Downpour
She wonders sometimes whether apple pie tastes different in sunlight or whether it's just with him. Bright May skies are a growing sign of summer's railroad creeping closer and she props her spindled legs up in front of her. Daisies tickle and dandelions itch and she craves buttercups and crocuses and shattered tuneless trumpets once again but they are now a thing of the unreachable past and intangible future; paintings on the backs of eyelids half-closed in inimitable ecstasy, of once upon a time and then.
And then.
And then what?
And then him.
"Daph?"
She smiles, with sugar mice teeth and cherry drop lips, and watches him tuck his sketchbook away, his subject gone, his muse asleep for another day. He pats the ground and she swings towards him because when his muse sleeps, she lives. She lives for him and has done for so much longer than she cares to admit. Coffee shop fairytales turned into real life, his muse sleeps alone but hers is alive as long as she is with him – dusty bookshops, stale bread and a mattress on the floor, she feels her imagination running and unravelling and growing and blossoming. Some would scoff – her sister, her mother among them – but she holds her head high and presses quill to parchment, pen to paper, and knows that he has saved her, and she him.
Strong arm around pale bared shoulders, she curls against him, hand pinning her place in her book as he kisses the crown of her head. Geraniums and Busy Lizzies and tulips from Rotterdam burst into life in front of them, brilliant and bright and brushed away by passers-by but not them. Passing life by is not their job. They record the slightest thing in words and pictures and to some they are merely strokes of ink on throwaway paper but they are more, and those who have complete understanding know that because if Daphne did not write, she would not have seen Dean work, and if Dean did not draw, he would not have seen Daphne read, and so they owe their happiness to disposability and imagination and the muse that they both now know comes from the other.
"It's a beautiful day," he murmurs into pomegranate waves. She quirks her lips up and eyes rise to blueberry skies and she shakes her head beneath his lips.
"It'll rain tomorrow."
His chuckle like a seaside breeze, she winces lightly as his breath trickles down her face. He kisses the crown of her head as she tilts it to see him.
"Always the optimist."
"Always watch the weather. Sunshine and showers," and they lull into silence once again because there is little else to add besides the lingering promise of watching a London downpour fall around them.
-::-
Suns set and stars rise and they do not move a muscle. The grass has dampened, and her dress – the same shade of pale peach that she blushes when she sees him – is home to yellowing brushstrokes that she thinks of not as stains but as enhancement, merely to the detriment of the opinion of everyone else, and everyone else doesn't matter. His fingers glide over them. He calls her silly with a laugh of water rumbling over a cliff face; she shudders. He makes her feel so safe, so young – for she may only be twenty-three but she feels old beyond her years, wrinkled lines from screwed up paper beginning to mirror on her forehead – and she wants nothing more than to stay there forever.
"Hungry?" he murmurs, twisting thick fingers through strawberry curls. She leans into him. She wants to shake her head, a story of forever – undisturbed, perfectly composed forever – lurking around them. Her hand twitches. Pale pink quill between tissue paper fingers, it would dance across parchment without much more than a moment of thought. Unfolding, unravelling, enrapture itself of looping l's and perfect o's and sharpened v's and e's which change from word to word, letter to letter. She wants her forever, but her stomach churns and throat is dry and although she wishes dearly otherwise, necessity to exist comes ahead of necessity to live.
"A little."
He pulls her up as though she is a doll and he a girl who believes it to be as breakable as a newborn baby. She holds herself firm, firm and straight backed encircled in arms which squeeze her and she feels she might never escape, and that's okay. More than okay, it's right.
She isn't quite sure how the picnic basket and tartan rug end up in her hands. She doesn't know how she has found herself leaning on metallic green railings, tapping tired fingers on grass-marked elbows. She doesn't really mind that he makes her lose moments of her life because if he is not there, it does not really matter.
"Classy," he mutters through a mouthful of food, wiping his lips and grinning. His eyes light up, even in orange streetlamps and fragmented moonlight and flashing headlights, once or twice. Foot propped up on a cold brick wall, she looks up to him. Fish and chips and a bottle of something Muggle between them – diet, because she doesn't insist but he knows – and plastic forks on polystyrene trays should creak and screech and yet they don't. They might, somewhere else, three months, three years, three weeks ago. Not now. Now the only noise she hates is the silence when there is no heavy breathing, no waterfall of laughter, no voice that might be the sound of love itself.
Screeching brakes and nails on a blackboard and the pop of a balloon, children crying – none of them hurt, none of them are important because sound brings things to life. It brings love to life, and they neither know nor need to speak of it because she hears heavy breathing, and he hears whispering sighs, and words cannot express it – and so they don't.
A/N: I really want to dedicate not just this chapter but the whole story to Marina (marinahill) at HPFF, whose ridiculous level of support for this has kept me with it. I hope I don't disappoint you.
Next update may be a while off as I've got horrible writer's block on this.
