Chapter 21 – Facing truth
The light of Harry's wand made the disrepair of the prison stand out clearly; they would find nothing in the cells. There was nowhere for any monsters to hide in there, so they slipped like ghosts through the shadows and darkened halls to where the fallen dark wizard had once lived with his closest followers.
He never stopped marvelling at the level of freedom he was allowed these days. As the ICW wardbuilder team had explained when they came to reconfigure a part of their complex charms, he was allowed to go through all the levels of the fortress on Tuesday evenings to find the materials needed to teach Harry. The limit of his movement at this time was at the gates of the fortress, and he looked forward to trying to turn the place into something more than a prison. At the same time he was really baffled how the warding team was more enthralled to meet the Boy Who Lived and didn't spare the so-called 'greatest dark wizard of his age' more than a passing look. He was old news, it might seem.
The locking charms on his old door were the same as they'd been fifty years ago and he borrowed Harry's wand to unlock them, unwilling to just blast off the door and leave the rooms defenceless until he knew what had taken up residence inside. He cracked the door open a little, unsurprisingly seeing nothing – the curtains had all been drawn when he had left to face Albus.
'Cast the charm I taught you, Harry.' He prompted and the boy quickly obeyed, poking his returned wand through the small opening and casting a Lumos Maxima. Gellert counted down from three, praying that they wouldn't find a Lethifold – the one creature a dark wizard couldn't fight - and they burst through the doorway. Harry's Lumos charm had done an excellent job of lighting the room and he could see that at least some creatures had been here.
The robe he hadn't put away was still out on a chair, the bottles were still in the cabinet with dusty glasses next to them. There would almost certainly be Bundimun infestations in the furniture, but he'd already cautioned Harry not to touch anything. He beckoned to the boy who quickly scurried up to him. He was afraid but excited, he had never done anything like this before and Gellert was determined to use this opportunity to teach him. Dark creatures loved places tainted by dark magic and there were few opportunities to clean out somewhere as tainted as Nurmengard had been.
He ignored the main room and moved through to the door on the left; that had been his bedroom and he knew it would be a prime candidate for a boggart. His room was dark and smelled strongly of dust. He got Harry to cast another light spell and began checking the many containers in the room. The space under the bed was full of Silk Weevils, so he took the opportunity to carefully extract one and show the worm-like, metallic crimson body to Harry. He demonstrated how the metallic colour changed against every surface and then how they were terrified of a small flame. With Harry's wand he summoned the ones that fled from the space and Harry fetched the empty water glass from his bedside table for him to put the small pile of insects in, explaining as he did that they could be useful in potions.
They found a doxy nest in the wardrobe and he decided to get some antidote before tackling that one. Then they finally struck gold in the stationary desk. It started rattling excitedly when they drew close and Gellert had to stop Harry from carelessly throwing it open.
'Pay attention.' He snapped and Harry looked appropriately chastened.
'That's either a boggart or a deniphin, but we're unlikely to find a deniphin this far from South America.' Potter diagnosed and Gellert nodded.
'Do you remember the charm?' He asked and Harry nodded. 'Ready?' Harry nodded again and positioned himself in front of the desk. Gellert noted how quickly the young boy pulled out his weapon with some measure of pride. He unlocked the lid and it creaked slowly but nothing stepped out – not the Voldemort Harry had prepared himself to ridicule. Instead, there was just a high, cold laugh followed by a curse that a thirteen-year-old had no right to know and the signature flash of green. Harry looked white as a sheet and Gellert smoothly stepped in front of him, ready to take the creature on wandlessly. He had prepared for both possible forms the boggart would take: if it's his former cell and himself a starved skeleton wrapped in chains, he'd swap those for tinsel and force the rest of the Christmas decoration in, complete with the cakes they had at the German class. If it's the crowd of people whose demise he was responsible for, he'd bring up the students to whom he'd told nothing but objective and useful truth. They wouldn't outnumber the former group, but the memories were more recent and as such, clearer.
Hands appeared over the lip of the desk, followed by a head; so it would be the crowd he surmised and readied his hands for wandless casting, fixing the faces of his students in his mind. It was a familiar figure who climbed out of the desk and jumped casually down to the floor, but it wasn't someone he'd killed. The boggart drew his wand, letting it land casually in his fingers as he strolled forwards, white hair gleaming in the Lumos. Their mismatched eyes met across the space and the younger Gellert sneered at him. He stared at the arrogant smirk of his younger self. He felt a wand being pressed into his hand and he suddenly remembered Harry.
He flicked the wand that was beginning to become familiar to him and suddenly his younger self was dressed in the astronaut suit he'd seen in the book on muggle achievements. The boggart dropped his illusory wand, unable to hold it with the padded gloves and was forced to waddle.
'Figured out what you're going to do yet, Harry?' He asked and glanced at the boy. Harry nodded, looking pale but determined as he took back his wand and faced the boggart.
Astronaut-Grindelwald disappeared with a sound like a balloon deflating and that high, cold laugh rang out across the empty room.
'Riddikulus!' Harry cried before the green flash could even come and the voice broke, then came back as if the laugher had just inhaled helium. Gellert wondered if Harry was even aware how funny it was hearing the killing curse spoken like that.
The change in his own Boggart was unsurprising, but he wasn't sure what to do with the information and he mulled over it all the way back to their floor.
.
"Professor? When we talked about snakes last year, you said that they... I can't remember the word."
"They are natural occlumens. Legilimency is to read a mind, occlumency is to close it. Why, you want to learn that?"
"Is it possible to learn?"
"We have the time."
Cheerfully, Harry settled on the office table his teacher usually occupied.
"All right. But be warned, you will see a lot of my own thoughts. My past. Things I'm not proud to have done."
"I know about those, professor."
"You do, but to know and to see are two very different things."
They began the next day, sitting across the desk in the office. The last of the summer sun shone through the window giving the lesson a benign feel. That feeling was only skin deep however, for all Harry believed he knew Gellert's crimes, it was very different to see the bodies piled up, the torture and the harsh reality of dark magic.
'To become a successful legilimens, one must also understand occlumency. We will work on the basics of that this morning; the basis for both of these skills is in organising and controlling the mind – a legilimens who is not an accomplished occlumens will not be able to control what he sees in the mind he invades. Now, meditations...'
He knew the first few lessons would not be bad; the boy's attempts would probably not work. The middle stages would be the worst, when the boy could get in but not control what he saw.
It came sooner than he had hoped; Harry was a powerful wizard and his third day of lessons they moved on to legilimency. They stood opposite one another as Harry fiddled with his wand, now it seemed he was finally nervous as he faced the dark wizard opposite him.
'Will it hurt?' He asked uncertainly.
'No.' Grindelwald lied, it wouldn't hurt Harry physically at least.
'Legilimens.' He muttered. Nothing happened.
'You need to mean it. Remember your principles of spell casting.'
'Legilimens!' He bellowed this time and colours blurred as Harry made contact.
'Better, much better. Again.' He braced himself.
'Legilimens!' His cell window flashed in front of him, then faded.
'Very good, now once you get in, use the same method that you use for occlumency to find the memory of your quiddich match against Ravenclaw.' It was something that was relatively safe and easy to look for, especially because they both remembered it.
'Legilimens!' He managed to get in deeper this time and suddenly they were in an alley. Grindelwald breathed a sigh of relief as they talked with Credence. This memory was a safe one, and he let Harry remain in his head to work on controlling what he saw. He gave him a little mental nudge to remind him that he wasn't meant to be watching the events and chastened, the boy began to focus.
He could feel the tugging at his memory as Harry tried to force his thoughts aside and suddenly they were standing outside a dark door in a house, they watched a bright green flash before stalking down the corridor. Harry gave a mighty tug and they were in a quiddich pitch, but it was the wrong quiddich pitch. People screamed and as fire licked at the stands, Gellert laughed as he sent flashes of green and purple light soaring into the fleeing crowds.
Gellert slammed up his shields and the boy was thrown out faster than he could catch himself on the table.
'That was a good attempt.' He said reassuringly, but he couldn't meet the boy's eyes, dreading the condemnation that would be there.
'I'm sorry.' The apology surprised the dark wizard and he looked up with a start. He had expected rejection, and an apology caught him by surprise. He stared at the boy in amazement; he was everything Albus pretended to be. 'Can I try again?' The boy asked timidly. Gellert nodded, still awestruck by the boy's acceptance.
'Legilimens.' It spoke a lot for the boy's power that he could get into Gellert's (unshielded) mind without bellowing the incantation. They were standing in Bathilda's garden in Godric's Hollow with the young Albus Dumbledore, joking about his brother. This was a safe, long memory so Harry would have plenty of time to focus on exactly what he wanted before trying again to summon the correct memory. He could feel Harry preparing, then there was a sharp tug and they were looking at the Hogwarts quiddich pitch. The bludger rocketed through the air towards the seeker, then did a U-turn and came at him again. Grindelwald waited until the Snitch was caught, then gently guided the young wizard from his mind.
'Congratulations, Harry.' He praised and the boy grinned from ear to ear. 'Would you like to try something more difficult?"
'Please, Sir.' The boy replied, so Gellert described his memory of arriving at Durmstrang for the first time.
Harry cast the spell again, he managed to locate the early memories of his schooling very quickly, then filtered through lessons and casual interactions. He touched once on the experiment that had gotten Grindelwald expelled and seemed to recognise this memory as something he really shouldn't see. To his credit, he tugged laterally, but with that, threw them into a completely unrelated memory. Unfortunately, this one was worse; a muggle woman screamed and writhed on the floor until Grindelwald lifted the torture spell. A dark-haired lady laughed in the background as Gellert crouched and whispered a question into her ear. Harry skipped sideways again, but he was scared and the fear was guiding his subconscious focus. The new memory was Grindelwald raising the bodies of decaying soldiers from mass graves. Then inferi attacked a city, then bodies burned, their skin crisping in graphic detail. The boy was panicking, flicking through the memories so fast that Gellert couldn't regain control to force the boy out. So he did the only thing that he could think of and focused on one of these memories as hard as he could. For a moment there was clarity as muggle soldiers foamed at the mouth and died as poisonous gas spilled from the dark wizard's wand. Gellert slammed up his shields and finally Harry was thrown out of his mind.
For a moment they both just sagged against the furniture, panting. Then Harry began apologising profusely, tears running down his face and Gellert felt an agonising guilt twisting in his chest. He didn't know whether he was meant to comfort him or leave him but he was certain that the boy would hate him.
Then he realised that the boy seemed to be under the impression that it was his fault for bringing those topics up. The boy was begging forgiveness for seeing what Grindelwald had done, which confused him so much that he actually responded when the boy hugged him. He awkwardly rubbed a hand up and down his back in the way his mother had done to him when he first began to have visions of the world war.
'It's not your fault, don't worry. The only one to blame is me.' He didn't know what else to say, so he just fetched Harry's blanket and tucked it around him. "Catch some sleep and you'll spend tomorrow morning flying around on your Nimbus-2000. You can go and see the waterfall, it's close enough that you can return inside the wards immediately, should anything go wrong. It's beautiful at this time of the year."
Harry didn't seem to appreciate the distraction from the horrors he'd seen, although the mention of broom-riding had its predictable effect on his mood. After all, Gellert was the war criminal imprisoned; the boy under the same roof deserved all the freedom Nurmengard could offer. No British murderer would find him here, especially not if he's under the Cloak of Invisibility as he tended to fly ever since his quidditch team had left. Him disappearing under the gorgeous Hallow was a sight Gellert never could get bored with, and once the young wizard even allowed him to try it on. It had felt like the deepest of death magic combined with the strength of blood wards and the flexibility of the finest artworks of Transfiguration.
Suppressing his still-swirling memories of the war, the old wizard left Harry to himself and went to cook dinner over the fire.
.
'After I read all your discussion with the diary,' Dumbledore's next letter began, 'I'm more and more shocked at what Voldemort has done to his own self. Are you sure the diary is of more use than a threat?'
"What's a horcrux, sir?" Harry asked as Grindelwald sat down to compose a reply. He was still wearing his quidditch robe after the morning flight, as the sun had yet to warm up the September air. In stark contrast, his teacher wasn't wearing more than a thin shirt and trousers, and didn't appear to have noticed the cold.
"Half of a damaged soul," the former teacher and former warlord responded. "Darkest magic in its origin, although the most harm creating one would cause, is to the soul of its maker." Potter looked up at him mutely, waiting for him to continue. Which he did with only a twinge of regret. "Murder, truly intentional murder, always leaves a soul ruptured. Remorse can heal it, but take it from me, true remorse is nowhere in consideration most of the time. If it's there, then perhaps the deed was more like a mercy kill or an accident or the murderer was under compulsion of some sort. We're talking about absolutely free-willing, intent-driven destruction of a life."
Harry paled, but nodded.
"As I said, that deed ruptures a human soul. And there is a ritual to make said rupture to break completely, to the point that one part of the soul leaves the wizard who performs it. It is then tied to an object of the wizard's choice, that object is called a horcrux. That British dark lord has made his diary into one after killing a fellow student in his sixth year. Do you want to see how that ended for him?"
Hesitantly, Harry nodded, and took his wand out. The disdain in his teacher's eyes must have discouraged him, although its subject was Tom Riddle, not his student Harry. "Come on," he smiled.
"Legilimens!"
He didn't block out the boy, but didn't simply toss the related thoughts at him either. He could tell Harry was practically scrolling through his mind, at the memories of a possessed Miss Weasley ('Ginny' as Harry referred to the witch), of Peeves and a swim in the lake in January, of writing into the diary and it writing back. Sheets of text recreated by the Gemino spell, the vision of Albus finding them next to the diary that had been kept safely away in a sphere. Random lines of the exchange between the then-disguised Grindelwald and the attempt to cajole the secret of the Defence curse out of it. A sixteen-year-old Riddle emerging from the booklet and running into a wizened Grindelwald's occlumency shields. The diary boasting about the concept of six horcruxes, of which four would be items from the Founders...
More lines of writing, blurred...
"Harry, back away, you're exhausting yourself."
"How do I...?"
Finally, the boy retreated from his teacher's mind, and both of them reached for the very last remaining slices of Harry's birthday cake.
"Next time, we'll begin with you willingly ending the connection."
Harry gave a tired sigh.
.
On an early October morning Fawkes arrived with their usual mail and a letter for Gellert that's opening line was 'Please do not show this to Harry.'
"Looks like Albus is back to his charming old self," the imprisoned man noted. He read it twice while his student was busy with his own messages. "Do you want to learn how to make a Howler? Pass me your wand."
The young master of the Cloak of Invisibility gave him a long look, but in the end offered his wand without a fuss. 'Wohl' cast the initial spell on the plain blank paper and began to dictate the reply, the holly wand channelling his words to the sheet.
"Albus Dumbledore, you unpardonable champion!" the Howler began. "Don't you DARE commit what you're planning to justify as ridding the world of Riddle! You don't even practice the dark art in question, so do us a favour and don't act on something you don't understand. To give you some pointers, do the math, you ridiculous Gryffindor! Creating one horcrux splits the soul in half. Your wizard with half a soul went on and created another horcrux and walked away with just one quarter of the original. Then we can safely assume he picked up at least three belongings of the Hogwarts founders, that's two on the third power. One quarter divided by eight, that's what Riddle had when he had raised his wand at Harry. I agree his damaged little soul was falling apart on its own by that time, but be reasonable! You wish death on a boy over an estimated one sixty-fourth of his enemy's soul! All that, after you have ALREADY ruined TEN YEARS of his life, leaving him with the worst muggles available. Which reminds me, Albus! When was the last time you looked up 'obscurial' in your precious books?
I'm facing my own guilt, shame and remorse day and night, but the more I think about your recent actions, the stronger I fear you inspire to outdo me. Stop right where you are or start preparing for a re-match."
With that rant out of his system, Grindelwald let out an audible huff and, voicing his hope that it'd be delivered in front of the entire school, he sealed the now-red envelope.
Which was, in the next moment, taken out of his hands and torn to shreds by Harry. "I'm not letting you send that," the boy declared with an unwavering determination.
"Harry?"
"Professor Dumbledore trusts you. That is why he asked. That is why he invited you to Hogwarts in the first place. You can't betray his trust like that."
"Harry!"
The young wizard was staring into two-coloured eyes with a pair of glowing emerald. "You won't put that in a Howler. Write it down in a normal letter that he can read in the quiet of his rooms, fine, but no Howler. Not with my wand nor with my owl. That's final."
"Harry..."
The boy pulled away from him, his sudden defiance evaporating along with Grindelwald's rage. He reached for the original letter he wasn't supposed to be shown, and retreated to his own cot, in dire need for the privacy to read.
"Do you even understand it's you I'm trying to protect from your headmaster?"
"I do," the boy now sobbed.
Grindelwald shook his head without anything to say. Apparently, this time it was Albus on the receiving end of Harry's unfathomable forgiveness, and the war criminal admitted it wasn't his place to scold the boy for it.
With nothing else to do, he put up a kettle of water for tea, and started a new letter.
.
"I'm sorry this isn't like the breakfasts at Hogwarts." He levitated out some of the rubbery eggs that he'd been cooking. It had always been Harry's responsibility for a reason.
"Yeah, but we're not at Hogwarts," Harry pointed out.
"That reminds me, I'm no longer banned from teaching you what you must learn to effectively protect yourself," Gellert said, demonstrating a spell of clear-blue fire with Harry's wand. "The truest shield."
"Dark magic?" Potter carefully asked, his enthusiasm a fragment of the usual.
"Deadly magic," Grindelwald nodded. "But entirely intent-based. It calls on your ultimate, primordial and unlimited magical powers to defend yourself and those at your side. It separates friend from foe."
Harry shook his head, but took his wand back after his teacher extinguished the wall of blue fire. He pretended to focus on his plate.
"Let's hope you won't need to use it, but you'd better prepare for the worst and practising it in itself isn't harmful. The entire point is that you cannot hurt a loyal friend with it."
"What if I don't want to torch an enemy alive, either?" the boy asked. "I mean... It's not like I haven't... Professor Quirrell..."
"Practice," Gellert said, looking with blue and brown eyes into Harry's green stare. "Practice. Learn control. You have the right to defend yourself from anyone who wishes harm upon you."
"Do you mind if I don't start today?"
"Tomorrow will be fine."
.
Harry was relieved to have had a quiet Halloween, for once. Gellert spent the evening pondering about people who had once been close to him, and invited Harry so that he could share the memories. He wasn't his usual social self, however, nor was he musing over his deeds like he was prone to in the hours of quiet. "It's grief over the loss and hope for seeing them again," he explained. "For you, it might be the time to remember your parents."
"If only I had more than the album Hagrid made..."
"Do you have it with you?"
"Yes."
They didn't talk more that night. Their focus was on the dead, for those few hours, so that they could concentrate on the living for the other 364 days. At least that's how Gellert explained in the following morning.
.
Two days later they received a vague letter from Tonks, informing them that she'd convinced Remus to leave a message and stationery in the tunnel leading to the Shrieking Shack the following day, where Sirius Black was certain to find it. She'd sworn that Remus is a wonderful and amazing person even in his unhinged state, and she hoped that the investigation would last until she grew old by the side of the crown witness. Grindelwald promptly wrote her to leave her own message next to Lupin's, asking Sirius for tips to the suspected werewolf's heart. Her next letter only contained two words: 'NO WAY'. There was a box of candies attached to the brown owl's leg that day, however.
Then, three days later, Hedwig arrived with a Prophet and an apology to Harry that Tonks failed to capture the real traitor.
.
"He told them Pettigrew is an animagus!" Harry fretted over the Prophet, something the exhausted Hedwig didn't exactly approve of. "Sorry, girl, I know you had a long flight."
The bird hooted once more before taking off to the owlery. That cell was much quieter than the floor of two agitated wizards, and Harry had recently placed some very comfortable branches in it.
"They BOTH told EVERYONE that Pettigrew is an animagus, and he still slipped away!" Potter continued his tirade over the newspaper.
"You expect too much from the aurors," Gellert calmed him. "At least they're no longer after the soul of your godfather anymore. You can return to school."
Harry threw his arms around the aged criminal. "Thank you for everything, sir."