Chapter Text
Any young witch or wizard grew up on gruesome stories of Azkaban. They heard the tales at their parents’ knee, warnings of what happened to bad little magical children who misbehaved. Ghost stories, but real, the damp stone walls and odd drips and the silent, chilling procession of the Dementors.
Most witches and wizards never questioned the stories their parents told. Even though, if they had really thought it out, a dripping dungeon didn’t entirely make sense. Prisoners survived for decades in Azkaban. If the prison was kept in squalor, in the middle of a frigid sea, one nasty cold could wipe out the entire inmate population.
The reality of Azkaban was that it was ruled by merciless, methodical care. No human guards could withstand the stark isolation of the fortress, so the Dementors tended to the inhabitants’ needs. Illness was a danger borne by filth, so Dementors swabbed floors and coated the cell bars in stinging disinfectant. Hygiene was necessary. Prisoners were rinsed, forcibly if necessary, twice per week. Food was essential of course, and there were Dementors whose role it was to prepare the gruels and stews prisoners ate, and to bring the trays to the cells.
In return, the Dementors reaped a harvest of madness, desolation, and despair. This was another part of the story that most witches and wizards did not fully comprehend, unless they found themselves inside the prison. While it was of course true that Dementors drained the brightest memories first, most Dementors had little use for the sensations of human happiness and pleasure, however ambrosial the flavors may be. Despair was dense and glutinous to a Dementor’s taste, but filling. Insanity was fermented, crackling over a Dementor’s taste receptors. Darkness was the majority of what Dementors consumed, especially since most inhabitants arrived at Azkaban already despondent. Humans entering the prison thought they’d be stripped of happiness and left alone. They never seemed to realize the feeding would continue, year after year.
To the Dementors, Azkaban had no prisoners, only livestock.
*
It was the Dementor’s first day in Azkaban. The Dementor was newly-spawned, coming into being in the midst of a swarm a matter of months ago. It had spent its existence up to this day clinging to others of its kind. It absorbed knowledge this way, the rhythms of work and dim impressions of the sensation of feeding. It learned, from the memory of another, the emotions that pulsed off humans in waves and sated a Dementor’s need. It had time to feel hunger.
Dementors developed to be suited to certain tasks, guarding or cleaning or repairing. Whatever task needed filling in the colony, new Dementors would grow to be naturally adapted to the work. This Dementor was a feeder. It would work in the kitchens.
The Dementor’s first day in Azkaban was its first chance to feed itself, as well as its charges. This also happened to be a day when new inhabitants were brought to the prison. Long-term prisoners dribbled a low, steady flow of despondency or quick bursts of madness, but new prisoners were a torrent of denial outrage shock horror fury fear terror disgust anguish. All the Dementors were drawn to the feast.
As the new Dementor approached the frenzy, it caught a taste that was different. It turned its cowled head, seeking the source. A young prisoner with pale hair and gray eyes. The fear disgust terror it recognized from other Dementors’ memories was there, but there was something else mixed in. Where the denial should be, something different from the sensations it had learned while spawning. The Dementor had its first tastes of confidence and hope. It instinctively shielded its prize from the others, guarding the new flavor for itself.
It was interesting. The Dementor felt curious whether the inmate would make these tastes happen again, and this too felt interesting and new.
*
Draco Malfoy had been in Azkaban for 44 days, if the marks he kept on the wall of his cell were accurate. He was no stranger to counting time. If he felt like giving matters a dramatic flair (and why not?), he could say he’d felt his days were numbered since he was 16, charged with a mission to murder, or else forfeit the lives of his own family. If he were, on some rare day, not inclined toward the dramatic, he’d most likely say the same. Live dangerously enough, and pragmatism and drama led to the same conclusions.
Count 9 months, then, from the beginning of term 6th year to the Astronomy Tower. Another 11 until the Battle of Hogwarts. Then page after calendar page as house arrest and trials and deliberation dragged on. Even Draco lost track of how many times he sat in court listening to hand-wringing over oh, but wasn’t he barely more than a child and no more so than the heroes rewarded in full, as adults, and after all, a man is dead.
Finally, conviction came, and from that point it was only another 3 months for sentencing, and Draco found himself thrown into Azkaban with the latest batch of convicts on June 5, 2001. His 21st birthday. The sentence was 50 years, symbolic of the casualties of the Battle of Hogwarts. But only 90 days until he heard whether the Magical Court of the European Union would consider his appeal.
Day 44 was only one day away from the halfway point, then. Draco scratched a line by the others in the thin beam of light that entered his cell in the early morning and felt a flicker of hope.
As soon as the feeling arrived, a clammy sensation of doom chased it away. Draco knew where to look. Most Dementors drifted at random through the halls. This one lurked in the shadows. Draco had come to recognize it. The shroud-like cloak it wore was a lighter shade of gray, and not as bedraggled at the hems as most others. The Dementor waited for him every morning, just out of range, prowling closer after he scrawled his line in the wall.
Draco hugged his elbows and scowled. A minute or two — was that so much to ask? He’d lost his fortune, his reputation, his freedom, his family (Lucius and Narcissa were both locked in here somewhere, for war crimes committed outright or aided and abetted). Was it absolutely necessary to drain every waking moment of any peace?
The Dementor was just outside his cell now, scabby hands nearly brushing against the bars. It leaned in with a rattling breath. Draco wasn’t left without any tricks of his own, though. The Dementor could sap his ability to hold onto any feeling but crushing sadness. But he could limit the creature’s ability to feed off it. Draco methodically Occluded, shutting the mental doors one by one, locking himself in.
Mealtime was not a joy — nothing was, in here — but it was a way for Draco to anchor himself in time. The light that slanted in through the ventilation slivers in the walls couldn’t always be trusted, but it seemed that meals could. Twice a day, Dementors came around with a bowl of mushy gray pap and a crude spoon. Once a day, a watery stew with some sort of chewy protein.
The tray came in through the slot in the bottom of the cell door. Draco looked at the bowl of pap. His face twisted in confusion.
There were...chunks of something in it. Draco had forced this shit down every day, except the first day, and it was always the same goblins-awful bland gray mush. Now with translucent white flecks the size of his little fingernail on top.
What’s more, the same light-gray Dementor had brought it, and it was now standing still in front of Draco’s cell, instead of proceeding to the next. Watching him.
With a mixture of dread and deeply morbid curiosity, Draco delicately lifted one of the flecks to his lips. It crunched.
“This,” Draco announced. “Is raw onion. There is raw bleeding onion on my...porridge, to use a much more charitable term than this deserves.” He poked the spoon through, trying to scrape the pile of eye-watering garnish off the top of the mush. There were stiff little flecks all through the gruel. A surge of indignation rushed through him. The Dementor was still standing there, grisly hands folded together in front of it. Draco sneered at it.
“Were you trying to make this Merlin-defiled mush even worse than it already is?” he demanded, shaking his spoon at it.
The Dementor stayed where it was. Then, slowly, the cowled head swiveled from side to side.
Draco’s mouth fell open. A voice in his head that had to be the first sign of insanity was telling him that he had just asked what was obviously a rhetorical question to an Amortal creature of nightmares, and the creature had responded.
Draco was still brandishing his spoon at the Dementor. This was madness, but he’d been through enough madness already not to trust his own eyes. And, gods help him, this was the first new thing in 44 days.
“Were you trying to make it better?”
A long pause again. Then the Dementor’s head dipped and came up again.
Draco felt all the hairs on his arms stand up. Any thought of Occlumency was lost. Draco felt like he was standing on the edge of a canyon, trying not to fall in. He wanted desperately to regain a sense of control over the situation, so he reached for one of the earliest mannerisms he’d perfected as the Malfoy heir.
“This is garbage,” Draco said, voice barely wavering. “If you’re attempting to make this edible, put some cinnamon on it next time.”