you're gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul
The cold prison air sends a chill up Barty's spine, and his breath forms white clouds as he exhales, but he is far from cold.
Perhaps, he thinks, he has gone numb at last. As not only does the cold penetrating him fail to have an effect on him, his mind is a dark haze. He does not care about his father, or why he is rotting within Azkaban's walls, or the pieces of happy memories that have long since decayed.
All Barty notices anymore is the always-looming dementors.
And, of course, the man who has acted as more of a father to him than that power-hungry rat that gave Barty his name.
The Dark Lord.
Even the dementors are not so bad, he thinks. They drive despair deep into the hearts of their victims, and after a while all they can do is wallow in their cold, dark insanity.
In a way, they are like him.
He takes a breath, allowing another small white puff of air to leave him, and remembers the fateful night at the Longbottoms'. How he mercilessly shouted "Crucio!" and their screams of agony were music to his ears. How after a while, the fight went out of them, as did nearly everything else, leaving only shadows of the unfortunate Aurors.
Really, they were not unlike some of the prisoners the dementors had broken, locked in their minds, only to be freed by a nonexistent key.
Usually, he tortured for fun.
But that had been a special case. He had needed information about the Dark Lord.
Were this a less powerful figure, he might have believed the circulating rumors that the dark lord had fallen, had been vanquished by the power of a sacrifice. But this was the Dark Lord, the man who struck fear into the hearts of the wizarding world for years upon years.
An infant was no match for that.
Leaning against the cracked stones of the prison wall, Barty mumbles to himself,
"He has not fallen, he will return, he will reward us..."
It had to be true. Barty may have grown numb to the once-biting cold, and the feedings of the dementors, but he doubted he could hold out forever. A long time perhaps, but unless the Dark Lord arrived to retrieve him, have him stand by his side once more, he would inevitably crack under the weight of all the darkness held within the prison, locked away within the confines of his dwindling sanity, waiting for salvation that would never come.