Written for prompt 12 at barefootboys on lj
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There were no windows in Azkaban.
He couldn't tell whether it was day or night, morning or afternoon, sunny or raining. Sometimes he would imagine things, things he didn't quite understand. He thought maybe they were memories, because there were sudden, alien emotions sometimes, stirring in his chest and his stomach before the dementors could take them away. He couldn't really tell though, and after that brief, shining moment they would be gone, and he would sit in the darkness once more, wondering if it had even happened, or if he'd imagined that too.
He couldn't even really remember what the sun was like. There was one of those memory/imaginings; that the sun was blazing down and there was bright green grass and a tree and a boy, whose face he couldn't see, who laughed a laugh he didn't remember and called him a name he wasn't sure was his. Everything was blurry and even though the sun was there it didn't have a feel and neither did the grass or the boy, and it made him frustrated and miserable. He supposed that was why the dementors allowed it. He knew that there was happiness there, but he couldn't reach it, couldn't even remember how to.
There were other memories, clearer, that they allowed, where he was running, always running, the ground slipping away beneath him. He ran with four legs instead of two, and so did the boy – he knew it was the boy, who he didn't really know – but the feelings were different, deeper, more confusing. Sometimes he knew he was happy, because the boy's smell was there at his side and they were together and the night was still full of opportunity, but it wasn't happy like he thought he remembered. Other times he couldn't tell, he felt things he didn't understand. He didn't understand anything. His thoughts led in circles and his feelings weren't there and at times he would lie on the cold floor of his cell just willing things to make sense. Most of the time he couldn't remember his name, and sometimes he forgot where he was and thought he was other places, and mostly the boy was there, places he wasn't sure he'd been but felt real, realer than anything else did in his tiny square of darkness with no windows.