Fire rained continuously from the skies and smoke filled the air and Gellert Grindelwald didn't even notice any of it. He was instead looking at his limbs. Or, rather, what had once been his limbs before Albus ripped them all off and turned them into mice, which scurried off into the sewers of Dresden. Gellert knew he should have felt something. Rage. Fear. Anything. But he was just numb, in total shock. His one-time lover had managed to defeat him. Gellert had everything going for him: his unprecedented embrace of the darkness, a magical core unlike any other in the world, and the unhesitating support of his Muggle Nazi allies. And Albus had managed to sneak into Dresden, using the Allied firebombing as a cover, and duel him to a crushing, humiliating defeat.
It was the capstone on a pyramid of humiliation. Gellert's plans to subjugate humanity had been dependent on the Axis powers winning the war, but that egomaniac Hitler had decided to invade Russia in the winter, and everything had just slowly unraveled under that. He had intended to rule from the shadows, being the true power behind the Fuhrer's throne, but it was abundantly clear Gellert had bet on the wrong horse. There were months left until the Axis lost the war, and Gellert could see the writing on the wall.
Gellert had been sure he could come back from this humiliating defeat. In fact, his spies in MACUSA had informed him that the Muggles were developing bombs which harnessed the very building blocks of matter itself, weapons of such power that the world could be annihilated. Gellert's newest plan had been to use those weapons to destroy all Muggle infrastructure – after figuring out a way to make wizards immune to them, of course. But Albus had shot that plan all to hell. His life was about to end, and he was no closer to ruling the world than when he'd began his crusade at Albus's side.
"Oh, Gellert," Albus said in that sanctimonious tone Gellert despised. "You could have done so much for the world with that brilliant mind of yours. Instead, look around you. Your chosen allies have brought devastation and depravity to all corners of this world."
"You speak as though I forced them to do this," Gellert snarled. "Their very nature compelled them, not I. Muggles are filthy, savage brutes. They fight each other with weapons most wizards cannot conceive of, and for what? Pride? Lines drawn on a map? It is meaningless!"
Albus nodded sadly. "That, I can most certainly agree with. I do not understand why you continue a path of violence, Gellert. Do you not understand the importance of forgiveness? Of love? You speak pretty words, but they are lies. You know very well the Nazis never would have risen to power in the first place without you paving the way. You have been manipulating the Muggles behind the scenes for decades. Do not think I do not know how you put Gavril Princip under the Imperius Curse and commanded him to assassinate the Archduke Ferdinand, dooming this world to a devastating war."
Gellert kept his face carefully blank. He had just meant to start a small skirmish between Serbia and Austria-Hungary as a distraction while he pilfered valuable magical tomes from the Belgrade Fortress. To this day, he still had no clue just how it had devolved into a world war. But if Albus wanted to think he did it on purpose, then Gellert certainly wasn't going to enlighten him. "I have done what is necessary for the greater good."
Albus winced. "How I hate those words. You speak of the greater good as if you care, Gellert, but you do not. Your heart is rotten. There is nothing but sadism and cruelty within you. I have seen the result of your experiments," he spat the word as if it was a savage swear word. "You are a monster."
Gellert sneered at him. "When you kill me, my cause will live on. You cannot see what is in front of your eyes. The Statute is doomed. The Muggles are becoming more powerful and threatening!"
"Due to a war you started," Albus said, clucking in disapproval. "The Muggles are not a threat to us, Gellert. If the Statute falls, we will simply have to learn to live as one people. We are all human. I truly, genuinely believe the power of love will conquer all in the end." God, had Albus always been this weak-minded and idiotic? Gellert hoped not. It did not speak well of his taste in men.
Gellert spat in his face. "I will not beg for mercy! I will accept my death with an open heart and a wide smile, knowing I will be a martyr for the revolution that is to come!"
"And that is precisely why I am not going to kill you, my old friend," Albus said in a jovial tone. "You will be placed in Nurmengard, where you have conducted so many of your twisted experiments. And you will be left there to rot."
Gellert could not believe what he was hearing. After all they'd gone through, after they'd fought and suffered and bled for a better world, Albus was just giving up on him?! He didn't even want to kill him anymore? Gellert hated Albus fervently, but it wasn't the kind of hatred he had for most of his enemies. It was a precisely inverted form of love. The idea of Albus deciding he was going to be irrelevant was even more galling than the idea of him torturing Gellert to death. If he had done that, then Gellert would have known he meant something to the transfiguration master.
"You will regret this," Gellert snarled. "My vengeance will be terrible! I will get my revenge on you! I swear it upon magic itself, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. I will break you. I will destroy everything you love. Bloody, terrible retribution will be mine, and you will rue the day you did not finish me off."
"I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand that," Albus said with an apologetic smile. "Do you mind repeating that a little slower?" Gellert thrashed around with pure fury before realizing he'd delivered his rant entirely in German. Well, whatever. Let his vengeance be a surprise.
Gellert refused to say anything else as ICW wizards apparated away with him. Even if it took decades, he would get his revenge. He would destroy the Statute. He would make everyone rue the day they ever even heard of Gellert Grindelwald. And one day, he'd see Albus Dumbledore beg for the mercy of death. And it would be a long time before Gellert deigned to give it to him.
For Gellert, the next few decades were something of a fate worse than death for him. He was locked in his own prison, left to stew in his anger and hatred. The only one who ever visited him was Albus, who kept on waxing rhapsodic on the virtue of forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, and love. Did he not understand Gellert was the Dark Lord, not the Stupid Lord? Anger at the world moving on without him mixed with an everlasting hatred for Albus and just made Gellert more hateful and violent. He became determined to find some way to get revenge on Albus. Fortunately, he still had loyal servitors who, while too cowardly to break him out of jail, were at least willing to get their hands on dark tomes and deliver them to Gellert.
In one of those grimoires, delivered to him in 1947, Gellert found the long range possession spell but it would take him several decades to figure out how to use it effectively. His legs were returned to him eventually, but his arms were not and Gellert never had an affinity for wandless magic. Indeed, he was absolutely horrible at it. But any skill can be learned with enough practice, and after thirty-two years of practice, Gellert finally became skilled enough to execute the spell wandlessly.
It was a large risk he was taking, but it was absolutely necessary in his opinion. Ever since the end of World War II, the Muggles had become even more unruly than ever before. They had embraced the proliferation of nuclear weaponry. The United States and the Soviet Union had nearly blown each other to kingdom come over some missiles that were parked too close by. That would have just been the silliest apocalypse ever and if there was one thing Gellert could not abide, it was silliness. If wizards didn't rule the Muggles, there wouldn't be any Muggles left to rule over. It was for the greater good Gellert took over the world. Really, they'd thank him one day.
By this point, Gellert had pretty much seized control of the prison he was trapped in. This wasn't any help in the escaping side of things – at least physically escaping – because the whole place was also surrounded by ICW troops Gellert didn't have control in. But within the boundaries of the prison, he could do whatever he wanted. Save regenerate his arms, because the ICW inspectors who occasionally visited would have probably noticed something was amiss.
The first victim of the possession spell was the Raven, one of his top operatives who'd sadly gone onto a career as a mercenary, the disobedient wretch that she was. As the Raven, he'd used his puppet to duel Albus to a standstill and make him weak enough to transfer the possession to Albus temporarily. It lasted just long enough to allow Gellert to kill the traitorous Raven and make Albus to go to a hospital in Switzerland secretly ran by one of his operatives, where he was subjected to procedures that would make his mind vulnerable to possession.
The possession spell was not without its flaws. At least, most people would consider them drawbacks and were it not for some extremely specific circumstances. First of all, it required immense power to sustain. But Gellert used his own magical core to power the initial spell, which was vast, and once he'd ensnared Dumbledore, he used the power of the wards and the magical cores of incoming Hogwarts students to power the spell. This, however, had the drawback of the wards basically not being able to serve any other function. Which was useful when Gellert needed to cast compulsion spells over the student body, but not so useful when, for example, it wasn't keeping out things like trolls and basilisks.
Second of all, the possession spell would not allow Gellert to use his own body for anything simultaneously. Which would be a problem for many people to sustain a continuous possession, but Gellert had literally nothing else to do with his time. His servants ensured his physical body was magically nourished, and Gellert had no desire to use his physical body for anything when Albus's body had both power and freedom.
In time, Gellert had acquired a firm hold over Albus. Oh, the old goat still struggled each time Gellert did something Albus considered evil. He tried his best to fight the possession. But he never came close to succeeding, and no one noticed. The only physical symptom of the fighting was that his eyes twinkled unnaturally, and, honestly, Albus had done way weirder things than that in the past. Albus absolutely hated seeing his body used to commit horrible deeds, and Gellert relished every ounce of the pain.
Of course, making his ex suffer was fun, but Gellert wasn't about to be distracted very often by such things. He had work to do. Albus was fighting against an upstart so-called Dark Lord who called himself Voldemort. Voldemort was a melodramatic fool with a ridiculous name, but he was a useful one. Gellert realized that if Voldemort won the war, he'd attack the Muggles, breaking the Statute. At that point, the Muggles would be desperate for a savior, and then Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore would step into the fray! It was absolutely brilliant. Gellert started sabotaging the Order at every turn, preaching forgiveness and redemption and absolutely banning killing spells. The tide of the war turned rapidly in Voldemort's direction.
And then one day, Gellert was conducting a boring job interview with some hack of a seer when the Trelawney woman gave a prophecy. Gellert knew very well that divination was real and took Trelawney's prophecy extremely seriously. Like most prophecies, Trelawney's had multiple interpretations. The average wizard would have assumed the Dark Lord mentioned in the prophecy was Voldemort, but Gellert knew the odds were decent it was actually him. But if Voldemort killed this Chosen One, the prophecy would be fulfilled quite nicely and Gellert wouldn't have to worry anymore.
And there was much to worry about. Harry Potter was no doubt the prophecy child. The Potters had absolutely defied him three times. There was that time when he and James had a screaming row about the new no killing policy which had ended with James saying he would defy it if the situation demanded it. Then there was that time when Lily had called him out for preaching a second chance for a Death Eater who'd murdered several children. And worst of all, absolutely unforgivably, James and Lily had refused to give him a rare Chocolate Frog card he needed to complete his collection! Disgraceful!
So Gellert tracked down that greasy-haired idiot Snape and made him think he'd overheard part of the prophecy, then promptly sent him to Voldemort. Meanwhile, Gellert realized Peter Pettigrew was working for the Death Eaters. Pettigrew's total lack of anything vaguely resembling morality impressed him highly and in an impulsive move, Gellert had revealed his true identity, at which point Pettigrew instantly became zealously loyal to him. Gellert liked Pettigrew. He knew his place, which was depressingly rare these days.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Voldemort took the bait. But then in an absurdly shocking turn of events, Voldemort somehow was vanquished, presumably by the Potter girl. Though Gellert, to this day, was still not sure how Lily had accomplished it. Nevertheless, Harry was alive and Voldemort was a wraith and all of Gellert's well crafted plans of world domination had to go back to the drawing board.
But Gellert did not have the reputation of a master strategist for nothing. There was a reason he'd come closer to ruling the world than any other wizard before him. He was able to improvise on the fly, and came up with an impressive scheme to ensure Black would be put in Azkaban so he wouldn't interfere with Gellert's plans for Harry. A lesser Dark Lord would have tried to kill the baby himself, but Gellert knew that would be the height of lunacy. Until he understood precisely what had happened to Voldemort, directly physically harming the child was out of the question. So instead he dumped the baby with his blood relatives with a letter detailing some malarkey about blood wards.
Contrary to what some might think, Gellert did not deliver Harry to the Dursleys to make him weak and submissive and pliable when he returned to the wizarding world. No, Gellert gave Harry to the Dursleys because he did not want Harry to ever return to the wizarding world. Ever. The Dursleys were absolutely obsessed with mundanity and normality and Gellert was absolutely certain they'd deprive Harry of his heritage, persuade him to reject the wizarding world that had killed Petunia's sister, and force him to live out a life as a Muggle. Gellert had no grandiose plans to use Harry as a hero. In fact, he cursed Hagrid every day for spreading the tales that had caused this Boy Who Lived nonsense. No, Gellert never wanted to see Harry again as long as he lived.
For the next decade, Gellert tried his best to use the political power he'd acquired to subtly undermine the Statute of Secrecy. He wanted badly to try to bring Voldemort back to life so that his plans could continue, but he couldn't find the damn idiot. So eventually, he'd scrapped the whole resurrecting Voldemort idea in favor of a new plan: ruining Albus's reputation utterly. But no matter how openly, diabolically, moustache twirlingly evil Gellert tried to be, Albus's reputation of Leader of the Light seemed completely insurmountable. It was ridiculous! What, was the wizarding world entirely comprised of sheep?! What did it take for a man to be caught and sent to Azkaban? For pity's sake, they'd caught him standing over a child he'd killed with a bloody dagger in his hand, and then they'd bought his pathetic excuse of the Imperius curse hook line and sinker!
Wizards, in Gellert's opinion, were bloody idiots.
Still, at least he'd had a decade of not having to worry about Harry Potter. At least, until McGonagall had charged into his office, raving about Harry living in a cupboard under the stairs, like he was supposed to care. Gellert had convinced her to leave with some pretty words and a potioned lemon drop and thought no more about it. He was actually feeling pretty smug. If the Dursleys hated Harry so much they put him in a cupboard under the stairs, they'd never let him attend Hogwarts!
But then, to his everlasting horror, McGonagall went behind his back and sent hundreds of letters to the Dursleys! And then she sent Hagrid to collect Harry in the hopes that his size would intimidate those odious Muggles into backing up. And much to Gellert's dismay, it did. Gellert was absolutely furious when he'd learned Harry was coming to Hogwarts. At that point, he'd started experimenting on McGonagall's mind to destroy any and all traces of disloyalty. Gellert was a scientist at heart. Back during the war, he'd had many happy hours running experiments on captives and came up with many ideas of how to break a person down and reorganize them into what he wanted.
Gellert was very satisfied with the results of his tampering with McGonagall's mind. He could – and did – kill someone right in front of her and her senses would literally be unable to conceive of it happening. It was really quite beautiful. A work of art even. Some of his best work. It was a pity no one would ever be able to appreciate his genius, but he'd long accepted his fate was to be unappreciated on an epic scale.
Not too long after that, an unexpected opportunity dropped into Gellert's lap. Albus's old friend, master alchemist Nicolas Flamel, had decided to entrust "Albus" with the Philosopher's Stone. Why, precisely, he had done this was unclear to Gellert. It didn't seem to make any sense. But Gellert was just too grateful Flamel hadn't seen through his impersonation to inquire too deeply. If anyone could have seen through it, it would have been the centuries old sorcerer. Gellert knew there was a decent chance Voldemort would try to infiltrate the school already with Harry being there, but there was no chance he wouldn't try if he knew the Philosopher's Stone was there. So he leaked the fact the Philosopher's Stone was being kept in Gringotts to the criminal underworld, and sure enough, some enterprising soul tried to rob it.
Gellert's plan, and it was rather brilliant in his opinion, was to put the Stone behind a ludicrously easy gauntlet of tests that even a first year could get through. Of course, this would have been a terrible strategy if he wanted to keep the Stone safe, but an excellent one if he wanted Voldemort to get his hands on it, which he did. When Voldemort returned to his new body, the war could resume and Gellert could finally return to his original plan, which had been magnificently elegant, and, really, it wasn't fair at all it had been thwarted.
He had made the fatal mistake, however, of overestimating Voldemort. Little did he know that the tasks were, completely inadvertently, extremely difficult for him. Voldemort was terrible at chess, he had a curious problem with unlocking charms, and what he knew about magical creatures could be put in a matchbox without taking the matches out first. It took the better part of the year, with Gellert doing everything but shouting out solutions at the top of his lungs, for Voldemort to figure out how to get through the obstacles. Odin, that creature was an idiot.
After ostentatiously departing to the Ministry by broom, Gellert returned, intending to narrowly lose a duel with the resurrected Voldemort, and what he saw before him was just flabbergasting. It simply didn't compute. Harry Potter, of all people, had somehow, unaccountably burned the possessed Quirrell to death with his bare hands. Like, seriously, what was even up with that? Three first years had somehow figured out what was going on with the Philosopher's Stone and decided to go and protect it from "Snape." (Gellert couldn't help but roll his eyes a little bit at that; Snape was the last person who would seek immortality. Frankly, he wasn't quite sure why the dungeon bat hadn't killed himself already.)
After all the time Gellert had spent trying desperately to ensure Harry had a normal life, it would seem he was going to accomplish his destiny after all. The boy was the prophecy child, and that was very bad news for Gellert.
The next year, Gellert's brilliant plan to create a homunculus and pretend it was Voldemort reborn kept running into problems. Namely the fact Gellert was always terrible at that kind of magic and, ironically, had either killed or had his Muggle allies kill just about everyone who could have done it for him back during the war. But that wasn't the only concern. A basilisk had been let loose on the school, which was something of a problem, to be sure. Gellert was ludicrously powerful, but he was no match for a basilisk's gaze. So he was more than happy to step down when Malfoy moved to oust him. To his dismay but not surprise this time around, Harry ended up saving the day once more.
Harry's third year turned out to be much better for Gellert than the second. The presence of the Dementors were leaving the students depressed and miserable and there was no sound sweeter for Gellert than the crying of children. But Sirius Black was a concern, to be sure. If he killed Pettigrew, it wouldn't be a great loss, but if Pettigrew was captured, there was a chance Pettigrew would sell Gellert down the river to save himself. So he made sure to Confund Lupin into not taking his Wolfsbane to create a distraction allowing Pettigrew to escape. He then decided to take a stab at getting Harry killed by having him time travel to save his godfather in the hopes he'd get Kissed by Dementors. As he expected, it was for naught, but the opportunity had to be taken.
Much to his dismay, rather than doing the responsible thing and running away with Harry to some foreign place where Gellert would never have to see the wretched boy again, because, honestly, the poor kid had gone through so much danger, Sirius had listened to Gellert's halfhearted attempts to supposedly persuade him to go on the run alone. He was supposed to see through his weak arguments, but the damn sheep mentality of the wizarding world struck again.
This year, Gellert had taken a radically different tack. He'd deliberately positioned himself publicly as Harry's enemy. He tried his absolute level best to make himself look like the villain of Harry's story. He'd ensnared Molly Weasley's mind and make it look like Albus had been trying to arrange a marriage between Ginny and Harry. He'd faked Harry's visit to 'Gringotts,' utilizing the old multiple lordship scam to his advantage. He'd taken credit for stranding Harry at the Dursleys in public. The journals he'd planted in Albus's office had been his most brilliant idea yet. Once people read them, they'd assume Gellert had been innocent the whole time, and they'd release him, allowing him to openly rule the wizarding world. Albus could tell the truth all he liked; no one would believe him and they'd all think him mad.
It had seemed to be working so well, right up until Bones had revealed she knew about the wards, and he'd had no choice but to kill her and start up from the drawing board. No one could know about the wards. If they did, there was a chance they might realize he was using them to power the possession spell. So Gellert was back to the drawing board, and at a significant disadvantage to boot. While Lord Greengrass had underestimated the strength the wards had, there wasn't enough power to use them to power mass Obliviations or geases or similar spells from that point on.
The only thing left to be done was hope Voldemort's plan to use the Triwizard Tournament to resurrect himself would succeed, and maybe help it along subtly. But for now, subtlety was all Gellert had left. There wasn't even enough power left to keep the mental manipulation of McGonagall, as delightfully fiendish and alliterative as it was, going for much longer. So he decided to just dispel it all in one go…
"…and take this golden opportunity to kill you," Gellert finished monologuing. Wow, he was feeling exhausted. He had been monologuing for hours. He'd had a lot of pent up gloating to do, but it was starting to take its toll. "So what do you think, my dear kitten?"
Gellert peered at McGonagall closely and then let out a groan. Somewhere in the middle of his monologuing, McGonagall had died of her injuries. To add insult to injury, he belatedly realized he had been once more monologuing in German the whole time and McGonagall likely didn't understand a word of it. Sometimes, it didn't pay for a Dark Lord to get up in the morning.