A/N: Happy Halloween, everyone! Here you go - have a treat that's short and sweet! And just a reminder - you have only a few moments more to vote for my story, "Danse Macabre", in the Reviews Lounge Reviewers' Choice Awards!

::yawn:: are you tired yet of my disclaimers? I don't own Harry Potter, or the timeless jazz song, "Dream A Little Dream of Me". Thank you very much to WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot, SaintRidley and NezalXuchitl for their reviews on the last chapter!

3

Gellert

"Dream a Little Dream of Me"

In spite of all that he has achieved, there are days when Gellert Grindelwald is quite unsatisfied with his life. Just as, in spite of the ample four-poster bed with its silken sheets, there are nights when he is utterly unable to sleep. He looks up at the canopy above him, dotted with gems to resemble the night sky, and numbers them his head. The only twinkling objects he can envision when he shuts his eyes are blue and almond-shaped.

"We count sheep – but in Asia they count stars," he remembers Albus saying, when he was trying to explain a particular Indian text, the title of which evades Gellert the same way sleep continues to.

He opens the bed-curtains to get some air. He tosses about. He sings Brahms' Lullaby in his head. He burrows under the covers. He closes the curtains to keep the warmth in. He puts a pillow over his face. He sees how much of Eliot's "Love Song" he can recite off by heart. He gets to "Till human voices wake us, and we drown." He tries Shakespeare. "To be or not to be... To sleep, perchance to dream..." and then he remembers telling Albus about Shakes of Grey and the Myth of Dichotomy and Blake's Binaries and how "there is nothing good or bad, thinking makes it so".

Gellert wonders if stirring up the memories of Albus – even if the last time they were intimate was decades years ago – will do him any good. He screws up his eyes and imagines the delicate ankles, the long, lean, milk-white calves, the bony knees, the parchment-thin skin of the inner thighs...

"Oh Albus, ja, ja, jaaaa!"

...and after about five minutes, moaning into the imaginary mouth of the man on top of him, he's spent but not somnolent. As he gropes for his other wand to perform a quick, nonverbal Tergeo, he's been left wondering if the object of his imagination has ever lain in bed at night and conjured up images of a similar kind. Good-night kisses, rib-crushing embraces, whispers of, "I miss you..."

He thinks he must be dreaming when he hears birds chirping outside, but when he gets up to check, he finds the stars fading outside the window. If only memories could wax and wane like the moon, or lighten and darken like the sky, or come and go like the stars.

"But then they wouldn't be memories; they would merely be sentiments," says a sneaky voice in his ear, "For the nature of a memory is to linger forever, is it not?"

All his worries about facing business tomorrow without any sleep are dissolved by the many splendours of the dawn. When he sees the sunbeams of red and gold kissing the mountains in the distance, he sees in his mind's eye the strands of auburn hair that he used to kiss. When he realises, though, that time has put one more day between them, the sweetness turns to gall,the bitter taste a reminder of everything he left behind.

No, everything he threw away.