Chapter 4
January 1999
Harry doesn't sleep on his first night in Azkaban.
He lies awake in the half gloom listening to the wild sea. It doesn't sleep either. It crashes against the island’s savage rocks, again and again. Let me in. Let me in.
But Harry doesn't know how to let anyone in. Not anymore.
He stares at the entrance to his room - another old cell. Only now there is a door where once there were bars. And Harry isn’t a prisoner here. He's just imprisoned in life.
Moonlight falls through the gap in his curtains and across the door handle like a white silk ribbon, luminescent in the dark. It reminds Harry of Malfoy’s hair. Incandescent in the overcast grey.
He sighs into the darkness, into the disrupted quiet. Should he have left too, when he had the chance? Should he have followed his old enemy off this dreadful island?
Harry felt compelled to come here. But here nothing is different.
The guilt still consumes him. Why did he live, when they had to die?
And the hopelessness still haunts him. What is left, after so much loss?
He closes his eyes to the sound of the sea and waits for sleep. For relief.
It does not come.
*
Harry stands - bleary-eyed - in an empty hall in Azkaban’s eastern wing. It is cold in the way that only winter mornings can be, and his breath comes out in little clouds of white against the chill of the air.
The ceiling has collapsed in one corner and the crumbling gap is patched with shimmering defence charms. Winter sunlight filters through and refracts into a million colours on the floor like a shattered rainbow.
Harry can't remember the last time that his life felt full of colour.
It has been bleak for so long.
He rubs his hands together for warmth - his knuckles slowly turning from white to pink - and looks about.
The rest of the space is as dreary as a disused Muggle car park.
The surviving walls are hewn from vast blocks of stone - which Harry is certain only a giant could have quarried - and up high a row of windows, clad with iron grey bars, look out onto an iron grey sky. Beneath his feet, the flagstone floor is strewn with dust and dirt from years unswept.
There is nothing else. Only emptiness.
Like the void in his chest.
Harry pushes his glasses onto his head and rubs his eyes. They sting with tiredness.
The man with the mariner’s cap - whom Harry met yesterday - turns towards him then.
‘This will be the library,’ he says. His voice is deep and comforting like a warm woollen cloak on a cold day - something that Harry is sorely in need of.
His name is Hamish Abberley. He is an Auror, like Harry, though unlike Harry he has many years of Ministry experience.
‘Hard to imagine, I’m sure,’ he adds. ‘But some paint and some shelves and some books and job’s a good’un!’
Harry almost smiles at the way in which he talks.
Almost, because actually smiling feels too difficult these days.
Hamish’s words and the cadence of his speech remind Harry of Hagrid. Hagrid, who survived, when so many didn’t.
He tries not to think about them.
‘Right,’ says Harry.
‘We’ll have’ta repair her ceiling, of course, but that shouldn't be too troublesome.’
And so he continues.
Hamish has been showing him the ropes, which is to say the rules and rhythms of the prison.
How it wakes, how it sleeps, how it feeds. What the Aurors oversee, where the Dementors still patrol, and what is taken care of by other people and other creatures, in the hidden and the tucked away parts.
Azkaban, Harry has learnt, is like a city unto itself. Full of secrets and rules, and rule-breaking. Like the wand that is tucked into Hamish's sock, just in case.
‘She gets cold in winter, but there ain’t much use in heating empty rooms,’ Hamish says then, and he sounds a little sad.
Harry notices that he talks about Azkaban as though it is a living, breathing thing, and he wonders if this is out of respect for the place, or a strange sort of affection.
‘Now, let me show you how to check her charms.’
Hamish claps his hands together and walks towards the crumbling ceiling.
*
Their next stop is reception.
It is housed in a small wooden shelter, more like a shack than a building, overlooking the port.
One of the heavyset Aurors from the pier is sitting inside, behind a small desk, flicking through an old copy of Wizard’s Weekly with a bored expression on his face. He does not look up when Harry and Hamish enter.
‘Here’s the Wand Weigher,’ Hamish says. ‘She’s a little old, but in fair nick.’
He gestures towards a brass instrument, tarnished by the sea air, with a singular scale and a scroll of parchment tucked into a small chamber beneath. Harry recognises the device from the Ministry, where one sits atop the Security Desk.
‘Visitors have’ta submit their wands for examination on arrival,’ Hamish says.
He walks over to the desk and nods at a colossal ledger that takes up most of its surface. It is bound in deep blue cloth, the colour faded along its spine. Beside it sits an old quill and a glass inkpot smeared with fingerprints. There is a hairline crack in its stopper that reminds Harry of the Metropolitan line, etched in glass.
‘Record the results here.’
Hamish opens the ledger with a resounding thump and points at its pages.
‘Oh, and make sure the visitor signs their name and arrival time.’ He gestures to the quill. ‘It’s enchanted, so they can only sign their true name. No false identities and such.’
Hamish looks at him expectantly and Harry feels the need to nod approvingly. ‘Uh - great idea,’ he says.
Hamish beams. ‘I recommended it.’
The Auror behind the desk rolls his eyes.
Harry comes closer to peer at the quill then, more out of politeness than necessity. As he does so, a name in the ledger catches his eye.
Draco Malfoy.
Harry doesn’t think that he has ever seen the Slytherin's handwriting before. A surprise given all their years at school together.
Even more surprising is how beautiful Harry finds it. His letters are tall and sloping, like reeds swaying in a summer breeze, each one perfectly placed apart.
Harry thinks that he could be a letter in Draco’s name.
Perfectly apart from everything.
Then he notices how many times Malfoy’s name appears in the ledger.
Yesterday, December, twice in November.
Harry is certain that if he turns back a page, to autumn gone, Malfoy’s name will haunt those lines past also.
‘I thought regular visits aren't allowed?’ he asks Hamish.
He means to look up from the ledger, but he can’t. He is lost in the slashing of an ‘ l ’ and December’s slanting ‘ y ’. A perfect ending to a name that still bothers Harry.
Hamish scoffs. ‘They’re not. But some people have friends in high places.’
Harry frowns. ‘Even now?’
The Malfoys have taken a fall from grace since the war.
‘Even now,’ says Hamish.
Harry is irritated.
Some things never change.
*
Harry has lunch with Hamish and two other Aurors in the staff tower.
The kitchenette is cramped and smells of last night’s fish and chips. Winter sunlight filters through the grime streaked window above the sink and falls across the black and white tiles that decorate the floor like a chessboard.
Harry and his new colleagues sit squeezed around a leaning wooden table, pushed up against the far wall for support. Its lacquered surface is stained with the tacky residue of one too many nightcaps and strewn with day-old crumbs.
‘So,’ says one of the Aurors in a thick West Country accent. ‘Be settlin’ in?’ His tone is sceptical.
Harry recognises him from his tour yesterday. He is tall and broadly built, with a nose that has been broken and reset at least twice.
‘Yes,’ Harry says. ‘I am.’
It's a lie, but he doesn't feel like making conversation. Not that the Auror gets the hint.
‘How old are ’ye anyways?’ Broken nose asks. ‘Eighteen?’
‘Nineteen,’ Harry corrects him, though he feels ridiculous saying it.
He is nineteen years old and he's seen more pain and suffered more loss than most people have in their entire lives.
Broken nose laughs and tears into his sandwich. He reminds Harry of a vulture shredding meat from its fallen prey.
‘I give ’ye a week,’ he says between mouthfuls of bread and cheese, the crumbs of which get caught in his thick black beard.
‘Davy,’ Hamish cautions.
Harry says nothing.
‘You know,’ Broken nose - Davy - goes on, ‘there ain’t no VIP treatment ’ere. We all be sleepin’ in them old cells at the end o’ the day.’
‘Davy.’ Hamish has set his own sandwich down on his chipped white plate and is fixing his colleague with a warning look, as if to say ‘leave him be.’
But Harry doesn't notice. He's thinking about how much he hates that word.
VIP.
He hates the press. The journalists. The public that wants to know everything about him, when he doesn't even know himself.
He has never wanted fame. He dreams of being ordinary, unknown. A different boy with a different name.
A boy without a scar.
‘Nineteen,’ Davy chuckles to himself and shakes his head in disbelief.
Yes, Harry is nineteen years old, and he has already seen the very worst of the world.
‘I don't care what you think,’ Harry says suddenly.
His words seem to come from nowhere and they catch his colleagues off guard. Broken nose looks put out, Hamish looks amused, and the last Auror looks at his plate, not looking for trouble.
‘I’m here,’ Harry says, ‘and I'm staying. So deal with it.’
He leaves his lunch, and his colleagues, sitting in the kitchenette.
*
Harry lies still in the moon-touched darkness, eyes closed, listening to the sea.
At first it was haunting. Now it is almost comforting. Constant and ever present. It cannot leave him, cannot die.
He drifts in and out of sleep listening to the untamed lullaby of its waves.
Harry thinks of the hall, not yet a library. Barren but filled with potential. Can he nurture something from nothing too?
He thinks of Malfoy’s name in the ledger. The intention behind each letter.
If only he could have such purpose, such clarity.
And between sleep and waking, he wonders - what is Malfoy up to?
Why does he keep coming here?
Because Harry can only think the worst these days.
He wakes to his alarm and the crashing of the sea.
He wakes with a purpose.
To find out.