Title: Reanimation
Author: Amadelia
Disclaimer: Original characters are mine, J.K.'s characters are hers. Not to be confused.
Chapter I
The sound of water dripping was the one constant that Anais used to register whether she was alive or dead. After first gaining the correct sensory faculties to actually recognize the steady dripping, she allowed for the expansion of cognizance. She stretched and curled her fingers, listened to the screams or grunts of pain in the cells near her, listened to her own laborious breathing. If these signs of feeling, pain, and suffering showed themselves, she knew therefore that she was alive, and cursed the very fertilization of her mother's egg from which she was created.
After only three months here Anais had learned that sight was only a passage to the unthinkable-a deeper, more excruciating pain than she experienced with her eyes closed-which was enough to wish her dead, obliterated completely into a never ending blankness. With the knowledge that sight was only betrayal to the part of her that desired some sort of peace and sanity, she chose to exercise the facility of listening more often than not-it was more exact, and didn't lead her into depression as sight might-in some twisted way, it seemed to be the only sense that she wanted to keep with her. Thus now, after eight months here, she never opened her eyes, unless it was unavoidable. The sounds of suffering in this hell house were hard enough to endure on their own; the last thing that Anais needed was a visual accompaniment to this auditory hell-if she had any illusions left about the place, she wanted to keep them.
She had learned to stop feeling in the past eight month. She was utterly and completely numb to any natural pain or fear that she technically should be experiencing due to her hellish confinement here. Although she didn't have the ability to experience a complete shutdown, something closer to a coma than she experienced now, the senses that stayed with her Anais speculated subconsciously that perhaps were something she wanted to keep. She had a strange, inexplicable feeling, a whine that complained that it didn't want utter and complete physical and mental separation from this tomb. Although it embraced the feeling of living death, rather than the living dying that Anais should be exposed to, it also wanted a touch of reality and life to make it qualify for somewhat animated death. Keeping her emotions and physical motions sanctioned was enough, so she told herself on the rare moments that she exercised cognitive thought. During these moments, she relented, coming to believe that perhaps these four months left of hell and punishment might be what she needed to regain the sanity, or at least gain the sanity, that she often wondered whether she was born with. And so she accepted her temporary fate-she stopped thinking, feeling, desiring. Her body slept as her spirit regained some sort of strength from the source of the comforting absolution from life, and slowly the flames of her Soul began burning brighter, climbing higher.
Somehow, her body had adapted to this twisted form of what was supposed to be considered existence...known to the excommunicated outside as Azkaban.
At Number 4, Privet Drive, Harry Potter leapt up, sweating, from his bed, the pain in his scar lighting his entire body on fire.