Disclaimer: I own nothing but the OCs.

"So, Miss Dursley, I see that you're taking a fairly common subject combination. It's quite versatile, but most people who choose these subjects apply for positions as Aurors. Do you aspire to be an Auror?"

I fidgeted a little in my seat as Longbottom browsed through my file. Maybe the Sorting Hat made a mistake in Sorting me into Slytherin, because the height of my ambition now is to win the Quidditch Cup. I hadn't put much thought into getting a job, despite Daddy exhorting me to think about it.

"Your grades are generally very good – if you worked a little harder on your DADA and pushed it up to an O, I'd say that you have an excellent chance in making it through to the interview stage."

I cleared my throat. "I'm not particularly sure of what I want to do, Professor, but I'm quite certain that I don't want to be running into death and destruction in return for a salary."

Longbottom put my file aside and steepled his fingers, looking thoughtful. "What about curse breaking?"

"Again, Professor, that thing about death and destruction."

"A desk job?"

I winced.

"Quidditch?"

I pursed my lips. That's an interesting option, but only so many people make it. I know that Lindsey's gunning for a spot as Seeker with the Holyhead Harpies, and all of us are living with her stress. I shook my head.

Longbottom sighed and passed a hand over his eyes. "We had this discussion almost two years ago, Miss Dursley, and you are no closer to deciding your future now as you were then."

I felt a pang of sympathy for him. It couldn't be easy, trying to shepherd seventeen year olds into figuring out what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives – or, at least, for the next five years. He probably even had to explain what a career is to Goyle. No wonder he looked so exhausted. "I suppose I need more time, Professor. In any case, most applications begin in January. I guess I also should talk to my parents about it." Can't say I'm looking forward to that.

Longbottom sighed again and nodded, shifting my file to another stack. "You know where I'll be. If you need another session come January, just let me know. Please send Miss Ouyang in on your way out. Have a good afternoon, Miss Dursley."

I murmured a goodbye and exited the room as rapidly as I could without seeming rude. The future made me nervous.

The hall outside Longbottom's office was lined with a couple of benches – an hour and a half ago, they were filled with Slytherin Seventh-Years. Now, they just served three. Al and Scorp could've gone with the others once they'd cleared their session with Longbottom, but they'd stayed to wait for me.

Sweethearts.

Tapping Lindsey on the shoulder, I jerked my thumb at Longbottom's door before sinking into the seat beside Al. Scorp was splayed out on the bench on the other side of the hallway, completely dead to the world, his precious Herbology essay clutched in a possessive fist. Al, who'd been furiously highlighting his way through his Transfiguration textbook with one of my Muggle highlighters, heaved an almighty sigh as I produced a sheaf of parchment from my backpack.

"Are we really going to do this now?" he whined, tapping the end of the fluorescent pink marker against his thigh. "I need to deal with this bullshit before MacDougal turns me into a chair. Don't you usually talk to Lindsey about this, anyways?"

"I already did. I just need a second opinion." I squinted at my notes from the Gryffindor tryouts. "Is this an s or a c to you? I can't read my own handwriting."

Al huffed and glared at the page. "It depends. Did you mean to call McLaggen a diskface or a dickface? Because he does look like a plate, now that I think about it."

I stopped to consider that for myself. He did look pretty squashy, but that was beside the point.

"Shut up. You have a real fucking problem; Jordan got fucking good over the summer, and you're flying with a new team. Also, their chasers are seasoned and sneaky as fuck. Nott's fantastic, but there's only so much damage that he can mitigate. Thankfully, their Seeker is still shit, so Lin could just get the Snitch before they do. But then we miss an opportunity to rack up as many points as we can for the cup." I paused for breath. "How now, brown cow?"

"What does Lindsey say?"

I pursed my lips and handed him a roughly drawn diagram that was liberally splattered with nail polish from when Lindsey got overexcited about obliterating Gryffindor. Al fished his wand out of his pocket and tapped it to the surface of the diagram, watching as arrows and dots wriggled their way across the page. "Lin included footnotes," I informed him helpfully as text scrolled across the page at certain points of play.

Appalled, Al rewound the gameplay at a point. "Did she suggest ricocheting a Bludger into Dom's face?"

I shrugged. "She calls it psychological warfare. At best, Dominique will quit Quidditch altogether, and at worst, she'll be too emotionally scarred to play her role as the backbone of Gryffindor's Chasers. Personally, I reckon that a less brutal way of crippling the team would be to break her nose and pray that it heals crooked, but I can't do that with a Bludger. It would be like trying to perform surgery with a hand-axe."

"Please don't," Al implored faintly. "She's my cousin. I have to see her. Constantly. And all the other houses would hate us again."

True.

Al scribbled out Lin's footnote on Dominique Weasley before handing the diagram back to me. "Lindsey is crazy. But she's right that our best bet is to run interference on the Chasers before they even reach Nott. That'll be up to you and Gardner, but for Merlin's sake, try not to maim any of my cousins."

I rolled my eyes and shovelled my stack of parchment back into my bag. The three Gryffindor Chasers were all Weasleys: Dominique, Hugo, and Roxanne. Hugo was pretty chill (… or, at least, he was pretty chill as compared to his sister), and Dom's main concerns in life were Quidditch and her hair. Roxanne, however, was a Class A bitch who thought that she was cooler than everyone else because she was so witty.

She was not.

So, yeah. Not to be vindictive, but no promises!

I checked my wristwatch and got to my feet just as Lindsey stepped out of Longbottom's office, looking more sour than usual. I raised an eyebrow as Al glanced at his own watch and swore before zapping Scorp with a mild stinging hex to wake him up.

Scowling, Lin began stomping down the corridor to Transfiguration, which all four of us were pretty much late for. I left Al to handle Scorp while I fell into step with her.

"Longbottom still asking you about Plan B?"

"There is no Plan B," she snapped. "I'm going to make it to a Quidditch team. I don't know why he's so hung up on me applying to the Ministry or whatever. Does he really think that I won't get to play Seeker on a professional level?"

Scorp must have checked the time for himself, because there was an explosion of swearing from behind us as the boys hurried to catch up.

Lindsey turned around to holler at them to hurry the fuck up before turning back to me, eyes blazing. "We need to win, Blair. I need you to captain us to a win. Don't fuck us all up."

Whoa. No pressure.

And then Lin was stomping away, expending her frustration with the world on hapless third years unfortunate enough to wander into her path.

Al and Scorp sidled up beside me once she was gone. "Real charmer, isn't she?" Scorp asked conversationally. "Really makes you wonder how your father could've fancied someone who'd grow up to spawn that."

Al made a face. "He was fifteen, mate. Everybody has lapses in judgment. Like you. You've had, what, about fifty of them?"

Scorpius winced and changed the subject. "So, are you any closer to Getting Your Act Together, Blair?"

Merlin's balls.

"No. When are you telling your father that you're applying to the Healer's Academy?"

Al sniggered as Scorpius winced again as his attempt to redirect the conversation backfired. "When my DADA grades improve. They're just going to laugh at my A; and then Father is going to laugh at me."

"You know, you could just let your father hear about it and pull a couple of strings."

The look that Scorpius directed at Al was ferocious enough to stop him in his tracks. "If I can't get an O for Defence, then I don't deserve to be a Healer. Would you feel comfortable with letting someone who got half-arsed grades poke around inside you with a wand?"

Al flushed, but he didn't lower his gaze. "You know it's not that I don't think you're capable," he said steadily. "But I think it's ridiculous that people seem to think that it's acceptable for the course of your life to be dictated by your academic ability. It's great for people who are academically brilliant, like Rose, or her mother. But I know that you'll be a great Healer regardless of what you get for DADA at the end of the year, and unlike you, I'm not averse to making use of the opportunities available to ensure that you get the job you want."

Scorpius's expression softened, but not by much. "Either way, you'd better get cracking on your Transfig, Potter. Everybody knows that the Aurors only take the best – and everybody will know how you got in if your grades are anything but."

For the second time in so many minutes, I had a friend stalk away from me in a blaze of fury.

My cousin sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose as we stood in the middle of an increasingly crowded corridor. I slid an arm around his shoulders. "It's different for him," I told him quietly as I began herding him forward. We really were late for class. "The Malfoys have spent centuries tugging on strings and playing the world like puppets, and look how they turned out in the Second War. He wants to distance himself from all that – surely you can understand?"

Al's shoulders sagged. "Yeah. He's got more issues than Witch Weekly. But I wish that he'd deal with them instead of cutting and running."

I shrugged again – I seemed to be doing a lot of that, lately – and squeezed him tight before letting go and setting a slightly faster pace. "The Malfoy name comes with just as much baggage as the Potter one, and the only difference is that theirs is tainted with murder and torture and corruption and shit. So try not to push the issue, yeah?"

He made a non-committal sound and glanced down at his watch again before breaking into a sprint, effectively ending the conversation.

We were late for class, and Albus did get Transfigured into a chair. Scorp deigned to reverse it with a poke that was slightly less vicious than it could have been, though, so at least he was over the argument in the hallway. I was usually paired up with Lindsey, because Corinth didn't take Transfiguration at NEWT level, but she hadn't even showed up – I was willing to bet my broomstick that she'd been out on the pitch, running drills.

I wasn't in the game to win for Lindsey's sake. But the fact that she had so much riding on my success did up the ante. From what I'd gathered (from Corinth, mostly), her mother had cut a deal with her: if she didn't secure a spot in a Quidditch team by the time we left Hogwarts, she'd end up chained to a desk at the Wizarding Examinations Authority, charming quills to be Anti-Cheating under her mother's supervision.

Fun.

I found her lying on her bed in her pyjamas when I went back to the dormitories to drop my books off before dinner. She was clearly freshly showered – her hair was more wet than damp, as evidenced by the growing pool of moist pillow beneath her head – and she was staring blankly up at the ceiling in a very un-Lindsey-like manner.

Something looked different about Lindsey's space.

Corinth, who'd been silently reorganising her closet, caught my look of confusion and jerked her head towards a crumpled-up ball of glossy paper tossed into a corner of the room. A hand enthusiastically waving a broomstick around was just visible from where I stood.

Ah. Lindsey's Holyhead Harpies poster, which normally hung above her bedside table, was no more.

I crossed the room warily, kicking the balled-up poster under my own closet. "Lin? Are you alright?"

In response, she threw another balled up piece of parchment in my direction, which I barely managed to catch (…. it was a terrible throw – she hadn't even aimed). A fist clenched in my chest as I smoothed the parchment out and read the polite, typewritten rejection note on it. She'd probably gotten it at breakfast and stewed on it all day. Poor Lindsey.

"They don't need any new players," Lindsey croaked suddenly, and I saw Corinth halt in the act of folding a set of lacy purple underwear. "I was so confident about getting in – I, I didn't apply to any others. A lot of the tryouts were during the summer. I just sent out more applications, but what if it's too late?"

I crumpled the rejection letter back into a ball and tossed it under my wardrobe with the poster. "They always send scouts to the games," I reminded her, trying to sound reassuring. "We'll impress them. You'll impress them."

Lindsey turned away and buried her face in her wet pillow without a sound.

I glanced over at Corinth, who had clearly given up on reorganising things and had shoved the rest of her clothes into her closet without folding them. Expression grim, she grabbed her wand, gesturing to the door.

"We can bring back an apple or a sandwich or something for her later," she whispered as we slipped out of the room and closed the door quietly behind us. "She was already catatonic when I came in, and she didn't make a sound for, like, an hour. Can't we ask Al's mother to talk to a couple of people? She used to play for the Harpies, right?"

I shook my head. "Aunt Ginny hasn't played for them in years, and while she's a Quidditch correspondent, she doesn't have as much pull as you'd think. Lin's got to get this on her own. What was she thinking, only applying to one Quidditch club?"

Corinth looked more regretful than I'd ever seen her. "I suppose that she didn't want to consider the possibility that what she'd wanted for so long didn't want her back. The only thing that feels worse than failure to achieve a dream is not wanting one."

Not quite, I thought, as we slid the dungeon wall aside and began climbing up to the Great Hall. There's also wanting to want something but having no idea what it is. But it isn't fair to compare abstract feelings like that, so I just pushed it aside and began planning icebreakers to play during our bonding session on Saturday at Hogsmeade. We all needed a distraction from job-hunting.

A/N: I'm SO SORRY that it's taken so long for me to get this up! There were exams, and then there were holidays, and then there was school again - everything seems to be moving too fast to deal with. Either way, I'm hoping that this chapter kind of makes up for the long wait!

But, some things to note:

Bad news: this is going to be a terrible semester for me, because I've got a lot of deadlines and I want to end my university run in a blaze of academic glory. Unfortunately for Blair, however, that means that I will not be able to update regularly, because I have to spend more time on my readings than writing fanfiction. I apologise deeply - trust me, I'd rather spend my time in Blair's head instead of writing case briefs. So, to my 11 followers: I'M SORRY. I'M SORRY YOU HAVE TO WAIT. You deserve better than this, and I will write like a Writing Fiend once my exams are over (my last one is on the 21st of April - I've got a countdown going).

Good news: I will definitely finish this story. I've got the entire outline for Magic Tricks planned out, so really, it's just a matter of writing it out and doing it justice. It may take a while, but it will be done. I promise. I make an unbreakable vow. It shall be done.

To my constant, encouraging reviewers IHS and WhatsTheTimeMrWolf: you guys are the best. Please don't give up on Blair and I; we'll get it done. And I owe you guys butterbeer. So much butterbeer.