Fic: In the Dead Language
In the Dead Language
Regulus + Walburga, Lucius/Regulus, implied Lucius/Walburga
R for sexuality
for alittlewhisper, a late birthday present.
You said anything with sex, angst and pretty words.
This can also be seen as a prequel to " In the Dead Room."
warning: may be a little 'flowery'
Mother, you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness
Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.
--Sylvia Plath, Who
The garden is, in a real sense, his heart, so it is not surprising that it is very rarely still. Though encircled, in the old way, completely by the house, great keening winds catch along the cluttered Victorian eaves only to spiral themselves out of life as trapped genies in the hollow with its herbs and flowers.
The language of the garden is the dead language of the house; Regulus finds it is the only place he can force the stopped cogs of his mind into motion when his sympathies overwhelm him. The language gets in his head and tugs at him.
This cracked seat by the broken fountain, where the stagnant water of its pool is now thick with lily pads, is the best place. Here there is asphodel and adonis, circaea and red balsam. For Regulus always cinquefoil, heliotrope and dark geranium. Creeping cereus in the shadows, night-blooming jasmine and blue-flowered Greek valerian. Ray grass and nettles, magnolia trees that seem to never lose their dead colors. Uncontrolled rose bushes which, for lack of cutting back, lack of killing and pruning the once-lush buds, now rarely bloom. For Sirius, sunflower. For Orion, walnut. And for the one whose heart matches Regulus’ in this place: his beloved Walburga, lady’s slipper, lupine and mourning bride.
They were not destined to be such friends, but the garden makes its own decisions. Both of them occasionally indifferent, preferring to choose their own friends, with little attention to the worlds others wanted to build: how could they have been close in childhood? It was Sirius (sunflower and fleur-de-luce, dead or swallowed by the rest) who wormed his way into her arms; he gave her as little choice as she gave those whom she had enchanted.
But Regulus and Walburga had the garden, each for their own reasons. Soon he would see her, her wet hair a trap for more of those common autumn genies, gathering moss and night convolvus in strong, lovely hands grimed from the herb garden.
Soon it was their place, and Regulus found that the knowledge of just how much of them was buried here, old organic pulses of women’s magic, relaxed him. He would sit, never painting here as he’d once promised (the light was always bad), not knowing he had been waiting for her until she arrived with her bare tiny feet and that laughter that sometimes the crows answered.
He slept sometimes in the hall where the old heads peered down, silent sentinels, whispering to his dreams that he was not the first to cut his heart out for this house. A brooding would settle slowly over him like dust, and then he’d wake in that place, not remembering lying down there. Whatever comfort there was to be found in morbid old cruelty cradled him.
These, he thought, the votive candles of our past. They might have gone out yesterday; they do not change; they do not leave us.
All the women of his family are like birds. They settle somewhere, disarrange his hair, and often sing or sigh or complain incomprehensibly. They arouse fondness, but an indifferent sort of fondness that too-conventional beauty elicits: Regulus finds dull what he has seen before. His autocratic aesthetic longs to alter them, to create more perfect beauty with an unstained kiss or a palette knife.
Walburga, always unpredictable, might become a flock of birds or slip sideways beneath the shadow of a moth’s wing. Painting her on canvas is meaningless, but if skin stretched properly…
He wears gloves whenever he touches anything.
Skin on skin seems too intimate, even for lovers. This world is not a fairy tale where boys are kept in lobster cages. There is no true little sister to cut off her finger only to get through the doorway of this dull school with its parochial pleasures. There’s no ring in the goblet, to taste of her bright blood.
Without the brightness of that childhood world, where speech was always hushed and the huge garden flowers were nodding conversationalists, intimacy seems an atrocity. It is a rape by the dirty realities of the world, forcing the petals of his thighs to bruise to colours.
Regulus will not tolerate force. His mind slides away, a slippery fish beneath silver waters, and denies whatever reaction the forceful hand desires. His taut body, rasined like a violin’s bow, begins to play itself, responsive of nothing.
The first time Lucius comes to the garden, Regulus is indignant. His soft steps upon the cracked stonework seem intrusive and his personal style too removed, too untouched by the wild beauty that surrounds him. He is neither the root, Walburga, nor Regulus the stone, to be so unmovable. Rather, Lucius should have been a brief wind, trapped only temporarily in that place and then gone.
So Regulus does not speak to him. No matter what pleasantries or questions slide from the parted lips, no matter what seductive tone Lucius chooses, Regulus only watches from the corner of his eye as small shifts of muscle or the colors of Lucius’ eyes betray his reaction. Malfoy bows after a few moments, and withdraws in silence.
The next time he comes, Lucius does not speak at all. He stands in the shadow of a cypress tree, and watches Regulus. He watches the spiders crawl over Regulus’ shoulders, not pausing to bite, climbing back into their flower-nests. He does not disturb the flowers, though he touches a few of them gently, as if caressing a lover’s lips.
Regulus speaks, when the silence becomes too comfortable. “Why have you come here?”
It becomes a dance, then. The responsive and the unresponsive. The uninvited resident of Regulus’ privacy is demanding, unpredictable. Lucius can be as still and silent as water over stones. He can flash into sparkling life, dazzling Regulus with the sudden application of a smile or a gentle touch to shoulder or elbow. It is because Lucius so rarely extends his fingers to others that these caresses spread such electricity. And Lucius can move from that moment of still water, cold almost to the point of being glittering ice, to reveal himself in an instant as a controlled fire of unimaginable brilliance. When Regulus, once, on a whim, kissed his mouth, Lucius’ lips seemed to burn him.
They tripped through these games in the garden. Perhaps this day, Regulus will be the obsequious one and Lucius the cold Narcissus, remote and cruel. Perhaps Lucius will seduce and cajole, and Regulus will toy capriciously with whatever joke of a heart is offered to him. Or perhaps they will make love among the flowers that are Regulus’ language, permitting Lucius only close enough to see the garden that is his heart.
Tapered fingertips brush gently across a smooth cheek. They meet, arms slightly lifted, as if it were a promenade in some secret ballroom. Eyes meet, twin sets of grey mirrors, mysteries reflected infinitely deep. They each know the rules and betray nothing.
A kiss. First Regulus’ tongue slides across Lucius’ lower lip, then they press together, opening to each other. Regulus drags his short nails sharply against Lucius’ scalp, pulling at his long hair, and Lucius arches his neck and gasps suddenly. The flood-gates of his light are opened, and the heat with which he suddenly kisses Regulus almost disturbs him. Regulus gasps and lets his hand fall free, arms to each side and back curved, his head thrown back, giving himself over to the ravishment of Lucius’ mouth. His collar is torn suddenly open and bare skin warmed by a deluge of kisses.
“Do you want me to go on?” Lucius whispers. The words slice through his solitude, bringing him back from the place where he is, in his mind, doing this to himself and Lucius is only his silver shadow.
Regulus swallows, feeling the muscles work against Lucius’ cheek, and nods.
Lucius smiles, running a teasing hand down Regulus’ spine. “You have to vocalize, my dear. I won’t tolerate you going away on me.”
Regulus shivers. He is not sure he wants this. Lucius is being too forceful, too direct. But his body has its own ideas. He’s already flushed and hard, and a part of him wants nothing more than to be shaken to the core of his ideas, to be driven to the brink of his own mind. He says, “Yes, Lucius, go on.”
Lucius circles him, pulls his robes the rest of the way down to the ground. The air is chilly, but his body is warm, his hands like the hot bricks they laid in their beds sometimes during winter, when the heating spells died.
Lucius’ hands cover him with heat and sensation. He swoons, in the thick of it.
Lucius’ voice, low and sardonic, “Don’t move now, Regulus. Don’t tremble. It’s not like you.”
It is not, none of this is, and Regulus’ heart speeds chaotically as Lucius parts his buttocks, running his fingertip up and down the cleft, stroking his anus but never quite intruding. Of a sudden, it is too much for him and Regulus whirls, grasping both of Lucius’ wrists. He throws the taller man back away from him.
Lucius falls, but lies on his side in the mud and moss, his hair partially hiding his eyes, but never that calculating smile.
“Do you want to please me, Lucius?” Regulus asks, his tone cool.
“But of course, my darling.”
“Then take off your clothes. Give me your belt, and turn around.”
The belt is of soft patterned silk, with a bit of rope running through it, ending in gilded tassels at each end. Regulus shoves Lucius hard between the shoulder-blades. Quick, deliberate knots bind Lucius’ wrists behind his back.
Lucius purrs, “My hands displease you, then?”
“You tell too much truth with them,” Regulus replies. “So you’ll use only your mouth. And you’ll do it on your knees. You lie quite adeptly with both.”
“You wound me,” Lucius says, but the hot silk of his mouth yields readily enough. It envelops, tongue tasting and caressing, until it takes Regulus to the root and brings him over into the sweet oblivion of depth, of suction, of passion denied intimacy by the simple application of a binding.
Regulus, still gloved, caresses Lucius’ cheek as he reaches a shuddering orgasm. He does not close his eyes.
“Did you make love to my mother, here, also?” He asks, afterward. They sit by the pool, wrists throbbing with afterglow submerged in the cold green water.
“Years ago,” Lucius replies.
“Do I remind you of her?”
Lucius’ laughter slithers through the garden. “No. No, my darling, not at all.”
Regulus + Walburga, Lucius/Regulus, implied Lucius/Walburga
R for sexuality
for alittlewhisper, a late birthday present.
You said anything with sex, angst and pretty words.
This can also be seen as a prequel to " In the Dead Room."
warning: may be a little 'flowery'
Mother, you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness
Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.
--Sylvia Plath, Who
The garden is, in a real sense, his heart, so it is not surprising that it is very rarely still. Though encircled, in the old way, completely by the house, great keening winds catch along the cluttered Victorian eaves only to spiral themselves out of life as trapped genies in the hollow with its herbs and flowers.
The language of the garden is the dead language of the house; Regulus finds it is the only place he can force the stopped cogs of his mind into motion when his sympathies overwhelm him. The language gets in his head and tugs at him.
This cracked seat by the broken fountain, where the stagnant water of its pool is now thick with lily pads, is the best place. Here there is asphodel and adonis, circaea and red balsam. For Regulus always cinquefoil, heliotrope and dark geranium. Creeping cereus in the shadows, night-blooming jasmine and blue-flowered Greek valerian. Ray grass and nettles, magnolia trees that seem to never lose their dead colors. Uncontrolled rose bushes which, for lack of cutting back, lack of killing and pruning the once-lush buds, now rarely bloom. For Sirius, sunflower. For Orion, walnut. And for the one whose heart matches Regulus’ in this place: his beloved Walburga, lady’s slipper, lupine and mourning bride.
They were not destined to be such friends, but the garden makes its own decisions. Both of them occasionally indifferent, preferring to choose their own friends, with little attention to the worlds others wanted to build: how could they have been close in childhood? It was Sirius (sunflower and fleur-de-luce, dead or swallowed by the rest) who wormed his way into her arms; he gave her as little choice as she gave those whom she had enchanted.
But Regulus and Walburga had the garden, each for their own reasons. Soon he would see her, her wet hair a trap for more of those common autumn genies, gathering moss and night convolvus in strong, lovely hands grimed from the herb garden.
Soon it was their place, and Regulus found that the knowledge of just how much of them was buried here, old organic pulses of women’s magic, relaxed him. He would sit, never painting here as he’d once promised (the light was always bad), not knowing he had been waiting for her until she arrived with her bare tiny feet and that laughter that sometimes the crows answered.
He slept sometimes in the hall where the old heads peered down, silent sentinels, whispering to his dreams that he was not the first to cut his heart out for this house. A brooding would settle slowly over him like dust, and then he’d wake in that place, not remembering lying down there. Whatever comfort there was to be found in morbid old cruelty cradled him.
These, he thought, the votive candles of our past. They might have gone out yesterday; they do not change; they do not leave us.
All the women of his family are like birds. They settle somewhere, disarrange his hair, and often sing or sigh or complain incomprehensibly. They arouse fondness, but an indifferent sort of fondness that too-conventional beauty elicits: Regulus finds dull what he has seen before. His autocratic aesthetic longs to alter them, to create more perfect beauty with an unstained kiss or a palette knife.
Walburga, always unpredictable, might become a flock of birds or slip sideways beneath the shadow of a moth’s wing. Painting her on canvas is meaningless, but if skin stretched properly…
He wears gloves whenever he touches anything.
Skin on skin seems too intimate, even for lovers. This world is not a fairy tale where boys are kept in lobster cages. There is no true little sister to cut off her finger only to get through the doorway of this dull school with its parochial pleasures. There’s no ring in the goblet, to taste of her bright blood.
Without the brightness of that childhood world, where speech was always hushed and the huge garden flowers were nodding conversationalists, intimacy seems an atrocity. It is a rape by the dirty realities of the world, forcing the petals of his thighs to bruise to colours.
Regulus will not tolerate force. His mind slides away, a slippery fish beneath silver waters, and denies whatever reaction the forceful hand desires. His taut body, rasined like a violin’s bow, begins to play itself, responsive of nothing.
The first time Lucius comes to the garden, Regulus is indignant. His soft steps upon the cracked stonework seem intrusive and his personal style too removed, too untouched by the wild beauty that surrounds him. He is neither the root, Walburga, nor Regulus the stone, to be so unmovable. Rather, Lucius should have been a brief wind, trapped only temporarily in that place and then gone.
So Regulus does not speak to him. No matter what pleasantries or questions slide from the parted lips, no matter what seductive tone Lucius chooses, Regulus only watches from the corner of his eye as small shifts of muscle or the colors of Lucius’ eyes betray his reaction. Malfoy bows after a few moments, and withdraws in silence.
The next time he comes, Lucius does not speak at all. He stands in the shadow of a cypress tree, and watches Regulus. He watches the spiders crawl over Regulus’ shoulders, not pausing to bite, climbing back into their flower-nests. He does not disturb the flowers, though he touches a few of them gently, as if caressing a lover’s lips.
Regulus speaks, when the silence becomes too comfortable. “Why have you come here?”
It becomes a dance, then. The responsive and the unresponsive. The uninvited resident of Regulus’ privacy is demanding, unpredictable. Lucius can be as still and silent as water over stones. He can flash into sparkling life, dazzling Regulus with the sudden application of a smile or a gentle touch to shoulder or elbow. It is because Lucius so rarely extends his fingers to others that these caresses spread such electricity. And Lucius can move from that moment of still water, cold almost to the point of being glittering ice, to reveal himself in an instant as a controlled fire of unimaginable brilliance. When Regulus, once, on a whim, kissed his mouth, Lucius’ lips seemed to burn him.
They tripped through these games in the garden. Perhaps this day, Regulus will be the obsequious one and Lucius the cold Narcissus, remote and cruel. Perhaps Lucius will seduce and cajole, and Regulus will toy capriciously with whatever joke of a heart is offered to him. Or perhaps they will make love among the flowers that are Regulus’ language, permitting Lucius only close enough to see the garden that is his heart.
Tapered fingertips brush gently across a smooth cheek. They meet, arms slightly lifted, as if it were a promenade in some secret ballroom. Eyes meet, twin sets of grey mirrors, mysteries reflected infinitely deep. They each know the rules and betray nothing.
A kiss. First Regulus’ tongue slides across Lucius’ lower lip, then they press together, opening to each other. Regulus drags his short nails sharply against Lucius’ scalp, pulling at his long hair, and Lucius arches his neck and gasps suddenly. The flood-gates of his light are opened, and the heat with which he suddenly kisses Regulus almost disturbs him. Regulus gasps and lets his hand fall free, arms to each side and back curved, his head thrown back, giving himself over to the ravishment of Lucius’ mouth. His collar is torn suddenly open and bare skin warmed by a deluge of kisses.
“Do you want me to go on?” Lucius whispers. The words slice through his solitude, bringing him back from the place where he is, in his mind, doing this to himself and Lucius is only his silver shadow.
Regulus swallows, feeling the muscles work against Lucius’ cheek, and nods.
Lucius smiles, running a teasing hand down Regulus’ spine. “You have to vocalize, my dear. I won’t tolerate you going away on me.”
Regulus shivers. He is not sure he wants this. Lucius is being too forceful, too direct. But his body has its own ideas. He’s already flushed and hard, and a part of him wants nothing more than to be shaken to the core of his ideas, to be driven to the brink of his own mind. He says, “Yes, Lucius, go on.”
Lucius circles him, pulls his robes the rest of the way down to the ground. The air is chilly, but his body is warm, his hands like the hot bricks they laid in their beds sometimes during winter, when the heating spells died.
Lucius’ hands cover him with heat and sensation. He swoons, in the thick of it.
Lucius’ voice, low and sardonic, “Don’t move now, Regulus. Don’t tremble. It’s not like you.”
It is not, none of this is, and Regulus’ heart speeds chaotically as Lucius parts his buttocks, running his fingertip up and down the cleft, stroking his anus but never quite intruding. Of a sudden, it is too much for him and Regulus whirls, grasping both of Lucius’ wrists. He throws the taller man back away from him.
Lucius falls, but lies on his side in the mud and moss, his hair partially hiding his eyes, but never that calculating smile.
“Do you want to please me, Lucius?” Regulus asks, his tone cool.
“But of course, my darling.”
“Then take off your clothes. Give me your belt, and turn around.”
The belt is of soft patterned silk, with a bit of rope running through it, ending in gilded tassels at each end. Regulus shoves Lucius hard between the shoulder-blades. Quick, deliberate knots bind Lucius’ wrists behind his back.
Lucius purrs, “My hands displease you, then?”
“You tell too much truth with them,” Regulus replies. “So you’ll use only your mouth. And you’ll do it on your knees. You lie quite adeptly with both.”
“You wound me,” Lucius says, but the hot silk of his mouth yields readily enough. It envelops, tongue tasting and caressing, until it takes Regulus to the root and brings him over into the sweet oblivion of depth, of suction, of passion denied intimacy by the simple application of a binding.
Regulus, still gloved, caresses Lucius’ cheek as he reaches a shuddering orgasm. He does not close his eyes.
“Did you make love to my mother, here, also?” He asks, afterward. They sit by the pool, wrists throbbing with afterglow submerged in the cold green water.
“Years ago,” Lucius replies.
“Do I remind you of her?”
Lucius’ laughter slithers through the garden. “No. No, my darling, not at all.”