7. When the prisoner in the last cell of the second block started to talk to himself, hoarse murmurs like wracking coughs, the dementors thought he had finally lost his sanity after two years of resistance. Their unseeing eyes could not know he wept as he dug his hands through the soil surrounding his prison, gasped and shuddered as the muddy brown grains fell through his fingers, like sand in an hourglass charting time that would never pass. With shivers of pleasure, they felt his stubborn spirit break, felt the stormy intensity of his soul consume itself whole, like a hurricane with nothing left to destroy but its own eye of calm. They waited for the moment that insanity would claim him, and they knew it was near, in those starless nights when he would remember, when his fierce eyes glazed indigo, mirrors into nothingness.
The man remembered the brush of tentative fingers, white bone against the fine line of ribs; searching lips as they traveled his jugular, teasing and smiling as though the other man already knew the life within belonged to him. The man remembered a conspirational smile, brown hair like a carpet of autumn leaves, offering the gift of dirtin a bottle. Earth to keep him grounded, for those nights in the Astronomy tower, when he felt the keen danger of losing himself close at his throat, pressing till blood came. A gift of earth, bottled, to help him hold on to himself, even as he laughed at the ingenuity of the idea, dizzy at the thought of the unspoken concern he thought he saw in those ocher eyes. A gift of dirt to tell him that he is heard, even if he screams under his breath – and earth surrounds him now, shackling him down, absorbing his howls, his litany of anger and regret that could reverberate in and around him, but would never be heard again by that smiling wolf.