Title: impossible equilibriums
Series: Harry Potter
Genre and Pairing: Romance, Introspection. Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald.
Words/Progress: 1200; Complete.
Notes: T. Non-AU. Elements of a past D/s relationship. Written for Remix-Redux 8: Magic Eight Ball; remix of No Stopping by Lj's sophinisba.
Summary: For now, the hate of the last half-century is gone, as is the paralyzing love that once rocked your hips into his. For now, only rank clarity remains.
"Surrender," and the single command shudders the air about you. It forms an aged echo of his voice in your mouth where once only tight acquiescence—resided. What a queer, tin taste it leaves on your tongue. And try as you may to settle it, revulsion rips at your throat, joining with the vague sting of bile and hot shame cutting at your stomach. There is also something even more wicked there and just as you see it, it is identified. Juxtaposed emotions—hundreds and thousands of dozens of whimsical and sickly pale sunbursts—coil in the edges of your mind. They gyrate in a cacophony of birdsong, siren wails and silence—a horrible and utterly black stillness that churns within you; a gasp of epiphany welded to a meaningless string of remembered minutiae.
The timing of these glimpses, of course, is awful. You have a responsibility to carry out, but the presence of forgotten tenderness fractures you for a moment and, from the mess, your heart only gathers the parts it wants. For now, vanished are the desperate multitudes you must protect by slaying the cold rabid dog that Grindelwald has become; vanished is the forgiveness you bequeathed to the boy who effectively murdered your beloved kinswoman (her name and her proper relational title are still too hard to say, even in your thoughts: weakness in your sorrow). For now, the hate of the last half-century is gone, as is the paralyzing love that once rocked your hips into his.
For now, only rank clarity remains.
In this singular moment, you are you. You are a man; a tired man—a man with a world upon his shoulders—you are Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, and those five names feel like a misnomer considering that their purpose is to identify all that you are but they never quite do. You hold magic: true, base and oft times frightening magic that pulses in your bloodstream and in your words and in all your introspective musings. You are you, and he is he. Gellert Grindelwald (you do not know his middle name as he never bothered to surrender it and now you wish you had asked). Grindelwald, light hair still framing his merry features in the most ironic of halos. Grindelwald, the murderer of too many to count with a harrowing power that no single person should have. Grindelwald, he who civilization has decreed as evil: he who stands before you with his face contorted like an animal and pupils blown lewdly.
And at your feet, the world burns and the sky and sun burns—or maybe it is just the small universe within you that twists in agony as the weight of the battle draws upon you. In the hours or days or minutes that you fought him, you have found yourself raging against a vacuum. Any damage to one side of the fight only results in the near equal damage to the other; any progression toward destruction of the enemy only the proof that your own body is exhausted and in pain.
Bitterly—mutely—you recall that you two are deftly, frustratingly evenly matched—skill-wise, at the very least. It sickens you to dare admit this: you have long convinced yourself of the impossibility of equality ever having lived between you and him. To find any similarity to yourself in that madman is just... wrong. And how could it not be? He had led you into a session of months-long subspace: your control was gone; body, willing; heart... confused; and he spit his evil words onto the folds of your mind with every touch, every promise of a greater good. He kept you subdued with the knowledge that no other boy would touch you so interestingly; no other person could whisper such evil, exciting things into your oblivious ears. He trapped you, drew you in with a charisma not unlike your own, and any reserves you should have felt laid dormant when faced with the overwhelming ease you felt when he chose you above all others to confide in.
And you... you welcomed his charm so completely that you had no defenses against his wits. Sure, you want to believe it all was a product of his manipulation and to some extent you do believe, but it will never be the truth. He had not forced you into doing anything: you brought just as much to the unspoken truce as he did, perhaps more. All those years ago, there was you, submissive and repressed, taken advanced of and finally accepted, a victim of one hate but the welcome recipient for another. There was you, hissing an exhale against Gellert's lips (now you press a kiss of groaning energy to Grindelwald and hope it strikes). His strength, equal to yours; his mind, just as clever; hands, as young and curious as yours; but none of these equalities really mattered to the impossible equilibrium balanced between you two.
Together, you represented just what he wanted and still wants; what you wanted but can never endorse now—not after the destruction it has caused to so many. A clear hierarchy of command and obedience so strong that every individual part worked as a single unit, a single entity beautiful if only for its seamless functionality: this was the goal. This is still his goal. Two parties united in deliberate inequality: him and you; wizards and Muggles; the one in the role of the dominant and the other as a submissive—the willing subjugated by the willing. Your relationship—those ethereal months of wandering seductions and wanton moans, of yes and no, of the infection of his smile and of the cure of his mouth on your jaw—made it all seem too easy: stilted peace seemed like the inevitable conclusion to the institution of this power dynamic.
But, but now you know. You understand. It may... Being with him may have been pleasant at the time, but now you comprehend that no one should have that control over another. It is not something one should strive for. It is not desirable or good or deserved or necessary or what have you. It is wrong, Albus. It levels one man higher than the other, and if there is anything you can be completely sure of, it is that no person—no matter who or what or where or why they are—is more valuable than his fellow man. No one.
...Why, then, does your hand hesitate so? Why do these declarations sound so bland and flat? Why does his answer—"never"—to the command you uttered a lifetime ago sparks the memory of fingers against your inner thigh; his foul lips on your stomach; his air in your lungs?
And just as quickly as you fell into this reverie, you answer your own questions with a whisper across the synapses of your mind: you are Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. You are you, he is he, and and here is where the Great Dumbledore and the Dark Lord Grindelwald meet; where Albus and Gellert tragically reunite; where you and he breathe together once again.