Moment of Clarity
Madness was creeping up upon him, slowly taking possession of every cell of his body, stealing precious, lucid thoughts.
It's hard to tell the difference between animalistic growls, tormented moans produced by other prisoners and the waves crashing against the walls again and again in an endless, monotone rhythm.
The sky was almost always clouded and the small window provided such a faint light that often he didn't know if it's day, or a long night. He knows that whatever time of the day is – his nightmare never ceases to be.
Never ending, ever present. With moans and cries accompanied by wind, echoing in the haunted corridors, it makes the scariest muggle horror movies a reality. His reality.
He knows he's innocent, but the constant presence of Dementors; ghostly vicious creatures which feeds on his memories, eating away parts of his soul, is making him lost, making it hard to tell the difference if he's guilty or not. Everyone's guilty. Rotten to the bone, infecting each other with their putridity. Like a mythical plague; unavoidable, incurable, inevitable.
Everyone screams that they're innocent and he himself stopped doing this a long time ago. When the madness clouds his mind, he screams again though.
He is not eager to torment himself more, clinging to scraps inside him which were his soul and sanity once; so he doesn't dream and hope and pray.
Sometimes he believes that his former life is some trick of a mind which slowly drifts away to come back along with the howling wind and merciless waves crashing somewhere below him.
He doesn't hope for freedom; as the word became foreign to him, along with the feel of warm sunshine on his sallow skin.
He's been through hell.
No.
He is still in hell, because he never left it since the day he came here.
The before slowly fades away, as the daylight does every time when the sun hides behind the horizon. It's a natural process and nothing can stop it. He doesn't fight anymore, then.
He can't stop the sun and he can't go back to before and welter in it.
There are some invisible strings, wide as a spider's web which holds the trembling remnants of his soul - there are conversations and a newspaper from time to time.
He doesn't scream that he's innocent. Not anymore.
Never, ever he would be, as he's tainted along with the rest of the dirt of this world.
He screams of revenge; gut wrenching shrieks educe themselves from his thin chest.
"He's in Hogwarts!"
Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hogwarts!
It echoes, multiplying his cries and stirring something inside him. Something he buried a long time ago – or maybe it was a Dementor who made him hide it?
"I want to kill him; I will kill him!" he howls along with the wind, the sounds combined resembling a lone dog or wolf.
He stops to eat as he has one; one and only one desire.
To kill, to bring hell upon the one who did it to him.
In a moment of clarity (as these moments are shorter and shorter each time), he turns himself into a dog and pushes himself through the bars. Carefully, slowly, he makes his way towards a hole in the wall.
He heard that some prisoners were pushed through it, for the amusement of Those Who Always Watch. The Keepers. The Hellhounds.
He pushes himself through this hole without providing amusement to anyone and jumps into the raging waves.
There is a bubbling, yeasty hell of waves crashing against hard rocks, but he's past caring.
He's been through hell. He lived in that for twelve years. It blended with his very being, becoming a part of him.
A part which would never cease of exist.
In a moment of clarity he knows it, as he makes his way to the shore, fighting with hell down there for the first time since he embraced it inside of him.
A/N: Thanks to Artemis J. Halk for beta reading this story.
I also wanted to thank MizMi whose works were my inspiration for writing madness.