Closed Lasting Legacies PV Aly

Sixteen had been bittersweet to Aly in the week since her birthday; yes, her party on the ninth had been lovely, filled to the brim with friendship and fun, but they'd been followed by a failure to catch the Snitch in the Ravenclaw's first game as a Seeker, an equally devastating loss for Ravenclaw at the first duel she'd ever attended, and of course the looming deadlines for the Headliner and her O.W.L.s, creeping ever closer. That didn't even begin to address all of the insanities that had come about before her sixteenth bithday, seven days past. Between all of these, the girl, newly one year away from adulthood, had become mildly withdrawn as of late, locking herself away in the Headliner offices and Ravenclaw common room to study when she wasn't poring over textbooks in the library or practicing her spellwork on the grounds.

Suffice to say, she wasn't used to company at the moment - especially from younger years, for when she was with anyone, it was usually her fellow fifth-years. Checking up on Peri, for instance, or memorising spell pronunciations with Dee. The higher pitches of Hogwarts' children chattered on outside her little bubble, of course, but she hardly paid attention to them, only sometimes remembering what the fifth-years had seemed to be when she was a first-year: aloof, bothered, too characteristically busy to pay attention to an eleven-year-old. History was a hungry snake, gnawing on its own tail.

A younger voice cutting through her pleasant almost-silence of flickering candle flames and scritching of a quill nib on rough parchment, then, was entirely unexpected. When had Bex come in? How had Aly simply missed her, so engrossed in finishing this article before her coming deadline? The fifth-year started in surprise, nearly falling out of her chair as electricity and fear shocked down her spine, before realising that it was only herself in miniature: Rebecca Lark, a second-string Beater on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team and one of Aly's favoured underclassmen. She heaved a sigh of relief, flicking a loose curl out of her face as she looked up at the twelve-year-old (who actually was taller like this, her standing and Aly seated at the desk). "Merlin, Bex, you scared the hell out of me," she panted, her heart fluttering with leftover distress in her chest. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to calm down, offering the younger girl as calming of a smile as her anxiety-ridden face could make. "Sorry, hon, I didn't mean to startle you."

Having sufficiently relaxed from being shocked in the dark, Aly could feel her heartbeat begin to calm; only now did she think onto what Bex had actually said. A moment to chat did sound enticing, but at the same time, the soon-to-be-sixth-year cast a wistful glance at her article, which was so close to being finished and another check mark on her long list of to-dos. Just one more paragraph to go, something about reminding the upper years to shy away from using powdered dragon claw to cheat on their examinations, perhaps, and she'd be done... but, at the same time, Bex's big brown eyes were pleading and awestruck, nervous almost, and with a pang of melancholy Aly once again remembered how the fifth-years had seemed to an eleven-year-old version of herself. Perhaps now was the time to break the chain.

Again trying to put on a confident façade for the little twin, Aly smiled at Bex, pushing her parchment aside and setting down her quill. "Sure, the article can wait," she said casually, as much trying to convince herself as she was trying to reassure Bex. "I always have time for you, mini-me. Is something wrong?"

MENTIONING @Dealla Prince AND @Pericles Dralt
INTERACTING WITH @Rebecca Lark

⋄ Banner made by Ulysses Drake ⋄
⋄ May 16th, 2024 | Corridors (Headliner Office) ⋄
⋄ Interactions: @Aly Salinger | Mentions: @Pericles Dralt, @Finnegan Connor, Jack Warren, and Helena Rose ⋄
Consent provided by both Helena and Jack's writers for Bex to navigate their departures.

𝓐 fun new personality trait she'd had the intimate pleasure of welcoming into her mind palace recently was paranoia. She hadn't used to be this skittish, constantly jumping at shadows. But while Pericles giving her the CliffsNotes version of the past five years of Hogwarts misery would almost certainly help to keep her safe in the long term, it had functionally taken a mallet to her psyche in the meantime, and she was struggling to reassemble all the pieces of herself with superglue. Case in point: she was the one who'd startled Aly when she'd unthinkingly snuck up on her in the dark, and yet the other girl's blatant shock and fear set off her own. When Aly had almost tumbled out of her chair, Bex quickly stumbled back in response, alarm bells going off in her head as she quickly scanned the room, trying to get eyes on whatever danger might be lurking in the dark.

There was no danger, of course. She was the creature lurking in the shadows, luring young women away from their Headliner articles. She could feel a blush start to creep into her cheeks as she struggled to catch her breath, embarrassment flooding in to replace the rapidly receding fear. "Sorry," she replied, awkwardly shuffling over towards Aly again. "I wasn't- I didn't mean to scare you. It's my fault."

Tucking her hair back behind her ear, she surveyed what was visible of Aly's personal Headliner queendom in the dim, flickering candlelight. It appeared that she and Aly were alike in more ways than just physical appearance, as Aly's desk was as cheerfully disorganized as Bex's own living spaces tended to be. Crumpled parchments - likely scrapped article revisions, if Bex had to venture a guess - were scattered haphazardly across the desk, with various half-used bottles of ink clustered near the edge. Bex could spot three different scrunchies taking up residence amongst the wreckage (which, same), as well as a weaving displayed prominently in one corner that Bex remembered from Aly's birthday party the week before. A four-leaf clover made from string, a gift from one of the girls in attendance, whose name Bex had never managed to learn.

Bex smiled gratefully when Aly agreed to put her article aside to speak with her. This was a conversation that she found herself nervous about having, though that had by no means ever stopped her before. Aly exuded warmth in a way that always felt like a balm to Bex's grotesquely frayed nerves. Her easy confidence and gentle guidance were a port in a storm, and Bex found herself continuously seeking the older girl out for the simple creature comfort she provided. The idea that something had happened to the older Ravenclaw - something like what Pericles had described to her, especially - sat uncomfortably with her. She didn't like not knowing. So far, she hadn't liked almost anything that she had learned over the course of this past month, but at least now she knew.

She grabbed a chair from one of the neighboring desks and pulled it over towards Aly, a hideous screeching sound providing a delightful ambiance to the endeavor. Flopping down on the chair, she turned to face Aly once again. Aly's assertion that she always had time for her was soothing in a way that was far too mortifying to ever voice out loud. Since Helena had left school back in January, Bex had found herself struggling to connect with her classmates in her own year, and after April she'd formally stopped trying, instead retreating into the trauma-forged circle of trust she'd built with Finnegan, Pericles, and Aly. She knew where she stood in her friendship with Finn, but she often questioned if she was imposing on the older years' time. Aly's immediate accommodation of her presence eased some of those fears, giving her the confidence she needed to start the conversation.

"No, nothing's wrong." She glanced away as she gathered her thoughts, the tip of her tongue poking out of her mouth as she tried to assemble her thoughts into an order that would be coherent to outsiders. She could see Aly's open desk drawer from where she sat, with what appeared to be cauldron cake wrappers sticking out of it. Perhaps they weren't the same in every way, then.

"I was talking with Pear the other night. He was telling me about the, uh-" She waved her hand to-and-fro above her head, as if this could adequately convey every tragedy that her classmates had borne witness to in their time here. "Hogwarts Ball situation. And the, uh, train? And the slugs." This was maybe not off to the best start. "But, um, he told me that you went away for a while last year. He wouldn't tell me where you'd gone, though. Poking him didn't work this time." She twisted the ends of her curls nervously. "I guess I'm just worried that it was like what happened with Jack and Pear, that someone hurt you, and you had to leave. Was it something that happened at one of the Balls? That made you go?"

Bex pulled up a chair, and with the screeching of its legs against the floor faded Aly's motivation to finish up her article this evening. The soon-to-be-sixth-year (assuming she could pass all of her notoriously difficult O.W.L.s, of course) tilted her head to examine her younger companion, worry flaking through her mind as it so often did. When Aly had been eleven years old - or twelve, as she realised she didn't know Bex's birthday off the top of her head - her biggest worries had been making her mother proud, getting Outstandings in her classes, and making it onto the Quidditch team. In just the last few months alone, the curly-haired child whiz in front of her had seen losses of all kinds, from losing in Quidditch to losing blood and eyes. Who would Aly had become if she'd seen such violence and desperation so quickly into her Hogwarts career? Perhaps that was the reason for the shadowed, and vaguely haunted, look in the first-year's brown eyes. "You're okay," she whispered, almost beneath her breath; was it again a reassurance for Bex, or for herself?

The Beater sat down across from her with a statement that nothing was wrong, and Aly narrowed an eye at her, slightly disbelieving of the fact. No one asked for conversations like these unless something was wrong, a law she'd learned most indisputably during her five years (well... four and change) at Hogwarts. Clearly, Bex had not yet gotten the memo that serious topics and conversations were meant for, well, being taken seriously.

And sure enough, as Bex chattered on about slugs and trains and absences, Aly's face fell more and more until she was no longer smiling. When I catch Peri Dralt, I'm going to wring his scrawny neck, she thought, glad in that moment that Bex was (to her knowledge) not a Legilimens. (Child prodigies like that could happen, right? But she'd probably have known by now if the kiddo could read minds.) What in the name of Merlin's bloody undergarments had gone through Peri's head to make him think it was okay to dump this kind of information on, at best, a twelve-year-old? Hell, it wasn't even okay for them to know about it, and they were sixteen. The younger, the worse, in Aly's opinion. The curiosity poured out of Bex as if she were an open faucet, and Aly the bucket placed below, left to catch all of her droplets and worries, contain them from reaching the rest of the world.

She was right to be worried, of course. Lots happened at this bedamned school - in fact, some of the stuff the first-year had just mentioned was stuff that even Aly didn't really know much about. She had been blessed to be involved in the insanity very little, only a handful of times, from learning why not to cast Incendio in the Ravenclaw common room as a second-year to watching her best friend fall into a long coma at the beginning of fourth year. In the grand scheme of things, most of Aly's drama had been interpersonal - relationships and breakups and family deaths. Until recently, that is.

Heaving a long and drawn-out sigh, Aly was quiet for a moment as she pondered how best to approach this problem. Though she no longer mentored younger years, she did consider Bex to be an adopted first-year of some sort - a friend, yes, but also a youth in need of protection and shielding from the harmful halls of Hogwarts. So how best to explain this in a way that didn't make Bex want to hole up in the Ravenclaw dormitories for her entire education?

She supposed the best way was just... honesty. To tackle the parts she could, at least, head-on.

The fifth-year leaned back in her chair, kicking up her booted feet onto the desk in front of her and crossing them at the ankle. After some silence, she finally said, "Well." More silence. "I don't know about too much of that. I've heard the rumours of the train and the slugs and the crazy stuff that always happens at Hogwarts dances, of course, just like you, but I wasn't there for either incident and even my ball experiences have been fairly tame, so can't tell you more, unfortunately."

Silence again, her heart beating in her chest the only sound except for Bex's soft breathing, as Aly garnered the courage to explain what, still, even over a year later, she still had trouble telling people.

At last, she spoke. "Peri couldn't tell you why I went away because I asked him not to," Aly said, softly. Her eyes found Bex's, green on brown in the flickering golden light. "Not many people know, actually. Dee, Peri. And the Headmaster. Maybe some professors, I'm not sure. But, I mean, when your dad - passes-" Five hundred and thirty-three days, and yet, the word still caught in her throat, only having been said a handful of times in just under the year and a half since the speeding car on a Muggle road- "you don't really just go around shouting it to everyone."

Breaking the gaze, she glanced down at her hands, intertwined nervously in her lap. They sat there for a moment in the quiet revelation, Aly's eyes pricking hot with tears she fought back so desperately, and just barely won over. "So don't worry," she offered to the younger girl, still not making eye contact. "I didn't leave because of anything that happened here. It is possible to be safe during your school years, you know. Just gotta stay out of trouble."

MENTIONING @Pericles Dralt AND @Dealla Prince
INTERACTING WITH @Rebecca Lark

⋄ Banner made by Ulysses Drake ⋄
⋄ May 16th, 2024 | Corridors (Headliner Office) ⋄
⋄ Interactions: @Aly Salinger | Mentions: @Pericles Dralt, @Finnegan Connor, and Jack Warren

𝓣here was something uncomfortable in the way Aly looked at her. She found she could not pinpoint the expression on the older girl's face as she gazed over at her, but it left her with the urge to shy away from her almost-twin's view. So soft that, at first, Bex thought she'd misheard, Aly murmured, "You're okay." It didn't sound like a question, and as such, Bex was unsure if it was meant for her or not. She tentatively answered, "Um, yes? I'm fine." And she was, at least from her perspective. Whenever the hurt threatened to rise to the surface again, she let it knot and twist into anger, allowing the unfairness of it all to stoke the coals of spite inside her. Grief and fear were useless; anger, though, could be a tool. She was by no means a very elegant wielder of it, but she intended to get quite a lot of practice. The Headliner was a good outlet for it if nothing else. Scandal sold, after all.

Letting out a sigh, the older Ravenclaw leaned back in her chair and insouciantly propped her feet up onto the desk. It seemed bold to Bex's eager eyes; the Headliner office had a certain serious, professional air to it that made her feel hunched in and judged on days when it was filled to bursting with staff members far more competent than she could ever hope to be. Often she felt more like a child who'd gotten a hold of her mum's iPad than a serious writer, at least in comparison to some of the more accomplished journalists they had on staff. Aly's eschewal of decorum was satisfying to a girl who'd spent more time in tree branches than at dinner parties, and while she wouldn't join her in resting her feet on the desk - her legs were far too short for it to be comfortable if she had to hazard a guess - she would assume her normal studying posture of planting her feet onto the seat of the chair and pulling her knees up to her chest.

It was a weight off her chest to know that Aly, at least, had mostly safe Ball experiences to report, both out of the affection she felt for the older girl, as well as just from the perspective of survival. She made a small note of it in her head: whatever Aly had been doing, it was perfectly possible to walk through fire without getting burned. Nary even a singe, if she was understanding Aly correctly. She thought back to Pericles' discarded request for them all to stick together back in April; perhaps if she'd stuck by Aly's side and been her shadow in miniature as intended, the night could have ended very differently.

In Bex's eyes, Aly oozed safety and comfort from her every pore. It wasn't the most logical of deductions, the conclusion she had reached, but magic followed far more esoteric rules than she was used to, and trying to deduce some semblance of order in the chaos had so far born no fruit. As she'd speculated with Pericles, she didn't think a curse was out of the realm of possibility. Perhaps Aly knew something the rest of them didn't even if she was unaware of it, and as such, whatever curse had been plaguing the Hogwarts' Balls these past seven years had left her largely untouched.

"So he did know." She murmured. "I knew it." Pericles knew everything. She frowned, furrowing her brow as she pondered the implications of this; clearly, this meant that he had gained immunity to her poking, and she'd have to quickly evolve her tactics in order to overpower him.

It took her a moment to understand what exactly it was that Aly was telling her. The possibility of a parent passing - her parents, in particular - was not a foreign concept to her. After Grandma Becca had passed, it was a thought that had stuck in her head like a clogged drain. But for her, this was an abstract possibility, less a premonition than a poltergeist. For Aly, however, it was, apparently, very real, and Bex's heart ached for her.

"I'm sorry. I don't-" Know what to say. "Sorry." She averted her eyes to the floor at the sight of Aly's tears. She had never been good at this, certainly not like Aly herself was. She found herself to be a poor source of comfort most of the time and could never seem to find the right words to ease another's worries the way others in her life were able to do for her. Instead, she quietly scooted her chair next to Aly's, side-by-side, and pressed her shoulder against the older girl's. She attempted to indicate through her body language that she was available for a hug if Aly was so inclined, but she wasn't sure how clearly this message was conveyed, especially since she was attempting to politely look everywhere except at Aly.

She was glad that Aly hadn't been a casualty of Hogwarts' legacy of carnage, but would refrain from saying so out loud. She wouldn't fault Aly for preferring to have faced the school's curse head-on rather than having lost her father. It was a wound that could never heal evenly, and as such, she'd do her best not to prod it needlessly. "Tell me about him?" She asked. If Aly chose to talk about it, she would listen. Talking about it had not brought her grandmother back, nor would it bring Aly's father back, but sometimes it could make things a bit more bearable for those who had been left behind in their wake.

It's a long while before Bex says anything at all, content instead to sit with Aly as the both of them process. Eventually, once the moment had passed, she said, "It's... good that staying safe isn't impossible, I guess." She stared at the past issues of the Headliner lining the walls, searching them for guidance that they were in no way equipped to provide. "I don't exactly- Where did Finn and I go wrong? How do you stay out of trouble when you don't know what it looks like? And- Pear, too. Neither of us thought Jack was trouble."

Those who knew Aly Salinger knew she could very rarely be described as quiet - pensive, perhaps, over this past year, and definitely an overthinker, but the silent type? Absolutely not. As such, it wasn't quite a surprise that Bex heard her reassure someone, but no one in particular between the elder and younger sides of the same coin, that they'd be okay. Still, she was glad to hear that the first-year considered herself to be fine. The strength, or perhaps that was confusion, in her voice was a bit of a relief. Aly had begun to worry that hearing about dangers past from Peri was going to cause a crumbling of the baby Beater's sense of safety, or worse still her sense of self; it was amazing how something as small as a few words could assure Aly that Bex was still the same old Bex she had been all year, if slightly more worried than usual.

And that Bex was someone who couldn't keep her lips shut, muttering that 'he' had known, and that she had known that 'he' had known; there was only one answer to the identity of the unknown masculine figure, and that was their mutual white-haired friend. A true smile broke over Aly's face for the first time, just for a fraction of a second, but it was there. "Peri, you mean? Peri knows everything," she ribbed, even though the object of her affectionate teasing was not there to hear it, though perhaps somewhere in the castle his ears would be burning; after a moment, she amended her sentence. "Everything but the future, that is. I just found out this year his mum's a Seer, did you know that? I suppose it makes sense, what with the white hair and all." She shrugged, readjusting in her chair. "Ah, but no one can know everything. I think our O.W.L. grades will prove that."

She needed to not think of O.W.L.s at the moment, with them looming over her the coming month, so the speed with which Aly changed the subject was astonishing if not simply instantaneous. "But anyway. Don't worry about it, kid." She waved off Bex's apologies, the warmhearted pet name falling from her lips with all the ease of a greased wheel. "It's... I'm getting better at talking about it, I think. Now that I'm thinking about it, I told Cassius, too, back in the fall - you know Cassius, right? The prefect, the solemn one. Always looks like he's sucking on a lemon." It wasn't necessarily a one-hundred-percent-apt description, but sometimes, the Ravenclaw duelling captain did have a somewhat sour look on his face. Not to mention those cheekbones. "It's... I mean, it's tough, but at some point, I have to remember I didn't die with him, right?"

Wow. That was dark. Again one-eightying away from her words - her mouth always had moved faster than her brain - Aly leaned back in her chair and sighed, spinning a quill in her fingers as she stared up at the dark vastness of the office ceiling. What was there to say about Benjamin Salinger that hadn't already been said? He'd been born, lived an adequate life with the one shining achievement of perfect grades at Hogwarts, and then he'd had a small family, and that was it. Sometimes, it seemed to her that his life had been over in the blink of an eye; but then she had to think, and remember all the love and laughter she'd had growing up, the spinning records in his office, the stargazing through his window, the ever-present affirmation that she could be whoever she wanted, do whoever she wanted, make friends with even the stubbornest of brick walls. Benjamin's death had been tough, but at least with her, his life had been so bright.

"He... he had a lot of dreams," she said, finally, the quill still tapping light feathery sounds on the side of her armrest. "Left a lot of them to me. I think I've been doing pretty well with them so far. I've gotten more into Astronomy, for one. Even managed to sneak into the Astronomy To-" She bolted upright, nearly unbalancing herself right out of the chair, realising too late that she'd been meaning to impart a life lesson of staying out of trouble on the younger girl but yet, here she was, doing the exact opposite. "Uh. Ignore that. You never heard that, and nothing ever happened, ever," she said pointedly, levelling the quill at Bex's face. "You hear me?"

Speaking of trouble, it was almost immediately name-dropped in the form of one Jack-in-the-box making his terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad way into the conversation. Aly's face soured instantly, her lips pulling into a thin, pursed line in a very good approximation of her mother, looking off into the distance at an imaginary Jack Warren much the same way Hesper Salinger would look at an Exceeds Expectations on a report card. "Neither of you thought he was trouble - Jack Warren, I mean - but that just goes to show that maybe Peri doesn't know everything, after all," she bit out resentfully, a tart lilt to her usually starry tone. "Some of us knew he was a right prick, but did anyone listen to me? Nooooo," drawing out the last syllable in a bitter sing-song. "You'd do well to stay away from him in the future, Bex. And not just 'cause he stabbed someone. He'd done much more breaking before all that business went down."

MENTIONING @Pericles Dralt, @Cassius Eden, AND @Dealla Prince (AND JACK WARREN, RIP)
INTERACTING WITH @Rebecca Lark