albus dumbledore (little_lion_man) wrote in unloading_zone, @ 2010-08-12 18:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | albus dumbledore, gellert grindelwald |
Who: Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald
Where: Albus’s bungalow
When: BACKDATED: August 1
What: Just because something is returned, doesn’t mean you’re the one who finds it
Status/Rating: Complete
There were few places Albus felt he could find proper refuge, but at least the relentless churning of emotions had diminished. It was, in fact, a little peculiar. His mind still reeled much of the time, and trying to sleep was often accompanied by a headache in the base of his skull, though even that seemed to have improved slightly. The Dumbledore family had never been much for holidays on at the coast, but there was something pleasant about the rhythmic crash of the surf against the sand. On his own, he didn't have to look at his sister and feel guilty, he didn't have to look at his mother and feel worse, and he didn't have to look at Gellert and feel--
Surely it would be only a matter of time before his cottage was repaired. There was someone on the island, he believed, who was supposed to be charged with the maintenance of its buildings. A visit was surely in order. With this Gellert, seemingly unspoilt and captivating as ever, he could feel the tug of a past he tried to ignore, of a future he was sure he no longer wanted. Had been sure.
Why hadn't he simply suggested Gellert stay at his shop?
By the time he was back to his own little cottage, his clear head was clouding again; a murky swirling beneath the careful ease of his expression. As soon as he walked in, however, his brow was knitting together just a bit. He could hear Gellert's voice, coming from the bedroom, but he didn't think his other housemates were at home. His stomach did not lurch. The blood in his veins did not flash uncomfortably cold. No knife twisted in his gut over the idea of Gellert with some stranger in Albus's own bedroom. And even if it had, Albus was resolutely ignoring it. Gellert, in his day, took lovers frequently enough, according to the reports he received. Busy attempting to tell himself that this was no different-- or at least, that he shouldn't regard it any differently, Albus was making his way back to the bedroom.
Gellert had read all of the letters thrice over by the time he heard the front door open, and Albus’s characteristic footsteps in the front hallway. They only got more entertaining with each rendition--and they were clearly not forgeries; Gellert knew his own writing voice, could see too clearly now the structure of the relationship that Albus remembered. What Albus had not been able to tell him himself, or to explain with enough clarity, these letters mapped out in unmistakable detail. There was no doubt now why it was that Gellert had thought Albus a worthy partner in pursuit of the Hallows, or why he had been so willing (eager, even, it seemed) to encourage Albus to leave England and return with him to the Continent to find the Wand and begin their journey toward domination.
He’d found them lying in the bottom of an open trunk when he’d returned to Albus’s house after a day at work, neatly stacked and tied with a single pale lavender ribbon. Gellert doubted he would have been able to compel himself to ignore them even if it had not been for the fact that his own handwriting was etched across the top envelope in the pile, reading nothing but Albus, 6 June 1899. And that had been too much temptation to healthily resist.
Gellert had eventually settled on Albus’s bed with the stack of letters, picking through them and debating whether he more enjoyed the ones in which he was describing to Albus every naughty little thing he planned to do to him the next day, or the ones from earlier in their friendship--from before they ever slept together--in which he did essentially the same thing, but subtly enough to look accidental.
When he heard Albus enter the house, he immediately flipped through the parchment to find the one he liked best of all for the time being and settled back against Albus’s pillows as he began to read aloud words his mind had already memorised.
“...I know that I, for one, will never be able to look at Batty’s desk in quite the same way ever again. I’m still not totally certain that we put all of her books and papers back precisely where we found them, but I am sure she will be very understanding when I explain to her calmly and rationally how sorry I am. That you got a little overexcited and don’t know your own strength, and at the time what you were doing to me felt too good for me to be able to spare concern for her quill jar.”
“What are you doing?” The question fell, flat and inane, from Albus’s lips before he could think better of it.
He knew what Gellert was doing. He knew precisely what Gellert was reading. All of them, he knew by heart. He’d kept everything, every letter, every hastily scribbled note Gellert had ever sent him. Every one, he knew by heart. He tried not to read them anymore, and he hadn’t - for the most part - in years. He’d locked them away, along with every letter his sister had sent him while he’d been at Hogwarts. It somehow seemed fitting, to tuck the two pillars of his past away and out of sight. But the question wasn’t so much what Gellert had, but how he’d gotten them.
“Where did you find those?” he amended, trying very hard to ignore the memories straining at the surface of his mind, drawn up all too easily with familiar words on a too familiar voice. It was simply difficult to manage when so much of his focus was devoted to keeping his feet right where they were, to keeping himself from closing the scant distance between them. His grasp on linear time felt precarious at best, and some part of him, however irrational, wasn’t convinced that Gellert wouldn’t find some way to tap into his future and Albus’s past in some sentient fashion. Perhaps it wasn’t irrational; Gellert had an exceptional knack for defying the limits that confined nearly any other wizard.
Much as he wanted to, Albus found he simply couldn’t let them lie, let the pages of his heart remain scattered and exposed for Gellert - who suddenly seemed both stranger and more familiar all at once - to idly flip through. Making his way to the edge of the bed, Albus picked up the nearest few sheets of parchment, assembling them slowly and neatly. He’d worry about setting them in chronological order later, when he was alone, when he suspected he’d be better able to attend only the dates, and ignore the content.
Gellert paused halfway through a sentence to look up at Albus, a smirk settling across his face. He could appreciate it so much more now, all the emotions that tugged at Albus’s voice and expression, the way Albus’s past must colour so much of his present. These letters had made Albus fascinating to him in a way that their typical, strained interaction never could. And to be reading these letters, to have Albus standing so close to him--it just resurrected all of the feelings Gellert had been trying so hard to suppress ever since opening that damned piece of luggage. He found that he (still?) wanted to pursue everything with Albus that they’d planned together during that fated summer...but it would, of course, be so much more difficult to arrange now than it would have been the first time around.
“They were in your trunk,” Gellert said, gesturing toward the piece of open luggage on the floor, just inches from the foot of Albus’s bed. “I figured since my handwriting was on them, I had every right to see what I had written.”
Gellert flipped to one of the other letters he still had in his hand. “Oh, I liked this one--it was cryptic. ‘There is no need to apologise for what happened down at the lake. I suppose you could not help it.’ What happened down at the lake, Albus?” Gellert glanced back up at Albus for a moment before his gaze dropped back to the letters, sifting through, trying to organise them into the order of most to least amusing.
For a moment, all the rest of Albus’s concerns were entirely derailed. He’d periodically re-opened the trunk, in the interest of discovery, but nothing had happened after its initial opening. No emotional onslaught, no revelation, not a single thing of discernible notice. So why now? Why something tangible? Why something undeniably real, and his own? It didn’t seem so terribly surprising that if he had been taken, his possessions were likewise susceptible to abduction, but why this? Why these letters? No one else even knew about--
Albus only realised that he’d caught Gellert’s words when he felt an obnoxiously familiar burn bloom along his cheekbones. It had been humiliating. Endearing at first, and then wholly embarrassing.
Reaching for another note, brief and quick and one Gellert had inked in the middle of the night atop what was quite literally nothing more than a scrap of paper, Albus’s eyes fell to the work of his hands. “We were swimming,” which in their day and age meant they had also been nude. “You seemed to think I was in some kind of danger, and pulled me out-- you were on top of me,” he added, disliking the way he still sounded just a shade defensive. “I found you more attractive than you found me, evidence of this arose, and you took offense.”
It had been worse than offense, really, and the worst of it was the look of almost... hurt. The look in Gellert’s eyes that had made Albus so entirely certain that he was taking advantage, that he was degrading their friendship because he couldn’t control his baser self. Looking back, however, he couldn’t tell if the elements of calculation he perceived in his memories of Gellert were genuine, or manifestations of his own fear and hurt. Truthfully, he didn’t wish to discuss it, he barely wanted to concede the past at all, but he knew better than to court Gellert’s curiosity with refusal.
After a curbed sigh, Albus looked back to Gellert, his eyes a bit sharper. “You didn’t write these. These aren’t your memories. Whatever we may-- I would have much preferred if you hadn’t read these.” It was among the few times that his voice delineated from the crisp, formal clip he found helpfully distancing, straying far closer to something earnest.
Gellert laughed, discarding the papers in his hands after he finished stacking them appropriately. “They’re my memories now,” he pointed out, perfectly content to shift semantics to favour his own argument. He could too easily imagine that scene at the lake, now that Albus had explained--and he’d thought it must have been something like that, for him to tell Albus that it wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help it, with such an attitude of tolerance and forgiveness as he’d affected in that particular letter.
He reached out and caught Albus’s hand, lacing their fingers together and squeezing a little too tight for the gesture to be entirely platonic. The physical contact sent an unexpected surge of want through his veins and Gellert shifted on the bed, drawing closer to Albus and into a half-kneeling position, never once breaking Albus’s gaze. “I know I invaded your privacy,” he said, his voice soft again, his other hand finding its way to rest lightly on Albus’s chest. “And for that, I apologise. But surely you can understand why I found that temptation so difficult to...resist.” It was the Wilde quote, he hoped, that would ensnare Albus’s senses. He knew after reading those letters how effective he’d apparently found Wilde to be in drawing Albus under his control, and he wanted nothing more at the moment than to own Albus completely once again.
Albus tried not to notice the tremor slipping down his spine over that laugh. That laugh that echoed over empty years. It warned at him, from a dream remembered too clearly, too sharply, to be altogether dismissed as something meaningless. It was haunting, on the coattails of too-old words cloaked in Gellert’s voice. They weren’t Gellert’s memories, not yet. They were more an inheritance. A pending allowance. And it was so curious, the way none of it seemed to faze Gellert. Perhaps it ought not be, however; Gellert’s initial refusal had been so understanding, so paradoxically accepting.
Any ruminations, and considerations on what that had meant, on how similarly that seemed to be manifesting at the moment, were cut short by the intertwine of Gellert’s fingers with his own. The presumption there, the assumed liberties Gellert seemed so inclined to take had Albus doubting his own ability to argue that the Gellert before him was in any way different than the one he knew. He was barely breathing by the time Gellert’s hand met his chest. And again, too familiar words tugged the edges of his mind. The blue of his eyes sharpening, they searched Gellert’s for falsehood, for machination and design. But Albus couldn’t even begin to trust himself to accurately gauge what he saw.
“I wish to be honest with you, but to disclose too much of the future--” All of a sudden, however, it made a dark sort of sense, if Gellert had known everything that was to come. It made every careful construction Albus had discerned seem almost excusable. Or perhaps entirely excusable. Except for the last. No--no, Gellert couldn’t have known, couldn’t have been warned of what would eventually come to pass between them and not done something to try to avert-- Unless that was it. Unless it had been Gellert resisting an estrangement on their horizon that had forced one into being. It was an absurdly common occurrence when it came to attempting to meddle with the natural flow of events.
His mind reeling, spinning nearly beyond his ability to control, Albus managed to ask, “What is it you want? I’m nothing to you. If you wish to know about your own future, there are other ways.” Other ways than rifling through letters like these, ways that didn’t involve Gellert reading words both his and not aloud to rattle the cage of Albus’s memories.
There were other ways, to be sure, but none were quite as good as this one. Albus knew him intrinsically, Gellert could not help but think, or at least more intimately than any others in Gellert’s life--and Gellert knew that Albus’s interpretation of events was likely to be very different than someone else’s. It was unfortunate, of course, that Albus only knew of whatever had happened since Gellert’s own last recollection and four years succeeding, but Gellert suspected that of that summer, no one else would know. The things they’d spoken of in the confidential silence of the August heat were unheard by any other. And Gellert had a feeling that it was those things that were the most important of them all.
Besides, there was more to it than that, of course. Albus himself was intriguing, not just the things that he knew. “I want you,” Gellert was able to say with complete honesty, the hand on Albus’s chest slipping up to curve around the back of his neck, fingers catching in the long strands of Albus’s hair. He did want him. His mind, his memories, his body. Gellert felt a shudder curl up his spine and found himself leaning in, closing the distance between their chests.
“Is that so hard to believe?” he murmured, his third finger tracing small geometric shapes on the back of Albus’s throat. “That I would still want to be with you? It is only a few months until we meet, in my time, after all....” And the luggage, of course, the luggage hardly helped matters--Gellert was burning with the need to feel himself pressed against Albus, Albus’s skin bare underneath his own, Albus’s voice breathless and husky as it tumbled around Gellert’s name. Gellert’s own eyelashes fluttered against his cheek, his breaths gone shallow, and he tilted his head up to brush his lips almost experimentally against Albus’s own. That simplest of touches was almost too much for Gellert to bear--and he could not restrain himself, not any longer. The hand on the back of Albus’s neck suddenly tightened its grip and Gellert was kissing Albus fully, his eyes falling closed as he gave in to the need that swarmed through his chest.
This was absurd. Completely absurd. He knew what was happening, what Gellert was doing, but some part of him found it all too surreal to truly grasp it. His body remembered Gellert’s touch far better than his mind had ever permitted him to realise-- but this? The first time he’d told Gellert he loved him, Albus had thought Gellert had returned his feelings, primarily because Gellert had been kissing him only moments before. Gellert had kissed him -- or had he kissed Gellert? -- and then turned around and told Albus that he preferred women. Surely, this was more of the same, more of young Gellert simply pursuing whatever felt good at the moment.
And it did; it felt far better than good. It felt perfect and completely wrong and Albus had no idea how many moments he permitted to slip by with Gellert’s lips against his own, with his own lips, however hesitantly, softening and then parting of their own accord. Only when the muscles of his arms began to remember what to do next, where his hands were supposed to go, did he properly realise what he was doing. His mind scrambled for a way to call a halt to it, to bring to the forefront of Gellert’s mind that however nice he thought this felt, there was a limit, there was a line at which he would balk.
Albus’s hands pressed themselves against Gellert’s chest to hold him at bay as Albus withdrew, tucking his chin because he wasn’t sure he wanted to see the look in Gellert’s eyes, or if he wanted Gellert to see the look in his own. Clearing his throat, he lifted his gaze, schooling his expression into something sensible. Sensible, and constructed with all due traces of doubt and disbelief. “Because you’ve bedded so many men already? You’re too... too young.” Gellert had been nearly too young the first time around, and now years yawned and stretched out between them. “And you’ve no idea what you’re asking for.”
It was beyond irritating, really, the fixation that people seemed to have with his age. Gellert still remembered the way his Magical Theory professor had cried after he finished fucking him, convinced he had just traumatised Gellert for life. How even the day before he was brought here, someone had spoken at his trial to say that he was too young to fully understand the consequences of his actions, and could not be held ethically liable for the harm he had caused. And now Albus just assumed that because Gellert was sixteen, he could not possibly have had any significant sexual experience.
Gellert realised that he was rolling his eyes and immediately tried to smooth out his expression. The desire that tugged at the pit of his stomach won out over righteous indignation, easily. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, taking hold of both Albus’s wrists and drawing them away gently but firmly. “I know what I want better than most. And I know I want you.” He held Albus’s arms by his sides as he let his lips fall to Albus’s throat, kissing down to where his skin vanished beneath the collar of his shirt, Albus’s flesh cool and soft and so very alive beneath his touch. “I want to see if the rest of you is as perfect as that which I can see when you are clothed.” He rested his head briefly against Albus’s shoulder to disguise the smile that refused to leave his lips. “I want to feel the way you’ll throb when I take you into my mouth...I want to hear you moan.”
Gellert’s voice was becoming traitorously low and hoarse, and he was certain he did not still have quite the same grasp on the English accent as he typically did, but he was far past caring. He lifted his head again, kissed Albus’s jawline, daring to release one of Albus’s hands so that he could begin to untuck Albus’s shirt from the back of his trousers, smooth his fingers against that flawless and untouched skin. “So let me.”
Albus ought to be putting a stop to it. He ought to be pushing Gellert away, but how could he? This Gellert didn’t deserve that sort of hostility, not at this age, not for expressing this sort of interest. Albus couldn’t help feeling as though he understood Gellert’s initial response, all those years ago, a little better. That had been properly handled, he could at long last decide. Gellert had been considerate enough to do it gently, to say no but not harshly.
To his own credit, at least he’d been able to keep his hands -- Merlin, and his mouth -- to himself once Gellert had begun to pull away. The more Gellert spoke, the more Albus’s pulse shuddered through his body. Before he could make sense of why this particular breath felt so tight, it escaped him as a soft little whine. The sound, at the very least, managed to lance through the mounting haze of his thoughts, allowed him to remember that this... simply couldn’t happen. The returning clarity jolted with full force as Gellert quite literally began slipping him hands inside Albus’s clothing.
Entirely startled, Albus’s hands were scrambling to take hold of Gellert’s wrists, because they couldn’t keep doing that. Couldn’t. Gellert might think he wanted this, but, truly--- “I can’t,” he breathed. “You may think, right now, that you want this, but when you remember that you prefer women... it would only be natural for you to begrudge those who permitted you to forget.”
Albus had no doubt to how utterly pervasive Gellert’s inversion was, but Gellert wasn’t aware, not yet. He could understand that it made a difference, that this Gellert was likely only contending with physical attraction, not... not whatever else it was that Gellert had managed to feel for him. And because Gellert had yet to go through such things, Albus had to assume it was safest to cater to Gellert’s grasp of himself.
Afterward, it would occur to Gellert that perhaps he should have known then, should have gleaned from the context and Albus’s own words that at some point in his future, he’d convinced Albus for a period of time that he had some preference for sleeping with women. And that perhaps it would have been in his best long-term interest to play up that angle and make good use of whatever ammunition Albus gave him, because to prove himself a liar could be a very poor move indeed.
But under the influence of the luggage, of lust so pervasive that not even sex had managed to satisfy it, Gellert found it impossible to think altogether clearly. The most important goal at the moment, he was convinced, was getting those clothes off of Albus and getting Albus onto the bed, with him. The rest of it was insignificant detail, and if reassuring Albus that Gellert was not some normal boy to be corrupted by the influence of an invert would bring them together any faster, then that was the immediate option to which Gellert turned.
“But I don’t prefer women,” he pointed out, letting Albus seize his wrists only because that meant his hands were too occupied to prevent Gellert from moving closer, trailing his lips along his cheekbone. “There’s nothing to corrupt, Albus, I’m already hopelessly depraved.” He nibbled at Albus’s ear, temporarily breathless all over again when he realised that sudden scent of honeysuckle came from Albus’s hair. His hips pressed forward, back arching of its own accord to drag his erection against Albus’s pelvis a little desperately, a little helplessly. “I know what men--what you--want. I know how to give you everything you need.”
Albus had been almost ready to brush Gellert off once again, and he would have, had it not been for the timbre of Gellert’s voice, for the thread of something too certain and too sure. Too entirely comfortable with the idea. And it was more than just the idea, it was the ease with which Gellert’s hands and his lips moved over his skin. This- this was a Gellert he knew, too. All too suddenly, he hated the way the words seemed to carry an echo, as though they’d been said too many times. To too many other men.
His mind seized too wholly on the idea. Either the Gellert before him was lying, or the one he could claim as his own had lied to him from near the very beginning. The idea took insidious root, pulling taut dozens of loose threads in his recollection of that summer.
But. Why. Why lie? Why, apart from spiteful amusement--
“No,” he said quickly, taking a step back. The torrent of his thoughts pitched sharply, reevaluating every moment, every soft touch and every burning grip, and everything he thought he knew about the two of them. Once Gellert’s influence on the Continent began to grow, it had only been sensible to keep careful track of him. Albus had known of Gellert’s practically exclusive interest in men, but he’d never truly considered the possibility that for Gellert, it might have simply been a return to a trend. “Stop this, I mean it.”
It was unbearably frustrating, it really was, Albus’s refusal to play along with Gellert’s wishes. The surface of Gellert’s skin felt as if it was crackling with heat, restless energy built up in his bones, and he thought for sure that if he’d had any grasp of his magic at the moment he might have accidentally singed Albus’s bedsheets.
“I don’t understand,” Gellert managed to say at long last, after he’d uncurled his fingers from their white-knuckled fists against Albus’s mattress. He supposed on some vague plane that he was lucky he hadn’t grasped one of the letters and crumpled it beyond repair. “I know you want me. So...so why do you want me to stop?”
He was too high off want and lust to be able to fit together many of the smaller pieces of this puzzle that would be too obviously apparent to him later, when there was both time and distance between him and Albus and this moment. In that second, though, he truly did not understand it. If the two of them had been in a relationship, a sexual one, and Albus still desired him, why would he not wish to take advantage of Gellert’s offer? Gellert knew perfectly well that just because he would have done something did not mean it was a choice that most or even many others would make, but it seemed sensible. Albus was hurt, emotionally, but didn’t people like him like to seek catharsis through sex, whether wisely or not?
It was difficult to ignore the weight and pull of such obvious expectation on Gellert’s part, hard to set aside the sense that he was denying Gellert something he had every right to demand. Some of it, he was certain, was his own sinking mind, grasping at anything it could reach to justify something foolish. His heart, however, knew better. Knew it could not endure what Gellert was offering. Awareness of Albus’s memories, aside-- possession of precisely the body he remember too clearly against his own, apart-- and the same consuming air that still seemed to threaten to swallow Albus whole, ignored-- this was not his Gellert. He was not a stranger to his Gellert.
“You barely know me,” Albus said, the words heavy, resigned. If Gellert’s response had been peculiar, Albus hardly noticed. He’d never denied Gellert before, not of himself. But Gellert had been his first, and practically his only, sexual partner. He’d only ever given himself on the premise of that affection. The empty thing the boy before him was offering, how could it even begin to compare? How could it be anything but a torment, the moment it was over?
“I have had you-- I’ve poured my mind into yours while I took you. What you want? This? One... more man in your bed?” And he tried, desperately, not to think of it even as the words left him, the idea of Gellert so effortlessly, so thoughtlessly falling into bed with however many other men before him. “You neither know nor care for me... and I cannot do this.” He couldn’t tumble into Gellert’s bed, and have it mean nothing. It was simply beyond him.
“You’re wrong,” Gellert said, the words falling from his mouth before he could think to censor them. “I do know you. Maybe not as well as I one day will, but you are hardly a stranger.” They had been living in the same house for weeks now, after all, and after those letters....
Gellert had never had a man deny him before. There had been a few who had hesitated, mostly those who were far enough his senior to worry about the legal ramifications, but none who had refused to the end. It was unthinkable. But...but, a small voice in the back of his mind suggested, that Albus refused now did not mean he always would. Gellert needed to acknowledge a defeat, if only to better prepare himself for securing a victory the next time. He was not--he would not be--a slave to the manufactured emotions and urges that luggage inflicted on him.
So when he touched a hand to Albus’s arm again, it was not with the intent of trying to drag him back down into bed. His fingers were light, barely grazing Albus’s sleeve as he let his gaze drop in his best mimicry of shame, as if he could not quite bring himself to look Albus in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he said, after several moments had passed. “It was not my intention to harm you.”