SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 031 ] maybe i'm a threat

And now Oliver is looking at her like he looks at the quaffle during Quidditch matches, trying to puzzle out the angle of her trajectory, and it feels like he's hot lighting her, and Sawyer wishes she could tell what's in his head because, really, who would look at her this way? Who could stand to? More and more she stares at Oliver Wood's face and she feels something in the box of her chest shake like a tic-tac. Oliver, she wants to ask, do you know what you're signing up for? Not everything is as straightforward as a Quidditch match; you might think you've scored, but there is no winning when you're with me. You of all people should know the difference between scoring and winning. It is not the same thing. Nothing about me is as pretty as the regimented columns in your head, the diagrams you've mapped your life out with. After awhile, everything hurts.

Instead, she digs her thumb into his jaw and pushes, so he's looking at the sky again.

* * *

THE FIRST WEEKEND TO HOGSMEADE, Rio stays behind. He doesn't have to claim illness for them to believe it. These days, he's been milling about school, and what classes he attended he cycled between like a motorised corpse, and his complexion more or less began to resemble Peeves'.

"You guys go ahead. I'm going to go see Poppy," Rio tells them. He never calls the staff by their titles. Always just their first names or a nickname he'd coined, as if by doing so, he'd rescind their power over him. Even though Madam Promfrey had seen both Rio and Sawyer often enough over the years to know when to prepare for their arrivals, she wasn't an exception. It wasn't a secret that Rio had a problem with authority. Maybe it was his father, or his psychopathic bastard brother. Rio wouldn't let someone monopolise him if he had a choice. Names were power, he said once, something his father used to tell him. Sawyer didn't believe that. Never had. Names were just names, and they didn't mean anything if you didn't let it.

"You sure?" Jeremy says, brows furrowing in concern. "You don't want one of us to stay with you?"

Marcus looks away. Planting himself by Sawyer's shoulder, he doesn't meet Rio's piercing gaze when it lands on him with purpose, as if by putting Sawyer between them, he might finally have something solid to hold onto. Sawyer doesn't blame him. Rio looked almost translucent these days. It must hurt, seeing someone you might want around forever slowly fading away, like the painstaking undoing of a dead-knot. It was odd. Ever since Rio had been back to his own house, the night before school started—a temporary thing, he'd said to them, and dragged one bag with him to attend the dinner his mother had invited him to come home to—he'd been slipping. Before, the addiction was easier to isolate and control. Something they had backed into a corner and were curating surgically, like a tumour.

Something had decimated all that.

Until then, he'd been as close to fine as they could get him, and he was struggling up the steady slope to recovery. There was still ground to cover, but now it's like he's recoiled, taken his foot off the gas and turned around. The withdrawal symptoms had only grown worse, and he'd been looking more ghost than boy. Sawyer wanted to point fingers at the Dementors, but even before he got on the train, she'd spotted the first traces of his slipping. Perhaps they worsened his condition, but they weren't the ones who kicked him back down.

"I'm fine," Rio says, his tone a little brusque. He tugs at the sleeve of his leather jacket idly, but it doesn't hide the tremble in his hands.

Sawyer isn't convinced. Then again, neither is everyone else.

I'm fine, Rio says, again, but it's past the point of believing. Still, they leave for Hogsmeade anyway.

When they come back, bags of sweets in their arms, a flask full of Firewhiskey in the inner pocket of Sawyer's black puffer jacket and two bottles of Dragon Barrel Brandy in Marcus' coat, all of which were pilfered from the store through a loophole Marcus had found in the charm that prevented shoplifting. He was good at that, Sawyer found. Bypassing charms and spells, finding little loopholes to dig a finger through and rip apart until he could fit through. Sawyer wondered most of all about his time with Rio; they weren't secretive about their affections, just what they got up to when the others weren't around. Whatever they had between them had been watertight.