The Allure of Darkness

Nicely

Cell #408 [January 22nd]

It was the darkness that was the most unsettling. She had gotten used to the freezing air that slipped through the cracks in the walls, even if it felt like a whip against her skin. She no longer flinched at the loud sobs and heart-wrenching screams she could hear echoing in the distance. Even the disgusted sneers and angry threats of the wardens that passed by her cell had stopped affecting her.

The darkness, however, was terribly suffocating.

Surrounded by utter nothingness, she started to understand how an otherwise healthy person would be driven to insanity in Azkaban. Time was endless here. She wasn't sure how many days it had been since she had been dragged out of her home and woken up in her new cell.

Days?

Weeks?

Months?

Who knew how long it had truly been?

As she leaned her head back against the uncomfortable wall in her cell, Lily realized that it made no difference how long it had been. The concept of time simply didn't exist in Azkaban. It was a punishment that seemed to last forever.

She was well aware her sentence could quite literally last forever, or at least until she took her last breath. She doubted any trial they were holding for her case would end up in her favor. That is, if, they were even holding a trial for her in the first place. She would not put it past Albus to convince the Wizengamot to sentence her to a life in Azkaban without a fair trial. He always had a tendency to turn a blind eye towards the people that did not fall in line with his master plan.

If only she had realized his manipulative ways sooner. It had all started with Albus, hadn't it?

She would never have sent Harry away if James hadn't been so insistent on pleasing their old Headmaster. She never would have allowed Alexander to carry such a heavy burden if Albus hadn't emotionally trapped her family. He was just a boy.

This was a war that had been brewing since back when she had attended Hogwarts. It was a war that should have ended with them, not with their children. She wasn't sure whether it was willful ignorance or sheer desperation that made her friends and family so eager to use their children as pawns in this war. It was not a war for school children to fight. It was their burden. Their mistake. And now their children were paying the price for it.

Lily pulled her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs as tightly as she could. Her eyes stung with unshed tears and she blinked up at where she assumed the ceiling was in an attempt to stop her tears from falling. What had the world come to?

All she could do was sit in the darkness and think. Think about the past, think about her mistakes, think about her anger, her pain, her sadness.... There was nothing else to do, after all. She had slowly come to learn that the walls that trapped her in her cell were nothing compared to the prison of her own mind.

It wasn't as though she didn't deserve it.

She had essentially destroyed her family. Truthfully, it had been broken ever since she had been coerced all those years ago into abandoning her son. Then, she had watched quietly in the background as her husband took her only other son and spent years turning him into a weapon. She had tried to protect Alexander, but her son had been too seduced by the fame and glory that came with his title to see the true danger that lay ahead.

Lily knew she was not a strong woman. She had always been protected and rescued in her life. First by Severus, then by James–she had never learned how to truly fight for something growing up. Despite being an accomplished witch and duelist, she had never truly won a meaningful battle in her life. She should have fought harder to protect Alexander. She should never have let Harry go.