Thank you for the supportive response! Even though I suck at replying individually, I read and appreciate every single review. To celebrate reaching the 500 responses count for Visionary, please accept this belated yet plot-relevant interlude while I work on the next chapter.
To abaude and biblioholic: I'm glad you noticed the touches. Ancient Greece and Rome have been an interest of mine since I was… six, I believe. I've never studied it, but it tends to crop up now and then in my writing. Cheers.
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Interlude: Privileges
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Never in his life had Albus suffered boredom. Boredom was something that did not happen to him. Idleness? Perhaps, occasionally. It could be enjoyable, for limited periods of time. Not too often.
But boredom?
He let his eyes slide over the entirely too familiar barred arch, and the vacant corridor behind it. Once in a while muffled speech filtered in from a lower floor or another wing, but in the stretches of time in between the only human-produced sound detectable to ears was Gellert's breathing.
Even that was a cause for alarm, because Albus was entirely too aware that his ears were not nearly so sharp as to hear a man breathe over such distance. As much as he would have liked to ignore the obvious conclusion, he could not lie to himself.
Gellert had a chest infection. Considering the level of care he enjoyed and the genuine joviality that the guards expressed toward him, its lack of treatment meant that there was nothing to be done.
Albus was disconcerted by how many conflicted emotions that realisation sparked in him.
He watched with a frown as Gellert walked into sight, holding an oil lamp in one hand and a book in the other. He wore his glasses. The corners of Albus' mouth still, weeks after he had first seen a bespectacled Gellert Grindelwald, twitched.
"I would have thought that you would be wahnsinnig with the ennui by now, Albus," Gellert said, setting the lamp onto a table he had had one of the guards move there earlier that day. He took a seat in the armchair next to the table, crossed his legs, and settled the book on his thigh. "And instead you are smiling. Or-" Gellert quirked a brow, "-are you smiling because you have taken a leave of your senses?"
"That is the topic of many a discussion," Albus replied drolly. "I'm afraid it would detract from the air of mystery if I ever gave a definite answer to that question."
Gellert laughed. "You and your love of mystery… Had you been born a muggle, you would have become a superb magician, I wager. Not that you are not a superb magician as it is."
Albus had to laugh with him. He had not let himself think about Gellert's sense of humour in decades. In fact, he had done his best to forget the good parts of his and Gellert's association, because they were overshadowed by the war, and Albus had grieved for too many losses without torturing himself with memories of happiness lost.
"Thank you," he said. "You were quite astonishing, yourself. Pity that you chose to turn to the Dark."
A moment later Albus regretted the loss of levity. Even if he was still angry and disappointed about the illustrious end of his long and adventurous tenure as the Headmaster of Hogwarts and a member of the International Confederation of Wizards, that was hardly an excuse to act ungraciously toward a man who came to him to lift his spirits.
"I have been Dark before I ever met you, Albus. You chose to not see me for what I was," Gellert said, biting softly on the knuckle of his thumb. Then he smiled again. "Although, I have to admit that I have never been a very good Dark Lord. I was an intellectual rather than a warrior – how else could I have learnt to be content locked away in a library?"
Albus, who had been informed by the guards to be glad for the mattress on his bed and the upholstery on his chair, eyed Gellert's armchair, lamp and book with suspicion and more than a little envy. "How is it that you live in a library rather than in a cell?"
Gellert stroked the spine of his book. The flame from the lamp reflected individually in each lens of his spectacles. He mused for a minute, and eventually replied: "I have been on my best behaviour, and they have allowed me a new comfort every once in a while since I stopped wishing to get out."
"You do not wish to leave?" Albus asked, startled. It was difficult to imagine that the vivacious, predatory wizard whom he had once known – and fought – would have given up on freedom. Had Nurmengard broken him so completely?
Was it, essentially, Albus' fault?
Albus comforted himself with the knowledge that Gellert Grindelwald had been out to massacre a part of the population, and despite long and arduous effort had not allowed himself to be persuaded to give up on genocide.
"Not at all. I have nothing out there. My time is over, my vision for the world unfeasible… I have no desire to subject myself to freedom." He gave Albus an infuriatingly superior look. "You disagree?"
Albus, somewhat disgruntled, drummed the fingers of his left hand against his right upper arm. Perhaps Gellert had been incarcerated for so long that he could not even imagine a different life anymore, but Albus was not willing to idly sit in this place and let Tom and Harry wreak havoc on everything he had tried so hard to protect. He could not allow wizarding Britain to suffer through the horrors of segregation based on blood purity or, worse, the reinstating of the institute of slavery. What of the children he had taught?
He would not have been able to live with the knowledge that he had doomed the next generation through his failure to neutralise Tom and Harry while they had still been vulnerable. The children needed him.
"I have my school-"
"Not yours anymore," Gellert cut in, without even looking up, and turned over the page in his book.
"-and my Order-"
"It was taken from you," Geller informed him.
"-and a war to fight. Voldemort must be stopped!" Albus released an angry sigh, particularly annoyed at Gellert's undisguised, theatrical pose of paternal patience directed at a petulant child.
"He has been stopped quite effectively, from what I have seen." Gellert laced his hands on top of the text he was pretending to read, and looked up. There was a slight smile on his face, barely distinguishable in the flickering light of the oil lamp. "Face it, Albus – the war as you have pictured it, your story-book story, is over. Those two boys learnt from our example, but they took the reversed approach. They hated each other for years, before they fell in love and decided to remodel the society together. And, by gods, I wish it works out for them."
"You don't know Tom, Gellert. He is…" Albus paused to seek a descriptive enough word.
"Insane?" the erstwhile Dark Lord suggested, smirking. "A sociopath? Hardly. He used to be, perhaps. I have had decades of nothing to do but collect newspaper, Albus. I know of your Lord Voldemort and your Boy Who Lived. I find it incredibly improbable that the two would end up bonded, and yet that is what happened. I ask: how?"
Albus scowled.
He did not have to say anything, naturally, but Gellert's bearing, the manner in which he leant forwards and seemed to hardly breathe as he hung onto Albus' lips, always made Albus want to show off his knowledge. It was a weakness that he had recognised already at the end of last century, but which he had yet to counter.
"In 1943," he spoke, aware of having lost some unacknowledged challenge, "one Harry James Potter appeared on the list of the sixth year students, quite out of nowhere." It had been a long time ago for Albus, but the memories had been freshened, since he had recently reviewed many of them in his pensieve. "The contemporary Potters could not find a link to him in their family tree; thus he was assumed to be illegitimate. He claimed to have been home-schooled prior to his admission to Hogwarts and Armando never contested that claim – in fact, he did not contact Mr Potter's guardians, as far as I am aware. I do not know whether the tuition fees for him were paid-"
"Basically," Gellert spoke up, with an unholy grin stretching his face, "you're saying that your pet hero traveled fifty-three years into the past and fell in love with his future nemesis? Oh… priceless!"
"Gellert?" Albus exclaimed, aghast at the incredible effrontery his once-companion demonstrated by finding amusement in such a twisted, tragic tale.
Gellert softly coughed into the back of his hand, squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temple. "Albus, there is nothing to do in here but read. Do not be such a grouch. Learn to find entertainment where you can." The smirk returned to his face, muted and tinged with bitterness.
That, Albus mused, was the reason why there always had been and always would be contention between himself and Gellert. Albus was aware that some reviled him for what they considered his propensity for caring for the needs of many above the needs of few. Albus reviled Gellert for his insistence to put the wants of few above the needs of many.
They had been intellectual equals, once upon a time, except for one difference between them: where Gellert had always understood Albus, Albus had never wholly understood Gellert.
Perhaps that was why he had craved his favour. It was so rare that he found anything enigmatic about a human being.
"Would you lend me that book?" he asked, as interested about the subject that kept Gellert occupied as he was curious whether Geller would lend it.
"Do you wish for freedom?" the man asked faux-casually.
"Of course I do," Albus replied. He had made that clear enough, he believed.
Gellert shook his head, smiling again. "Then I cannot help you, Albus. I will not endanger my own privileges because you refuse to admit defeat. If you wish it, however, I would not be disinclined to read aloud."