Chapter Text
The letter crumpled in his fist before he realized he’d done it. Another refusal. Another polite dismissal wrapped in meaningless pleasantries and Ministry seal wax. Albus exhaled, slowly, deliberately, and smoothed the parchment with trembling fingers.
Dear Professor Dumbledore, while we acknowledge your concerns regarding Mr. Grindelwald's activities in the European theatre, the Department of International Magical Cooperation must advise caution before escalating matters involving foreign leadership...
He didn’t need to read the rest. He’d memorized its variations a dozen times now. A soft flick of his wand sent the letter to join the others—stacked in the corner of his office like a paper graveyard. Some bore the golden crest of the Wizengamot, others the blindingly white seal of the ICW. None bore action.
He stood.
The room felt too small. Too still. The walls of his study, once so comforting in their silence, now felt like a cage. He paced, boots brushing the edges of worn rugs and old chalk lines from abandoned arithmancy.
"They won't act," he murmured aloud. "They see the headlines, the disappearances, the fires—and still they stall. They all wait for someone else to lift the wand first."
Just like he had.
He stopped by the window, gaze flicking east—toward the continent, toward the stormclouds building far beyond Britain’s borders. And somewhere in that storm…Gellert.
His name still hurt. Albus pressed two fingers to his temple. The blood pact floated into his thoughts unbidden, its magic still dormant and terrible, coiled like a sleeping serpent around his heart. He couldn’t fight him. Not directly. Not yet. But he had begun the research.
Hidden in the back of his shelves—beneath layers of old Transfiguration texts and obscured under unrelated charms—lay the tomes he'd sworn not to open again. Books on soul-binding, magical contracts, intent-cursed relics. Ancient dueling traditions from before the Statute of Secrecy. He’d even written, in coded Latin, to an old friend in the Mediterranean who might know more about magically severing blood oaths.
He was running out of time.
He had sent the Ministry letters. He had sent warnings. Whispers. Proof. They hadn’t listened. Because Grindelwald wasn’t their problem yet. Because Britain hadn’t burned.
Yet.
And because Albus Dumbledore—darling of every academic board and darling disappointment of his brother—hadn’t acted.
A sharp knock at the door startled him. For a split second, absurdly, his mind flared: Had Gellert come himself?
“Enter,” he called, forcing calm.
It was a student. Wide-eyed, oblivious, with a note from the Headmaster’s office about something trivial. He dismissed the child gently. Smiled like the world wasn’t fraying at the edges.Then turned back to the window.
His voice was soft. Raw.
"How do you stop a man you once loved—when the world needs him stopped, and you still want him to live?"
There was no answer. But a storm was coming.
And the blood pact would not hold forever.
The room pulsed with candlelight and murmured languages long dead. A thousand pages whispered under his fingertips, inked with fragments of prophecy, mirror-script, stolen tongues. Symbols bled into one another, arcane and divine. And still—still—the visions came in pieces. Not of the wars he planned or the nations he’d bend to his will.
But of the boy. Harry.
And more recently—a child. Small, pale, and sharp-eyed. Always beside Harry and lingering in the corners of his vision.
The timeline he had once glimpsed was... disintegrating. No—shifting. Shedding its skin like a serpent. And in its place, a new future was being rewritten.
Visions swam behind his closed eyelids—
A red-headed boy vomiting slugs.
A black dog barking at a werewolf.
A castle on fire.
And then the fragments breaking—no, dissolving—into a different path.
A child smiling at a giant snake, a laughing Harry behind him.
A Muggle home, its inhabitants grim-faced as Harry and the child confronted them.
A man in absurdly bright robes, grinning too wide, gesturing grandly as a classroom full of students watched in confusion and awe.
Grindelwald opened his eyes with a thoughtful expression on his face.
How interesting.
The future was volatile, it seemed. Teetering on the edge, eager to be tipped. And the hands on the scale? Two children. Chosen by fate.
Fascinating.
Grindelwald sat very still. Then, slowly, deliberately, he reached for his quill—eyes shining with the thrill of revelation.
Tom was upside down on the sofa again. Not falling off. Not climbing. Just… hanging there, limbs folded over the cushions like a particularly smug bat.
Harry eyed him suspiciously from the side, sorting through the pile of mail—and wasn’t that a surprise: apparently running cults required answering a lot of mail and ordering excessive amounts of glitter. Among the requests for neon capes (approved), suggestions for a new musical (why not), demands for individual dragons per member (sick idea but ultimately too dangerous—one dragon to share though…), and responses from their material suppliers, there was also a letter that was suspiciously un-glittery and—Merlin forbid—almost official looking.
He almost called out to Al, wondering if the Caribbean government was finally cracking down on their underground pillow fight club. But then he noticed the inscription written in fancy cursive:
To Harry.
Interesting.
All letters to him were usually addressed with his proper title—The Super Awesome General Of The AA.
Curiosity won out. He opened the envelope and, skipping straight to the end, read the signature:
Yours,
Gellert Grindelwald.
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he groaned, flopping dramatically onto his back.
“What’s ‘fucking’?” came the tiny, curious voice of Baby Nightmare-Future-Dark-Lord—who had, at some point, crawled up beside him and was now peering down with those sharp, annoyingly intelligent eyes.
Harry sighed, already regretting everything. “Ask Al when he gets here.”
Tom considered that solemnly. “Okay.”
A moment of silence.
“I’m bored.”
Harry tilted his head to the side, still sprawled on the floor. “Of course you are.”
He picked up the crumpled letter with a sigh and sat up. “Alright, how about this—Uncle Creepy sent us fan mail. Want me to read it out loud? It’s going to be hilarious.”
Tom perked up immediately. “Okay.”
Harry cleared his throat with exaggerated pomp and held the parchment like a dramatic actor about to recite Shakespeare in a dive bar.
“Dearest Harry,” he began, voice dripping with fake gravitas, "Okay wow first off we don’t know each other like that, nuh uh."
“Time is a delicate construct. Fragile. Unraveling. I have seen futures crack like mirrors under strain—”
He paused.
“Ten out of ten on the ominous opening. Very ‘dark and brooding warlord who journals with a feather quill by candlelight’ energy.”
Tom giggled.
Harry continued. “—and in the shattered reflections, I saw you. A constant.”
Another pause. “Okay, calm down. Stalker.”
“You stand at the axis of fate, Harry. The crossroads where empires fall and rise. You are—”
“—completely ignoring this letter,” Harry muttered, scanning forward “Moving on.”
Tom leaned closer, eyes wide. “What does he say next?”
“Let’s see—There is… a child.” Harry stopped and looked pointedly at Tom. “Oh look. He’s talking about you.”
Tom sat up properly. “Really?!”
“Yup. Right here—A child with eyes like stormlight and a future soaked in blood. He stands beside you. He learns from you. He listens. He watches. He is the pivot on which destiny turns.”
Harry tilted his head. “Wow. That’s not creepy at all. Very normal way to describe a toddler.”
“I do watch you a lot,” Tom said thoughtfully. “Sometimes when you sleep.”
Harry blinked. “Cool. That’s definitely a thing I’ll unpack in therapy later.”
He turned back to the letter. “He could be anything, this child. Salvation or ruin. I wonder, Harry… which will you teach him to be?”
There was a pause.
Then Harry burst out laughing.
Tom looked delighted. “Read more!”
“Sorry, that’s the end. He signed it ‘Yours in the shadow of fate,’ which is the most dramatic thing I’ve ever heard and I’ve met Snape.”
Tom bounced on his knees, face bright. “Can we send him a letter back? Please? He wrote about me!”
Harry gave him a long, considering look.
“Sure we can, buddy. Sure we can.”
And wasn’t that going to be an experience.
Gellert hadn't expected a letter back. Not ever. And certainly not this soon.
He had expected the boy to be unnerved, perhaps even frightened. To burn the letter without reading it fully, and then pretend—poorly—that his words hadn't crawled under his skin.
But it seemed he was wrong. Something that was happening with increasing frequency these last few months.
He didn't like that.
His attempts at pamphlet-making had been largely successful, but the Hogwarts Incident had proven—perhaps conclusively—that unhinged cult techniques were best suited for the more… insane.
Really, what had he been thinking?
He was quite sure the island had something to do with that…brief lapse in judgment.
But that was something he wasn't about to admit. Not to anyone. Not even himself.
He stared down at the envelope with something like dread.
It was leaking glitter like blood. It was also thick enough that, for a moment, he'd assumed someone had sent him a brick. He tested it thoroughly for any hexes or curses but upon finding nothing of note he tore open the envelope with some apprehension.
The letter was ten pages long. The first of which seemed to only be chicken scratch made with crayons— the child's work no doubt?
The second contained a drawing of what was supposed to be Harry—as labeled by the arrow— and beside him was the child—Tom, it said with another arrow.
Tom. Tom and Harry.
The simplicity of the names was amusing for reasons he couldn't quite pin-point.
He continued reading.
The third page was a 'rap song' titled “You’re Not That Guy”, performed by "DJ H & Lil’ T", complete with beat instructions like “drop the bass here” and “Tom beatboxed but it was mostly wet noises.”
Page four was just a badly rhymed poem.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
You’re a shit head
But Tom thinks you’re cool (?)
Also stop being creepy. Sincerely, Harry.
He didn't manage to get past page five. Namely because page five seemed blank until it began glowing and singing a variety of nonsensical songs.
It was at that moment that Rolfssen—who had just come back to work after extended leave due to 'mental health and sanity reasons'—walked into his office and froze.
"No, no, NONONOOO—" He began screeching at the sight of the glitter covered letter in his hand, clawing at his ears when he heard the song. He crumpled to the ground, sobbing, "Please. Not again. I can't do this anymore—please, not again."
The room was filled with the loud off-key singing and Rolfssen's sobs.
Gellert sighed loudly.