Someone keeps moving my chair.
Wrote this for this week's Slash Challenge.
Trailing Dirt
The last time Harry left, Draco just stood at the living room window and watched his retreating back until the shock of black hair was just another bobbing blur in the mass of pedestrians and the sun set the buildings a blaze with the orange light of evening. It had happened so many times in the past that he was almost used to it, the pertinacious arguments, the way Harry’s face twisted into a rictus of anger that left Draco thinking that they must be fourteen again and back at Hogwarts. The slam of the door and resulting rattle of dishes, and this time, the dull thudding crash of terra cotta hitting oak as the potted lilies on the shelf by the door met the floor.
Harry had been rather enamored with lilies, and, on occasion, he had brought them home in pots. They were always obscene five-inch-diameter Stargazers, dripping with nectar, stamen crowded with rust brown pollen, and their throats a deep violent pink that clashed with absolutely everything else in the flat. Their scent would hang in the air and tint everything they ate for the first week with the sticky sweet taste of flower perfume. After the blooms had withered away, leaving bright yellow pollen stains on table, or shelf, or floor, Harry would take the bulbs outside and plant them in the three foot by three foot patch of their tiny yard that passed for a garden. And, though the plants always lived, they never bloomed again.
Draco had asked Harry once why he didn’t just buy cut flowers, since the ones in the yard never flowered again anyway, but Harry hadn’t really answered, he had just mumbled something about them never being given a chance the other way and walked back into the flat, trailing dirt.
Clumps of potting soil escaped the shattered pot and rolled onto the rug, where Draco inadvertently ground them in, creating new patterns in the already intricate oriental design. He wasn’t going to clean it up. Harry could pick up his own bloody plant when he got back.
The grey light of predawn, the sun not quite over the horizon and the night still clinging to the sky, found Draco sitting at the tiny kitchen table nursing a cup of black coffee. Harry hadn’t appeared, as he usually did, at three am with echoes of sorrow in his eyes. Draco bit his lip and tried to ignore the broken pot and the lilies languishing at a haphazard angle in the middle of the floor as he left for work.
When Draco opened the door that evening and was hit with the sweet scent of lilies and saw that the broken pot, a blot on the floor of the usually meticulous ordered flat, was still there mocking him, he knew it was over. He could see that Harry wasn’t coming back as clearly as if he had written him a letter, with the usual scratched out sentences and blotches of ink where the quill sat too long on the page, in his messy scrawl.
Draco gingerly freed the plant from the soil and shards of terra cotta and carried it out to the garden. It bloomed again the next year.
ps: olukemi, I know this is H/D and all, but I think you might like some aspects of this particular fic.
Trailing Dirt
The last time Harry left, Draco just stood at the living room window and watched his retreating back until the shock of black hair was just another bobbing blur in the mass of pedestrians and the sun set the buildings a blaze with the orange light of evening. It had happened so many times in the past that he was almost used to it, the pertinacious arguments, the way Harry’s face twisted into a rictus of anger that left Draco thinking that they must be fourteen again and back at Hogwarts. The slam of the door and resulting rattle of dishes, and this time, the dull thudding crash of terra cotta hitting oak as the potted lilies on the shelf by the door met the floor.
Harry had been rather enamored with lilies, and, on occasion, he had brought them home in pots. They were always obscene five-inch-diameter Stargazers, dripping with nectar, stamen crowded with rust brown pollen, and their throats a deep violent pink that clashed with absolutely everything else in the flat. Their scent would hang in the air and tint everything they ate for the first week with the sticky sweet taste of flower perfume. After the blooms had withered away, leaving bright yellow pollen stains on table, or shelf, or floor, Harry would take the bulbs outside and plant them in the three foot by three foot patch of their tiny yard that passed for a garden. And, though the plants always lived, they never bloomed again.
Draco had asked Harry once why he didn’t just buy cut flowers, since the ones in the yard never flowered again anyway, but Harry hadn’t really answered, he had just mumbled something about them never being given a chance the other way and walked back into the flat, trailing dirt.
Clumps of potting soil escaped the shattered pot and rolled onto the rug, where Draco inadvertently ground them in, creating new patterns in the already intricate oriental design. He wasn’t going to clean it up. Harry could pick up his own bloody plant when he got back.
The grey light of predawn, the sun not quite over the horizon and the night still clinging to the sky, found Draco sitting at the tiny kitchen table nursing a cup of black coffee. Harry hadn’t appeared, as he usually did, at three am with echoes of sorrow in his eyes. Draco bit his lip and tried to ignore the broken pot and the lilies languishing at a haphazard angle in the middle of the floor as he left for work.
When Draco opened the door that evening and was hit with the sweet scent of lilies and saw that the broken pot, a blot on the floor of the usually meticulous ordered flat, was still there mocking him, he knew it was over. He could see that Harry wasn’t coming back as clearly as if he had written him a letter, with the usual scratched out sentences and blotches of ink where the quill sat too long on the page, in his messy scrawl.
Draco gingerly freed the plant from the soil and shards of terra cotta and carried it out to the garden. It bloomed again the next year.
ps: olukemi, I know this is H/D and all, but I think you might like some aspects of this particular fic.