Some nights he returned, most nights he didn't. It was like he said many months ago, when he had pledged her love for an eternity. And like he said, she waited through those lonesome hours, stretching on a bed too big and empty for one occupant. With each week, she was less able to fight the apprehension bubbling within her. With each day, the sadness within her grew.
Albus Dumbledore is a man of control. He relishes it, he exercises it, and he never, never loses it. True, he had been unpredictable at times, given his eccentric personality. But Minerva had always attributed his unpredictability to the fault of the onlooker. The masses were simply too dimwitted to comprehend his intentions, which most often garner astonishing outcomes. To her, he was like a suspended pendulum swinging back and forth, never breaking its equilibrium. She could always guess his intentions, his position on a map, his tasks during a specific period on his schedule. Minerva McGonagall read him like no one else could.
But now she had lost that certainty, that air of confidence. Day by day he retreated from her, leaving before sunrise, and seldom returning before midnight. He brought with him the Elder Wand and her delicately packed lunch boxes, then later just the wand. By then, she didn't know what he ate, or whether he ate at all. A month into his daily expeditions, she found his Deluminator sitting idly on his desk, along with his other curious possessions. In solitude she wept, seeing evidence of him discarding all his guidance home. She wondered if he even considered her place home anymore.
She loved him with her everything. But perhaps even that was not enough.
Their home was a humble cottage house in Caithness, passed down to Malcolm and later to Minerva when her brother's family moved to Edinburgh. Albus had remarked on the convenience of the location, despite her knowing that he could Floo anywhere he wanted. Anyhow, they only had the luxury of staying there during the summer and winter breaks.
She did feel his genuine excitement when he warded her family cottage house with a series of ancient protection charms. He even charmed the roof a hideous shade of purple. With a kiss on her nose - then wrinkled with disgust, he chuckled and pointed out that the powerful magic swirling in the air would make their home outstanding in the darkest of nights. She nudged him with her elbow and retorted that Grindelwald's troops would find that a brilliant road sign, after which he slouched and did away with the more flamboyant outcomes of his charms.
She missed it now, in a way. She even tried to charm the roof purple again to remind him, but it was never hideous enough a shade that resembled his odd preferences.
So some nights she sat shivering on the front porch, waiting for the solitude figure to wander through the mist. Some nights he was just wobbly and smelling of firewhiskey, others he would crash down and throw up the moment he reaches the toilet. On occasion, he would step out of the shower, and she would notice the absence of steam on a cold winter night. On even scarcer ones, she would hear his breaths coming in short, broken gasps behind the closed bathroom door.
Dusk shifted into dawn, and she realized despite her hopes that her idleness did little to help the both of them. As the sun rose, she dragged her shivering self back to their bedroom and collapsed onto the mattress. When she woke again at noon, his side of the bed was still empty.
He came home looking forlorn, shoulder-length auburn hair weighed down by grease and dirt, dreary eyes marked with thick wrinkles beneath and beyond, etching into the once smoother span of skin that stretched towards his temples. His entrancing blue eyes had lost their characteristic twinkle, his handsome features losing their charm. Creases and sludge marked his robes, and his waistband - once taut circling his waist - had drooped in its unfitting looseness, displaying the smile its owner had forgotten to wear.
Silently he discarded his dirty outer robes onto the cleanly mopped floor, without bothering to cast a scouring charm, and proceeded towards the kitchen. Several homemade dishes, cast with a persistent warming charm, remained untouched on their dining table. He did not conjure anything to cure his empty stomach. Instead he filled a tall glass with cold tap water, the old Muggle way, and downed it like his life depended on it. Once his scratchy throat regained some moisture, he propped himself against the stone kitchen table and stayed motionless, lost in thought.
The small creak of the entrance door was enough to wake her from her light slumber, and his powerful, omnipresent aura confirmed her suspicions. Her wizard was back in the wee hours of the morning. It was his longest journey yet. For five days he was gone, no sign of where he was going or when he would return. The first two nights she had waited on the porch, the third one she transformed into a cat and made herself a nest with warm blankets. At the breaking of dawn on the fourth day, she decided that he was not coming back. All the better, she thought in her initial rage. But her rage wore off in the afternoon, and worry seeped back into her by night. This was the first night in a long time that she had spent in her bed, but even then she could not drift very deep into dreamland.
Soundlessly she crept down the staircase, deliberating whether to address her lover when she saw his soiled clothing on the ground. She levitated the batch into a laundry basket and scoured the floor until it returned to its spotless, pristine state. A few steps towards the kitchen, and her keen feline instincts caught onto the rich, dizzying scent of alcohol in the air. There he stood, an empty glass dangling dangerously between his fingers, a dazed look in his eyes as he leaned back for support.
"Albus?" She asked tentatively. The wizard vaguely registered the sound, though perhaps not her voice, her presence, or her identity. She took a small step towards him, closing the distance when he made no move to back away. The glass finally dropped between his slightly parted fingers, but her catlike reflexes allowed her to grasp it before it broke into a thousand irreparable pieces. Gently and noiselessly, she placed it into the sink.
"How are you, dearest?" She hugged him, but he did not respond. She wrapped her arms around his neck, but his hands remained on the side of his hips, unmoving. "Do you want dinner?" She tried again, tugging lovingly at his auburn tresses. He stood no more responsive than the uncharmed armored soldiers along Hogwarts corridors, a once powerful man rendered an empty shell. It frightened her, more than anything.
"Please, Albus, talk to me." She pleaded softly, tracing his skin from his temple to his chin. She felt rather than saw a wound on one side of his forehead. Despite the dimness, it looked vaguely like a claw mark. Although she was fixed in his line of sight, his attention was focused on afar, as if his gaze had bored through her into a vast, dark void that laid beyond her being. Taking his hand in hers, she asked, "Come to bed? You need rest." She sighed, when the answer did not come. She had dreamed too many times of war ending, of peace to come. Yet the ending of the war bore unexpected consequences for her, as it did for their straining relationship. The great Albus Dumbledore carried a new title, a honorary medal, wherever he went. Yet to him, it was neither fame nor fortune. It was torture.
He had not turned on the lights, and she had not bothered to. All that illumined the small kitchen was a faint streak of moonlight that penetrated through the window behind them. His expression was then unreadable.
She moved to guide him out of the kitchen, still aware that he might be drunk, but a small pull from his end prompted her to stop in her steps. Her questioning gaze was met with his glazed one, and he pulled her into a hungry kiss, devouring her against the mass of cold stone behind them. His touch was neither gentle nor romantic, and if it did serve to remind her of anything, she momentarily remembered Riddle's animalistic claws and desperate ravishing, more than any of Albus's pleasurable ministrations.
This was not her Albus. She knew without conscious thought that this Albus would not shower her with words of adoration or pamper her with strokes of passion. This Albus wouldn't give a care about the wonders of the world, or poems or chess or waltzes to slow, soothing music. This Albus was hardened by war and crippled by winning it.
The kiss ended abruptly. He proceeded to her neck, marking her with bruises sharing the darkness and hue of the wound that crossed his forehead. The intensity of his suckling, then his bites, gave her the vision of him drawing blood from her shoulder blade, painting her unblemished skin with visible signatures denoting his claim.
He seized her hair with a new urgency. In the darkness, her hair was as blond as it was raven, as short as it was long. He allowed himself to taste her skin, favoring the freshness of her lavender bathing oil. The pleasant flowery scent was quickly substituted by a strong, musky odor that he could only relate to one other. His hands gripped her firm buttocks and pressed her to him, allowing her to feel his erection straining against the fabric, before placing her on the kitchen table. Only then were their sight level and she looking straight towards the man before her.
He looked older these days. He had, for the past decade, maintained his youth well, but war had taken its toll in the last year. Or perhaps ending the war was the real trigger. She had watched lines creep onto his face, saw the drier, thinning lips, and even his beautiful auburn hair had receded slightly and taken on a silver tinge. The greying had started at the temples, then intermingled with the longer strands. He had also grown out his hair and his beard. It was a good three or four inches longer than the cleanly trimmed outlook he maintained at school. He taught only the N.E.W.T. classes now. She had taken on the younger students, then the O.W.L. classes, and soon, when this batch graduates, the young teaching assistant would become the unofficial Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts. But she had never dreamed to succeed Albus Dumbledore in this way. They had all expected him to progress onto becoming Headmaster - a promising one at that, but now even Armando was second guessing his most accomplished subordinate.
She opened her mouth in an attempt to ask, or to make conversation at least, but he captured her again in a passionate kiss. For that second, there was nothing tender about his actions, for he gripped her hair, twisting it as he went, pressing her by the back of her head to deepen the kiss. His tongue was dry with a lingering bitterness that tasted like alcohol. He bit her lower lip repeatedly until she could discern a metallic fluid flowing across her tongue. Her lips were swollen and bleeding when they parted. He licked her lips, then his own, as if savoring the taste.
One moment her arms were still wrapped around his neck, and the next she was forced to let go, arching her back as a searing pain overtook her. He placed his hand on her stomach as her fists clenched and unclenched, and her eyes were shut tight as he pumped inside her. It was nothing that reminded her of their coupling - always sweet and delightful - now it was of pain and of him venting his repressed emotions into a body he claimed his rights to. And even when she felt the tearing of her walls she dared not utter a sound. Even when she could picture the crimson of blood mixed with his precum in her body, and feel it dripping down her thighs between his vigorous thrusts, she bit back her sounds of distress and allowed him to do as he pleased. She could tremble and sweat but she would not let the small cry of agony escape her swollen lips.
She reminded herself that this was her Albus. That even in his brutality and self-righteousness, he was the man she had chosen. And sacrifice she must, for the path she had willingly taken.
He kissed her neck while he was still buried inside her, and stayed where she could not see his face and he could not see hers. He was breathing heavy against her skin, mumbling something inaudible - it was a word, a name, but not hers, and she tried her best not to dwell on that fact. She tried to imagine his loving caresses and his gentle touches as she felt the burning in her lower abdomen. It was all she could do to prevent the wetness forming into tears in her eyes.
With a blink, her blurry vision was met with the well-groomed, gentlemanly professor, guiding her across the Great Hall with a waltz that drew both awe and envy from their audience. She was gliding, not dancing, across the marble-clad floor, led by the one man she entrusted to guide her to safety. In his crystal blue eyes, she saw the bright twinkle that reminded her of why she fell in love with him and no other. She fell in love with him and gave him her everything, and she would continue to do so. She would not regret, she would not complain, she would not-
A small whimper escaped her as a particularly painful thrust caught her unawares. He did not allow for another, for he hushed her by claiming her lips roughly. He slowed, if only a little, as if that waking call was enough. But even in the midst of passion and pain, she knew he was still forcing himself to see the illusion rather than reality. When the thought occurred to her, she didn't know if it struck her as comforting or disturbing. That as warped and impulsive his actions were, he still cared for who he was fucking. The catch is, despite his hands on her, his mouth on her, and his cock in her, she didn't know who he was fucking.
For her it felt like an eternity, for him it was no more than a momentary outburst. He came inside her eventually, shuddering and spent. Slowly he pulled out of her, a track of semen and blood in his wake. Only then did he look up from the nape of her neck, reading her silent acceptance and the lone tear that had trickled down the side of her nose, disappearing between her lips. He stared at her as if the recognition was building within him, but at last he retreated, his expression still indecipherable. He did not utter a word when he pulled her into his arms and carried her up to their bedroom, and neither did she.
She woke to pleasant chirping, characteristic of the countryside, and once again relished in the delights of her cottage house. Dread and pain had yet to consume her when she rolled over. Her lover, sitting against the headboard, gently caressed her head when she did notice him.
"Good morning, my dear," he smiled. It was one that did not quite reach his eyes. He had already changed out of the clothes he donned a few hours ago, and was wearing his usual midnight blue nightwear. Captured and framed, it would be a picture-perfect reminder of the domestic life she sought for. "Would you like to have breakfast?" He asked, his hand moving to her shoulder, then her arm. He was taking care not to touch the bruises.
"Soon, not yet," she nuzzled closer to him, wanting to feel his hand on her naked body. She was not disappointed by the familiar touch when his hand massaged the skin of her waist, lingering on the side of her buttocks. "How is he?" She finally asked. He flinched, his eyes for once fluttering close with a slow blink.
"Not at all like I remembered him," he mumbled, expressionless. "Watching him was like waiting for time to devour a decaying mound of flesh."
She looked up, trying to convey her understanding through her unfaltering gaze. "You had to do it, my sweet. But you were a strong man, you could have killed him, but you didn't."
There came a short silence, a failed attempt at answering, then he looked away from her and fixed his eyes on the window. From his view, he watched the sun drape over the land and sea, all brightened by hope and joy. In his mind's filter, he could only see freedom in the continuous spans of landscape before him. A flash of a small confine in Nurmengard crossed his mind. "He would have been more grateful if I had ended his life then and there," he found his words in an uncharacteristically hoarse voice. He shifted uncomfortably, but allowed himself to lay back on the bed alongside her.
"What did he say?" She wanted him to confide in her, if only a little. She wanted him to know she was there for him, that she was strong enough for him, despite her age and inexperience. "Did he taunt you?" She watched him worriedly, and by putting her hand on his chest, she felt the dull thumping of his heart. "Did he blame you?" Her hand was now on his cheek. She stared squarely at him, making her words clear for him to comprehend. "His words are spoken out of hatred, of jealousy. Think of all the helpless souls you have saved, the family and friends you have reunited. Know that the lands once warred upon are now flourishing because you have done what you must. You cannot allow this blame to consume you."
But he closed his eyes, denying her assumptions. "How I wish to lose myself to the world's flattery, even to my own justifications... but in my good conscience I cannot. When I stepped through the gates of Nurmengard, all I could see was the young man from Godric's Hollow. A young, very much misled man, who wandered the forests and had fallen into a pit. He growled when he saw me, like an inerudite caged animal." He said, remembering the scene. "He lunged at me, frantic, then he laughed, an uncontrollable, high-pitched, piercing sound that caused a ripple to course through the invisible wards surrounding his cell."
It frightened him even more that his instinctive fear and guilt was not for reducing the once brilliant, striving man into the helpless, weeping animal before him. It was the thought that the line between Gellert Grindelwald - the bloodthirsty, Muggle-slaughtering monster - and Albus Dumbledore - the famed and faultless - was so thin it could be nonexistent. That once upon a time, Albus was not so different from his former friend. He also dreamed of doing great, revolutionary things. He also didn't mind that blood be spilled for the greater good. And blood was spilled, that was certain.
There was a manic spark in the prisoner's eyes that captured Albus and made him go back again and again. A glint that told him he knew. That young Gellert - lively, ambitious, beautiful, and human - knew that exact moment whose curse had hit his poor, undeserving Ariana. He was chained to the unknown.
Warped as he was, Minerva needn't know.
"It's over now," he reassured her, pressing a kiss to her forehead. He mustered the most genuine smile he could manage and she looked a bit more convinced. "Let's get breakfast," he said again, moving to get out of bed, "Unfortunately you'll have to watch me eat if you're not hungry. Merlin knows I'm famished."
A small tug on his shirt made him retreat again. "Yes?" He answered, without looking back. She sounded timid when she addressed him.
"Will you go back?"
He hesitated, but his mind was resolute on giving her an answer whether it was true or not. He climbed back to her, closing the distance between them with a gentle kiss on her forehead, then another one on her lips. Their kisses were like unspoken promises in their language. Nonetheless, he confirmed, "Never again."
"Good," she said after a moment's contemplation. Relief did not dawn on her face like he wished it would. Instead he saw unvoiced determination in her eyes. "And when you do break that promise…" Her voice trailed off, but soon she continued, "I'll be here. I always will."
He brushed his finger across her lower lip, observing the marks he had given her. In that moment, he did not doubt her. "Thank you," he said, kissing her once, then twice, as if he was sealing their promise with many layers of trust. She responded by holding him close and murmuring in his ear that she would never let go.