Weighted Hearts & Gilded Feathers

It was dark, and cold, so cold. Don’t think about the cold Thorfinn, lest it seep into your very bones. It sounded crazy but it did get colder when you thought about the cold. Fuck. Stop thinking about the cold. It got so much worse in the winter months. Salt spray from the sea outside would splash against the barred aperture of their cell, solidifying, and turning into a pane of ice in the winter. His very own window. 

 The only warmth Thorfinn ever found was late at night, when the guards went on break and the other prisoners slept. Antonin had become his solace in the last few years, keeping him sane on this desolate rock. Quite literally fucking the life and warmth back into him. 

If you’d have asked him years ago where he’d be right now, he’d have said home, at Rowle tower pumping heirs into some pureblood bitch. But instead here he is, fucking and getting fucked by a Russian prick. 

He didn’t think there was any true affection there. It was just exercise, like jogging around the pitch. That was what he told himself, on nights when he fell asleep in Antonin’s arms. But that was a lie. There was a bond they held. One stronger than any bond Thorfinn had in school with Avery, Flint or Montague. 

All you had time to do here was think, think and sleep, and fuck. His sanity had begun chipping away. Piece by piece until he’d sat against the wall staring at the same carved-in marks for three days straight. Antonin beat the shit out of him for that. Said he refused to share a cell with a lunatic for the rest of his life. As if he hadn’t been doing that when he was just in the cell by himself. 

Before he’d been a jokester, would fuck his way through pubs, turn on the charm that could get any witch to drop her knickers. 

He’d never contemplated fucking a man. He’d messed around in the Quidditch locker rooms before, gotten drunk as shit, and let Avery suck his dick on a dare. Maybe he was more fluid sexually than he initially thought. Witches were so different, with soft edges and tiny mewls. Men were rough, hard planes, and punishing hands. 

Antonin had obsession issues, he hyper-fixated on the most minute things. God forbid if he turned that obsession onto another person. Antonin’s hyperfixation turned to Thorfinn’s cock when they started fucking. Had pierced and tattooed it himself. Having been in Azkaban for so long he had the connections and pull to get the things he needed to accomplish it. 

Now whenever he pulled Thorfinns cock out of his prison trousers he would stare. Study it like the piece of art he had made it to be, before gripping it and swallowing it down like it was his salvation, and maybe it was. Thorfinn always thought he resembled a Norse God and had been called Odin in bed before. He guessed Thor was too close to his actual name.

Thorfinn didn’t know what Antonin was like before he got here, but he liked to imagine he was helping him too in some way. Sometimes, when it was especially cold, Thorfinn would shift into his animagus form, a grey wolf, and wrap himself around Antonin. Keeping him warm, and shielded from the dementors. they seemed to ignore him when shifted as if wearing the pelt meant he no longer had a soul they were interested in. 

******TW**********

He’d been here since 1992, having burned a muggle village to the ground with fiendfyre. He didn’t regret it, one of those muggle boys had assaulted his sister Freya, tarnished her, which led to her drowning in a bottle of dreamless sleep. 

She’d reminded him of Sleeping Beauty from the muggle books, her golden hair fanned out on the bed, the only way he knew she was dead was the purple tint to her usually rosy lips. 

She’d left him with just a charmed note to say goodbye. He’d hated her for a moment when he realized he’d have to trudge through the rest of his life without her by his side. She’d always been his shining light, a golden goddess put on Earth to shelter him from emotionally detached parents. She’d left him like he was nothing, like she didn’t know he needed her. But then he read the letter. He’d opened the parchment and for a moment it was blank, until a single tear dripped onto the page, revealing Freya's last words. 

How presumptuous of her, he thought now, to assume he’d cry for her. Of course, he’d cry for her. Fuck her for still leaving him here. Fuck her. He hated her some days, hated her just as much as he missed and loved her. 

She’d written what the boys from that village had done to her, her words chaotic swirls on the tear-stained parchment. He wondered for a while why she hadn’t told him, hadn’t used her wand to kill them, or sent him a Patronus. He would’ve come for her. From across continents, across time and space, he would’ve come. He wished he had a time-turner.  Maybe she thought she could just pretend it didn’t happen, but then their intrusion had borne twisted fruit. He still could’ve helped her, he would’ve gotten her a potion, or a healer anything to save her from this. Because she was meant for existence, meant to shine her light on this world, and now she was gone. 

 His parents would have just shipped her off or married her to a lower family like the Selwyn heir if they had known. Thorfinn shuddered at that, Hollis Selwyn was ghastly, not even remotely suitable for his sister. She’d be put in a dowager house until she gave birth, the child either abandoned in the muggle world or killed and then rushed into an unwanted marriage. 

*********TW**********

The Aurors didn’t even ask why he had done it, not that he would have told them. No one else could know of his sister’s dishonour. They’d just assumed he was a Death Eater wannabe and shoved him in a cell with an actual convicted Death Eater, said it would help him learn what that really meant. He didn’t mean to burn the whole village down. Just those boys, but the fiendfyre went out of control, feeding on his inner hatred and consuming everything as it went. He still heard the screams, when the dementors got close and he was too tired to shift into his wolf, he’d hear the screams of the women and children as his fire devoured them. 

He’d tried to save one, there had been a small girl with golden hair and bright azure eyes like his sister, who couldn’t have been a day over eight years old, trapped under a fallen beam. She cried for her mom, looked at him with tears in her eyes and soot on her face, begging him to save her. So he had run forward, seeing Freya instead of this girl, but when he reached for her the structure collapsed completely. He got twisted keloids on his right arm for his trouble, they were mostly gone now. Covered with tattoos he’d gotten in the prison yard. His favourite is a portrait of his beautiful Freya. 

He looked over to Antonin who was staring out of the bars to their cell, watching. He was always watching, always waiting for something. He’d been especially antsy the last few months. Kept saying “he is coming.” Thorfinn had asked him who “he” was. Antonin looked at him like he was a fool. “The Dark Lord of course. He will come for us, the mark is burning.” 

Antonin had told him a lot about the Dark Lord over the years. How his power was intoxicating, that he respected magic and wanted to unshackle wizardkind from the binds of light and dark magic. It was just magic to him, and Thorfinn understood why that resounded with Antonin. Having been an Unspeakable in the past he worked in grey, that was his area of expertise. He wasn't made to operate within the confines of social acceptability. That Ravenclaw mind of his processed things analytically. 

Thorfinn hoped that when he came if he did come, he’d take him too. Although he didn't want to hope, hope wasn't good in a place like this. It was like the dementors had a sensor for that shite and wanted to squash it.

He’d gratefully join the Death Eater ranks, if that meant he could rid the wizarding community of the pestilence that was muggles. If only they’d been successful the first time around. His sister would still be here, and he might be braiding her flaxen hair, placing a daisy chain on top so she looked every bit the Beltane priestess he saw her to be. 

___________________________

Antonin felt anxious, glancing over his shoulder at every slight noise. He hadn’t always been this jumpy but the mark had started to burn, he knew what that meant. He only hoped they wouldn’t have to wait much longer. He missed the feeling of magic coursing through his veins, the heady feeling that swept through him when he cast a curse, making his cock harden in the confines of his trousers. 

He had a psycho-sexual relationship with magic, he knew other people found that odd, and off-putting. They were just too small-minded to notice the intricacies even the simplest of magic had. 

He spent the years exercising his mind, though he knew Thorfinn just thought he was staring into space. He practiced arithmancy in his mind, and carved equations into the walls when his mind was too jumbled from the dementors to stay clear. He knew his already slightly twisted mind had descended into madness since he’s been here. Trips to the yard used to be the only human interaction he’d get before Thorfinn. 

In the early days of his arrival here, it wasn't so bad, the dementors while horrific hadn’t dug their claws in fully yet. They were still coherent enough to talk in whispers in the yard, making contingency plans. They’d been so naive in the beginning. Rodolphus and Rabastan had believed, being the only scions of their house, they would be freed. They were wrong. The torture of the Longbottoms had seen to that. Not that they didnt have cause for the torture, it was divine retribution. 

Bella believed that Arcturus Black would pull some strings to get her out, he didn't, not for her or Sirius Black. 

Months faded to years and then a decade had passed. Antonin was grateful for Thorfinn’s arrival. They never really spoke of what put him in Azkaban. It didn't really matter what he had done, only that he was here now. He quieted the voices, the whispers in his mind that fed on his impulses. 

It was late December he surmised looking out of the window, or early January, he was sure Yule had passed, not that they celebrated it here. It was eerie in the prison, too calm, too quiet. The other Death Eater inmates in the same hall as him were talking loudly, which usually brought the Dementors but they hadn’t arrived, had not come to quiet them. 

Bellatrix was yelling out of the bars of her cell, shrieking “It's the Dark Lord, he’s come! I told you all he would come back for us. You will be punished for your lack of faith. I never doubted him, never doubted our Lord.” 

The others were yelling in response to her, their voices layered on top of each other like wards, the cacophony of it ringing his ears. 

Suddenly he felt it, the wave of power washed over him, it felt like war and home, a wet cunt and a glass of Polugar Vodka in front of the fire. His pulse quickened, and he walked from the window across the cell to the doors. He could see the others. Holding onto the bars angling their heads down the hallway, hoping to catch a glimpse. The silence was deafening, their anticipation hung in the air like smoke in the air after a village raid. 

Thorfinn walked up behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder and gripped it. They didn't need many words to know what the other was thinking, not anymore. 

“It's him, isn't it?” Thorfinn murmured. 

“He is coming, I told you he was coming.” he shook his head, then looked over his shoulder at Thorfinn, “I’ll bring you with me, I’m sure he would appreciate more soldiers, especially pureblood ones.” 

They heard footsteps in the corridor, and they grew closer and closer, slow and steady, confident footsteps, turning back to face the hallway. The cell doors all opened but no one stepped out into the hallway, not yet. 

His voice called out in the darkness, “Come and join me in the great war, there is no shackle I will place on you, no limit to what you may accomplish at my side. Reclaim your place in this world.” 

Antonin grinned, he wasn't just talking to his followers, he was talking to the others coaxing them to join him, dangling the promise of freedom in front of them with the small price of subservience. There would be no physical manacles clasped on their wrists, but the mark was every bit a shackle. A magical collar to be yanked on at Lord Voldemort's whim, that was fine for Antonin though, he enjoyed bondage. 

He was sure there was a manic gleam in his eyes, as he turned to Thorfinn, “Let's go molodoy volk, time for a little havoc and mayhem.”