SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 001 ] girls who play with fire

So: three minutes. The only accomplishment she could celebrate for herself, albeit, alone, knowing nobody else would share this triumph. Three minutes. She's almost there. She can feel her heart jamming in her teeth, the old bray of please, please, come up for air, that she ignores because she's come too far to stop now. Fifteen more seconds. The alarm would ring at any moment.

Around her head, her hair floats like black smoke and she pretends she is at sea, a mermaid in her glass cage, watching the scintillating bubbles escape her lips into the sun, the round, bright bulbous light shining above the waves like champagne. Seven seconds. She's been keeping count. Determination numbs the burning sensation in her expiring lungs, snuffing out the feeble hope of her thundering heartbeat that her Roman resolve might crumble from within and she might gasp into mortal existence once more. Four seconds. Her head has been spinning, spinning, spinning for the past minute but she pushes through. Three seconds. Two seconds—

A rough hand clamps down on her shoulders and she's jerked out of the water before she can count the last second.

Her eyes snap open as she breaks the surface, coughing and spluttering. Chest heaving violently, she sucks in desperate lungfuls of air, quaking hands clutching at the sides of the bathtub. The disturbed water sloshes around the tub, spilling over and splashing onto the tiles. When the chill finally seeps into her skin, she sees everything in pieces, a silhouette eclipsing the light, a tan face, brown eyes fraught with concern, frantic hands thrusting a towel around her trembling body. Panting hard, Sawyer cuts her eyes to the person standing in the bathroom. It's Wyatt she sees and the rage that floods her veins boils her blood. An electric energy hums beneath her skin, restless. It wants her to hit him. She wants to tear his eyes out.

   "Sawyer—"

Eyes flashing with the scathing promise of murder, Sawyer snatches the towel from around her shoulders and snarls, "Why the fuck did you do that?"

He flinches, as though the acid in her tone had burnt him. It makes her want to hit him even more. "I thought—"

One second. She was almost there and he had to ruin everything. A fresh wave of anger flushes her skin in a glowing heat and her pulse throbs between her teeth.

   "Get. Out."

   "Sawyer, I was just trying to—"

   "What? Help?" She seethed, flinging the towel in his face with more force than necessary and drawing the shower curtain shut. When she looks down, her hands are shaking. From anger or from how long she's pushed herself under, she doesn't know. She balls them into fists, knuckles blanching, fingernails digging deep into her palms. A sharp pain lances through her skin but she doesn't release them. She welcomes it, this pain. It gives her something else to focus on. I don't need your fucking help. You're the last damn person I want any help from.

On the other side of the curtain, Wyatt shifts in anxious discomfort. "I thought you were... Mom wanted me to come get you for dinner and you've been in here for ages and I heard the water— I tried calling your name and knocking but you didn't answer and I just... and I came in and you weren't moving and I saw the timer so I got scared and I thought..."

A pinching guilt poisons her gut. He doesn't want you dead, a critical voice in the back of her head muses, but you'd wanted to tear his eyes out on more accounts than he deserves. If the roles had been reversed, would you have pulled him out of the water too? If it ever came down to it, the standing answer was no, she wouldn't have, because there was a sick part of her that would have wanted him to drown for two reasons. One being that she wouldn't have been bothered to, and the second being that, if she could get rid of her brother without dipping her hand in fratricide, her mother would have one less prominent example to constantly compare her to. But, of course, Wyatt had to be the good guy in their sibling dynamic. Of course she had to play the role of the unjustifiably spiteful sister.