[ 032 ] a problem that doesn't want to be solved
*before you read: ok look i know these past couple chapters have been upsetting / difficult to read because sawyer is backsliding, but i promise it does get better. truly, it will get better.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
a problem that doesn't want to be solved
"WHERE'D THESE COME FROM?" Oliver asks, tracing the scars on the back of her hands.
They're lying on the grass, backs damp with sweat, their skin dewy and flushed from the run. Breakfast wouldn't be for another hour. They have time to kill.
By now, the bandage had come off, now, and the cuts completely healed over with new scar tissue running like a many-fingered river branching through a valley. Which also meant her new burn scars were visible, angry and puckered, pink and white ridges so thick you couldn't see the veins on the backs of her hands anymore. In time, they'd flatten and fade when new skin replaced the tissue. He pressed a finger against one of the burn scars, a concentric circle in the centre of her hand from when she'd put the flame to her skin and waited until she couldn't take it anymore. She remembered the smell of her own burning flesh, the pus that it'd wept for days after until she'd been forced to go to Madam Pomfrey for antiseptic cream, and was bitched at again for being stupid. Oliver's touch sent a phantom tingle down her wrist.
"Doesn't look like abrasion burns from your Quidditch gloves," he says.
"That's because they aren't," Sawyer says, the clawed hand of her emptiness gripping her heart, stilling it as Oliver swept her with a look so intense she felt as if she might be crystallised.
"Who—"
"I did," Sawyer says, not really knowing why she's telling him all this. Nobody (with the exception of Wyatt, that one time in fifth year) had ever asked about her scars before, mostly because they don't pay that much attention where she doesn't want them to. Maybe if Oliver knew, he'd leave. Maybe if he knew now, what he was signing up for, he would walk away before the attachment grew terminal. "Some people are cutters, some are hitters, some are burners, like me."
Oliver frowns. "Why?"
Why do you do it? Why do you hurt yourself, Sawyer?
Unsavoury questions want unsavoury answers.
How to answer this, Sawyer thinks, in which they don't think I'm a coward?
Why do people knock over such carefully organised things on tables in the heat of the moment? Why do children push a tower of carefully constructed building blocks over? Why do people turn to tall buildings when things on the ground get too much? In a world where stepping forward is harder than stepping backwards, where creation comprises of complexities, destruction becomes a form of catharsis. Unmaking something is always easier than making it. In a world where everything is so hard, everyone just wants something easy. Something to tell them that life isn't so complicated after all. Pain is easy. Blood is evidence. The relief is instant.
Humans are complex creatures. But sometimes, the only way to deal is to uncomplicate things.
Most people call that cowardice.
Sawyer thinks it's a lack of understanding. But how to communicate all this without being committed?
"Because I don't deserve to live," she says, flicking her dead gaze to meet Oliver's. "But I don't want to die either."
"Does you psychiatrist suck or what?" Oliver's voice is sharp, but not cutting.
"Wyatt told you," Sawyer muses. Of course. "He didn't tell you that I've told Dahlia more than I've ever shared with him? No, Dr Josten works for me. Last year I had almost no relapses, so I suppose I should thank her for doing all the heavy-lifting."
Last year feels like a fever dream, a bad one you wake up from in a cold sweat. It's not just the medication haze, or even that she counts her days with pill organisers, or that she hates Thursday's piss yellow flap-lid. Maybe it's the counselling sessions of the summer, the sterile smell of Dr Josten's office, the way she walks in and dumps all her tangle onto the little lacquered coffee table in front of the lumpy sofa upholstered in bruise-blue brocades for Dr Josten to unravel and determine a timeline. How one thing led to another, like checking the successive height of her rage and emptiness year-by-year against the doorway in pink sharpie. She's never had to fight so hard to keep something in before.
"If I told you to stop, would you?"
"No," Sawyer says, the most honest thing she has said about herself in awhile. "I want to blame it on the Dementors, but I don't know anymore."
She already knows the question before he even has to ask it. It's in the way he looks at her, his dark brown eyes searching, searching, searching, trying to excavate beneath the layers of stone.
Don't you want to get better? Oliver asks.
A simple question with a not-so-simple answer. The neat answer would be, yes, of course, anyone who is sick wants to be better, wants to feel normal again. But the answer sitting in the back of her throat like phlegm you can't decide you want to swallow down or hack up is this: no, I don't want to be better because this is a state that is familiar to me, I have learned how to navigate it in the dark so I don't bash my shins against the sharp edges of my afflictions, like a house I have lived in since I was a child, a house I could walk through with my eyes closed. I don't know how else to be. There is no other state I will ever feel like myself. Granted, I don't even know what that is, either.
It's because of this answer that Sawyer understands that she might be a hypocrite.
You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness, even if it isn't sadness at all, but the dichotomy of rage and emptiness, two states she oscillates between. Dr Josten says that.
(At least Rio's addiction is physical, something you can torpedo down the toilet. But feelings? That's a part of you. That's brain chemistry feeding on brain chemistry. How can you help it?)
So she tells him, "You're ready for that answer yet."
"I always thought those were from Bludgers," Oliver says, tapping a finger over her scars. "Until I realised you never let any of them touch you. You've never been injured since third year. I saw them in Transfiguration last year, and I kept wanting to ask, but I didn't know how."
"That's because, in your head, the world is pretty and simple. Things that matter fall into the box labelled Quidditch, and everything else is irrelevant. Now you know." Now you know. Walk away.
"Not true."
Sawyer flexes her fingers, watching the scars stretch and slack, loose skin tightening over the bones of her hand. "Humour me."
"You really want me to say it?"
"Now's your only chance," Sawyer says, holding her hand up like she was reaching for the sky, the sun wedged in the valley between her middle and index finger, sunlight splaying over their faces.
"Maybe that was me before," Oliver says, "but there's other things in life that matter on the same level. Like mixtapes."
Sawyer shoves him, but he rolls over, so he's hovering above her, face just inches from hers, arms on either side of her head.
"Don't try to be cute," Sawyer says.
Oliver grins. "I'm not."
* * *
SAWYER IS LATE TO BREAKFAST, but none of her friends question it because they're too busy pouring over a letter in Jeremy's hands.
"Dear Jeremy," Marcus reads through a mouthful of cereal, pinching the letter between his fingers like it's a piece of garbage, "You haven't responded to my previous letter. Maybe it got lost in the mail? Aw, hell, I can't read this anymore I'm going to puke."
"Pathetic," Rio says, shaking his head. He stirs his bowl of Wheetabix idly.
"Oh, keep going," Sawyer says, pouring herself a cup of orange juice from the dispenser charmed to float over the table. She snatches the letter out of Marcus' hands and crushes it inside her pocket. "You can smell her desperation from all the way over here. Poor lady. Pity. She needs to learn her lesson or she'll keep treating our boy like her lapdog."
Jeremy manages a weak smile, but his eyes are distant.
By the time Quidditch practice rolls around this afternoon, Sawyer has stashed the letter away and everyone else has forgotten about the woman fighting to call herself Mum. With the season closing in and the first match within arm's reach, Cedric has them running motion drills until the sun goes out. He doesn't try mock scrimmages until everyone has their parts locked down, and the new players have a long way to go. All afternoon, Cedric and the reserve Seeker play airborne catch with a tennis ball. By the goalposts Sanchez runs her Chasers into the ground like a drill sergeant without mercy and Sawyer is certain that everyone in the Gryffindor tower and their mothers can hear her hollering at them.
One-two-three-pass
fucking ex-tend, Zacharias!
On the ground, Violet is instructing Malcom and Anthony on their swing. They haven't improved as much as Violet had hoped, but Sawyer saw progress where she wasn't looking. For one, Malcom had stopped over-extending, and Anthony had begun to position his shoulders better. In the air, suspended twenty feet off the ground, this would all be a different story, but it was a start. Sawyer broke them away from precision drills to practice flying. Malcom couldn't get both hands off his broom long enough to take a swing at the basketball Sawyer had tossed his way, and Anthony almost fell off his in a bid to save an errant shot. It was no use. They were too scrawny.
"Lift some weights this weekend, would you?" Sawyer says, pinning both boys with a flat look. She crossed her arms over her chest. "You'll hurt yourself in a match if you can't even get the Bludger to rebound. Don't make excuses. Violet managed to beef up by her third week on the team, and she was pullet-thin when she first started."
She hates how much she sounds like Oliver in that moment.
"If you meet me here everyday in the evening, I'll get you there," Violet says, a vivacious grin slashed across her lips.
A little bit dazzled, Malcom nods, but Anthony looks skeptical.
Sawyer flicks him a cool look until he glances away first. It doesn't matter what he thinks, but he has to know that it's all part of the process. Believing is one thing, doing is another. If you want it enough, you work hard, you get stronger, and it's yours. Oliver says that.
At dinner, Marcus is seething and one of her boys is absent from the table.
"Thirty minutes. Thirty fucking minutes. He was late again to practice," Marcus says, cuttingly, as he stakes his fork into a carrot like he's going for someone's jugular, and Sawyer doesn't have to ask who he's talking about to know that Rio's missed a chunk of practice. Immediately after the Hufflepuffs evacuated the pitch, the Slytherins have the late afternoon slot for practice, and as the days grew shorter, daylight became precious as currency—it would stop mattering in time, though, since they'd installed proper stadium lights for night practices. Granted, one of Marcus' pet peeves was tardiness. You'd think that someone who's dated him two years strong would know this, but it's clear that Rio's either forgotten himself, or he just doesn't care anymore. Sawyer thinks it's a mix of both.
"There's something going on with him," Quinn says, frowning as she twirls a strand of pasta around her fork. "It's like you said. He's fading."
"He's in trouble," Sawyer muses, flippantly. Deep down, though, she can't help but feel that he's breaking his promises again. "Give it a hot minute and he'll come running back. He always does."
"What if he doesn't?" Marcus asks, and his voice is so soft, thick with some unchained emotion, that Quinn winces.
"He will," Jeremy says, confidently, "if he knows what's good for him, he'll know we're here if he needs us."
But something in his voice betrays exactly what they're all thinking:
What if, this time, they aren't enough?
What if he doesn't know better?
What if they've already lost him?
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
RE: the SKOD next gen spin-off that is max wood x james sirius potter, it will only be posted once SKOD is complete (countdown: 13 more chapters)
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