ἀκηδία
Tallies. Cut into the black walls of Azkaban with a bloodied thumbnail, they counted his first seven months of confinement. 216 marks. 216 days of watching the sun taunt him through the thin slat of a window before he’d turned his back on it, and his hope.
Days. Stretched into weeks, stretched into years, they bled into each other like the memories he couldn’t occlude against. Bodies and blood and fear. Classmates felled, brutalised, whispering in his dreams that he deserved the deaths they faced.
The Mark. Cursed and carved into his arm, it was warped now from the gouges he had clawed during desperate nights seeking atonement through suffering. He barely noticed it now, barely noticed anything. Why would he when each moment, each hour, each day was the same as the last?
A solicitor. Curls tamer now than they were in childhood, she looked appallingly clean next to him, and whatever pieces of himself that remained in this shell wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream at the antilogy.
An offer. A shortened sentence in exchange for the sweat of his brow, the labor of his hands. He spat at her feet. Or would have if his mouth weren’t sticky and dry. He managed a harsh bark in its stead. The concept of work was laughable, perhaps especially now. He would rather rot than offer up his body to those that locked him here.
A plea. Her touch was soft, and his eyes stung with tears his desiccated husk couldn’t shed. A child, she called him. Just a child who’d had no choice, who deserved the opportunity to remake his name. If only he would work towards it.
A word. Filthy and hateful, croaked through a throat that had only been used to scream. She recoiled from it, and he was glad. She left him to his torpor, and he sought to lose himself again in its soothing, dark embrace.