The North Sea, Azkaban Prison
3rd Person POV
It was a normal day in Azkaban. Which is to say, it was miserable. The sky above the island was filled with dark clouds, thunder rolled somewhere in the distance, rain fell cold and unhurried. The dementors moved through their rounds around the island, slow and casual. No light reached the prison. It never did — as though the sun had decided that this place did not deserve its warmth.
Every cell was dark. Every cell was damp. Every cell smelled of years of accumulated misery, torment and hopelessness, each radiated indifference. It had stopped being a distinct smell long ago and was just the air now.
There was no warmth in Azkaban and no hope in the hearts of its prisoners.
Except, quietly, in a few.
Overall, the place had the calm and silence of a haunted house. But this peace would soon be broken.
In his cell, Alex lay in half-sleep — the only kind of sleep Azkaban ever allowed. It was not meant for restoring oneself, but to survive another day in this place.
Creeeeak.
The door to the corridor swung open. It was a familiar sound — normal daily routine. The door opened, dementors made their rounds, checked if any prisoner was feeling too much, the door closed. Except today, something was different.
The prisoners who had not yet lost their minds, who still had shreds of sanity left, noticed immediately that something was not quite usual — that the soul-freezing chill did not appear.
What came instead was the sound of heavy footsteps.
Footsteps. Human footsteps. Deliberate, heavy, real.
One by one, across the corridor, those who still had some instincts left dragged themselves toward their bars. Hollow faces appeared in the gaps, eyes blinking in the dim light. The footsteps grew louder and louder, until they stopped.
Right outside Alex's cell.
Alex POV
I was already sitting up. I had been half-awake when the door opened, and the absence of the usual creeping cold pulled me back to consciousness faster than any alarm. In the simple life of Azkaban, it was quite easy to recognise anything unusual.
'Another prisoner? No — if it was a prisoner, it wouldn't be walking by itself. It would already have been drained by the dementors and left too weak. Then who?'
My heart was beating fast, already making an assumption with hope that I dared not accept before it was fully confirmed.
The footsteps kept getting closer and louder, until they stopped right outside my cell. My heart was beating so fast it might break out of my chest.
I turned toward the bars and looked up. A tall witch, green robes, hair pulled back severely. A face used to showing a stern expression — except now its edges were cracking. She was looking at me with an expression of pity, care, and kindness.
"Are you here to take me away?" I spoke before she could. My voice came out wrong — far too different from what I had expected from myself, too raw. It was as though a dam of emotions had just broken completely.
Before I could process anything, my body was already moving with a swiftness that should not have been possible for a body as weak as mine. I was already at the bars, my hands wrapping around the iron as I pressed my face into the gap between them.
"You are here to take me away from this place, right?" My voice sounded again, all the desperation and hope accumulated over the years spilling out. "Please. Take me away."
'What am I doing! Calm down, calm down. Think about it later.'
3rd Person POV
Her heart ached as she saw the pitiful child — so thin, so frail, dirty, tattered clothes, sunken eyes — asking for her help. It would have started to physically hurt her, had she continued to imagine the misery this child had suffered.
"Yes, I am here to save you and take you away, Alex," said Minerva in a kind, soft but clear voice. "I am Minerva McGonagall, a professor at Hogwarts, a school for witches and wizards. You may call me Professor McGonagall."
Her words — take you away — moved through Azkaban like a stone dropped into still water.
The silence and quiet of the corridor broke as the cells erupted. Every prisoner left with the capacity to understand words came alive at once. Voices filled the corridor like a wave crashing against stone walls. They begged. They bargained. They offered riches, fame, power, even themselves. Those who had nothing left offered everything, as they saw true hope for the first time in their cursed lives.
Their words fell on deaf ears as dementors swept into the corridor. To the dementors, the desperate vitality and rekindled hope was an unusually rich feast. The voices cut off one by one as the cold reached them, their joy extinguished like candles in a wind, the corridor once again falling silent.
Seeing such a scene, one might even wonder if the dementors considered making a promise of freedom once every year, just to have this feast again and again.
McGonagall watched it all as a dementor approached Alex's cell with keys. The lock clicked open. She extended her hand.
Alex gripped it tightly. For the first time in years, he stepped out of his cell. Minerva's hand was warm. Actual human warmth.
Minerva turned to leave with Alex's hand in hers. Alex was looking at the door at the end of the corridor, thinking about the outside world, when he noticed — McGonagall was looking at Sirius's cell.
That cell was dark, but you could make out a vague outline of a thin, tall man. Unlike the others, he hadn't come to the bars once. He was sitting silently against the wall, watching, with the stillness of somebody who had made peace with their situation.
Alex saw the expression on her face worsen, only to return to normal a moment later. He knew what the professor must be thinking — a man she had once known well, a man who had betrayed his closest friends to kiss the dark lord's feet, or so she had always believed.
They walked. The corridor stretched ahead of them. The cells passed on either side.
They reached the door at the end of the corridor. McGonagall pushed it open, and the cold air that hit Alex was different from Azkaban's cold — it was real sea-wind cold, the cold of a world that existed outside of a prison.
'I will never go back there.'
The thought arrived not as a vow or a declaration, but as a statement of fact. A thing that was simply true and would remain true.
Three Hours Later — St. Mungo's Hospital
3rd Person POV
The second-floor corridor of St. Mungo's was warm. Well-lit. It smelled of Dittany and clean linen. Quiet as usual.
Albus Dumbledore moved along it, his expression one of careful concern. He pushed open the door to a private room at the end of the corridor and stepped inside.
Inside the room were four healers, a considerable amount of diagnostic equipment, and a small boy sitting on a white bed.
Alex had been cleaned up. His hair had been cut — shorter now, neater, cleaner. He was wearing a clean hospital robe, sitting with his back straight, watching the healers with a smile. On the surface, he looked fine.
McGonagall stood to one side of the room, watching the child, her heart refusing to calm. Dumbledore came and stood beside her.
"How is he?" he asked in a low, concerned tone, his eyes remaining on Alex.
"Horrible," she said after a moment. "It is worse than what we had expected." She continued in a subdued voice, "Multiple healed fractures — healed incorrectly, alignment is wrong in several places, they'll need to be re-broken and set properly. His right ear has begun to decay. Severe malnutrition — there is essentially no muscle mass. His immune system has very nearly stopped functioning. There are other things, smaller things, that add up." She paused. "Physically, the healers say he can recover mostly within a month with proper treatment, potions, and nutrition. It is the malnutrition and muscle loss that needs time."
"A month is not long," said Dumbledore.
"No. They will keep him under observation for another month after that, before Hogwarts, to ensure everything holds. He will need to sleep properly and eat consistently, and his body will need time to rebuild. But yes — he will be physically good enough to attend Hogwarts by September." She paused. "But."
"But."
"His mind. The things they can treat, they will treat. But what the dementors do to a person — four years of that, starting at age seven — there is no potion for it, no spell. We can put his body back together, but we do not know how it affected his mind. We know neither the shape of his scars, and nor how to help him heal them." She sighed.
Dumbledore looked at the boy on the bed, who was smiling and talking to the healers.
"Some scars need time," he said. "They will heal eventually, as long as he is in a good, healthy environment."
Alex POV
I was smiling, feeling the warm floor, the soft bed, the good food I had just eaten.
'I am free. I am finally out of Azkaban. I can now eat real food, sleep like a human, and live like a human.'
The healers turned and began briefing Dumbledore on my condition, drawing him aside. McGonagall stayed where she was.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed a small stack of newspapers someone had placed on the bedside cabinet. I looked at the front page of the topmost one.
THE DAILY PROPHET
BREAK-IN AT GRINGOTTS: HIGH-SECURITY VAULT TARGETED
MINISTRY UNDER SCRUTINY: CHILD FOUND IMPRISONED IN AZKABAN — HOW DID HE GET THERE?
THE BOY WHO LIVED BEGINS HIS HOGWARTS JOURNEY
The second headline was noticeably shorter than the other two, accompanied by a photograph taken from a distance and from behind, showing a small figure in a hospital robe being led through the entrance of St. Mungo's by a tall witch in green. Smaller subheadings detailed the Ministry's response to the Azkaban situation, the sharply declining public trust in the Ministry, allegations of corruption, and the growing question of whether dementors could continue to be trusted with the responsibility of guarding Azkaban.
I turned and looked at Professor McGonagall.
"Um — Professor McGonagall, where is the toilet?" I asked politely.
A healer stepped forward and offered to show me. I pushed myself up from the bed carefully as the healer led the way.
The healer showed me to the washroom. I went in and closed the door.
I was washing my hands in the sink when I looked up into the mirror.
I was smiling. I had been smiling since the cell door opened — for three hours, the appropriate smile of a grateful boy.
'Why? Why are you smiling? What good thing happened that you should be smiling? You should not have been in Azkaban in the first place. It is all their fault — so why are you so grateful when they correct their own mistake?'
The smile cracked slowly. The feelings I had been holding for years, the buried emotions, started rising to the surface. My expression turned to disgust as a nauseating feeling erupted from my stomach and I vomited everything I had eaten in the past hour.
My back pressed against the wall. I slid down, knees drawn close to my chest, as tears came — slowly, uncontrollably — though no sound escaped, out of habit.
I sat there for five minutes before slowly getting up. I looked at my reflection once again. I wasn't smiling, but I felt more at peace than before. Relieved. I looked at the tear marks.
"Scourgify."
I used the Scouring Charm to clean up the vomit. Surprisingly it worked on the first try. Maybe letting out those emotions had done something.
I washed my face and cast the charm on myself to clean my mouth and remove the smell. I took a deep breath and looked at my reflection.
'You are out and you will never go back. Nobody will control my life — not the Ministry, not their dumb rules, not Dumbledore, not Voldemort, not Grindelwald, nobody. Only then can I truly live freely. And for that, you will need power and influence. You must rise above everyone. I must have everything.'