Chapter Text
Draco had stopped trying to find meaning in his punishments in Azkaban. Or rather, he had learned to deserve them.
In the beginning, when there was still fight and life in him, his days were filled with rage, rebellion, and a constant sense of injustice. The Aurors punished and punished him, claiming misconduct, grave errors, unforgivable failures. But it was nonsense! Whether he fought back or not, the result was always the same, those men were wrong, and Draco was right. He tried to behave, to do as they said, and still he was punished! Ironically, he was suffering from injustice and abuse of power.
But days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and still the Aurors punished and punished him. The boy stopped fighting, stopped arguing, and his mind became too preoccupied with what he could do to avoid the punishments to even try to understand the meaning behind them.
Some moments stayed carved in his memory.
The first time he was slapped across the face. The first black eye. The first broken bone. He cried like a child when he spit a tooth once. That’s when he learned pain came in different forms.
The pain of punishment was sharp and violent. His heart would race with adrenaline, his body tense, his eyes alert. His mind would descend into chaos, and his limbs couldn’t make coherent decisions, every movement was impulse. The impulse to run, to escape, to protect himself, to beg.
The pain of hunger was different. It was heavy and ugly. It felt like a monster that crept inside him, draining his energy. Reality became warped, and even Azkaban’s disgusting food became a feast in his mind. His stomach twisted and folded in on itself, pleading for anything to fill it. Once, Draco lost a fingernail trying to scrape bits off the wall to eat. The Aurors laughed and called him insane.
Another agonizing pain was the cold.
Draco no longer remembered what warmth and comfort felt like. The cold was an endless void, a silent frozen sea from which there was no escape, no matter how hard he tried. It was morbid and lonely, and there was so much missing. The floor was cold, the walls were cold, there was no light, only stone, and cold stone. Every night, he curled up on the thin mat of his cell, trying not to move, as if the cold might forget him there, lose track of him.
Once, a new Auror had been assigned to watch over Draco’s cell for the week, alone, covering the night shifts. That was unusual. Draco wasn’t the kind of prisoner who needed a personal guard. He wasn’t dangerous enough. But the Auror stepped inside his cell, wearing a look and a smile that didn’t match the routine. That day, Draco learned another kind of pain. The worst of them all.
And those days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and the months into nothing.
Nothing he could do. No one to tell.
Only wait for death, which, ironically, had become his only hope.
"Hey, princess. Get up. Time to eat."
Draco stayed lying in the corner of the cell, his back to the bars. His body rested on a thin mattress that barely masked the cold of the stone floor. The sheet was nearly transparent, revealing the sharp outlines of bones sticking out beneath his skin, narrow shoulders, angular hips.
"I'm gonna throw this bowl on you," the guard growled. And the boy began to rise, slowly and tiredly, because he knew the guard would throw the bowl at him.
Today, he was exhausted, like every other day.
He walked forward, dragged down by the chronic fatigue that pulled at his feet with every step. His hair, now long and unkempt, fell into his eyes. He no longer bothered to brush it aside. It made no difference anymore. The guard huffed impatiently. The sound sliced through the silence of the cell like a veiled threat, and Draco flinched instinctively, bracing for the bowl’s impact. But luckily, he managed to catch it before the Auror made good on his threat.
He limped back to the far left corner of the cell, the space his mind pretended was the "kitchen". He sat on the damp floor, back against the cold wall, knees drawn to his chest. His hungry eyes stared down at the bowl, a thin, murky broth that looked more like dirty water from an old pan. The smell was sour, almost rotten.
For anyone else, it would have been inedible.
For Draco, it was the closest thing to comfort he’d have that day.
He always ate slowly, trying to make the moment last. The salt hit hard in his empty stomach, but he was grateful to have anything to swallow. He chewed the nothing, dragging out that small moment of distraction.
But something was wrong.
The guard was still there, standing by the bars. Watching.
Draco pretended not to notice, clinging to his routine as best he could, forcing himself to eat under the gaze that burned into the back of his neck.
Long minutes passed before the man finally walked away.
Draco’s hands kept trembling long after that.