'What a night for a dance, you know I'm a dancing machine.
With a fire in my bones and the sweet taste of kerosene,
I get lost in the night so high I don't want to come down.
To face the loss of the good thing that I had found.'
'In the dark of the night I hear you calling my name.
With the hardest of hearts I still feel full of pain.
So I drink and I smoke and I ask if you're ever around,
Even though it was me who drove us right in the ground.'
'And I told myself boy way to go, and it rained so hard it felt like snow,
Everything came tumbling down on me.
In the back of the woods in the dark of the night,
In the paleness of the old moonlight, everything just felt so incomplete.'
'Just know it was you all along who had a hold of my heart,
But the demon and me were the best of friends from the start.'
Revelry – Kings of Leon.
Dreaming of Revelry
His fingers gripped the edge of the balcony so that his pale knuckles turned the colour of bone. He put his cigarette to his dry lips and took a long, suffered drag before bowing his head and letting the cool breeze rustle his hair. The fine blonde strands had been parted neatly by his mother at the start of the night, but not anymore.
He tugged his bowtie loose and exhaled a ragged breath, expelling a stream of silver smoke that surrounded him with the kind of comfort offered by Satan. When the young man – yes, a man; no one could experience what he had and remain a boy – opened his troubled eyes, the floor inevitably swam at his feet. He raised his head to focus on the full moon.
There was a fire roaring in his veins; a fire that strengthened the tight knot of emotions that consumed him until, it seemed, he felt nothing. So much pain, he was numb.
He stayed like that for a long time; broken and lost, clutching the balcony because his life depended on it.
In the cavernous brightly lit hall behind him, guests had taken to the dance floor, but the sound of clinking cutlery and revelry was a dull roar in his conscious. It was the enticing whisper of the woods which surrounded Malfoy Manor that caught Draco. The way the tops of the ancient trees let themselves sway in the gentle wind. Those huge wise figures that had stood for millennia and seen a millennia's worth of horror. They smelt of antique, dignity, fresh water and wisdom. And when they whispered, they sounded like her.
If she were here, he would be holding her close and swaying on the dance floor, not alone. She would tease him with that enticing quirk to her lips. He would smile and breathe her in.
But she wasn't here, and he was alone.
The darkness of the night covered him like a blanket, but it did nothing to warm him. And he wondered: if he had such a hard heart, how did she have the strength to break it so viciously? But of course, it was Draco who had driven them to the ground. Hermione had never done anything wrong. She was always perfect.
His jaw gritted and his gaze fell to his left arm. Beneath the deceptive stateliness of his suit, Draco knew the Dark Mark festered. His thoughts darkened. Yes; the demon and he were best friends from the start.
Detached, he let his cigarette slip from his white fingers and watched its spiral descent to the trimmed grass three stories below, shedding white ash as it fell.
And that's when the rain began. It beat against his back with a furious hatred that he bore humbly and cut his face out of the sheer cruelty that he deserved.
As the cold possessed him, his fingers clenched, as did his heart. Because in the paleness of the old moonlight, everything felt so incomplete.
Finis.