SOME KIND OF DISASTER ─ oliver wood

[ 026 ] there is a light that never goes out

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
there is a light that never goes out

SOME DAYS it gets too much, even with the medicine piped through her veins. Voices in her head, voices outside of it, each accidental brush against her skin, every collision of elbows and knocking shoulders in the hallways like a thousand needles to the flesh. Every inch of her senses, a blaze of touch. When she woke up this morning having to rip the sheets off her body because they felt too scratchy when they were normally ignorable, she'd already predicted how her day was going to go. Even after she'd swallowed down two pills, she knew it was going to be terrible.

It's why she avoided breakfast today and didn't meet Oliver earlier this morning for their run. It's why, when she dropped into her assigned seat in Transfiguration next to him a minute before class began, he looked at her with a pinched expression, like he was trying to piece a puzzle together. The urge to dig her finger into his cheek and push his face away until he was staring at the blackboard instead of her was strong. And she gave into it.

"Are you okay?" He asked, fiddling with his wand, not bothering to take Sawyer's finger away from his face. "I didn't see you this morning."

"I'm not dead," Sawyer said, irritably, retracting her hand. She knew he didn't deserve her palpable hostility, but today was one of those days that, even on her pills, even though she was out of her own head, even though she was supposedly better, the world insisted on forcing the wrong words out of her mouth. After all, she knew something dangerous. She knew that he cared, even though he didn't have to. But he did. And it was still unfathomable to her why he bothered.

Turning back to face her, Oliver lifted a brow, eyes roaming over her face like he was checking for signs that she wasn't feeling well. She didn't tell him that her entire life was drenched in "not feeling" or "feeling too strongly". His stare burned, but she didn't entertain him. They didn't speak again after that except for a stiff discussion about the applications of the Bird-Conjuring spell, and while Oliver was suggesting that the spell could, in theory, block the Killing Curse, Sawyer wanted to tell him that she cared about him too, except she didn't know how.

After class, Sawyer left without a word, and found Marcus waiting outside the classroom for her. He'd been leaning against the wall, staring into space and it didn't look like he'd even noticed that she was standing right under his nose. When she punched him in the shoulder to get his attention, he jumped and let out an embarrassing shriek, earning himself a handful of stares from passing students in the corridor.

"Asshole," Marcus growled, shoving her violently. A blush tinged his ears.

"Did you lose your way to Potions?" Sawyer asked, as they headed towards the library, where Jeremy was supposed to be holding down the fort—fending off students from the table he'd claimed—so they could study together. "You know you can't afford to flunk out of this year."

Marcus rolled his eyes. "No, we were let out early."

Sawyer found that hard to believe. Professor Snape wasn't the lenient type, though, Marcus was a Slytherin, and it was common knowledge that Snape favoured that house in particular.

To Sawyer's chagrin, more students began spilling out of classrooms, filling the corridors with voices that were too loud and too abrasive and bodies that clipped her shoulders as they shoved against the tide of students. Each time someone's shoulder accidentally knocked against hers, Sawyer had to resist the urge to turn around and lash out. If it were last year, she would've already gotten into a fight over someone stepping on her shoe, but this year was different. She'd promised herself. This year was different. She had to believe it.