Dead. And at that angle? Alive.

Take care they do not gaze back into you.

Harry had finally collapsed into a grief induced slumber, after his pleas had turned from desperate yelling to rasp begging, to praying whispering. Before even those misted out, unheard, along the cold corridors of the fortress.

Bellatrix tucked around him the ragged blanket that someone had managed to give her ages ago in the beginning of her sentence. It had had colours. Now it was stone and dirt grey.

Shadows shifted and seemed to grow closer before morphing into ragged human shapes. They had kept quiet as the boy called, but now eyes of all sorts, sunken and dark, lost and sharp where hungrily taking his sunken shape.

There had been whispers, running from one cell to another, like a dark curse. The boy was special. Their master's magic was running under his skin. And he saw things, very special things. Rookwood said, it seemed like the boy was dreaming of the Department of Mysteries.

And Rookwood had a fair idea of what their master was after. Men like Rookwood didn't go insane in Azkaban, the Dementors only acting as a grinding stone to the blade of their mind. You see, most people fashion sanity as a two-end spectrum thingy, when it is rather more of an anulus. Rookwood was, by too far, a sane man. With a sharp mind.

Voldemort was after the prophesy. Which meant that Potter, even shackled down, remained a source of either concern of fascination to him.

***

Harry's nightmares took a turn for the worse after the incident with Mr. Weasley. At first, he tried to hang on to the hope that he had not witnessed an actual death and that perhaps, someone had made it in time. But the Dementors soon siphoned his hope, and all he was left with were festering regrets and guilt.

He had been the snake.

He had struck.

In his dreams, he was bathed in blood, the sticky, tangy substance covering his face and his hands, soaked his clothes. His mouth felt to big, as if he could swallow the world. Sometimes the mangled body would be Mr. Weasley's, sometimes it would be a fair woman. After a few nights, the quality of the dream twisted and the corps started to be Ron, Hermione... his friends and classmates. McGonagall's. The horror tasted like blood on his tong and his mind twisted, curling on itself and bending unnaturally not to break. There was a monster coiled in his soul, relishing his torments and begging to be set free, watching hungrily the straining string of sanity that refused to snap.

So close to admit it. That he was a murderer. A dangerous freak.

Asleep, there was a sort of darkness, the rich colour and scent of blood and the corpses. And sibilant whispers coming from the edges of his vision, like tendrils of thought trying to reach him. They coursed along the same feeling that pulled at his mind, like a hand patiently stretching a thin line at the back of it.

The whispers were slowly ever more bleeding into his waking moments. Even as Bellatrix held him, it was getting harder to focus on her soft voice. They were pressing, demanding his attention.

Voldemort.

The impossible thought had finally bloomed into existence, after he woke up shaking and shivering from a particularly vivid dream.

He'd been back to the graveyard. To Him. But this time, Voldemort's snake had climbed onto him before he could break away and toward the cup. It had clenched the breath from his chest and collapsed him to his knees. It had pressed against him until he could not make their two bodies apart.

Harry had gazed into its eyes and seen himself reflected in their depth.

'We do not run, brothers-ss.' She had whispered.