CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
in through the out door

MAYBE HER FRIENDS were more perceptive than she'd initially given them credit for.

Something had shifted between Oliver and Sawyer, a palpable casting-off of pretences. They went about things as per normal, which, come to think of it, in retrospect, meant they'd been pretty much doing everything people in relationships did even before they'd confirmed that there was something that could come out of their prior arrangement, something far deeper, and the way they oriented themselves around each other started feeling less performative and more natural.

Each night Quinn awoke from a nightmare or couldn't seem to fall asleep no matter what she did, she crawled into Sawyer's bed and nested under the covers like Sawyer was one fleshy talisman warding off whatever curse had been plaguing her.

Those nights, they shared everything under the protective umbrage of Sawyer's blanket, which Quinn had christened the cone of truth. Sawyer learnt everything about Quinn's secret obsession with miniature gardens, how she'd wanted a pony since she was seven until she'd nearly been murdered in cold blood by one—psychopaths, I tell you, she'd said, with an acrid vengeance, you can see it in their beady eyes—and suddenly every pony had become her arch-nemesis, and how she felt about Nick Carraway (whoever that was) and the new book she was reading by some philosophical guy Quinn happened to really like who'd written a book of literature essays titled What Would Your Verse Be? which Sawyer thought was stunningly pretentious. Dreams, they consecrated in the dark, too, both good and bad and the lucid in-between. That last category had Quinn swearing she was psychic. And in moments of raw honesty, the more vulnerable, softer moments, she learnt about Jeremy and the inside of his gilded heart through Quinn's eyes.

In those moments, she thought about telling Quinn about Oliver, too, just to even out their score. But then she realised that she wanted to live in the bubble of privacy a little longer, a bubble where nobody else had to be involved. Of course, complete secrecy until graduation was a pipe dream, and neither Oliver nor Sawyer were moronic enough to believe they could hide everything from their friends.

When the blood-orange dawn sun flooded the sky in flames, drowning the oil spill of clouds in saturated heat, Sawyer found herself on her back in the grass, Oliver's shoulder just inches from her face. It'd finally stopped raining for a week, and they were able to resume their morning routine, coming down to a Quidditch pitch that wasn't waterlogged.

"Rio knows," Sawyer said, twining her finger around the string of her sweatshirt, "I never told any of them, but Rio knows. It's strange, kind of like an omen, the way he always knows."

In hindsight, perhaps he'd known all along.

"You have a creepy friend," Oliver said.

Pulling a fistful of grass out, Sawyer hummed. It was undeniable that their friends had begun to notice something's changed, even though they didn't say anything. They learnt not to ask. Sawyer learnt that Oliver was pretty secretive with his friends, too, who merely bet they were—quote, unquote—"hate-fucking". To her surprise, he wasn't the type to tell them a lot outright. Even Wyatt, who's been his best friend since they were old enough to grasp the concept of object permanence, and finally stopped crying each time they saw each other as babies. Maybe they were holding out on them just to see how far they'd let it run before they started interrogating them. In their world, nothing was private, yet everything was. And then, yesterday: It was a small action. Nothing flash, nothing that should've invoked a commotion. Oliver had walked her to the library to meet up with her friends. As he was leaving, he'd bumped his knuckles against the back of her hand, lingering long enough for her to feel it. They weren't big on public displays of affection, and that subtle brushing of hands should've safely flown under the radar.

But then: Quinn. Avid Jane Austen fan. Self-proclaimed romance connoisseur.

"It's all about the hands," Quinn had raved to Sawyer, who was trying and failing to shut down a conversation that didn't need to take place. "If you understand hands and lingering looks, you understand romance."

"This conversation is out of hand," Marcus grunted.

With an indignant gasp, Quinn slapped him upside the head, but Marcus calmly put a hand on her face and pushed her tiny frame away before she could cause more damage.

Turning to her, begrudgingly but not unhappily. "Really? Him?" Marcus sighed, and shook his head when he realised Sawyer hadn't been listening and wouldn't listen even if he threatened to push her off the Quidditch stands. "I guess I can live with it." 

Laying out his books and reaching for his assortment of multicoloured pens, Jeremy had only grinned. "Now I have someone around to talk Quidditch with instead of you unresponsive fuckers."

"What the fuck am I here for, then?" Marcus had exclaimed, deeply offended. Granted, the thing about Marcus was that he has always been quiet about his interests. Like Oliver, Marcus lived and breathed Quidditch. He was just less expressive and emotional over it. Maybe it's because his family hardly speaks about anything at all.

Lastly: Rio.

"If he hurts you," Rio had said, forebodingly, through a mouthful of Twizzlers, the dark bags under his eyes and the sheen of sweat slicking his temples even though they were well past November and eating into December bolstering the scheming villain picturesque, "I'll burn his house down."

"Alvarez is fucking terrifying," Oliver said, in a moment of complete candour as Sawyer relayed all of this to him whilst they were lying on the grass, watching the sky change colours. "Even your dad isn't scary."

Sawyer wanted to remind him that her father was a forty-eight year-old astrophysicist who drank coffee saturated with a morbid, diabetes-inducing amount of sugar out of a #1 DAD mug and had to stop for a breather and to roll out his gout-swollen ankles each time they walked up a slight incline on a path. Point was, Oliver could easily outrun her father even if the man were on roller skates. That, and the fact that he'd practically watched Oliver grow up alongside his own children, so any chance of ill-feelings were annulled by sentiment. Rio, on the other hand, had a track record of putting people in the infirmary and was happy to kill for an ill-timed comment. Furthermore, even though he was unreliable on promises, Rio was a sworn pyromaniac, so the threat was something he wouldn't miss out on the opportunity to fulfil. Oliver was right to be wary.

"I think I vaguely know what I want to do after graduation," Sawyer said, after a beat of silence. Oliver knocked his ankle against hers, and she knocked him back. It wasn't a definite answer, but it was still something. Vaguely was better than nothing. "Rio helped me figure it out. But I want to hear what your plans are besides Quidditch. Where you're going to go, if you're going to talk to your dad, all that." What you think would happen to us.

"Wyatt and I talked about getting an apartment in London," Oliver mused, "it's going to be killer expensive because London is criminal, but it'll be fun. Wyatt wants to be a physiotherapist, that's why he's taking all those muggle studies classes. McGonagall's helping him get into a muggle university after graduation."

A tiny twinge in her chest had her rolling over onto her stomach, just to look Oliver in the face. Sawyer hadn't spoken to Wyatt if she could help it in a long time. She'd be lying if she said it wasn't anything personal, but it was less to do with his disposition rather than everything he reminded her of. Despite how many times she'd said she didn't care, she'd also be lying if she said she wasn't a little angry that their relationship had fallen so far into disrepair that she knew close to nothing about him. Their bedrooms were side-by-side, and still Sawyer couldn't tell you what his favourite colour was or who his favourite Quidditch player was if you asked. Everything fell back on their mother. All the blame, the madness, the apathy. It all started with her.

A phantom smile ghosted Oliver's lips, so faint it almost didn't make a difference in his otherwise composed and unimpressed countenance, but Sawyer could see it. She saw everything. "That's why he works so hard all the time. He wasn't born a genius, and maybe he has the advantage of not being dyslexic, so he does what he can, y'know? He's always in the library studying whenever he can, and we always have to pry him away from the desk just to take a break. I've had to bodily remove him from the library in front of everyone before OWLs and it was kind of embarrassing for us both. Between you and me, he pushes himself academically because he's still upset your mum freaked and pulled him off the Quidditch team after he took that fall," Oliver said, pausing for a moment to let the words sink in. They did. Like a million teeth into her flesh. "You should ask him about it. I know you don't care about him, but I think you'll find more common ground than you'd think."

Flicking him a cool look, Sawyer bit down on her tongue hard enough for the pain to cancel out the internal screaming, the storm in her head, but not hard enough to draw blood. Yet.

Oliver shrugged. "Either way, do or don't, it's up to you. Now, I want to hear about this post-graduation plan of yours."

* * *

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Sawyer, Jeremy and Quinn were gathered around one of the tables in a secluded corner of the library, which was populated now by nervous fifth years and caffeine-withdrawn seventh years scrambling to cram the remainder of the term's syllabus, but Sawyer's mind was far away from the notes laid out before her, and Jeremy's in-depth explanation on the celestial syzygy affecting magic sounded as though she were submerged underwater and his voice was a strain of static beyond the paracosm she'd built out of the drug-addled haze.

Throughout the entire day, Oliver's words kept playing in her head like a broken recorder. Before the medication took effect, she'd almost broken another mirror, but stopped herself by repeating the line seven years' bad luck over and over and over until she didn't feel like punching out her reflection anymore, until the fire under her skin died and the venom of self-loathing subsided. She didn't believe in superstition, and she'd broken enough mirrors to be breathing bad luck for the rest of her life, but it'd helped. Maybe it had something to do with her breathing. Maybe Dr Josten was right. She could be in control, if only she wanted to be.

In her head, she compiled a list of what she had to say to Wyatt—Wyatt, who was always so eager to please, so happy to be—and after hours of agonising over details she never would've agonised about if it weren't for Oliver and his uncanny way with getting to her, she drew a blank. Here's the deal: Sawyer had forgotten how to talk to her brother. She didn't know if it was comically ridiculous because he was just another person on the circumference of her life, or if it was just plain sad.

Maybe it was all that distance, the continental drift that'd pulled them apart. Maybe she'd pushed and pushed and pushed until the space was impossible to bridge. Maybe she was just wallowing in guilt. Wyatt hadn't done anything wrong, she saw it now. It was all her. She'd made this choice, and now she had to deal with it. There was no more option to meet in the middle. It was far too late for that. Some part of her couldn't help but dredge up the old memories of when they used to be able to look each other in the eye and share a joke without any of this dissent. Old memories that cut like a knife. Before it all went downhill when Sawyer threw her preschool classmate into a cabinet—her first signs of magic activated by an emotional wave. Before their mother had decided which child was more worth her time. And now Sawyer didn't know anything about the boy who shared nine months pressed up against each other in the same space in the hollow of their mother's belly.

Each time she thought about her brother, just the sheer image of his face unearthed a visceral, scalding burn that dug deep into her gut like the roots of a forever-growing tree, twisting up her intestines and slashing through her vital organs. A hatred that'd been years in the forging, a hatred dogging at the stretched-thin shadow of that change in time, the line between before and after, she couldn't get her fingers to release because she's held it to her core for so long her flesh was melded to the memory, thermonuclear and radiating with the promise of slow, painful death. In the fallout, there were more casualties than one. In retrospect, she'd been holding onto the memory of a feeling that her mother had birthed. Maybe she'd been hating the wrong person after all this while. Somehow, that felt a thousand times worse than the reminder that she would never be the daughter her mother wanted, but Wyatt would always be the child she preferred.

Nothing cuts deeper than a mother.

Sawyer was scribbling something that probably didn't make any sense on her notes when she spotted a familiar figure scurrying past her table.

Since Jeremy and Quinn were too caught up discussing this author that Quinn was presently obsessed with, an A. Darlington-somebody, Sawyer figured they could do without her for a short while. Without bothering to excuse herself with an explanation, Sawyer got up, her chair scraping against the floor with a plaintive screech, and followed Wyatt to the other side of the library. He must've spent as much time here as Oliver claimed, perhaps even longer, because he cut through a maze of old volumes that led them both directly into an obscure section of the library where there were no browsing students. Every step that brought them closer to the restricted books section, where hardly anybody lingered (Quinn always said that section had bad mojo), seemed to dial up the old bitter malevolence inside. Due to his height—another thing they didn't share—Wyatt's strides were long, but Sawyer was an athlete and she managed to catch up with him just as he rounded the corner of a set of shelves where the silence told of nothing living within the sequestered section.

Sawyer went round the other side of the shelf. Wyatt must've had something on his mind bothering him enough to distract him from noticing that he was being followed, or that Sawyer was standing directly in his path because he didn't stop until it was too late. As he almost ran right into Sawyer, who snapped her arm out like a barricade. The slap of her palm against the shelf made Wyatt flinch. Surprise flickered over his features when he blinked down at her in disbelief. Sawyer only cut him a vicious look and splayed her fingers out.

"Five minutes," she said, her voice so sharp she felt it shred through her tongue. "Convince me you're worth my energy. The day you got pulled off the Gryffindor Quidditch team, what did mum say to you?"

For an endless second, Wyatt gaped at her, his face stunned pale. She'd never bothered initiating conversation before, so his speechlessness was understandable, but Sawyer wanted fast answers. Old habits died hard, after all, and talking to him now wasn't any easier than before. Swallowing pride had never been something Sawyer had to do before, and the hatred was still there, a flame threatening to torch everything in sight, including the bridge she was laying out the foundations for now. Even if she realised she had to do it. If not for herself, then to put some skeletons to bed.

"Clock's ticking," Sawyer said, eyes flashing.

Wyatt dragged in a deep breath. "It's a little more complicated than what she said to me."

"Four minutes."

A stitch of panic tugged at Wyatt's expression.

"I've wanted to go professional since forever," Wyatt blurted out. "Oliver and I had plans to get drafted into the same team, play together, retire together, all that. And then the accident happened, and when Madam Pomfrey told mum I was lucky to have just barely avoided damage to my spine irreparably, she flipped and told me I couldn't play anymore."

Brows furrowed, Wyatt scratched at an itch under his chin, and he wouldn't meet Sawyer's eyes. Trawling up old wounds must be painful.

"I was sad, but I guess I got over it," Wyatt said, letting out a humourless laugh that convinced her otherwise. "It still hurts to think about it, I mean, I put all my eggs in this one basket, and now I can't even see that plan to fruition. I had to find a new career path, so I guess I had to do what everyone else did. I actually had to study, which was fine, whatever. I'm not bad at it." He met her eyes with a wry smile on his lips. "I was angry for a little bit. Not at mum, though. She had reason to be paranoid. But just at how unfair it was that you got to keep playing—and you didn't even want to play—but I couldn't. All mum would say to that was that you needed this."

It was unfair on so many levels. At least Sawyer had Quidditch, this one option that was open to her. But Wyatt had that door closed on his face, too. Still, he hadn't taken it out on her. He'd never once pushed her aside because he envied what she had. With a sinking feeling in her gut, Sawyer thought: oh, so I'm the shitty one here. It wasn't exactly news, but having it delivered to her like this—she felt the impact of that realisation resonating in her bones. Because one door was forever closed to him, Wyatt had thrown himself and his frustrations into studying. He'd become the prodigal, golden son not because he'd been relegated that role, but because he made the choice to get things done rather than stay bitter and twisted.

It was unfair on so many levels, but it didn't make it any less fair that their mother had to draw comparisons between them. Instead of inspiring Sawyer to work harder, it'd just driven a wedge between the twins, and now the damage ran deeper than the surface, deep into a place that nobody could reach. All this while Sawyer had resented her mother for making her feel worthless. It didn't matter that her motivations weren't born out of ill-intention to hurt her own daughter. And maybe Wyatt didn't hate their mother, just felt a little sore over having his childhood dream ripped out of his hands. But the undeniable truth was that the damage had been done. Something had been taken from them, and it was neither's fault. Rage flared in her chest like a million knives slashing up her insides.

There it was: that infinite anger at her core.

Wyatt's expression pinched with worry. He must've seen it. Seen the way her expression went dead in a heartbeat. Make no mistake, though. She hadn't let it go. Nobody could let that much rage go that quickly and easily. She'd just buried it where it couldn't touch anybody else.

"Are you—"

Before Wyatt could finish his sentence, Sawyer had stalked away. But even though she'd put enough distance between them now to shake off the old, uncomfortable resentment she always wore like a second skin whenever it came to her twin that made her want to take a knife to the books surrounding them and tear it all to shreds, she couldn't deny the palpable shift in atmosphere. They would never be whole. At least, not anytime soon. They would never be the kids who'd sneak out of their rooms at midnight on Christmas and eat gingerbread houses until they were physically sick. They'd never be the same again. Old habits were hard to unlearn. But as much as Sawyer hated to admit it, this was a start. Something had managed to creep in through the out door, like a shadow or a creature of the gutter.

Nothing had changed, yet everything did.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
9

(a. darlington is bIoodbender 's OC from her sirius fic, Carpe Diem!!!! go check it out if you, too, are a slut for god-tier writing)