CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
maybe i'm a threat
SOMETIMES, Oliver says while he's plucking at the bandages around her hand, we have to let ourselves want things, even if they're out of reach. You spend your whole life denying yourself greater things, things you want so bad it scares you, and you miss out because all you can think about is what could be taken from you—but if you don't even try, it'll be taken from you anyway. You can't be afraid.
Between pointing out his team's chances against Slytherin in the upcoming match and pressing his mouth against hers, Sawyer doesn't know which thing he's talking about. They're lying in their backs now, collapsed on the dew-springy grass, their skin still flushed hot from their run, just half an inch apart, all-too-aware of the body warmth radiating off his arm. It feels like the summers when she'd float around in the pool, face-up to the sky, until the minutes meant nothing and the passage of time was marked by the colours of the clouds and all she could hear was the water lapping against her ears. Now she hears her heartbeat. She's never been more aware of it.
"I had a dream," he says now, eyes filled with the marble sky, the sweat drying on their skin in the morning sun, "that we weren't allowed to talk for a whole day, and so everyone had to use hand gestures to communicate, but I didn't understand anything and I didn't know how to make gestures to tell you about the hamster I had when I was a kid that I saw eating its own babies."
They do this now. Oliver trading dreams for the press of her knuckles against his palm, Sawyer collecting them. For a moment Sawyer feels a tension pulling at her hairline, like that prickling tell when you're about to get a sunburn. "I was in your dream."
"Yeah," Oliver says, laughing softly. "It was stupid. I didn't even have a hamster when I was a kid."
"You had a terrapin," Sawyer says, before she can even think, memories from their childhood rattling in her brain like wishbones in an altar box. "You called it Wilda, after Wilda Griffiths, the Chaser from Puddlemere United. Wyatt almost dropped it twice."
"You remember." His head jerks and he's looking at her now. He sounds surprised.
"I don't forget," Sawyer says, ripping out a handful of grass and rolling it between her hands until her palms are stained green, and now she knows how Oliver must've felt in his dream, all those words in his head but no way to say them, no way to know how.
It gets quiet for a little bit. A wind picks up, cutting across the pitch, rustling the grass, and Sawyer lifts her hand up, lets it sweep away the blades of grass plastered to her palm.
There was so much from their childhood she never forgot. Every time his mother would lift him up so he could ring their doorbell when he was six, every time Wyatt would pretend Sawyer didn't exist like he'd found a replacement in his friend who liked the same things as he did, every time they'd shut the door and leave her to play by herself with her broken Barbie dolls and safety scissors. And the way Oliver's eyes would pass over hers like she wasn't there each time she tried to join him and Wyatt in their boy-games, fumbling the controls with her girl-hands. Eight years old marked a different time, when she'd grown out of her little girl-crush on him, and he'd started barging into her room without ceremony, demanding her to play backyard Quidditch with them. She'd complied, begrudgingly, until he kept criticising her for terrible form and she'd pushed him over out of rage before running back into the house to hide in her room.
But she also remembered times that were a little less cruel. Like when he'd say hi to her, all soft and shy, like he didn't know what to do with his hands. Or that point in time when Oliver carried around sweets in his pockets, and when their families had dinners together, and he'd quietly place a neat line of green gummy bears next to her plate because she'd told him she liked the green ones best.
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.
On the way back to the Slytherin common room, with Marcus and Sawyer ahead, determined to get there before anyone smelled the alcohol on Marcus' hands (he'd fumbled a pour and spilled more than he saved), and with Jeremy and Quinn walking behind, they fingers laced together, it is the voices around the corner in that halted them in their tracks.
"Leave me the fuck alone, Nott," Rio snarls.
"You asked for it," the second voice sneers, a boy, Sawyer sees now, peering round the wall. "It's your problem."
They stand in the corridor, under the flaring torchlights, Rio's fists bunched and ready to swing, the tension in his shoulders electric and itching, the sparks of something dangerous gleaming in his death glare, and the boy he's facing off steps closer, closer, closer, all up in his space and says something none of them can catch. Behind her, Sawyer hears Quinn's sharp intake of breath. Nobody intruded in Rio's personal space like that unless they wanted blood. Sawyer sees the vein-covered peaks of Rio's knuckles as he seizes him by the collar, lips curling into a vicious snarl. The boy throws his head back and lets out a sharp laugh. Amusement flickers over his smug features, sharp as broken glass, a wild and gaunt face, his smile a wicked slant that reads new trouble.
Before Sawyer can intervene, Rio shoves the boy away so violently the boy stumbles against the opposite wall, but his smile doesn't wither. He has something over Rio.
"Fuck off," Rio says, his voice a low growl of thunder, a shadow clinging to his expression, rage-sharp with disdain.
"Sure," Nott—Dominik Nott, Sawyer recognises now—says mockingly, smirking. "See you around, junkie."
Rio stormed off.
Right into the path of his friends, still gathered around the corner. Sawyer didn't know what Rio actually did between the time that they were gone, but it was clear that if Rio really was unwell, whatever Madam Pomfrey plied him with must've been potent enough to bring the colour back into his face and the fight back into his shoulders.
As though he'd run into a brick wall, Rio stopped short, flinching under Sawyer's stare.
"Madam Pomfrey's medicine worked, then," Sawyer says, grinning like she had a knife point at his ribs. She might as well have. She could smell the aggression radiating off him, but aggression was a cover for a lot of things with Rio. His body, like hers, was a body of impulses, but while Sawyer's aggression sat at her core like an urn of molten magma, Rio's aggression sat on his skin. An easy slipcover, like scar tissue. Rio says it's a bad father thing. Everybody who has a bad father grows up rotten, grows up in the arms of chaos. But Sawyer knows the opposite: some people found comfort in their fathers. Fathers can be good, and mothers can be bad. Either way, someone was hiding. "Good."
"Like magic," Rio said, flashing his teeth, sending her an impenetrable look.
Beside her, Marcus stiffened, his spine drawing ram-rod straight like someone was twisting his skin.
"Well," Jeremy said, pinning Rio with a softer gaze, "we were just heading back to the common room to put all this stuff down, and I was thinking we could have a study session afterwards?"
"I was going to the pitch to get in some Quidditch practice," Marcus said. He glanced at Rio, who only stared back, a shadow of understanding eclipsing his indecipherable expression, their silent communication lost to the others.
"Oh, crap, I have to meet Sinistra about my Astronomy essay," Quinn said, realisation dawning in her tone.
"Coming, junkie?" Sawyer mocked.
"Not today," Rio said, a muscle in his jaw ticking.
"Just you and me then," Jeremy said, nudging Sawyer in the arm.
Sawyer only fixed Rio with a hard stare. Things would unravel. Some of it might not turn out pretty, but that's life. And Sawyer has never looked for pretty things while her hands were dusty-violet bruised, knuckles split like tiny volcanoes, the blood flowing out like magma. There's something to be said about the rage rooted deep in her veins, the dark twists of a forest. Whatever Rio was hiding, she would get her hands on. Truth will out.
Later, it is just Sawyer and Jeremy alone in the library, their books splayed open before them on the table, taking up more seats than required for just the two of them. But that's just Jeremy's style of studying. He's a messy academic, too many thoughts running in his head that he'll lasso and wrangle into neat lines on a page or spider diagrams that web into more thoughts, blossom into new ideas. The paper bleeds colour, and Sawyer thinks that this might actually be what the inside of Jeremy's head looks like. Jeremy doesn't use quills like everybody else, he says they interrupt his train of thought. Constantly having to dip the tip into an ink well isn't that big of a deal to Sawyer—she needs to time to think, even if she can admit that she procrastinates more than she tries, and sometimes the ink doesn't run out because she's been writing but because she's let her quill sit idle in her hand for too long and all the ink's dried up by the time she manages to figure out her next sentence.
But looking over Jeremy's notes—fuck me, Sawyer thinks—it's like he's presented her with a cross section of his brain. Organised colours spreading from theory to theory in tiers, red to highlight the most important exam bits, purple requires more memorisation, green questions explanations for further elaboration, blue demands clarity. There's always a corner of his notes that are clustered in the corner in black in his haphazard cursive—a mesh of afterthoughts.
What are you cramming in the corner of your skull, Jeremy? What's itching to be said that can't be because you don't know where to put it all?
Sawyer glances down at her own notes, and the only thing substantial in her possession is a star chart that Quinn had helped her with. Both Sawyer and Jeremy took Astronomy, but they didn't share the same class due to a clash in timetabling. She has the word 'the' written down, and another word started, and it's either constellation or cetus and she can't tell what she'd been meant to write down when she'd initially began.
Jeremy says something about Mercury in retrograde, about constellations meaning [ ... ], about magic at its most potent at [ ... ]. Sawyer is lost after the first thing.
A funny expression twists Jeremy's face for a second so fleeting Sawyer thought her drug addled-brain had conjured it. But then he says, "I miss her. I shouldn't, but I miss her, and it makes me feel stupid. It's not fair." Her, Sawyer knows, even without having to ask.
"Nothing's fair, Sunshine," Sawyer says, wishing in all the world that Quinn was here. Quinn would know what to say. She reads so many books, so she must know all the words. There's a reason why none of her friends opened up to her—if they did, it was in rare moments, and mostly Rio, who could understand Sawyer's cheese-grater tongue shredding into his comfort. Sawyer only knew hard truths. "Some mothers are rotten, bottom-barrel scum. Somehow we got the last pick and we have to live with it."
"She wasn't always horrible—"
"She chose to leave," Sawyer says. "If she really cared, she would've taken you with her, but she didn't, and now she cares because it's convenient. Because she wants to hurt your father the way he hurt her. Your house is empty and sad and haunted because of her. You suffered a Christmas and half a term and a whole summer without a single word from her. She doesn't deserve your forgiveness. You feel stupid because you know this. You feel stupid because you know she's treating you like ammunition, but you still call her Mum. You don't have the heart to leave your dad either."
Jeremy flinches.
"I don't care about my dad," Jeremy says in a brutal murmur, albeit, the way he's scratching obsessively at a point on his knee like there isn't actually an itch, but the urgent need to do something with his hands, doesn't convince Sawyer.
"Say that with more conviction and maybe I'll believe you."
"He's..." Jeremy flounders for the words. They don't come.
"You care," Sawyer says, levelling him with a dead stare. "You care because you are not me or Rio, so don't try to be. But if it makes you feel better, we can go down to the greenhouses and break all the windows."
Jeremy exhales a weak laugh. "No. I'm not like you or Rio. I don't want to damage something so it looks the way I feel inside. But I do want to talk about it."
"I have to warn you that you might not like what I have to say."
"Then don't say anything," Jeremy says, sending her a hopeless look, "just listen."
And so she does.
And he tells her everything.
* * *
AGAINST MADAM POMFREY'S WARNINGS to stay off Quidditch while her cuts were still scabbing, Sawyer showed to every single practice and her left hand never caught a break. In the shower, she felt the cuts—angry and puckered—sting so bad but it didn't mean that she was finished. Just that she existed in the present, like a wire shocked to life by the first spark of electricity.
In the dark, the shadows of her dorm room sway like grass in the prairie, even though the curtains draped over the window are still, blocking out the full moon. Her roommates are lumps underneath their duvets, rising and falling in slow rhythm, and she can hear Georgie's snores rocking the bunk bed. Quinn had stopped reading by wand light hours ago, and had lapsed into a fitful slumber. Slowly, Sawyer unwinds the bandage around her hand and traced the rough cracks of her skin where her wounds had scabbed and were slowly healing. She flexes her fingers, feels the skin tighten around her knuckles where the cuts were the deepest. She makes a tight fist and the scabby skin tears a little bit, a small spark of pain dances through her hand. But there's no blood.
Sawyer stares at the back of her hand. She can't see it, so she splays it against the wall that her bed is pressed up against, fingers finding the grooves in the rough brickwork, something to anchor herself with. Nights like these, she wishes she had her earphones in, music cranked so loud she's blasted into oblivion, filling her body with sounds. Instead, her Walkman is on the floor and she has no motivation, can summon no energy to twist around and get it. And there is the darkness, not like an ocean or a watering hole, so full of things nobody knows how deep it goes until it's just darkness, but a darkness like an abyss, carved into her by the hands of time, a darkness born from something hollow, something empty, carved so deep it grew a spine, and that spine began to spread, into ribs, into collarbones, shoulder blades.
Until it became this corporeal thing inside her, an organ rotting to life in the gap between her body and the grieving thing it came from.
She shifts, her undamaged hand creeping under her pillow until her fingers click against the corner of her flip-top lighter, its rusty metal case adhering itself to her skin instantly. It is instinct that guides her hand as she flicks it on and the flame wavers just inches from her face. Instinct, that lets her run her fingers through the flame, the heat a soft tickle at first as she skims over it, toying with it like it isn't the very thing that could swallow forests whole. Gradually, the heat builds, and it starts as a searing pain than threatens to send her nerves into a frenzy, and she feels like a lit molotov rag, seconds away from shattering, seconds away from taking something down with it in a flash of heat and fire.
Sometimes she wonders why she needs this. Ever since she's been put through psychological treatment with Dr Josten, she's always searching for a rational answer to counter her irrational actions. Why was she hurting herself? Why did she want to die? Why does she feel empty? Before, the answer was always definite, a conclusion that Dr Josten had drawn out of Sawyer.
(It is your mother's words that dig into your skin like teeth, a harsh god of your childhood you can't hide from or ward off, so you turn yourself to stone just so you don't feel the bite of her cruelty. You turn yourself to stone with resentment until you stop being jealous of your brother, who has always been golden, who has always been able to afford being soft. Stone severs the fleshy insides from the harsh edges of your environment. But stone makes it hard to connect. Language is communal but there is no community with her or him and you don't know how to stop. Stone makes it hard to separate what's real and what isn't when nothing has felt real in years. So you do foolish things, self-destructive things, just to be able to feel a lick of anything, just to be able to stop feeling at all.)
(Dr Josten says that. How does she say it with a straight face? Isn't it funny, how the blame falls in circles.)
But then there are times like these, when she realises the answer really is that simple:
She doesn't need a reason.
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
y'all this is OUR oliver 🥺❤️❤️😭🥰🥴😩
also not to be like....... getting ahead of myself but i do have a james sirius potter fic (next gen) planned out involving sawyer and oliver's daughter................. who wants it???