There was always a window.
He spent many hours staring out the window, reveling in the sight of a city alive. Alive and moving like busy little ants, like busy little bees, everyone with their own destination in mind, going on and on. The skies were grey, of course, because London was London and it wouldn't be the same without its characteristic gloom and dreariness. But those grey skies brought him back, tumbling down the rabbit hole into stormy grey seas.
Azkaban was surrounded by seas. To add insult to injury, every day he had heard the monotonous breaking of waves upon stony shores. There had been a window in his cell, he remembered. High security prisoner or not, his cell had a window.
It had been a tiny thing, the length of his palm and his fingers – thin, only bones now – combined, bisected by two thick metal bars that hummed with the glass crackle of wards. On the most miserable wintery nights, he remembered holding his hands above his head and warming them with the warning sparks the wards graced upon his skin.
He remembered days of climbing that stone wall, trying to get a mere glimpse of the outside.
The dementors came by on those days. He remembered scoffing, a mere shadow, a glimpse of an emotion that had lived for a tenuous second in his depraved brain before the dementors stole his soul and took his life with it. He remembered his lessons, back in that castle that he couldn't believe was real because it was grey stone but his memories of it were somehow warm.
The dementors could only steal your soul with their Kiss, he had been told. What a lie. Every time a dementors had made a pass he could feel his light grow a bit duller. It had been a fine day when he discovered that being in his animagus form allowed him respite from dementor attention. His vision changed, now a flurry of grey tones and blacks – for there was no white – that changed nothing but removed the last hints of color in his life. He would lie on cold stone floors, dreaming in that simplistic dog way of open plains and skies and forests where he recalled racing under the light of the moon.
The air in Azkaban had always tasted of salt, parching the tongue. A constant reminder of their lack. Their dwindling humanity, the end of their prospects, the quenching of their hope as they woke up with salt crystals gumming their eyes. When he had made his way to Grimauld Place and had opened it for the cause – how could he not when Fawkes was so brilliant gold and red? Like Gryffindor, like those happy memories that held one blurred out face – any reminder of salt left him trembling.
He was a grown man, he had told himself. But wasn't that a lie? He had been thrown in Azkaban just out of school. There was only so much maturing that one could do as a dog, he told himself in consolation whenever he felt that he was letting Harry down. The taste of salt upon his tongue was the taste of his fear, the taste of twelve stolen years. Molly Weasley was a fine cook to some, he surmised, but not for him, unable to find anything but the most bland food acceptable. He had lived on gruel and salt for twelve years, then on the run choking down animals raw in animagus form.
He had had enough of blood and salt. Molly Weasley had taken offence to his lack of enthusiasm about her food but something within him refused to care, to elaborate and educate. He was a dead man walking, having died twelve years ago when one friend sold out another and the last disappeared just when he had most needed his help.
He spent a lot of time at the window in Grimauld Place. Safely inside, looking out. When he had been living like a stray mongrel, napping in remote Scottish caves, he had been unable to stay out in the open for long. Twelve years of a small six by six feet cell had put the fear of open spaces in his heart. He had looked for the smallest caves he could find to assuage his agoraphobia, the openings mere tiny windows. The world was safer, more comfortable at a distance.
After the fiasco of Harry's third year, when he had escaped with Buckbeak – a marvelous creature, all in familiar grey feathers that he couldn't decide whether to love or to hate – he had known that tiny caves were no longer an option.
So, he had made his way to Grimauld Place, knowing that it was better than nothing. Grimauld had been grey and dark, filled with suspicious smells and the reassuring hatred of Kreacher that brought back times when he had been truly alive and not a mere shadow of himself. He had made the most of the squirreled away remains of the Black fortune in Grimauld – thank you, Regulus – bringing color to his temporary home. He could only afford so many brilliant tropical birds to brighten his day, but it made him feel warm and pleased to imagine Harry looking at the majestic birds bringing his letters and imagining him lounging on some far away tropical beach.
As if he would go back to the sea.
He looked out the window of Grimauld, seeing his reflection in the glass inside his room, looking out at the world with haunted eyes. A reflection of him still inside, in a self-made trap of his own, afraid of mirrors and the tantalizing glimpse of the world that they had shown.
He had been standing at the window when the ethereal wisp of a patronus cavorted through the air, first to be aware that something had gone wrong. He had raced down the stairs into the kitchen, knowing that something had been wrong and that the glass would soon break, falling down and shattering into irreparable pieces.
The ministry of magic had been awash with beautiful colors, spells hissing throughout the air and turning the ice cold subterranean corridors into a toasty hell. He caught a glimpse of Harry, fighting for his life amidst Death Eaters – those ragged cloaks that were too much like dementors for comfort, sending a chill down his spine – and knew that this moment was what he had lived for these fourteen, fifteen years, beyond past his time. A muttered curse at a Death Eater pointing his wand at Harry and his deed was done.
He stood in front of the arch, the gauzy window, hearing voices in his head like the whispers of the wind when he had cracked the window at Grimauld Place a centimeter in a bizarre moment of bravery. He dueled with Bellatrix and had his last laugh.
He fell into the arch with a smile upon his face. The glass, the tattered cloth, bent around his body. There were no sharp shards digging into his skin. Instead, there was a sense of freedom as he let the mirror break, and stepped out of the world.
So I'm not dead yet! Evidently I have not yet learned to avoid making promises when real life takes priority. In any case, here's a oneshot I wrote a while back that I thought I might share to tide you over as you guys all wait for ADC or MW.
The title, Dark Room, is a reference to the camera obscura, the precursor to the camera where light shines through a pinhole in an enclosed dark space and is projected inverted upon the opposite wall. I had this image in mind as I was writing this.