Then there's a small twitch in the corner of her lips that might've been scorn, though Oliver isn't convinced, and he feels like the sun is imploding inside him again.
"One week to make you love me again," Sawyer muses.
Oliver rolls his eyes, and he has to stop himself from choking on the old brag of his heart: I never stopped.
Instead, he says, "clock's ticking."
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This is a story about things spinning out of control.
About the friends you love and the love you lost and the life you shaped in the wake of grief. A life hastily safety-pinned together by bloodied hands and pricked thumbs and with tears in your eyes and a bandaid smoothed over your nosebridge.
This story is a bruise, and Sawyer Lee is both the fist and the Tiger Balm breaking and healing the capillaries ruptured in her wake.
After graduation, Sawyer kept all of her promises. Or, she tried to. She went professional, signed on with the Appleby Arrows as their second Beater, got on fine with some of her teammates, worked it out with the ones she couldn't. She moved out of her parents' house, got a nice two-bedroom flat in London to share with Rio, her best friend, then moved out of that apartment and into a new one-bedroom flat in Edinburgh with Oliver, when the future was sprawled out ahead of them, sprinkled with red little pins and markers to denote the touchstones of their life together. She made peace with her Mum and the effort to visit her brother at muggle Uni semi-regularly. She made a life worth living from scratch and it was more magic than the seven years at Hogwarts.
This is where things spin out of control.
At first they're okay, then they are definitely not.
Oliver Wood had risen through the ranks with Puddlemere United fairly quickly. After a couple seasons spent warming the bench, he was taken off the reserve team, and when he made it onto the Quidditch pitch, there was only the game and the goal. And Sawyer. Always Sawyer, who fit into him like a puzzle piece, the picture complete, and everything made sense. He'd planned everything to the dot and the dollar, and there was nothing he couldn't see coming with that scaffolding plan of his filed away in his ever-calculating brain.
Things changed after the war. Oliver had seen battle in his own home before, and so had Sawyer, but a seige like this was different. They lost friends, laughter in hallways reduced to mere memory traces and names scrawled across tombstones; they lost parts of themselves, things they couldn't even name. And then, somewhere along the way, they didn't fit together anymore, the picture no longer resolved, and they had to come to terms with the fact that no matter how hard they tried, the pieces had shifted, no longer interlocked where they should be.
