Summary: Neville is at his wits end at the summer's beginning. Stagnation, fantasy and the tall grass in his backyard. Slash.
Rating: PG-13 for implied sex and innuendo.
Pairing: Neville/garden Neville/Draco.
Dandelion
Neville is free. Neville is home. Wouldn't it be nice if Neville were home free?
Neville is seventeen and he is finished. Summer is newborn and just beginning.
Neville comes home from school and without even unpacking he runs to the yard and digs a garden. He sweats until the dust turns to mud where it touches him, and then he spreads the seeds, haphazard and hopeful. Spinach, radish, cauliflower. He says their names in English and then in Latin to cast a spell of permanence to tie them to the earth.
"Spinacia oleracea, brassica oleracea botrytis, Raphanus sativus." And he isn't especially clever to know these names, he reads them right off the seed packets.
In two weeks the few seedlings that survived the bitter June rains have wilted and turned to soggy spinach, swampy radishes with rotten centers and mutant cauliflowers intent on flopping over and melting back into the earth. This flimsy garden lasts for three days of real, healthy sun, just long enough for the rabbits to discover it.
In the end-it has been three weeks since he finished school forever and he still feels like the trailing ellipse that comes after the end--all he has is a neat line of string marking where his garden completely failed to grow.
The ruins of his garden quickly rot and fall in on themselves, returning to wild lawn. Neville has failed as an architect, as a landscaper, as a God of Creation and Growth. Neville has failed. Neville is a failure. He is so sure of this that it is almost tangible. If he could touch his failure it would feel like the smooth cold inside of a refrigerated egg. It is a shell that surrounds him, inescapable and comforting.
He breaks his Gran's beautiful painted glass plate with the red and white tulips on accident when cleaning a shelf one. The next morning trying to glue the plate together, bind it with some spell that must exist but the past seven years of training have vanished from his brain overnight.
Sitting with the broken pieces spread out in front of him like a disassembled jigsaw he begins to count his past mistakes. He estimates himself to be on the very edge of his Gran's patience.
One last misstep and she will tell him to leave. She will tell him to go live with a cousin, get a job, go live at the hospital with his daft parents for all she cares, just leave! He can imagine this explosion vividly, so he plans a thousand escape routes from his hypothetically livid Gran.
The most obvious escape from being thrown out is to make no more mistakes. This sets him on edge and makes him tiptoe and he cannot last long under that strain, he knows. There are other ways out. He could go and live with one of his friends. Though who would have him? He could run away to-but that one fills him with such a bitter yearning that the thought turns foul in his brain. Run away to where? Quick, Neville, think of a place before one final failure tips the balance.
Running away doesn't work, though, not even as a fantasy because he cannot think of any fantastic final destination. Neville is not well traveled but he has seen a few places in his life, and none of them remain bright enough in his memory to get there by Apparating. Neville has been to London, he has seen some the coast and been as far North as Edinburgh, but he cannot imagine living anywhere but here in this ramshackle house with the wild bees in the eaves and the mice in all the walls and Gran in the last room on the upstairs hallway.
Neville is waiting, he is waiting for a butterfly to flap its wings, waiting for something he touches to explode for no reason, waiting for a catalyst.
Neville is waiting for something to pull him up from the depths of murky summer and shake his roots and throw him out of the garden and past the well-marked borders into the Unknown.
Neville is hidden from the watching windows of the house. They are both hidden, though it is so light that is anyone came and stood on the back porch they would be able to see two long and slithery shadows in the grass like snakes.
He is tired waiting for someone-anyone, please, anyone--to lay him down in the tall grass. Neville is tired of waiting for the right anyone, but not too exhausted by waiting to know that whoever it is that fills his interim it should not be /this/ boy. This boy should know nothing of laying.
It is one thing to be practically a squib and a definite failure. It is another thing entirely to moan this name like a caramel prayer, like melted chocolate and marshmallow. There is an entire flavor made up of this name, just the way it sounds, dusty and feathery and thick and weightless all at once, like meringue.
Their borders are marked with fallen-down fences that neither of them should cross. But sometimes the fence has tumbled one way and sometimes it has tumbled the other way so it is hard to tell which side is the right side to stand on.
Neville if he remembers this, or if was told it by someone, but in a foxhunt once, as the fox was chased after by stampeding horses and dogs it climbed a stone fence and every rider leapt over the fence, the whole pack of hounds swerving enthusiastically past the animal, the pursuers over-taking and passing their prey.
He imagines dancing on top of the stone fences that border the ancestral lands, the lands he was planted and grew up in. But the fences are toppled with age, scattered like the long-burned ashes of his Grandfather. There is no room to dance on the tops of them if they have already fallen. And Neville is not as delicate as a fox.
They used to meet on the edge of their grounds, staring at each other across the fence. There was an invisible line they knew they weren't supposed to cross but in the way of children they managed to ignore them in favor of a small world containing only two, two is enough of everything, with two of everything you could re-populate the world.
In their earnest play, Neville never realized that two of this kind could never repopulate anything. But 'earnest play' stopped when they were ten.
Neville is sure that someone found them out, that someone barred their doors and underlined that wall with spells and warnings. But by then the fences were half tumbled, the boundary-lines were scuffed.
The thing he doesn't want to face is that his playmate abandoned him in favor of the rest of the world, outside of their covert summers.
Their abrupt parting was that summer of Neville's trip to the city and the terrifying unknown. He wanted to come home, not climb onto that train. But he had to, he had to stand tall and be brave and pretend he was older and stronger and wasn't going to forget his head next. He would be as mighty as a piled stone wall, not tumbled and haphazard and quaking. That lasted about two minutes, and then they met on the train. Neville had been profoundly snubbed in front of two bigger boys by the one person he trusted to share his miniature duplicite world with.
The grass leaves red marks on his bare legs that last for hours. But he is not the only one who limps away covered in marks. He leaves grubby fingerprints on the boy's back, on his bright white shoulders. Neville thinks only time the sun touches Draco is when he comes to Neville's garden.
The yellow head bends and bobs like a dandelion. The weeds growing in Neville's garden are almost as tall as he is, now. The dandelions are wild and ferocious with their saw-toothed leaves and they grow at the roots of everything, finding enough sun, their yellow heads serving as beacons for any handy ray.
Draco is not a yellow rose or a perfect yellow tulip or a crested yellow orchid or anything of long heritage and a cultivator's voracious desire. In the end, Draco is just a dandelion, wild and tow-headed and saw-toothed, nails and teeth.
It begins to rain when they are in the midst, so that when they are finished-they will never really be finished with each other, after all those years of school torment Neville knows this as he knows his own eggshell-they are covered with a slick second skin of rain, cold slimy wet covering their hot sweat and making them shiver as they rise break apart, swimming for air like drowning penguins.
Neville sits in his ruined garden and wonders how anyone could expect children to thrive in old soil, too rich, ruinous earth that might make a plant shoot into the air, only to sicken and die of sweetness and too much. He is smothered. What he wants is air and light and wings to rise above it all, oh to be a parrot, brilliantly feathered rising from his cage and flapping into the loose sky.
But Neville does not dose himself with what he needs. His needed medicine is bitter and frightening and feverish, it would require him to pull himself up from the known, the easy. His life is falling into the dangerous patterns of summer, wet, roiling stagnation.
It is easy to dangle his legs off of the porch, rooted to this place as the weeds are rooted in his garden and as Draco is rooted to his family obligations. Neville can almost understand the reasons why this cannot be. Almost, because he understands why is shouldn't be, why other people wouldn't believe it, but he knows that it is, and they can't change that. Not with all the poison in the world, a dandelion can survive anything.
Here he can weight down with Draco's whiteness, leave muddy mars and red scratches and the pucker-sized bruises where mouth sucks flush. They say very few things when they come to the grass. There is very little to say. They say very few friendly things at all. Their first world where everything was two is long past, they make do with this small world where they make up only half of anything when they come together. They lie against the earth and flap like limp butterflies, fresh and wet with metamorphosis. They lie (they do lie) and they flap their wings like butterflies, hoping to cause a storm that will cause a shipwreck that will bring about the end of the world around them so they can return to that place where there is two of everything. Where Draco and Neville can recreate the world in their own image.
One of the few things they have spoken of is the War that Is, and how when it is over, when they are older, the world will be an entirely new place. Neville does not speak about this, he listens about this. Draco talks of a weedless world, a garden that is empty of all but the pristine roses and delicate tulips. Neville imagines himself as a dock root in the new garden, imagines Draco as the dandelion that he is and he knows that if (when) someone finds their tall grass and tells the new Gods of the Garden there will be no Neville and no Draco in this pristine garden either. This is why he listens and does not talk.
This is why he pins Draco to the ground hard and makes him flap like a frantic butterfly skewered with a steel pin, though it is hardly a steel pin that presses them together.
They are panting in desperation and digging into each other, legs twisted, ankles at odd angles, both of them flapping, neither of them colorful birds, both of them incapable of pulling free until they are spent and gasping and aching.
This is their summer.
Neville feels himself sinking into the earth, deeper into the mire.