Bugs

****

~All these... ~

Dementors, everywhere. It had been unbearable at first. At first. But now, the days had melted together, and the weeks had transformed into months, and the months were no longer clear in his mine. He could not remember exactly how many years he had been here, but it felt like forever.

~I got bugs~

Yes, he did. They scampered through his thoughts, the feeling of them twisting his thought even further than the Dementors did.

~I got bugs in my room~

And then he saw them making their slow, steady way up a grey stone wall, sluggish black bodies heavy and round, juicy and plump. He watched them for hours on end, what with there being nothing else for him in this place. He watched their slow ascent to the ceiling, but always interrupted their journey just before they got out of his reach. He would knock them back to the floor, smiling gleefully at their kicking legs as they tried to right themselves, and began the ascent yet again. He couldn't let them reach the top and escape, because then he would be alone. Alone, and with

~Bugs in my bed ~

If it could be called a bed. Really, it was a lumpy mattress shoved in the corner with a grey blanket draped over it. No pillow. He moved it around from time to time, to create the illusion that time was really moving forward rather than standing still like he knew it was. The bugs did make their way into it, but he tried not to pay them any mind. He tore a tiny hole in one side to let them climb into the thin stuffing, and that made some of them happy. Some just preferred climbing on the mattress, and on his own body. He tried to be gentle with them, but sometimes, it just wasn't possible.

~Bugs in my ears,

Their eggs in my head ~

Yes, the bugs were creeping into his head, seeping through his scalp into his mind and making him despair over every wrong turn in his life and making him wish for death and making him feel horrible and driving him mad and it hadn't been his fault, honest, and he was innocent, but... But he was here, with the Dementors. The Dementors who made his worst nightmares seem tame, who affected his mind, who made him wish that he really could go insane just so that maybe it wouldn't feel like this anymore.

~Bugs in my pockets,

Bugs in my shoes~

He no longer had proper shoes. They had been taken away, way back when the daylight had seemed real, and there had been such a thing as friends and happiness and love and kisses and warm afternoons and chocolate cake and holidays. He no longer had pockets, which didn't really matter because he had no money, or wand, or pictures, or anything resembling a possession that he would with to keep on his person for any amount of time. The pocket less state of his dingy, time worn pants no longer bothered him. The thin slippers he wore in the winter no longer seemed inadequate. He had no need for anything more. All he had was the festered-with-bugs mattress, the grey blanket, a utilitarian toilet, the small rusty facet in the corner, a toothbrush with most the bristles bent and softened beyond use, and a small tin cup. It was all he needed, really.

~Bugs in the way I feel about you~

You. It seemed like the word 'you' would have meant something to him once. It seemed like talking to someone face to face had once been reality, not dim memories and dreams. It seemed like, once, he had contact with others like him, or, rather, the way he had been before. Once, there had been others besides the Dementors, his horrible mentors in the way that he thought, the ones who demented his mind and made him wish he was no more, that he was crazy, that he had something to occupy his mind other than this profound aloneness.

~Bugs on my window~

Nor did he have a window in this tiny dank cell. After all, such luxuries as windows and knowledge that an outside world existed was not necessary for murderers, for people who committed crimes of such atrociousness that the darkest, most isolated corner of Azkaban was the only place worthy of them. It was only too bad that he wasn't the one who deserved it.

~Trying to get in~

The bugs were still making their ascent, trying to escape. He wondered sometimes why they were even in here. No one would ever try to get in, but these bugs did. All sorts of bugs, big ones, small ones, grubs, worms, beetles, and cockroaches. They all made their way in, but despaired of escaping. Just like him.

~They don't go nowhere ~

Just like him.

~Waiting, waiting...~

That was all that anyone here did. Wait. He waited, though for what he was unsure. Perhaps for death. Death, that elusive grail that promised... something. Happiness, maybe, if he made it to Heaven. Something better than this if he made it to Hell. Even just the pure nothingness that atheists prophesied would be something. But what if death only brought something worse? He briefly pondered the odds of him becoming a ghost bound to the walls of this prison once he died. True, then he would be able to leave this cell, but then who would talk to the bugs, and keep them from being lonely?

~Bugs on my ceiling ~

Not really, he tried to keep that from happening, but the few bugs blessed with wings did cling to the damp ceiling from time to time. They seemed to cluster around the dark spot a lot. He'd spent a lot of time staring at the dark spot, and he had finally decided that it looked like a great, dark snowflake. Snowflakes weren't native to Azkaban, he was well aware. He was also aware that he had no idea if it was even snowflake season yet. It was cold down here, true, but he was numb enough that he couldn't tell the numbing coldness of the 'Mentors from the chilling coldness of nature.

~Crowded the floor
Standing, sitting, kneeling... ~

He had tried all these positions, and found that sitting was the most comfortable. He paced the perimeter of his space, and had tried doing exercises every now and again when he began to rot. Not rot like his mind was, not decay like his coherency had done, but when his body began to just want to shut down, and sit in the corner, and do nothing for the entirety of weeks, or what he supposed where weeks here. Week was kind of a subjective term.

~A few block the door ~

Some of the bugs were lining up in front of the heavy metal door of his cell. There was a tiny line of blackness along the bottom that was now hidden by the bugs, and more kept coming. The scuttling black bodies, the shiny hard black shells that protected the delicate beings, created a pile in front of the door that he watched with fascination. He lay down if front of the accumulation of insect bodies, and stared down his nose at them. He wanted to shift shape and smell them, but he couldn't do that here. The bugs scurried and clamored over one another, creating a festering nest of bugs that seemed to be trying to escape his cell. How dare they want to leave him!

~And now the question's:
Do I kill them? ~

Yes, killing them was a good idea. It would show them not to try and leave him alone here. He experimentally picked up a squirming black bug, and smashed it between his fingers. He felt nothing. He scraped his fingers along the stone floor, leaving a wet trail of bug guts. Maybe killing the bugs would not help him any. Maybe he needed another thing to do with them.

~Become their friend?~

This idea had worked in the past. The bugs were mostly already his friends, too, which was always helpful during the darkest moments of his experience here. Darkest, meaning, more dark than every other moment he had spent here, because there had not been a single second since that horrible afternoon so long ago that he had felt any sort of joy whatsoever in his existence. He had become complacent to the pain at times, and he had times of something almost like peace when he had sat and considered the fact that he was innocent, and he knew this, and one day the guilty one would get his.

~Do I eat them?~

Eating the bugs was something he normally only did in desperation. Not that every action here wasn't desperate in some way, but only when true hunger began to eat away at his insides, then become that steady, constant ache in the back of his mind and in the depths of his body did he begin to consider eating his companions for nourishment. Luckily, or whatever a semi-fortunate happening was called here, the greyish mush and perpetually stale bread they 'served,' or rather magically teleported, to his cell, appeared on a fairly regular basis. He was certain that these basis were not the normal meal times, as he had learned in life before here, but he thought that he might be getting a full meal a day, and an extra bowl of mush in the morning. Or sometime. He wasn't really sure of when was when here, due to the lack of social contact, as well as the lack of environmental exposure and the absence of a clock. He was sometimes struck by a faint feeling of gratitude that there wasn't a clock here, ticking away seconds in the mostly silent corridors and cells. The screams were bad enough. He didn't need a constant reminder of how time kept going on in the outside while he was stuck stagnant here.

~Raw or well done? ~

Ah, that was always the question, wasn't it? He'd had that one occur to him many a time while traipsing through the woods in dog form. His sensible mind always said the well done was best for him, and that it was probably disgusting to eat things without at least pretending to make them modern and socially acceptable by burning them. His primitive side, a prominent feature in his personality well before becoming an animagi, always had the same snide comment. If it had been intended to be burnt, it would be made of wood. He looked at the bugs closely. No, they were not wood, though there was a smallish green one that resembled a twig. So he could eat them raw, if he so chose.

~Do I trick them? I don't think they're that dumb~

No, they weren't that dumb. Not like him. They didn't trust anyone, these smart little bugs. The pile had dissipated some. He looked under his palm, which had somehow ended up flat on the stone floor near the edge of the heap of bugs. There was a rather thick layer of smushed bug parts and fluids clinging to the floor, and his palm and fingers, which he realized suddenly were in pain. He had been smashing his hand down for a few minutes, it seemed. He wiped some of the bug goo on the floor, and flinched as his hand hurt more. Looking closely, he noticed that bright red drops were mingling with the pale viscera and dark shell. He touched his tongue to the red drops, almost hesitant, and was rewarded with the rich coppery flavor of his most precious of fluids. Blood. It's flavor clung to his tongue, and he suckled the small wound on his hand, hoping to make himself feel better through the primitive action. This time, the dull, earthy taste of the insects blended with the rich, vibrant, Gryffindor red, creating a wonderfully organic experience for his taste buds, long since dulled by the bland and occasionally rancid food provided to him.

~Do I join them?
Looks like that's the one ~

He looked at the bugs again, and then slowly raised himself to a sitting position. One of them crawled onto his uninjured hand, the one that was still resting on the floor.

~I got bugs on my skin ~

The bug made a few careful, hesitant movements across his hand, before crawling just inside the sleeve of his course grey shirt. Another bug, seeing its brother make such a bold move, followed, and he soon found himself playing the role of playground equipment for the tiny creatures that he had keep company with for so long. Their tiny legs tickled his skin, and it also

~Tickle my nausea I let it happen again ~

Yes, he suddenly felt repulsion at the colony of beetles and cockroaches and other creepy crawlies that were climbing over his body.

~They're always takin' over
I see they surround me, I see... ~

He felt like screaming, for the first time in a very long time, and he suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this, with any other companions but these. He felt the aggression rising deep inside him, the first true, unmuddled feeling he had felt in a while, the only true, unmuddled feeling he was allowed to feel other than despair and anguish and fear and loathing. The bugs, they were everywhere, everywhere around him, in him, under him, in his hair, in his ear, climbing his legs and lost in the folds of his clothing...

~See them deciding my fate ~

No! They would not decide his fate, he was better than them, he was innocent and he could be free but for...but for that one, the one whose name he could not even think without feeling a deep rage, the kind of rage that the 'Mentors loved and ate like the sweetest candy and the feeling he would not allow them to receive from him, because only the one who had betrayed him and the others was the only one who could receive that rage...

~Oh, that which was once...was once up to me...
Now it's too late ~

He began to fling the bugs off of himself, and stomped on the heap near the door, getting savage pleasure from the crunch of his former friends under his feet. He killed his former friends in a blaze of movement and aggression, he took his fear and loathing and anguish out on the tiny, crunchy bodies. He needed to act, and be violent, and create mayhem...

~I got bugs in my room...one on one~

Most of the bugs were now just smears on the floor, and walls, and the door, and he threw tiny smashed and broken bodies at the ceiling to create a speckled night time sky full of stars out of the juices that the broken bodies bled. The bed was next, and he ripped the mattress open to reveal a colony of bugs, and he began to smash and stomp and murder and pillage and indulge in every primitive instinct that wracked his malnourished and maltreated self.

~That's when I had a chance
I'll just stop now ~

He realized after a long, long time of murder of innocents and the eradication of all his friends and comrades in the world that there was nothing left moving in the cell, and he looked around slowly. His mattress was destroyed, torn apart with more savagery than he thought that he possessed. Dead bugs covered the floor, with a specially large smear of carcasses and juices and fluids and broken hope by the door, and then he realized what was smeared all over his body, and caught in the folds of his clothing was dead bugs, and there was blood from his hand there too, and the pain hit him again, this time more intense.

~!I'll become naked And with the... ~

He stripped off the ruined, soiled garb of a dead man, a man with no hope or sanity left, and looked some more. He spotted the faucet, and turned it on, and began to cleanse the juices and parts, tiny legs and portions of shells, from his body and hair and mind. He then wrapped the grey blanket from his bed around him, and cleared a small corner out, and began to think, actually think, for the first time in ages.

~I'll become one ~

He was getting out of here.

fin.

***