rurounihime: (callisto by morbideclipse)
Aha, and now the remixes have been unveiled! So here is the story I wrote. Thanks ever so much to Coffee for allowing me to remix her beautiful fic. *hugs* I loved this experience.

Title: The Morning Walk
Author: me
Pairing: H/D
Rating: R
Summary: Draco finds solace in his morning strolls.
Notes: Remix of [livejournal.com profile] coffeejunkii’s Autumn Afternoon, for the [livejournal.com profile] hd_remix challenge.

...

The Morning Walk


Draco slips from under the duvet into the cold morning room with as little movement as he can manage. Harry’s nose, so lately nestled into the hollow of Draco’s pillow, is rosy-pink. Draco tucks the top quilt around hunched, heated shoulders, lets his hand linger for just that single moment, as he does every morning, and then dons trousers and shirt, and finds his way across chilly floorstones to the kitchen. His shoes are a damp misery by the door, muted by the thick wool of socks. His? He’s no longer sure, and somewhere along the way, he stopped differentiating.

The crisp morning is full of soft pinks and vibrant purples. Draco’s own hands stand out against the luminous sunrise. His long overcoat is a dark blotch, stark and disruptive, and poignant, he thinks. Disruption can be instructive, if one is open-minded enough to be taught.

The chitter of the earliest avian risers loops and reels into the hush. For many mornings, the sound woke Draco into a grouchy haze of whispered curses and burrowing into quilts, or the pliant, hot skin of his drowsy bedmate. When exactly it was that he learned to hear the tune under the racket, he is not certain, but he listens to the thrush and blackbird now with something approaching – if not quite reaching – welcome.

Draco walks every morning now, because Harry is not a morning person, has never been, and would rather take his tea already warmed upon his stumble from bed when the sun has been up for some hours. Draco finds all the time he needs within the fields and sloping hills, and still comes home to put the kettle on. And maybe, maybe take that white cup with the blue dots out of the cupboard and hold it in his hands as he waits for the water to boil. The edges jag at his skin, rough along the chipped rim and the place where the handle once curved. He turns it over and over as he stares out the window at the golden ball of light climbing over the ridge. It is only when the kettle begins its reedy shriek that he remembers himself and sets the cup down.

It is Harry’s cup. Draco has never drunk from it, and if he has his way, he never will.

It is a clear morning full of flitting birds and the inconstant tug of breeze. As if the night is breathing itself away in soft, forlorn gusts. The tang of past rain is not there, but Draco still sees the similarities between this wintry morn and the one just after the night he arrived, soaking wet in a downpour he hadn’t the patience to care about, dripping on the small cobbled stoop as Harry stared at him through the open front door.

The morning had dawned bright the following day, and Draco thinks, as he picks his way down the narrow foot path in the drawn shadows of the trees, that maybe it was the first arrival he ever truly understood.

Draco has arrived, has been arriving for weeks. Arriving at thoughts and realizations. Arriving at sounds he never thought he’d make. Books he never thought he’d read, and rents in his flesh and in his hea— in his… his flesh that he never thought he’d be bold enough to risk. Or absent enough. Tiny, thin tears that surprised him by not bleeding right away, or scarring over.

How can they scar over when he keeps helping them reopen?

A break in the line of trees to his left lets a gust of wind from the valley tease his cheeks. Draco stops and breathes, and wonders at pain and the absence of it. He hasn’t felt pain for two-plus months, and with all these little rips and tears and cracks inside him, he probably should have. Some cuts are different that way, though; they give no pain, nor should they, but it takes some time to figure all that out. He has stopped likening them to the occasional stubbed toe or gash across his knee, the ones that had him in brief furies over the impertinence of stone floors and drawers left open too far.

Harry likes the stone floors, and Draco, if he is perfectly frank with himself, loves them. They are cold, too much like ice this autumn and growing colder by the minute as the snows creep ever nearer. He imagines the hills in rolling white, wonders if there is enough snow here to manage such a blanket, and if there is enough firewood to fill the infinitesimal space between white and wondrous.

He wonders if there is enough room against Harry’s stomach for bare feet just drawn up off the stone floor, and in his warm, cupped hands.

How to explain to Harry what it feels like to have him touch his feet? Not the tender finger-points or the almost-painful kneading of heat from skin to skin. How it feels in his soul, not his flesh. Draco has always liked his own feet, admired them shamelessly with their long, slender toes and perfect arches and elegant tendons. But his feet are intimate, hidden places. Sometimes they seem more his than any other part of his body, and to touch them, carefully, casually, even accidentally, is the breaching of a wall that he does not think Harry is yet aware of.

But Draco has never been good at walls with Harry.

The fields are frosted over already, delicate chips of ice tipping each strand of grass. Draco ambles, and wonders what it would be like to take off his shoes and feel the chill seeping between his toes, melting the frost with his body heat. Staring at bare, pale feet that, somewhere along the way, ceased to be entirely his and became someone else’s.

It is like when Harry takes his hand, sliding palm over palm and weaving fingers. Shared warmth, the touch of entwining. As they walk. As they skirt around each other in the kitchen, guiding hands over cooking pans and old, cracked plates; joining. In the cool, slow darkness as they make love.

He remembers the press of the backs of his hands into soft sheets and downy mattress, and shivers. Even now he can taste the clutch and release of Harry’s fingers against his knuckles. Stretching. Squeezing.

He loves Harry’s hands. Worships them, if he were to give it a name. Because Harry allows him to do so. While it might be more attentive to kiss Harry’s mouth, more prudent, perhaps, to let his lips wander – because that body, Harry’s body, is no less Harry than his hands – in the silky stillness of nighttime, daytime, sex, feeling… he always returns to Harry’s hands.

Touching those hands does not make Harry stutter or tangle his words in much-needed breath. It does not quicken the sublime arch of his back, tense the muscles of his thighs in that last foggy, incoherent instant, when everything is most in danger of being said. It does not bring Harry over the brink.

But it does bring Draco over. Again. Again.

Draco steps off the path and crosses the field, leaving a swath of bent grass and crackled ice behind him. He can see the cottage through the low-hanging mist, looking like some fairytale gingerbread house. Draco squints. One of the eaves hangs loose, and the earthy paint is patchy along the east corner where the rays of the sun are sliding lower. He has long since learned to recognize the faint edging of darker paint below the top coat, and the comforting angle of that drifting eave. The perfection of towering manors and pristine gardens strikes him as unreal now, a fantasy he had once and lost, thankfully. The imperfections are the spirit of the cottage after all, the asymmetry of a private smile, the delicate fleck of hazel in deep green eyes.

Draco has come to yearn for imperfection. To need its importance. He has known for some time that he himself is imperfect.

A small, unobtrusive book sits upon his nightstand these days, its cover wrinkled and its pages dog-eared, something he told himself he would never do to a piece of literature. For literature this is, though for a time he had trouble deciding which name on the cover was the author and which was the title. He is nearly finished. Would have been earlier, except Harry startled him a week ago with a subtle and creeping fear during such a walk as this.

All your things are gone, and the door bangs in the wind because you forgot to close it properly when you—

He has told Harry the book is tedious, and for some time, it was. He turned it over in his hands many a time and wondered at the way it clung to him, unable to be laid aside. Blamed it on the calm of the cottage and the undiscerning humour he found himself in just as the twilight rose from the earth to claim the skies each evening. But now, he feels it thrumming in his core in ways that keep him awake at night, staring up at the uneven ceiling and wondering about attics and hidden secrets. Secret love. The power of briar and ivy, and the ceaseless tug of two souls against one another, perhaps in a futile, endless dance for a peace that will always be pulled from their grasp by the pasts they have tried to abandon. He is struck by it because he knows the past can be overcome, but that possibly, he has not managed it as well as he thought he had.

Harry has asked him why he came here. Why, why, why. As if he even knew. Such a question… Draco sighs: It often has no answer.

Draco has not lied. He knows he is not ready to pin down a life that may end up to be a century and a half long, to fix it to a certain place or person. He is practical to a fault, and knows that life has a canny, mercurial meddler lurking behind its stately mask. He is also aware that the moment when he actually does pin his life down is under little threat from this; he can see it approaching, still far enough away to rest easily in his consciousness. That moment is ingratiating itself with him little by little, becoming a thick blanket over his freezing body, the honeyed taste of tea on his tongue. A set of warm hands rubbing at the soles of his feet.

But there is more to it than that, just as there is a dark and dusty attic in Thornfield, and Draco would be a fool to push that part of it aside. He would be unwise, and unworthy of everything he feels himself falling toward whenever he steps out into this cold, clear air, or tumbles into the heat of firelight and cracked tea cups and Harry in the cottage.

Draco does not work in absolutes. Absolutes are for people still hiding from themselves, because people do, and people keep sides of themselves tucked away where even they may not see; they don’t see the gray lines between every shadow, how often unexpected clouds sweep in over the sun and pearly blue, how life rotates like the heavens, but in the sudden, sheer twist of a moment, very unlike the stars. Draco’s life is a wild, tempestuous creature and eventually it may rear its misshapen, scarred head and demand other things of him than this.

Draco knows already – has even whispered it aloud in the darkness of the night kitchen with a glass of ice water trembling in his hand – that he will tell it to go to hell when it does.

Harry did not question the shards of broken glass in the rubbish bin the next morning, nor the broom propped against the kitchen counter. But Draco knows he saw them both.

Has Harry thought of the moment when he might leave? When the cottage door might swing from a greater and more lasting sorrow than a mere parting of ways? Draco has seen people come and go, and felt them take bits of himself with them when they vanish from the earth. It is sometimes too difficult; the nights too long, the days too oppressive, to pull at those new, painless furrows in his soul and simply hold the pieces out in front of him. They might be snatched away.

He has always kept something for himself alone.

Someday soon, I want to be able to say that I’ll be here with you, for good.

It is no riddle; it is the truth, the one he sees approaching like an old friend in the distance. How he spoke the words themselves is still a mystery; such vows do not come easily to him, and he knows it is most definitely a vow because it does not disappear in the winds of his memory. He meant it. He would speak it again, had he to start all over. For it is the truth, and there is one person he has found he will never lie to. But it still beats at a primal part of his soul, the part he tucked away and may have – may have already – lost control over.

And when I do, I want to mean it. Because…because I don’t want to disappoint you, or hurt you.

He fears he has already hurt Harry. Knows he has. Just as he knows the cross of lines traversing Harry’s palm, the ripple of taut knuckles, coarse fingertips. He kisses them all, hoping the pain is there in those creases and veins and bones, that he has somehow eased with silence what he is too cowardly to admit out loud.

The path meanders into sight again, and Draco leaves the field with damp trouser legs and the watery warmth of the rising sun on his face and neck. The breeze whorls about in his hair, and he can smell the blossoms of the valley – thistle and honeydew. Long since intertwined with the cottage and Harry in his mind. Harry will be dreaming, tucked under layers of quilts and throws, dark hair a rich splash across the snowy pillow case. The cottage beckons, and Draco quickens his steps just enough to send a pair of warbling swifts into the trees.

Draco stops. Watches them flick and dart about the branches. An oak today, its limbs dark and dewy, nestled in ruddy orange leaves. Yesterday it had been a tall, regal beech. They are never in the same tree twice, but they are always, always together.

He sees, all over again as if it were the first time and not the second or third such epiphany this week, that he has defined “home” incorrectly all his life. And perhaps he has reached it, the real thing, at last. If he could only speak the words to himself.

The cottage is quiet with morning, and the quilts still hold the slope and shade of a slumberer. Harry’s hand has left the confines of heat and thrown itself outward, palm up against the sheets. Fingers curled, casting shadows across his skin. Draco cannot stop himself from reaching, touching that soft palm with one finger, tracing a line he knows well. Harry’s head turns, the slightest of sighs, and Draco is caught, frozen halfway between standing and kneeling, and unable to move.

He mouths three words into the silence. Three words he cannot yet find voice for, but hears every day, every moment. With every breath.

They take different shapes from time to time, warning Harry of scalding water, chiding his mess in the sink. Urging breathlessly amidst the heat and sweat and most sacred of physical devotions. But he knows, every time he speaks, that they are the same three words.

~fin~

Date: 2006-09-05 08:30 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] oohyaoi.livejournal.com
hello! I was just commenting to let you know that you have been approved to be archived on PSA. I'll be the one in charge of updating your page/info/fics. I was wondering if I could get your email address so that I can keep in touch w/ you w/o having to make irrelevant comments on your posts.

Date: 2006-09-05 10:56 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Hahaha, wow, score! *pumps fist* Thank you for checking this out for me. My email is rurounihime@gmail.com

How do I go about posting? I assume I go through you? *is curious*

Date: 2006-09-06 05:07 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] spacetweenears.livejournal.com
Hi Ruby Ru!! This was great! You really put me there in the field with the cool breeze and Draco's inner anguish. :D

Date: 2006-09-07 12:30 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Thank you, Spacey! *smoochy* It feels so nice to be told that my fic placed you right there in the setting. Making me blush...

Date: 2006-09-07 05:09 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] spacetweenears.livejournal.com
I think you always do a great job of painting the picture for me. I usually get a very clear picture in my head (not all writers can do this with me) of the scene you're setting. That's why I keep reading. :D

Date: 2006-09-08 08:29 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
High praise, love. *snogs*

Date: 2006-09-06 06:18 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] alex-s9.livejournal.com
I haven't read the original yet and right now I can honestly say I never plan to. This fic, remix, is beautiful in a thousand ways I can't even start to explain. You're a wizard of words, girl.

Date: 2006-09-07 12:29 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Hmm, while I thank you for such a wonderful compliment (really, truly, thank you!), I feel that you are missing out by not reading the original. I could never have come up with this one without the beautiful subtlety of Coffee's fic. I very much recommend it.

Thank you so much for leaving me such a sweet comment. *kiss*

the morning walk

Date: 2006-09-06 12:11 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] ravenpan.livejournal.com
-=sniff, whimper, sigh=- this... this is so gorgeous and heartfelt.

Re: the morning walk

Date: 2006-09-07 12:26 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Thank you, my lovely. *snuggles*

Date: 2006-09-06 02:43 pm (UTC)From: (Anonymous)
Popping in from my work computer just to tell you how utterly beautiful this is.

*adores*
starbellys

Date: 2006-09-07 12:28 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Awww! *smooch* Thank you!

Date: 2006-09-07 02:01 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
I believe this is called delurking but... moving on.

I just wanted to say that I fell upon your beautiful fics in some odd manner (I honestly can't remember...) and that each and every one has been written beautifully and touching in their own way (for example, Disintegrate broke me--♥). This was certainly no exception. I read this directly after Autumn Afternoon and your Draco is perfect and blends perfectly between the stories. I especially liked all your hot-cold references :)

Thanks so much for sharing all your excellent writings!

Date: 2006-09-07 02:03 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
Post Script: I totally loved how Draco spoke of Harry's hands! maybe it's just because I have a hand thing too... but it was really, really beautiful.

Thanks again!

Date: 2006-09-08 08:25 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Ahaha, me too! Hands are very intimate to me, even more so than some of the more obvious intimate places. We don't often let strangers touch our hands except to shake, and that speaks of hoping to know them better, so... Even there, it's intimate.

Date: 2006-09-10 03:43 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
I completely, completely agree with that--I don't honestly think I've ever let any one touch my hands as of yet.

Date: 2006-09-10 05:23 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Strange, huh? I mean, we do everything with them. They are out in the open the most. But we keep them close. *ponders*

Date: 2006-09-10 05:26 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
Hm.. indeed. How very philosophical of you.

*ponders with you*

Perhaps that is why we keep them so close? Because they are so vulnerable to the rest of the world?

Date: 2006-09-10 05:28 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Sounds likely to me. Hands are very... personal. It's so intriguing. Why hands? Why not feet, or our noses (which I suppose you could argue, actually)? But yeah. Vulnerability really fits.

Date: 2006-09-10 05:33 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
Interesting point. *ponders again*

But then again.. people hold hands and I wouldn't really want someone to hold my nose or hold my feet.

Date: 2006-09-08 08:24 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Thank you so much! This really made my day. I love it when people de-lurk. *grins*

And thank you especially for your comments on my Draco. He is honestly my favourite HP character to write, and it's such a treat to know you liked my rendition of him.

Date: 2006-09-10 03:45 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
yay!!

I've always really wanted to write him but, as of yet, I have not had the nerve. But! It's good that he's your favourite to write because you do it so well.

Date: 2006-09-10 05:23 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Awww... *points* You are too good to me.

Go for it! Practice makes perfect. ^_^

Date: 2006-09-10 05:27 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
*points back* I don't give undeserved praise, my dear. :)

I'll hopefully get around to it.

Date: 2006-09-10 05:29 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Well, I look forward to it. ♥

Date: 2006-09-10 05:34 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] viper-knight.livejournal.com
♥ I'll try not to disappoint.

Date: 2006-09-07 02:27 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rice-queen.livejournal.com
As always, your work has that graceful quality to it that I enjoy a lot.

Date: 2006-09-08 08:23 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Thank you, sweets. *hugs*

Date: 2009-11-02 03:36 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] vampisandi.livejournal.com
This fic is so beautiful!!!
The hands thing! ♥
And the end, everything is so awesome!!

Date: 2009-11-21 12:40 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Oh my goodness, I'm sorry I've taken so long to respond... Thank you so much! I just love the fic I was remixing, and I do hope you will read that one, too. It's beautiful!

Date: 2012-08-23 01:51 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] feathered-ink.livejournal.com
I've just discovered this little gem of yours, and I just wanted to say, your descriptions are always absolutely breathtaking. Your words made Draco's feelings here tangible and real and just oh-so-beautiful. Thank you. ^^

Date: 2012-09-15 04:44 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] rurounihime.livejournal.com
Thank you SO MUCH! Oh, I'm so glad you liked this one. It was a pleasure to remix [livejournal.com profile] coffeejunkii's story. Thanks again for this review!

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