It's a fine line between love and hate, between friend and foe: a line coloured with fascination and obsession. Deep in that murky grey gloom - the one we claim is so clearly black and white - lies all that is the best and the worst of what makes us human. In the end, when we try to define it, it becomes clear: the line does not exist.
Despite his top marks, quick and powerful magic and early exposure to the sometimes harsh reality of the world, Albus left Hogwarts utterly naive of that conceptual, indefinite line. It wasn't until he met him, that fateful summer in Godric's Hollow when everything changed forever, that his eyes were opened.
Albus was fresh out of Hogwarts, full of passion and promise, and suddenly faced with the millstone of a crazy sister and wayward brother around his neck. He loved them dearly - he reminded himself a thousand and one times of the fact every day - but it felt like the end of everything he'd ever dreamed of to return home and pick up where his mother had left off. Aberforth offered to abandon his own half-baked education to care for little Ariana and set Albus free, but something inside him recoiled at allowing Aberforth that final mark of failure on his behalf, and so he insisted his brother return to Hogwarts in the new school year.
Albus joined his siblings when school finished at their home in Godric's Hollow. Ariana was unsettled: whiny one moment, a rage of red sparks the next, before quieting enough to disappear with Aberforth into the goat shed. Albus knew it wasn't her fault, but those mercurial moods that were so intrinsically linked with her unstable magic were driving him slowly mad. They were the reason for every plight his family had faced.
I don't hate you because you're crazy, he told himself when he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling as it darkened and lightened, you're crazy because I hate you.
The tension was rising, and the unspoken frustration and resentment seethed under the veneer of a happy family life. Some climax would surely have been reached even if he had not waltzed so abruptly into Albus' life, but the timing seemed at once so utterly perfect and so utterly tragic, and certainly changed the course of the Dumbledores' lives forever.
Albus strode briskly down the cobbled street, his hands deep in the pockets of his robes, rubbing a Galleon between his fingers anxiously. He hoped Mrs Mearns' Potion Supplies was still open - he'd only just managed to settle Ariana down, and that wound she'd inflicted on Aberforth looked like it was on the turn. Aberforth hadn't wanted to admit they'd run out of essence of dittany (Albus had bought a large bottle just last week - how many times had Ariana lashed out at him since then?) until the rotten smell became too obvious to deny.
But thankfully it was still open. Albus pushed open the door and felt the breath rush out of him in relief. One more crisis averted. He tried not to think of the endless future where that may not be the case.
It was then that he spotted him, poring over the catalogue next to the counter. He was taller than Albus, with the long, elegant fingers of a pianist. His hair was longer than fashion dictated, as pale as spun gold and as soft and silken as secrets.
"No powdered root of asphodel?" the boy sneered at Mrs Mearns, "I don't think that my father, the German representative to the International Confederation of Wizards, would be too pleased to hear about this."
"We're only a small village shop," Mrs Mearns protested, and the boy's gaze sharpened with the promise of violence. For a moment, Albus held his breath, but then the boy turned away and the moment passed, and Albus felt slightly ashamed of the way his heart had quickened.
Then that direct, knowing gaze turned to him.
Gellert Grindelwald was flawless. Every time he looked at him, right up until the very last time he stared him down over the point of his wand, Albus felt his breath catch. There was something compelling, something magnetic about him. He was handsome, he was clever, he was ambitious, and he swept Albus along in a current of shared excitement.
To Albus, stuck in the endless cycle of love and resentment his sister created, he was like a breath of fresh air in the oppressive summer heat. Or like pure, cold water in a parched desert. Albus confided his hopes and dreams in Gellert, and found them a reflection of his own. But, equal and opposite to that magnetic attraction Gellert held for him, there was a strange and inexplicable repulsion.
One day, Albus had asked Gellert about school. He certainly hadn't been to Hogwarts: it would be interesting to compare the academics of different institutions, and how it affected their approach to the further magical philosophy that was so central to their long discussions.
"School?" Gellert had laughed, humourlessly, "What a waste of time. Durmstrang takes no credit in teaching me the things I know. I couldn't have stayed there."
"Durmstrang?"
Albus knew he shouldn't be surprised - there were only two other schools that Gellert could possibly have attended. But Durmstrang was so notorious - and he couldn't reconcile that home of the Dark Arts with the bright and shining figure before him.
"Yes…" Gellert said, slowly, his eyes glittering, "But that was all a misunderstanding."
Part of Albus considered what the misunderstanding was: the events that led to Gellert leaving the school, or attending it in the first place. But the tightening of Gellert's jaw made him uneasy.
"Another example of the failure of the establishment?" he joked, and a disturbing smile slithered across Gellert's face.
Another day, the pair were perched on neighbouring gravestones in the old cemetery. Albus had bent to read the inscriptions out of some instinctive respect, but found them illegible. Gellert had simply laughed, and rolled his eyes in a fashion half fond and half exasperated, and referred back to the passage of the text they were reading on the International Statute of Secrecy.
"How different life might have been had the Muggles not hunted us," Albus had mused aloud. Gellert's eyes had sparkled, and Albus was entranced.
"You're quite right. You really are one of the brightest wizards I've ever met," he said with a crocodilian grin.
"Thank you," Albus replied, a returning smile blossoming on his face.
"Oh? So you agree?" Gellert asked, accusingly, tilting his head in a way that seemed to change the entire tone of the conversation, "You think you're clever?"
In the late afternoon, lying on a blanket by the village duck pond, empty bottles by their side, Albus had turned his head to meet the full force of Gellert's gaze.
"I just don't know. How can we be sure it's the right thing to do? Is it worth the cost? How can we tell when good intentions become evil actions?"
Gellert smiled, a smile as lazy as a tiger in the midday heat.
"There are two kinds of evil people in this world. Those who do evil things, and those who watch evil things being done and don't try to stop it. If we don't try to stop the evil that is the persecution and the terrified hiding of wizards from the rest of the world, that makes us just as evil as those who have done it."
Albus turned his head, looking back up at the clear blue summer sky.
"It's for the greater good, then," he said.
"Exactly."
Late at night, a night wild with summer rain and lit with bright lightening, they sat in front of the remaining embers of the forgotten fire. Gellert held a ream of parchment in his hand, brandishing it like a weapon.
"If you don't come you'll regret it. All we can do here is sit and plan, and paint perfect pictures of the future - but if we go, then we can actually do something about creating a better world. A world where we don't have to be afraid anymore."
"I can't," Albus said in anguish, "I have Ariana."
"But don't you see!" Gellert said, his gestures as wild as the storm outside, but his eyes at quiet, calculating odds, "This way you are protecting her! She could live a normal life without fear!"
"I can't," Albus said, feeling his torment like a physical ache. There was a long moment's pause, interrupted only by the rumble of thunder.
"Then I must go alone," Gellert said with finality.
"Please, don't leave me," Albus said, quietly, holding back the crushing fear he felt at the prospect of an endless life alone in Godric's Hollow.
"Don't leave you?" Gellert grinned, "When we can do nothing here? Why, are you so obsessed with me?"
It was an endless cycle of attraction and repulsion, of love and loathing that, in hindsight, was more destructive and more wearing than the cycle he so desperately sought to escape. And yet he threw himself in head first.
"Where are you going?" Aberforth asked one morning as Albus picked up his cloak, "You were going to play that game with Ariana today. The one with the charmed mice? She's having a really good morning, too."
"I can't," Albus said, "Next time, though."
"Where are you going, Albus? I want to bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles that everyone can eat and be happy."
Albus smiled, and ruffled Ariana's hair as she watched him with her oddly vacant gaze.
"I can't right now," he said softly, "Next time, though."
"Albus, where on earth are you going - I've just put dinner on the table," Aberforth complained as Albus strode towards the door, cloak in hand.
"I can't not go," he said apologetically, "Next time, though, I'll have a double helping."
As the nights grew longer and the air grew colder, the climax approached. Decisions would have to be made, and Albus felt like forces far greater than Hogwarts had taught him to wield were pulling him in opposite directions. To stay, to go, to fight or to fade.
He sat in front of the window, staring out across the wild little garden. He hadn't bothered to light a lamp. Somehow, though, Aberforth found him anyway, and pulled up a chair to join him at the windowsill in silent companionship.
"There's so… much," he finally said, for the first time unable to articulate an idea.
Aberforth was silent.
"I'm sorry if you can't understand. I can't help it if I want more than you do."
Aberforth remained silent.
"You know, I'm not sure who the crazy one is anymore," Albus said with an odd, high pitched laugh that spoke of the edge of hysterics.
"Say 'crazy', again," Aberforth said, his tone disappointed with an edge of resentment.
"Crazy," Albus whispered.
The next day, with a smile that stretched his skin across his skull, Albus ushered Gellert into the living room where Aberforth sat at the piano stool, playing for Ariana. Albus had an odd moment of deja vu - weren't Gellert's hands the ones that ought to be playing the piano? - but his fevered enthusiasm could not be dimmed.
"We're heading to Germany," he told his siblings excitedly.
Aberforth gave him a long look.
"You really are crazy," he said.
Albus' excitement turned to anger.
"I am your guardian, and if I say we're going, we're going," he insisted, hotly.
"Ariana is not in a fit state to go traipsing around Europe after the dreams of a madman," Aberforth retorted.
"A madman, eh? So you're standing in our way?" Gellert asked, quietly, calmly, icily.
For a brief, shining moment, Albus thought Gellert was protecting him. Standing up for him. Then he saw the way those eyes were lit with cold, detached ruthlessness, and felt the frozen dread in the depths of his stomach, and he knew that he had been so, utterly wrong.
Albus deserved to lose his dreams. He deserved to lose his best friend. He deserved the punch in the face Aberforth gave him at the funeral, and the years of silence thereafter.
He deserved it, because no matter the warning signs, no matter how much he disliked about him and his past and his beliefs, he had still wanted to be him. He'd desperately wanted Gellert to like him, and the more disdain he'd shown the more Albus had needed it.
He had learned the hard way that the much vaunted fine line between love and hate, friend and foe, did not, in fact, exist. There was only the grey. The grey, and the long, self-effacing slog of the rest of his life to keep away from the danger of that murky middle ground.