We the Chosen: Or, How to Break Up with a Dark Wizard
By wethechosen
Author's note: For nearly fifteen years, I have been intrigued by the tour-de-force of Dumbledore and Grindelwald's relationship. However I have been hard-pressed to find a depiction of their relationship that portrays its full depth. This fanfic is my attempt.
I write in first person Dumbledore. I've tried not to slot anyone into a simple trope or archetype but portray them in their full spectrum of humanity. I try to make the events as true to canon as possible, so that we have a common reference frame, in an attempt to understand the moral origins of the great wizard that we come to know as Dumbledore.
This fanfic is also an exploration of love and morality, including the work of Nietzsche and the Christian axis that is good/evil.
The events take place immediately after the Secrets of Dumbledore, but otherwise this fanfic does not not make heavy use of Fantastic Beasts series at all. Rather, I stay true to the original seven-part canon.
Warning: Depictions of a seriously abusive relationship, including sexual assault, emotional abuse, and psychological manipulation. I have tried to walk the fine line of rendering an abusive relationship realistically, with the full passion of the lovers, while not romanticizing it. While this fanfic explores dark themes, I do not encourage or support abusive behavior in any form— magical or not. If you need help, I strongly encourage you to reach out to the hotline and resources in your area.
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"My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and HE remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a might stranger: I should not seem a part of it…. My life for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff!He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again.." - Catherine Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights
"Dumbledore, who was the great defender of love, and who sincerely believed that love was the greatest, most powerful force in the universe, was himself, made a fool by love. That, to me, was the interesting point. That, in his youth, he became infatuated with a man who was almost his dark twin." -JK Rowling, Pottercast interview, 2007.
"Attraction to darkness means that one is not fully mature in one's psychic development; there are still crevices and caverns of the psyche that one must explore; one must achieve an integration of dark and light and allow light to triumph." - Professor Margaret P Mercury.
—
Chapter One: The Schism
DUMBLEDORE
Date: 1932
When my fingers trace the muscles on your back, I trace the very structure of magic itself. We had traveled, down the unfathomable tower of turtles, to Nature's most fundamental laws. We had played with her rules like children, like gods; we had modified her primitives; we had forged new first principles for the functioning of All Things. Yes- this is how we were going to recreate the world! Blood mingled, fingers entwined, we pushed the boundaries of magic further than they had ever been pushed…
A wedding unfolds in the building behind me on this snowy London night. Two hearts, both alike in purity, united in their glowing candle of love.
Tonight is fittingly cold. Alone, I trudge away from the bakery. My boots crunch through the snow. I'm not sure where I am going. I cannot possibly be around people. No one understands this exquisite flavor of loneliness. There is no one who can empathize, there is no one to confide in.
I want to say that I was married once. That's certainly what it feels like. We were never married in the eyes of Wizarding law- but our bond was deeper, written in laws more ancient.
My name is Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore— but really, no one really knows who I am. I carefully show slices of my life; I curate my public image. As I grow older, I aim for venerable wizard with a beard and love of lemon drops. This is me. This is terribly not me. There are the versions of me that only Gellert would see. He's the only person who I let in close enough. Who I trusted enough. I sometimes think that Gellert is the only one who will ever know me in all my dimensions— that every relationship after him will pale in grandeur and depth.
You hurt me. I can barely think the words: rendering these thoughts feels blasphemous and tugs at my heart with black strings. I can recite all the patterns of domestic abuse like a well-trained schoolchild, the gaslighting, the broken promises, the honeymoon cycles— yet I still love you. You were my dark mirror. For who else could possibly match my ambition, my genius, my vision of the world? It's always been you. Only you. And now I must go against you. To go against you is to go against myself. Your plans are mine. We are one body and blood.
I turn the corner, and the quaint Muggle bakery is out of sight. I apparate to my next location: the forest outside of Hogwarts.
Forest at night. Rustling darkness. Owls hooting softly in snow-laden trees. I trudge across the grounds and into the castle.
The schoolchildren who are home for the holidays are sleeping, and the old castle is still. I walk through the Great Hall, which is cavernous and empty, tracking snow across the floor that magically dissolves behind me. My Transfiguration professor office is where I have always felt the least alone.
As I enter, Fawkes lifts his head. The phoenix is crying. His tears fall wasted to the floor. No one will see these tears but I. No one will know that Fawkes cried for a dark wizard; and I suppose that, soon, no one will know that I loved him, a secret that will be lost in time like tears in rain.
I can feel Grindelwald's tears, mirroring mine, countries away— he is also crying, crying as I cry, alone in some Russian forest— but wait! The blood pact has been broken. Grindelwald is no longer there! Grindelwald's emotions tug at me like a phantom limb. It's only in my imagination.
Our blood troth has been broken. It broke seven days ago, when our spells collided, and the merged spell traveled up the silvery chain around my wrist and shattered the vial.
Then why do I still feel you in me, always in me?
I light a few more candles, and it's just me, Fawkes and our dimly-lit books.
I can fight him now. And we had fought seven days ago, as soon as the troth had broken. I could anticipate his every move because we had trained together; and he had anticipated my every blow and matched it. I was a man fighting his reflection in the mirror. There was no way that I would win. There was no way that I would lose either. We would fight indefinitely, until one of us one by random chance, like the flip of the coin.
I boil myself a pot of blueflower earl gray tea on the magic kettle on my desk. The smell calms me. The smell reminds me of him— drinking blueflower earl gray tea while sitting in plush armchairs of the local bookshop at Godric's Hollow, designing our vision of the world.
At first, it had been an intellectual exercise: two smart boys, with vivid imaginations, exploring the politics of Japan. Magical Japan had been unusually fascinating, because the wizarding population had designed a government for both Muggles and wizards that was exclusively run by wizards. Only the wizards had access to books. The Muggle population was illiterate, and the government kept them that way deliberately. The wizarding government also designed a religion, centered around the emperor, and invented the most fantastic lore for the Muggles to follow. The whole movement had been a glorious work of art.
It was becoming increasingly unfashionable to say— but Grindelwald and I had been intrigued by benefits of fascism— Egypt, the first truly hierarchical society, run by the Pharaoh, who was like the fulcrum of a lever, sweeping across the nation, leaving sphinxes and pyramids and great magical structures in its wake. We had wanted to bring back the glory of Ancient Civilization; wizarding civilization simply does not make monuments like we used to anymore.
But I cannot for the life of me entertain those thoughts any longer; I had escaped into academia, into the laboratory of Flamel, to quietly study the laws of nature in less provocative ways (or, as Gellert would say, in ways that were less visionary, less agentic, and far more impotent). Gellert had not relented, urged onward by aesthetics, to shape the world into a diamond, into what he saw as a higher form.
And the world that Gellert saw was dazzling.
I don't think anyone understands the full genius of the world he saw but I. His band of followers are mainly half-witted, gullible politicians, compelled by his newspeak, and incels and other lowly members of society who are looking for social mobility. His followers are not theoreticians or academics or particularly genius wizards— the type of genius that comes only a couple of times each century. I don't think anyone appreciates the sheer technical rigor of Grindelwald's magical society. No one is skilled enough to appreciate it but I.
Who will love you now, Dumbledore?
Who will love you now, Grindelwald? When the greatest audience of your art has turned against you, who will be your new spectator? But you were building the world for me, because you loved me; you were reshaping the world, not in your name, but in mine, for I was your beloved… it was for me, and your plan for the world was nothing but a present for me, for this was not your vision, but mine…
There is too much adrenaline flooding through my brain, so I bring out the pensieve from the cabinet near my desk and start sorting memories, one-by-one. I have been doing this periodically for the past five years, but there has been little reprieve.
I draw a silver strand of memory from my temple and drop it into the pensieve. It swirls into the outline of Grindelwald's face, in intricate silver filigree.
He has subtly modified each one of my thoughts. There is not a memory in my brain that he has not somehow touched.
The candles eat away at their wax and dim. The sky outside glows with faint orange.
Perhaps tonight will be different; perhaps I shall hit some epiphany…
—
DUMBLEDORE
Summer of 1899.
The young man across from me was beautiful. There was fire in his eyes. His eyes channeled ten thousand years of potency. His finger scanned the lines of a large old book; his finger was precise.
"There!" he said, victorious, stabbing the page. He grinned. "I found it! Truly unknown magic. Not the stuff they'd ever teach in Hogwarts."
It had never been about darkness or evil. These are concepts that came later, which I used, in retrospect, to organize my past into a more comprehensible form.
It had actually first been about mathematics. Specifically, about Arithmancy, and finding more precise representations for the basic building blocks of magic.
"Magic is simply finding representations for the consciousness that is present throughout the universe, like panpsychism," Grindelwald continued. "The words that we use for spells… well, all words come from Wittgensteinian language games— social games, played between people, to communicate concepts in a shared social context. Words are fuzzy, approximate, contextual. Words are neither continuous nor precise. Therefore if we keep our magic verbal, we will never truly decompose our spells into more fundamental and precise forms of magic. The magic will also be very human-centric, because… well, most spells emerge from human societies, not two mavericks obsessed with nature itself, like you and I…
"Of course, there is nonverbal magic, which, once mastered, is far more powerful and precise than verbal magic. There's a reason for this, and it has to do with language. Transcending language allows us to access more precise representations of the magic. These representations are likely encoded in our minds in a distributed manner that is not easily translated into words.
"Now the process of translating subsymbolic to symbolic representations— of birthing magic into existence!— now that is exciting. And dangerous. Too bad the Hogwarts curriculum never touched spell invention— too dangerous, to have a bunch of teenage wizards plumbing the depths of their growing psyches! But, Dumbledore, you and I have always had more control, and this is something we're going to have to master. And in our off-curriculum summer adventures… well, we'll have to systematize this art…
"So first, poetry is obviously a form of magic, as the midwife between the unconscious and conscious minds. Romantic poetry is so fashionable these days— we can definitely throw a dash of romantic poetry into our spells. But what is less studied, in my opinion, is mathematics. With numbers, you can reach extraordinary levels of precision. You can go from 0.07, to 0.069, to 0.0699… you can reach arbitrary levels of precision in your spells. If we are going to systematize all of magic, we can create a new paradigm… a type of magical engineering… we would be revolutionaries, on the level of Merlin, or greater, the greatest wizards of all time…"
Like this, Grindelwald would talk for hours. Every word was electric. I had never heard anybody talk this way before— certainly none of the professors, who were stodgy and contained in their little disciplines. Grindelwald, on the other hand, thought expansively. There were no limits, just endless boundarylessness. I had never had my intellect challenged in this way— our conversations crossed vast swathes of knowledge-space in the span of a few minutes. I should never have gone to Hogwarts; I should have just found Grindelwald as an eleven-year-old boy and talked to him. We could have dropped out, and started inventing spells, child prodigies forging new branches of magic into existence.
"We are trapped in our humanity," said Grindelwald. His excitement had faded a bit, and he was looking solemnly out of the window of the bookshop at some distant horizon only he could see. "Our brains will only allow us to access certain representations, like a radio that can only access certain frequencies of the spectrum. Radios will never see ultraviolet light, only radio waves. Just like that, we will never see the upper realms of magic if we hold our humanity so closely to our hearts. Our humanity is only one lens out of a rainbow of lenses, and taking it so seriously will hold back millennia of progress and possibility that we presently have the agency to influence…
"We are one arbitrary path through the space of evolution, and there are a trillion shades of consciousness that we have not yet accessed… not even consciousness… but beyond consciousness, for the very concept of consciousness is a clumsy one…"
He looked at me now, and the fire in his eyes entered mine, and my nervous system felt hot and electric.
"That's what I like about you, Dumbledore," he said. "You are… the only person I have met so far who thinks expansively. Your mind is a glorious cathedral to all of human knowledge. No… beyond human… the knowledge of anything and everything that is conscious. Magic is raw consciousness that we are harnessing… and you are one of the few people I have ever met who wants to explore consciousness in its most alien form…"
It had never been about darkness or evil.
It had been about precision, transcendence, and the expansion of the mind.
It had been about searching the space of magical knowledge.
It had even been about empathy and open-mindedness to new paradigms, to new ways of being.
But it had never been about evil.
We did not yet know what evil was.