometimes whole decades - it was never scheduled. But whenever they did, they were always polite, chatted for a few moments, then nodded and went on his and her own ways.
The only real lasting meeting was after Bel returned to the Underworld following the decimation of the Brotherhood. Elizabeth shimmered into his quarters without announcement, deflected the fireball Bel hurled at her on reflex, and chided him about his aim. She stayed with him for a full day, still quiet and elegantly beautiful after all those years, and they spoke about everything but what had happened to him and what she had been up to: the latest power struggles (minus the past and present gambits to present his head on a platter to the Source), a new athame she'd seen in the marketplace, all trifling things.
When she eventually left, there were no goodbyes, just a mere "I suppose I should be going" as she finished another cup of tea. They both stood, and she looked up at her boy in silence. Then, with the faintest of smiles and the barest brush of a hand on his, she left.
- He doesn't like cats. At all. It's mostly because most cats he's come into contact with have been witches' familiars. And as he pretty much only sees a familiar in the course of killing its witch, not to mention they're magically aligned against him? Belthazor has gotten a number of pants and shoes clawed into ruin by very angry felines going nutso on him.
- Bel has a Thing with a capitalized T for the sky. Day or night, rain or shine, it doesn't matter. He grew up in planes where the only thing that fell above were fireballs, and that was assuming he was actually in the open air - the Underworld was just endless catacombs with nothing but stalactites that always felt like they were aiming at you. He can watch clouds and stars and just plain weather for ages without getting tired of it.
Of course, he'd be lying if he said he wasn't more secure and comfortable in closed spaces. It's just the familiarity of it. The sky's nice and all, but it doesn't inspire the feeling of home that enclosed areas give him.