SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 030 ] paper planes

"Anyway..." Jeremy said, offering a diversion as he lifted up a piece of paper and an envelope as he smiled apologetically at Oliver, whom, unlike his teammate and best friend, he had no quarrel with. "My mum wrote to me this morning."

"After, what, months of radio silence?" Marcus scoffed, snatching the letter out of Jeremy's hands, eyes hungrily scanning the letter. After a couple seconds, with Rio sticking his head over Marcus' shoulder to catch a better glimpse of the letter, Marcus threw his head back and let out a laugh. "Oh, this is fucking precious, she gave you her number."

"You're not calling her and you are not writing back," Rio said, like his word was law. When he caught the expression on Jeremy's face, the way he held Quinn's hand anxiously, the way his eyes didn't meet any one of theirs. "You cannot seriously consider being her little bitch after she basically abandoned you. C'mon, dude."

"Jere..." Quinn said, brows furrowing. "What do you want to do?"

"I don't know," Jeremy said, shoulders slumped.

"I'll make it easier for you," Sawyer said, the edges of her mouth cutting up in a cruel grin as she leant forward and snatched both the letter with the neat phone number scrawled at the bottom, and the envelope, with the new, unfamiliar address printed on the back, clean out of Marcus' hands and jabbing it in Jeremy's face. "Yes or no. Tick-tock, you have ten seconds to decide."

Jeremy pursed his lips, caught the other end of the letter and pulled. But Sawyer held fast, unrelenting, levelling him with a stare so intense, so intent, that it threatened to swallow him whole the way the night ate the stars. For an endless moment, Sawyer watched Jeremy's face, the determined curl of his mouth. Then the exasperation flickering like a guttering candle in his eyes. The frown when he realised she wasn't letting go. Like a guard dog clamping its jaws down on a struggling man's calve, Sawyer's knuckles blanched as she increased the pressure, the paper threatening to rip.

"Eight seconds," Sawyer said, their little game of tug-of-war over Quinn's cot unceasing. And then she saw it: the little falter in Jeremy's expression. The uncertainty as he was forced to think—to really think about what he wanted, and not what someone else wanted from him. "Nine."

Jeremy let go, looking both defeated and relieved at once.

"Ten," Sawyer said. She crushed the letter into the envelope and stuffed it in her pocket vindictively, out of sight, out of mind. Jeremy wouldn't remember the address or the number. "I'll hold onto this until I think it's time to stop punishing your mother. After that, you can do whatever you want. But I will not allow you to bend over backwards for this woman."

Sitting quietly in his seat, Oliver watched the entire exchange, his eyes flicking back and forth between Sawyer and her friends, between Jeremy and his protectors, his voices of reason, like he was a scientist studying the cross-section of a complex organism under a microscope. There was a slow dawning of realisation in his eyes, like he was finally understanding something.

✷

AT THE FRONT OF THE CLASSROOM, Professor McGonagall was giving them the lecture on turning something into something else, and then changing it into another thing entirely again. She told them about the longevity of a strong spell, about the crucial wand movement, about the precision they needed to have the spell work or else it'd backfire, but all of it flew over Sawyer's head. It was the Valium-cloud in her ears, clogging all sense, her brain saturated in complacency.

At lunch, Jeremy had personally forced her to take her afternoon dosage, watching her down the hatch. She'd even opened her mouth for him to check and earned a bread roll crammed between her teeth in response. And now there were the little noises contaminating the sterile sound of McGonagall's voice—the scrape of a chair leg against the floor, the hush and clatter of a wand rolling off the edge and falling to the floor, acrylic fingernails tap-tap-tapping against the corners of desks, gum smacking in the corner of someone's mouth, someone yelling in the courtyard where the window was facing—and no matter how many tunnels Sawyer built around McGonagall's words, trying to direct them into her brain, trying to filter them out, her concentration was too diluted. Thirty minutes in, and she'd given up.