Still Unsure Solo Finished

This is part of Aly's Cast the Bronze storyline. You can find other portions here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

If you're still unsure, let me lie for a day

The small, round table that had been claimed by a certain Ravenclaw seventh-year for several hours now looked very much a mess. Aly had shown up to the study room after her Monday afternoon Charms class with a handful of brochures, a whole stack of books, and one clear-cut thought running through her head: that today, she was going to figure out what she wanted to do post-graduation. Unfortunately, not only had that train derailed significantly since her arrival earlier in the afternoon, it had gone full-on action film and exploded; there would be no survivors.

Why was deciding what one wanted to do with one's life so bedamned hard??? It wasn't like Aly was at a lack of talent, intelligence, beauty, or riches - she could have had every opportunity simply handed to her just based on grades alone. When her father had graduated Hogwarts with straight Outstandings in every subject on both his O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s, half of the departments of the Ministry had gone vying after him, not to mention the many international and independent agencies and companies that would have killed to have had him on their team; now, some twenty years later, Aly was halfway to her father's record with a perfect slate of ten Ordinary Wizarding Levels each marked at the highest possible score, and there was simply... silence. No recruiting owls dropping envelopes into her pumpkin juice at breakfast. No one so much as stopping her on the street. No job offers, period.

She supposed it was just harder nowadays: fewer jobs, more graduates, and whatnot. Or perhaps, now that she was reingratiated into the Livingston family, folks just expected her to follow in that trade - to learn to harvest jewels like her grandfather and aunt, or perhaps to just sit there and look pretty like her grandmother and mother, to win over the British wizarding elite as one of the world's most bedecked socialites. And yet neither of those paths were particularly appealing to the young Ravenclaw, who knew as much about pearls as she did about mackled malaclaws, and cared as much about the social scene as - well. Okay. That one she actually did rather enjoy, but still, spending an entire life doing nothing but hosting parties and attending events and ending up on front pages of various newspapers and gossip magazines did not seem to be much of a life at all. Where was the adventure? The spontaneity? The excitement?

Then again, Aly reflected as she flipped through the brochures scattered across the tiny table in front of her for what seemed like the millionth time, where was the excitement in all... this? Half these jobs had been discarded for pure boredom, or because she despised their most-utilised subject here at school: History of Magic, Transfiguration, and the like. What seemed to be the other half simply didn't appeal to her either, for one reason or another. The list of possible careers was just never-ending, and yet, so was her list of reasons why to not choose each one.

Some of the categories were easier to clear out as Aly sorted brochures into this pile and that. Healing careers had long since been done away with; she had wanted to assist others in that regard perhaps when she was thirteen, but now the inability to save people carried with it a weighty sting that she would never quite shake off even if she lived a million lifetimes. Likewise, she had about as much desire to join the Ministry as she did to eat a Billywig alive. It had taken from her her mother, then her father, then her mother again. If Aly never interacted with politics or government ever again, it would still be too soon.

Crafting was simply not her style; as much as she would (in just a few days) attempt a sorry try at crocheting, the end result of that would put her off any artsy-type jobs for good. Oracle-based jobs she would have been equally incompetent in completing, for although Aly was an alright hand at Divination, she was certainly no Seer - and as for any potential careers in the Sentinel field, she was five-foot-one and as thin as a bowtruckle. She wouldn't do a halfway decent job of scaring anyone off, let alone actually defending something or someone from them - plus, there was that whole causing-harm thing that (despite the events of the summer's ill-fated wedding reception) she still just couldn't seem to properly get over. Finally, anything guard-related meant dealing with Aurors - and chief among them Aly's mother. She couldn't be sure that she wouldn't deal with Hesper in the field, but somehow, the idea of running into her mother on the job made a slight bile rise in her slender throat.

Entertainment also didn't seem to fit with her just right; the only one that seemed to be interesting was journalist, but even though Aly loved the Headliner, she couldn't imagine writing such articles for the rest of her life. As for the other entertainer-esque jobs, despite her ability to entertain a crowd, make others laugh and smile, and plan an excellent party or even a rave if the situation required such a thing, when Aly tried to imagine doing that forever for a living she simply wanted to hide for eternity instead. After all, what if people didn't like it? What if they didn't like her? She had already been in enough of a public spotlight lately with her debut into high society; the last thing she needed was more eyes on her. For once, Aly was quite happy to fade into the distance, just another face in a sea of people doing interesting things with their short time in the world.

And so into the other categories she went.

Academia would have been a clear-cut path for her with her grades; she'd have been a shoo-in to whatever graduate school she chose, if she had wanted to do so. But seven years of school seemed to be just quite enough for the teenager, despite her love for learning; even now, as she sat in the study room putting off looking at career books one more time by finishing up a few inches of parchment for Divination class the next morning, she found herself perhaps never wanting to write an essay ever again. Graduate school or any other academic pursuit beyond graduation, then, didn't seem to be the clearest-cut of paths for her. She also didn't know any other languages, nor did teaching or tutoring interest her, if only for avoidance of having to deal with first-years or (the horror!) younger. If Rowena Ravenclaw could see me now, I think she'd keel over in shock and shame.

Closely related, Nature jobs seemed equally up her "aly". She had always loved plants - loved them more before her hiatus from Hogwarts in her fourth year, but still had a soft touch for anything green and Herbology-related in the modern era - so working in a greenhouse could have been a nature-al path for her. But then again, there was that lack of adventure. Day in and day out, tending to the same plants, whispering stories to them that she would never once get to live out herself... it didn't carry the same appeal or weight as it had when she was thirteen, growing flowers on the sills of her windows in the Ravenclaw dormitories just to give out to people in the hopes she'd get a smile in return. She had grown up, and with her, her interests and hobbies had, too. Plus, anything related to creatures was still beyond her comprehension, knowledge, or curiosity. There is a reason I never ended up taking Care of Magical Creatures, after all.

Athletics might have been another natural pursuit for the Quidditch captain, who had actually caught a couple of Snitches in her day by now! She did rather enjoy the sport and had toyed around with the idea of pursuing it as a career many a time - usually whilst at practice with her team, the wind in her hair, the sun as bright above them as her future seemed to be. But @Koko Riddle had followed that path and was now warming the bench down in Cork, and if there was one thing Aly hated, it was missing out on the action. If she couldn't find a first-string job, she wouldn't want to go into the sport at all - never mind the fact that such a thought was snobbish and overly expectant. She'd worked on a team for years now, and captained it for nearly a year; didn't that count as experience enough? Why should she have to sit on a bench, useless and unused, while others got to have their fun? And if it weren't Quidditch, well, then sports in general simply wouldn't do. Aly had no desire to duel or race, or even to commentate; she would happily sit in the stands to cheer on her favoured teams, deck herself out in their colours and come up with rude chants for the opponents and the like. She'd play friendly skirmishes with her mates at holidays and leave her athletic career behind when she donned those graduation robes in June. Plus, there's what my family might say, and I'm not sure they're ready for me to be famous in a different sense as opposed to fame from their name. I think I even remember Grandmother saying she disapproved of Mother and Aunt Cassiopeia playing Quidditch in the first place...

Mercantile jobs were another that could have appealed to her in a different life. The Ravenclaw was gregarious - friendly, approachable, and rarely found without a smile. Who was to say she couldn't sell ice to a Yeti? And while the idea of exploring the world did pique her interest, she also wanted more freedom than simply flying goods around the world. Something more people-focused, perhaps, and less so on the gold. Not to mention that I don't like the idea of begging. People should want to interact with me... like they do now... mostly.

That mostly left jobs in the Hospitality sector, and though it was an idea Aly could certainly get behind, she also still didn't find herself totally drawn to any of the careers featured in the booklets. She flipped through them a final time and sighed, letting each of the little papers - gifted to her by her former Head of House, @Marcus Iwasaki, two years prior during their Careers Advice session just after her fifth-year Easter holiday - fall limply to the table, where they scattered and skidded across the wood as paper does so tend to do. Professor Iwasaki had suggested so many excellent paths to her in their advising session, and at the time Aly had been so excited for all of them... but as graduation inched ever nearer by the day, all the Ravenclaw could think about is how little she looked forward to any of the potential careers he had offered for her. (After all, if Marcus had left what Aly thought was a perfect career for him - Head of House - would she truly be happy anywhere?) She could work as a bartender - take up shifts at the Three Broomsticks, watch those below her graduate and move on to bigger and better things as she served them their butterbeer and wiped down their tables. Or perhaps a chef, pursuing the culinary intrigue that her Magical & Muggle Meals series for the Headliner had sparked in her, cooking up the most delicious of delicacies for others only to return exhausted to a tiny flat with no more energy to create anything halfway decent for herself. She could take up residence on a train or the Knight Bus, allowing her some travel, though still always at the expense of her passengers. It seemed that every brochure came with some sort of downside, the Ravenclaw's overly imaginative brain cooking up scenarios of misery just as easily as her hands cooked up new recipes in the kitchens with the house-elves each month.

Then, of course, there was the fear behind it all: that even if she did manage to find a career that interested her, to pursue a job that felt more like play than it did work, that her newfound regency of a family would come after it all tooth and nail.

Her future with the Livingston family was clear: if she followed the rules, she could have a place there, never having to raise a finger again for anything that was unrelated to fancy parties and haute couture looks. Sure, she would need to button herself up a bit and show a little skin, to hide away some parts of her while making sure every asset was just perfectly on display, so that the public could ooh and ahh over her fashion sense, her natural beauty, her talent with the dance floor, without so much as ever seeing past the façade to the actual person inside. With them, she would be taken care of even as she dissolved into someone she was not - a wilting flower kept alive by endless supplies of fresh water and magic. She would be reborn as someone else.

If she were to try something else, though, and pursue an actual career... what if they were to come after it? Her future if she tried to follow her own path seemed cloudier than a broken crystal ball in Divination class, foggy and unclear as a cloudy night sky on a new moon's night. She could be more herself, but at what cost? Sacrificing the only family she had left, not to mention the money they so clearly flaunted at every opportunity, for what - a chance to strike out on her own that may just lead to nothing? Would she even be able to keep the flowers alive if she let her hair down, followed a dream she didn't yet even have? What kind of life would that pure innocence - nay, naïveté lead her to?

Grumbling, Aly stretched her arms out over the brochures on the table and let her head tip forward to thunk into them, still just as unsure about tomorrow as she had been yesterday. If anyone came into the study room a few hours later, after dinner had ended and most younger years shuffled quietly up to their dormitories for the earlier curfew, and peeked in the corner... well, they'd certainly find a tuckered-out Ravenclaw fast asleep atop enough brochures to smother a doxy, her carefully pinned-up curls beginning to come loose from her messy bun. It had been a long, hard day, after all, and she was nothing short of exhausted.

She could figure out her future another day. For now, she just had to live in the present.

Before they formally announce me dead...

The Study Room | November 4^th, 2025 | outfit, jewelry, hair | #C47DDB