Azkaban Revisited

Chapter 3

Hermione found that her prediction was correct. It did take them nearly three days to clear out and treat the residents of Medium Security Wing of the prison. They did it in batches, with Hermione making sure that Snape was in the first batch. Then, in front of all the prisoners in his batch, she announced that he needed special treatment and that he would have to stay in a cell, especially built for special cases in the cottage.

Some of the other prisoners looked suspicious and sullen at this news but nobody questioned it. It would have been suicide, Hermione reflected. After all, they had the wands and the upper hand.

The third evening found her the four of them and Snape sitting around the small table in their cottage - which was really a long, low building. She had decided to discard all pretence.

"Severus Snape fought on our side during the war. He even saved my life," she said crisply. "He doesn't deserve to be in Azkaban but since I can't release prisoners until their sentences are up, he will stay here with us."

Jean looked up with a mutinous expression on her delicate features. "And why are you so firmly convinced of his innocence?"

"Because," Hermione said. "Just because. I saw him risk his life many times. He's only in here for using the Imperius Curse on Death Eaters who were attempting to kill innocents."

"But Hermione," Jean argued, "that sounds awfully like the argument that just because the Imperius Curse doesn't directly harm people, then it's an okay curse." She shuddered. "Anyway, the cells are cleaned up, why can't he stay there?"

"Because he's not guilty!" she burst out. Helplessly, Hermione looked at Harry for assistance but he simply studied his fingers. Surprisingly, help came from another quarter.

"Azkaban hasn't affected my mind yet," came a dry comment from Snape.

Hermione gave a small jump. That was the first time he had spoken anything close to a full sentence. She studied him critically. He still looked severely malnourished, but fortunately was clean and had his wounds dressed. His voice though was still raspy but was closer to his former tone.

"You were found guilty by the Wizengamot," Jean said, as if that settled everything.

"It can be wrong," Snape said flatly.

"Can you prove it?" Jean demanded, her eyes flashing.

Hermione held up a hand to stop the argument brewing. "How about we have a democratic vote about the matter?" Hermione offered.

"A quaint Muggle notion," Jean said, "but fine."

"All those in favour of Snape staying with us?" Hermione asked. She raised her own hand. After a moment, Snape put up his hand hesitantly as if he wasn't sure he could vote. She gave him an encouraging nod. Jean mutinously kept her hands down as did Harry, but after another short pause, Will put up a hand.

"Will!" Jean cried, obviously angry.

He shrugged. "Sorry, but as I see it, we four are the only ones with wands. If one of us always stays with him, what harm could he do?" He let out a small breath. "Besides," he gave a small wry smile, "I remember Professor Snape from Hogwarts."

"William Sandhurst," Snape said, his voice expressionless. "1995, Slytherin."

Will smiled. "So you do remember. I used to remember getting pretty good marks in Potions."

"You were one of my best students."

"You were Slytherin?" Harry asked, surprised.

Hermione let out an exasperated sigh. "Don't you realise that house loyalties mean nothing now? I met a Hufflepuff girl who was a Death Eater a few days ago."

Snape blinked, a flicker of surprise over his features. "Rebecca Wang?" he asked.

"Yes," Hermione said, slightly surprised. She didn't think that he would have known every Death Eater to ever grace Hogwarts.

"The only Death Eater Hufflepuff ever produced," Snape said, his voice heavy. "That girl was loyal to a fault. Her parents were Slytherins and determined to rid the world of dirty blood."

"Of course," Harry interjected, sarcasm in his voice, "that wasn't your goal at all, was it, Snape?"

Snape shrugged. "It was once," was all he would say.

-

With extreme trepidation, Hermione entered the Maximum Security wing one more. Her colleagues, after sticking their heads inside the building, had all seemed a bit squeamish about entering. Harry had volunteered but Hermione, on seeing the rather ashen hue of his face, told him that it was fine. She supposed she could have simply ordered them to come with her, but she didn't think that was an effective way of running a team. Finally, Hermione had asked Snape whether he would come with her. It would mean that the prisoners would see him but she suspected that they wouldn't be lucid enough anyway.

"How many do you think are in here?" she asked Snape as they walked in. Her voice sounded nasal from trying to hold her breath. She briefly thought about a spell to block out the smell but decided that it was too much effort to maintain it all over Azkaban.

"About twenty, I'd guess," he said.

"That means Azkaban holds about a hundred prisoners in total. A thousandth of the wizarding population of Britain." She heard Snape catch his breath suddenly. "Is there something the matter?" she asked.

"My old friend Lucius," Snape whispered, seemingly oblivious to her question. He had walked over to a cell where a figure lay prostrate on the ground.

It didn't even look human, Hermione thought to herself as she followed Snape over, careful to still breathe through her mouth. It didn't really help, though. The smell seemed to be just as strong, even when she breathed through her mouth. The figure on the floor certainly didn't seem like the aristocratic Lucius Malfoy she knew.

"Lucius?" Snape said again, this time louder, his voice cracking on the second syllable.

The figure twitched and then a horrible sound assaulted Hermione's ears. It took her a few moments to realise that Lucius Malfoy was screaming. Not a simple, once-off scream, but a long, drawn-out scream of anguish. Wincing, she listened intently and could make out words in the screams, but nothing that she could recognise.

"He's cursing Bella," Snape whispered, seeming oddly child-like.

Hermione laid a hand on his arm, maybe to comfort him, but maybe simply to reassure herself. It was only now she realised that Severus Snape, Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange and all the other Death Eaters had probably grown up together and were childhood friends. She was filled anew with gratitude and amazement at Snape's turn to the Light.

She heard Snape mutter something to herself that sounded like, "Medium Security was nothing compared to this."

And Hermione had to agree. It was nothing compared to the stench and pervasive smell of death that hovered around Maximum Security wing.

The screams stopped.

She suddenly realised that it was probably impossible to ask the people in here to walk out of the wing on their own two legs. "We'll have to take them out one at a time."

"Lucius first," Snape said, his voice for the first time sounding like the Potions Master's voice. But then that small sliver of the past was destroyed by the almost plaintive, "Please," he added afterwards.

Hermione almost asked him not to say the word. It just seemed too strange, too unusual for Snape to be asking anything of her. Snape, in her mind, was always ordering, commanding. Never asking. She saw his dark eyes turned towards and nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

Lifting her wand, she touched it on the lock on Malfoy's cell and murmured, "Alohomora." The cells in Azkaban were locked only by the simplest of locking spells, but to unlock them required special augmented wands, like the ones given to them on their arrival at the prison. Hermione hadn't asked what would have happened to anybody trying with any other kind of wand, but she suspected that it wouldn't have been pretty.

"Lucius," Snape asked quietly as they stepped into the cell. "Can you walk?"

The stench was worse in the cell but Hermione was determined to ignore it. She supposed she could have performed a bubble-head charm, but it was designed to filter out oxygen from the surrounding air or water. She suspected that any oxygen filtered out of the air around them would be contaminated anyway. Plus, that particular charm tended to distort one's perspective and Hermione wanted to keep her clear vision.

Malfoy moved suddenly on the floor and, lifting her wand, Hermione saw his face for the first time for two years.

It was beyond awful, beyond anything she saw in any of the Medium or Minimum Security prisoners. Sores seemed to cover his entire face. His long, blond hair was matted, dirty and tangled with his beard. Underneath that mess of hair, Hermione saw glimpses of an emaciated face. As she was looking, the eyes snapped open and immediately closed again.

"T-t-the l-light," Malfoy gasped.

Hermione whispered something and dimmed her wand, giving an involuntary shiver. The eyes were the worst. They were red-rimmed, swollen, but that was nothing compared to when they opened. The eyes seemed glazed over, with the pupils not focusing.

"Can you walk?" Snape asked again. His voice wasn't exactly what could have been called gentle, but was certainly the nicest Hermione had ever heard it.

Slowly, painfully, Malfoy shook his head on the ground. This sent fresh waves of foul smell to Hermione's nostrils.

"I suppose we'll have to levitate him," she said practically.

"Or rather," Snape told her dryly, "you'll have to. I'm unfortunately without wand."

That was exactly what they did. With some trepidation, Hermione stepped forward and with a small flick of her wand and a few muttered words, Lucius Malfoy was levitated into the air.

He muttered incoherent syllables as she directed his body outside, but fortunately he didn't scream again.

She stopped at the door and turned to Snape. "I suppose natural light would be too much for him," she said evenly.

Snape nodded. "My eyes are still sensitive to it," he said quietly. "Lucius, you should probably shut your eyes."

To Hermione's surprise, the other man, still floating in the air in front of her wand, complied. And that was the strange sight that Harry, Will and Jean saw as they saw her and Snape walking out of the building.

"Hermione," Harry was the first person to recover his voice. "Is that Lucius Malfoy?"

"Yes," she said shortly.

"But..." he said.

She interrupted him. "Does that make him less human? No. He receives the same treatment as everybody else." In her heart, she knew that she shouldn't be snapping at Harry when she thought the same thing, but she needed an outlet for her repressed anger at the situation. These people just don't deserve this treatment, regardless of what they did, she thought furiously. "I treated Death Eaters yesterday. He's a Death Eater. Is it any different that we were... acquainted with him."

"You were acquainted with Lucius?" Will said, surprise lining his tone.

"Lucius?" Hermione repeated, with a slight frown. "You were on first name terms?"

He gave a short laugh. "Certainly. He was the patron of Slytherin after all. He donated more to my house than all other parents combined. He insisted that we call him by his first name." He glanced at the man who Hermione had lowered to the ground. "He's... changed."

"Well," Harry muttered, "we knew him on less amicable terms."

"What Potter means to say," Snape said dryly, "is that often he and Lucius were at wandpoint."

"That is a mild way of putting it," Harry snapped.

"That," Hermione interrupted before an argument could break out, "is all in the past. We actually do have cells built into the cottage. I suggest we put him there. He certainly warrants twenty-four hour attention." She glanced at Snape and saw a faint flicker of gratitude in his eyes. Obviously, he still held some regard for his old friend. Perhaps the years in Azkaban together had wiped away some of the animosity of the previous years.

"How do you know that other people in Maximum Security don't deserve to be put in the cottage, too?" Harry demanded. "There are only five cells."

"Some of those people," Hermione told him, with a tiny quiver in her voice, "may very well be dead."

-

As it turned out, she was quite right. There were a total of thirty cells in Maximum Security and only twenty-two of them had been originally filled. Five of those cells held people who had died sometime in the past few weeks, because their bodies were still recognisable. One of those five was Bellatrix Lestrange, and for that Hermione was very grateful. For all her talk about equal treatment, she wasn't sure whether she could have treated a semi-insane vindictive Bellatrix. Another two had died, by the looks of the black slime, quite a long time ago. The heavy moisture in the air had done its work on the bodies and they were completely unrecognisable. Of the other fifteen, three died in the first day that they were removed. Another seven were in a better condition than Malfoy and were moved into the Medium Security wing. The other five and Lucius were put in the cottage.

With teeth gritted, Hermione had managed, through pure power, to add an extra cell to the row of cells. It turned out to be useless because in the next week, two of the six prisoners died.

Lucius Malfoy seemed to be doing relatively well out of the four left. There was nothing seriously wrong with him, no illnesses or broken bones. Using magic, Hermione had managed to shave his head and beard. There was absolutely nothing she could have done to salvage the hair. He was washed - several times by Will and Harry, both of whom found the task detestable.

His sores were dressed by hand though and several times, Hermione had wanted to simply punch or slap the silent, unmoving man who lay in the bed in the cell as she smeared ointment in his wounds. She held her temper with a strict leash. She couldn't afford to become angry and besides, she suspected Azkaban was punishment enough for him. It was funny how the little things irritated her when she spent most of the day by herself looking after somebody she didn't like.

It seemed strange, but she had almost taken over the chore of looking after Lucius Malfoy entirely. Hermione wasn't sure why she had taken over this odious task, but it was well that she did because nobody else - not even Will - was willing to do so. The other prisoners in the cottage cells were looked after by Jean and Will on a rotation basis, but Hermione devoted a lot of her attention to looking after Snape and Lucius.

That's me, she thought wearily one afternoon about two months after they had all moved onto Azkaban Island, the caretaker of former Death Eaters - one repentant, the other unrepentant.

She then mentally kicked herself. It wasn't as though that was all she did. She did do other tasks, such as jointly running the Medium Security wing with Harry. But sometimes it seemed that she was only looking after those two. What's the point? she wondered. To change this place, she answered herself. She gave a wild little giggle and wondered if she was insane to be talking to herself.

"Insanity begins that way."

Hermione jumped and managed to spill an entire bottle of lotion on the ground. With an angry hiss, she knelt down and wiped it up with a rag. When she had finished, she turned to Malfoy, the only person within earshot. "Malfoy," she said flatly. "So you can talk."

Other than the day she and Snape had taken him from the Maximum Security wing, Malfoy hasn't said a single word to or in front of her. She had been beginning to wonder whether he had lost the capability altogether. Somehow she wasn't surprised that he hadn't.

Unlike Snape, his voice didn't seem croaky or changed. Even now after a month, Snape's voice was still not back to normal, but it was changing slowly and reverting to its former tone. Lucius Malfoy's voice, however, only seemed slightly rusty from non-use.

"Do answer me," she said irritably, "now that I know that you can speak."

"And what, pray, would you like me to say?" he asked, sounding genuinely puzzled. "Would you like me to thank you for being so kind and looking after me? Ridiculous. I know you aren't doing this out of any concern for me. Simply trying to satisfy that magnanimous impulse inside of you."

Despite the fact he was speaking civilly, she still felt like throwing something at him, or cursing him, or anything. "So you do deign to speak to the Mudblood."

His mouth twisted in what she supposed was a smile. It looked rather bitter and forced, as if the owner simply didn't know how to smile at somebody of inferior blood. "We Malfoys do uphold life debts." He didn't sound particularly pleased.

"You're the only Malfoy left," Hermione pointed out, feeling a nasty twinge of satisfaction as she said the words. And then she remembered Narcissa.

"True," Malfoy said, looking thoughtful. "I wouldn't call my wife a true Malfoy. Deep inside, she is still a Black."

"Bellatrix Lestrange was a Black too," Hermione retorted.

"True," Malfoy repeated, "but she was different." His lips twisted into a nasty smile. "She was better than the rest of us."

With irritation, Hermione picked up a roll of bandages and cut off a piece, tying it around a sore on Lucius's arm rather more tightly than was necessary.

"Good little Mudbloods don't--" Lucius began before he was overtaken by a fit of coughing. "They don't try to kill their patients," he finished.

If Hermione examined her heart of hearts, she would have found that she was rather worried about the persistent coughing. Everything else seemed to go on track, except for the dry cough. It sounded almost like an attack of tuberculosis. She shivered. Her grandfather had died from that particular illness after a visit overseas. It wasn't pretty. Of course, tuberculosis in the magical world was ridiculous. Tuberculosis in a pureblood family was downright impossible. There hadn't been any real research done on it, but as far as Hermione could tell, most serious Muggle illnesses didn't strike witches and wizards at all. When they did strike, it was almost always on Muggle-born witches and wizards who hadn't lived in the magical world for a while.

It almost seems as though the magical world itself provided immunity for its inhabitants, she thought as she cleared away.

Hermione determinedly decided to ignore the taunt Malfoy shot at her ancestry. "I'm not trying to kill you, Malfoy."

"Then kindly give me back the circulation in my arm," he said smoothly.

Even when Lucius Malfoy is asking for things, she thought irritably, he still manages to sound imperious. She loosened the bandage in his arm. Then, with more anger than she meant to show, Hermione scraped her chair back. The wooden legs made an appropriately screeching noise on the stone floor.

Malfoy winced at the sound. "I don't suppose my old friend Severus can find his way here to speak to me? I seem to remember him."

Hermione pursed her lips. She thought that he would ask for that sooner or later. "You seem to be under a illusion, Mr. Malfoy," she told him. "You're a prisoner here, not a guest. Just because the conditions are better than before does not means that you are any less of an inmate. You will be transferred back to the normal cells once I have determined that you are physically well."

"Severus is a prisoner too, isn't he?" Malfoy said slowly. "Yet I remember him walking around without chains." He rattled his own for emphasis.

"Severus," Hermione bit off, "is no longer allied to Voldemort."

"Neither am I," Malfoy told her, giving her an intense look. "Unless I am mistaken, he is dead and I do not find it advantageous to be allied to a dead man."

She rolled her eyes. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt for old friends to have a reunion," she acknowledged.

"Good little Mudblood," Malfoy said, almost affectionately.

Hermione glared at him, her earlier promise to herself to ignore his comments forgotten. "If," she said icily, "you wish to remain alive and reasonably well cared for, you should remember that my name is Miss Granger, not 'Mudblood'. If you call me that name again, remember that Azkaban Island is far removed from the Ministry proper and deaths from injuries are quite common." She felt guilty threatening Malfoy but suspected that threatening solitary confinement was rather useless in this circumstance.

She could have sworn that he gave her a slightly surprised, appreciative look. "You would have made a good Slytherin, Miss Granger," he said. "If only it wasn't for the unfortunate circumstances of your birth. You are aware," he continued, "of a move to recruit you into the Death Eaters during your seventh year, are you not?"

"I was made aware of it," she said carefully, wondering where he was going with this.

"Think about it," he said cryptically.

"Thank you for that piece of advice," she said sarcastically and left the cell. Perhaps I should ask Snape whether he wants to talk to Malfoy, she thought as she locked the cell behind her. Something within her rebelled at the idea of two former Death Eaters meeting. Snape was on our side, Hermione reminded herself yet again.

Getting back to her own rooms, only three doorways away from the cells, Hermione found a copy of the Daily Prophet lying on her bed. She noticed that it was Harry's copy.

Hermione supposed she could spend half an hour or so reading it. There was nothing else to do. She hadn't received any outside correspondence for the entire month other than Ron's letter at the beginning of it. It was rather disappointing in a way. She thought something might have been happening with one of her former colleagues... but obviously not since he hadn't even bothered to write.

She blinked slowly as she took in the headline.

Public Pleased With Ministry

The public is never pleased with the Ministry, she thought, bewildered and slightly worried. The article seemed to be about record approval ratings (something the wizarding world had adopted from the Muggle) for the Ministry and the new Minister. But, she thought, I suppose it's nothing new. The Daily Prophet had always been a paper less concerned with truth than making sure that the Ministry was happy.

Quickly, she skimmed the other articles.

New Shop Open in Diagon Alley

Minister's Wife Holds Ball

Hogwarts Open Again After Christmas Break

All Quiet On The Muggle Front: An Editorial View On Muggle-Magi Relations

She flipped a few more pages, but the articles all seemed to be the same. Just normal, bland stuff. Perhaps it was a slow news day, she thought, but was doubtful. The Daily Prophet was never this ... boring. Even during Fudge's years, things happened and were reported. Yes, most of them were outright lies or at best sensational journalism, but they were still reported.

From this copy, as far as she could tell, the wizarding world was peaceful, happy and better than it had ever been. Hermione thought that she should have been pleased about this, but she wasn't. There was something that didn't feel right.

She hoped that it was just her imagination.