So Damned Right
Albus Dumbledore had never recieved a Christmas present from anyone in his life. And at twenty one, with the holiday season hanging over his head like mistletoe over a love-struck couple, he realized that the fact of that made him extremely sad and disappointed in himself.
Never in his life had he gone out of his way to make someone's life better. He had taken care of his sister and mother, yes, but he had never bought them things to make them happy, or because he loved them.
(He supposed that he didn't really love them anyway, that he didn't love anyone, because there was simply no room left for love)
Never in his live had he thought about giving someone else a gift either, it might have been due to the fact that the friends he kept were selfish - just like him. Or maybe that those people he called friends weren't really friends, or at least the type of friends you get a gift for. They were more like rivals, always striving to be better than each other.
It was painful to think of having friends like that, or of having friends altogether. A real family too, or a lover. He had never been one for socializing, sometimes he wondered if it was because he was born to be alone. But he had just never gotten out there and tried to make friends.
(There was nothing like being alone - nothing on the plant, in the universe - Albus knew this first hand. There was always peace and quiet in the home, no messy emotions to order. Things like that were made for other people, other people more suited to it.)
At the ripe age of twenty one, he thought about sharing his life with someone else. How hard could it be? He wondered. And decided it must be excruciatingly so, because he had heard the couple upstairs arguing like crazy over something earlier that day.
There was enjoyment in sharing though, he remembered. When he was sixteen he had gone out for ice-cream with a girl. They had shared a large ice-cream, because that was the sort of things that girls and boys did when they were that age. The feeling of having something that someone else wanted made him feel loved, if only for a moment though.
Soon after that one time, the same girl called him a selfish boy, destined to grow old alone. It might've been a curse she placed on him, or she could've been reiterating the one placed upon him at birth.
(He was selfish, he knew it. It would be impossible to share a house with him, his extreme messiness infuriated the people he had over. The people who he didn't really like, but they thought he liked. It was a curse in play, he insisted to himself. One day, it would go away, or he would find a way to work around it.)
Perhaps he needed someone to share his life with, and that's why he felt so lonely and empty. Like his life was on hold, waiting for someone or something to happen. That thought had scared him more than anything else in the world. Is used to be that all he needed was his books - his knowledge - and his magic.
Thinking that there was a certain emptiness about his life, made Albus want to go out and do something about it, even though it probably didn't exist. The first thing he tried was picking up girls in the local pub, a shady place full of women waiting and wanting. If it was a physical thing that he lacked, they would most certainly give it to him.
They had failed to fill the gaping hole in him, now he knew it was real. Or his thoughts had convinced himself that it was real, and it was now creating itself, in the process, becoming more and more painful to live with.
(It wasn't like he was totally alone in life. His neighbour was very friendly. He was an elderly man with a long beard and bald head, filled with wisdom and mirth. Always had a Muggle war story to tell. They had dinner sometimes, the elderly man made Albus believe that Muggles were good people, with good hearts. So he vowed to always protect them.)
And then, on Christmas morning, there was a bird waiting at the foot of his bed. A great red and gold bird, with magnificently long tail feathers, a bright orange beak and talons that tore his sheets. Something about the bird filled Albus, it filled the empty space inside his chest that he had spent so long trying to fill with useless things. It wasn't the best feeling in the world, but it came close to it.
Even though Albus never spent another Christmas feeling alone, left out, disappointed, he always, always, always wondered he had imagined the blank feeling that had kept him lonely all those years. There were times where he thought about having something else in his life, needing something else. Love, maybe. But he could never convince himself that the great, beautiful bird wasn't what he had been waiting for all those years. It just seemed to fit him so damned right.
Author's Note: bleh. the last three words were just a random thing. i don't know where i got it from, but i wanted it in there somewhere. i always knew that dumbledore was an empty man - i really felt like writing about it too. he and severus had a lot more in common that we all originally thought. (even though snape isn't mentioned in this story)