♥ "Speechless" for arcz ♥
Title: Speechless
Rating: R
Possible Spoilers/Warnings:
Summary: Can a heart be put back together?
A/N: The poem is Jack Gilbert’s “Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” This story ignores the end of book 7 and invents an alternate end to the war. Forgive me the many and mixed metaphors, and also if Draco is less than cautious-“quiet” might be a better word.
SPEECHLESS
Tea with breakfast: eggs, toast, ham, preserves from the garden-not the garden but the garden just out back behind the little house from when it was summer and the plants grew and the flowers awoke-and milk in a creamer the color of a church window with a cool sharp taste like winter when he pours it into his tea.
She comes in with a gust of wind, pulling damp mittens from her hands, thrusting cold cold fingers down the neck of his shirt, against the soft spot where his fine blond hair tapers to a point, and kisses him somewhere above the ear: okay, okay, then, yes, of course, sure, yes, cheers, okay. The chair scrapes back, he feels her press her face between his shoulder blades as he stands, feels her sigh, the point of her nose, her hands, still freezing, dug in at his hips, somewhere under the sweater, pressure points from her fingers above the jut of the bone where his trousers hang low. He keeps his hand flat above the wooden tabletop, for balance, for love.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong.
The mugs will go here, she says, hanging them from hooks. They are precarious, he thinks, something will happen to them, they will tumble to the counter and shatter into shards and she will cry; she cannot stand broken things.
Oh, and the extra things-the spatulas and cooking spoons and ladle-in this drawer.
As though he will remember where any of it is, when he has his mind fixed on her all of the time, her quiet glances, her long looks out windows at busy dirty streets and beyond it the iron gate she can’t keep her gaze her from for more than a minute. Even when he draws the blinds.
This new house will be better now. The view is different and her face will no longer shutter itself at night. They will make love less quietly now. She will cry less now. She will miss everybody less now.
We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure.
She is more fragile, that first time in his arms, than he thought anyone could be, ten years on. She told him lightly over the pint in the pub. There’s something missing, she said. Gone with all of them.
Like birds flying over the ocean. Nowhere to land. They must carry on; they cannot turn back; if they stop they are dead. I’m still somewhere in the sea-
She cannot say the word without her lower lip trembling: dead. Dead, like crushed bone; dead, like Harry; dead, like her brothers, like her mother, like the babies she looked after in the nursery on that boulevard that has been rebuilt with gardens and reflection pools and memorials and statues: those we lost too soon we shall not honor too late, the newspaper said.
A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment.
He was surprised to see her sitting on a bench in the park. Shaking violently. It was winter then, too. She had on no coat, only a scarf. Wrapped around and around and around her neck like a noose. She was reading the memorial, reading the names, chiseled deep with magic not half so powerful as that that had sent the bearers of those names to death. Death. Death. Death. A litany from her lips.
I always come here at lunch, she said. I can’t stay away. It’s a disgrace what they did to it. A disgrace what they did.
It’s beautiful in springtime.
Of course. The dirt is good. All the dead bodies rotting underneath.
Dead, dead, dead.
He had never thought of it that way, but then, his father had not died in Diagon Alley. And she-
Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling.
The blueprints were crisp. Her finger bled when she turned a page too quickly, slicing the tender skin like a knife through butter. She traced the sketches of the boulevard, the twining alleys, the vast expanses of crosshatched space labeled so carefully: gardens: lilies, begonias, tulips and, elsewhere, daffodils, petunias, pansies, daisies; small icons where benches, water fountains, memorial, statue a and b and c and the reflection pool are found. She left behind a red smear on the waxy paper, a trickle of blood along the pathways she had walked as a child, broken into a heap of rubble, charred bone, shattered glass, upturned cobblestone. There was something right about her bloodstains on the blueprints, she thought, with all her brothers dead in that spot, their red hair torched and crisped and skulls scarred by the time their corpses were found.
And maybe not.
In the boardroom, his nipples cold and pointed beneath his thin buttoned shirt. An unusual feeling he dislikes. The other men at the table are twice his age. Hobbled, bent, the scars of a war still fresh on their skins in the wrinkles and spots of age they wear prematurely. These men were kept from the fighting; these men worried and plotted and signed death warrants, and now they plan for the same populace in prosperity. Draco does not understand how he came to number himself among them. He is too tall, too skinny, too angular, too young. His elbows are like icepicks. He has blistered, burnt skin up his left cheek, like a tree withered by disease along a single branch, the rest flowering brightly.
The chairman says: is this not the best method to placate the people, to put to rest their fury and their vengeance, to build a garden and a resting place for all the dead, to finish off this thing, this nightmare, this pestilence, this war?
Later: the letters, the letters, the endless letters in the same scrawled girlish hand decrying the indignity: you have made a frivolous park out of the place where my family was murdered and you have turned war into a picture postcard. The simpler ones: fuck you. And the curses in the envelopes that blistered fingers and singed eyebrows and gave the chairman a frog’s voice and a small forked tail from which hung a sign--disrespecter of corpses, grave defiler, etc.
When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records.
How not to invite the chairman to the wedding, and the other members of the board: watch me marry the woman who has plagued you, not with locusts or flies but unceasing protests against what you perceive as your finest accomplishment, glory in your age rendered old by calamity and conflict, the proper thing to do where all those poor boys came to die.
It’s not that she’s broken, he wants to explain. Yes, in need of some tidying, but not mending. She is a bookshelf overturned or a tablecloth crumpled on the floor. Some smoothing and replacing, some neat hands and careful fingers. A dress with a button hanging loose, yes, but not a button fallen off, rolled into a corner, and forgotten. If she is the button, he is the thread: she needs me, my hands, my touch, my kiss. Mine.
He can’t explain why.
But what if they
are poems or psalms?
This kiss, this kiss, this kiss. An invocation stronger than the naming of the names and the listing of the losses: touch your lips to mine and feel how pliable they are beneath your love, how they give way not in defeat but in something stronger: welcome. A gate you need not disdain. Kiss me, let your breath match mine and let me rest my fingertips upon your bare shoulder and your cheekbone just there and tell me-is this not sweet? Or joyful? Like a sunrise. New and not so unexpected but beautiful all the same.
My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
The new house, then. Better. No city to remind her of the shadows in her past. No more letters: there is the garden in the back to suffice, the garden to replace that other she so despises, a garden filled with fruits and berries, vegetables to be cooked, dirt to clean out of the creases of her palms before she runs her fingers through his hair.
When the blackberries come in, seeds beneath her fingernails when she eats them in the night at the wooden table, the hot summer seems to change her, a bird released from its cage of piled stones. She kisses him with dirty hands. His face is sticky, chest tight with something so joyful it hurts to swallow, squeezes his windpipes, hammers his heart.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton.
She saw his photograph in the newspaper, his heavy-lidded eyes blinking slowly in the black-and-white ink, the Committee for the Beautification and Reconstruction of the Fallen Diagon Alley bordered in curlicues and spirals and labeled neatly by name; the memorial would someday do the same for the dead, that careful lettering of the names-first and middle and last. The newspaper lacked only the framing dates.
She might have called him a traitor when she saw him in the park that was his creation but the way he walked across the paths she knew he could not abide the place any more than she.
And the way he took her hand. She thought she might learn to wind her clocks again, if he asked her somewhere, and set a time to meet.
My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark.
When she was a shadow, had his family been alive they might have asked, why did he bother? And when she was more than a wraith but less than a woman in love they would have laughed. And even now, when she is not the girl who threw curses on the battlefield, only a woman who loves the soil in her fingers and shakes at the sight of wrought-iron gates, they could not have understood, and he would not have had the words to say why he loved her, and he would not have tried even had he had them.
And she would say-somewhere she hovers mid-sea above the waves, beating her wings tirelessly, left behind but too far forward to turn back, white feathers flapping up and down like the wings of a mechanical dragon she saw in a shop as a child, its movement powered by a bellows puffed by a real baby dragon. Magic making machinery turn like clockwork. He is the bellows, her own baby dragon, his breath keeps her aloft.
Kiss me, she would say, if she could say it in words, instead of careful touches and licked lips. I don’t kiss back like I mean it but I might if I knew how.
Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
Tea with breakfast: eggs, toast, ham, preserves from the garden-the garden just out back behind the little house from summer when the plants grew and the flowers awoke-and milk in a creamer the color of rainpuddle with a cool sharp taste when she pours it into her tea.
He comes in with a gust of wind, pulling his gloves from his hands, laying them on the table beside her saucer, and pressing his cold lips into the burrow of her knotted morning hair. He runs fingers slightly damp from sweat inside the cracked leather across her cheek and around the whorl of her ear: okay, okay, then, yes, all right, okay. The chair scrapes back, she feels his arms wrap around her and lift her off her feet for just the barest of moments, feels her tips of her toes brush the wooden floor like a ballerina taking flight, and the point of his chin digging in the top of her head; his hands, still damp, laced across her stomach, under the woolen sweater, fingertips bent just so the nails scratch the skin beside her navel.
Ginny keeps her fists unclenched, her arms out like wings, for balance, for love.
Original Prompt that we sent you:
Briefly describe what you'd like to receive in your fic: A fic set in the first ten years after the war about the changing relationship between a bitter Ginny and a cautious Draco.
The tone/mood of the fic: a bit dark
An element/line of dialogue/object you would specifically like in your fic: a bitter but dependent Ginny, post-war world, ten years
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: below NC-17
Canon or AU? Either
Deal Breakers (anything you don't want?): A sad ending, a world without magic, character bashing, love at first sight, Ginny getting pregnant, Ginny being Draco's [or anyone's] secretary
Rating: R
Possible Spoilers/Warnings:
Summary: Can a heart be put back together?
A/N: The poem is Jack Gilbert’s “Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” This story ignores the end of book 7 and invents an alternate end to the war. Forgive me the many and mixed metaphors, and also if Draco is less than cautious-“quiet” might be a better word.
SPEECHLESS
Tea with breakfast: eggs, toast, ham, preserves from the garden-not the garden but the garden just out back behind the little house from when it was summer and the plants grew and the flowers awoke-and milk in a creamer the color of a church window with a cool sharp taste like winter when he pours it into his tea.
She comes in with a gust of wind, pulling damp mittens from her hands, thrusting cold cold fingers down the neck of his shirt, against the soft spot where his fine blond hair tapers to a point, and kisses him somewhere above the ear: okay, okay, then, yes, of course, sure, yes, cheers, okay. The chair scrapes back, he feels her press her face between his shoulder blades as he stands, feels her sigh, the point of her nose, her hands, still freezing, dug in at his hips, somewhere under the sweater, pressure points from her fingers above the jut of the bone where his trousers hang low. He keeps his hand flat above the wooden tabletop, for balance, for love.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong.
The mugs will go here, she says, hanging them from hooks. They are precarious, he thinks, something will happen to them, they will tumble to the counter and shatter into shards and she will cry; she cannot stand broken things.
Oh, and the extra things-the spatulas and cooking spoons and ladle-in this drawer.
As though he will remember where any of it is, when he has his mind fixed on her all of the time, her quiet glances, her long looks out windows at busy dirty streets and beyond it the iron gate she can’t keep her gaze her from for more than a minute. Even when he draws the blinds.
This new house will be better now. The view is different and her face will no longer shutter itself at night. They will make love less quietly now. She will cry less now. She will miss everybody less now.
We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure.
She is more fragile, that first time in his arms, than he thought anyone could be, ten years on. She told him lightly over the pint in the pub. There’s something missing, she said. Gone with all of them.
Like birds flying over the ocean. Nowhere to land. They must carry on; they cannot turn back; if they stop they are dead. I’m still somewhere in the sea-
She cannot say the word without her lower lip trembling: dead. Dead, like crushed bone; dead, like Harry; dead, like her brothers, like her mother, like the babies she looked after in the nursery on that boulevard that has been rebuilt with gardens and reflection pools and memorials and statues: those we lost too soon we shall not honor too late, the newspaper said.
A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment.
He was surprised to see her sitting on a bench in the park. Shaking violently. It was winter then, too. She had on no coat, only a scarf. Wrapped around and around and around her neck like a noose. She was reading the memorial, reading the names, chiseled deep with magic not half so powerful as that that had sent the bearers of those names to death. Death. Death. Death. A litany from her lips.
I always come here at lunch, she said. I can’t stay away. It’s a disgrace what they did to it. A disgrace what they did.
It’s beautiful in springtime.
Of course. The dirt is good. All the dead bodies rotting underneath.
Dead, dead, dead.
He had never thought of it that way, but then, his father had not died in Diagon Alley. And she-
Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling.
The blueprints were crisp. Her finger bled when she turned a page too quickly, slicing the tender skin like a knife through butter. She traced the sketches of the boulevard, the twining alleys, the vast expanses of crosshatched space labeled so carefully: gardens: lilies, begonias, tulips and, elsewhere, daffodils, petunias, pansies, daisies; small icons where benches, water fountains, memorial, statue a and b and c and the reflection pool are found. She left behind a red smear on the waxy paper, a trickle of blood along the pathways she had walked as a child, broken into a heap of rubble, charred bone, shattered glass, upturned cobblestone. There was something right about her bloodstains on the blueprints, she thought, with all her brothers dead in that spot, their red hair torched and crisped and skulls scarred by the time their corpses were found.
And maybe not.
In the boardroom, his nipples cold and pointed beneath his thin buttoned shirt. An unusual feeling he dislikes. The other men at the table are twice his age. Hobbled, bent, the scars of a war still fresh on their skins in the wrinkles and spots of age they wear prematurely. These men were kept from the fighting; these men worried and plotted and signed death warrants, and now they plan for the same populace in prosperity. Draco does not understand how he came to number himself among them. He is too tall, too skinny, too angular, too young. His elbows are like icepicks. He has blistered, burnt skin up his left cheek, like a tree withered by disease along a single branch, the rest flowering brightly.
The chairman says: is this not the best method to placate the people, to put to rest their fury and their vengeance, to build a garden and a resting place for all the dead, to finish off this thing, this nightmare, this pestilence, this war?
Later: the letters, the letters, the endless letters in the same scrawled girlish hand decrying the indignity: you have made a frivolous park out of the place where my family was murdered and you have turned war into a picture postcard. The simpler ones: fuck you. And the curses in the envelopes that blistered fingers and singed eyebrows and gave the chairman a frog’s voice and a small forked tail from which hung a sign--disrespecter of corpses, grave defiler, etc.
When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records.
How not to invite the chairman to the wedding, and the other members of the board: watch me marry the woman who has plagued you, not with locusts or flies but unceasing protests against what you perceive as your finest accomplishment, glory in your age rendered old by calamity and conflict, the proper thing to do where all those poor boys came to die.
It’s not that she’s broken, he wants to explain. Yes, in need of some tidying, but not mending. She is a bookshelf overturned or a tablecloth crumpled on the floor. Some smoothing and replacing, some neat hands and careful fingers. A dress with a button hanging loose, yes, but not a button fallen off, rolled into a corner, and forgotten. If she is the button, he is the thread: she needs me, my hands, my touch, my kiss. Mine.
He can’t explain why.
But what if they
are poems or psalms?
This kiss, this kiss, this kiss. An invocation stronger than the naming of the names and the listing of the losses: touch your lips to mine and feel how pliable they are beneath your love, how they give way not in defeat but in something stronger: welcome. A gate you need not disdain. Kiss me, let your breath match mine and let me rest my fingertips upon your bare shoulder and your cheekbone just there and tell me-is this not sweet? Or joyful? Like a sunrise. New and not so unexpected but beautiful all the same.
My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
The new house, then. Better. No city to remind her of the shadows in her past. No more letters: there is the garden in the back to suffice, the garden to replace that other she so despises, a garden filled with fruits and berries, vegetables to be cooked, dirt to clean out of the creases of her palms before she runs her fingers through his hair.
When the blackberries come in, seeds beneath her fingernails when she eats them in the night at the wooden table, the hot summer seems to change her, a bird released from its cage of piled stones. She kisses him with dirty hands. His face is sticky, chest tight with something so joyful it hurts to swallow, squeezes his windpipes, hammers his heart.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton.
She saw his photograph in the newspaper, his heavy-lidded eyes blinking slowly in the black-and-white ink, the Committee for the Beautification and Reconstruction of the Fallen Diagon Alley bordered in curlicues and spirals and labeled neatly by name; the memorial would someday do the same for the dead, that careful lettering of the names-first and middle and last. The newspaper lacked only the framing dates.
She might have called him a traitor when she saw him in the park that was his creation but the way he walked across the paths she knew he could not abide the place any more than she.
And the way he took her hand. She thought she might learn to wind her clocks again, if he asked her somewhere, and set a time to meet.
My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark.
When she was a shadow, had his family been alive they might have asked, why did he bother? And when she was more than a wraith but less than a woman in love they would have laughed. And even now, when she is not the girl who threw curses on the battlefield, only a woman who loves the soil in her fingers and shakes at the sight of wrought-iron gates, they could not have understood, and he would not have had the words to say why he loved her, and he would not have tried even had he had them.
And she would say-somewhere she hovers mid-sea above the waves, beating her wings tirelessly, left behind but too far forward to turn back, white feathers flapping up and down like the wings of a mechanical dragon she saw in a shop as a child, its movement powered by a bellows puffed by a real baby dragon. Magic making machinery turn like clockwork. He is the bellows, her own baby dragon, his breath keeps her aloft.
Kiss me, she would say, if she could say it in words, instead of careful touches and licked lips. I don’t kiss back like I mean it but I might if I knew how.
Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
Tea with breakfast: eggs, toast, ham, preserves from the garden-the garden just out back behind the little house from summer when the plants grew and the flowers awoke-and milk in a creamer the color of rainpuddle with a cool sharp taste when she pours it into her tea.
He comes in with a gust of wind, pulling his gloves from his hands, laying them on the table beside her saucer, and pressing his cold lips into the burrow of her knotted morning hair. He runs fingers slightly damp from sweat inside the cracked leather across her cheek and around the whorl of her ear: okay, okay, then, yes, all right, okay. The chair scrapes back, she feels his arms wrap around her and lift her off her feet for just the barest of moments, feels her tips of her toes brush the wooden floor like a ballerina taking flight, and the point of his chin digging in the top of her head; his hands, still damp, laced across her stomach, under the woolen sweater, fingertips bent just so the nails scratch the skin beside her navel.
Ginny keeps her fists unclenched, her arms out like wings, for balance, for love.
Original Prompt that we sent you:
Briefly describe what you'd like to receive in your fic: A fic set in the first ten years after the war about the changing relationship between a bitter Ginny and a cautious Draco.
The tone/mood of the fic: a bit dark
An element/line of dialogue/object you would specifically like in your fic: a bitter but dependent Ginny, post-war world, ten years
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: below NC-17
Canon or AU? Either
Deal Breakers (anything you don't want?): A sad ending, a world without magic, character bashing, love at first sight, Ginny getting pregnant, Ginny being Draco's [or anyone's] secretary