"Cold"
A Harry Potter Fanfiction
by Delphia
Disclaimer: all characters and situation belong to J.K. Rowling, no copyright infringement intendent. I make no money off this.
The cold is unbearable some months. Everything seems to move in slow motion when you first wake up to it. Your thoughts center on the cold and the wind and how long you think you can stand it and how long you'll have to, which is pretty much forever at your last count. You think about your skin, the exposed parts that feel like they're being scratched off with thousands of sharp needles, prick by prick, and you think that if the wind whips at it that way for much longer, it will freeze and frost over and turn blue like ice. Your breathe catches; the cold always astonishes you for the first second, and you remember that when it's cold enough, your breath shows itself in little, swirling clouds in front of your face when you breathe out quickly. You think about frostbite, and how you wouldn't know if you had it, because once your fingers and toes are numb, they're numb and you really can't feel them.
You sometimes feel like the cold is out to get you. Moony told you once that he felt the moon was mocking him, and now you think know what he means. You imagine the wind shrieking with laughter when it whistles down the corridors, rattling the metal bars and sending an involuntary shiver up your spine. You think about the shivering when you're doing it and how the word shiver doesn't describe it well at all and how cunvulsing does a much better job of it.
You think of the moon, and the supposed man who lives on it. The moon must be a lonely place, and a cold one too. Maybe even colder than where you are, but you think it's hard to imagine a place being that cold. According to you, the Man on the Moon deserves it. You talk to him sometimes, and when the moon itself is full and round, you yell. You yell and scream and rage at him for what he does to Moony, and you want him to scream back at you, just for some company, but he never does.
It seem unfair to you that the only hours you spend awake are the ones at night when the cold is at it's worst. The relative warmth of the daytime compared to the night is the only time your body can manage to sleep. You get scared sometimes, thinking that you could die in your sleep if the cold finally makes it to your heart and forces it to just stop beating. Your blood makes its way through your body and you can feel your heart beat in your chest and you think that if it got cold enough to kill you, would the blood in your veins freeze before you died, or after? The days get steadily colder and colder and each day when you wake up you wonder exactly how cold it would have to be to kill you because you're amazed that you've stayed alive this long.
It seems ironic to you now that the cold is even worse than the Dementors. You realize you can't defeat the memories that the Dementors bring, no matter how hard you try, but the cold can and it does. Screaming gets you nowhere fast when the cold freezes up your throat before it can even start to hurt from the screams, and crying is definitely unpleasant when the tears freeze halfway down your cheeks but you just can't seem to stop. The Dementors are always there. Padfoot howls at them and it's better that way. Padfoot only feels the cold distantly and his instincts accept that it's there. He barks and barks, because it keeps his blood flowing and almost makes him warm. On his better days, you and he wonder how stupid the Dementors must be, not to notice that you're a dog and not a person most of the time. They don't seem surprised to hear barks echoing through the halls of a prison meant for humans, but then, sometimes the mad ones bark in response so maybe they think you're mad too.
The Dementors eventurally tire of your lack of emotions and glide away.
You wonder why you haven't gone mad yet. They used to say that it only took a couple months for most to go. After their minds are gone, you've noticed that they sometimes freeze to death in their stupor. The gaurds come and drag them away, right past your cell, and if you didn't know that they were once real people, you might just take them as stone statues. Imagining yourself ending up like that is a bit painful so you try not to do it. You wonder if their actual brains would freeze if they were left there long enough. You think they would, but you hope yours don't, when your time comes. They probably wouldn't check to see if your brains were frozen. No matter that you're innocent. Maybe if you scratched out a message on the floor asking them to they might do it.
But then you wonder what they would do with the frozen dog brains of a supposed mass murderer, anyway.