Golden Apples of the Sun
Again, Bart, I'm sorry! I started your prompt and promptly (ha ha) found that I was being pants at it. I know it'll work at some point. I demanded a request from katieay instead, and then stayed up too late writing it (even though it's only 2.5k).
So here we go. Katie wanted Dumbledore and Grindelwald (she actually wanted their duel but I got Ambitious and then, er, didn't write the duel at all).
i.
I knew he was in love with me. For someone so brilliant he was a fool, too. So earnest. So moral, or he tried to be. I could see his morals getting in the way of our ideals and plans. I could see the paths he took, weaving round them, taking so much longer to arrive at my decision. Poor Albus, he had to try so hard to convince himself that we were right, but he did do it (for that time) because he wanted to believe.
As for me, I just knew. It was much simpler that way.
He was right, though. He could tell me why I had been expelled, and I saw what I could have achieved at school had he been by my side. He thought up the Greater Good and for him it was something to believe in, to give him reason - justification - for following our natural brilliance. I saw it as something for other people to believe in. It made me slightly lonely that I was the only one who saw clearly.
But those weeks with Albus - he was brilliant. As brilliant as I was, and our goals! Our goals were the same, or at least so similar that he could pretend they were. They should have been the same. We had the same mind, the same wishes, the same need for the Hallows and the same abilities to put them to use, to rule our world. We were the top of the natural order: the cleverest, most talented, most powerful.
Sometimes he could make even me believe that we were doing it for the world. We weren’t. We were doing it because it was right. Our destinies. Our Hallows.
Those weeks were the least alone I’d ever felt. I’d had followers before but never a true comrade.
Genius was isolation. We both knew this, even with all Albus’s contacts and his doting friends and his mad siblings. He was above them all, just as I was, and it was beyond luck that we had found each other, could spend our time pooling and sharing ideas that we two alone in the world could understand. We deserved each other.
Albus was weakened by his family. He was made guilty at the thought he was not catering to their needs - as if theirs should come before ours! A deranged girl and an illiterate schoolboy. He could see, I think, that they pulled him back, but he refused to admit it even to himself, even to me.
We should have had more time. Given time we would have found our first Hallow together and then Albus would have had to have seen that sacrifices would have to be made. For the Greater Good - our greater good, of course. The boy could have gone back to school and the girl could have been sent somewhere - she belonged in a hospital - and we would have been free to use our skills as it was our destiny, our duty to do. What use in power if you will not wield it? Even Albus agreed on that point.
Yet when his brother challenged him, on the night before he went back to school - so close, away from his brother’s censure I knew Albus would be easy to persuade - Aberforth challenged us. Challenged Albus, as though he had the right to question him. As though anything some stupid little boy could say could change the world, could stop us from changing the world.
What was worse was that I knew Albus would listen. In one moment I could see everything crumble and for the first time I did not know if I could go ahead alone, as I had planned to do if ever Albus could not persuade himself to believe in me. All the plans and dreams fell to ruin with one angry meaningless little boy dictating to Albus what he could and could not do and Albus - the most powerful person I’d met, the only one who’d understood - was listening.
So I cast the Cruciatus thinking only to stop Aberforth from speaking before it was too late. And then it was too late: Albus was defending his brother - chose his useless little brother over me and we cast and cast again, the mad sister shrieking like a banshee, louder and louder, the magic in the air thick as a taste, a force, growing and growing. When it vanished there was ringing in my ears and screaming. The girl was dead on the floor and Albus was crouched over her body. He looked up at me, just once, and I knew it was over.
I left, and knew there was no coming back to Godric’s Hollow.
I also knew that I could continue on my own. I could go on as I had - better, in fact. Wiser from Albus’s knowledge. I would find the Hallows and I would rule life and death, just as I’d always dreamed I would.
All that was new was the knowledge that I was alone.
ii.
You see him through the mist. Of course it is misty, and you wonder whether he has arranged the weather. You wouldn’t put it past him. Gellert has always been a bit of a showman. That’s how you knew, at the beginning, that the deaths were down to him. It makes you sick to think of it, and at the time you’d told yourself that it wasn’t him, he wasn’t like that, that you were mistaken. You’d known all the time, of course. You recognised his style. And you’ve put off facing him until now, until you must. This responsibility of power - you’d had no idea at seventeen, what seventeen year old could? - of the extent to which the world claims you because of what you are. It’s heavy, a thick cloak that is drenched in icy water, dragging you down, slowing your movements, binding your arms and freezing your chest. If you close your eyes you can see the dead. All the people who have been murdered in the years since he left Godric’s Hollow. Each death that could have been prevented by you had you not been so selfish, so wilfully blind, so weak.
She is at the front of the ranks of your dead, of course. It is her eyes which pierce you most, which cut you deepest. Ariana, the child who had suffered all through her short life and who had been, for the most part, a gentle, timid presence in your life that you had ignored in favour of brighter things. She was your first responsibility and the first that you failed.
Your hand is on your wand. You cannot fail again. You know that if you fall there will be no one else. Or rather there will be others, and they will be braver than you but not as powerful. You of them all have the best chance. You are best equipped to end this and you must do so for those who will come in your stead if you fail.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d show up, Albus,” he says. There is the old grin on his face - not the same, you tell yourself. He’s changed since then, it’s not the same - and it draws the old feeling out of yourself, from where it has been captured in layers of guilt and disgust and self-loathing.
For a moment there is a quality in his smile that is acknowledgement and recognition. You want to close your eyes. You must not be weak.
“I hoped you’d come,” he says, sounding almost boyish. He comes closer, wand outstretched. “I knew you would in the end. But, old friend, it took you a long time to stop hiding.”
There’s a stab at the word, and he knows it. You can see it in the sharp, vicious flicker of his eyes. He edges forward again. Your eyes leave his face and drop to his wand. The Wand.
“Well, Gellert,” you say, and your voice is steady at least. “It seems congratulations are in order. I see you have found one of the Hallows.”
“The best of them,” he says. He holds the wand loosely in his hand, so that you think briefly that you could reach out and pluck it from his fingers. He laughs.
“I think opinion may be divided on that matter,” you say neutrally, scanning your surroundings as you should have been doing from the moment you arrived. You have thought too long and too wistfully of the Hallows: you cannot let them distract you now. You know that he was dying to show you that he has the wand, that he thinks himself indestructable.
“Come, Albus, surely you don’t think of the stone! Haven’t you had enough of your dead?” There is nothing of the boy in his face now. He is cold and cruel. He stinks of the dark. He shouldn’t have mentioned Ariana. He thinks that he can destroy you with her death, but there is nothing he can say (nothing except you were the one) that you have not dwelt on, brooded over, nursed and kept warm in your soul. His distraction has failed.
“I challenge you to a duel,” you say.
“Where are your seconds?” He is alone, as you knew he would be for this. He has no one to trust as a second. Of course, he has the Elder Wand. He cannot dream that he’d need one.
“If they are needed they will come,” you say. You don’t know when. You don’t know who will try, but you know that someone will, that eventually someone will succeed and that balance shall be restored. But balance is needed now, with destruction raining upon Europe. You are today’s hope and tomorrow’s too.
You bow briefly. Gellert bows so deeply that his chin nearly touches his knees, and yet his eyes are raised and mocking you. He knows you will not strike until he is ready.
But when his back is straight once more, you do.
iii.
One day there will be an old man in a cell. He will have been in the same cell - the topmost cell in the fortress-prison of Nurmengard - for over fifty years. He will not always have been an old man in this cell. He will have been a young man, once, and as free as genius and ambition would let him be. He will have been a ruler, once, a leader and wielder of the Deathstick. Those are the times when he will have been exactly what he wanted to be. Or, at least, as close to it as he could get.
For he will have become a defeated man, a raging prisoner in the prison he built himself. There will be times when he will pace the cell, hating every square inch of it, hating the injustice of being imprisoned where he meant to be the gaoler. There will be times, many times, when he will curse with impotent breath the name of Albus Dumbledore who caused him to be shut up in this place. The man who was once his friend.
The first change will not come for years, but it will come when Gellert Grindelwald, now an elderly but not old man, will feel sympathy for those he once imprisoned in this space. He will identify more with the prisoner than the captor. Eventually he will think of those he did not keep alive. He will think of what it means to have killed them. He will not quite be sorry.
He will tell the guards that he has repented, and they will not believe him.
He will feel terribly alone, but that feeling will not be new to him. He will have felt isolated most his life, and his lonely years of confinement will be spent contemplating the years when he had power at his fingertips and yet was still alone.
He will dream, sometimes, of blood. The blood will smell rich and taste sweet. After two decades of these dreams he will believe, perhaps, that the words For The Greater Good are aptly carved over the gates of his black-tower-prison.
He will sometimes grin to himself and say that at least he has the penthouse suite, as he watches birds fly past at the level of his window. In the past he will have tried in vain to get to the birds but he will be an old man by now and won’t have the energy to try or care. He will remember the times he thought nothing was impossible and will know that he was wrong.
He will like to think that his name is remembered and feared.
He will like to think that his name is remembered.
He will hear of Voldemort and he will laugh at the upstart.
He will hear of Voldemort and he will be furious that his title of fear is being stolen.
He will hear of Voldemort and he will be tired. He will think of Albus, then, who will be tired too and will, no doubt, be expected to do his duty again.
He will think that he knew that Albus Dumbledore was dead before he overhears the guards talking about it. He will pace the cell and love and loathe each square inch and he will remember the wand that he took and which was won from him. He will smile at the memory of the duel now, after half a century of hate, because it was the last time he was alive.
In time his thoughts will be slower. He will realise (after longer than he should) that this is because he wants them to slow and to stop. It will take him a while to reason out that he does not know who is now the owner of the Elder Wand. Was Albus defeated? He will not know, and will feel uneasy about this. Voldemort must want the wand, he will think.
He will look forward to the day that he comes.
One day a man shall slide through the window of his cell like a snake. Gellert will not be surprised at this, even though no creature has made its way through that space in all the time he’s been here. He will smile. He will say he never had the wand, even though he will know that by saying this he is telling Voldemort that he knows what he is looking for and why. He will not care.
He will look at this not-quite man, this Dark Lord, and he will think that Voldemort is young and foolish and stupid. He will see cunning and talent and desire, but he will not see the subtle brilliance that he and Albus had all those years ago.
There is so much you do not understand, he will taunt. It will be true. He will be the last that understood.
He will be happy to die, to move on from that which was not life. He will think, as he dies, that he will have done something good, maybe. Something better. In any case he will have no more time to ponder it. He will remember, as he dies, that for two months he knew that he was loved.
So here we go. Katie wanted Dumbledore and Grindelwald (she actually wanted their duel but I got Ambitious and then, er, didn't write the duel at all).
i.
I knew he was in love with me. For someone so brilliant he was a fool, too. So earnest. So moral, or he tried to be. I could see his morals getting in the way of our ideals and plans. I could see the paths he took, weaving round them, taking so much longer to arrive at my decision. Poor Albus, he had to try so hard to convince himself that we were right, but he did do it (for that time) because he wanted to believe.
As for me, I just knew. It was much simpler that way.
He was right, though. He could tell me why I had been expelled, and I saw what I could have achieved at school had he been by my side. He thought up the Greater Good and for him it was something to believe in, to give him reason - justification - for following our natural brilliance. I saw it as something for other people to believe in. It made me slightly lonely that I was the only one who saw clearly.
But those weeks with Albus - he was brilliant. As brilliant as I was, and our goals! Our goals were the same, or at least so similar that he could pretend they were. They should have been the same. We had the same mind, the same wishes, the same need for the Hallows and the same abilities to put them to use, to rule our world. We were the top of the natural order: the cleverest, most talented, most powerful.
Sometimes he could make even me believe that we were doing it for the world. We weren’t. We were doing it because it was right. Our destinies. Our Hallows.
Those weeks were the least alone I’d ever felt. I’d had followers before but never a true comrade.
Genius was isolation. We both knew this, even with all Albus’s contacts and his doting friends and his mad siblings. He was above them all, just as I was, and it was beyond luck that we had found each other, could spend our time pooling and sharing ideas that we two alone in the world could understand. We deserved each other.
Albus was weakened by his family. He was made guilty at the thought he was not catering to their needs - as if theirs should come before ours! A deranged girl and an illiterate schoolboy. He could see, I think, that they pulled him back, but he refused to admit it even to himself, even to me.
We should have had more time. Given time we would have found our first Hallow together and then Albus would have had to have seen that sacrifices would have to be made. For the Greater Good - our greater good, of course. The boy could have gone back to school and the girl could have been sent somewhere - she belonged in a hospital - and we would have been free to use our skills as it was our destiny, our duty to do. What use in power if you will not wield it? Even Albus agreed on that point.
Yet when his brother challenged him, on the night before he went back to school - so close, away from his brother’s censure I knew Albus would be easy to persuade - Aberforth challenged us. Challenged Albus, as though he had the right to question him. As though anything some stupid little boy could say could change the world, could stop us from changing the world.
What was worse was that I knew Albus would listen. In one moment I could see everything crumble and for the first time I did not know if I could go ahead alone, as I had planned to do if ever Albus could not persuade himself to believe in me. All the plans and dreams fell to ruin with one angry meaningless little boy dictating to Albus what he could and could not do and Albus - the most powerful person I’d met, the only one who’d understood - was listening.
So I cast the Cruciatus thinking only to stop Aberforth from speaking before it was too late. And then it was too late: Albus was defending his brother - chose his useless little brother over me and we cast and cast again, the mad sister shrieking like a banshee, louder and louder, the magic in the air thick as a taste, a force, growing and growing. When it vanished there was ringing in my ears and screaming. The girl was dead on the floor and Albus was crouched over her body. He looked up at me, just once, and I knew it was over.
I left, and knew there was no coming back to Godric’s Hollow.
I also knew that I could continue on my own. I could go on as I had - better, in fact. Wiser from Albus’s knowledge. I would find the Hallows and I would rule life and death, just as I’d always dreamed I would.
All that was new was the knowledge that I was alone.
ii.
You see him through the mist. Of course it is misty, and you wonder whether he has arranged the weather. You wouldn’t put it past him. Gellert has always been a bit of a showman. That’s how you knew, at the beginning, that the deaths were down to him. It makes you sick to think of it, and at the time you’d told yourself that it wasn’t him, he wasn’t like that, that you were mistaken. You’d known all the time, of course. You recognised his style. And you’ve put off facing him until now, until you must. This responsibility of power - you’d had no idea at seventeen, what seventeen year old could? - of the extent to which the world claims you because of what you are. It’s heavy, a thick cloak that is drenched in icy water, dragging you down, slowing your movements, binding your arms and freezing your chest. If you close your eyes you can see the dead. All the people who have been murdered in the years since he left Godric’s Hollow. Each death that could have been prevented by you had you not been so selfish, so wilfully blind, so weak.
She is at the front of the ranks of your dead, of course. It is her eyes which pierce you most, which cut you deepest. Ariana, the child who had suffered all through her short life and who had been, for the most part, a gentle, timid presence in your life that you had ignored in favour of brighter things. She was your first responsibility and the first that you failed.
Your hand is on your wand. You cannot fail again. You know that if you fall there will be no one else. Or rather there will be others, and they will be braver than you but not as powerful. You of them all have the best chance. You are best equipped to end this and you must do so for those who will come in your stead if you fail.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d show up, Albus,” he says. There is the old grin on his face - not the same, you tell yourself. He’s changed since then, it’s not the same - and it draws the old feeling out of yourself, from where it has been captured in layers of guilt and disgust and self-loathing.
For a moment there is a quality in his smile that is acknowledgement and recognition. You want to close your eyes. You must not be weak.
“I hoped you’d come,” he says, sounding almost boyish. He comes closer, wand outstretched. “I knew you would in the end. But, old friend, it took you a long time to stop hiding.”
There’s a stab at the word, and he knows it. You can see it in the sharp, vicious flicker of his eyes. He edges forward again. Your eyes leave his face and drop to his wand. The Wand.
“Well, Gellert,” you say, and your voice is steady at least. “It seems congratulations are in order. I see you have found one of the Hallows.”
“The best of them,” he says. He holds the wand loosely in his hand, so that you think briefly that you could reach out and pluck it from his fingers. He laughs.
“I think opinion may be divided on that matter,” you say neutrally, scanning your surroundings as you should have been doing from the moment you arrived. You have thought too long and too wistfully of the Hallows: you cannot let them distract you now. You know that he was dying to show you that he has the wand, that he thinks himself indestructable.
“Come, Albus, surely you don’t think of the stone! Haven’t you had enough of your dead?” There is nothing of the boy in his face now. He is cold and cruel. He stinks of the dark. He shouldn’t have mentioned Ariana. He thinks that he can destroy you with her death, but there is nothing he can say (nothing except you were the one) that you have not dwelt on, brooded over, nursed and kept warm in your soul. His distraction has failed.
“I challenge you to a duel,” you say.
“Where are your seconds?” He is alone, as you knew he would be for this. He has no one to trust as a second. Of course, he has the Elder Wand. He cannot dream that he’d need one.
“If they are needed they will come,” you say. You don’t know when. You don’t know who will try, but you know that someone will, that eventually someone will succeed and that balance shall be restored. But balance is needed now, with destruction raining upon Europe. You are today’s hope and tomorrow’s too.
You bow briefly. Gellert bows so deeply that his chin nearly touches his knees, and yet his eyes are raised and mocking you. He knows you will not strike until he is ready.
But when his back is straight once more, you do.
iii.
One day there will be an old man in a cell. He will have been in the same cell - the topmost cell in the fortress-prison of Nurmengard - for over fifty years. He will not always have been an old man in this cell. He will have been a young man, once, and as free as genius and ambition would let him be. He will have been a ruler, once, a leader and wielder of the Deathstick. Those are the times when he will have been exactly what he wanted to be. Or, at least, as close to it as he could get.
For he will have become a defeated man, a raging prisoner in the prison he built himself. There will be times when he will pace the cell, hating every square inch of it, hating the injustice of being imprisoned where he meant to be the gaoler. There will be times, many times, when he will curse with impotent breath the name of Albus Dumbledore who caused him to be shut up in this place. The man who was once his friend.
The first change will not come for years, but it will come when Gellert Grindelwald, now an elderly but not old man, will feel sympathy for those he once imprisoned in this space. He will identify more with the prisoner than the captor. Eventually he will think of those he did not keep alive. He will think of what it means to have killed them. He will not quite be sorry.
He will tell the guards that he has repented, and they will not believe him.
He will feel terribly alone, but that feeling will not be new to him. He will have felt isolated most his life, and his lonely years of confinement will be spent contemplating the years when he had power at his fingertips and yet was still alone.
He will dream, sometimes, of blood. The blood will smell rich and taste sweet. After two decades of these dreams he will believe, perhaps, that the words For The Greater Good are aptly carved over the gates of his black-tower-prison.
He will sometimes grin to himself and say that at least he has the penthouse suite, as he watches birds fly past at the level of his window. In the past he will have tried in vain to get to the birds but he will be an old man by now and won’t have the energy to try or care. He will remember the times he thought nothing was impossible and will know that he was wrong.
He will like to think that his name is remembered and feared.
He will like to think that his name is remembered.
He will hear of Voldemort and he will laugh at the upstart.
He will hear of Voldemort and he will be furious that his title of fear is being stolen.
He will hear of Voldemort and he will be tired. He will think of Albus, then, who will be tired too and will, no doubt, be expected to do his duty again.
He will think that he knew that Albus Dumbledore was dead before he overhears the guards talking about it. He will pace the cell and love and loathe each square inch and he will remember the wand that he took and which was won from him. He will smile at the memory of the duel now, after half a century of hate, because it was the last time he was alive.
In time his thoughts will be slower. He will realise (after longer than he should) that this is because he wants them to slow and to stop. It will take him a while to reason out that he does not know who is now the owner of the Elder Wand. Was Albus defeated? He will not know, and will feel uneasy about this. Voldemort must want the wand, he will think.
He will look forward to the day that he comes.
One day a man shall slide through the window of his cell like a snake. Gellert will not be surprised at this, even though no creature has made its way through that space in all the time he’s been here. He will smile. He will say he never had the wand, even though he will know that by saying this he is telling Voldemort that he knows what he is looking for and why. He will not care.
He will look at this not-quite man, this Dark Lord, and he will think that Voldemort is young and foolish and stupid. He will see cunning and talent and desire, but he will not see the subtle brilliance that he and Albus had all those years ago.
There is so much you do not understand, he will taunt. It will be true. He will be the last that understood.
He will be happy to die, to move on from that which was not life. He will think, as he dies, that he will have done something good, maybe. Something better. In any case he will have no more time to ponder it. He will remember, as he dies, that for two months he knew that he was loved.