1.
Cold. He was always cold here. He couldn't recall if it had been so cold the last time, but last time his mind had been occupied by… other thoughts. He shivered. The Dementors might have been gone, but his stay was no less uncomfortable. The food was the same, the guards were the same, and his clothing - such as he had been given - was the same as it ever was. He realized that he felt the same despair even without the presence of sinister, emotion-sucking creatures.
So, all things considered, there was little more that could go wrong.
With nothing more to do than think and relive the past, it was no wonder that many of the prisoners had begun to go mad. He might count himself among them, but how does one know if one is going mad? Would that not belie the definition of madness? Could there be some kind of test he could perform on himself to find out how mad he was? He heard his own harsh croak of laughter, echoing loudly in the stone cell, and figured he shouldn't allow his mind to travel down that path any further.
He huddled on his pallet bed, pulling his knees in against his chest and wrapping the thin Azkaban standard blanket about his increasingly bony shoulders. After his first foray in prison, his robes at home had hung on him loosely, but his frame was only mildly leaner than before. Now, his tailored shirts and neatly hemmed trousers would be comically big on his skeletal form. If he ever returned home to wear them. He knew he hadn't regained any weight while the Dark Lord resided in his home. How could he eat with that - that presence in his personal space? And now that he had been returned to prison, where they were fed meagrely only twice a day, he continued to shrink. He would soon be able to count his ribs, which on the upside, would be a novel way to spend his time.
He refused to dwell on what he had left behind at home. A wife, frustrated by how his misdeeds had left him with few options and no way out, resentful of how he had brought her and their son with him. A son, disappointed and disgusted with the father he had once worshipped. He considered the Mark, now fading on his forearm. The boy had one to match it. If he could go back in time, and live it all over again, he would have done anything to prevent his son from being Marked.
A fit of coughing took him, and he could do nothing more than curl in on himself and ride it out. Most of the prisoners were sick. What with the ambient temperature, the lingering dampness, and the close quarters, it was unavoidable. And what healer in their right mind would be willing to travel to Azkaban to treat the sad remains of the Dark Lord's Death Eater army?
His health was failing and he feared that he would soon be too sick and weak to do anything but lie on his pallet. He couldn't let it come to that. He still had pride. He refused to die inside the walls of this terrible place. He stared, unseeing, at the stone wall in front of him and thought of escape.
The prisoners were permitted to stretch their legs for an hour a day in the loosely named "exercise yard" in the middle of the building. While he was still healthy enough to move about on his own, he took full advantage of that hour to walk and meditate on escape. He had no tools, no utensils, nothing readily available to use to tunnel out. He had little opportunity to acquire anything, since all prisoners were chained and manacled when not in their cells. They took no chances here.
He was ruminating on this problem as he walked the perimeter of the yard, his chains making a rhythmic jingling that was almost pleasant to the ear. He frowned at the earth in front of his feet. That's when he saw it - shining in the brief smattering of sunlight that had leaked through the constant cloud cover. A broken chain link. Metal. His eyes lit up with the fire of determination.
He glanced surreptitiously at the other current occupants of the yard. 4 guards and 11 other prisoners, none of them paying specific attention to him. He kept moving as before, dropping quickly to a knee over the link and tucking it hastily into his palm. He smoothly rose and continued walking, taking another look around. No one seemed to have noticed what he had done.
After he had been returned to his cell, he immediately crouched on his pallet and examined his new treasure. It was an ordinary chain link, probably from someone else's manacled and chained hands and feet, less than 10cm long. It appeared to have been bent nearly straight by sheer force, which was impressive on its own merit, but more impressive was the fact that it hadn't been detected by any of the charms the guards used to locate contraband items or forbidden communication which the prisoners might leave in the yard. He wasn't about to investigate his good luck any further, knowing that time was not on his side.
He needed to find a weak point. The best weak point would be near what passed for a window in his cell. Water often found its way in there, so he suspected that he could probably find his way out in the same area. He got down on all fours and used one end of the chain link to meticulously prod the cracks between the stones, beginning at the junction of the floor and the wall below the window.
It took him countless days to find a weak spot. He had no idea how much time had actually passed, but he did know that his cough was getting worse. He worked at enlarging the cracks in the mortar around one stone - the only stone he had located in the outside wall that had significant weak points. The winter storms on one side of the wall, joining forces with his pitiful efforts on the other side were slowly loosening the stone from its position.
More time passed. He paid it no mind. His fingernails became worn down as he became impatient with his lack of progress using the chain link and began scraping at the gathering dust at the edges of the stone using his fingers until they bled. He worked long into the night and was awake at the first hint of grey light each morning.
The first time the stone moved, he thought it was his imagination. He thought his mind was finally beginning to crack. Then he pushed on it again and the rock slid against its neighbors with a jarringly loud sound. He froze, convinced that a guard must have heard it, but after a heart-poundingly anxious 2 minute wait, he allowed himself to relax for the first time in many, many days.
The wind howled that night, and he couldn't have been more grateful. He redoubled his efforts, attacking the wall with his precious bit of metal, enlarging the gaps between the rocks and pushing with all of his pitiful might. Confident that no one would be able to distinguish the sounds of the rock sliding out from the storm battering the island, he worked until the clouds began to clear and the first light of morning stole out from beneath them.
His cough was now so severe, he could hardly draw breath without succumbing to a coughing fit. He forced himself to choke down the food that appeared in a plate on the floor of his cell and gulped down his entire vessel of water. If he kept working, he would be able to attempt a break tonight. For the moment, though, he would sleep.
He tossed and turned fitfully, unable to catch more than a few minutes of restless sleep before being startled awake by his own coughing. With a sigh, he gave up on rest, and returned to his task. The faster he was able to free the stone, the easier it would be to make his escape under cover of darkness that night.
By the time darkness fell, he knew he had a raging fever and was well on his way to delirium, but he could not stop, obsessed with the idea of escape. He carved and dug with the link and his fingers until they were raw and bleeding. At last, the stone was mobile enough for him to ease it from its place with minimal sound. He pushed and wiggled it until it dropped out of sight, leaving him a window of space that would not have been sufficient had he not lost so much weight. At his current size, he would just fit.
He peered out. The lightning of the night's storm lit up the roiling seas some distance below him and he quailed momentarily. But no, he could not die here. He refused to die a prisoner. If he could control but one aspect of his destiny, he positively refused to die in Azkaban. It would be better to drown in the raging sea than in his dank cell. He nodded to himself. Yes, whatever he would find out there would be better than being trapped in here.
With that, he took as deep a breath as he could manage and slipped through the hole, into the darkness below.
The black water closed over his head and he was momentarily disoriented. The water flung him about mercilessly. He felt his legs glance off some sharp rocks that must have been near the island. Involuntarily, he let some of his air go in a flurry of bubbles. Fortunately, he could re-orient himself by following the trail of bubbles toward the surface, where he gasped for another breath of air.
He knew he couldn't tread water for long, so he scanned the shore of the island he had just left, hoping there would be a crevasse or cove he could take refuge in. There was none. The island prison of Azkaban was surrounded by nearly sheer cliffs that descended sharply into the sea with no actual shoreline in sight.
This is it, he thought. This is how Lucius Malfoy leaves this world. Drowning like a rat.
He was about to give up when he was swept against a solid piece of flotsam. He struck his head on whatever it was and saw stars, but he managed to reach an arm out and grab onto it. Regaining his senses, he saw that it was an enormous chunk of driftwood. He thanked whatever deity happened to be looking out for him at that moment, and pulled himself onto it, wrapping his limbs securely around it, hoping against all odds to wash up on a shore where the wizarding population was sparse.
He regretted not bringing his blanket with him so he could tie himself to the wood, but it was too late now. He would just have to hang on and hope that his paltry strength outlasted the storm. The roar of the sea and wind swept around him and tossed him madly about, pulling him under one moment and throwing him high atop the waves the next. He slipped in and out of consciousness almost with the rhythm of the sea, his feverish delirium mixing with his lack of sleep to produce a horrifying half-dream landscape - a hellish world of water and lightning.