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Please, could you be tender? And I will sit close to you Let's give it a minute before we admit that we're through
✷
After, 1999
It takes only a second for a heart to break. A deadly deluge of adrenaline and noradrenaline flooding the heart and pulverising pathways and musculature, a breaking of strings and stitches of tissue coming undone. It's temporary, takes only a couple weeks or even a few days for the heart to remember its function, to remember itself as the organ that the body can't live without, doesn't seem to leave any lasting heart damage, no scar tissue to commiserate the psychological distress, and yet.
And yet, Sawyer doesn't think she will ever recover.
Her heart hasn't remembered itself since it walked out the door.
It takes only a second for the breakage, the moment of the ripping and the wreckage left in its wake, her chest cracked open upon the kitchen island between the blue ceramic bread bin that was their first housewarming gift, and the bags of groceries. What hurts most is the domesticity of it all, the fallout she'd seen coming for months now, but never had the guts to put into words. He'd managed to do it just fine, though. Really, she shouldn't be surprised. He's always been the one who's better with words, and she's always left staring at the empty space he's carved out, forced to replay the moment he walked out the door with everything they'd built, waiting for the entire building to come crumbling on top of her.
After the fact, Sawyer knows there's no cure for it, no quick fix for a broken heart but time. And aspirin for the ache.
After the fact, there is just this. The thunderous ticking of the wall clock, a canned echo pounding against the weeping wound, with no safety net to catch her in the free fall, and the pieces of the people they used to be scattered like leaves across the one-bedroom flat that felt much too empty now without a second warm body, and the ghost of his lips pressed against her forehead.
There is just this, a supercut of Befores and Afters left behind for Sawyer to sort into boxes and leave out on the doorstep for collection.
—
I. Graduation, 1994
It's easier to say no to things before she's denied first.
Which is to say that Sawyer has always put herself in a position where she's able to make her own choices. It'd served her well throughout the years at Hogwarts with nothing academic to excel at, and growing up in a chemical home and a twin whom she'd treated like a ghost rather than a mirror.
There was Quidditch, but that was a whole other can of worms, which had been blown wide open by the force that was Oliver Wood. Oliver—the relentless chisel that chipped away at the fortress that built Sawyer Lee to get to the soft animal within.
