Broken Trust

Sirius Black sat on the floor of his prison cell, leaning against the stone wall. Boredom and uneasiness were the bane of his existence recently. Boredom because he was in prison. When one was in a prison like Azkaban for their 15^th year running, one was out of activities. Uneasiness because of the events that had started only a few weeks before.

Sirius had been sleeping at the time. He tended to get a lot of sleep, something to take him out of the state of boredom. Not that it helped. Even sleeping was boring. At least it was unconsciousness. Yells didn't usually wake him up, for he was fairly used to them. Yelling when a new prisoner was brought in, when a seasoned prisoner got extremely bored, when an ancient prisoner finally snapped. These sounds weren't yells. It was more like a rustle of knowledge and excitement that ran around the cells in this corridor like head lice during their worst season. The atmosphere was what had woken him - the pure mood of the place. When he sat up, he had noticed the person in the cell directly across from him staring. Just staring.

The prisoner was fairly new, by Azkaban standards. He was only on his second or third year running. He hadn't paid much attention to Sirius before then.

"Don't you feel it?" he had asked finally.

"What are you talking about?" Sirius asked, irritated.

"The burning. We will be free again!"

"What?" Sirius asked again, confused this time.

"Aren't you one of us?"

"One of who?"

The man had sat back then, his eyes alarmed. He hadn't volunteered any more information and Sirius had quickly grown tired of pressing him.

The next event had taken place earlier that day. Sirius now had two human guards and a dementor outside of his cell, rather then two dementors and a few guards to patrol the corridor. There were at least three times as many human guards around as usual. Sirius sat back and thought about Azkaban. It wasn't something he enjoyed thinking about. Usually he tried to direct his thoughts in another direction, memories, fantasies; whichever amused him more on that particular day. Now he thought about who he was 'rooming' with. He knew that he was in a maximum-security area. The Lestranges were in this area, but they had cracked only a few years after Sirius was brought in. He realized that many of the people in this part of the prison were death eaters. Then he mentally smacked himself on the head - he was considered a death eater.

Sirius Black, a death eater. It would have made him laugh if it didn't make him so sad. Remus obviously believed it. Not once in the entire 15 years had he made an attempt to contact Sirius. Surely if Lupin just thought about it...Sirius would have died before betraying Lily and James. And little Harry. Harry would be going into his fifth year in Hogwarts now, if he had counted the years correctly. Did he like Quidditch? Was he still living with the Dursleys? Was he friends with descendants of any of Sirius's classmates? Did he even know about Sirius?

The last thought made him wince. He hoped that Harry knew nothing about him. He didn't want to be known as a murdering traitor.

So what was the cause behind all of the guards in the hallway? What were they worried about? Sirius thought again about the possibility that had been pulling at the back of his mind. No. That wasn't possible. How would Voldemort rise again? There was no way. It was probably just some disturbance that he had slept through. At any rate, he had no way of finding out. No one spoke to the prisoners, unless it was absolutely necessary, and it was rare for anything important to be said or done in front of them. Sirius shook his head and went back to sleep.

Sleep. Boredom. Slight uneasiness. Boredom. Sleep. Head lice. Sleep. Oh, food, how nice of them. Rain. Sleep. More lice. More boredom. Uneasiness again. A rat. Could it be trained, by any chance? Two hours later, Sirius exhausted the possibility of training a rat to do anything and went back to sleep. The next two months of his life followed the general pattern described above. Then things became more mysterious. Lucius Malfoy came for a visit.

Sirius happened to be in the boredom part of the pattern when Lucius entered the prison. He knew him at once, although he had not seen him in over 15 years. Something about the man was dark, and Sirius knew immediately that he was not a man fighting for the light side, as he claimed. Lucius had come to Azkaban with a ministry official, and was verifying the identity of the death eaters he saw, or at least that's what Sirius guessed he was doing from what he could hear and see.

"Ah, Sirius Black. Such a faithful little spy. Not so great though, not as you pretended all those years in school...you got caught."

Sirius's dislike came rushing out. "Ah, Lucius. Such a nasty little liar. You are a wonderful liar though, because you managed to convince the ministry that you'd been brainwashed and you wanted to be on the side of Dumbledore again."

Lucius's face turned cold. "You will not speak of things you do not know."

Sirius merely leaned back into the shadows. Lucius was not here merely to help the ministry, that much he could tell. The question was what was he up to?

He wasn't to find out that afternoon. Lucius made his way through the area of the prison and left. A feeling that something was definitely wrong overtook Sirius again. This time, though, he lay awake most of the night, trying to put his finger on it. Could it be possible that Voldemort had risen again?