Hell
Your socks, master Potter.” Dobby stood at Harry’s feet, holding a mismatched pair of socks in a bony, outstretched hand. “Your socks, Potter.” Dobby said once more, in a voice that wasn’t his own, and began to smash his head against a wall, blood flowed. Filling the room, everything was red. Blood red.
Harry gasped for air, struggling to keep his head above the cardinal tide.
He grappled for a rope floating on the surface, tugging himself through the ocean of red, and then the rope wasn’t a rope, but long white hair, remaining white and untouched even when soaked in the thick red seas.
A pounding voice echoed over the waves, “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.”
Harry washed up on a beach. Sun beat down on him. Murmurs of, “This isn’t Hogwarts,” drifted through the air, and then there was a loud bang of metal against stone.
Harry woke up with a jump, to the sound of the dungeon door slamming open.
The next time he slept, he was naked and covered in his own blood.
After that, Harry didn’t sleep for a long time.
He sat, counting the stones that built up the cellar walls. There were three hundred and eighty nine. Harry reckoned had been nine more visits from the death eaters, and though he had no idea how much time had passed, he thought it must be at least nine days.
Harry had tried to count how many times he’d been fed, how many times he’d slept. But both were too rare, his own ribs digging into his thighs as he hugged his knees to his chest, and no sleep pattern to speak of. Harry wondered how Sirius had coped in Azkaban. Well, from what he could decipher, he hadn’t coped. Not really.
Harry could only compare it to hell. Something he had never experienced. He had seen illustrations at his primary school, though. It was very red and firey. Harry was also very red; the blood dried in layers. He didnt have water leftover from what they gave him for drinking, so it just build up. Sometime it flaked off, pulling painfully at the ever thickening hair on his legs, arms, and more noticeably, face.
Sirius had shown him how to shave in the public bathroom at the train station, before Harry had to find the Dursle’s in the car park. The Dursley’s said he was a freak. Because he was magic, and because he was hairy. Hermione told him it was genetics, that lots of brown people are hairy. Sirius said James had been very hairy, that it was a Potter trait.
Harry didn’t know what to think anymore. He was glad he didnt have a mirror, he must look like a tramp. The Dursley’s wouldn’t ever let him back in the house. If his face was in the same state as his hands, it would be caked in thick layers of dry blood and sweat.
Disgusting.
***
Time passed. The next time he was dragged back into his cellar, Harry wasn’t sure he knew his own name, or the name of the man in front of him. He vaguely recalled someone telling him to “keep the boy alive.”
Harry murmured, trying to form fruitless words, to reassure himself of something, though he didnt know what. The man forced glass phials to his lips and Harry drank. He was so thirsty.
The buzzing in his head faded, but before he could even recall the face, the name, of the man before him, he was gone, and Harry was asleep.
Days passed like hours, hours like days. That house elf popped in with food sometimes. Harry ate. He didnt want to, but he knew he should keep his strength up, or try to at least.
Harry dreamed of strange things. Even in his waking hours he dreamed. He ignored what he saw. He knew it couldn't be real, and he preferred pretending he was still sane.
He dreamed of Dobby, of Snape and Crouch. Dreams where Macnair and Crouch would do to him what they often did. They turned to nightmares when Harry enjoyed it. Because he didn’t. He never would, ever.
He woke and experienced just though things. Those dreams and nightmares. So much felt the same that Harry wasn’t sure what was real or not anymore. When did he sleep? When did he wake?
He usually forgot the answers to those questions, if he was even aware of the answer in the first place. Harry often awoke screaming, to a wand at his temple, a poison at his lips or one of those awful death eaters gripping his hips.
Today was one of those days. He was bound by hidden threads, imperio-ed one too many times. He accepted his fate every time now. It hurt. It would hurt more if he resisted.
The door to the cellar swung open. Macnair didn’t cease his lewd ministrations over Harry, not until a stinging hex grazed them both. Finally, Macnair pulled away with a grunt.
“Put your grubby cock back in your trousers, Macnair. There are many a precious potion whose ingredient entail human penis. Don’t tempt me.” A voice bit out as the door shut once again.
“Aww, Snapey doesn’t want a go? Funny, that. Always took you as a poofter.” Macnair shot back, tucking himself into his trousers.
Harry hunched over himself on the floor. Snape, his own potions master, seeing him like that. Godric.
“I have no interest in little boys, Macnair. I deal with them often enough at Hogwarts.”
Harry blanched at the disgusting insinuation. Snape truly was a creepy git. “Potter, your attention is wanted upstairs. Clothe yourself.” The potions master said with indifference, glancing Harry’s way, his eyes held contempt and careful neutrality. Harry assumed it was only to hide whatever perverse thoughts he had.
He had only just tugged his manky sweat pants from the night he’d been taken back on, when Snape grasped him round the wrist and took off. He marched Harry down many corridors, dragging him when the boy’s wobbly legs wouldn’t keep up.
They passed places Harry had never seen in Crouch Manor, but he hadnt long to look before he was wisked away after Snape.
Suddenly, fresh night air was upon them, and Harry tripped over a heap of black cloth on the ground. Snape’s grasp on his arm was the only thing stopping him from crashing to the ground, and Harry looked behind him at the lump of cloth. It had rolled when he tripped on it, revealing the pale slumbering face of Bellatrix Lestrange.
Harry frowned. “What- why is sh-“
Snape intercepted his question with an exceedingly unhelpful answer, “Be quiet.”
Harry huffed and followed along, legs aching, flicked of darkness among his blurry vision. Black spots floating around. His back tingled, liquid shone black in the light, weeping from wounds that had reopened from trying to keep pace with Snape, or had never healed in the first place.
Soon, Harry’s feet ached. Needles with twigs and leafy undergrowth. The night grew darker, darker, darker.
Was it getting darker? Maybe those annoying black spots were just getting bigger.
Then, everything went black as pitch.
A small but gleeful voice in the back of Harry’s mind shouted,
“reprieve!”