Disclaimer: Don't own Dumbles or Grindels, regrettably.
Please review! I'm open to anything reasonable .
He was brilliant. It was what Albus loved and there was no other word, no other description. Gellert was brilliant, in intellect and in physical grace, and it made him radiant, luminous.
They were fast friends, but fast in a dangerous, hurtling-downhill sort of way, the catalysts of their sharp descent being firstly Albus's awe and secondly, although Albus did not know, Gellert's carefully calculated need. Gellert was as clever, if not more so, than Albus himself. It was dizzying to Albus, but gratifying, comforting; it filled him with a feeling of relief, a sense of finality, a release of a breath that he didn't know he had been holding before he was allowed to let it out. Albus Dumbledore had never felt less alone.
It was the cleverness, the fact that neither of them were very easily deceived, that made it heartbreaking, Albus thought once. He caught Gellert's game slowly but surely. Albus was not one for denial, no matter how devastating the realization was that lay behind that door. So he gradually trapped more and more of the cryptic but telling remarks, the hidden smirks, the nervous, sidelong glances.
It is an often unsettling fact of humanity that after several entrancing words and several burning glances we can give away our unrequited and yet unflagging faith, love, and devotion to someone who may well be leading us, blindfolded, to the gallows. So Albus Dumbledore stayed. He knew, but he stayed and he hoped.
What was agonizing was that some of it, he realized, had to have been the smallest bit real. He remembered writing a letter in Gellert's attic room while the boy regarded him calmly, neutrally. Albus made a small gibe about the recipient's incessant questions and then looked up with his face lit entirely with a grin at his own humor…and Gellert shot back an immediate replica of the smile, his composed features breaking and looking more boyish than they ever had, more connected to anything real than they ever had. It was gone a flash later, and when it was gone, it was very much gone. It was not real anymore. Thirty-seven years later Albus stared up through the gaping hole in the roof that had several stray boards halfheartedly nailed across it and he stared at the stars. He thought this: When someone smiles that way so quickly you cannot do anything. It is human, biologically human, to respond. It means nothing to respond.
The thing he wondered most of all was whether it was extraordinary to make Gellert Grindelwald so human. If maybe he had been, to Gellert, the slightest bit extraordinary. If Gellert had ever felt that twinge, whether or not he dismissed it.
It was the hope, he realized, that he loved too. That glimmering, glistening chance that he was enough to tinge the other boy's darkness a shade lighter. When you love someone with that hope it is different, he thought. You love the fear, too. It grows and you wonder if maybe, perhaps, you love the horrible parts of him too, if you love those more…
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore had given countless speeches, accepted numerous awards, changed thousands of lives. But as he died and as he lived the defining moment of his life was in an attic in Godric's Hollow. It was why he fought for anything that was ever good.
In that fall from the tower he knew peace. He had never really known what it was before. It was the look upward from a letter, the routine warmth of an accepted and wholly returned love.
