After having spent most of the past few nights lying awake, either crying or pacing the house or a combination of both, Alex was exhausted. He'd found himself nodding off over supper. Falling asleep in the sitting room chair. Sleeping with one hand propped on the table, cereal spoon in one hand.
He didn't feel sleepy today. He felt numb, without the compulsion to cry, or think, or speak.
He'd found Aunt Hermione earlier, biting his lip as he'd approached her, asked her for something, half expecting her to refuse, or to ask why, but she hadn't. Instead she'd led him to her room and pressed a small something into his hand.
His mother had never minded the eyeliner. She'd stuck up for his desire to wear it, taught him a spell to make it stay. He'd stared into the reflection of one brown eye as he lined it slowly with black, smudging the corners and blinking once before turning to the other. Someone had brought clothes. Black trousers and shoes and robes. Not his clothing, but his sizes. He dressed in a fog. Brushed his hair and tied it back off his face.
And now he stood, staring down into a hole at a polished wooden box. Crumbles of earth dotted the top. His mind refused to imagine his mother inside. She didn't belong here, not in this box, not in the ground. Not in the ground.
The ache inside him spread, chilling him more completely than the breeze, and he folded himself into his cloak, gaze focused on a bit of grass in the clump of earth on his mother's coffin, and did not cry.