Selfish Desires

Listening to his block-mates call out their morning greetings cheerily to one another Harry smiled, knowing that this time five years ago they would sooner be screaming insults. They still did at times, Harry joining in, but for the most part the five of them were very close. Hearing Bellatrix start singing he smiled. Two years ago they had begun working out every morning-after explaining Jazzercize to the purebloods they\'d started singing with it. The guards had gotten really really tired of hearing the Hogwarts school song (the only song they all knew), so they\'d started bringing in Muggle music. This morning Bella was obviously feeling frisky-she was singing \'No Sleep Till Brooklyn\' by the Beastie Boys (who were actually Animagi who\'d left the Wizarding World).

Harry was only about an inch taller than he\'d been when he\'d arrived five years ago last month, and he was still overly thin, but now he had a layer of muscle (such as it could be in the circumstances-you could see most of his bones) that ran just under his nearly transparent skin. Going through the agreed upon movements to their workout regime, Harry jumped and stretched and twisted and bounced through Bella\'s song, Rudy\'s \'I\'ll Be the One\' by The Backstreet Boys, Stan\'s \'Man, I Feel Like A Woman\' by Shania Twain, and Siri\'s \'Bad Name\' by Bon Jovi. When it was Harry\'s turn, the passing guard laughed to hear \'Fight For Your Right\', by the Beastie Boys.

That over, they cleaned themselves as best they could from their tiny sinks (they were lucky to have the small slivers of soap the guards and Draco smuggled them). Settling themselves into their customary positions next to their doors, they chatted about nothing of consequence until the Dementor/guard meal unit arrived. As usual, the guard \'accidentally\' left the five doors open so they could get a glimpse of eachother. Harry smiled to see Bella\'s knee-length curls, knotted and matted though they were. Harry\'s own shock-whitened hair was the same length, though it never seemed to knot or mat. In fact, it no longer curled or waved, either. It was white (white enough to make Draco\'s seem pigmented), straight to the bottom of his knees, and incredibly soft. His hair had turned white in his first year, which had saddened him. By now, though, everyone accepted it as a given-though he could see a lingering sadness in his \'family\'s\' eyes when they saw it. And they were family, really-the best kind of family.

Jackson Leberatis was a simple man. He remembered when the tiny little Potter boy had been brought in. He hadn\'t believed the boy to be capable of murder then, and he believed it even less now. Just look at what he\'d done, for Hera\'s sake! At close to fourteen the boy had, with all of the childish optimism of youth, decided that Dementors spoke to one another. Everyone had teased him about it but he would not be swayed. By his fifteenth birthday he was fluent in Demis, which was apparently the English translation of their language\'s name. To be more accurate, he was the first human being to have ever discovered the language (it would be on record but Harry had asked that it not be-he didn\'t want his many enemies to know, just like no one outside the prison knew he was a Parselmouth). Now, though, nearly two years later, all five of them were fluent, and Jackson had been taught enough \'to be getting on with\'. He didn\'t want to know too much, else the other guards notice, but he did like talking to Brevia (the Dementor he worked closely with). Jackson had asked Harry once why he\'d decided to search for a language thought not to exist-thought to be impossible-and had been astonished by the answer.

\"I was raised in the Muggle world, where Magic is thought not to exist-is thought to be impossible. If magic\'s possible, makes sense to me that anything is.\"