SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 039 ] lover

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
lover

A SUCKER PUNCH TO THE FACE would've hurt less than returning to Hogwarts. Stepping off the train alone into the Dementor-infested castle grounds felt like walking in with two black eyes and a caved-in chest. In the space between her ribs, Sawyer felt it the moment the Dementors and the darkness trailing them like sleigh dogs drifted closer to the new onslaught of fresh meat, a pack of sharks swarming the sea of returning students pouring out of the train carriages, lugging more baggage than visible to the eye. All those ugly feelings — or non-feelings — piling up like dead bodies, all that animated emotion drifting into the atmosphere like blood in the water. On the crowded platform at King's Cross, even though she knew it was coming, Sawyer hadn't felt the dread setting in just yet, still clinging to that little piece of respite. Mostly because Jeremy and Quinn had swept her up in a tag-team hug so tight she positively felt every single joint in her body crack, and Rio had clapped her so hard on the back as his usual greeting that her lungs had crushed into her ribcage. In return, she'd slammed her elbow into his solar plexus, forcing him back into Marcus, who was talking to someone on his right just as he caught Rio with one hand like he was expecting the repercussions.

Just before they'd boarded, Wyatt had waved goodbye, and Sawyer met his parting gesture with a nod of acknowledgement. Despite how small, how barely noticeable that action was, nobody could miss how instantaneously and vibrantly Wyatt's features lit up just as his friends swept him away before all the good cabins were taken.

"You and your brother are... cool now?" Marcus asked, lifting a brow as he unceremoniously shouldered past a tiny girl struggling with her bags. She let out a cry in protest, but before she could do anything about it, Marcus and Sawyer had been swallowed up by the boarding crowd packing the carriages like sardines. Elbowing someone else out of the way, Sawyer could barely breathe, could barely hear Marcus as he raised his voice over the clamour and calamity of the bustling passengers. "How'd that happen?"

"It just did," Sawyer said, shrugging nonchalantly. And part of it was true. It did just happen. Out of nowhere, something had awakened in Wyatt, terraformed that image in his head that he held of their mother, and he no longer saw her as the woman he'd idealised since forever. At some point that day, he'd taken his hands off his eyes. Sawyer didn't know what had prompted that change of heart, but she wasn't aggrieved by it. Not all mothers were good, but they wouldn't be bad forever. Not all sons were blind, and someday they'll stop protecting the wrong things. Change happened deliberately, relentlessly, and regardless of volition. It was stirring in her mother, and it had shaken something unshakable in Wyatt. Sawyer didn't know if she'd ever forgive her mother the way she could forgive Wyatt, but she also didn't know if she could see that far into the future.

Once they'd secured a cabin, and all five of them had piled in with their bags, Sawyer had been bodily sandwiched herself between Marcus and Rio, who looked marginally less ghastly unlike the last time she'd seen him. Perhaps staying with Marcus had actually did him some good. Perhaps putting on a healthy front for the boy he loved was just a way to cling to his sanity. Either way, it felt good to be with her friends again. Her own house had been suffocating—less so, though, now that her mother wasn't being overbearing in the way she usually was, and Wyatt wasn't her enemy anymore (he never really was, anyway), and there was the chronic case of Oliver, who'd stayed over for three days until his mother demanded he come home, which had been the only time Sawyer had seen him look more annoyed and clammed-up than the time he'd lost the match to Hufflepuff—and leaving that place to come home to the arms of her people felt like a breath of fresh air for a long time of recycling stale tensions.

Throwing open the window just as the train gave a jerk and a animalistic shudder, Quinn grinned and handed out homemade cookies her mother had baked the night before. She'd packaged them into brown bags of five, each a different flavour. The engine gave a hostile hiss and Sawyer had already devoured two.