Druxy (and the angsty one ofc)
druxy - something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside.
Things are.... fine. The funeral’s over, everyone who attended the small private ceremony -- their closest friends, Minerva and Dumbledore and a handful of other Order members, nothing overwhelming or public -- has gone home. And the two of them are left, in their black robes, alone in the flat they’ve been staying in since the house was destroyed. There’s food, on the counter, lots of it. Merlin, there’s so much food. A curry that’d last the two of them a week even if they were both well enough to eat, three casseroles of various kinds, a nicely wrapped box of cookies, a basket filled with fruits.
Lily is cleaning the counters off.
He doesn’t know what else there is to do, so he grabs a piece of fruit. A pomegranate, just for something to do with his hands. He’ll crack it open and spend the next twenty minutes picking out all the seeds into a bowl, even if he never gets around to eating them. Maybe Lily will want some, when he’s done. At least it will give him a task to focus on.
He sets to work, cracking open the hard shell of the pomegranate. His hands are shaking, just a little, from exhaustion, or something else, and its harder than it should be. Like he can’t get a good grip on it.
‘I can’t do this,’ Lily says, from the sink. She’s facing away from him, her hands on the edge of the sink. She’s looking at something -- something out the window, there? someone on the wall? -- or maybe at nothing. Her voice is just loud enough for him to hear.
The pomegranate comes open in his hands, at last. He looks down at it, expecting to see the rich red of the fruit, but instead the seeds within are blue-black with rot, as if all the color has been seeped out of it.
‘What?’ he says, though he’s not aware of saying it, hadn’t planned to say anything at all. ‘Lil...’
‘This, James. Us,’ she goes on. ‘I need to-- I can’t...’
He sets the pomegranate down on the table and stands, and goes to her, moving to stand behind her, to rest his hand on her shoulder-blade. She flinches away from his touch, turns to face him, turns as if to withdraw, only she can’t, now, with the counter behind her. She opens her mouth to keep talking, but as her eyes meet his the words falter, and she falls silent again. Her eyes are wide, as she looks at him, vacillating between determination and fear.
So he steps away, takes a step back so that she can move away from him if she needs to, so that he isn’t trapping her between his own body and the counter.
