The First Stage (Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald) Title: The First Stage Author:puella_nerdii Rating: Hard R Warnings: dubcon, spoilers for Deathly Hallows, character death Wordcount: 2,008 Prompt: dubious/semi-consensual sex - "For the greater good" A/N: Title taken from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her theories about the five stages of death acceptance.
He’s only vaguely aware of Gellert’s hand tugging on his wrist, Gellert shouting at him to move away from her, there’s nothing he can do, but Albus remains kneeling, his hand hovering over against Ariana’s lips.
They’re still. Still and cooling fast, or maybe that’s just his fingers growing numb. And no breath is rising from between them, no puffs of air to warm his hand. And she’s only going to get colder. So cold. Cold and alone beneath a white marble headstone, with granite angels watching over her as she rots.
Something slams into his cheek; he barely has time to register a splintering burst of pain and the tang of blood in his mouth before the sound in the room comes roaring back into his ears and Aberforth’s driving his knee into Albus’s chest again and again. His vision lurches. He feels his wand slip from his fingers and clatter to the floor. Aberforth’s forgotten about his wand, too—he’s slamming his fists into every inch of Albus he can see, and as each blow knocks his glasses further askew, he wonders as if through a fog where Aberforth learned to fight like this.
“You killed her!” Aberforth’s face is scarlet, red as the blood flecking his knuckles. Oh. Albus didn’t realize he was bleeding. “You killed her, you killed her, you and him, you—”
“Stop!” Gellert shouts. “It was—Aberforth, you fool—Stupefy!”
Gellert would never drop his wand, of course, Albus thinks. The thought makes him want to chuckle. He’s not sure why. Aberforth grunts and rolls off Albus, his head lolling to the side. Albus presses his glasses back into place.
“What did we do?” he whispers.
“It was his fault.” The color has drained from Gellert’s face, leaving it the sickly hue of spoiled milk. “He provoked us, and we—”
“We killed her,” Albus finishes. The pit of his stomach gives a forceful lurch. He bends over double, gagging and coughing. It hurts to breathe. It hurts too much. His lungs are blistering and his throat feels like a vice is tightening around it and his hands are stiff (but not as stiff as hers will be, he remembers) and his brain is worthless now. “Gellert, we killed her.”
No matter how many times he says it, it never quite sounds real.
“It was an accident. Albus, listen to me. We never meant to. We never would have.” Gellert grips his shoulders hard and shakes him a little. “Albus, listen.”
“I’m listening,” he says, staring straight ahead: Gellert’s on the ground kneeling in front of him, but he doesn’t really see Gellert. He’s staring right through him, his eyes burning a hole through Gellert’s head the way a basilisk’s might, and he sees past the walls of the room and past Godric’s Hollow into another place altogether. He wonders if this is how Seers feel. “You can’t say that we never would have, though. We did. It was us.”
“But it was not our fault,” Gellert insists. “Hold on to me. I will get us upstairs.”
A hand crushes his lungs together, his ears pop, and he’s sitting cross-legged on his bed with Gellert beside him. They still have their notes from earlier in the afternoon spread on the blankets, and the parchment crunches as Gellert shifts his weight to move even closer to Albus. Too close, Albus wants to say, but he can’t make his voice operate correctly. He peers at the scattered quills and rumpled rolls of parchment, but even with his glasses on, the alchemical symbols and arithmantic equations swim in front of him, nothing more than a tangle of black ink.
“Albus, don’t do this,” Gellert hisses. “You cannot become a catatonic wreck. You know it was not our fault. You do know that, don’t you?” he adds.
“I don’t know,” he says, his voice thick and cracking. “I don’t.”
“Albus.” He leans in closer, touching his forehead to Albus’s. “Please.”
“What do you expect me to do?” Albus asks, his hands balling into fists at his side and then relaxing, clenching and releasing until his palms are sore. “I swore I would take care of her, and—”
“You did all you could,” Gellert says brusquely. “And now, you can do no more.”
“I can…” he begins, but Gellert interrupts him with a searing kiss, hard and hungry. His breath flies from him, and he abandons all hope of completing the sentence. He tries to focus on the way Gellert’s lips pulse against his, the feel of the stubble on Gellert’s chin scraping his jaw, but a small voice in the back of his mind repeats the same numb phrase: stop.
“There is nothing for you here now,” Gellert whispers. “Tomorrow, we can leave this place. We can travel to my home—and to so many places more, Albus. Worlds where no wizard has dared to tread. We will be the first to see them, the first to know them.”
“I can’t think about this now,” he says, shaking his head and drawing back. Not with Ariana still inert on the kitchen floor, glassy-eyed and pale. His hands are trembling.
“You must,” he insists. “Unless you would rather have the Ministry take you to Azkaban?”
“They wouldn’t,” he says, his throat dry. “Not for this.”
Gellert snorts and fists his hand in Albus’s hair, dragging him close again. “It is as we discussed. They concern themselves only with the well-being of the weak, the cowardly. You told me what they did to your father.”
“Yes, but that was different.”
“Was it?” Gellert’s eyes remind Albus of opals: polished and black, seemingly blank until you catch the iridescent spark tucked deep within them. The spark is there now and Albus stares at it, transfixed. “He acted to protect his family.”
“And I didn’t,” Albus says. “There’s your difference.”
“Come with me,” he repeats, nudging Albus’s robes open with the tip of his wand. Albus feels the wood pulsing as it caresses his skin, feels a trail of heat blaze a path from his chest straight to his groin. “You cannot change the world if you remain here in a sulk.”
“A sulk?” Albus feels a different type of heat coursing through him, breaking through the barriers of numbness he’s erected in his mind. “You call this a sulk?”
“I do.” Gellert shifts his weight forward and bears down on Albus until he’s straddling him, pinning his hips in place with his legs. “There is more to the world than your sister.”
“You don’t understand,” he says, his breath coming in harder. His heart hammers at his ribs with enough fury to break them. “I can’t forget—”
“Then remember her in deed, not thought.” He brings his leg between Albus’s thighs and flexes it slowly, grinding it in agonizing circles against him; he feels the pressure mounting there, the ache building where Gellert touches him, and shudders. “Make it so no child will endure what she did.”
“I don’t know if I can—”
“You are a great wizard. Be one. Embrace it. Do not fear it,” Gellert murmurs, tracing arcane symbols on Albus’s chest with the tip of his wand. He can’t see precisely what they are, but he feels them sink luxuriously into his skin and send ripples of energy pulsing through every inch of his body, slow and insistent. They throb beneath his skin and bid him to rest. Breathe. Relax. Appreciate.
His back arches away from the mattress.
“Diffindo.” Albus hears the soft sound of cloth tearing, and Gellert pushes the tattered scraps of fabric that formerly served as his robes from his arms. The tips of his fingers linger there, caressing Albus’s skin in slow strokes.
“For the greater good.” Gellert’s voice is barely louder than the breeze drifting in through the window. “In the end, that is what matters most.”
“How does this serve the greater good?” His breath catches in his throat. Gellert’s hands slide down the expanse of his chest now, pausing at his hipbones.
“Don’t you see, Albus?” He brings his head down, blows lightly at the hairs on Albus’s thighs. “You are free.”
And before Albus can protest, Gellert’s mouth encircles him. He keeps his hand curled tight around his shaft and strokes, lazy at first, as though he has all the time in the world to do this, all the time he wants to lap at the tip and…he squeezes his eyes shut. He won’t ask for this. He never asked for this. Ariana, he tries to think, but the bolts of lightning radiating up his spine don’t cease, and his hips acquire a life of their own, thrusting helplessly into Gellert’s mouth. Gellert teases him, holds back with his lips and tongue and even teeth just enough to keep Albus suspended here, red with need and shame and too many other things to name.
“Please,” he finally gasps, the words erupting from his lips before he can stop them. “Please…”
Gellert’s lips make another pass, taking him in deeper and faster, and he’s warm, so warm, so warm when everything else is cold. Albus fists his hands in the blankets, crumples the parchment between his fingers and wonders idly what rune he’s clenching, feels the tip of a quill prick his palm. Then something catches fire behind his eyes and colors his vision red; Gellert swallows around him and grazes his teeth along the underside of his shaft, dragging them up and up and taking Albus up with him, taking him to a place beyond his own body in this hateful room in this hateful house.
He opens his eyes.
“How is this freedom?” he asks.
Gellert sits back on his heels and gazes down at him. “You are not tied to this house.”
“I am.” His laugh is a horrible thing, a grindylow’s cackle. “Now more than ever. I have a funeral to plan. Merlin’s beard, it’s another funeral. So soon after the last one.” He claps his hand hard over his mouth and drags it away slowly. “We Dumbledores are good at dying.”
“You are hysterical,” Gellert says shortly. “Come to your senses.”
“I can’t leave tomorrow,” he says, turning his head to the side. “I need to plan, I need to think, I need more structure than this—”
“That can come later. There are more immediate concerns now.”
“Her funeral.”
“We can leave after her funeral.”
“You can leave after her funeral. I can’t.” He lifts his hands into the air and stares at them.
“You never showed her such devotion when you were alive,” Gellert notes, his eyes narrowing.
“Perhaps I should have!” Albus sits upright, every muscle in his body taught. “Aberforth did, he loved her more than I ever could. He never locked himself in his room and—”
“Our work was important. It is important still,” Gellert says, gripping Albus’s wrists tight enough to bruise. Albus hisses. “Sacrifices must be made—”
“Ariana is not an acceptable sacrifice.” He jerks his hands free in one violent twisting motion. “Get out.”
“Your grief blinds you,” Gellert begins, but Albus cuts him off.
“Get out,” he repeats, his voice trembling, “or I’ll hex you.”
Gellert draws back from the bed, sending parchment spooling to the floor as he shifts back. “I will leave,” he says. “But I will write to you. By the time the owl reaches you, I hope your mood will be improved.”
“I can’t guarantee that,” Albus says, staring resolutely at the wall. There was a picture on Ariana’s wall, he remembers. Just one. A photograph of a carousel, the horses gliding silently through the frame again and again, the white of the carousel’s glimmering lights eternally bright. She could pass hours staring at it.
“Nevertheless, my letter will arrive.” Gellert is too composed to slam doors behind him; the door clicks softly into place as the echo of his footsteps fades.
Albus clutches his pillow and closes his eyes, but sleep refuses to come.