Between Forgetting and Remembering
Between Forgetting and Remembering
a love story by the sea
Summary: The sea is like his memories. Insistent, unforgiving, exquisite.
Pairing: Draco/Hermione
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Angst, UST, Pronouns, EWE, an unlikely spot for a lemon tree
Length: 4447 words in six parts, Complete
Beta: Alpha'd by eevilalice. THANK YOU!
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Between Forgetting and Remembering
a love story by the sea
Set in Clonakilty, a small coastal town in Co. Cork in Southwestern Ireland.
1. The Task of Forgetting
One year.
One year and three days, to be exact, and he had to forget her all over again every one of those days. He had to forget her many times each day.
With each gust of wind in autumn, he tried to forget her.
And then with each snowflake that melted on his cheek.
And in spring, the new blades of grass taunted him.
Summer though… in summer she ran in the sand in his mind, laughing and running from him, to fall into the sea. His memory would not let go of summer.
Though he pushed at it, saw her slink away with the tide, each time he thought he was free, she was returning to crash into him again. Relentlessly. Beautifully.
And now, seeing her again, unexpectedly, in her cotton dress with the hem bunched in her hand, green salt water swirling around her skinny legs, he let himself be pulled under.
He watched her look out over the empty sea and wondered if in her mind she was back in London. With him. Was she in their warm flat, in the too small bed they couldn’t bear to replace, with the sun streaming across her face, setting her curls on fire?
And what was she doing here? This beach was his to forget. The day she walked away, it became his and his alone. One year and three days from when he didn’t stop her. From when ‘sorry’ wasn’t enough.
She dropped the bunched fabric in a motion of futility, her arm hanging limply by her side. The scratchy breeze threw her curls into the air, and suddenly he was forgetting again the way those curls went wild when she was over him, her breasts heaving and her cheeks pink.
The cotton clung to the back of her calves as the water ebbed, pulling the soaked fabric out to sea, and then, with its rushing back, made it crumple against her shins.
And then she was walking away, trudging through the heavy water at her ankles, and he was forgetting again. Forgetting the ripping through his chest when he last watched her walk away.
*****
Leaning on the bright blue painted doorframe, he knocked the layer of sand from his ankles. This green place, with its worn out roads and round old women in bright skirts, with bright smiles, threw everything into sharp contrast. Made her absence more vivid.
Memory is cruel.
It never gave up. Never.
Hours later in the dark, still sitting in an old chair by the window, he gazed out at the sea tumbling over itself, again and again and again and again.
The sea was like his memories. Insistent, unforgiving, exquisite.
Now, her sudden return, the physical proof of his loss, brought with it the memory of disappointment in her honey colored eyes. And that he didn’t think he would ever forget.
Had she come here because it was summer, and they always came here in the summer? Was she reliving the warm days and weeks they spent here every year, in this tiny stone and plaster cottage? Were these sun-bleached rocks and sand a habit she could not break, just as the little beach house, every crack filled with her, was a habit he could not break?
He thought that they were happiest here, and maybe that’s the reason he never left. And perhaps because he could not return to London, where every street and alley seemed to lead to their cozy flat. He could see now that they were always best close together in small spaces, where he could breathe her in and his arms didn’t have far to go.
2. Two Rough Stones
A week later, he still had not seen her again. He began to think that she was an apparition. That he had made her up. That she hadn’t really been standing there in the sea. A siren to drown sailors.
He kept to his routines, afraid to look for her, afraid to hope. He visited the newsstand just like he always did. Bought coffee at the cart and talked with the young man there who didn’t want to be a dairy farmer like his father. He sat on the same bench at the canal and read his paper. Every Monday and Thursday, he walked up the mountain. And like he always did, he stopped half way up, in the shade of a small lemon tree, and looked out over the sea.
The first time he’d seen the sea from this height was with the old man. The small, wrinkly man with salt and sand ground into his skin who had insinuated himself into their lives.
Under the lemon tree, alone now, he was forgetting her, years ago, standing at their kitchen window chopping vegetables by hand. He was forgetting the secret smile she wore when he would grumble and complain about the pushy old man with the heavy accent that wouldn’t leave him alone. He had felt like the subject of some unknown campaign where he was always being thrown together with the old man. Two rough stones in tumbler, knocking against each other, and he couldn’t escape.
She had understood then, that they needed each other. The old man was the father he should have had. Pestering him, questioning him, caring about him. He was like the ocean, forever advancing, cutting into the rocks, seeping into the cracks. And before he knew it, the old man had been folded into his heart.
Twice a week they had walked here. The old man slow and hobbling, past the ancient graveyard where he was now buried, past the street vendors at the side of the road, past the abandoned factories and the scattering herds of sheep.
He would listen as the old man rambled out his stories, filling in the holes and drawing himself into the scenes. And then it would be his turn to talk as the old man asked him a thousand questions he didn’t want to think about. Was his mother beautiful? Could he remember her smile? What was the weather like where he grew up? Could you grow tomatoes there? What was his father like? Could he remember his father’s smile? Had he ever seen it?
The road was slow, and he had been reluctant, but he had opened the wounds and he had healed. When the old man died two years ago, a new wound was carved into his heart. A cut as deep as the cold sea, and he closed up around it, hiding it away. He shut out the wind and the cold and the salt, and with them, he shut her out too.
He focused his eyes on the line where sky and sea met and blurred. He tried to identify where the disintegration began, but lost himself in the haze. If it had been clear, black and white…if he had done something, if he could have seen, he could have fixed it, he could have stopped her from leaving. He refocused his eyes on the ambiguous horizon and tried again.
Every time they had made this trek, the old man would stop at this spot. Sometimes he spoke of the town, and sometimes of the sea. Once he spoke of his son that he hadn’t talked to in twenty years. But usually he just looked out over the water, lost in his mind, in another place.
Once, the old man pointed to the black, rocky island that broke the line of the horizon. In his clipped, heavy accent he said, “That island used to be a part of us. And the sea came, slow and creeping, and by the time the island knew, he was swimming in his sorrow. Too worn out to put up a fight. And now he is just alone and doesn’t call to anyone.”
3. Walking with Ghosts
He was being haunted. He was sure of it.
He openly stared at what must be her ghost as she scurried down the street outside the old government building with her arms full of papers, ten days after he had seen her standing in the sea.
This second time hurt more than the first. It was another scene to add to his rich and endless movie of her. Another scene to forget. Now he had to forget her and the ghost of her, and he wondered about the tenuous nature of his hold on reality. But worse than the fear of insanity, as he watched her adjust her papers, was the thought that her ghost was here to work, and not to haunt him.
The ghost stopped in front of a small restaurant exactly across the street from where he stood transfixed. One dusty street and two sidewalks separating them, and for three seconds he was forgetting to breathe. The cement of the sidewalk had almost released his feet when he heard her voice again for the first time in three hundred and seventy-eight days.
She was shaking hands with a small group of people, and smiling, and then holding the door as they all filed in before her. The absurd question of whether the restaurant would serve a ghost was erased when she turned suddenly, just before going in, and looked directly at him.
She was real. She was here and she was real and he felt like he was being tumbled underwater in an unforgiving sea.
*****
When he saw her the third time, it was in the marketplace and her arms were full of vegetables and oranges. He watched her contemplating clusters of small blue flowers as if the decision would change the course of her life. She bought one stem.
Forget-me-nots. He had to smile at the irony as he watched her lay the blue flowers on top of the oranges. Forget-me-nots that
reminded him of her pink-cheeked face turning to laugh at something he had said, as they pushed their way through the crowded market in another summer, her arms then burdened by masses of red poppies and her bright smile that outdid every one of them.
He looked up to find her eyes locked on his and he felt pinned in place. He was not sure if he was smiling, but he hoped that he was. He wanted to move forward, to speak to her this time, to hear her voice up close, maybe to smell her again. But the impulses were stuck at the base of his skull, a swirling tide pool of electricity that felt like a thousand tiny fireworks, pin pricks down his neck and over his shoulders. And then she was coming towards him, and as she neared her shy smile was squeezing him and warming his body.
“Hello,” he said, and now he knew that he was smiling.
*****
Every step he took as he walked her back to her rented room would have to be forgotten.
Every uneven cobblestone, every time her full bag bumped his arm, every time she brushed a strand of hair off her face. He would have to forget these things. Perhaps tomorrow, or maybe it could wait a few days. Right now, he was just floating beside her. A seagull resting on the ocean swells.
She talked about her job, about her family and London. He talked about the small town they had both loved. He told her about the shops that had closed and the new ones that opened. And she smiled when he told her that the bookstore had added another room.
She became quiet and thoughtful when he told her which young lovers had gotten married, and which had gone against their parents’ wishes, and which couples had separated to turn into other couples.
He told her about the people who had moved away, and the young ones that had their bags packed and waiting, ready to move to the city. Any city. Far from the ocean, where they could escape the persistent crash of the waves and the vacuum sound of retreating water.
He was careful not to talk about himself, about them, which was easy because he didn’t want to hope. He would have to add hope to the piles of things he needed to forget.
The rented room came too quickly and they lingered for a long time at her gate, even after the misty night air had set their teeth chattering. He leaned against the whitewashed stone wall, where her fingers drew uneven patterns that he tried to puzzle out. After a long while, when he had run out of excuses, his hand reached out to wrap softly around her upper arm, and then slid down to the silky bare skin near her elbow.
“Goodnight,” he told her. He didn’t make plans to meet her again.
He walked slowly through the damp night, meandering back to the little cottage. The sea sounded far away, like hearing it in a seashell held up to your ear. He wanted to hold on to this surreal night as long as he could. To put off forgetting a little longer.
Half hidden in a layer of fog, he found himself standing at the old man’s grave. He came here when the task of forgetting became too much. When he wanted to remember her arms wrapped around him and her sleepy morning smiles, the old man was here, waiting for him, giving him permission, even when he couldn’t give it himself.
Standing there now, freezing and quiet, he remembered her standing there too, with worried wet eyes and a handful of black dirt in her white hand. He could see now that it was that day the forgetting began. It was not the day she had left. No, it was the day he had started to forget the gifts he still held. The day he started forgetting to let her love him.
4. The Undertow of Memory, or The Red Current Tree
Three days passed before he saw her again. This time through the large window of a café where she sat reading at the counter. For a moment he stood outside, captured by the way his own reflection disappeared where she began.
His eyes took in the scowl on her face that always appeared when she was concentrating. It made his heart hurt to see it again, because this he had managed to forget.
Inside, he startled her, but the surprised smile that spread over her face was warm and genuine, and it made his heart hurt in new and different ways because it was throwing itself against his chest. Like the tide trying to follow the moon.
Later he would know that this is when he started to hope again.
The swelling in his chest made it hard to speak, or to think, as they walked with no destination in mind. Their conversation was clumsy. Lacking the ease they’d had the day he saw her in the marketplace with the oranges and the forget-me-nots. But it was also exciting and full of scary possibilities.
He didn’t want to suggest a destination. Didn’t want to give her an excuse to leave. So he just continued to walk next to her, catching the flush high on her cheeks through sideways glances.
Every store they had once visited together, every hole in the wall restaurant they had loved, the Lisselan Gardens they had once admired while holding hands, as they passed them now, made his stomach twist a little more, and made him ache to feel her hand in his again.
When he realized that they were climbing the hill to the ruins of an old abbey where they had once made love under a red currant tree, he was suddenly desperate to turn back. But she was smiling. And her arm had brushed his three times. And once she had stumbled and he steadied her with his hand at the small of her back. And anything was worth that.
They were quiet as they neared the pale crumbling stone building, and he was glad because it took all his effort to not allow the memory to come. But as the garden grounds appeared around the corner, he lost the fight.
The gravel lane narrowed, bringing her closer. Making the memories push harder against his will. They approached the bend in the path, and he was holding his breath and he wondered if maybe she was too.
And then they were there, and he was sucked into the undertow of his memory.
He remembered all of it. How she circled around him, smiling, mischievous and coy at once. Her butter colored dress flirting around her knees. Pulling her under the full bloom of the currant tree. Kissing her. Kissing her. Tasting her neck. Pulling her straps down to bare her breasts. The way she tried to hide herself from the view of the path and the way he turned her back, a silent dare passing between them.
And then she was lying down. Her breasts white and milky against the lush dark grass. Dappled sunlight and three tiny red-pink blossoms that fell on her chest. Would-be jewels that were poor competition for her rosy nipples, pebbled and reaching up, eager for his mouth.
The pale yellow skirt was bunched at her waist. And her knees were opening for him like butterfly wings.
He remembered all of it. The fresh and grassy smell, the sounds of their moans mixing with the breeze, the crushed blossoms sticking to their damp skin.
All of it. He remembered all of it.
Looking cautiously at her standing next to him now, he could see by the stain on her cheeks and neck that she remembered it too.
A long moment stretched out as they stood there looking at each other, both flushed with embarrassment, until he said her name and it came out strangled and heavy and it hung in the air between them.
For one blissful second, he thought he saw something like longing, or desire, or even regret in her eyes. But then she turned quickly to head back down the mountain.
His heart made hard, awful thumps in his chest the whole way down, following behind her, watching her escape. He felt like he was at the edge of that desolate island, being crushed against the black rocks, the cruel green sea, filling his lungs with salt water.
5. Crossing the Great Divide
Four inches. Four inches and an almost empty bottle of wine was the entire sum of space between them. Only one day since she had fled down the mountain, and now he was sitting against the damp wall of a small fountain in the middle of the empty square. It was late, even approaching morning, and he sat next to the one thing he wanted most in the world. With only four inches and a bottle between them.
In that small space, he could feel the soft heat radiating off her arms, enveloping him, caressing him, tempting him. The pleasant buzz of the wine, and of her warmth, mixed with the rushing and smashing sound of the water behind his head, and he knew that those four inches would be the hardest to cross.
The old man was in his head then, on a windy day years before, as the two men crossed the square. “The noise of this fountain makes it so we can talk and never have to say anything, because nobody can hear us anyway.”
He reached for the bottle at the same time that she released it and as his fingers brushed hers, his breath caught in his throat. Something changed then, a fuzzy horizon that suddenly cleared, and he could see the exact point where the sea ended and the sky began.
His courage and his longing and desperation for her gathered in his chest, like a swelling wave about to crest, and he knew that tonight he would tell her everything.
For her. For the slim hope of this, of claiming this as his own, he would tell her everything in his heart. He would open the wounds and lay them bare and know that he would never again be able to close them.
And he did.
With hesitant beginnings and awkward middles, he told her.
Though he suspected that she already knew, he told her that he had wanted to be loved by his father. And about the love that he wanted - needed - from his mother, love that he had only caught passing glimpses of.
He told her about the old man’s love. About the hole he felt when he lost him. And about how he had been too consumed by his sorrow, like the island, to ask for help, to ask for love. Her love.
She sat quietly, listening, with her eyes open and warm and soft, as he told her about his revelations, about what he’d learned. Even if it was too late for them, even if he could not go back and stop himself from shutting her out, even if she couldn’t love him again, he wanted her to know that he had finally learned.
And when he was done, when he was laid open, naked to the night and to her, he told her again that he was sorry.
He let his hand rest on the empty bottle sitting in the middle of the four inches between them, half way, with his heart in his throat, and asked her for one thing only. Forgiveness.
The pounding of the fountain was beating in his ears, and he closed his eyes and waited for her answer, if she would answer. And when she did, with her fingers tracing over his, he barely breathed, afraid to wake and find that she wasn’t really touching him. But then she was taking his hand and folding it in hers, and her lips were on his knuckles, and on his fingers, and he was sinking into a calm sea where he wanted to remember everything.
6. Remembering
Love only gives one answer, and it is YES.
To every fear that begs to be faced.
To every longing for approval, to the need to be valued.
To the heart’s wish to be treasured, even with its cuts and scars showing.
Love says yes.
When he stumbled with her through that pale blue dawn, fear and hope thrumming in his veins, when they stood at her gate and she pressed her palm to his face, and her eyes were shiny and full and warm, love said yes.
Days later, when they stood in the graveyard and she laced her fingers with his, love said yes.
Sunny afternoons as they laughed over pints of Guinness, when he would touch her neck or her ear, and she would blush softly, love said yes.
And when she finally came to the cottage, and it sighed in relief, as if it had been waiting for her, holding her place until she returned, love said yes.
He understood now that there had been no other course he could have taken. No alternate path that would have led somewhere else. Just as the sea can only be the sea, the only answer love could give him was her.
Tonight, his answer stood at the open window in the dark bedroom, their bedroom, outlined in sharp blue lines of moonlight, and gazing out at a black ocean.
Having her here, in this room, in the dark, was a reminder of every time they had been here before. Every time he had kissed her by the open window, every time he had taken her against the wall, or laid her out before him, a feast to be savored.
Remembering these things made him feel desperate and achy, his fingers longing to prove the truth of those memories. He felt himself giving in to it, crossing the room, his heart beating hard - fear, desire, joy - all banging against his chest as he stepped in behind her.
The night in front of her was quiet and still. It hung heavily in the air around him. Waiting. Even the sea seemed to be holding its breath.
He looked down. Four inches again, and the space between her back and his chest was alive with electricity. He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the tiny sparks fire and explode against him, and he was remembering how to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
And like a great building wave, mounting higher and higher, he finally could not hold back any longer and his hand slid over her hip to pull her back into him as his other hand moved into her curls to bare her neck.
His lips were on her then, dragging slowly, at last, over the soft, silky warm skin along the column of her neck. Her head tilted to allow him in and he sucked at the spot just below her ear, as his hand slipped low on her stomach, and pulled her harder into him, making her moan.
The sound washed over him, affirming every memory he had of that sound, and his heart rate became rapid and shallow, and he turned her with a strangled groan and took her mouth with his. Said yes. Cupped her face in both his hands and held it still as he plundered her mouth, sweeping his tongue over hers, and feeling himself filling up with her, swelling like the ocean.
The wave crested and in a heartbeat they were tossing on a wild sea.
He was going to make to love to her. And then he was going to do it again. And after they slept, he would make love to her again.
And then he was on her, sinking into her, sinking into the fathomless sea, deep and slow, deep and slow, deep and slow. Drowning. Slowly. Beautifully.
Finally, the sea let out the breath it had been holding in a great ragged sigh as he collapsed on top of her, pulled down by her arms wrapped around him, and falling into her soft kisses and her declarations of love.
He held her tightly, whispering to her, repeating the sacred words between kisses, and then made love to her again.
Hours later, he lay awake, exhausted and exhilarated, and remembered the last time he had stood with the old man in the shade of the lemon tree, looking out over the sea.
“That island is still attached to this land, even if it has forgotten,” he had said. “I think…yes, I think one day it will find its way home.”
He watched her sleeping, her body curled into his and her hair in a silent explosion around her head, and he knew that he had found his way home.
And now, as he closed his eyes, he was forgetting again. Forgetting one year and three days without her.