House: Slytherine

Category: Short Story

Prompts: "Do as I say!"

Word count: 1,208

Author's Note: Happy 37th birthday, Harry!

Junk Drawer

"What is this?" James laughs. Lily looks up from the box she's digging through, and flushs.

"I said the boxes, James, I didn't ask you to help so you could snoop." He kneels down on the floor next to her, still holding on to the offending object.

"Ask me to help? I practically had to beg." James pulls the box he abandoned to rummage through Lily's desk drawer closer to him with his free hand, but doesn't start sorting its contents like he is supposed to do. Instead, he focuses his attention on what looked like a dull pink rock, about the size of a snitch, with a button glued to it.

"What is this?" he asks again. "It's cute." Lily throws a pair of broken earmuffs in the trash pile next to her bed.

"It's nothing. Are you going to help? Honestly, you have the attention span of a two-year-old."

"Can you give me a more interesting box?" He asks, "this one," he flicks the old cardboard, "has nothing but blocks of wood and pebbles. Why was this even stored?"

Peering into his box, Lily saw, indeed, it was full of only wood and pebbles.

"I don't know." She picks up one of the wood blocks, "mum liked to keep things. 'Said you never knew when something would come in handy." Lily's lips quirked up.

"A hoarder." James looked under a few pieces of wood, then pushed the whole box into the trash pile.

"Yes," Lily said, "but an organized one. The house stayed clean while the garage turned into a library of junk. She even had a color-coded map so she could find everything." Lily fiddled with a pair-less slipper; James pulls her to his side and kisses her temple.

"You know, you're a lot like her," Lily looks up at him, "you always seemed so collected and meticulous at school, but now that I've seen your desk…" Lily hits his chest and he laughs.

"That's a junk drawer, James," she defends, but laughs too.

Lily decides it's a good thing she brought James. He rifles through her drawers and asks questions; he slows the process, but he makes her laugh. And she needs that today.

Lily knew, of course, this was inevitable. Petunia has the house in Surrey and she lives with James; with both their parents gone, they have no use for the old, Cokeworth house anymore. The house has to be ready for staging next week, at least that's what Petunia said when she called her Monday, "all of those boxes need to be gone." When Lily argued, saying it was too soon, her sister just screeched "Do as I say!" and hung up. Petunia and her pet walrus, also known as Vernon Dursley, had emptied the house of everything Lily would have wanted earlier in the month. She even took her mother's pottery.

Petunia is probably going to throw it all in her attic, Lily thought, bitterly, when she first arrived at the house that morning.

Her mother's death made the already Grand-Canyon-sized rift between Lily and her sister completely insurmountable. There was nothing tethering them together anymore, there was no one to force them to have Sunday dinner. Now, they will just drift further and further away until they can no longer see the place their lives intersected. Never does that seem more clear to Lily than now, as she decides which remaining relics of her childhood to keep and which to trash.

In sixth year, when their father died, their mother forced her and Petunia to sit and grieve together, to remember him together. Lily tried to do this at their mum's funeral, it was what she would have wanted, but Petunia avoided her every time, never making a scene but still making her thoughts clear: we're done. This is your fault. We're nothing, anymore.

And it was her fault. Her mother was driving home from Lily and James' house; she had dropped off some pictures and a bottle of wine. "I'm so proud of you." Those were the last words she spoke to Lily before that semi-truck ran that red light and killed her instantly.

James insisted all week that he come with her, "this isn't something you should do alone."

"I have to," she said, her eyes closed, her voice small but sharp, "I need to do it myself."

James, grudgingly, relented. This morning, though, as she tried to get out of bed, James' arm draped around her, she knew she couldn't.

"I change my mind," James was looking at her. Awake, "you can come."

And here they are, on Lily's bedroom floor - she didn't want to spend her day in the garage so they levitated half the boxes to her room and the other half to the hall outside her door - a trash pile nearly the size of her bed, a keep pile significantly smaller, picking her past apart.

James rubs her arm.

"Hey, we're not doing too bad. The wood box was the last of this half."

"Yes and it only took us three hours. With magic." Lily stands with the old, cloth bag she charmed to fit all the garbage. While James levitates more boxes into the room, the trash pile disappears into the purse.

The boxes left to sort take up half her room and stack three deep.

"This would be easier in the living room," Lily says, even though James hadn't made any comment, "but I just wanted to spend the day in my room. My old room," she corrects.

"I get it." James presses her back against his chest. "I'd sort boxes in the crawl space under the stairs, if you wanted me too." Lily puts her hand on his cheek then turns around and kisses him.

"Harry," she breaths between kisses. James pulls away.

"Hold on, I don't know how I feel about you saying some other block's name while I'm seducing you." Lily laughs.

"Sorry, no, that's the name of this." she bends down and picks up the pink-button-rock and hands it to James. "When I was, like, five, my mom was working on her potter's wheel in the garage and I snuck in and took some of the scraps of clay.

"I went to my room and I rolled the clay into a ball - more like a blob, actually. Mum caught me." Lily laughs, heat building behind her eyes. "I thought she was going to yell, but instead she asked me to give it to her so she could put in the kiln with her pots. I decorated it when she gave it back to me." She holds James' hands. "It used to have two buttons and a pencil-drawn mouth. I would talk to it when Tuney got mad at me." She was crying now. "He was my best friend." James wrapped his arms around her and held her tight to him, running his hand through her hair.

"Harry," he says, smiling, "that's a nice name."