Arranged {Ominis Gaunt x Sebastian Sallow x MC}

{Part 1}

Ominis Gaunt, POV
~

The cold, sterile room felt overwhelmingly stifling as I slouched in a rickety old chair.

The wood groaned beneath me, amplifying the sound in my ears. My hearing had always been my strongest sense—an unfortunate gift in a place like this, where every noise was a slow descent into madness.

My arms and feet were bound, as they had been for years now. The all-too-familiar weight of the cuffs and the clinking of shackles were accompanied by ugly indentations on my skin, worn like scars—reminders of the grand and regrettable sacrifice I had made for my old friend, Sebastian Sallow.

The chains dug deep into my bones, almost as if they were a part of me now. A reflection of my current self. My former self was nothing but a distant shadow. Never to be resurrected again.

Who was Ominis Gaunt now? I thought to myself. It was a question I asked myself often. Too often...
The question haunted me, it was a whisper in the back of my mind, growing louder with each passing day of my five-year sentence in Azkaban. Five years, with most of them spent in total isolation.

Darkness had always been my world, even before I came here. I had never known sight. But here, in this place, my mind painted horrors I could never escape.

The screams of tortured prisoners, the absence of companionship, and the constant threat to my life had a way of making me see things that weren't even there; shadows twisting into figments of my imagination.

Every minute was a fight. A fight for survival. A fight against hunger. A fight against the thirst for blood, for freedom; which had become the only thing my body could comprehend.

Five whole years of this.

You can see why I am a shell of my former self. I missed who I used to be.

I was twenty years old now; only fifteen when I was thrown into this wretched place. A foolish, courageous boy who wanted to save his best friend from the horrors of Azkaban, knowing he'd get off lighter than him.

A friend I had thought I owed everything to.

I should have graduated from Hogwarts alongside him. We would have built a life together, just as we had always planned. I would have worked at the Ministry, bringing change to the wizarding world, fighting to make all blood statuses equal, and rejecting my family's preposterous and cruel beliefs.

That dream was long, gone now.

Criminals didn't work in the Ministry. Nor were they allowed too.

The only future awaiting me was the one my father had come to propose yet again. For the third time this week. The eighth time since I'd been locked up here.

My eyes, hollow and haunted by years of confinement, locked onto the elderly man sitting across from me. My father.

Anger burned in my chest.

I wanted to reach out and grip his throat after everything he had done to me. He had used my time in here to make me his puppet, i'd feed him information from some of the more higher profile prisoners here, in exchange for time off my already short sentence. The information would include bits and pieces on war criminals whom were outside of this place.

Worst of all, my father's years of conditioning, manipulation, and relentless cruelty had broken me down. He had taught me the ways of a dark wizard, molded me ready, for a war I never wanted to fight. And yet, now that war was all I could think about. Victory was the only thing on my mind.

Hand in hand with that thought was the realization that it had stripped me of everything. The love. The joy. The laughter I once shared with my friends at Hogwarts.