Disclaimer: It's JKR's set of characters that I am borrowing here, and the inspiration for this one is a little film called the Shawshank redemption. Any similarities you see therein are not claimed as my own, and seeing as how I get paid in reviews no profit is made on my part.
A/N: Just a three or four part plot bunny I stumbled upon to tide you all over until I bat the muses around the head a few times as I try to write the next chapter of OYE: OOTP. Harry isn't the boy who lived here, but he is a wizard and there is a magical world, thankfully devoid of dementors, Voldemort, and his flunkies, and instead filled with more subtly evil individuals as you'll see inside.
'''''''''''''''''''
I've made a lot of stupid mistakes in my life, and one in particular I made when I was 20 years old haunted me for more than seventy years. Prison teaches you a lot about yourself after all, but it seems the most important lessons I learned while behind bars, were taught to me by one man.
I could tell from the day he was brought here in 1998 that Harry Potter wasn't the usual type of new prisoner brought around to Azkaban prison. His eyes weren't filled with the fear that typical newbies were, rather his eyes held more than a bit of determination, and something not seen often inside the walls, hope.
His story was a lot like the one the rest of us would recite if asked, he had been innocent of the crimes he was convicted for. Killed his newlywed wife and friend when he found them in bed together, a crime of passion he said the judge had called it, of course if you asked Harry he would claim that passion or compassion were obviously foreign things to the magistrate.
He never really told us what he did for a living, but from the bits he did share we figured he was a banker of some sort, and he told us once that he worked with the goblins a lot.
At any rate the years passed as they did in Azkaban, Harry settled into the routine of prison life as each of us traded what little we could to make our own personal lives a little bit easier to bear. Of course, for Harry that was a relative term if I ever heard one.
Warden Cornelius Fudge had taken a rather active interest in Harry once he found out the truth of his checkered past. It was hard enough trying to scratch out an existence in Azkaban, but with the warden aware of a person individually their life tended to become complicated in one of two ways, either the beatings from the guards increased, or the beatings decreased.
For Harry, things seemed to complicate in both ways, or rather they did when he wasn't the perfect automaton to launder the Warden's dirty galleons.
Things really began to turn when a new batch of inmates came around fifteen years after Harry first made an appearance at the prison. One inmate in particular fit in nicely with our little group of prison inmates. Seeing as how the prison population of Azkaban was filled with both witches and wizards, seeing a witch amongst the group wasn't all that unusual.
However, the look on Harry's face when he first saw her should have been a hint that things were going to change drastically. Now, being a creature of habit I can freely admit I'm not a big fan of change and as a result I might have been a bit more cool to Hermione Granger back then than I should have been at the time. But, seeing genuine joy and unmitigated hope in my friend's eyes after seeing muted amounts of it for fifteen years sent me for a bit of a turn.
From there I think it best for the story to tell itself, but in case you were wondering my name, Gellert Grindelwald at your service, even now I can proudly claim that anything you might need, I'm your man.
A/N: There is a taste of what remains to be written, hopefully I'll have the next part out in a couple of days. Thanks for reading, and if you have something to say leave a review on your way out.