A/N: This fic was written for thelionwithoutaname for the Grindeldore Holiday Exchange 2016 on Tumblr. Happy Holidays & Happy New Year, thelionwithoutaname! :) I hope you enjoy this!
This fic is also based on JKR's tweet about Grindelwald being a lying seer. That being said, I excluded any reference to FBAWTFT from here, because I wrote this in a hurry. Thank you for reading. :)
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i.
His mother was the true Seer, not him. She spoke without fuss about the Inner Eye, the Eye of Clarity that began its opening in her fourteenth year of life, and only grew wider and wider, and her gaze went further and deeper. Until the Eye consumed her and her whole bloodshot existence became the Eye.
She looked at him and saw all the shadows of his future strung behind him, dogging his heels. All the possibilities and pathways that he would ever tread parcelled up and strapped to his shoulders. He hated the thought.
To think that he could be made transparent to any one person, even if she was his own mother! And have his entire life, still unlived and yet already reduced to nothing more than symmetry!
"So you can tell me who or what I will become?" he demanded.
His mother trailed her fingers down his cheek, stopping at the point of his chin. "Some things are better left unseen."
But Gellert was not completely spared from the Eye. He woke one wintry night, when he was ten. He wasn't even certain if he was indeed awake, or still half-snagged in the mesh of a dream. The darkness felt membranous, lulling. He saw himself as though through a broken mirror: fragments of himself in steel grey robes, a badge sewn to the lapels, looking out from the top of a fortress to a leaden sky. There were countless others around him, clad in the same uniform, some of them his age, some older. They all wore expressions of wariness and deferred to him. He stood in a vast library pulling out books he had never seen before. He held a wand, which spewed spells that made everyone applaud and beg for more.
The next morning, he received an owl with a letter from Durmstrang Institute of Magic, informing him of his place in the school. Durmstrang was prestigious and faraway; not every magical child was admitted.
"I already knew," he said as he gave his mother the letter. "Perhaps I am like you."
She folded the letter into half and set it gently down before him. "There are some things that you will never have, some things that you will never be."
"Things that you have, but I don't?" he said with disbelief.
"You are too self-sufficient, my dear Gellert. And too attached to yourself."
He left for Durmstrang that year, after he turned eleven. His mother paid for his fare but halfway across Alföld, on the way to Budapest, he jumped off the train. A restless, black weight seemed to be chasing him across the plains and it could not be outrun. Everywhere he looked he saw bales of dried grass and the wide pale hand of the sky, cupped over the world, sealing him in.
Six days after the school term had officially begun, he passed through the towering gates and stepped into Durmstrang. He found his way to the rooftop of the highest turret, climbed over loose slates and felt the ice-sharpened wind carve at his body. The Baltic was a far wrinkle beyond miles of boreal forests and scattered lakes. He did not dream this.
"Be careful that you do not mistake clarity for the fulfilment of desire. That may very well be your undoing." That was his mother's farewell to him before he'd left for Durmstrang.
His mother was the true Seer, not him.
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ii.
The second time the Sight toyed with him, he was wandering the corridors of Durmstrang, engraving the sign of the Deathly Hallows in the walls. The sign of the Hallows was his new Eye: triple-lidded and slit-pupiled, he planted it in stone so others could feel as watched and as restless as he felt.
Instead, he was constantly punished for vandalism of school property.
This time, though, he had been whittling its shape into the wall of the school library. Once complete, it glowed, its grooves filling with amber. The warmth spread beyond the lines of the shape and engulfed him. The Sight stuttered through him, and in pieces he saw a churchyard, summer-dusted fields and someone standing in a grove of birch trees, their back to him. He held on to the vision with all the concentration he could muster. The place was unrecognisable, but perhaps if he could see this person's face, if he could just see—
Grey crept in at the edges of his vision, corrupting it like a film over his eyes, until he was back in Durmstrang, blind as ever and rooted to the present moment. All he had glimpsed were thin shoulders, and too much light streaking across an auburn head.
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iii.
Durmstrang passed away for him-good riddance to it. He had had enough of roving through its lightless, stone-cold bowels, enough of engaging in petty quarrels with the teachers, which he'd used to delight in, enough of the untalented, uniformed hordes of his schoolmates. Instead, he chose the isolation and insignificance of his great-aunt's village of Godric's Hollow. He walked its dirt lanes with a sense of bemusement. He found a churchyard dotted with ancient yew trees and his heart seized. He breathed in anticipation. Not long now.
When he saw Albus Dumbledore (he lived next door all this while) for the first time, Albus was standing in his garden, locked in an argument with his younger brother. From where Gellert watched at the second floor window of his great aunt's house, he could only see Albus's back, but he recognised the shoulders, the sun on auburn hair, the familiarity of the scene.
It was a pleasant feeling—maybe something his mother enjoyed about being a Seer: the smugness and the familiarity of moments foreseen.
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iv.
"Tell me that you think this is all a child's fairytale." He held a pebble in his hand, a smooth white stone, polished by the river. He had gone wading in the stream to retrieve it; his shoes lay kicked askew on the bank, and Albus lounged on the yellowing grass beside them, an arm behind his head.
The earth smelt dry, and the stream ran thin and silty. Summer in Godric's Hollow was windless, petrified in heat; Albus's presence was so strained with longing that everywhere he went, Gellert felt the air turn brittle around him. Albus could break into two any moment.
He lay down beside Albus and dropped his head carelessly against Albus's shoulder. Into Albus's hand, he pressed the pebble.
"The true Stone, they say, is blacker than Death and though it gleams, it will yield no reflection. The key to unlock the gates to Death's realm." He closed Albus's fingers around the smooth hard surface. "Something to add to your collection."
"Your collection," Albus corrected, with a smile. "You started this. Along with all the fanciful stories and dreams you brought with you."
"I also brought you methods. Plans. And most importantly, a cause. I have given you purpose." Gellert paused. He plucked a yellow thistle flower growing beside them and tickled Albus's eyelids and nose. "I suppose you will now denounce me as an arrogant sod."
Albus snorted and flicked the thistle away with indignation. "You know me far too well. Perhaps I shall settle for juvenile miscreant with an ambitious political agenda. Or reckless idealist."
"Visionary, maybe."
Gellert drew from the depths of his pockets a handkerchief, knotted at the corners into a small package. He unwrapped it and lay it flat on the grass between them. There was a twig in the centre, broken off an elder tree. There was also a lace doily, which was a bit of a joke. Gellert had filched it from his great aunt's tea tray a week ago, and they had infused a Charm into it, so different parts of it disappeared at different times. Currently, it resembled a half-chewed snowflake. Albus placed the stone in between the two objects.
"Imagine, two Masters of Death! We will complement each other, set our own fates and change the order of the world."
"For the greater good of all." Albus folded his other arm behind his head and turned away from Gellert. He stared straight up into the sky, but his gaze retracted, his eyes unfocused. "I always believed in a different variety of fate. One that is a little harder to grasp, and therefore had nothing to do with me."
"Who is the dreamer now?" Gellert mocked.
But it wasn't Albus.
He never sought anything from the Eye until now. Now, he ransacked his thoughts, pillaged through his own sleep, brewed draughts to force himself to dream. The dreams came, a steady rhythm of them, broken sequences that echoed each other like mirrors and showed nothing else. The Sight would not be used. His mother's words became live ants, eating the corners of his thoughts.
Every time he looked at Albus, he was unnerved by the glint of spectacles and his unexpected gentleness. Albus understood his passions, his rationales, his longing for liberation. Albus held him in ways that he could barely comprehend, and without fear. He flaked away that summer, crumb by crumb; he felt sick and flushed; he felt caverns open up in his body, black and desperate, until he saw Albus, spent every waking moment with Albus. He was undone by each kiss he took from Albus, undone by the illness of Albus's skin, the press and the wrangle of their bodies together, the hoard of promises they plundered from each other.
Albus was unknowable.
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v.
Who cast the fatal curse? Who held the guilty wand? Who would have checked?
If it was Gellert, it didn't matter. He had a new wand now, a third of the pact he had once sealed with Albus.
The Elder Wand slipped into his possession—easy, far too easy and almost anticlimactic. But it resisted him at first. He wrestled with it, his resolve against its opposition.
It only submitted, very grudgingly, to his will, after he returned to his hometown at the edge of the plains, and cast spells to blacken the wheat and the maize, to turn all the fruit into lumps of clay, and then pelt hailstones down on the roofs of the townsfolk. His mother was long gone by then, and he never knew where she went, only that she must have foreseen this, and severed any association with him. Only after such destruction did the Elder Wand obey, and even then, it sat at the margins of his thought, restive and sentient, awaiting weakness. In a way, it was him submitting to it: eliminating his roots as an offering, courting its allegiance by casting himself adrift in the gulf of its power.
At nights, he slept with the Wand in his grip. Sleep was a blind, mangled crush of dreams, and soon he began to eschew it.
Gellert abandoned the search for the other two Hallows—the Elder Wand did not care to be united with its other parts. Let Albus have them! He sent the handkerchief with their childish imitation of the Hallows—the elder twig, river pebble and grubby half-Charmed doily—to Albus, and received no response.
This was beyond grief or resentment, no longer the question of what happened between them during that summer in Godric's Hollow. Rather, it was indifference from Albus. Albus no longer believed in their cause.
Cities smouldered with Gellert's bitterness and the Elder Wand's triumph.
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vi.
When Albus finally descended into the fray, the Elder Wand began to fail Gellert. Perhaps it sensed that this master was all but spent, his defeat imminent.
He tracked Albus's progress across Europe. Hasselt was wrenched from his grip, his demoralised armies expelled from Limburg. Then Liège and Antwerp and finally Brussels, and the whole country of Belgium was seized back and liberated.
"Your men are deserting you on all fronts," one of his advisors said, bluntly.
"Far more than just my men," Gellert answered, running his thumb over the Elder Wand's handle. It was cold as metal, and it hung by his side like a mercenary.
"This—Albus Dumbledore," said the advisor. "Why do you not act? You can eliminate him with a single curse."
"I know his movements," Gellert said. "Put your fears to rest; I will go and meet him tomorrow evening at Grudziądz, on the banks of the Wisla. There is a pocket of resistance soldiers that he intends to lead."
When his advisors left him alone, the Sight jolted through him with one of its apparitions. He sat, pinned to his chair as Albus advanced on him, his hair longer and shot through with grey but still beautiful. Albus did not hesitate as he approached and Gellert felt himself pulled up from where he sat, pulled up by his hair, his head forced backwards to meet Albus's gaze. Cold fingers clamped against the back of his skull, and a colder mouth pressed to his. He felt himself turned to stone, all ability of response robbed from his limbs. How he would have liked to kiss the ghost of Albus back, to rake his hands across Albus's aged face and throw him to the ground, to wrestle once more with Albus, to curse him and be cursed by him.
But he remained immobile, his flesh turned to granite, until the next morning, when his advisors found him standing the whole night by his desk, sleepless and paralysed. Cold sweat drenched his scalp.
That night, they fought in the buttressed compound of the granaries of Grudziądz and close to midnight, he saw Albus, a tall silhouette at the end of an alley, a twenty-foot wall to his back, duelling three of Gellert's followers. Cornered, or so it seemed. But Gellert knew better. He stepped back and cast a Shield Charm as Albus's curse swept down the length of the alley and all three of Gellert's men folded over.
Gellert lit the alley up with light from his wand, so Albus could see him. For a moment, they stood facing the other, transfixed, Gellert's arm held aloft as light spurted upward in steady flares. The stone alley and the space that enclosed them was incandescent.
Now that he was facing Albus at last, a heavy paralysis took root in his bones, just like the night before. It was real now. The Wand started in his hand, impatient for blood but he paid no heed to it.
"Gellert," Albus said. His voice was a dream resurfacing. A clarion call.
"No."
"Have you not done enough?"
"Not for you, I have not." The old laughter came easily to him.
"Then I will do what I was sent to do."
"For the greater good, I suppose," Gellert said, bitterly. "You are not as different as you think you are. And you know this."
He broke free from his stasis and extinguished the light from the wand. The darkness that fell was sudden, like a blow to the back of the skull. He sent a vicious curse toward Albus, but did not wait to see if it hit its target. Gellert fled.
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vii.
Nurmengard was the last stronghold, squatting high on the brow of the Carpathians. The prisoners were all dead, killed in one final mass execution, their bodies dropped into the caverns deep in the mountains and then incinerated with Fiendfyre. The gates were sealed and Gellert was alone.
Snow fell, the colour and texture of ash. He stood in the inner ward of the fortress and looked up to the skies. Somehow, he felt heat. A rosy warmth grazing his cheeks, before it crawled down his neck and unclasped the cold from his pinched hands. The razor winds turned to feathers on his skin.
There was only Albus as Albus had been, all those years ago. Somehow, he had made Albus climb to the top of a large oak. That was where he had hidden a stack of Albus's books, stuck them with a strong Sticking Charm at the back of a squirrel hole so they could not be Summoned easily.
"Go on," he told Albus. "I heard you are quite a master in Transfiguration. So change yourself into a squirrel and go fetch your books."
And Albus, half-infuriated, half-amused had refused to humour him, and instead pulled himself up branch by painstaking branch. Gellert followed behind, far nimbler than Albus.
Until they reached the top, and Albus was still fumbling around, feeling through the leaves and poking at an old nest, searching. Gellert sat with his back to the squirrel hole.
"Well," he said, "here we both are. At the top of a tree."
"Where are my books please, Gellert?"
"I can make you do anything I like, you know."
"It feels as though you have gone to a lot of trouble for this prank."
"The books are behind me." Gellert flicked his head backward. He smiled at Albus.
Albus edged forward. Their knees and thighs brushed against each other. The branch held. As Albus reached past him, Gellert caught his wrist and held him steady.
"I can see you so clearly," he said. He brought his lips to the side of Albus's neck and kissed the fluttering pulse. "You are so much clearer up here."
In Nurmengard, the blizzard paused. Empty chambers echoed. He sensed the pulling back of his enchantments on the gates. He heard a voice in the wind. He heard his name, a scrap of a word, lacerated by the scalpel-edged mountain air.
The Elder Wand thrummed in his hand, readying itself for its new master. In his mind, an Eye opened, bright and clear at last, and all paths melted into one, and it led across the inner ward, to the entrance of the fortress. And accordingly, Gellert followed that inevitable route, and with his own hands flung the gates open to greet Albus Dumbledore once again.
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end