Different Refrain Solo

Backdated to August 2024
Title from "Mad Dog" by The Crane Wives

It was one of those late summer nights where Bridget was awake long past anyone else in the house, and for some awful reason she had books and pages laid out in front of her to assemble a schedule for this year. Something to keep her NEWT studying in order, to set up the Viridian Vipers for the best possible shot at the duelling championship, to maybe have time in between all of that to entertain her rat while he still had more of his magically long lifespan and be a person with friends and a maintainable sleep schedule. This was not her first draft, it was her third; the failed previous attempts were crumpled up paper thrown over her shoulder, which was not helping the general sense that this room was too small and halfway an office. It didn't seem to fit, not the way she wanted it to, which was of course the way that let her do everything with the maximum dedication.

She was overthinking this, probably. Definitely. Normal amounts of thinking about non life-or-death scenarios did not make your hands shake. But she had to schedule team practices and be available for one-on-one sessions at least occasionally, more before duelling stages, and fit in all the classes she was taking with their homework and the base level of studying you were advised to maintain all year or else NEWTs would creep up on you, and though not life-or-death, NEWTs were exceptionally important because they decided what you could do with your future. And Bridget had no clue what she wanted to do with her future, which meant until further notice she had to do excellently on everything. Ideally, outstandingly, but she'd ruled out that level of studying after her first draft.

When she was little, she would say she wanted to be a doctor. Only because Matthew said he wanted to be a doctor and she regarded her older brother with stars in her eyes, but it had still been some statement of intention, of direction. Then it was a scientist, an astronaut, a professional football player.

And then she was a witch, instead. Neither her nor her family knew what that future looked like. There were similar paths, but the magical world as a whole was foreign. During her first year, which she spent largely holed up in the library to make up for all the knowledge she was missing, she tried on a few possibilities. Librarian, so she could always have all of these keys at her fingertips. Potioneer, since that wasn't so different from the chemistry degree her father had pursued, right? But Hogwarts wasn't so simply magical, the more she saw of it, and by the time she had a curse and new nightmares to go with it, she wasn't really thinking about future jobs, she was thinking about how to protect herself and her friends, how to be the most competent witch she could be, which was an ever-moving bar her own expectations would never let her reach. And somehow she'd made it here, with a short list of careers where nothing really stuck out. They should invent a job for people who learned spells under the assumption that if they didn't, something bad would happen that could have been prevented with that spell specifically.

The discarded schedules spoke of the hopelessness of figuring any of this out tonight--she did not do her best work past midnight, she knew this--but it had her too wired to think about going to sleep. The answers were in here, somewhere. In her, if she could only stretch the limits of herself a little more.

And at some point she had the thought: Something has to go. It was a dizzying idea in itself. Something had to go, but what? Her already minimal social life? The studying for the most important exams of her life? There was only one piece that could be moved, really, if she was being realistic and not sentimental. It was, obviously, her captaincy. She could put in her resignation and the team would still run and she wouldn't even have to leave, just take several slightly agonizing steps back.

She didn't try for a fourth draft that night, mostly because she knew it would work and she didn't want it to. Captaining (or co-captaining) the Viridian Vipers had been a part of her life since her third year, which kind of felt like forever. She liked the way it made her feel, like a shell of cool, collected confidence settled over her skin whenever she duelled in anticipation of the eyes on her, their expectations for her to represent and lead her team. She also liked not feeling like spiders were crawling under her skin, which was about how she felt now about the next year and graduation. Bridget abandoned the littered floor, switched off the lights, and moved to lay on her bed, on top of the covers, and stare at her ceiling. In their old house, she'd had glow-in-the-dark stars up there, but she'd never put any up here.

Outside of her window there were street lights and the occasional late-night car, but if she really tried she could imagine moonlight filtered dark green and barely trickling through, the steady presence of the lake, and the grounded nature of an old castle. It lulled her to sleep, eventually, the spiral shutting up long enough for the heaviness in her eyes to take over.

But she thought about it the next day, and the next. No decisions had been made yet--she didn't have a quick way of resigning right now, anyway--but she did retry the schedule. It worked. She talked to her brother and he said it made sense if that was what she needed to do, but it wouldn't look great on her resume. That was the biggest practical drawback, an issue for the little line in her list of potential jobs where she'd scribbled Professional Duellist. Or maybe it was an issue for all of the lines, to a lesser extent, because Matthew was right; if she did this she would have to explain to them why she quit a leadership role in her last year of school. And her honest answer would be that she was cracking under the pressure, which would not be what they were looking for. If she did this then her NEWTs really would need to be perfect so she could say here, look, I dropped the captaincy but it was all successful strategy.

Her August became weighing the choice, shifting between certainty and a certain level of nausea. This was big, this was irreversible. What wasn't? Would it be so terrible to ease the pressure for this last year, just a bit, and try to let herself enjoy it? To hand the reigns to someone not liable to snap if things strayed too far from according to plan? By September, her mind was made up. It had to all fit, she couldn't let herself do so much that she started doing things only in parts. This was her last year of Hogwarts; she would let go of one title.