Chapter Text
His prison cell was damp from the lingering cold of winter long passed; the stone wall jagged and unforgiving. Outside, the black blur of dementors flew by his cell, bringing with them bone-chilling emptiness.
He lied sideways on the floor, wide awake as sleep once again eluded him. There was a thin layer of dirty hay underneath him, of what was supposed to be his bed. As he gazed at the sliver of the darkened sky visible from the tiny iron-barred window, his inner left forearm tingled in phantom pain. He ignored the ghost-like burn; knew that it was his mind playing tricks on him, a reminder of the sins he wasn’t allowed to forget no matter how much he wished to sometimes.
Tomorrow marked the three hundred days he spent in Azkaban, awaiting the promised trial but that was two hundred and twenty days ago. Months later, even the prison guards had grown bored of him. No longer they found amusement in beating an unresponsive piece of trash like him within an inch of his life, taunting him with barbed insults, all in the name of their self-righteous retribution and justice. Whether deserving or undeserving, he accepted it all without uttering a single sound.
The trial would be a fair one, they said, but what was the use of a trial anyway, when everyone already had a single consensus opinion about him: the youngest Death Eater in history.
As he curled himself smaller, trying in vain to ward off the chilling misery the dementors brought with their close proximity, a silver light broke through the thick thunderclouds, like a silver lining to the irony of his life. Oh, what a mess he had become.
He supposed, as all stories went, his also started on that one fateful day when he was eleven. Or should he say: it had ended right from the start, from a single decision that was not his to make but had cemented his doom nonetheless.