A/N: The song for this chapter is called Memorial, and it is a music piece only (there are no lyrics), so I wrote this stand-in freeverse. Hope you like it; it was my first :)
A s o f t e s t rain
The world's awash
But on the night c r e e p s
Dusk fades (slowly)
The moon lurks (faint)
Behind the clouded sky
And I
l
i
f
t
my face
To the Heavens
As I stand within (my) Hell
I will b-r-e-a-k free
xXx
He collapsed against the door. A crumbled statue in a city of ancient rubble. Cold and empty marble, fashioned in the likeness of a figure long forgotten. A wrecked and forsaken piece of art, its meaning buried deep beneath the sands of time.
His chest felt empty. As void and dark as the Manor. And the silence within him was more profound than the anger that had raged within him moments before. The room around him lay in ruins—the fragments of its holdings strewn across the plush carpet like victims of a gruesome war. Perhaps they were. But the raging fires of remorseless fury had long wavered and burned out, and in their place was left a barren town of ash and grief. His heart felt blackened by its own reckless flames and, with his very last vestiges of ambition, he had firmly shut the heavy drapes against the coming of the sun. Such a symbol of hope was too much irony to be permitted to fall so gracefully upon his battlefield.
His mind was blank. The thoughts trapped beneath fallen rafters. Trapped and no longer hoping for rescue. Resigned.
Mechanically he opened the door and stumbled into the hall before realizing he had no destination. A single thought flitted through his mind. Shower. He imagined the water cascading over his shoulders; the ashes of his body smouldering beneath its spray.
But the water didn't burn through his flesh. It didn't drown him beneath its weight. It didn't smother him within its thick steam. Rather, life crept through his veins as though the marble of his making were being slowly chipped away, and the brush of air upon his skin were bringing his heart back to life. And Draco Malfoy cried, his tears mingling briefly with the cleansing rush of water before he halted them firmly.
The time for being stone had drained ever so slowly from its hourglass. The time for being weak was long past. Perhaps, he thought, it was time for the snake to emerge from the dungeons and step bravely into the sun.
And so slowly, so slowly, he edged towards the tall window. The sun's rays crashed into his body as he forced himself to throw back the heavy curtains and the dust that had long blanketed the drapes spun into a filtering cloud, hazing through the air around him. Carefully he unlatched the ancient window, and swung it gently open. Fresh air blew into the room, breathing over his dripping hair and filling his lungs with the taste of freedom.
Time.