SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 040 ] getting used to the rhythm

"No," Sawyer said, "but I'm going to find out."

Quinn frowned, but thankfully didn't press.

It wasn't until lunchtime, the following day, that Sawyer found a way into the Slytherin common room. Over the seven years she'd been attending Hogwarts, Sawyer had spent a measurable amount of time in the Slytherin common room with Jeremy and Rio, enough to know where Rio's dorm room was, and that there was no spell preventing girls from entering a boy's dorm unlike the other way round. Before she got here, she'd told her friends that she was going to take a nap because she hadn't slept much. Part of it was true. She'd stayed up past midnight on the Quidditch pitch messing around with Oliver—and by messing around, she meant trying to score on him using various unorthodox methods entirely disregarding the rules, clearly pissing him off.

Since the Slytherin common room was empty because everyone was in the Great Hall, Sawyer took her time. Fractured sunlight fell in silvery lines through the glass ceiling separating the bottom of the lake and the common room beneath it, fissuring the mossy green gloom in a watery veil of phosphorescence, moving with the water that was mysteriously clear yet murky enough to obscure its inhabitants at the same time. Sawyer chalked it down to magic. Almost everything in this side of the world seemed to be able to be explained away with that one arcane word.

Even during the day, the Slytherin common room looked like a villain's lair with its dark green walls and silver-embroidered sofas that looked less comfortable and more like thrones. Instead of torches or a fireplace, they had silver candelabras holding up thin green candles tipped with white flames that flickered elegantly and threw tall shadows along the expensive-looking carpet. Sawyer wasn't sure which part of the lake the Slytherins were placed, but they were deep enough so Sawyer could see blurry silhouettes darting behind the glass in periphery, gliding gracefully between the submerged plants growing from the bottom of the lake. Before Hogwarts, Sawyer had never imagined both the possibilities that mermaids were real, and that they didn't look like the ones she saw in paintings or in The Little Mermaid. They couldn't speak the same languages that humans did, but Jeremy had told her once that some of the Slytherins in the previous years had taught the mermaids sign language, and they'd passed that little nugget of knowledge down to their juniors.

One of them drifted so close she saw its tentacles pressed up against the glass, its mouth stretched in a silent scream, displaying tiny rows of jagged teeth. The glass must be soundproofed as well, since she didn't hear anything besides the air current within the common room. It didn't cause too much of a commotion, so Sawyer paid it no mind, and continued up to Rio's dorm.

His bed was the most obvious one. Clothes were strewn everywhere, and so were half-tattered textbooks and a set of quills. Sawyer's foot nudged a stack of miscellaneous items gathered in a mountainous pile by his bed, and sent something skittering under it. Coming here, she didn't know what she was looking for, but whatever it was that Rio was hiding so clandestinely from them would make itself apparent. Bad things had a way of surfacing at the worst times, the ugly truth among them. Sawyer always had the impression that Slytherins were creatures of order. When it came to the quintessential Slytherin, Sawyer saw Marcus, who had everything in order, every variable laid out before him in four categories—controlled, independent, dependent, and confounding. He might not be the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, and he was the opposite of charming, but he knew his way around things. But if anything, neither Jeremy nor Rio fit the stereotypical ideals of Slytherins. She saw some of the qualities in them, but their personalities weren't ruled by their house. Just the same, Rio's bed was the only unmade one amidst the five.

A corner of something black was poking out from under his pillow, and Sawyer went for that first. Tugging it into the open, Sawyer lifted a brow when she saw that it wasn't anything even remotely suspicious. Just a sketchbook with Rio's name scribbled in white ink on the hard cardboard cover. To any creator, their creations were private, but nothing about Rio could be private anymore. After all, Sawyer had the sense that if she went too easy on him, he'd vanish quicker than he already was. The last she'd seen of him was at dinner, when he'd excused himself midway through. In the same instance, she spotted Dominik Nott get up from the Ravenclaw table just seconds before Rio stepped away from the Slytherin table. Whatever their relationship had been, Sawyer assumed it'd just been physical, that Rio had been using him to get over Marcus. Sawyer didn't see Dominik often enough to question him about it, since he was pretty much also a ghost around campus. Nobody knew where he went in the time he wasn't in class, and apparently he never spectated Quidditch matches.