Something I Can Do solo fin

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 18 19

Make me bleed if you need to confirm that it's something I can do...

School had just started up again after the winter holiday and the unexpectedly dangerous trip to Tenūsa, and Aly Salinger had been injured more physically and mentally in the last two weeks than ever before (with perhaps the exception of a few Quidditch matches over her years on the team - Bludgers could hurt if used right!), causing her energy to be drained more so than usual.

The Hospital Wing, therefore, had seen her pretty much every day this week since her return from Tenūsa, seeking out anything from Invigoration Draughts to keep her from yawning a seventeenth time during N.E.W.T.-level Transfiguration to a Blood Replenishing Potion after her now-frequent nosebleeds. (Aly could have brewed them herself, or asked her resident potions-whiz best friend @Dealla Prince, but the former involved getting ingredients and the latter would have caused her mates more worry than she wanted them to have for her at the moment.) One of these, the hot gushing sensation in one nostril and the slight burning between her eyes, had occurred during Potions class this afternoon, and Aly had managed to stem the bleeding by stuffing a handkerchief into her nose and waving off her concerned friends with an excuse about the cold weather causing a runny nose after having gotten used to the Oceanic warmth this past weekend. Now, this evening immediately after the conclusion of class, Aly had excused herself to "drop off her satchel in Ravenclaw Tower", but instead of heading up a million flights of stairs to the Martial Eagle dormitory, she instead took a very different path into an all-too-familiar room with rows of hospital-cornered beds and the faint smell of antiseptic in the air.

One of the interns took one look at her gushing nose (when unplugged with the handkerchief) and sat her down on the bed closest to the door, fetching the requisite Blood-Replenishing Potion. The taste was bitter almost to the point of being sour on her tongue, with a slight tang of iron, as if the dark scarlet liquid was blood itself that she was drinking (though Aly had never quite been a fan of Blood Pops). She would now need to sit here for a bit until the blood dried up in her nostril and she "looked less like one of the castle ghosts," in the intern's words, at least. The Ravenclaw didn't mind a pale complexion, something from which she always suffered, but she'd been turning white as a sheet when her nose bled lately.

At least her magic was back. It had arrived on New Year's Day, just in time for Lady Prudence to convince the Livingston matriarch Darcy to allow Aly to attend the visit at Tenūsa. At this point, the seventh-year girl wasn't quite sure if she was glad to have gone on the trip or if she wished she hadn't. On the latter hand, being kidnapped from her room by evil vines in the dead of night had not been a pleasant experience; her friends had been forced to rescue her as she faded in and out of consciousness in the cruel plants' lair. It was true, however, that the trip to Oceania hadn't been entirely bad - in fact, one part in particular had resolved a problem of nearly a year. The handsome stranger Aly had stumbled upon surfing the idyllic waves of a secluded private beach had been none other than @Kavi Kattimani, her pen-pal from the Beauxbâtons event. At least their actual meeting had been less lonely than their accidental reciprocal standing up of each other, and far less fiery than how Kavi had met Dee. And in the five days since the two had met, not twenty-four hours had passed without the bronzed boy's gorgeous face flitting into Aly's mind, often during the most inopportune of times... like when she was trying to remember the wand movement for the Expulso Curse during Astronomy, or in the middle of Quidditch practice when she was supposed to be grabbing a Snitch from the air in front of her. She had already begun to pen a letter to him, full of pleasantries like It was so lovely to finally meet you alongside not-so-subtle hints of wanting to see him again such as asking if he was going to the Koldovstoretz Olympic events in mid-February. Whether the letter would be sent or not remained to be seen.

She blotted her nose with the handkerchief once more, feeling the burning sensation begin to slow. The potions here were definitively of higher quality than the ones she could have brewed herself - Nurse McLoughlin was talented in her concocting, that much was for sure - but, nevertheless, Aly resolved to study up more on her healing potions. The third-year version of herself that had dreamed of working the tiled halls of St. Mungo's would have been very disappointed in her. She ran the top of her tongue over her top row of teeth, trying to taste and remember all of the necessary ingredients of the potion she had just downed. Unicorn horn, for sure. Or was it unicorn blood...? And... stewed Mandrake?

On the bright side, her lack of energy and waning health lately had given her a bit of a respite from having to think all the time about how she wanted to move forward in her life with the Livingstons - or, rather, if she wanted to move forward at all. Over the break, it had become clear to her that she could not expect to live the experience of an heiress - or, at least, if she did, it would be at the cost of what she felt to be her own humanity. Having a family was nice; having her family, the people she chose, around her would be nicer. But the thought of how to break with a lineage so powerful as the Livingstons was no easy feat; Aly also didn't want her mother Hesper to be taken down with her, since other than Aly, the Livingstons were the only family Hesper had left. An amicable split would be necessary - once she was feeling up to planning it.

For now, however, Aly simply leaned back on the pillows, twisting a blood-stained handkerchief between her fingers. For all she had felt less than human, less than witch, these past few weeks, at least she could still bleed. And that was something.

And I'll paint it red...

The Hospital Wing | January 8^th, 2026 | wearing Ravenclaw uniform | #C47DDB