Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
HOMEWORK, IN THEORY, should be more challenge and less torture, but, sometimes, it was difficult to distinguish between the two.
Midnight, the rest of the world rocked away into oblivion, the chillingly void-like darkness outside her window stitched with shadows like pitch spilled over Hogwarts, and Sawyer was sat cross-legged on her bed with a torchlight clipped between her teeth, pointed down at her textbook, unable to focus on the ridiculously boring Charms homework Professor Flitwick had set her class. The lights in the dorm room had been blown out and the only other source of light was the moonbeams streaming through the window situated next to her bed. Throughout her life, Sawyer had consistently been a selfish person (within reason), but she wasn't above ignoring her roommates' need for sleep at such an hour just to turn on the lights and involuntarily wake them up. She never really cared for other people's' feelings, but she wasn't that inconsiderate.
And so, she settled for using the miserable torchlight stolen off one of her sleeping roommates. She'd resolved to return it when she felt like it. Probably after finishing the stupid Charms homework. For some reason, Sawyer had always found Charms difficult to grasp. Possibly because she was slow. That was it. Nothing profound.
Even as a child, Sawyer had always been slow; a late bloomer. While Wyatt was already running around and actively screaming his first words, Sawyer had waited until the very last minute—while her parents were worrying themselves to bits wondering if there was something wrong with their daughter—to mutter what must've been a slightly less articulate version of every profanity she's ever heard from her neighbours. It'd horrified her mother to no end and her father had only laughed before being reprimanded by his wife.
More so after that, while Wyatt had progressed to being able to read without trouble, Sawyer struggled with concentrating. She wasn't dyslexic or anything. She was just slow. When they got to school with tests or the like, Wyatt always scored better. Sawyer never did well in anything she wasn't interested in. Wyatt was praised and Sawyer was reprimanded. Which eventually birthed that outright hatred for her brother because she was constantly being compared to him. Wyatt was bright. Sawyer was slow. Everybody loved Wyatt, hung onto his every word. Nobody listened to Sawyer; she was the rotten twin.
Always the angry soul, always the dimwit. She wasn't born with that anger, though. It'd manifested inside her over the years of basically being told that whatever she did wasn't enough. Until she got so frustrated that she'd stopped trying completely. The anger fed into her thoughts and actions and mechanisms. So much so that she would be set off with just the slightest comment or even a slight shove in the wrong way.
Eventually, she pushed back. And she pushed back hard. She'd snap at everyone and everything. Sometimes, the anger would be reigned in, locked so deeply it would only ever be targeted at herself. Mostly, though, she became impulsively-compulsively violent. And it damaged a lot of things for her.
