When you are in prison, time does not behave as it ought. It goes slower, it goes faster: whatever it does, it doesn't travel in an even stream.
All time is spent waiting: for food, for punishment, for an opportunity.
One can hope, but one cannot: hope is futile, all dreams are impossible. One must know that, realistically speaking. Hope is a denial, a pathetic self-deception.
But to give up - that is to relegate oneself to death, to the negation of everything. He chooses something in the middle: not hope, but an obsessive, consuming desire for vengeance. He has never been one to drop a grudge. This one he doesn't merely cling to: he grasps it, he savages it, he gnaws on it at night. It keeps him warm, it keeps him well-fed.
There is a slat in the wall that serves as a window. Sometimes, in his waiting, he looks outside and watches them bury the dead. If he gives up, if he doubts for a moment, he tells himself, he will go out with them. He has so little now: what is left is his anger, and that is his to nurse.
Sometimes there is no slat in the wall. He wonders if they have removed it, if it was ever there to begin with. He might be going mad. The slat appears, disappears. He searches for it. Maybe it's there, only somewhere other than where he remembers it. He doesn't know. He thinks he is in places he is not. He thinks there are windows where there are not; or perhaps he thinks there are not windows where there actually are.
Thin gruel is shoved through a slat in the bottom of the door. He thinks it comes twice a day, but he can't be sure. That is the only way he regulates time. After a while, he loses track. Has he counted one hundred meals, or one hundred and one? It doesn't matter. He stops counting.
At first, he spent a lot of time thinking, pacing, hating. He spent days or weeks or months stalking around his tiny cell, furious and grieving. The guards, when they drifted down his hallway, barely affected him at first: what did they have to take away? Sometimes he could hear others screaming, crying, but always too distant to call out to. Not, of course, that that would have been permitted. And what would they say to each other? Consolation was not a possibility in that place. They had no words of hope or comfort to offer each other.
Eventually he became desperate to talk to someone, anyone at all, and he talked to himself, to the walls. There are not even spiders to play make-believe pets with. And so he talked to himself, thinking out loud. Sometimes he pretended someone was there with him, and he would carry both sides of the conversation, trying and failing to suppress the knowledge of the pathetic futility of it all. Later, there was no conversation. He sat still and babbled things that he was vaguely aware were not words, making sounds that were neither human nor animal. He would change, and he would change back. His form didn't matter. He threw himself about and howled ceaselessly.
He would say, if someone asked him, that he never cried: that is true. He didn't cry. But the truth was not that he was too brave, too tough, too defiant to cry; he had simply forgotten how. After a while, he stared blankly when the guards came for him, he didn't look up, he barely noticed. What did it matter? Noticing was as pointless and useless as everything else. If someone were occasionally to speak to him, to give him some kind of instruction, minutes would pass by before he responded, because that was the time it took him to translate these strange sounds into a directive, and from there to a language, and from there to piece together the words and hunt down fragments of memory to try beginning to understand.
Language is a process, and like all processes, when one is unused to them, it takes time.
At first he scrabbled at the walls. After a time, he lay curled in a corner, head on his hands or paws, he didn't know which, occasionally moving when he was fed; he would drag himself across the dank floor and devour the scraps he had been given and then retreat to his corner.
Ten steps or twenty five, depending, from one wall to the other.
Time and time and time. It seemed like forever, it seemed like yesterday. Sometimes he thought he was imagining his old life, sometimes he thought he was imagining this one. He hallucinated, or maybe just dreamed: he thought he was back, ten years earlier, he was a boy again, when laughter was possible. In this place, even happy memories could provide no solace; they only served as bitter reminders of all that had been lost. He thought he hallucinated being in prison. And then he thought he was simply mad, and thought he was probably in an asylum.
After an amount of time without speaking, one forgets how: language is superfluous for animals, and so it is for humans who don't interact with others. Something much more primal than language rules the mind. Something alligator-like. Something feral and fey.
And so, when he made his escape, when he finally saw his opportunity after all this time (months? years? decades?), it was not that he made a conscious plan or decision, but rather, some wild thoughtless animal part in him chose for him, roused itself enough to make a desperate grasp at freedom.
He doesn't know how he escaped. That is a story that is lost. The overall gist, sure, he knows that. The details, those are gone. Sometimes, when someone asks him, he makes them up. Other times, he just smiles secretively and lets them guess. There is, and always has been, a wildness in him, something unreachable, untameable, untranslatable. What happened to him was all of those things, and how he left Azkaban was all of those things as well. There is something that dwells in the survival instincts of a dying animal, fighting without any purpose any longer (it's over, you're dying, you're good as dead, lay down and do it in peace), but unable to surrender, the instinctive fury of a creature wounded beyond comprehension, somehow dragging itself away, to curl up under a frond and die alone with one last scrap of dignity intact.
And so the true story of his escape, then, is not one of derring-do and triumph, but the last spit of defiance from an animal mortally wounded.
And if that animal miraculously survives?
Well, mistakes are made, and must eventually be rectified.