They say the mind can be just as effective a prison as solid cement and steel, only several times as worse.
They also say that the prisoners who are sent to this prison don't die from the starvation, or the cold suffusing every inch of the surface available, but rather the loss of will that comes after the unending mental scarring and torment invoked.
Some are so weak willed that they last just days, while others have held on for months at a time.
My godfather, Sirius Black, had endured over a decade before his own succumbing to their grasping claws.
I had few edges over those being brought here except for the clues left behind in his unsent letters during that tenor here. The former Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, one of the greatest minds of our age, had passed those letters on to me toward Sirius' final days as a last request.
I had never read them until just a few short days ago. I wished I had; it would have given a better connection to the man who had been so close to escape before they sucked out his soul and hung the corpse out to dry as a warning to all those who would arrive thereafter of the price to pay.
When you come to Azkaban, they search your body for magical artifacts and hold your wand in reserve until the last straw, so that they can destroy whatever hopes you might have still had if they find anything.
I had taken the opportunity to graft what I needed into my own body. However, when I say that, I don't mean in a physical sense; Sirius had mentioned the aid his own memories had served him, as well as served to be used against him, without having ever learned Occlumency.
I already had a degree in the art from my years at school, but I also had something better still; a link with the Headmaster. He was a grand figure from another time, a man not made for the stress of war in his golden years, and it ultimately put him in a grave before his due.
In his will he left me several items for the war in which I was later classified as a War Criminal for, but that is a tale for another time and ultimately irrelevant to my current narration.
The greatest object for what has come is the Pensieve he gifted to me. It was a long and truly arduous prospect to sort and sift through my memories and categorize that which would haunt my days to come and those I should cherish and retain, but for nearly every waking hour for every waking day of a week I scoured deeply and thoroughly back to my earliest days alive.
When they finally found and captured me at the muggle residence, I was a blank slate of blissful high, complying with their desires and vicious cues without a care in the world.
When they sentenced me and drugged me upon Veritaserum to get their answers, my lips gave unbidden no secret of mine, for no memory remained to accurately derive from.
For all intents and purposes I was a hollowed shell of the man they wanted to persecute and be rid of, and if they had retained even a shred of Albus Dumbledore's personality among them that might have been enough to sate their appetite.
It was less than even a fool's hope, however, to believe that my seeming mental degradation would see my sentence altered to Saint Mungo's; Fudge declared Azkaban, and the Wizengamot Jury agreed.
For days the Dementor's sat around my cell and feasted upon the warmth and joy of my mind, and I ran around from my greatest and happiest moments into some that were, at worst, mildly misguided and muddled with confusion.
The trapdoors and pitfalls I had set into place had yet to be stumbled upon and string me along as I suspected would be required, to follow in Sirius footsteps to freedom that had ultimately been cut short.
Truly, how long I remained in such a way I could not tell you. I had no calender on hand and no thought of what one was besides, and so the concept to mark out my delirious days in any manner was a foreign concept at that stage.
When they delivered the platters of gruel and water I ate with empty melancholy over the taste, and indeed this became one of my more dissatisfying memories to repeat over and over again.
In time the Dementors grew full off of my mind and began to come less and less often to crouch before my cell, slothful and resilient to commands, and without their deliberating presence the first steps began to come back.
I slept and dreamed a broken sequence of events, and when I awoke, only the strongest of those details remained, but it was such that began to return and linger in the back of my mind and settle into the required pattern.
Days crept by with a piece here, a piece there, coming together in greater and greater results.
I had no idea what it meant then, not until the time when the Dementor's stopped coming altogether; fattened up and full for the first time since they had been employed, they refused to wander the other halls of the prison again and set forth to be freed, to breed.
For the first time since they were employed, the Dementor's rebelled, and human guards were forced to wander and keep check on the place.
Without the threat of their souls being stolen away, and against Fudges wishes, the initial law rebuffing visitors except for under dying circumstances was repelled; all part of the grander pattern I had set into motion before arriving here, as I would come to find out.
My first visitor came a month after the fact.
"Blimey, Harry, what did they do to you?" the other wizards voice asked quietly.
I looked up at him in mild interest, smiling as I remembered him from our vague days at school. "Hello, Neville," I greeted him.
The guard nearby tapped his wand impatiently against his thigh as the five minute time slot allotted to me continued to dwindle.
"Er, could you give us a minute? You've already searched me, I don't have anything to slip him!" Neville asked the guard quickly as the flat thump continued to echo off others thigh at a regular beat.
"Don't see why I should, boy. You've got something to tell him, you can share it with the rest of the class," the older man stated neutrally. Neville stood up a little straighter.
"With due respect, what have you done for our society? What were you doing when V-Voldemortwas in control of the Ministry?" he asked with a hard note in his voice.
The guard flinched at the sound of the name, posture straightening out as he stamped a foot to the ground. "Dammit, boy, don't speak that name here! You'll have the whole floor chanting it in due time!"
Neville's eyes flickered with an uncertain emotion. "What name? V-Voldemort?" he asked with a raise of his voice. The man in the cell next to me repeated the name including the stutter at the start.
"V-Voldemort?" he asked, and repeated it as Neville said it again, and each time I watched the guard flinch again with a growing flustered panic.
"V-Voldemort?" Neville repeated louder still, and in less than fifteen seconds everyone around us was likewise chanting the name exactly as predicted, varying in one pitch to another.
The guard slapped his hands over his ears and began to tremble as his own memories surged against him unbidden by the constant repetition.
We both watched him sink to his knees before Neville drew a small cloth from his robes and ran it under his nose. A moment later he sneezed violently into his hand, and I watched in curiosity as a silver glow was left behind in the palm.
He gave me an apologetic glance before kneeling down and pressing the stuff against the aura. A concentric ripple appeared as the mysterious substance slipped through and wafted over the air toward my position.
I glanced up at him as Neville mouthed the words, "Snort it!" with a pained look on his face. I brought the light-as-air material up and sniffed at it and soon felt it drift up and into my head.
Almost as soon I felt a sudden weight on my mind and leaned back against my cot in confusion. "Good luck, Harry," Neville mouthed again before turning away to face the back-up sprinting down the hall toward our position.
"What are you doing?" the middle-aged Auror on hand demanded of Neville and the downed guard as one, wand flashing with red light as spells soared into the adjacent cells to quiet them down again.
Neville shrugged in a remarkable show of no interest. "Teaching a smug arsehole a lesson. Harry isn't the one who should be in that cell, and we all know that." He responded.
The Auror gripped Neville by one of his sleeves and dragged him off, and I wondered what the substance was and why my mind still felt foggy for it.
In days I understood. It took almost a week for the effects to materialize, but by that point I had been checked several times over to try and ensure nothing had been changed.
The microgram of increased weight of new memories flowing in couldn't be detected, and nor did they bundle together in a way that would show up at that point.
When I slept again after the final examination, I dreamed a new dream from the altered pattern. The lone Dementor that could be wrangled back under their control and was posted outside of my cell ate its usual fill, but it had indigestion from the creep of unpleasantness filtered through that time.
When I awoke, I was still as joyful as ever, but beneath my conscious thoughts the memories, the triggers I had left behind, began to come together with the addition returned to me from Neville.
Whenever the Dementor drew near, I lapsed back into empty bliss that was only slightly ill-afflicted, but once it had been replaced again by a wizard guard the puzzle turned just that little bit further, nudged me along another millimeter at a time.
Neville never again visited me while I was held at Azkaban. Fudge had taken another stab at those who had once been my allies in the war and prohibited any I had once knew and might have been relying on from visiting.
I had no way of knowing this until the guard assigned to my cell said as much over a bottle of firewhiskey months after the fact, taunting me as if I knew what the purpose was in my state. When I cheerfully congratulated Fudge on the idea, the guard threw his half-empty bottle at my head in frustration and we both watched it crash to the floor amid a chorus of noise.
I awoke one morning to find an unknown man looking down on me from just beyond the reach of my cell. His look was one I could not place, but his eyebrows were locked together in an awkward arch beneath his tousled blond hair.
"Awake at last, Potter," he said to me in a neutral tone. On either side of him stood a red-clad Auror. I did not recognize who he was, but he apparently knew me.
"I've been waiting months to get this chance to confront you, Potter. Do try to stay aware of your surroundings for the remainder of our five minutes."
I leaned forward and stared at him curiously. "You may have vanquished the dark lord, but you haven't severed all the ties he left behind to our world. Even if you do ever get released from this prison, you'll have your hands tied trying to find a role to fall back into," he told me.
In the back of my mind I recognized what he was saying beneath his words. I leaned closer to the edge of the cell.
He glanced at the left-most Auror. "How mangled in his brain? If this was the Potter I knew, he would have been retaliating by now with whatever he had on hand, even just sniping back with words; how am I supposed to get any satisfaction out of this one-way banter?" he demanded.
The Auror glanced at a pocket-watch without answering. For whatever reason the other wizard ground his teeth together. "I'm paying a tenth of his salary and I'd like the compensation the Minister told me I would have! At least give me my wand so I can make this fool scream again!"
The Auror looked back at his watch for a moment before nodding. "The Minister also set a particular amount of instructions... Dawlish is no longer employed for failing with Longbottom the last time, and I may not be as qualified as Dawlish, but I don't think his loss was as bad as he made it out to be," he said before putting his watch away and turning back down the hall.
"I'll be in the back for another five minutes, and I expect you to do what you will and finish it up by the time I return. Getting fired for incompetence is better than another sentence in this place- Shacklebolt, give him the wand."
The second Auror looked to be in the same state of unknown emotion as the blond had displayed when he looked at me, but after a moment he drew out the required wand and handed it over.
This time an expression of glee lit up the wizards face as he pressed the tip against the barrier around my cell and finally slid it through a fraction.
"I'm going to dearly enjoy this, Potter," he told me in the same tone. I just smiled back at him.
When the original Auror returned almost ten minutes after he had first departed, Draco's work had been done. I hadn't expected to rely on him or the life debt incurred earlier in our lives, but he had stepped up to fulfill my true friend's roles here while the decree passed by Fudge remained firm as ever.
Blood dripped past my lips where my teeth had bit into them and an after-ache was present from arching my body into twisted shapes for his amusement, and the evidence of a job well done met the Auror's eyes when he examined the scene.
"I was about to clean him up, but I'm satisfied with what I've done. If you still want to be fired, I can arrange that in return for this favor," Draco told him.
The Auror flicked his own wand and my lip resealed itself up, but he left my cloths stained in red and did nothing for the shaking in my bones and muscles.
"You do that, Mister Malfoy. Just remind the Minister that I have other skills that could be put to better use out of here."
Draco waved a hand neutrally and offered his wand back up. "Good riddance, Potter."
I weakly waved at him as the Auror lead the others away.
When I slept that night, the rest of the problems filtered through to the surface. I was another several steps closer, but I knew it would be impossible to escape from here just yet. For that, I would have to rely on the rest of the outside details to converge together.
Before I had come in to Azkaban, I knew I would be searched and broken; Fudge was too petty a man to allow me to be sentenced without the drama he had tried to instill in my fifth year at Hogwarts to be repeated within and without the court.
Sirius' letters helped confirm what my path had to be at that time while I was still free; I could have fought back and, yes, ultimately defeated Fudge and his regime the same as I had undone Voldemort and his Death Eaters. But in doing so I would have proven his lies true.
A war of spells was not the answer I could seek here, not without the resources set up in advance to sustain me and hide the more serious repercussions.
It would have to be the same battlefield that he himself had taken to heart and chosen for us that I would fight upon. A broken opponent had to be the first move, to become as if a King who was left with no more defenses than a single pawn or two against a full field of Bishops, Knights, and Queens.
That is what I had put into motion during the week leading up to my discovery and capture at Godrics Hollow, so that I could present the appearance as truly as possible.
The rest of my memories- those of the war, those of my trials and tribulations within Hogwarts and against Voldemort besides during that brief prelude before fourth year, all the thoughts I had possessed of an unpleasant disposition I extracted and sealed away.
I portkeyed them to my friends and allies with the knowledge that they each required to align with the secondary section of retaliation against what was to come.
I couldn't have done any of it without my godfathers letters. I would have gone in not knowing what the Dementors were truly capable of, having never before suffered under their presences as Sirius had for over ten years.
I would have become another empty wreck as the torments of my slim nineteen years upon the earth were exploited and brought to full relief within my mind, even with the Occlumency shields I possessed to help filter through the quivering mire of dread and dismemberment.
Instead I had rendered the worst tool this prison had to offer all but obsolete and forced Fudge to reinstate useless human guardians to wander the cell blocks and keep the other prisoners in check, those too foolish and easily influenced to the right settings.
It helped that I was sealed into the very same cell that had held Sirius- of that I recognized quite clearly after Draco's visit.
Perhaps Fudge had hoped it would be a sense of irony, or perhaps he merely felt like being the shriveled coward he was and couldn't resist getting the metaphorical final word in against me after the mockery of a trial in my undeniably happy state of being.
Regardless, I was returning to a state of wholeness again. I remembered my lessons at Professor Dumbledore's hands, his eyes if you will, and my training in the mental arts to fortify against external assault.
The very prison I had formed of my own memories coming in simply became another layer in which I could defend myself with if they ever came again to probe my thoughts.
Days crept by as I awoke back into who I was and used to be one stage at a time. My expression of loose pleasure at simply breathing and being alive grew wrinkled around the edges as I recovered from the damage Draco had inflicted to my body, in part a necessary action and in part a final stroke of spite for having defended his life when it counted.
The Auror who had allowed Draco his time never returned, much like the former-Auror John Dawlish.
In the outer world another round of political attrition was in play, but even I was surprised at how swiftly the next change came about. While visitors were officially allowed under proper circumstances, the addition was a costly one in its initial and then secondary drafts for me personally.
The third version prohibited anyone in a legal position of holding law from restricting the rights of the individual witch or wizard from approaching the island.
It was repealed two nights after it slipped into the system, but while it was there I was rewarded with another visitor and an update on the way of things.
With the natural buffers of my more pleasant memories set up first and foremost before my Occlumency shields, the occasional Dementor arrival did little to off set me.
When the human guards returned, I did not banter back with them in any noticeably different manner, smiling and laughing along with their sharp retorts until all pleasure they could derive from our conversations dissolved back into silent anger.
Behind the facade I waited and worked out what was to come. Being sent to Azkaban was an inevitable conclusion and the first stage, and the finale and progression into the second stage was already underway with every day that ticked away.
It amazed me that Fudge actually thought he could get away with this, no matter how much sway he had built up in the Wizengamot in the two years since the war concluded- I was not without allies and alliances from those darker times that were still firmly intact.
I certainly couldn't deny the charges of Unforgivable usage, but the loophole of Fudges predecessor from the first war was what I was relying on to get me out of here.
I just had to wait and bide my time until it was pressed forward, and knowing my friends, I had little doubt it would take longer than another few months with the deck so stacked against them.
A year can change a man in ways he could not have previously imagined- I thought that I had planned out everything accordingly.
The first several months I had been a bundle of pleasant cheer, but the remaining six after Draco's visit had given me more than I anticipated to hold here.
When I slept, the war returned. My Occlumency shields could do little to defend against the inner sanctum of chaos where the mind wanders unguarded during slumber.
I awoke covered in a cold sweat with out even remembering why, only the distant red gleam of a terrifying gaze staring forth from the shadows.
I stayed awake the rest of the day and night to ensure my facade hadn't fallen.
It happened again off and on throughout the week, with varying intensity to torment me with. I could not scream for risk of revealing my hand at this point, but it was not something I could easily hold back, and in my weakness the occasional guard caught the noise of a rough sob from my cell.
When I awoke on those next mornings, I was examined thoroughly- to no avail. Occlumency kept the good on the surface and blocked it from reaching the depths where darkness swallowed my true self whole.
After a month I took to sleeping with a section of my shirt pressed into my mouth and turned up beneath the chilling cot to hide that fact.
After two I began to stay up for days at a time, using the frozen water dripping in to help shock me back from the edge.
Eventually I did not sleep at all.
I drifted in and out of a waking dream, altering the depths of my mental shielding and weaving it out in rough spirals, so that the war was suddenly interrupted by scarlet sunsets seen from the top of Gryffindor Tower or a night spent out by the lake before being roughly re-immersed.
An Azkaban story meant to be a successor to a previous Sirius-themed entry. The idea that memories were the most capable weapon against the prisoners of Azkaban eventually turned into this. I can't say I'm happy with it, but compared to my earlier drafts, at least this one went somewhere more or less and hinted to a greater story in the background.