Stone Whispers by scheherezhad

Rating: PG

Summary: Draco reflects.

Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, no money is being made, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Author's notes: Something a little angsty that was inspired by a quote from the movie Rebecca (bonus points if you find the quote). Slight slash implications.

We should be somewhere warm. It's alwasy so cold here; I keep charms on my clothing and on my bed because I always feel the chill. I want to warm my fingers on your skin. We should go somewhere mild, an island, perhaps. Down near the equator where it never gets cold.

I should be making violent love to you behind a palm tree. The reflections of the leaves would make your eyes the legendary green they never were.

You should be healthy and tan, out under the sun. Not sheltered, protected, behind walls and spells...and hells, I want to see you in my arms, laughing, smiling, shining once again, the golden boy of our world. You weren't so golden the last time I saw you. You looked sick and sad and tired, in need of the kind word I couldn't give. I regret not reaching out to wipe that smudge of dirt from your cheek.

Instead, I held myself rigid and uncaring like always, wanting to touch you all the while. But what is want compared to habit? One can want to stop overeating, but the habit of a lifetime doesn't fall so easily aside when confronted by emotion. If my habit gave in so easily to want, you would have seen my sheets long ago, or I yours. Or perhaps no sheets at all and we fall against the wall, so wrapped up in one another we don't notice the whispers of the stones.

They do whisper, you know. I learned to listen down in the dungeons, hearing the secrets they told of past and present, learned to ask them for things I wanted to know. How do you think I always managed to find you when you were getting into trouble? It wasn't until much later that I realized I'd been asking the wrong things.

I should have been asking about you, not your location or how to catch you breaking rules. The stones would have told me anything I wanted to know about you, but I didn't want to know then, not until they wouldn't talk to me anymore, sometimes couldn't but mostly wouldn't. Hisses and taunts and "traitor" followed me in those later days of hiding. When I neared you then, they filled my head until I thought my eyes would burst, and I had to leave. Finally, I left for good and hoped maybe the way you looked at me from the window meant you cared.

The day I last saw you, in that cave, you looked at me like that again. I couldn't look back; there was no time to touch you, or I would lose everything. I made myself leave without looking back, even when you said my name - my name, not the family name - for the first time. But I never saw you again.