Name: Dierdra Jones Birthday (Age): December 8, 2000 (26) Gender (Pronouns): Female (She/Her) Blood Status: Halfblood Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff Occupation: Quidditch Player Faceclaim: Laura Harrier
Character Teaser
Dierdra spent her childhood looking up to her Auncle Gwenog and wanting to be just like them. When she discovered Quidditch skills, all those dreams were possible. Dierdra kept to them and happily started a successful Quidditch career. Ten years is often the marker of when a Quidditch career is over, but Dierdra is going strong enough that there’s talk of her being a lifetime player well into her thirties. Lately though, Dierdra has started wondering if that dream she’s always had is really what she wants most. She’d love to start a family, and while there are ways to do that without giving up her career, she isn’t in a place to even have those options yet. But she’d like to have them.
Feelings on Magical Integration
Dierdra is more than willing to use devices based on muggle tech, but she doesn’t fully understand them. Whether she wants to admit it or not, that lack of understanding fuels her feelings about overall integration. She doesn’t get muggles and thinks many wix who think they do actually don’t. She also suspects most muggles wouldn’t be able to understand them. Their cultures are just too different to coexist, as far as Dierdra is concerned.
Biography
Emrys Jones lived a relatively quiet life after Hogwarts, which meant that his daughter lived that same quiet life--one that she should have been more grateful to have. Dierdra grew up in Caerphilly in a small wizarding neighborhood not far from the muggle population. Her life had been full of warnings, cautioning her to behave with made-up stories about how the muggles would take her away if she didn’t stay within those boundaries. It made muggles out to be much scarier than they were, though the only purpose of those stories as Dierdra would find out later, told by their neighbor Cardella Wopsle, was to keep the Ministry from coming in and causing everyone trouble.
Since her parents were always working, Dierdra was always at some neighbor’s house. If it wasn’t the stories of muggles, it was a fear of being disliked that kept her on her best behavior, understanding that the reason she hadn’t just been kept in her own house by herself for hours was because of the kindness of her neighbors. And it was really those neighbors who introduced her to Gwenog as someone who was much more than her auncle she saw at family Christmases and Catapults’ home games.
The closest thing she had to a role model, really, was her auncle Gwenog… or rather, Gwenog’s career. Spending time with a few neighbor kids made it easy to keep up with Quidditch every season, and Dierdra was a staunch supporter of her auncle—not quite realizing that their belligerent attitude on the pitch wasn’t just them being larger-than-life as they were during the holidays. Gwenog would still be her favorite relative, Quidditch player or not, but there was something to their brazenness that made Dierdra yearn for more than just the cul-de-sac she lived in. But hearing stories from them about their last match or their opinions on the Quidditch finals made it easy for Dierdra to see that they were in their element, and easier as well to be convinced that she too wanted stories like that to tell.
She did not, however, figure out a way to make a name for herself once she was in school. She couldn’t figure out how Gwenog managed to take up so much space and still glow in the hearts and minds of Harpies fans. Hufflepuff showed her that she didn’t need to be more than she was—but it was fortunate that what she was… was a Quidditch player. Anything else would have been acceptable, but she still hung onto Gwenog’s stories and their appearances on the sports pages of the Prophet. Everything else outside of Quidditch had been filled in by what her classmates had decided for her, her opinions molded by (if not a copy of) theirs.
Because of the unspoken rules of their magical community, Dierdra took the hint not to ask for a broom from her parents. The first time she had ridden one was the rickety older models in first year flying. It wasn’t that she had gotten a more functional broom by chance during her first class. After the second, third, and fourth meeting, it was clear that she could fly faster and higher than most of Hufflepuff house, receiving the first detention then when she strayed too far, but at the time she felt proud of herself for having proven that she had that natural talent.
Although she wrote to Gwenog about what had happened, the letter had gotten shuffled in the same pile as the fanmail their assistant slogged through for them. But perhaps by way of apology, even though Dierdra hadn’t felt like she was slighted, for Quidditch players were always just busy, Gwenog gifted her a broom after her first year to tryout for her house team, noting that the seekers are the speedy ones. Their advice made sense to her even if Gwenog didn’t tell her outright that she should be a seeker; what they said was barely advice so much as it was an observation. Dierdra did not have it in her to knock people off their brooms, nor did she want to get involved in the mid-field wrangle for the quaffle.
Dierdra’s life at Hogwarts did not revolve around Quidditch to the point where she had abandoned everything else; rather, Quidditch was a tool to remind her that the only thing worth doing was doing what she was good at. Sure, she did her due diligence, perhaps giving some of her favorite classes a little more attention than she should have--but her achievements academically were so patchworked that it was obvious that she hadn’t given much thought to how the combination of them could turn into a real career. Most of what mattered was that her marks were high enough so she could stay on the team.
While Dierdra made fast friends at Hogwarts in her first year, the peak of her popularity at school had come after victorious Quidditch matches, having broken the school record for the fastest snitch catch in her fifth year. It was then, she realized, that she didn’t need to be as boisterous as Gwenog to fill the space in someone else’s opinion of her… because most of that work was already done by whatever preconceived idea they had of what Dierdra should be. This didn’t mean that Dierdra was never honest; she had just become more selective about what she made sure to let people see, though there wasn’t much there anyway that would turn anyone’s heads. She didn’t mind; she was no trailblazer by any means.
Despite the fact that she had inherited the talent (if it worked that way), there had still been no guarantee that her Quidditch career would extend past seventeen. Even during her Career Advice meetings, she had been advised against pinning all of her hopes on the sport. She couldn’t find herself at all interested in the typical Quidditch-adjacent work: journalism at the Prophet or a Ministry position under the Department of International Games and Sports. A combination of the right OWLs and NEWTs would have qualified her to be a broom maker, had it not been for her lucky break.
Dierdra called it lucky. It was one of the matches where recruiters were watching, though she put that out of her mind and tried to treat this game like all of the other ones she had played in the last six years. For a Seeker, strategy didn’t seem to matter; no amount of height or speed mattered so much as Dierdra caught the snitch.
She was first signed to the Pride of Portree out of school and was traded to the Magpies after four seasons, though her rise to stardom didn’t start until she signed with the Harpies—though the media storm had been less about her record as a pro seeker and more about carrying Gwenog’s legacy. The Harpies were any player’s dream team to be part of, and barring being signed with them, they were any player’s dream to defeat in the finals.
Being signed on the Harpies didn’t make Dierdra work any harder than she already did. It felt as if Dierdra had done all she had sought to do, but she had wondered if being a Quidditch star had truly been a goal at all, so much as she was doing what she was good at doing. Perhaps that was the reason why she had always looked up to Gwenog: they were always so assured of themselves while Dierdra was convinced that her path to the Harpies was a series of events that just happened to be in her favor.
More often now, she wonders what her life would be like had she become a broom maker instead, understanding the magic between her and her broom and reliving the first time she flew. Maybe she’d be more enthusiastic about the muggle toys that started to take over the last few years, especially since GPS has become more prevalent as a broom accessory out of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
Besides, what the helll was wrong with using a map? Dierdra had found herself lost trying to use the new muggle device, having chucked it in Cardigan Bay on a flight back to Caerphilly. It just felt wrong, the way it interfered with her and her broom. But that was the least of her muggle problems: having a phone now had been mandatory for the Harpies. Dierdra was wary of being forced to have a social media presence, unsure of what to fill her profiles with and unsure of how much autonomy she really had over what she was forced to give away. Now more than ever she was forced to channel the energy Gwenog had, with words like aesthetic and brand she never had to think about before. Quidditch was demanding more and more of her beyond catching the snitch nowadays.
As some of her teammates were talking about retirement because of a bad fall here, a pulled shoulder there, and bludger injuries everywhere, no one seemed to talk like their careers were over. They still had to carry the legacy through whatever they posted, and it seemed like all anyone spent their time doing off the pitch was creating something out of nothing for the sake of staying relevant.
Dierdra had never succumbed to her injuries too long to miss a significant portion of any season; how lucky was she to have fantastic healers behind the scenes. (Hell, they were even integrating muggle methods like physical therapy that kept her on the pitch, but she’d never understood how it works.) She wasn’t just in good health; seekers had a penchant for being injured often and she was doing better than most of them in the league as far as recovery time. She should be grateful that she has the next eight to ten years still to keep doing what she’s doing.
Or at least, what she thought she was supposed to do. What she thought her only job was. Muggle technology had more than just complicated what Quidditch was supposed to be. Playing the sport itself—getting on the broom, lifting off, searching for the snitch—had become less worthwhile because of the sacrifices she had to make for her career, beyond just becoming a good seeker. But even if she could cut and run, the lack of stability scared her into doing so. Dierdra had always been risk averse. On her pros/cons list, there were always more cons: it would be scandalous, she didn’t want to ruin her luck, she wasn’t qualified to do anything else, she didn’t know how to live without Quidditch…
That last detail grew into something beyond just a bullet point on her list; the mere thought of this hypothetical other life eroded her resolve and extinguished her passion. Dierdra had friends from school at this point who have had their luck lead them differently. She attended weddings and had her assistant send snitch themed gifts for their newborns. Dierdra couldn’t help but feel she had everything and nothing at the same time, missing out on something she was sure she hadn’t seen but had given up without even knowing.
Connections
Thom Nguyen: Although these friends might not seem to have much in common, Thom and Dierdra clicked immediately and have been fast friends ever since.
Saoirse Finnigan: Dierdra was her Quidditch captain back at Hogwarts, but Dierdra can’t stand Saoirse’s outspoken opinions.
Kyong Park: The two of them don’t know each other well, but Dierdra looks at him and sees a lot of possibilities for what they could be. That doesn’t mean she’ll call it a crush.
Dierdra is played by Pat.