Summary: The war is over, and Voldemort has won. The destruction climaxed with the death of one of the remaining members of the Resistance. And I heard of her death inside of my prison cell.

Disclaimer: 1. This story is also archived on FF.net, although that version is much older, and very different; so if you ever run past it, know that this is just an updated version of that one, not a plagiarized copy. 2. Harry Potter is not mine in any way, shape or form. That honor goes to J.K. Rowling. Nor do I own the parts of the poem I used: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde. It is a magnificent poem (all approximately 22 pages of it), but I have dramatically reduced it and altered it to fit the story line better. 3.Thanks to Cara62442 from Perfect Imagination for looking this over!!


Sky Room

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I listen to the dull, dull thud of flesh against metal for the thousandth time in the thousandth hour of time.

It is the man in the cell across from mine – I call him Metronome – tapping his fingers against the steel, to a steady, syncopated rhythm. He once told me that he worked with Celestina Warbeck, and that “for a bird with such ace vocals, she had a shitty sense of time” – which is where he supposedly came in. He kept her on beat with a metronome he’d bought for her – he’d gotten it monogrammed and everything, which really makes me think he did more than help her with music – but when they came for him that was one of the first things they had broken, other than her. Either way, he’s made “the solemnest of vows” to always keep a rhythm going for her…some bollocks about “the flame of her music burning ever on, to summon forth a newer dawn”…

I think he’s mad. Had Warbeck continued to sing her trite love songs instead of opting for all of those protest ballads, she might still be alive and he wouldn’t be compelled to rhyme so horribly whenever he spoke.

Despite that, a louder, far more impressive sound comes from the man two cells away. There’s talk (the kind that one gets in prison), that he’s got this oblong dent in his head from banging his skull against those steel bars. Every now and then one of the human guards will come and rough him up a bit to get him to settle down, but I don’t understand what their problem is – at least he’s got something to pass the time with, whereas I –

…Well, I don’t really know what I do all day. The days sort of blend in after a while. You’ll wake up with brittle remnants of dribble in the corner of your mouth: the only evidence that you had a nice dream of something outside the dark walls of Azkaban. Then you’ll fall asleep with – yet again – the same flaky saliva, in the same place, from smelling the fresh steak and kidney pie that the guards’ wives send their husbands. The same thing everyday…

And so I suppose that’s why it was so interesting when he came.

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“He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed,” Metronome whispered through his bars three nights after the new prisoner arrived.

Metronome has always been incredibly keen on piecing together bits of information that the sane inmates dole out, and as I hadn’t gotten to see the new bloke while some of the others did, he had volunteered to let me in on what was going on. Metronome had been sent to one of Azkaban’s upper levels at the guards’ behest (his continued usage of Warbeck’s ‘negative’ songs was beginning to grate on their nerves), and after his punishment had been decided, he’d caught sight of the new man exiting one of the courtrooms.

Chewing on his already rundown cuticles, since he wouldn’t be getting any dinner for the next week, Metronome informed me that the man had come out of Courtroom 7 – Courtroom for the Condemned, as we called it. But the strange thing about him, Metronome continued, was the look of despair on his face – or rather the lack of it.

“He walked amongst the Trial Men
In robes of shady grey;
A wizard’s cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.”

I paused to think of what a man like that might’ve done to end up here, but the others were not so forgiving.

“What a fucking pansy!” called the man housed two cells away from mine – in slightly hushed tones, of course. See, he had it on authority that all the new guy did all day was scrunch himself up in solitary (a mean feat I tell you, since the whole cell qualifies as a corner) and stare at the fissures in the ceiling. He seemed to think that these cracks would become windows or something, and that miraculously some bloody bird – a phoenix or something – would squeeze through and pull him out. Just like that.

I felt like laughing myself.

There was only one window in the detainees’ section of Azkaban prison, and you only got to see it right before you died.

But, you see, that night as I pulled my knees up against my chest and closed my eyes, I didn’t have the heart to condemn this man, at least not out loud with the others. Oddly enough, as I’d never met him, his attitude reminded me of the one I had clung to when I first came here.

I could recall all the whispering voices that spoke of my failure and my fall from grace. I could remember the undiluted effect of the dementors’ chill as they slithered past my cell, whispering their sirens’ call of madness, the acrid taste of despair and stinging blanket of defeat that had made me want to slide through any hole in the wall to whatever was waiting outside…


However, after a few days, when my interest in the newest drama was beginning to wane, I overheard the most fascinating bits of information I had been privy to since I came to my little cell: he was the one. The new man was the one who had dealt the most recent blow to the Light.

The story went that a beautiful, beautiful woman…whom I actually used to know…had been recently slain in the Dark Lord’s lair. The new man had apparently been keeping her in hiding for quite some time after my own capture, and when they were discovered she had made him fulfill a vow that called for –

“Was it quick?” the man next to Metronome asked in a harsh whisper.

Metronome spat out a crescent shaped piece of his thumbnail and smiled.
“They say it was and that afterward he wept ‘til he was dry.
And so now we know what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
This man has killed the thing he loved,
And so he has to die.”

From that day on, I could feel myself shaking continuously, valiantly though I strove to calm it. It wasn’t the cold – there was always an icy draft running through Azkaban even during the sweltering days of summer, and it wasn’t even the dementors, as I had finally built up a passable resistance to them.

What afflicted me now was hate, and I tasted it, and swallowed it, and choked it down with my ration of stale bread every day since I had heard the news. For the longest while I had entertained the thought that I was now beyond feeling; all through my youth I had kept petty grudges that were truly unimportant, and when I had “come of age” I had failed at the task that the world had set upon me, and been devastated as a result. Then I had come here and began to welcome the comforting grayness of apathy, choosing instead to keep my days casually varied with Metronome’s tales and tunes. But now…

…Now I spent my nights cursing myself and him, nearly going mad with rage and horror at this world that everyone told me I had failed – a world that had done wrong by me in turn. A world that had taken what few friends I truly had, that had robbed me of whatever joys I could eke out and then had dumped me unceremoniously into this hell.

I had been in this sick, sad place for much longer than he – I had learned to turn off everything – the beating of my heart, the whispering of my breath, everything that I had been told made me human, and I vowed that I would come out the victor if we ever crossed paths. We were all animals in this prison and I would kill him in his sleep if I ever managed to get him alone.

“In his sleep, you say?” Metronome asked with a chuckle, when I told him of my plan. “Sounds peaceful.”

Even after I told him to keep his fat nose out of my affairs he continued to smile.
“With curious eyes and sick surmise
We may watch him day by day,
And we even know that one of us
Will end the self-same way.
But none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.”

He chuckled again and I could hear my teeth grinding. “Sleep’s far more peaceful indeed.”

---------------------

The prisoner next to Metronome was hell-bent on insisting that the new bloke would get off the charges, though he was none too happy about it. After all, we were under a new regime – the Dark Regime – and while this gentleman was never the Dark Lord’s friend (in reality, who was?), Voldemort had been fixated on him for years.

All the same, in the end, a simple ‘fixation’ wasn’t any help. After a few days’ deliberation, the tribunal that had met in Courtroom 7 did for him what they would not do for me. They sentenced him to death.

I’d thought that would be the end of everything – that his execution would happen promptly and with utmost haste, but the day after the verdict I found myself corrected. The cell next to mine had lain graciously open for years, and I had figured that the sad sod that’d eventually end up rotting there would come after my own time. It was considered the unluckiest room in Azkaban by the guards, as the last time that someone had resided there, he had escaped. And so even though the escapee’s desertion had occurred years and years before, the higher-ups had decreed that any man who had a thirst to leave the prison would never sit for a moment in the cell next to mine.

And that was precisely why he was put there.

As Metronome so eloquently put it when his obsessive neighbor badgered him for news about what the newest convict was doing:

“Twice a day he smokes his pipe,
And drinks his quart of beer:
His soul is resolute, my friend, and holds
No place for fear;
He often says that he is glad
The hangman’s hands are near.”

When myriad voices demanded to know if the first part was true, I only smiled grimly. I highly doubted that even if we had been offered the tantalizing option of having a smoke (for those who desired one), or a pint (which everyone craved), that he would have accepted anything. En route to his new home, he had seen me crouching eagerly against the bars to catch a glimpse of him, and as he staggered by in his regulation robes, he only looked at me once and then looked away, forgoing the chance to have a go at me as he would have loved to do, once.

Even in my fallen state the look in his eyes made me shiver.

Perhaps it was because I was already sentenced, or because I was such in such close proximity to him after so many years, the thoughts of carnage when he crossed my mind dulled and faded until I was left with such an aching sensation in my chest that I could do nothing but lie very still and try to see if I could hear him breathing through the concrete partition that separated us.

As Metronome watched me place an ear against the rough, cool stone, I ignored his look of disbelief – he obviously though I was mad…but the more I tried to discern any sound from the other side of my own cell, the less ludicrous the idea seemed. He and I had chosen varied paths for our lives and had esteemed different things and people…but hadn’t we loved the same woman? And hadn’t we ended up in the same place?

I remember, the night before he left, that I tried to seek him out one last time. In my familiar position up against the wall, I heard nothing, like always. And I opened my mouth, just slightly, to call him…but no sound came forth. I tried once more, but I couldn’t force anything but a hoarse whisper from my throat. That night as I shut my eyes and begged for sleep, I heard Metronome whisper,
“What should Human Pity do
Pent up in Murderers’ Hole?
What word of grace in such a place
Could help a brother’s soul?”

And whether he meant to comfort me or not, it took me ages to find any sort of repose.

---------------------

I never expected it to happen so abruptly – but then again, I never knew that I would fight and end up losing all that was dear to me, and so I was probably a poor judge of when things should occur. I never understood until I saw the new man that I still had more to lose; he was still so young, and such a part of my own past – no matter how awful – that he became almost dear to me, because as time went on, I had less and less of a past to claim.

A chill unlike any other had swept over me that night. I sat up dazedly, still half-dreaming and drenched in sweat, convinced for a moment that it was blood, only to see the whites of Metronome’s eyes gleaming across the hall from me. I heard ragged breathing – but not from just him – from everyone on the floor. There was a mania in the air, and we were all breathing it in together.

I remember shaking so hard that my teeth chattered and cut through the dry flesh of my cracked lips. Someone was weeping into his pillow, and someone else was crying out for help and for mercy, but all I could do was shut my eyes against the sight of the wraiths slipping by my cell and make myself believe that I was somewhere else. That there was no man banging his head against the silver bars, and that Metronome’s neighbor was not cackling his pleasure at the harshest of all crimes being committed next to me.

Shut up! I screamed, and all of the other inmates howled. And suddenly, as if I had only been hallucinating, there was silence. Metronome was quiet as a church mouse, crying like a newborn into his nail bitten, bleeding hands as the dementors swam past once more.

At last I saw the shadowed bars,
Like a lattice wrought in lead,
Move right across the whitewashed wall
That faced my three-plank bed,
And I knew that somewhere in the world
God’s dreadful dawn was red.

And I knew his soul was dead.

---------------------

It seemed like an age had passed since the ‘new bloke’ had come, but in actuality, he had been with Azkaban’s merry men for less than a month. But though he had stayed for only so long, something did leave us when he was gone. I struggled through the days trying to figure out what was exactly was amiss, and at last when I called out to Metronome for some sort of an answer, feeling a bit stupid but not really caring anymore, my reluctant friend turned to me from his little stall, tears streaming down his once handsome face and tapped his fingers listlessly, but rhythmically.

“We are as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope,” he whispered.
“We do not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or to give our anguish scope:
Something is dead in each of us,
And what is dead is Hope.”

Then, sliding his hands across his grimy face to clear away the tracks of his tears, he eyed me with the very thing he’d just told me had passed away, and asked me if I would go with him to see the prisoners’ window in the Sky Room. And though I knew he’d endured endless jeers and beatings to secure permission for me to accompany him, I hesitated before saying anything. I’ve always hated funerals, and going to that room with him would be unappealingly similar.

But I thought for a moment about my own sentence. I was doomed to die in this hole for the rest of my days, to think and then rethink about my ‘crimes’ toward the magical world, never again to see any trace of blue again.

And so I accepted, and we went the next day.

---------------------

Usually, only a few of us ventured into Sky Room, a small vestibule with a transparent, domed ceiling.

People who have never been to Azkaban think that it is so very sweet that we are allowed the indulgence. We all know that Sky Room serves one purpose and one purpose only: to help us along to madness.

Because there is no quicker way to go insane than to have merely a portion of what you love for the whole of eternity. Humans are greedy like that. They want everything in its entirety, its full being. They want the fresh air of blooming flowers – not the stale whiffs of frightened men’s breaths wafting through filthy prisons. They want to see the sky, to touch it, even – or they’ll die trying. No one aims to slide his fingers against our azure imitation, our lovely glass showroom that stretches but so many meters high. To be human is to want love, friendship, a connection, and I thought I had forgotten that…but he, and Metronome, and the dementors made me remember.

Either way, Metronome and I went to Sky Room for his last day in Azkaban.

“Out into God’s sweet air we go,
But not in wonted way,
For this man’s face is white with fear,
And that man’s face is grey,
And I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I’ve never seen sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon this little tent of blue
We prisoners called they sky,
And at every careless cloud that passes
In happy freedom by.”

We had been strolling through the room in a dizzyingly cyclic path, as the room was oval-shaped and had no corners, but when Metronome sang what was to be one of his last little ditties, I stopped short and had to crouch low against the wall to catch my breath. Was I destined to be taken under one convict’s wing and taken by another prisoner’s hand until it was my own time to expire?
Death, something I had once been laughably afraid of, had increasingly become a goal – a means to an end for me, and I coveted Metronome’s fate until I felt sick at heart and was no longer able to stand.

Yet all the little music man did was the thing I both despised and desired. With a smile in his eyes and a last tune on his tongue he helped me to my feet so that the guards would have nothing to go on about, and he kept his gnarled hand around mine.

“He is at peace – this wretched man –
At peace, or will be soon:
There is no thing to make him mad,
Nor does Terror walk at noon,
For the lampless Earth in which he lies
Has neither Sun nor Moon.

Yet all is well; he has but passed
To Life’s appointed bourne:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.”

---------------------

Soon enough, I was back to being myself.

My stomach gnaws against its sides and the man in Metronome’s cell whimpers while he dreams. The madman two stalls down bangs a rhythm into the bars with his head. Maybe he’s the one with the right idea, I think, feeling suddenly lonely.

I again imagine the days going by inside of my mind’s eye as I close my eyes and lay back against the cold walls. I think I can picture the sky bleeding as the sun falls through it, piercing it, and trying to extinguish itself in Night.

The crust begins to dry in my throat as I think of her. I can’t breathe. I think of my lost love…and I force my fist into my mouth to stop any sound or tears from pooling out.

I am afraid the tears will come out crimson like the blood on his hands when he held her close for the last time.

…But after a few moments or so, I am okay. As I finger my scar, I hear Metronome’s grizzled, lyrical voice and I think I am okay.

“Because there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man has killed the thing he loves,
And so he has to die.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
Dementors do it with a kiss,
Malfoy did it with a sword.”
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End.


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