CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
a taxidermy of you and me

OUT OF HABIT, Sawyer finds herself rising before the sun, like she used to, back in fifth year. In the moonlit dawn, the darkness oozes, shadows pulsing in corners, gnarled fingers creeping around the fluttering curtains and soaking into the floorboards like oil stains. With the motorised movements of an automated robot, she untangles herself from the sheets, slips her grey hoodie over her head, slips a sports bra on underneath and replaces her hoodie and slides her feet into trainers. All without waking a single one of her slumbering roommates. It's with the rattle of pills in their little plastic container and the cap half-unscrewed in her fingers in the midst of this routine that she's managed to perfect that she realises what she's doing.

Staring down at the prescription bottle, Sawyer pauses, half-in, half-out, blinking out of the haze. She didn't have to be up at this hour. She didn't have practice to get to. But sleep was miles away and there was mint on her breath—she must've brushed her teeth at some point—as her teeth chilled against the frigid air and a sharp ache staked into her gums. Most of all, she didn't have to take the pills. Not yet. Not while the sun wasn't up and there was no one to see her, no one to be a menace to besides herself and she still had her brain in her head. Sawyer pursed her lips. Two pills a day sent her into oblivion. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't a pleasant experience, drifting about the corridors, watching the world go by behind a cloudy screen.

If she didn't take them now, Jeremy would always remind her later during breakfast. He kept a prescription bottle on him. Just in case she forgot. Somehow, he always knew when she forgot.

In her hands, the pills mock her. Two shiny, pristine capsules flashing in the meagre moonlight streaming in through the window like pixie teeth. Mocking her. Sawyer clenched her jaw. She pressed the nail of her thumb against the centre of one of them until her hands shook. Until the pill cracked and two imperfect halves lay beside a whole.

And then a sudden, shameful thought struck her. She wouldn't be lying to Jeremy if she took one and a half. It'd still be plural if she left out one tiny half.

No. Two pills. That was the promise she'd made. Two pills to keep her mother off her back, and she'd honour it because if anyone were to cross that line, it sure as hell wouldn't be Sawyer. She couldn't let her mother have the upper hand on this one. Especially this one.

Without a second thought, Sawyer knocks back all of it—one whole and two halves—and swallows it dry.

And then Sawyer leaves, letting her feet guide her body, away, away, away, before the drugs can melt her brain down to the barest of its functions and the haze can take her, less alive but not dead. Not yet. Death, Sawyer thinks, musingly. Once an ink-dark familiar perched over her shoulder breathing down her neck, and now a distant complex shadowed by the everyday musings. Strange how quickly things can change around here.

Once the high hits, she's looking up at a clear, open sky. Why her body on autopilot had brought her down to the Quidditch pitch, she didn't know. She didn't question it either because as soon as she lays eyes on a familiar figure all the way across the sand pit, time runs out.

There is no shadow of a doubt in anyone's mind (including hers) that Oliver Wood is a true athlete. Someone whose movements are suffused with grace, so even though he's a body of pure muscle and sinew, he isn't lumbering when he walks nor is he all bulk and no joints. Everyday things, like him taking off his sweatshirt or wiping his forehead with the hem of his shirt become fascinating to watch, chiselled muscles flowing, rippling in small gestures.

Oliver spots her as he's lifting his water bottle to his lips. Mouth parting in surprise before lapsing back into the hard line, he stands there, watching her watch him, stock still and tensed, hesitance flickering across his features—so human, so unlike the boy on the pitch whose words are law and every move is calculated aggression—before settling on stony resolve. He takes a swig of his water before capping the bottle and tossing it onto the grass beside a duffel bag overflowing with a light grey towel and other training equipment. Sawyer's eyes cut to the sky as Oliver jogs over to her.

"What are you doing here?" He asks, slightly out of breath, drawing her gaze back down. Torches mounted on the edges of the pitch, at the mouths of the changing rooms flare and flicker, puppeteering shadows dancing over their faces; Oliver's gleaming with a thin sheen of sweat, a wild storm and a question in his earth-brown eyes, and Sawyer's washed-out, devoid. Her guess was that he'd been running drills.

Sawyer hummed, feigning contemplation. "If I told you I came here to burn this place down to the ground, would you believe me?"

Oliver cut her a flat look, but the corner of his mouth twitched up. Just the slightest bit. Granted, it was enough, and she'd take it. It was in this moment that a sudden, selfish, striking thought slithered through the haze making her brain swim: whatever he gave, she would take. If he asked for something now, she would give. It barely registered for a second. Until it did. And Sawyer didn't know what to do with her hands. Or the macabre weight that'd piled onto her gut, a house in need of a haunting.

"It's kind of hard to believe, isn't it?" Oliver breathed, letting out a short whistle. He turned back to the pitch, his head tilted up at an angle that set his gaze on the goal posts, the six rings he guarded with his life during Quidditch matches and practice. But Sawyer's eyes were on him. There's always been a hardness to Oliver's face, a granite mask slipped over his expression so his features seemed sharper, less likely to be pried into. Now, though, something softer crept over his mouth. For the first time since the last Quidditch match, Oliver seemed content.

"What's hard to believe?"

He made a vague, sweeping gesture to the stands, to the sky, to her. "Y'know, how we would've been running drills with Harry and Violet. How Violet would've almost fallen off her broom at least five times already by this hour, and how Harry might've fumbled a catch. How you would've spent the entire time ignoring me, or at least trying to fight me."

"I like fighting," Sawyer said, a sharp grin carved into her lips.

"I know," Oliver said, the slightest glimmer of amusement in the ghost of a smirk on his mouth. "I liked fighting you."

Sawyer shrugged, as though the physical action might've helped her shrug off the weird feeling those words set into her stomach. "They just grow up so fast."

Playing along, Oliver shook his head. "You know how kids are."

For a moment, as their eyes met, Oliver let a tiny smile gloss over his lips. Let the slow light of the rosy-fingered dawn, the sun breaking over the top of the Forbidden Forest in the distance, the bright rays saturating their skin in a halo of glowing saffron, take away any past resentment they might've harboured, replace it with the calm of the stalemate they'd reached during their pointless game of tic-tac-toe in Professor McGonagall's class a couple weeks ago. With the way he was holding her gaze, like they had a secret nobody else knew, like she wasn't a menace and a mess and he had room in his head for something else other than Quidditch. For a dangerous moment, Sawyer thought that this was something she could have. Something she could be allowed to want. Because as long as she kept her mouth shut, as long as she kept the feeling locked down in the dark fortress of her insides, nobody could take what they couldn't see. Granted, she didn't know what 'this' was either. She just knew that if he asked, she would say yes. Even if she didn't know what question she was expecting.

And then reality came crashing back down.

Breaking their pointless little stare-down first, Sawyer flicked her gaze beyond his head. Because this was all that was. Pointless. She couldn't have this. This would go nowhere. No matter what amount he gave, she wasn't going to take. She wouldn't let herself. This was just another one thing that could be snatched out of her hands.

Cocking his head toward the pitch, Oliver cleared his throat. "I was... I'm done with drills. Run with me?"

It wasn't a command. It was a question. She had a choice. Yes, because otherwise, what was she here for? No, because there were some paths you just didn't go exploring. No matter how tempting.

But even on medication, floating in the dream-like trance where she could think but couldn't pin down any of her thoughts before they slipped between her fingers like sand, couldn't hold onto one emotion long enough to feel it—Sawyer was a body of impulses and myopic decisions.

"Ten laps," Sawyer said, finality stamped in her tone, and then, more to herself than him, she added, "and then I'm going."

Wiping his hands over his black track pants, Oliver shrugged. "Whatever you want."

Whatever she wanted. Shock stroked her heart, but before it could register, the feeling had slid away into the depths of the haze of oblivion. All she knew was that she didn't like the way he looked at her. Not with such casual tenderness, the notion of some form of friendship not binding them but held between them on equal plane. Not in this light. It didn't bother her so much as annoyed her—which were, in actuality, mutually exclusive things. All these discombobulated, festering feelings—invoked by a single glimpse at dawn of a boy she'd known of her whole life but hadn't known until last year, a boy gilded in calculated victory who shouldn't be looking at girl-embodiments of dormant volcanoes—settled like a toothache, a stabbing monstrosity in her gums. Sooner or later, it'd be rot and ruin. Better to excise it now in its contained form rather than let it spread, let it take root in deeper places she'd rather not reach for.

"Should've brought my Walkman," Sawyer mused, striding towards the pitch. Not ignoring the inconvenient thud of her heart, no. Just prioritising.

Cutting him out would've been a step she'd have resorted to before the medication—before, when she was all bruising fists and blind fury and pent-up violence. Now, even though her thoughts were muddled and her life was a screen she could only watch play out before her before she could put a hand in to change the course of things, she wanted to see what she would do with all these strange feelings she hadn't felt since she was six and Oliver had just been her brother's best friend, a boy she could only see in passing because he was always with Wyatt, who hadn't yet grasped the concept of sharing his friends.

Oliver caught up in two long strides. He shot her a puzzled look, like she'd just sprouted two extra heads. "A walkman?"

"It's a muggle thing. You listen to music on it."

They set off down the length of the Quidditch pitch at a slow but steady pace, starting from the Ravenclaw stands. Surprisingly accommodating to her shorter steps, Oliver hummed. "Can you show me?"

"That depends," Sawyer drawled, an odd sense of calm washed over her now that they've settled into a familiar rhythm, their breaths coming out in visible puffs as the frigid morning air stings her cheeks. "Will this be routine?" She didn't have to voice the subtle message between the lines. Are you expecting anything from me?

"Do you want it to?" From the prick of curiosity in Oliver's tone, Sawyer read: Only what you're willing to give.

Did she want to make this a regular thing? Voluntarily coming out to the Quidditch pitch at the crack of dawn to exercise with Oliver didn't sound like what people would expect of her—hell, it didn't even sound like what she'd expect from herself—but Sawyer didn't care for stereotypes and she cared even less for people. But for once in her life, she wanted to figure something out. Instead of avoiding him, shutting him out like this particular curse was contagious, she wouldn't mind the company, as if by remaining in contact with him, she might inoculate herself.

Sawyer said nothing. Let Oliver interpret her silence however he liked, and liked, he did, whatever he'd extracted from her wordless promise, because a small smile tinged his lips once more as they lapped the pitch once.

"What kind of music are you into?" Oliver asked, breaking the quiet companionship they'd formed thus far in their run.

"Rock, mostly. Blame my dad's influence," Sawyer said, a small thrill in her veins. "You?"

"What do you think?"

"You seem like a classical music guy."

Oliver let out a surprised laugh, startling Sawyer a little though she held onto her composure and glanced up at him squinting against the sun as it loomed behind his head, silhouetting his face.

"Yeah, Beethoven really does it for me," Oliver said, a sardonic bite in his tone but it was without heat and Sawyer saw the smile on his lips touch the light in his eyes. She ripped her gaze away, an odd tingling in her veins, and all the coherent thoughts in her brain had condensed itself into two words that came down upon her in a cleaving stroke like the thud of a guillotine: oh, no.

Sawyer remains silent.

Oliver takes this as his cue. He shakes his head. "I don't know. I don't really listen to music. My father—" she doesn't miss the slight wince— "plays the weird witchy stuff they play in taverns, but I hate those songs, so..."

She couldn't imagine her life without music. It sounded like an affectation rather than a confession, but the truth was in its bones—in the madness, she found sanctuary in the grit of an electric guitar, found footholds in the rasp of a singer's voice. Sometimes she wondered what it was like, to have such unshifting, undaunted focus that the lack of something as fundamental to the soul as music had little impact at all in his sanity.

They fell into another comfortable silence, just the sounds of the morning, the rustling trees, birds calling to the saffron-robed sky, the ancient groan of the school weathering the wind. Their footfalls thudded against the ground in tandem with their pulses. Four laps in a silence like an unspoken agreement. Until four laps became six, eight, and finally, on their last round, Oliver and Sawyer made it full circle to their starting point. Panting slightly, Oliver picked up his bottle from the bench and put it to his mouth, until he paused, seemingly realising something when his eyes flickered to Sawyer. She'd pulled her hoodie over her head, using it to wipe the sweat from her face, leaving her in a faded band tee. She hadn't brought anything with her.

Extending his hand, he offered her the bottle. She pinned him with a blank look.

"You can have some if you want," Oliver grunted, catching his bottom lip between his teeth, eyes darting furtively everywhere else but her. "Seriously, I don't mind."

Wordlessly, she swiped it from him and took a sip.

"I heard you've been giving your team some hell during training," Oliver said, mirth tinging his voice.

"I don't see a point in training if my team's going to lose every time," Sawyer said, giving a one-shoulder shrug.

"Kenai's been complaining."

"Good for him."

As the school year crept towards Christmas break at a snail's crawl and the season began to set in, Quidditch practice took precedence of Sawyer's time. Between now and the term break, Kenai had spurned a determination to push them all to victory, starting with drills, morning runs as a team, and more targeted practice. Where Nia, their recently graduated ex-captain, sowed dispute with her fruitless intensity, Kenai annoyed everyone with his excessive enthusiasm. Even though she was on medication, Sawyer had come too close one too many times to crossing the threshold between where the drugs kept her rooted behind the fog, and complete clarity in the moment where violence was not just a solution but the only option.

"If you hate your team so much, why don't you just leave them?" Oliver asked, promptly before draining the contents of his bottle after Sawyer passed it back.

"And do what? Join your team?"

With a tiny grimace, Oliver tossed the empty bottle into his duffel bag. "I've asked McGonagall about transferring an external player into our team, but she keeps shutting me down. So, even if you wanted to, it's too bad you're stuck with Hufflepuff."

Sawyer almost rolled her eyes. Trust Oliver to pull something like that.

"And you know, you never really answer my questions about why you hate Quidditch so much."

"That's because I don't," Sawyer said, fixing her eyes at a point in the sky behind Oliver's head. Flummoxed, Oliver pursed his lips, pinning her with a look of bewilderment. Sawyer let out an explosive sigh. How to explain to someone who expressed their passions so explicitly that she couldn't? Not out of fear, but out of some sense of nurtured territorial response to keep it all buried so nobody could take it from her. Everything she'd wanted once upon a time—for someone to understand, to be left alone—she never got, because nobody took chances on a ticking time-bomb. When Harry asked her why she didn't care for Quidditch at the beginning of their morning practices, she recalled the exact words she'd said to him, "Quidditch is boring, but it's less boring than life. It's not that I don't care for it." She didn't know how to say the rest. I just don't want to put my entire life in this one pool when it could so easily be taken from me.

"You play life like you play Quidditch," Oliver remarked, perking up as though he'd reached some sort of epiphany. "You realise that?"

Saying nothing, Sawyer drew her deadpan gaze back to him.

"You're your team's most reliable line of defense. You protect your friends like you make life hell for the opposing team," Oliver pointed out, zipping shut his bag and hefting it over his shoulder. "Doesn't look like you don't care to me, anyway. I believe you."

"I don't care what you believe," Sawyer said, the white lie turning on her tongue like a mouthful of dirt. His words struck an odd chord in her. An echo down an endless tunnel that dead-ended with I believe you. What was his point, anyway? Why he was telling her all this, she didn't quite understand.

Oliver shrugged. "It's your choice, anyway. You can keep resisting your team until they fall apart and into real dysfunction, or you can actually just go with the training so they stop resisting your attempts to break them."

Sawyer let out a surprised laugh, a sharp and cruel sound, slicing the frigid air between them to ribbons. He'd seen right through her. "Oh, aren't you such a perceptive guy? This should be interesting. Care to diagnose me further?"

Clutching the strap of his bag, Oliver didn't answer, didn't entertain her waspish antagonism, which seemed as instinctive as it was a defensive mechanism, a pointless wall she'd thrown up to keep everyone out and turn them away. After being met with concrete for so long, Oliver had finally learned when to give up. Or perhaps this was it—she'd exhausted his notorious determination, and he was washing his hands of her. Just like her mother. Just like everybody else. Instead, he turned to go.

As she watched his retreating figure, Sawyer thought...

She thought she might be long overdue for a root canal.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
we're back in busines baby...... i'm not happy with the quality of my writing in this chapter but hey.... at least we got through writer's block right