Chapter Text
This year, I’ll stop, Albus decides, lifting a glass of champagne to his lips somewhere in Paris while the sky litters with explosions of neon and Nicolas kisses Perenelle. No more agonizing.
Three days later, Albus wakes with the ghost sensation of Gellert’s lips on his. His mattress is drenched. All he wants to do is reach for the stack of letters shoved deep into his trunk, hidden, as to avoid the temptation of reading them. Stop, he tells himself sternly, you can do this.
But before he can think twice, they’ve been accio’d into his hands. The nightmares peter out, and he thoroughly hates himself for being unable to resist continuously re-living a time when Gellert still saw him as the center of the universe.
He is faced with yet another dilemma after agreeing to a teaching position at Hogwarts. Twice, he unpacks his stack of fading letters on parchment before deciding that he obviously can’t leave them in Godric’s Hollow – what if Aberforth were to find them? So two minutes before departure, he tucks them into the inside pocket of his coat, keeping them close to his chest, next to his bounding heart.
Another Christmas passes and Albus makes the same New Year’s resolution he has made every year since that wretched summer. But the moment he opens The Prophet and sees his name and picture splayed out over the page, his resistance crumbles. Heart racing, eyes flying over the page, he soaks in every new piece of information he can get, from his approximate location to the deepened crow’s feet by his eyes. He even notices a new mole on his neck.
Albus subscribes to several newspapers in Central Europe. His desk, previously cluttered with student essays and quills, is now overtaken by stacks upon stacks of morning, evening and even weekend news in various Germanic and Roman languages. He invents a spell to scan through the information faster, so that he can keep up with his work, but still, his co-workers wonder about the daily shower of owls. He makes sure they fly directly to his bedroom from then on out.
The days when there isn’t any new information are the worst. Albus is forced to simply read through the old, to look at moving paper clippings that simultaneously soothe his pain and make him feel ill. Why isn’t he sending me any letters? It’s been well over twenty years, why isn’t he trying his luck?
In his darkest moments, he’s planning out clever, intelligent replies in his head just in case Gellert were to write him. In even darker moments, he wonders if he should reach out first. Things have escalated on a global scale. People are begging him to get involved. It would only make sense if he’d arrange a meeting, to have a talk. Not only for his own sake, but for the sake of the world. Albus wants to know what it’d be like to look into his eyes again, after all this time. What would he find in his gaze? Love? Contempt?
But he can’t do it.
Another year, another resolution. His resolve crumbles in ten days, which is his best effort yet, made even more impressive by the fact that teachers and students around him constantly talk about the attacks around Europe in fearful, speculative tones.
His nightmares are worse than ever, and he dreads going to bed, even for so much as a nap, because he knows who he’ll meet the second his head hits the pillow. So Albus stays up late, penning a transfiguration essay in the library. It’s only by mere coincidence that he finds the mirror.
For someone going through withdrawals, the mirror is like an oasis to a parched man. It’s a miracle, it’s his very own holy grail. Why had he ever dreamed of the hallows when such an object existed at Hogwarts? It’s a perfect distraction. And the best part is the familiarity, the love reflected to him in Gellert’s eyes. It’s not something Albus can get from a newspaper clipping.
He yearns more deeply than ever. Minerva worries, he can tell. Albus vaguely notices that his heart isn’t into teaching anymore. It’s much less into maintaining friendships. He’s slacking, in all areas of his life. A kind of fever has taken hold of him, and he knows he isn’t thinking rationally. It scares him, reminds him of his vulnerable state immediately after that fateful summer.
Albus fights tooth and nail to cling on to a semblance of normalcy. He must be on top of his work. He must be a responsible adult. With much difficulty, he limits his visits to the mirror to three nights a week. The nightmares creep back in the evenings he isn’t visiting the mirror, but in just a few weeks, his body adjusts.
One day, he’s marking essays in a secluded corner of the Three Broomsticks. The pub is bustling, but it’s preferable to Aberforth’s grumblings. Albus’s eyes are clouded over, his mind on a student’s poorly executed explanation of Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration, when he suddenly catches something blond in the corner of his eye and his body floods with adrenaline.
But it’s only a student. A female student, even, throwing back her tresses over one of her shoulders. Albus feels deeply disgusted with himself. What was he thinking? That Gellert Grindelwald, a wanted wizard in over 50 countries, would be in the Three Broomsticks, sharing a butterbeer with witches and wizards less than half his age?
It’s bothersome enough to share intimate moments with Gellert in his sleep, but now Albus sees him everywhere else, too. It drives him to extreme measures. The Order of the Phoenix doesn’t start as much as a secret organization to spy on Gellert and his acolytes to ensure the safety of the muggle and wizarding worlds, but more so as another way for Albus to maintain order, to keep track of someone he longs for with every molecule of his being. He wants to know what is going on because he craves control. He follows Gellert like a loving shadow, but he tells himself it’s for the greater good of everyone else.
It's only sometimes, late at night, that Albus remembers his sister and the fact that if it weren’t for his lack of judgement, she’d – maybe – still be here today. At the very least, she wouldn’t have died at their hands. Albus remembers Gellert’s violent temperament, the flip of a switch so theatrical that it was difficult to see how one person could contain such multitudes. All the love vanished from his eyes, in that instant. Albus remembers how he begged, on his knees. He remembers the tortured screams of his siblings, and he remembers the total lack of remorse in Gellert’s eyes when it was all over.
But these thoughts are uncomfortable to dwell on. Albus prefers the sugary sweet memories. His thoughts soar to them like a moth to a flame. The suppressed guilt grows to gargantuan scales once he’s asleep. It creeps in the corners of his dreams like a lethifold, ready to smother him at a moment’s notice.
Often, he wakes with a racing heart and Fawkes peering at him in concern. The bird would sing a beautiful tone and fly across the room, landing his comfortable weight on Albus’s chest, over his heart, and he’d be calmed in an instant. Albus is grateful for the bird that one day appeared so very suddenly on his windowsill. He isn’t sure he deserves it. It gives him a sort of strength he didn’t know he had in him.
Fawkes is like a close friend and an ally at the same time. When he sings, he reminds Albus of his childhood; of his father throwing him in the air as a toddler and his mother teaching him how to knit. Of racing Aberforth to the salt of the ocean and of reading Ariana to sleep. Fawkes’s cries beat a steady drum of comfort into Albus’s heart. Often moved to tears, Albus is reminded he had a home before Gellert, and that he carries it with him wherever he goes.
During the particularly bad periods, when Gellert is a permanent grey cloud floating in and out of his thoughts, Fawkes steadies him into the present day. Despite the clear benefits, Albus feels embarrassed that it’s his unbridled emotions that brought forth the phoenix in the first place. It irks him that Fawkes lingers when he should be doing fine. Over the years, Albus grows to accept his warm and eternal companionship. There is something to learn from watching the magnificent bird die and be reborn, over and over again.
But despite Fawkes’s soothing abilities, Albus is dragged further and further into a global conflict. He’s acutely aware of the responsibility he bears in encouraging and inspiring Gellert to strive for wizarding world domination. When Albus catches wind of the rumor of Gellert standing in the election, he knows he can’t turn a blind eye on reality anymore.
After so many years of imagining penning Gellert a letter, it is surprisingly easy to phrase one in a detached, neutral tone. But when Albus ties the scroll of parchment to the leg of a barn owl, his hands shake, and his hearts pounds uncontrollably as he watches his emissary soar towards the horizon.