CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
feels like fourteen carats but no clarity
WHEN THE SKY IS ONLY JUST BLEEDING from night-black to a roseate-robed dawn, Sawyer re-enters her dorm, her Walkman in one hand and a bottle of water in another. In an unsurprising turn of events, she had made good on her promise to show Oliver her muggle contraption, a gift from her father, of which he'd taken a liberal ten minutes admiring.
After their run—ten laps around the pitch, sometimes making small talk about the hypothetical, sometimes lapsing into waves of companionable silence washing over them with the serenity of dawn, a static white-noise blanket of screaming crickets and a distant, haunting howling, where it felt like nobody save the two of them were awake at such an ungodly hour—they'd sat in the stands for a little bit, legs sprawled on the bench, huddling over Sawyer's Walkman. The mixtape she'd brought with her had been composed a couple summers ago, while she'd been sitting by the creek behind her grandmother's house with her bare feet in the gurgling tide and soaking in its omnipresent coolness, listening to the water run until she forgot herself, until she was less of a body of flesh and bone and quick anger and more a sound put into the universe. These were songs that didn't make her throat feel so scrapped raw from screaming to be heard. Not hostile and resentful songs she typically listened to that fed the red perpetually clouding vision, the bleeding edges of second, third, of fourth chances, cut jagged by the world's cruelty and her mother's abrasive voice demanding to know why her daughter didn't function like she was meant to. It was only later that week when they'd returned to the city when she'd ventured out to actually assemble the cassette tape.
And now, she let Oliver listen to the curated collection of songs that pulled her back to a day she didn't feel like a bloodstain on her mother's wallpaper and she could've sworn the anger had been drained out from her blood and washed away with the rushing water, pulling away, away, away.
"This is so cool," Oliver said, grinning a little bit when the mixtape had run its course and the cassette tape made a clicking noise, demanding to be reset. There was a gleam in his earthy eyes, so different from the enthusiasm invoked by even the slightest allusion to Quidditch, not so much fire but the flash of a setting sun.
"You think so?"
"You know how my parents always ask me what I want for Christmas and I don't really know what to tell them because everything I want, I already get myself beforehand?" He handed her back the headphones. "I think I know what to ask for this time."
He told her he liked that one Morrissey song on her mixtape and her pulse felt like the beckoning pull of the rushing tide in the creek and her entire body had been submerged.
Neck cooling from the sweat drying on the nape of her neck from the run, Sawyer dumps her things onto her bed without ceremony, but just as she's about to head to the showers with an armful of her toiletries, a muffled sniffle from the other side of the room caught her attention. Sawyer casts her blank gaze in the direction of Quinn's bed. She blinks. It strikes Sawyer now that she's never seen the girl as anything other than cool and rigid and reserved, a house built from composure and quiet nights of companionship, of trust, of promising to listen. Now she is a caved-in roof, curled in on herself, clutching something indistinguishable in the last dregs of the dawn's darkness to her chest, ribs rising and falling in erratic hiccups, barely contained sobs gurgling past her lips as though she were trying to keep them all in but couldn't.
As Sawyer approaches Quinn's bed, it's clear, from the way her shoulders are set, wired with tension, and in the tight lines of her face that the tears streaming down her cheeks in jagged lines weren't kindled by sadness (well, she is definitely upset, so maybe a little sad, but isn't everyone these days?), but by the smouldering embers of anger.
Ah, Sawyer thinks, recognising what breed of rage Quinn is. An angry crier.
"Go away," Quinn says, sniffing as she slanted a watery glare at Sawyer, who stood over her at her bedside.
Amusement lit her features as she leant against Quinn's bed frame lackadaisically. "You tell me what's eating you first."
Wrapping her duvet around herself tighter, Quinn sniffs again. "It's nothing."
Sawyer pins Quinn with a deadpan stare. "Don't lie to me."
Quinn lets out a defeated sigh. Instead of explaining herself, Quinn thrusts a hand out, shoving a piece of parchment paper into Sawyer's chest with more force than intended, but Sawyer doesn't even stumble. Doesn't snap back at Quinn's unexpected violence. A mirthful grin works its way onto her lips as she puts a hand up to stop the paper from falling to the ground, clipping it between her front and her arm. It's a letter, Sawyer realises as she scans the cursive writing, addressed to Quinn from her father, beginning with 'your mother and I' which Sawyer knows from personal experience is never a good thing. Turns out, she's right.
"They're never happy with me," Quinn says, swallowing, and Sawyer hears her sheets rustle as she pushes herself upright. Her voice cracks, a merciless sound, like a glass dashed against the corner of a table. It's the first time she's opening up about her parents. In the course of their friendship, Sawyer doesn't recall ever hearing Quinn speak of them. "I mean, I'm no child prodigy, but I do work hard and my grades aren't shit, but they're never happy. I just... I don't know what I have to do to get them to stop being so passive aggressive and condescending. I don't know what I have to do to finally be enough. You know?"
"Parents suck," Sawyer says, folding up the letter and tossing it to the foot of Quinn's bed. "Sometimes they're alright, but they always fuck you up. Even if they don't mean to. Why do you care about what they think, anyway?"
Quinn's brows furrow as she swipes the heel of her palms over her cheeks. "Don't you care what your parents think of you?"
"I don't waste my time on pointless things."
"But don't you want your mother to like you?" Quinn presses, winding her thumbs in the hem of her pajama shirt. "Just a little bit even?"
Sawyer shrugs. "My mother and I have an agreement." Her voice was affectless, very matter-of-fact. People have told her that she adopted a certain tone when speaking about her mother, emotionless and blunt, meant to reflect how she felt—or didn't—about a woman who never had anything good to say about her daughter.
Frustration flashes in Quinn's red-rimmed eyes as she drags her fingers through her curly hair. "Some days I feel so... so invisible. So small. Like I don't matter. I mean, I like invisibility because there's no drama when nobody knows who you are, but it's just... I'm so, so lonely. Do you even know my favourite colour, Sawyer? Do you know my favourite song? Nobody takes the time to get to know these things, and maybe it's my fault, and I don't know why but it's so hard for me to talk to people, but shouldn't there be someone who tries anyway?"
"I think you might be reading too many romance novels."
Quinn lets out a humourless laugh. "Melin, I swear, I feel like I can't talk to you sometimes because you just don't understand. You don't feel anything, and that's fine. I wish I could be like you, but the truth is, i'm not. I feel too much and I don't know what to do with all of these feelings. I don't tell people because I don't want to burden them with what I feel. There's a difference."
Anger flares deep in Sawyer's gut. Her lips curl into a broad smile, cheerless and empty and sharp in a way that cuts deep down to the bone, a poisonous vacancy. "Now, I'm just disappointed in you, Comet. Don't make assumptions about me. I never assumed anything of you. I've been waiting. I give you opportunities to talk. Don't pin this on me when you just never take them."
"Well, I couldn't see them," Quinn snarls.
"What do you need?"
Quinn stared down at her hands, falling quiet. "I don't know."
Sawyer pushed off the bed frame, crossing her arms over her chest. "You know, Rio always says that a molotov cocktail can solve everything."
Confusion flickered in her eyes. "I mean... I can see how cathartic that could be. What does he do with them?"
"Throws them at expensive cars," Sawyer says, nonchalantly. She'd partaken in some of Rio's explosive and extremely illegal endeavours, knowing that his father would fish them both out of trouble in an instant, in an attempt to prevent Rio's delinquent tendencies become a stain on their family name. Each time, she watched Rio spiral into the nuclear and relentless cat-and-mouse game of committing some sort of attention-seeking behaviour that was usually morbidly criminal, usually vandalism and destruction, and have his father sweep in to save the day with his polished politician's smiles and money. What neither realised—or refused to acknowledge—was that they were playing a losing game. Rio would never give up trying to tarnish everything his father had built—starting with their image—as long as his father had the authorities in his pocket, and Rio's father would never stop cleaning up his son's demolition lover messes as long as he kept at it. Sawyer stopped trying to understand the father-son relationship in second year. As far as old money went, the ties were always binding, dark in the twists of a forest.
"Holy hell," Quinn breathes, eyes widening.
"I'm guessing you don't want to do that."
"Obviously not," Quinn hisses, scandalised. She eyes Sawyer in mild suspicion. "What do you do when you're so mad, but there's nobody within reach to put the blame on?"
"I think about burning the place down," Sawyer offers.
In fire, the destruction was the only thing that could match what she felt. But now, with the drugs worked into her system, the fire's gone cold. The embers still lay there, still smouldering, still glowing in a hazy heat beneath the blanket of the drugs, a fog blunting all the sharper points of her anger. There's a certain catharsis in burning things, the violent diminishing of something until its value has been rendered nought. Memory is a smokestack bleeding out ghosts, the total annihilation of recognisable shape and form. Self-destruction is all-consuming, swallowing everything in its path until it devours itself. Both flame and arsonist all at once.
Casting the letter lying at the foot of her bed a hard glance, Quinn purses her lips. "I think I know where to start."
One of the girls in the top bunks shushed them in irritation, jerkily turning over in her bed and pressing her pillow over her head. Sawyer didn't react, while Quinn looked a little bit sheepish.
Minutes later, they'd migrated, Quinn kneeling in front of the fireplace in the common room, and Sawyer squatting beside her with her arms hugging her knees to her chest. The flames flickered hungrily as Quinn fed the letter into the glowing fireplace. Sawyer watches the shadows dance over the yellow walls of common room—empty at this hour, quiet as a tomb. No hesitance flitted over Quinn's face when they'd entered the common room, but she stood frozen before the fireplace for a minute, clutching the letter like she wanted to cling to the words a little longer, hurt a little more. So Sawyer pressed her flip top lighter against Quinn's chest until she took it. Worse than evil was indecision. Quinn seemed to understand. And then she shook out of her trance, flicked the top off, and set the tiny flame to a corner of the letter until it caught and the edges began to brown and crumble where the fire spread, until the head seared her skin and she dropped it into the fireplace. With a wave of her wand, the fire reared its head and roared, until the letter disintegrated and then was no more. Ashes to ashes.
Firelight glinted in Quinn's eyes, a halo of amber illuminated her wild curls "Thank you."
"For what?" Nobody's ever thanked her before. She'd never given anyone reason to. (With the exception of Violet Finch, who seemed to think of Sawyer as some sort of saint. The truth was far from it, but Violet was adamant.)
A fragile smile ghosted Quinn's lips. She nudged Sawyer with her shoulder. "You know."
"So what is it?"
"What?"
"Your favourite colour," Sawyer said. "Everyone seems to have one, but I don't."
"Edgy." At Sawyer's unimpressed look, Quinn hummed contemplatively. "Brown. But not the normal kind. Brown, but backlit, like Jeremy's eyes. Kind and soft. Almost honey."
Rolling her eyes to the back of her head, Sawyer fake-retched. Quinn mimed shoving her. Sawyer punched her in the shoulder, sending Quinn sprawling to the ground when she lost her balance, startling a half-scream-half-laugh out of her.
"You suck," Quinn snickered, cheeks flushed.
"What's your favourite song?"
"Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" Quinn said, a flicker of light in her eyes. "Joan Jett and the Black Hearts."
That song was on the mixtape Sawyer had shown Oliver.
"Are you close to your brother?"
Sawyer's expression blanks. There's something deadly in the unfeeling, the emotionless void she retreats into. Like a skin she's grown and lets the years toughen it, an impenetrable wall she throws up when a nerve is brushed against even slightly. Somehow, in Sawyer's callous silence, the hostile air is all the answers that Quinn needs.
Quinn flicks Sawyer a meaningful look. "Where do you go every morning? I hear you, you know? You're not exactly subtle."
"I know," Sawyer says. More pressing silence. Then, "the Quidditch pitch."
"I thought you didn't like Quidditch," Quinn muses, surprise flitting across her face.
Sawyer shrugs. She was tired of explaining herself. Quinn seems to accept her non-response.
They stay like that until noise stirs in the walls, going back and forth, collecting pieces of each other in the flare of dancing firelight. Elves in the kitchen, girls turning in their dorms, snores making the air gutter and tremble.
* * *
MIDNIGHT FELL OVER HOGWARTS and the large expanse of sky above the Astronomy tower glistered with stars, a billion tiny diamonds, like someone had spilled salt from a shaker over a black tablecloth.
Oliver set his telescope to the side and consulted the large volume on stars he'd cracked open over his lap, combing the pages for the constellations aligning in tonight's sky for reference. Professor Sinistra let her sixth year class take charge of their personal projects for the year, and Oliver was struggling a little with deciding which topic he wanted to commit to. Wyatt's was about how certain alignments of the planets affected prophetic magic—something like that. Divination was his thing. Oliver didn't quite believe in predetermined fate. He made his own luck.
"Okay," Wyatt said, slowly, staring down at the parchment paper which he'd scribbled all over with notes and arrows and annotations circling planet alignment charts he'd drawn up himself. Confusion creased his features as his eyes roved over his own writing. "I think I missed something— No, wait— Ah, yup. I did. Fucking hell." Dismay lined the downward curl of his lip and the defeated slump of his shoulders.
Oliver lifted a brow. "Still confident that the answers to the future are in the stars?"
"Well, my crystal ball told me that you're about to win tomorrow's match by a landslide, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss divination," Wyatt tutted.
Rolling his eyes, Oliver shot his best friend an unimpressed look. "They're just floating rocks in space, Wyatt. Whatever you think you see in them, it's all self-fulfilling prophecy. Like if I think I can block a goal, and I think about it and believe in my own abilities hard enough, I can make it. Plus, of course, we're going to win. We've got the best team in the entire school. I mean, sure, everybody's got their flaws, but overall, not too shabby for a school team."
"And I'm telling you, Slytherin has nothing on you guys." Wyatt smirked, as though proven right even before the results were in. "My crystal ball doesn't lie."
"Does your crystal ball tell you when your sister's friend is going to finally fall in love with you?"
Wyatt scowls, shooting a surreptitious glance towards the back of the classroom. "Shut up. I'm working on it."
From the corner of his eye, Oliver spots Sawyer and her Hufflepuff friend, a dark skinned girl with wild hair and aloof features that were always arranged in a perfectly closed-off composure, lingering around the back of the group. It was a little disorientating, witnessing Sawyer hanging around anyone else apart from her exclusive quartet of herself, Jeremy, Marcus, and Rio. In all the years that he'd known her, he had never once seen her interacting—by choice—with anyone outside of this little circle. Her Quidditch team didn't count. Communication was a paramount factor in matches, and Sawyer was already doing the bare minimum, as little as she could get away with. Already, Oliver thought himself an exception. Somehow, as much as she pushed him away every time he got too close for comfort, she'd begun opening up. When she'd showed him her Walkman this morning, the muggle device her father had gifted her some Christmases ago, Oliver hadn't expected her to let him inspect it—especially when she held it like it was worth more than money. Hadn't expected the mixtape. Hadn't expected to glimpse this scintilla of Sawyer Lee's head.
"If by working on it, you mean admiring from afar and doing absolutely nothing but pine in silence, I highly doubt your crystal ball will help you," Oliver drawls, not taking his eyes off Sawyer, as she looks to the sky, stars pooling in her dark irises. "And anyway, I've run by enough plays to know how to outmanoeuvre the Slytherins. We're thinking about the Gryffindor team's playbook from James Potter's year, Harry's suggestion, which is a little outdated, but I've made some adjustments to the field positions—"
A sharp jab in Oliver's side shocked a sharp yelp from him. Abruptly, almost half the class stops mid-conversation, turning to stare at him. Oliver froze for a startled second. Not daring to see if Sawyer had looked too, he sent Wyatt a scathing look.
Wyatt's lips curve into a deceptively innocent grin.
"Did you really just poke me?" Oliver hisses.
"Did you really just want to talk about Quidditch?" Wyatt retorts, cocking his head at his sister. "When did that start?"
"What?" Oliver scoffs, disbelief written across his features. His pulse jumps.
"Are you really playing dumb with me right now?" Wyatt asks, with a disapproving shake of his head. Oliver didn't miss the flash of sadness tinging his features, a conditioned response when speaking about anything regarding Sawyer, who refused to acknowledge Wyatt. That was a mystery both of them had yet to crack, and Oliver was working on it. He just didn't know how to bring it up without triggering a shut-down response from Sawyer, who turned her surroundings into a chemical environment the moment someone stepped over a line in her emotional capacity. Problem was, nobody knew where the line was drawn. It changed depending on her whim; Oliver could only guess, and he hated it. Hazarding wild guesses wasn't enough. He'd always been a firm believer in equations and strategy, sure-fire formulas and critical angles. But Wyatt didn't have to know what Oliver was picking at relentlessly.
"I was talking about Quidditch," Oliver points out. "We have a game tomorrow."
"Merlin, I get it." Wyatt tosses his parchment paper filled with notes only he himself could decrypt onto the pile of astrology textbooks by his feet. His eyes flashed, and in the moment, Oliver could see the twins' uncanny resemblance clear as the night sky above in Wyatt's features as he glared at Oliver, miming holding a ball in front of his face. "You know how Quidditch is this shiny thing of your sad little world, and you're like a racoon—"
"Shut up," Oliver grunts, batting away Wyatt's hands. "Sawyer and I are just... we're nothing. She said it herself. We're done."
Unconvinced, Wyatt hummed, regarding Oliver with a mistrustful stare. "Yeah, keep telling yourself that."
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
quinn and sawyer make me go 🥺❤️
also i'm starting to write a little headcanon stuff + bonus chapters so if you'd like to see anything in particular (bits of this story in someone else's perspective, whatever else you want to know about), comment here!!!