The room was silent. The dust that clung to the ancient stones and abandoned desks was still. Midday glow shone through the windows, illuminating what it could in attempt to beat the shadows that were drawn out from the stacked furniture. In the centre of the abandoned classroom was the raven haired boy, with his hating eyes closed shut. He was cross legged, hardly breathing, back relaxed but rod straight and his wrists handing loosely off his knees; fingers twitching every now and then as he searched.
His mindscape was designed to be the one place he could actually remember well enough to know. At age eight, when he had first begun to build, Potter Manor was a distant dream despite the self-acquired eidetic memory. To him it was the house of ruined childhood, neglect and the petty jealousy he once had. Azkaban was where he found others and where he learned the Dark. Add in the Dementors, and it was not a mindscape many would enjoy entering.
There were other barriers, of course. The best and most intricate his mind could concoct and once you finally, exhaustingly got past those you would be met with the onslaught of the aftermath a Dementor would bring to your soul, to your already fragile sanity. He had designed his mindscape to be a hell to all, even occasionally himself.
There was one simple reason he was in it. He'd let go and allowed it to become disordered and chaotic in a brief lapse. This was not something he could allow. He needed straight thought, cold logic and the numbing lack of feeling that came with sprinkling of shallow emotions. The few he really could possess were not ones that many enjoyed. He could hate with a passion. Obsess as though his life was on the line. And possess with a determination one rarely saw. Boredom was something he refused to admit, always scrambling to get his high, his thrill away from it. Love he wasn't acquainted with. Sadness was something that plagued his life and eventually just became as easy and unnoticeable as breathing.
He twitched, Rodolphus Lestrange suddenly looming before him, a wry, amused grin on his face.
"No, no, Bella, not a psychopath," he had waved off his wife's comment about what Harry was growing to be. "Try a sociopath."
He pushed the memory away, tucking it into the endless, never-ending cells he claimed as libraries for such things. If he wanted to be done and still have time to search for Lord Slytherin, he had to focus.
He swept through the narrow, chilling corridors, fixing the bent bars, the fallen links of the disused chains, putting back the occasional Auror's fallen trinkets. Ensuring the scorch marks from private duels were in the correct cells, and on the right walls. That the Dementors that swirled around, dipping and pulling at the building; strict schedules to when they ventured inside.
All for a simple purpose.
He could not allow what had happened the Monday morning to happen again. His closely guarded insanity; he knew very well he had it, all who entered Azkaban had it; had burst through due to the ill-thought, drunken, furious words of a father who hadn't loved him for nine years. He'd shown his cards to early in the game, and it was vital he kept the few little he had left, close to his chest.
He exhaled slowly, his eyes fluttering open.
"What were you doing?"
His body whirled out of years of honed instinct and within minutes he had his wand pointing at the doorframe, where a certain, suddenly stricken, blonde stood. Narrowing his eyes, Harry relaxed and rolled up his sleeves whilst instantaneously pocketing his wand.
"Whatever you believe I was doing Draco, will be the story I go with," he drawled easily. "Unless of course it is unfavourable, in which case I shall deny it vehemently."
"You entered your mindscape," Draco said. He inclined his head in acknowledgement. "My godfather had only barely begun to help me build mine, refusing to have done it earlier by claiming it could be dangerous for my sanity if tried younger. How come, you Harry, have one already?"
"My sanity was already questionable," he answered. "And I had secrets that needed to be kept." He paused. "Why do you ask?"
"No reason."
Emerald orbs narrowed, scrutinizing the Malfoy Heir before them, and then finally he realized. "You wish to know if Ella has one."
Only the palest of blushes tainted Draco's skin, but the boy held resilience and gave a stiff nod. "You caught me."
Harry donned his robe with careless grace, beginning to stride towards the door. "Of course she does. You don't believe her parents would teach me, but not their daughter, do you? Have a little sense Draco, incompetence doesn't suit you."
The ex-prisoner slipped past nimbly, leaving the older boy behind him.
The corridors of Hogwarts were lit by the autumn sun, so instead of walking them, he avoided them- taking as many shadowed passages as he could down to the dungeons. He had, of course, discovered what he believed to be fifty percent of Hogwarts's secret passages before Wednesday, knowing that should a quick getaway be needed that they would provide them. Memorizing Hogwarts would be advantageous in that respect.
A person could immediately tell when they entered the dungeons. The walls immediately became darker, cooler, damper. The air froze as though it had suddenly been dipped in liquid nitrogen. Sounds echoed but were swallowed in the darkness. Fiery torches turned emerald and were few and far between. Windows ceased to exist. And of course, to all those who were not in Slytherin, you found yourself in a maze you could not navigate. It was, according to rumor, Salazar Slytherin's doing that the lower levels were like this. When someone could not find you, neither could they find the body you wished to hide.
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