unspeakable | jegulus

woe is me

chapter title: why don't you write me? by simon & garfunkel

if you'd like, you can add:

'Come Back' by Alex G / 'Kimochi Warui (When? When? When?...)' by Car Seat Headrest / 'I Am a Rock' by Simon & Garfunkel / 'Back to the Old House' by The Smiths

to your queue <3

The train rolled away from London and James gazed out the window, lost in thought as the city passed them. It was always strange to him to observe people when they could not see him in return. Behind glass the world seemed far away and unreal. The people were like players on a stage, like extras trapped in a television set. Muggles bustled about with heads ducked, hiding from the fierce wind blowing down on them, and the vicious snow caught in it like shards of glass stinging cheeks and eyes. The world looked white outside, purified somehow. James felt filthy, heart covered in soot and dust, like he'd been handled incorrectly. Like he would never be clean again.

His attention shifted when the compartment door opened and he felt the shoulder pressed against his stiffen, turn to stone. Regulus sat up instantly, his posture perfect. All his previous ease and warmth was gone. He was wearing his most comfortable armour: a look of haughty disdain.

"You're not dead," Dorcas observed, seeming bored, yet with an unreadable edge to her expression. She looked thinner than she had when James met her for the first time. Her eyes looked harder, ringed with deep shadows, like she didn't sleep well anymore.

"Decidedly not," Regulus replied. He looked over her shoulder, and his mouth twisted foully. "Are you hiding behind Dorcas, Evans?"

"No." Despite the fact they hadn't spoken face to face in weeks, James knew her well enough to hear her embarrassment. She was always familiar. Lily was a song he'd loved all his life. He'd never forget the words, the melody, no matter how much time passed. She was part of him. He could see the pulse of pink in her freckled cheeks without even looking at her. He turned back to the window, the white snow everywhere, seeing nothing. Lily was here, Lily was worried, Lily had worried about him enough to find him the second the train left King's Cross. Something warm and awful blossomed in his heart. "I'm not hiding."

"You were literally cowering," said Evan, coming up behind her. Amused, not a hint of the usual uncanniness James had been catching glimpses of in his expressions lately. He looked the way he had when James had first set eyes on him. The better half of Barty. An ordinary boy with a smile that was perhaps a little too sharp, and eyes a little too attentive. "What are you doing here?"

"She wants to see James," Barty said, a particularly vicious smile carved on his pointed face. He'd dyed his hair black again recently. His fingers were stained with the colour. "I totally get it, Lily-love. He laid one on me and he's still starring in my daydreams, he's dreamy. It's a nice name to draw hearts around in the margins, isn't it? James." He drew out his name in a girlish sigh. Regulus rolled his eyes.

"I didn't lay anything on you," James muttered.

Barty laughed, he mimed twirling imagined hair around his fingertip, batting his eyelashes flirtatiously. His tongue poked between his teeth like it had a mind of its own. "I could jog your memory if you've forgotten already, doll-face."

"Stop trying to steal my boyfriend." Shadow, who had been sleeping so soundly in Regulus' lap, protested their increasingly heated conversation with a pointed stretch and yawn. The tip of her tail flicked ominously back and forth. She looked at Lily and Dorcas with a sullen silver glare, her ears flat against her skull, a physical manifestation of Regulus' irritation. "I don't share, not to mention that James has made it exceedingly clear he doesn't want to be shared." James didn't want to look at Lily. He was worried what he would see in her eyes. He looked everywhere else. Barty, Regulus, Dorcas, Evan, the window, the row of trunks at the top of the compartment, the pattern on the fabric of the seats, his own robes—not a school uniform, the robes he'd been wearing for break at Grimmauld, dark and neat—the sort of thing his mother used to have to fight to get him to wear, and the kitten perched in Regulus' lap, already moving to pace the bench as she had been before she settled into Regulus' robes. "If he hits you again, I'm not going to stop him this time."