Hollow Man by Rumors
Disclaimer: Not mine, just borrowing.
He padded from his bedroom to the bathroom. He didn't like looking in the mirror anymore. What he saw wasn't right. Dolph remembered being a young man with barely any hair on his face. Good looking, fit, sane. The thing staring back at him was not him. It couldn't be. He had to shave regularly, something he never remembered having to do. And he had gotten so thin, so sick. Maybe, maybe he could have put up with the physical changes if only he could have done away with the way his eyes stared back into him. Asking, prodding, taunting, gloating, jeering. It made his head hurt. What was that phrase? "Look into the abyss and it looks back." That's what had happened. He had looked for so long into the emptiness that he had become the emptiness. It had taken everything that was him and left a shell, full of its own nothingness.
Nothing… nothing… nothing… empty. Full of half memories and whispers of feeling. Faint traces that he could hold onto for a short while and believe that yes, he loved Bast still. He loved Bella. He still believed in his Lord with all the fervor of a convert. Then he would lose his grip and fall back into himself. The nothingness. The void.
That was what Azkaban did. He turned the shower on and got in. It ate away at you. Bit by bit it took and took. To survive he got small, curled up inside his own mind, surrounded himself with thoughts and formulas and facts. But to go from big to small you had to cut away everything you didn't need. So he fed them. Fed them everything he dared lose. And then hid. Then they left him alone. He had tricked them. Dolph remembered laughing when they had stopped coming. It wasn't because it was funny. It was because that was the only thing he could do. He had laughed in that strange mechanical way of someone who knows what they have to do, but only because they read the manual. Alone… he had been alone. The water washed over him. He liked being clean. Azkaban was so dirty.
So he thought, and thought. And he didn't like where those thoughts went. Murderer! Criminal! Monster! They whispered and caressed. Nasty, awful thoughts. He had done what was right. Didn't those idiots see that? No. Never did see. Never could see. His hands clenched in fists. Jaw muscles twitched. He wasn't those things. He was Rodolphus Lestrange. Their better. They were monsters. Right? Yes. No. He was. Monster. Evil thing. Bad thing. Got caught. Shamed the family. No! He grabbed hold of his breathing, forcing himself to be calm. It was a trick he had learned. Don't get worked up or they'll come and drain you dry. And if you were drained already, they could still feed off your misery, which was easy enough to feel in their presence even for the prisoners who had been there the longest.
He turned off the shower and stepped out. The mirror was fogged up. Good. He automatically dried himself and pulled on a pair of finely made pajamas. Stepping out into the sitting room he grabbed the pile of essays he had to grade. There was one good thing about this job and it was that he could assign the students enough work to keep him busy.
As he sat down, quill in hand, he idly wondered if someone hit him hard enough, would he echo?
Author's notes: Yes, Dolph is a teacher at Hogwarts. In an RP I belong to the DE got pardoned (Don't you just love Fudge? I know I do.) and so a few of them are working at the school. T'is amusing, really. Not really important to this short fic, but I didn't want to leave people confused because of the next to last two lines.