CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
fool's holiday

UNIVERSAL TRUTHS FALL INTO Sawyer's scar-calloused hands amidst the snow on Christmas Eve as she perches on the ledge next to her bed with her legs dangling out the window, thrown wide open to let the cold in. The bitter chill sinks its teeth into her skin as the wind howls into the winter-grey sky, bleached of colour. A Green Day record spins on its turntable, volume cranked up so loud Sawyer felt the bass in the walls. She didn't care that the neighbours could hear, didn't care that she knew her mother hated when she blasted her music like this because it was inconsiderate and disruptive. But her mother hadn't spoken two words to her since their agreement to ease up on each other. Some darker part of Sawyer that'd been kept in its cage for too long wanted to see how far she could push her mother into breaking the promise, wanted to see if her mother would come storming into her room demanding for her to turn the music down, wanted to see if she could pick another fight.

But the most her mother had done was cast a sound-proofing charm on Sawyer's door, preventing the music from travelling any further from the confines of her four walls.

Down the hall, Sawyer hears the annual ruckus in the kitchen, her mother bustling about, the clatter of a tray slipping into the oven, Wyatt chattering about the Quidditch match Gryffindor had won, and how he was right about them beating Slytherin by a landslide. Sawyer had been there, sitting in the Slytherin stands with Quinn, the only splotches of buttercup yellow amidst a sea of jade. Quinn had Jeremy's scarf wound around her neck, screaming her head off with the heaving Slytherin crowd every time the Chasers scored a goal. Despite her friends making their best efforts on the pitch, Sawyer's head was turned on the other team's goalpost. She watched as Rio scored—the Slytherin team had decided to trial run a new tactic, letting Jeremy and Marcus run defense, protecting Rio who seemed to have an unmatched affinity for precision, fend off the Gryffindor chasers with whatever tacky manoeuvre Marcus had put together during their training sessions—a handful of times, before something in Oliver clicked, and he'd begun shutting down more goals with a relentless brutality until Harry caught the snitch.

After that game, Sawyer remembered Jeremy passing them talismans he'd bought from some fourth year smart enough to capitalise on the recent mystery of students being petrified every now and then. Quinn had kept hers, using it as a bookmark she never went anywhere without. As a cheap joke, Rio had turned his into an earring, which had been confiscated by Professor Snape within the first twenty minutes hours it'd been worn. Unsurprisingly, he hadn't been slapped on the wrist with a detention. Both Marcus and Sawyer had scorned Jeremy's paranoia. Bearing a talisman was as useful as a rosary. You could put all your faith in one thing, but you could never count on it to save you. Sawyer had set hers on fire. Within the month, two students and Nearly Headless Nick had been found, petrified, in the hallways at different occurrences. Marcus stuffed his scorn into his pocket with his talisman.

Now, Sawyer wonders if that talisman does more than ward off invisible mystery terrorists. She wonders if it's enough to protect Jeremy from what's going on in his own home. He hadn't gotten any letters from his family after last year, and Sawyer had been waiting for him to open up about the surfacing issue. To no avail. He held onto his sunny composure just as tightly as he held onto his fake talisman every time they walked down the hallways of the ancient castle.

A knock on the door snatches her attention away from the street below her window.

"Hey," Wyatt said, a nervous smile on his lips as he pushed her door open, propping one shoulder against the doorframe.

Sawyer flicked him a cool smile. "To what do I owe the prodigy child this time?"

Wyatt winced, like her words were wolf-teeth sunk into his skin.

"Just letting you know that dinner's gonna be ready in an hour," Wyatt said. "We're still making the stuffing for tomorrow's Christmas dinner and all, but Dad told me to let you know." Met with Sawyer's stony silence, Wyatt looked torn between leaving and staying, like he wanted to say something else, but seemed to think better of it. Instead, he shot her a taut smile and shut the door.

Half an hour later, the apartment smelled like Christmas cooking when Sawyer finally ventured out of her room and made her way over to the kitchen. Upon entry, the light mood seemed to turn to stone as her mother took one look at Sawyer and turned to the sink and began scrubbing down a pan with stiff movements. This was one reason why Sawyer had opted out of helping in the kitchen for the six hours they'd been in here, which snowballed more into her mother's passive-aggressive silence, the palpable rift ripped open between them. Not wanting to admit that it rubbed her the wrong way, Sawyer pointedly ignored her mother and Wyatt, who waved at her before resuming chopping onions with red-rimmed eyes, as she opened the fridge to take the carton of milk off the shelf.

"Use a cup, you gremlin," Sawyer's father mused, handing her a glass before she could drink straight from the carton like she usually did when nobody was home as he set down a tray of potatoes on the kitchen island. He reached over a tray of chopped vegetables for his #1 DAD mug that Wyatt had gotten him for his birthday last year.

With a derisive flick of her fingers, Sawyer snatched the glass from him and poured out her milk.

"You decide to come help out after all?" Her father teased, with a breathy chuckle.

Her mother let out a sharp laugh. Not out of amusement, but a bitter, passive-aggressive sound wicking off the acid in her tone that made Wyatt grimace. "You think she'd want to help? Please, she's been shut in her room all day and not once has she asked."

With a cold smile, Sawyer took a sip of her milk, and raised her glass in a toast to her mother's abrasion.

Her father sighed, and turned to Sawyer. "I'm going to run down to the shops to get more salt. Wanna join me? It's not that far of a walk."

Sawyer shrugs, as if that motion could shake off the irritation in her bones at her mother's comment. "I'll grab my coat."

* * *

IGNORING HER FATHER'S FLAT LOOK, Sawyer dumped a tub of chocolate fudge ice cream into the basket. They were currently waiting in line to pay, and Sawyer had just remembered that they'd run out of ice cream.

"Your teeth are going to fall out," her father said, but didn't remove it, only eyeing the tub of ice cream as it slid between a box of fruit roll-ups and three mars bars that Sawyer had thrown in earlier, as he'd been perusing the shelves for salt, squinting at the labels and cursing himself for forgetting his reading glasses. "Your mother's going to murder me if you get more cavities. Which reminds me, we have to fix your dental appointment for next week."

Sawyer scoffed. "What did you even see in her anyway?"

With a disapproving frown, her father flicked her on the back of her head. "Hey, now, don't talk about your mother like that."

Rolling her eyes, Sawyer bent down to fix the loose laces on her Doc Martens.

"Your mother isn't a bad person," her father said, after a beat of silence. At Sawyer's incredulous look, he sighed. "She's not your enemy, believe it or not. I mean, you guys have your differences, and you clash so much it feels like she doesn't love you, but she does. You're both just too angry at each other to see that it goes both ways, or that you owe each other apologies."

Her father nudged her, and Sawyer shuffled forward as the line moved.

* * *

IT WAS RAINING WHEN RIO SHOWED UP ON HER DOORSTEP, hours after the kitchen had been cleared out and Sawyer spent the entirety of Christmas Eve dinner in silence, mulling over her father's words as her parents and Wyatt filled the dining area with noise. Wyatt had tried including her in a couple dramatic reenactments of the year's madness, but gave up after Sawyer consistently ignored him.

When Sawyer opened the door to a drenched Rio dripping rainwater all over the doormat, the first thing she noticed were his bloodshot eyes and the defeated slump of his shoulders and his face, devoid of all emotion except a crumpled will. A stark contrast to the Rio Alvarez of sharp anger, of brooding scorn, of untouchable disaster built into a dark Adonis of a boy.

"I didn't know where else to go," Rio grunted, his voice flat, Adam's apple bobbing as swallowed agitatedly. He swiped a hand over his weary face. It's so disorienting to see someone so cold expose the layer of soft flesh they'd buried beneath an avalanche of jagged rocks that'd slice you open if you tried to pry.

Sawyer cocked her head. "He sounds like Rio, but he doesn't look like him."

Rio screwed his eyes shut. "He broke up with me." A muscle in his jaw jumped, and Sawyer began to notice his hands weren't just shaking uncontrollably. He'd been working the joints in his fingers furiously, cracking his knuckles finger by finger, over and over again. Telltale signs of relapse and withdrawal. "He said he couldn't... he couldn't watch me become my father."

Wordlessly, Sawyer seized Rio's wrist, and tugged the sleeve of his leather jacket up. Embedded in the flesh of his forearm, amidst the broken veins and the faded scabs on burst lines under his skin were new track marks, yellow bruisings splotching over old scars and new holes where needles sunk their poison into his veins.

Rio's father was one of the more influential entrepreneurs of the wizarding world, which put the Alvarez's amongst the top of the social hierarchy, where Rio's family could invest in a small portion of power in the ministry. It made cleaning up Rio's messes much more efficient before his litany of felonies could rack up a record and taint the family name. But Rio's downfall into the family disappointment could only be traced back to his own home. He'd started using when he was eleven, when he was old enough to see what went on under the tables at the extravagant "work" parties his parents threw, and his father's friends almost always had drugs. As the years passed, his father's friends started bringing drinks and drugs into the house, dragging Rio's father deeper into the darker side of the party scene. In the midst of his third year, it wasn't Rio's father but a "friend" of his, a client of paramount affluence, who'd encouraged Rio to try anything he wanted, to which Rio's father turned a cheek and began talking business, and Rio seized on the offer as a way to bond with his father, who never once looked away from his business deals. But Rio held onto hope.

Until the cycle between addictions and sobriety began teetering towards harder drugs. In just a couple years, Rio graduated from pot and shrooms to cocaine and heroin. Every now and then, the fine balance between sobriety and relapsing was easily upset. Rio walked a wavering tightrope. At some point before tonight, he must've shot up at a party, sending him backsliding into old habits.

"Do what you have to do," he says, and all he sounds is tired. Not angry, not sad. Just tired, like a fugitive walking into a police station with his wrists outstretched, unable to find the will to keep running anymore. "Please. I want him back."

"Bathroom." One word, not spoken out of comfort, but understanding, and though his jaw clenches so hard he could crack some teeth, Rio's body visibly sags in relief. There's a reason why he'd come to her instead of Jeremy. Jeremy, who would discuss magical solutions and coax him into riding out the withdrawal. He'd chosen the harder option; no compromise. Sawyer wouldn't let him out even if it killed him. Even then, she'd slap him back to life and leave him shaking on the bathroom tiles.

Sawyer sidesteps, letting Rio into the house. She shut the door behind them and it's a wonder how he makes it to her bedroom, even makes it so far as to set his duffel bag down on her floor before he collapses two steps over the threshold into her ensuite bathroom, dry-heaving violently into the toilet bowl. Sawyer stands at the doorway, wand in hand, watching as Rio's head rises after an eternity, his ashen face suddenly so sunken-in, so gaunt and gutting and without fight.

Weak and shaking, the shivers working their way up his shoulders and into his bones, he fumbles a catch as she tosses him a fresh set of clothes she'd fished out of his duffel bag, murmuring the drying spell because his lips can't stop quivering enough for him to form a rounded sound. And then, once he's changed, ten painstaking minutes later, he lets her bind his wrists to the pipe under the sink. Before she closes the door, she slides a Mars bar across the bathroom tiles. It hits his knee. And then the knob clicks and he hears her back thump dully against the other side of the door as she settles on the floor.

Outside, the storm rages. Rain lashes against her window, the white noise lulling them into a capsule sequestrated from the rest of the world.

"Just like fourth year, huh?" Sawyer remarks, false cheer pricking her tone, but it's without venom.

"Fuck you," Rio spits, with every salvageable drop of black hatred in his veins. It doesn't transmit. He's running on empty.

* * *

NO MATTER WHAT TIME IT IS, they'll always be on opposite ends of the bathroom door, speaking through a block of wood with what little words two non-talkers have to exchange.

"In the event of an apocalypse," Sawyer says, entertaining the ridiculous hypothetical, "who do you save first?"

Rio is silent for awhile. (Surprisingly, his sanity hadn't escaped him yet. But Sawyer knew it was only a matter of time before he was all screams, angry and belligerent, pouring out through the blemishes branding his skin, bargaining, begging for one last hit, just one last one. In fourth year, he'd torn his vocal chords to shreds, the craving burrowed so deep into his core that it sounded like an exorcism in there.) She knows his instinctive, immediate answer, the name they'd exiled from these four walls like a blasphemy to be cleansed from his tongue.

"Callum," Rio rasps, his younger brother's name like acid on his teeth. He sucks in a shuddering breath. "Just so I can personally feed the sociopathic shit to the zombies just before we reach a sanctuary. You?"

"You know my answer."

"Sure," Rio scoffs. "Jeremy, Quinn, me, Wood—"

Sawyer banged a fist against the door in warning so hard it shuddered under the impact. Rio thought it would've broken.

"Violet," Sawyer says. "I trust Jeremy to save Quinn."

"Who?" A confused pause. "Oh. That kid." Another pensive pause. "You've grown attached."

"She grew on me," Sawyer says. And Rio leaves it at that.

"There's something wrong with Jeremy," Rio says, after a moment of silence. Thunder growls.

"Give it time." Sawyer picks at her nails. "Worry about yourself first."

Rio Alvarez doesn't know how to be soft. On one hand, he figures that's what makes him so perfect on the Slytherin Quidditch team, one the other, he thinks it's why his mother can't stand to be around him. Drug addicts and posturing violent assholes don't make good sons and he happens to be both. They don't make good boyfriends either, apparently. At this rate he doesn't understand why his friends still stick by him, but they do.

Of a boy-embodiment of the aftermath of a car wreck, weaned on self-destruction and raised by the callouses on his hands and the track marks scarring his forearms like sigils of shame, all blood and shattered glass spilled onto pitch-black streets, all mangled chrome and black smoke pouring out of his exhaust-pipe mouth.

Of the hell he will find on the grimy floor of his best friend's bathroom, curled up and shaking, with his hands bound to the pipe under the sink and his back pressed to the door; of uncompromising best friends who sit on the other side, refusing to let him go even as the agony rips and rends his insides to a no man's land; of boys who won't stop remembering how their old loves feel; of younger brothers who want to look up to their older brothers but can only find disappointment and remnants of cocaine on the counter; of expensive mothers who will never love their sons more than expensive parties with expensive people; and of fathers who will only ever see their sons as investments, pawns and heirs until proven profitless.

Outside, the grandfather clock in the living room chimes at the twelfth hour. And because they only have each other, because everyone else has gone to bed, because family isn't blood but something far more complicated, Sawyer says, "Merry Christmas, you suicidal fuckstain."

Through gritted teeth and shakes that threaten to evict the shredded remains of his soul from his body, Rio rests his forehead against the edge of the toilet bowl and says, "Merry Christmas, you soulless hypocrite."

* * *

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, Sawyer pegs a granola bar and a packet of crackers at Rio, who'd fallen asleep at some point during their conversation last night, still shaking, little groans escaping his parted lips as he curled up tighter, the lines of muscle in his arms straining against his skin. Under the binds, he'd scraped the skin of his wrists raw.

Somewhere in the corridor, the phone rings. And then it stops.

"Sawyer!" Wyatt yells. "It's for you!"

It's Marcus, asking about Rio. And for a long while as Marcus Flint sheds the stoic and cruel image he'd built for himself and rambles on about his ex-boyfriend, about what went down until they were unmade, Sawyer listens but says nothing. In her head, she turns over the links in their tight-knit friendship. For three years it had been Sawyer-and-Jeremy-and-Rio, until it had became Sawyer-and-Jeremy-and-Rio-and-Marcus and then Sawyer-and-Jeremy-and-Quinn-and-Rio-and-Marcus and she doesn't understand the complexity of such a polymer, or how simple it can be. But now that the -and-Marcus part was hanging in the air by a mere thread, she's faced with the tricky question twisting her arm behind her back, asking her to choose: did her loyalties lie with Marcus or Rio if she couldn't keep both.

Her first instinct is to call Jeremy, but stops herself from hanging up on Marcus.

Later, she would deal with Jeremy.

"How fast can you get here by Floo?" Sawyer asks, the first words she'd spoken to him since Wyatt passed her the phone.

"Five minutes."

When Marcus arrives in a flurry of ash and green smoke, he greets her parents, who're seated at the dining table with a wry grin, but his heart is not all there. His heart is curled up on her bathroom floor, bound to the pipe under the sink, quaking out withdrawal. Her mother pours Wyatt some hot chocolate. They don't ask about Rio.

"Alright there, young man?" Her father asks, a small smile on his lips. "Care for some hot chocolate? Family specialty."

Marcus declines. Sawyer leads him to her room.

Before she enters, she tells him, "be quiet. Watch. Don't let him see you."

And then they're standing in front of her bathroom, Sawyer knocking on the door.

"What?" Rio growls. Looks like he's entered the undeniable phase of craving.

"Just checking if you're still alive," Sawyer says. She opens the door, just a crack. Sprawled on the ground, Rio kneels in his own puddle of puke, the stench only just hitting Sawyer as she pokes her head into the bathroom. His complexion is a sickly green, and even though it's cold in her room where the radiator never works, a thick sheen of sweat glistens on his face, dripping down his chin with the snot and tears draining from his nose and eyes. If anyone else were in Sawyer's place, they might've been repulsed the second they'd opened the door, but Sawyer had seen it all before. Seen the track marks scoring him a failure, seen the hollow shell of a boy quaking on the bathroom floor that looked more and more like rock bottom as the minutes passed. Nothing surprised her anymore. "You're not my prisoner. Tell me now if you want anything to eat."

"No."

There's a loud thump behind her. Sawyer throws the door shut and looks back at Marcus who has flinched so hard he'd crashed into her nightstand. Hands clamped over his mouth to silence the strangled cry, he stabilises himself against her bedpost, eyes widened in horror and his face too many shades too pale, as though he's about to be physically sick.

Unfaltering, Sawyer pulls Marcus out of her room.

"He won't die on you." She regards him with a cool look as they stand in the corridor, Marcus leaning against the wall for support, and Sawyer with her arms crossed over her chest.

Marcus scrubs a hand through his dark hair. He looks exhausted. Perhaps even more than Rio when he'd first arrived. Hysteria bubbles from his chest. "He was backsliding while we were still together. I was just... I saw him. I could tell he wasn't doing so good... and I just knew... and now he's..."

"He told me he was doing this for you. What do you have to say to that?"

Shaking his head, Marcus swallowed, voice thick with some unchained emotion. "I can't... I can't go back there. I won't. Not now, at least. I can't go back to him. I wouldn't be able to take it if he—"

"Then you're free to go," Sawyer said, like it was that simple. In her head, there was nothing more. After all, she was just the messenger. Whatever was between Marcus and Rio, she chose not to dip her hands in.

Marcus shuts his eyes. He hasn't stopped shaking, but there is a quiet resignation in the twist of his features, the shadow passing over his face. "Does this mean—"

"It changes nothing," Sawyer says. "But don't force my hand."

Marcus nods in understanding. Sawyer knows that he sees the meaning behind her words: their friendship is not over, and she will still put herself between any imminent threat and Marcus, but if Rio and Marcus' problem grew bigger than it had to be, if anyone started hurting the other, she would always have Rio's back.

"He was there first," Marcus says, jaw clenching. "It's only fair."

Sawyer hums. "We make pancakes every Christmas morning, if you're interested."

Marcus shakes his head. "No, I... I better go."

Sawyer doesn't stop him.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

my last 2 braincells writing this chapter