 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||
 |
 |
|
||||
 |
|
|||||
 |
|
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Survival
The first night he screamed himself hoarse. His mind fractured, torn apart by decaying fingers. The Dementors gathered silently around his cell until he passed out from exhaustion.
Later, he settled into a rhythm. Food. Sleep. Mail call. At first he appreciated the letters (carefully insipid and heavily coded as they were), and the Dementors flocked around him. He soon learned to remain impassive.
As time passed, things took on a kind of heightened clarity. His mind seemed to uncloud. His thoughts stretched and thinned, and his will hardened. Azkaban was changing him, sloughing off the superfluous layers of his psyche one by one. The cold and damp seeped into his bones.
His memories of the outside world did not fade, but they shrank, as if seen through the large end of a telescope. A poised, well-dressed man with a beautiful wife and a promising son, an important man who used his money shrewdly and bent politicians to his will. None of it meant anything.
He began develop a kind of respect for Bellatrix's unconcealed savagery. Bella knew what she really was, under the layers of pettiness and civility. Azkaban had torn through her soul like purifying fire.
How long had it been? Days? Weeks? Longer? There was no way to mark the passage of time. It was always dark here. The meals came irregularly, and the food was always the same. Truthfully, he didn't mind.
He waited. Eventually, he stopped thinking about escape. His confidence in the Dark Lord did not waver, but the matter no longer held his attention. His mind contracted to a single point, a hard kernel of cold sanity. He survived, and that gave him a kind of quiet, brutal satisfaction that the Dementors seemed to find unpalatable. He could scarcely feel them anymore. He waited.