The characters and the world of Harry Potter belong to JK Rowling.
And still I dream he'll come to me
And we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather.
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
I dreamed a dream (Claude-Michel Schönberg; Herbert Kretzmer)
5 months after the Epilogue
It was bitter cold and a great storm was brewing, here in the North Atlantic. The island, hardly more than stark rock, stood seemingly open to the regard of the world, while in reality its deep defenses could withstand a fierce invasion.
The wards jealously kept the prisoners in check, and what the wards could not do, the Dementors were willing to achieve.
In one of the deep-security cells, a blond man sat dejected. He had very graceful, chiseled features which were marred by a grimace of pain. He had thinning blond hair, the blondest in England
From out of under his worn-out, threadbare robe, he took out a Wizarding photo and gazed at it lovingly, but the grief would not let him go. It demanded that he do something to assuage it.
He descended deep into grief and rage. The deaths of his parents were awful, but he had endured it, as he had when he turned out to be a soulless bastard. This was something worse. They had taken his son from him and sought to break him, they had effectively killed him, and they were revered by the sodding public!
So deep was his plunge into sadness that he was able to connect with his magic in ways he hadn't been able before. There was an ominous crack in the nearly deserted prison cell, and he intuited that a spell placed on him was broken. He felt more powerful, more alive than ever before. Trouble was, it came too late to save his son.
If he had had his full powers, maybe he could have resisted the lily-white poseur Aurors that came to arrest him, he would've flown the coop with his wife and son. If only… If only he could have read the future.
Grief continued to influence his actions, and bitter desire for revenge. All the sheeple had made up their little minds about him, it seemed. And nothing he did would change their judgment. So years passed, he was a model citizen, and still people would turn up their ugly noses or taunt him in so many ways, for him to end up like this, faced with trumped-up charges and tossed into a cell faster than a speeding broom.
He decided he was tired of it all. The problem lay in the wards of Azkaban. They're specially made to prevent the prisoners from injuring or killing themselves. No matter his new strength, the wards would react.
But then the blond remembered that what the wards could not do, the Dementors could.
He pointed his hand in the direction of the door and wandlessly wished it open, with all his might. The door opened. Then he Summoned a Dementor and it appeared, his power called to the creature and bade it to come closer.
The blond could see the hideous sight of the Dementor, could smell its stench, could sense the cold and misery it projected, and he didn't care.
He realized that, awful as its appearance was, there were decidedly worse things to face, like sweet words, spoken by seemingly-sweet persons, which turned out to be machinations. He had often faced utter moral ruin housed in the most noble of visages. Uncaring feelings from people who would be gods, and had to be endured.
Compared to this, a Dementor does not seem so threatening.
As the Dementor approached, the photo fell to the floor, together with newspaper scraps. The photo showed the blond man, sitting across from a lovely blonde woman, and a child sat between them, the mirror image of the man. They faced each other with the circumspection expected of purebloods, but there was no mistaking the warmth and love in their regard. The child had a top-of-the-line broom on his lap, and was obviously thanking his father. The blond just moved his hand, as if denying that it had been that difficult. The woman looked on with deep satisfaction.
The scraps of paper were torn in places, as if the reader had been mad with grief while perusing it and wanted to hit something.
"…. Searches continue for the adopted son of ...", "…. Yesterday the body was found…", and with a neat, precise and pedantic calligraphy, the gleeful annotation: "One less of you to deal with."
The Dementor finally reached the blond, and the man Kissed it eagerly.
tbc