Chasing April

Chapter One: The Forgotten Color of an April Sky

By: Verna

We are all guilty of something. You are. I am. We all are guilty of something. I sit here in my prison cell at the wizard fortress Azkaban and think of all the things I am guilty of: so many things-but the problem is that none of my crimes are the ones, which are the cause of my current incarceration.

Yes, I know. It is nothing out of the ordinary for a prisoner to say he or she is innocent of the crimes that sent them up the river, but I swear by all that I've ever held dear that I am innocent of this. I was never a Death Eater. Sure, I followed the Dark Lord. I killed for him and I was everything my father expected me to be. But I never became a Death Eater. Voldemort said there was too much innocence in me. Even after I had slaughtered hundreds of Muggles to prove to him my worth in his dark court he still deemed me too much of a child. But because my father is who he is, I find myself here.

Harry Potter and his band of little misfit friends of his must have loved to see it in the Daily Prophet. "The Malfoy Family Goes to Azkaban!" I can see it now. Oh well. What's done is done and I'm sure that Potter still gets a good laugh out of the whole thing now that Voldemort is dead.

Now there is a dim memory in the back of my mind. Laughter. It has been so long since a heard a peal of sane laughter. Sad, isn't it? That a person can almost forget the sound of laughter? For me, it is a dim recollection of a light and happy sound my mother and my nurse maids used to make. A sound from childhood days at Hogwarts or summers before that when he spent his time play games with my friends.

But the Dementors seem to love the taste of these very dim memories. They are the darkest yet sweetest desires of our hearts. Ones we often don't even realize we harbor still.

It should hurt shouldn't it? All of this? I should be writhing in pain and cold from the mere fact that I am surrounded by Dementors. Their cold should make me shiver but I do not. 'Why?' you may ask. I'll tell you why: I've felt it all before. But it wasn't from some kind of magical being in the past, oh no-before here, the tormentors were flesh and blood humans. It was so much more real.

My father beat me with his hands or even a cane he kept in his study for just that purpose. The worst was when he put The Spell on my mother and forced her to beat me a hundred ways to Sunday. And all the while he'd sit there and watch as if it were some great sport for him.

His eyes were so cold as he watched her do it; her eyes were complete contrast. Hers were so streaked with tears and pain at what she was doing. It hurt more to see that look in her eyes than anything that man in the corner could ever devise to do to my body.

I was told once that my own eyes held the color and clarity of and April sky after the rain. I wish now that I had a mirror to see it. I haven't seen my face in three years and it has been that long since I saw an April sky with its picturesque blue stretching forever above me.

I was told by the one letter I have received in my stay here that my daughter bares these same April eyes. That's what they named her. April. The thought of her face, though I have not seen it in so long, seems all that keeps me sane in this hell. Well, as sane as possible.

The walls here are so dark and cold. Every stone seems to meld into the next from years and centuries of people touching them in hopes of finding a weak spot-some way out. There are no windows and no sound comes from outside this cavernous room full of cells. I know it is April outside of the walls that hold me in. But yet, I do not know if it rains or if the sun shines from its heavenly post. I know nothing outside of these four walls that hold me in.

Ever read the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? I can't say I ever did, but I saw the title in a book shop once and it really struck home for me. It was a Muggle book though, and Father would not let me read it-so I marveled at the title rather than the content. It struck a strange chord for me then, and I have not been able to get it out of my head these past three years.

I think I get it now. As much as I thought I must've understood it while living under my father's roof, I know now that I never did until I came to live here. Why would a bird sing if it were not free? I know why. Living here in this hell, I know why.

That bird has gone mad and sings because it does not realize it is captive. The bird sings because he is as crazy as any other soul in these walls. But not all I of us sing. Some scream or are like me. As silent as we can. The singers so often cannot even hear themselves and so the rest of us pity them in silence. Like now, a voice drifts over the cell block. Perhaps she once had a nice vice but her throat is swollen from hunger.

"I know why the river runs to a place so far away.

I know why the sky is crying when there aren't any words to say..."

It's some Muggle song coming from a young woman in a cell near by. She's only been here for a few months. I remember when she was bragged past my cell. We'd all heard her screaming as soon as the door opened and some one began to snap out a horrible rhythmic beat with their fingers. They did this when ever someone new came in. I remembered how frightened that girl looked as they dragged her by with the steady Snap, Snap, Snap that someone was making from the back of the cell block. So sad to think that she's only been here a few months and has already gone mad.

"Do you know that song, Malfoy?" she calls. I don't know how she knows my name; I don't know hers. Not to say that I much care about either fact though. "Malfoy, you know the sky isn't really crying right? It's raining. Don't you love the rain, Malfoy? I do so love the rain..." Her voice gets dreamy as it floats off into the cold stones around us. The high thick walls simply absorb the sound.

"What is rain?" calls another inmate from far away. His voice gives away nothing. I can't tell if he is sarcastic or crazy. Or maybe he is some combination of the two. But the girl keeps her singing going though no one listens but perhaps myself.

As her voice floats around us, I think how sad it is that we have come to this. What is rain? What is laughter? Like a child we have no knowledge of these things. We must ask like a child but we have no parent to answer. Parents care and there is no one here who cares about us. I know that once, each of us took these simple things for granted, but now can not even remember what they are. What do April skies look like again?

Over the din of my thoughts I hear another prisoner yell at the girl to shut up. "Do you know what rain is?" she calls back to him.

"I don't care any more," comes the cold reply from the other side of the wall. For a moment, every one is silent. In a place like this the silence is more frightening than anything else here. The impact of his words have hit us all so hard I find it hard to breathe. He must have been here a long time, to lose that much hope. I still care about what rain may be, and what color the sky is outside. Times like this I treasure the memory of the enchanted ceiling in the great hall at Hogwarts-but the dark cold wall of this hell block is now the true sky.

As quickly as that hellish silence was visited upon us, it is gone. It can mean only one thing. The Dementors are back. As the cold memories that we each hold deep inside descend upon us in wave after excruciating wave, screams fill the thin air making it thick with pain and suffering. I see my father sitting in his favorite chair watching my mother hit me, over and over as he had commanded.

Maybe it is my time. I was never exactly sentenced to the Kiss, but something tells me that it's coming. I have been waiting three years for it. For the day when I will know nothing and every once of pain will be evaporated from my body. The fact that any happiness will go with it does not bother me because I never knew any except in those few wonderful months with that whore in Italy who later gave birth to my child. Yes, I think, the Kiss would be better than all of this. Maybe it is my turn today.

The tall hooded beings glide up to my cell and paused to look at me from beneath the dirty cloth. Fear enters my body as if it has been injected right into the center of my heart. The blood races in my veins but there is no prize waiting for it at its destination. Thrumming. Drumming. Roaring in my ears. The fear is so intense I can almost hear the Dementors laughing at it. My fear gives them so much joy. And then they are gone. It isn't my day after all.

In Muggle movies that I used to watch in those months before I came here where I hid out as a Muggle they always sugar coat prison. If Muggle prison is really like that, then I wouldn't mind living out my life in there; but in here it is so much different. Their's is a system of laws and order. But here, here you could be executed or given the Kiss at any time of the day or night. No one comes out smiling or even sane.

The man in the next cell begins his screaming. I was glad that this time I did not scream. "No! No! Oh, God in heaven, no!" The warden stalks down the rows until he passes mine and stops outside of the cell next to mine.

His voice is cold as the stone. "There is no heaven for the likes of you, Blaise. Not for any of you." His voice raises at the end so we all catch his words and their meaning.

I shudder as though the room has suddenly become unbearably hot. Blaise. I know that name. I remember him from Hogwarts. He slept in the bed on the other side of Goyle. His screams for mercy echo in my head, which suddenly felt empty of all conscious thought.

"Oh, God please, no! Please, please no! I'll do anything! I'll...I'll give you names! Anything! Please! No!"

In the silence that follows, some one begins to bang their chain against the bars of their cell. The bell tolls and it is for Blaise for whom it does so. It is tradition that the Kiss is never done in the cells; and as my old schoolmate is dragged past my cell, I too pick of my chain that links me to the floor and join in the unceasing rhythm. He doesn't see me but I see him.

He looks terrible. His face is dirty and bloody from sleeping on the floor. His hair is matted and he has a beard that is green from something growing in it. And as he passes by I wonder if I look the same. Selfish thoughts, I know, but in this place there are no other kind. Dead man walking.

All he can hear is the bell tolling his name over and over as we all join the steady pulsation. It is metal on metal and his screams are suddenly cut short by the slamming of the door. The clanging stops abruptly leaving my ears ringing in the sudden silence.

The woman who was singing earlier strikes up again but her song is different this time. The sky does not cry and her voice echoes high and sweet in this place. It seems so out of sorts here among the pain and cold but it brings comfort to us all as we think on our own impending mortality.

"Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, coming for to carry me home?

A band of angels is coming after me, coming for to carry me home..."

It is a pretty song, but I have never heard it before. And though Blaise was never much of sentimentalist, I know he would have appreciated the gesture of a mad woman. I would have.

"If you come to heaven before I do, coming for to carry me home, tell all my friends I'll be coming there too, coming for to carry me home..."

I don't know when my time will come. It could be as soon as tomorrow or the next day. It could be a week or a month or ten years from now. But one thing is certain: after that day, I'll never see the insides of these walls again. I'll wander lost forever as a soulless thing, but I will be free.

"Well, I'm sometimes up and I'm sometimes down, coming for to carry me home. But I'd steal my soul if it ever were down, coming for to carry me home."

As he song ends I think about what my life will be like once I am gone from here.

Some day I'll be walking along under a gentle April shower and a little girl will approach me with a smile on her sun kissed face. Perhaps she will be my long gone child but I will not know her face. Perhaps April will ask me, "Don't you love the rain?" to which I reply:

"What is rain?" She'll think it a joke and begin to laugh. Peals of gentle sane laughter. "What is that sound?" I will ask and she will stop laughing. I will be, to her, a man with eyes the color of the sky in April after the rain but does not know what laughter is or what rain is. Then she will weep for the sadness; for it is such sadness that a grown man doesn't know such simply joys.

But I will have already been walking away, for I will have already forgotten her and our conversation. I will be singing under my breath as I walk with no purpose to my life. It is a song I will know but not be able to recall where I heard it first: "I know why the sky is crying when there aren't any words to say..."

Then those skies will stop their tears, and the clouds will roll back. The church bells will chime to signal a wedding or a birth, and every one will run about with laughter on their lips in the bright sunlight of an April day under skies the color of my own blue eyes. But I will walk on, unaware of any of it. There will be no more April skies for Draco Malfoy, for I have forgotten what is the color blue.