"Consider it a debt I owe you, Potter!"
Seeing the blank, thoroughly bewildered look on both Potter's and Granger's faces at the outburst, Theodore flung the words at them over his shoulder, flushed with a tangled mix of anger and shame at having said them at all.
Then, clutching tight to the boiled egg and the slice of pumpkin pie he had just been handed, he turned and hurried back across the field to his father's side without another word.
"I'm a bit confused about what just happened, honestly—"
Harry slowly pulled his gaze back from the retreating figure and looked over at Professor Lockhart instead, who was glaring mournfully with wounded feeling at Theodore's retreating back.
As though reproaching the boy bitterly for having stolen the food right out of his hands.
His eyes swept left and right across the field as he stood there. Quite a few of the working prisoners seemed to be casting sidelong glances in their direction, apparently by chance.
"There's one thing Avalon Prison shares in common with Azkaban, I'll tell you that much—"
Lockhart choked on a mouthful of egg, rolling his eyes, and gasped out between coughs,
"The food is wretched, absolutely wretched, and rationed strictly besides, mind you! We're allowed meat only twice a month. The rest of the time, all they give us is dry bread and butter, boiled potatoes, and a bit of fruit if we're lucky!"
No wonder every single one of the prisoners looked so thin and undernourished, Harry thought, taking in the rows of stooped figures!
It was as if the prison were deliberately holding its inmates to the standards of some strict ascetic order.
"Doesn't anyone ever complain about it, Professor Lockhart?"
Though it felt a little odd, even to herself, to be worrying about a prisoner's rights in a place like this, Hermione couldn't quite help herself, and looked at Lockhart with honest worry.
"Oh, we can't complain!"
Stuffing another piece of pie into his mouth in a huff of indignation, Lockhart glared across the field at Mr. Barry, who was standing patiently at the edge of the plot,
"The guards eat exactly what we do, precisely the same rations, and they don't touch meat even once a month themselves. In this whole place, the best-fed creatures by far are the Acromantulas! I've seen it with my own eyes—feeding whole cattle shipped over to the island specially, right to the spiders.
Of course, they wouldn't dare skimp on the food for those blasted spiders, would they. If they did, the spiders would simply turn on one another and eat their own dead—or make snacks of the rest of us instead!"
Harry and Hermione looked at each other, and each saw their own surprise reflected in the other's eyes.
By rights, the Ministry shouldn't be short of funds for something like this at all. Building a whole prison in a place like this one and hiring so many guards had already cost an astronomical number of galleons—so why scrimp on the food, of all things?
"If you ask my opinion on the matter—"
Licking the last flavourful crumbs carefully from his fingers, Lockhart said indignantly, his chin lifting, "The Ministry simply wants us to suffer a little, that's what I think!"
Hermione mulled it over silently for a moment.
It wasn't, when she thought it through, entirely impossible.
Most of the people held here had lived in comfort and luxury on the outside, in fine houses with full tables, yet they had willingly chosen lives of crime regardless, with every advantage handed to them.
Meanwhile, plenty of hardworking farmers and workers, crushed down by the hardships of ordinary life, had been driven to stage marches through Diagon Alley just to be heard.
Thinking of it that way, comparing the two, it did seem, in some uncomfortable but real sense, right that these particular prisoners should be made to live a life of poverty for a time.
The sun here wasn't harsh in the least, and a cool breeze drifted steadily and gently across the wide fields. But after a full morning of hard physical labour, every single prisoner was drenched through with sweat nonetheless.
A squad of spiders emerged slowly from the prison building, carrying loads slung on long poles between them, bringing the midday meals out for the prisoners.
"To give you all a better feel for the reality of life in prison, you will be eating the same food as the prisoners themselves today—"
Professor Watson said with a small smile, watching their faces.
Each of the young witches and wizards was handed a plain metal tray, and on each tray sat— "Two slices of bread with a thin scraping of butter, a boiled potato the size of a fist… and a banana—"
Once they had their lunches in hand, Harry and Hermione moved off to one side of the field together. After picking through the food on his tray for a while without much enthusiasm, Harry sighed as he looked out at the prisoners crouched in the furrows eating,
"I see exactly what Professor Lockhart meant now. It'll certainly fill your stomach, but, well—"
Harry had meant to say that there wasn't much nourishment in it.
Then he remembered that he was talking about a group of hardened criminals, who arguably deserved every bit of their misery, and shut his mouth on the rest of the complaint.
"Objectively speaking, though—"
Neville had overheard Harry's sigh. Gnawing on his potato, he hopped over a shallow ditch and came up to join them, "for prisoners, the conditions here are already quite generous."
Harry and Hermione both nodded slowly at the point.
There was no doubt about it at all. Never mind a place like Azkaban—even Erkstag Magical Prison, which the papers had reported on at length not long ago, had looked far worse than Avalon from the few old photographs that had made it into print.
"My dad told me something about this, actually—"
Cedric and his girlfriend had also drifted over by this point. Facing Harry, Cho still looked a little self-conscious, while Harry was able to smile at her quite calmly by now. Then, out of habit, he searched for Ginny among the scattered crowd of students.
As though by telepathy, Ginny was already watching him from across the field. When their eyes met, she pressed her thin lips together and came bounding over, quite naturally.
"Before Avalon was ever built, the Ministry held a top-secret internal meeting on it. Professor Watson explained to the bureaucrats there his ideas for establishing Avalon Prison—"
Cedric said, with admiration in his voice, "Some people argued that the prisoners shouldn't be treated too leniently at all. Professor Watson explained to them that the purpose of a prison shouldn't be punishment alone. It should serve to discipline and to reform as well.
That way, when prisoners finish serving their sentences and return to wizarding society, they'll have a chance to reintegrate and start over.
A place like Azkaban only takes people who might otherwise have reformed and drives them instead into becoming ruthless brutes!"
Harry, Hermione, and the other young witches and wizards all wore looks of slow understanding.
"Then how will they actually tell whether a prisoner has really reformed, though?"
Harry frowned as he thought it through,
"Professor Lockhart told me that if they behave well here, they might have their sentences reduced. But if—well, if some of them only submit to the discipline in order to get out early, and their nature hasn't truly changed underneath… then wouldn't that just send them back into wizarding society sooner, dangerous as ever?"
"The guards will know whether they've truly reformed or not—"
Luna tilted her head to one side and said suddenly, in her usual dreamy voice,
"They can see right through the prisoners, whether they've gotten any better inside."
The others stared at Luna in surprise for a moment, and fell silent, no one was quite sure how to answer that.
After lunch, the prisoners were given half an hour to rest, after which they would return to work until just before sunset, when they could finally go back inside the prison for supper.
Theodore hadn't touched his own lunch at all. He had saved every bit of it for his father, and Daphne had quietly given her own food to Theodore as well.
"Remember what I told you, Theodore—"
The students had other visits scheduled for the afternoon, and it was time to say goodbye to these "ordinary" prisoners at last.
Before parting, father and son clasped hands together in the middle of the field and gazed at one another for a moment, "Don't resent Bryan Watson. The wizarding world will come to see his day. Remember—do the right thing, whatever it costs you!"
Seeing that the watching spiders made no move at all to stop Theodore from leaving his food behind for Nott Sr., Hermione hesitated for a moment, then handed the rest of the potato and banana from her own tray over to Lockhart as well.
"I'm sorry…"
At last the great charlatan who had once fooled so many people showed a hint of regret, a small and welcome sign. He lowered his head, unable to meet Hermione's eyes,
"I'm sure I must have disappointed you terribly, Miss Granger—"
"Hah…"
Hermione drew a deep breath.
"Reform yourself properly, and try to get out early, Professor Lockhart. I'll be looking forward to reading your new book."
Hermione said, then turned and walked away without looking back.
Lockhart stood there in the muddy field, clutching the potato and banana Hermione had given him, watching the young witches and wizards go, and stood in a daze for a long time afterward—
On the way back, the young witches and wizards were quieter than they'd ever been all day, and each face held some deep, private thought.
When they stood once more before the great gates of Avalon Prison, Professor Watson suddenly stopped and turned to face the students, a chilling look on his face that stirred fear,
"For the rest of today's schedule, you may each choose whether or not to take part."
The young witches and wizards blinked and stared at Professor Watson. Neville sucked in a sharp breath and raised his hand. "What are we going to witness, Professor Watson?"
"An execution."
Bryan's lips moved only slightly, and he softly spoke the word.
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy