Something very beautiful happens to people when their world falls apart. They watch as the pieces fall, desperately trying to grab a handful of shards in an attempt to fit them back together again. Some might never realize how fruitless it is to struggle; for others, a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.

In the end, we'll all become stories. Make it a good one, yeah Scorps?

Scorpius Malfoy could not remember the last time he had a visitor. Maybe it was months. Or weeks. Or days. He could not tell in this aphotic, dank space that he grudgingly calls home. Home was a language that he had forgotten how to speak as he ran from people dressed in war and blood, armed with lighters and matchsticks ready to set the entire world aflame. Home used to have a heartbeat. It still does, but he could no longer locate it.

"Mr. Malfoy?"

His attention returned to the woman standing by the door of his cell. There were precisely four bars to her left and six bars to her right, he noted. Her face, which was framed within the space of two greasy metal bars, stood out from the darkness.

"Mr. Malfoy, the Potter family has asked us to inform you that Lily Potter has passed away yesterday." Those wretched words tumbled out of her mouth like tear drops, splashing itself against the grimy dark floors of the cell.

Scorpius let the words curl itself into little tongues of regret and guilt at his feet, watching as it consumed his entire being. It lapped at his fingers and crept up his trembling hands, hands that had memorized the texture of Lily Potter's hand, the way her back arched into a tapered crescent moon, the vibrant red locks that they had tried too many times to bury themselves into. Gone. All gone. How smoothly it forms in the mouth. How lightly it falls off the tongue. How violently it dismantles the heart.

He did not feel himself collapse, grating an elbow and his head against the jaggard parts of the stone walls.

You remind me of mornings. When you step outside and the air somehow feels fresher and crisper than during any other time of the day.

Her words echoed in his head, bouncing off the walls of his skull. They were slamming itself against his eardrums until he was drowning in reverberations. Leave me.

"Are-are you alright, Mr. Malfoy?"

Leave me.

The Malfoy scion stared at the ridges of the wall, it seemed to shape its surface to contour the features of Lily Potter's face. He blinked and the wall was back. Still the thought of her lifeless form crept back into his mind's eye, in a peaceful slumber oblivious that decay awaited to feast on her. He pushed that vile thought out of mind and opened his eyes.

Crawling to the metal bar nearest to him, he peered at it like a doctor observing bacteria.

One. Two. A new scratch. Three.

By the time he got to two hundred and fifty, he forgot his visitor.

Somewhere across the strip of water separating Azkaban from the mainland, a girl was preparing to leave the country.

She had said her last goodbye. Or tried to. The word was stuck to the roof of her mouth, much like the way her tongue felt too heavy to be lifted.

Fighting the urge to turn back, she wiped her tears hastily with the back of her hand and continued to trudge forward. She liked mornings, they always seemed so crisp and fresh. She took a deep breath and grabbed the glowing crushed can that had been left intentionally for her, a Portkey to a new home.

A new beginning.

It sounded like a promise.