-1The Prison of My Memory
Severus opens the door to my cell and for the first time in months I feel a pang of hope. (There are no locks in Azkaban; they don't care what we do to each other. Not that most of us could muster the motivation to walk across the room, let alone… ) But my hope has brought them to us, and I shrink even farther into my corner. It's so cold. He ignores them and shuts the door behind him, casts a locking spell, wandless. Where does he find the strength?
He looks… like he always does. He looks sane. As I marvel at his fortitude the dementors slip their grey hands through the bars.
"Think about something you hate," he says. I close my eyes and think of Weasleys.
I feel a hand on my shoulder and it's been so long. I'm incapable of hiding my elation, a glimmer of pleasure they surely won't allow me. Even with my eyes closed I can feel them gathered around my cell, pressing up against the bars, the cold fingers of their minds reaching out to me, hungrily.
"Think about everyone who's betrayed you, how much you've lost," he whispers, so close, into my ear. "Think about how you will never be free."
I think of the humiliation of my trial; I think of the Dark Lord with that oh so sympathetic look in his eyes as he sends me off on a mission he knows I'll never survive. I think of the Boy Who Wouldn't Die slicing me open in that filthy lavatory with a curse I'd never even heard of (naïve thing that I was then, I'd thought I knew them all).
Severus's hand traces the scar down my chest as if he were reading my mind. And of course he is, he's a legilimens, and I couldn't occlude him if I wanted to, not now, not here. I must be leaking like a sieve, misery, lust and desperation. But it's the hope that will do me in in the end, because every time he touches me it sets it fluttering back to the surface, where they can get at it.
"How long has it been?" I ask.
"For you, three months. Almost two for me. I'm sorry it took me so long to find you. I really am."
"Is that all?" It feels like I've been here forever. It feels like I was born here.
I try to focus. I'm strapped to a chair in the middle of the Wizengamot, bound so tight it's giving me a hard on. My mother is weeping, my father is pretending not to know me. He'd been released on a very expensive technicality a few months before, and is claiming I'd put him under imperious. I wish I had, the bastard.
I light up with spite and sorely remembered shame and for a moment it's working; I can feel their interest flag and I'm almost myself again, but then he kisses me and it all comes crumbling down.
He's got a hard on. Who in the seven hells can maintain a hard on in the presence of fucking dementors? How is he here and still whole, when I'm this broken down little shell of a man, this sobbing pile of human detritus? They drift right past him as if he isn't there. I bet he doesn't even have any happy memories. Of maybe he just gets off on misery. I always knew he'd be a sick bastard of some variety or other.
"You're right," he whispers, "on both counts."