If he moved his head all the way up against the wall and tilted it to the left, he could just see the edge of the sky through the bars. Just a sliver of navy blue which told him the sun had been down a few hours now, and the birds had gone to sleep. Someone had given him a bird once, someone with black hair and black eyes. Funny how he couldn't remember face, though. All that part was hazy, his memory of the person wrapped in smoke but for the eyes and the hair.

When they found him all Tobias could do was laugh, over and over. They said he was mad and he knew he was mad, deep down, completely, but the powders they gave him made the world all muzzy and sideways. If he didn't get them regularly though, he could get agitated. If he got agitated he might howl for hours, or beat his hands against the wall until they were bloody, or generally raise merry hell until the Dementors flocked and he passed out cold.
At least they didn't try to inject him with anything anymore- the injections had made him wild, wilder than before.

Everything had happened just as he'd told himself it would. He had told the nurse she looked hungry, and she was- just like that- ravenously hungry. Told her she needed to make dinner, with her friends- she should go and get them, which she did- immediately. Then they were hungry too, starving like they hadn't eaten for weeks and all the time repeating that they needed to make dinner.
First though, he needed to go for a walk, he needed the fresh air. Of course he did, poor sausage.. and then they'd thought of food again and quickened their efforts. They ushered him out of the hospital- and he didn't think he would ever have to go back.
But they brought him back.
Three months later they pulled him from under a transporter lorry on the Irish coast, covered in dirt, babbling about a guinea pig and tasting blood that was not his. They stunned him and immediately apparated him to St Mungo's institution.
"Strip," a hazed and muffled voice instructed him when he came around, and he had tried to form some sense of cohesive and conscious thought. They had injected him with something, a muggle concoction and then there had been a lot of noise, punching and kicking and yelling. There had been the crunch of bone, the angry curse of a Auror.
His clothes were removed and placed into clear plastic bags, and a Healer came in. His hearing adjusted so that he could hear and feel every sound in the hospital. The sound of sobbing, and the the loudest, stiffest silence he had ever heard.
It was only when he considered the Healer's eyes and saw nothing but blackness that his one shot as escape had been destroyed, he was going to Azkaban now.

His hand went without thought to his jaw, touched the long thick scar that followed the line of bone from his chin right up to his earlobe. His face had been flayed open when they brought him in, his record stated, and they couldn't explain how or why but Tobias knew- Aurors could be brutal if they needed to be.
His father said it was his own fault, that if he'd stayed in St Mungos like he was supposed to, then he would never have been sent to this place. There was a reason why he was in St Mungo's High Risk wing- the outside world wasn't for people like him, he was like the filth you threw away and ignored. Azkaban was on the outside world through, so his father was wrong, he did belong there. Inside but outside, outside but in, ha ha.

He went cold and immediately closed his eyes, pulling his eyes away from the sky and curling his body into a ball. He focused hard as a dark and floating object drifted by the side of his cell and paused, turning towards him.
If he concentrated, in his head he was in a prison. Not Azkaban, but equally as dark and deep and empty- a well on the grounds of Stonem manor. He was five.

He would should not have disobeyed her, oh no he should not have. The bird wasn't for friends, it was for practicing.
Kill it! A female voice hissed and Tobias' whole body shook as she bore into him with her black eyes. You know you want to!
But he hadn't wanted to kill the bird, he liked it! He let it fly around his room and didn't even mind when it shit all over his bedcovers.
He should have killed it. Now, sat at the bottom of well with the dead bird he picked it up and nursed it in his hands and he felt a tear fall down his small face.

The floating shape of the Dementor passed, satisfied there was no laughter now, no joy for it to suck out of him.
Tobias was able to recreate scenarios in his head so vivid that he forgot where he really was.
But he had to be clever. The memories had to be dark and joy-less, so the Dementor wouldn't stay.

He didn't remember the last time he'd had a visitor. A man with a beard used to visit him, a kind man, but he didn't visit anymore. He remembered what the man had told him, that he might be able to get him out.
As he remembered this he was sure to keep his thoughts fact like- no hope, no promise, no Dementors. The days all ran together in here, no magic, no books to read, no things to do. He had once considered exercising so that he would be fit when he got out but somewhere in his heart he knew he would never get out. He was a broken thing, and the outside world did not like broken things.

That man with the long beard had asked him questions like "Why are you here?"
"I killed a lot of people," he had nodded, "with an axe."
The man had seemed intrigued, Tobias didn't understand why, "What do you remember?"
"I don't remember anything," Tobias had answered again, his voice hard, "It's like there's a haze over my eyes, black smoke filling everything up. I remember the weight of the axe in my hand, and the hot blood on my face, in my mouth. I remember the sound of the blade in soft flesh."
"But you didn't have an axe Tobias," Dumbledore had told him softly, "you used magic with your mind."

His words were like knotted fist to his gut, all the breath had left him for a moment. But they were true words and he could not pretend otherwise. The truth was all he had left.

He went to sleep with the memories of the bearded man, and dreamed of blood.
Blood on his hands and under his bare feet, blood in his mouth and pouring from his eyes. The room was filled with it, and he stood in the middle like a hideous shadow, something flashing silver in his hand.
Suddenly someone else appeared in the room, a man who looked like Tobias but with only half a nose. The man ran at him but before he could get any further than a step Tobias was upon him. He punched the man in the face hard with his left hand, twice, three times before he kicked him to the ground. Finally, he brought his axe down into the man's skull.
He walked across the bloodied room to a mirror and nodded in satisfaction, "You were the one who bit half his nose off. He was coming back to make sure you couldn't get out. Don't you see? He would never have let you leave…"