Sun-Soured Locks.
Title: Sun-Soured Locks.
Author: Rachel McFaith bloodrebel333.
Pairing: Fred/George-ish.
Rating: PG-13.
Warning: Dead!Fred (not necrophilia though), angst, excessive use of descriptions, word repetition, perfume, voyeurism-ish.
Word Count: 1057. (first time in about two years I've gotten past the 1000 words)
Summary: And does it not sting? Does it not slice into his mind as if in the tender skin around his eyes, burning, burning recklessly, the cities,
the cities they used to fly to when they closed their eyes (blood trickling down into his eyes through the eyelashes pressing, pressing together and bending with the strength of it, echoes as raucous as reality even the Sun bows to us, even the Sun and growing - glowing - with the vigour, the wild verve within its core) dashing through the sky like comets; cities and forests and rivers, flashing past his head in a blink's moment.
Author's Note: Originally started for squirmy for a fic-exchange that was called off - anyhow, it was July and RL got really difficult, so I never got to finish it. It'd faded to the background until Emma monifieth (who's ill and deserves fic) mentioned Fred/George in her Christmas Wish List and was the main inspiration that made me go on with this. Hope you like this, love! Thanks to my flist for putting up with me and giving advise about word-choice and lines and symbolism without actually having read the entire fic, especially txilar and Jess floatingoranges. Unbetaed.
Sun-Soured Locks
He can still smell the sickly-sweet perfume they used to borrow from Angelina on his old clothes, fragments of the past building a realm which the uninvited do not know, yet ever fear.
Some nights (when it is most forlorn around him and mirrors reflect faded hues that are still fading, fading) the fragrance is like a face, a face with a hoarse voice and a scarred, yet smooth hand, beckoning, beckoning him
into a paragon of forgotten curses. And although he usually closes the weather-beaten door of that forsaken closet with a swish and turns away instantly (unable to look into the darkness, afraid to think of the one he left there alone, alone, alone), sometimes the shadow sticking to the old smell does not permit him to turn his back on untold history.
Whispering of old promises and deeply iconised scars, a young voice defiantly dares to waver, then grows more indignant and challenging and obstinate in an attempt to cover uncertainty.
And those, those times he smiles and lets memories pervade his mind as a wet cloth (dripping with that wretched perfume, bound too tight, stinging his eyes sometimes, and didn't he laugh harshly in his mind whenever it was done?) over his eyes, swallowing up his consciousness, until, until, until,
until, (flame-tinted locks he feels but cannot see tickling his face, she won't come in, and air is superfluous) the world starts swirling and he is pushed back, back (same closet, other place: from dark to darker, and the feeling of a thigh slipping between his, pushing, pushing, see, even the Sun bows to us, even the Sun, George!) into where the Sun turns away her face and grants fleeting moments of fresh affinity, a final voyage gifted to the damned.
And does it not sting? Does it not slice into his mind as if in the tender skin around his eyes, burning, burning, burning recklessly, the cities,
the cities they used to fly to when they closed their eyes (blood trickling down into his eyes through the eyelashes pressing, pressing together and bending with the strength of it, echoes as raucous as reality even the Sun bows to us, even the Sun and growing - glowing - with the vigour, the wild verve within its core) dashing through the sky like comets; cities and forests and rivers, flashing past his head in a blink's moment.
*
Beneath the heavens, underneath the atmosphere and the echoes of long-forgotten wars, there used to be a kingdom in the clouds, drifting hazes forming scenes of majestic grandeur. Kingdom, child of the wind, born out of water and so far out that it was as if a universe of its own, with wind-swept scenes of battle and war and death, but also birth and love and the crowning of a young king.
And between all that, between all those scenes and frozen views, there was one, one that hinted at a dark mahogany closet and thick ropes, a cold drenched cloth and thin wood; at two people, a man choking, gasping at the prickling sensation of nails pressing, pressing deep into his skin; and another, spilling, spilling words from his lips staunchly.
And the air, the air smelling dimly of heavy perfume suffocating, tiny drops merging with blood and sweat, stinging, stinging the young men, Summer wine for when hips push against each other.
The image was but inert, for once upon a time the Lord of the Wind took pleasure in moving the vapours away from one another, only to subsequently blow them against each other so that they nearly intermingled.
And though frozen and timeless and flowless, no-one can deny that it's an image, an image that still exists in the windswept remains of the empire, behind the trees and walls and mountains, in a house symbolised by the drapes dimming,
dimming deserted rooms; an image of which George one time knew but refuses to think of now, and one in which the young men, stained by war and loss and love, never age and never die.
And no, no-one can refute even this, this tang of acidity that batters a dead man's hope that the world will for-ever stay the same, the tart aftertaste that shouts at the heavens (and to the Sun, the Sun who turned her face, faced for them, to the damned, to us, even the Sun) that souls know what contradictions dither in their own eyes; that George still knows, but does not look.
And in this mayhem and havoc scraped together and blown into the stream of air by anger seeing Sunlight flashing onto graves and reflecting into their eyes,
reflecting bright light eclipsing tarnished dates into their tightly shut eyes, and in
this mayhem, seeping through the heavy curtains thickened and fine-tuned with such care, Thor laughs.
*
Youth flies with the speed of a hundred pureblood (how they'd have laughed) wild palominos chasing after the wind, and he remembers very well the day he'd looked at his hands and saw them poised by well-earned callosity. In an era of misery time has proven to cut like a splinter, tickling the hair on his arm and flattening them with the wet heat of his blood, and this is the spot where every time his breath hitches so fast that even his eyes cannot blink fast enough.
And so today there's despair in the shape of his pupils, frailty in the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathes, harshness in the lines his face presents. Inertia's ruined his traits. Vertigo's risen in his head. His lover is dead. He cannot speak.
(Merlin, but you're still beautiful a shadow says, the reverberation languidly flooding over his hair like a frantic exhale.) He closes his eyes (there is no glory without a battle to overcome), chooses his way.
*
And after he'll say that it was nothing but the tick of a clock sliding time into the wrong direction (to the Sun), that the rush in his head was the chaos that raged over eternity that night, that shadows do not speak and scars do not ache (and the Sun will not shine the apple not cling the tale not waver the mirror not love the brother not want the memory not savour and the silence not take).
fin.