Chapter Text
His nail cracked against concrete. It may have hurt if he’d had the energy to feel... anything.
He no longer knew why he bothered with this particular monotonous motion day after day after day.
He only somewhat remembered why he started it in the first place. Traditions, it seemed, never quite left you when your life was anchored to them through childhood. No real way of counting off the line he just created, and yet there he was, crunched with his knees to his chest, making a tick mark that he couldn’t even see.
There was no telling how many there were now.
He would say it was comforting, if anyone was around to ask, that is. Then again…comfort wasn’t exactly the goal when he had been tossed into the dark five-by-five cement enclosure.
Kill a few people, and all of a sudden, you are less than a rat in a cage.
It wasn’t like they didn’t have it coming. There was only so much a man could take before the tip of his wand sparked green.
Suppose they had left him alone, or picked the right fucking side, then he wouldn’t have had to kill anyone, let alone all the other nameless imbeciles who racked his ledger. The number was probably less than the invisible tick marks.
Someone is lying to themselves.
He clapped his hands over his ears. Someone made a sound like a kicked dog.
What did I say happens to liars, boy?
He shook his head and turned to his side. He was fine. Completely fine. Hearing voices was perfectly normal. Society only turned its head when the person hearing them spoke back.
And he wasn’t talking back.
Oh, but he listened to all of them: the Cackler, The Planner, The Thinker, The Lover.
He could ignore all but three. One with the quick tongue, sharp opinion, and comments laced in disappointment. Then there was the soft-spoken, gentle one, whose voice soothed every cut the sharp voice took out of him. Finally, there was a voice he couldn’t pin down, one that came along with a blur of an image that made his heart clinch in his chest each time it spoke.
Oh, but that first one. He wanted to murder that grating voice, just to kill it again, and again, and again.
Creaking metal screamed in the small enclosure. Light like piercing fire stung his eyes, making them water as he scrambled to squeeze them closed.
“SHUT IT,” a gruff voice filled his ears like daggers.
He shuddered, trying to press his hands into his head. After a beat, he attempted squint at the whole, bleeding, abrasive light.
Striking blue eyes peered back at him, filled with annoyance and rage. “Oh, you don’t know how to shut up, yeah?”
He didn’t know how to respond, or even if he should.
“Animals don’t know when to shut up,” someone said further away, bored. “If you don’t get back over here, you are gonna lose this hand.”
The person at the box narrowed his eyes. As if the prisoner could do something without a wand and no way to use wandless magic. They knew the box effectively made him… a muggle. Still, the suspicion was palatable.
After what felt like an eternity, the guard said, “Tacitus.”
The room went dead, dead, silent. Silence leached from the world, from the universe. The prisoner felt rather than heard his breath begin to sparsely fill his lungs more sparsely. His hands slid from his ears to his year, gripping the roots for dear life.
You need to calm yourself, dearest.
He held his breath, counting each rapid rise and fall until it eased. Every bone grated against another as he hauled himself up against the far wall. Tick mark made, he tried to think of something…anything else.
What would he do first if given the chance?
The answer was simple.
He’d start at the bottom of his list and slowly, methodically kill each person who put him here.
He smirked in the dark. “Makes my prick hard just thinking about it.”