Prison
Prison
The cold was around me. It was in me, reaching deep and deeper, through my skin and all the way to my bones, until there would soon be no more room for warmth. No room for warmth, for joy, for hope. Not ever again.
Because I was dead.
I knew it. I was cold and I was dead, and it didn’t matter a bit.
At least I didn’t have to keep walking my cell, walking my cell, walking my cell as I had for days or weeks or months now… Walking my cell even when my muscles ached with the weariness of it… Walking because I was ordered to. By whom? I didn’t know. Didn’t care really. Walking because, no matter how much my legs shook beneath me, it was easier to walk than it was to try and find the voice to protest with.
Walking…
A little further… Just a bit, come on now, Stephen…
Walking because there was no voice, no breath to say they had the wrong man…
Again. Had the wrong man…
Wasn’t Stephen, whoever he was. Wasn’t Peter Pettigrew. Wasn’t a Death Eater. Wasn’t James and Lily’s Secret Keeper. Wasn’t the person they thought I was. Wasn’t the person who was going to walk any further…
Come on. A little further and we’ll get you something to drink…
Yeah, right. Heard that one before. Even thought I’d felt water at my lips miles and miles ago… Tens, hundreds, thousands of trips back and forth and back and forth and back and forth …
Across-
My-
Cell-
…ago.
But I’d almost walked the memory of that drink away. If there had really been one… Too long ago, too far ago to be sure it wasn’t a dream... Since then, if there’d really been a then, I’d walked myself hot with exertion… Walked til the sweat ran like tears down my face… Back, forth, back, forth. A little further, a little further come on a little further. Walked til the sweat dried and my mouth parched. Til my throat dried raw, til my chest screamed with the heat, til it tickled and shuddered and tried to cough out the deep, burning, sandy dryness that had filled it… Walked til my feet wouldn’t step and my knees buckled and I sank onto my narrow cot and felt the heat draining out of me.
And now…
I was cold and dead in my dark cell in Azkaban and it didn’t matter. My dear friends James and Lily were dead too. Because of me. Because, through my poor judgment, I’d asked them to make Peter Pettigrew their Secret Keeper and he had betrayed them. Betrayed me too, but that didn’t matter any more now that I was dead…
Their son, my Godson, Harry was probably alive. That was a good thing, if it were true, but due to my actions, he was an orphan… That did matter… Harry mattered. He was the only part of my life left to matter… All the other things that had been important were fading… growing more and more distant along with the old angers, old sorrows and regrets that were part of this endlessly desolate place…
Any friends that I’d once had, now believed I’d gone over to the Dark Wizard Voldemort like most of my family. There was only one person who had looked at me with kindness during all my years in this forsaken prison cell. She had been a beautiful Medi-wizard on an inspection tour from the Ministry of Magic. I thought once I heard someone say her name was Hessia. Hessia, same pretty name as a sweet little pony-tailed girl back in my school days had had. But more than likely, she had only been the lovely vision of a Wizard gone mad with loneliness and despair.
The narrow rays of sun that visited my cell each morning would escape soon,. They would slip away through my narrow barred window. Then I would lay on my bunk in the deep shadows of the day and the deeper ones of the night until the dementors came to carry my bones away.
Thinking of them touching me would once have frozen me with horror. But it didn’t anymore. They couldn’t make me any colder now that I was dead. I had lived through hundreds of days and nights in Azkaban. Now, I wouldn’t have to live through any more of them.
Being dead was kind of a relief.
The last rays of morning sun were touching my face. I could feel the heat on my eyelids. I didn’t know dead folks could feel heat on their eyelids. Was that why people sometimes put pennies there, so the heat wouldn’t disturb them?
It wasn’t disturbing me. It was… Well, it was kind of nice. If I could ever have said I liked anything at Azkaban, it was my early morning hour of sun. If I could feel that heat on my closed lids, maybe I could open my eyes one last time and look at daylight. The heat was so insistent on my face that I could almost feel the sweat running down into my hair as I opened my eyes one final time.
Clear, beautiful light poured through the window in a slanting stream. It splashed across my pillow and onto something lying a few inches from my face. A bit of newspaper! When had I ever had a newspaper in Azkaban?
Then I remembered. The Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, had given it to me! I knew what it said, too! I read it a hundred times! Peter Pettigrew, that little traitor, was living n his animagus form as the pet rat of a boy named Ron Weasley! Soon he would travel with Ron to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Harry was at Hogwarts! If Voldemort regained even a little of his old power, Peter would act to deliver my Godson to that dark Wizard!
There wasn’t time to be dead right now, I had to warn Harry!
I would pass through the bars. I would climb the wall. I would run through the trees. I would gather myself at the edge of the rocks and leap out into nothing. I would sail through sunset skies, streaking down into the sea and swim- and swim…
The water was gliding over my limbs, cool and silken. It caught in my eyelashes and filled my vision with rainbow prisms. Red, yellow, purple, green, like the colours that wait on the edges of a skrying bowl until the moment comes for them to flow in and form the prophetic images in its centre…
But this was no bowl. It was big. A whole skrying sea maybe, alive with brilliant, shifting colours. What would they reveal as I swam across the surface? Would they show me anything about Harry? About his safety? His future?
I didn’t care what they showed me! I wasn’t about to wait around and trust his fate to the colours in a bowl right now! Or to a sea! Or to anything or anyone else like I had with his parents. I had to reach him myself, before it was too late!
He was somewhere out ahead of me! I blinked, trying to make out his face through the shimmering colours in the water.
It wasn’t clear. I hadn’t expected it to be. I was always so rotten at divination! But for one moment, through the shimmers of light, I saw something steady and green.
Harry’s eyes. Clear, green eyes, so like his mother, Lily’s.
I was never so happy to see anything before!
I’m coming, Harry!
I strained toward him, flinging the wordless thought ahead of me as his eyes grew suddenly alert, their gaze locking with mine.
A warm wave of resolution flooded over me, sending me surging forward, up out of the sea, to where I lay, gasping and spitting out quantities of water on a soft and solid shore. The brilliant colours of the skrying sea were fading. But Harry’s eyes were still looking into mine, green and intent.
With a heavy, shaking hand I pushed hair and water from my eyes and blinked my vision clear.
Not Harry’s eyes. Not Harry’s face. A woman’s.
“Stephen?”
There was no shoreline. I was staring up at a ceiling. The woman was in a chair beside me. She had sunshine on the side of her dark red hair. The light was streaming in through a window just behind her shoulder.
“Stephen, can you talk to me?”
There was a cool, wet cloth brushing my cheeks, then my forehead. I pushed it away.
“Stephen?”
Was she talking to me?
“No.” My voice was barely a croak and my throat felt like I’d swallowed half the sand on the shore. “No, I… I’m not-”
My words trailed off. I remembered that window. It had been rain spattered a little while ago, but the shape was familiar. Not Azkaban at all, but still familiar. If I turned my head, I would see a fireplace with a mantle and several small, still paintings above it.
“Willow?” I asked. “When did it stop raining?”
Her voice was quiet. “Most recently? The day before yesterday.”
“What?” I pushed myself up on my elbows, staring at the window-pane as though a drop or two might be hanging around up there, waiting to say she was wrong. “What do you mean, the day before-?”
“You’ve been ill,” she said with that no-nonsense Madam Pomphrey sound in her voice again. “You’ve had a very high fever, but the worst of that is behind us now. I want to get you sitting up here for a few minutes while I fix you something to drink. It’ll help you to keep clearing your lungs.”
She was still speaking as she pulled me toward her and fluffed two fat pillows behind my head. I settled back gratefully as she got to her feet and hurried away.
I didn’t look after her. There was an odd stillness in this bright room, like the quiet moment between ocean waves. There had been something here before, darker and more desperate than illness, a sense of dementor-cold desolation. I could feel the echo of it deep in my bones. That was behind me now, too. Ahead of me, the future was full of questions. But for this instant, I was floating, suspended somewhere between them. I closed my eyes and rested in the feeling while I listened to the run of Willow’s words and the sound of liquid pouring.
“It’s important you drink a lot of fluids these next few days. They’ll help you get your strength back. I made you some tea. Not black. That would dehydrate you. But with herbs. A lot of people are very suspicious of herbs these days. Think the best medicines are the modern ones that come already made up in a bottle.”
“Odd notion,” I said. The words dribbled down my chin and I wasn’t sure she could hear me.
Coming back to the settle, Willow sat down beside me. “Here, drink up.” She put a cup into my hands, then steadied it with her own as I raised it to my lips. She laughed suddenly. “Oh, what a face you’re making! I know it’s dreadfully sweet, but the sugar in it will give you energy.”
“Was it really…? The day before yesterday…? Since the rain?”
It took an amazing lot of work to ask. After a few words I was gasping and out of breath. My voice was almost the croak it had been after Azkaban. “How long…? Before that…? Did I come here?”
Her eyebrows raised. “You don’t remember?”
I shook my head. It was easier.
“It was almost a fortnight.”
I stared at her. A fortnight, had she said? Really? Was that before the rain stopped? Or since I’d come here in the first place? How many days did that add up to since the storm on the hill? I squinted. A fortnight from…? From when? How many days? Tried to sort it out, but it was more numbers than I could count to right now. I closed my eyes, looking for memories to fill in those blank stretches of time. “Did I eat… sausage when I came here?”
“Leave it to a man to remember what he ate! Yes, you had sausage and tea. Do you remember anything else?”
“Eggs?”
“No, you didn’t have eggs. I mean do you remember anything else after you ate?”
“I dreamed…” I said, still searching out the memories. “That I was dead.”
“You remember that?”
“Yeah. Why?” The sharpness in her tone made me look up into her face.
Her eyes were very wide. “I thought you were dying. At first you were telling me how dark it was. And you kept saying over and over that you were cold, so cold, but your temperature kept rising and your lungs were filling up with fluid. I kept trying to make you walk, hoping that would help to clear them. At first you argued with me. Called me a few rather choice names, too!” She paused to give me a fleeting grin before her face sobered, “But after a while you stopped speaking almost completely and you were too weak to keep walking, even when I tried to support you. All I could do was get you into bed and sponge you with cool water to bring your fever down. But your breathing got shallow and developed a deep rattle. It got to a point where I could scarcely rouse you, even to take a little water. It seemed to me you had no fight left in you, no will to survive. As though it didn’t matter to you whether you lived or died.”
“It didn’t.” How odd to hear it said so matter-of-factly. I could still feel the echoes of that cold despair lingering, like the last shadows of night in a winter dawn. But I wasn’t imprisoned by it anymore. I had slipped through its bars and gotten beyond its cold walls to where I was bathed in warm morning sun.
“Something changed yesterday morning,” Willow was saying, nodding at a large bowl sitting on a wooden stool pulled up close beside the settle where I lay. There was a cloth floating in it. “Suddenly, you didn’t just lay there passive. You didn’t answer when I called to you, but you began to press your face and hands against the cloth when I was bathing you.”
The silken feel of water against my limbs…
“I was… swimming.” I said.
“Then you began coughing and trying to catch deep breaths.”
“Was full… of seawater.”
“You fought very hard to get it out of your lungs.”
“I had to keep swimming… Knew I had to get to shore… Before I could rest.”
“Well, I guess you made it. After your fever broke, you dropped off to sleep. That’s where you’ve been for the last twenty four hours.”
“That long?” I looked up at Willow. Around the bright room. “But how can that be? My Godson- was just here. Out ahead of me. Knew if I kept… Looking at his eyes, I could go on. Get to shore. Then- all at once the ocean was gone and I woke up here.”
“Is that the Godson you mentioned the night of the storm?”
“Yeah. Harry. It was… important. Wanted… to get to him.”
I had no wand and no idea how to get one. And I didn’t know a spell for time-travel when I did. But oddly, that peaceful feeling still held me.
“You must love him very much,” Willow’s eyes were very green, very serious as she looked at me.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know how it would happen, but I knew I would see Harry again. If, amid all that brightness, when I reached out, I could find his clear green gaze ready to lock with my own, I knew it was anything but impossible.
He had made it through the battle in the Chamber of Mysteries! I was sure of that, too! His presence had been there, even through my cold despair. No connection with a person who had died would be so warm and vital. Harry was alive, he was safe, at least for the moment, just as he had still been safe when I escaped Azkaban two years ago.
I hadn’t really known him back then,, only remembered a proud Godfather’s delight in the cheerful, gurgling baby of my dear friends. Even so, the need to reach him was the one thing that had roused me from the cold dark world of the dementors and given me a reason to venture back out into the light.
Since then, I had gotten to know him. We formed our own bond of love and loyalty between us. That bond, stronger than time, or death, or despair had just brought me out of another cold, despairing place. That bond had given me a reason to grab onto hope once more, even against all odds.
Willow took my empty cup and set it next to the bowl on the stool. I could feel her hand circling mine, strong and sure. “Stephen,” she said with so much certainty in her voice that, in that moment, the barriers of miles and years fell away and I believed her without question. “I’ll see we get you back to your Godson.”