Morsmordre

He woke them all up.

In the early hours of the morning with sunlight seeping over the horizon and catching the dark, choppy waves, they had – all of them – been hidden away in the darkest corners of their cells, closing their empty eyes and praying that they could simply fall away in their sleep.

He was crying.

They opened their empty eyes and stared at the source of the sound, following the path of the jailors as they dragged a struggling boy towards an uninhabited cell. He was calling for his mother, the way a child would do when confronted with unjust punishment. And, indeed, he could not have been more than nineteen. Hair, straw-like and greasy with lack of care, hung over his eyes and curled at the nape of his neck, but with his jerked movements it became unsettled until it resembled little more than a heap upon his head.

He did not find sleep.

They watched him with their empty eyes as he lay on the stone floor of his cell like an abandoned animal, his body shuddering with sobs. Like clockwork, he would whisper for his mother into the darkness or plead for a reprieve that would never come. With the rising of the sun, they turned their empty eyes away, uninterested by his repetitive nature and wishing only that he would be quiet.

The day was indistinguishable from the night, save for a slight change in the shadows as the sun crept across the sky, obscured almost entirely by a thick mist. The dark clouds broke, sending sheets of rain to splatter across the stone walls of Azkaban. The cells were lit up, briefly and undeterminably, with a violently white light as lightning speared and flashed in the distance, and the rumble of thunder drowned out his cries.

By nightfall, he was screaming. He ignored the gristly food that had been shoved roughly into the cell; they, with the empty eyes, had been hoping for a brief minute or two of silence as he devoured the petty meal. He had not eaten for almost a day, possibly more, and yet the need to shout for someone who would not hear him was apparently too great to be dismissed.

He did not eat for three days and three nights, and when the food he had been given was not eaten, it was thrown away. A waste, they thought, their empty eyes watching disdainfully as yet another plate of food was carried away. He begged for a rescue, he begged for forgiveness, but most of all he begged for his mother. He screamed and cried until his throat was hoarse, and still he did not stop.

And then, on the fourth day, when the sky had cleared enough for his shadow to be cast clearly over the stones of his cell, he fell silent, his eyes as empty and soulless as the Dementors who guarded him so greedily.

At long last, he had given up hope. They all did, in the end.