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Buddy, you’re a boy, make a big noise
Playing in the street, gonna be a big man someday
You got mud on your face, you big disgrace
Kicking your can all over the place
The soft sound of guitar strings filled the tiny dorm room with it’s melancholy melody. Albus didn’t have words to go with the music yet, but it was shaping along quite nicely and he let his melody lull him into nonexistence. He stopped thinking of his late father, his lonely mother, his sick sister, and poor Aberforth, drafted into the United States Army and sent to Vietnam when his grades weren’t good enough to land him into college.
“Jesus Christ.”
Albus’s fingers slipped from the strings as his guitar was yanked away from him. “Elph, what the hell?”
“I was about to ask you the same question,” his roommate countered pointing at the clock on the wall. “It’s eight on a Saturday night. You promised, Al.”
Albus pinched the bridge of his nose and glared up at his best friend of four years. He had no desire to keep his promise and go hunting for chicks at Princeton’s off-campus bar. That sounded fucking awful actually. “Just give me back the guitar, man.”
Elphias scowled and kept the instrument behind his back. “I will smash it if you don’t come out with me,” he warned. Before Albus could interject, Elphias added, “And I was able to score some of this and I will be forcing you to share it with me.”
Albus watched as Elphias pulled a joint from his shirt pocket and raised an intriguing eyebrow. “Really?” Al asked dubiously.
Elph clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes in annoyance. “I thought you wanted to be a musician. Come on! Isn’t this part of that whole thing? Sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll?”
Albus snorted and smiled genuinely up at Elphias. “You’re an idiot.”
“And I’m not handing this back until you put on some jeans.”
Elph had a smirk on his lips up until the two boys were seated at the pub, halfway to inebriated and fuzzy with marijuana.
Elphias left with a girl around ten because Albus was an excellent wingman who desperately wanted to return to his dorm and his guitar. He stumbled his way back across campus.
Albus tripped when his foot snagged on a loose brick and he careened to the concrete, scraping his hands and knees on the fall. “Dammit.”
“You alright, mate?”
Albus blinked as he staggered back to his feet. His head was swimming, but his breath caught in his throat when he met the eyes of the man helping him to his feet. They were different colors.
“Bloody christ. Cut yourself pretty good there,” the man said, poking at Albus’s cheek.
Albus hardly felt the pain. He swallowed thickly around his dry throat, and, realizing he hadn’t said anything yet, tried to get some words out. “You have an accent,” he sated stupidly.
“Do I?” the man asked, an adorable grin on his face. “Come on. There’s first aid in the library.”
Albus numbly felt himself being dragged in the direction of the library, through the locked doors (the man had a key) and down into a seat behind the big oak reception desk. Al watched mutely as the man rummaged through the drawers as if he owned the place.
“Do you work here?”
The man pulled out a kit and began removing some peroxide and bandages. He grinned. “Uh, no. My aunt’s the librarian.”
“Bagshot’s your aunt?”
“Great-aunt,” he corrected, dabbing some cloth in the peroxide and settling down in front of Albus. “Thought I could stay with her while in the states. She said no.”
“Oh— uh— I’m sorry.”
The man shrugged. “I’m used to it.”
“Did you take her keys?”
“Yeah, I nicked them,” the man replied easily, grinning like a cat who caught the canary. Then suddenly the peroxide cloth was pressed to Albus’s cheek and Albus cursed at the sting. “Stop being such a baby.”
“Fuck off.”
The man cackled. Clearly he was a psychopath.
The stinging didn’t last long and Albus let the man continue to clean his wounds for a long time in silence.
“What’s your name?” The question was loud in the quiet building.
“Gellert. What’s yours?”
“Albus.”
“Nice to meet you, Albus.” Gellert held out a hand.
“Yeah…” Albus shook the blonde’s hand. “Nice to meet you, too.”
***
Albus ended up letting Gellert stay in the dorm with him and Elphias for the few days leading up to spring break. He only learned a little about the blonde in that time, but apparently it was enough for Albus to trust that inviting him home for Easter with his family wouldn’t be the worst mistake of his life.
He and his mother had an argument at the dinner table about school. Albus skipped a lot of classes, but he was still passing. He told her to lay off.
“I will not have you sent away like your brother! Do you understand me?!”
Those words echoed endlessly after he stormed outside and settled on the porch steps with his guitar. He strummed one of his favorite melodies until the pain behind his eyes subsided. A presence sidled up next to him on the steps, his leg bumping into Albus’s.
“It’s nice,” Gellert commented once Albus finished the short tune.
“Thanks… I’m sorry you had to—“
“You’re sister forced me to clear the table with her.”
Albus balked at the interruption and twisted to face Gellert with a bewildered expression. “What?”
“It was nice,” Gellert said with a shrug. “Never— I’ve never done that before.”
Albus laughed even though it wasn’t really all that funny. He tilted his head inquiringly at his new friend. “What are your plans now? Are you gonna go back to— wherever you’re from?”
Gellert bit his lip around a burgeoning smirk. “I don’t know.”
“Do you—“ Albus tripped over his tongue, unsure what exactly he was about to ask. “Don’t you… have someone? Back home, I mean? Like a girl, or…?”
Gellert huffed a small laugh and twisted until he was looking right into Albus’s eyes. Gellert’s brown eye was an invisible black hole in the shadow of the night, but the grey one sparkled silver in the moonlight. “How do you want me to answer that, Albus?”
Albus’s heart skipped a beat, his mouth dry. He didn’t know how he wanted Gellert to answer that. How was he supposed to know what he wanted? He never knew what he wanted. He wanted everything. There was so much to do in one lifetime and he wanted it all. He wanted. He wanted. He wanted.
“I don’t want there to be a girl waiting for you.”
Gellert’s grin turned soft, less cheshire cat-like. “I know.”
Albus’s breathing was erratic and labored. “So… do you?”
Gellert’s teeth were a stark white in the darkness. He leaned in close until all Albus could see was the bow of Gellert’s top lip. His breath was hot as his mouth ghosted over Albus’s cheek and down, down to his lips.
“Girls aren’t really my thing.”
It was the best sentence Albus had ever heard in his life.
***
Buddy, you’re a young man, hard man
Shouting in the street, gonna take on the world someday
You got blood your face, you big disgrace
Waving your banner all over the place
Celestina Warbeck was the craziest landlord in the world, but she took in the illegal immigrant and the college dropout with little to no fuss and the two boys loved her more than words could say.
They also loved New York City. Albus thought it was disgusting and grimy. The streets were littered with trash and smelled of piss. But it was alive, like a swirling magic permeated every nook and cranny, every street and alley.
He tried to write down his conflicted feelings regarding New York in a letter to Aberforth, but eventually left it abandoned in the nightstand he and Gellert shared. It was better he never finished something Abe might never get to read anyway.
Albus took a job as a waiter down at the local Jazz club Celestina performed at most nights. When the club cleared out around three in the morning, Al would get up on the stage to strum his songs for Gellert. He still didn’t have lyrics to any of his melodies yet, but Gellert watched him from the closest table as if Albus hung the moon and stars. They would walk back to the apartment together, inconspicuously brushing their fingers when they were sure no one was around to notice. Their routine was something beautiful that Albus cherished with every fiber of his being. He wanted it to go on forever.
A man named Abernathy caught Gellert drawing on a napkin one afternoon and asked Gellert to be the political cartoonist for an obscure local magazine. One of Gellert’s doodles became the symbol for the magazine’s anti-war activist organization, known as the Alliance.
It wasn’t long before Gellert was basically running that group.
Albus was too busy with work most of the time to attend the Alliance’s earlier peace rallies. But when Elphias came to visit him in late July, Albus took a few days off from work to show him around the city.
“What’s going on up there?” Elph asked, his top lip slick with the vanilla ice cream in his hand. Albus grinned when he heard the music playing and saw the tops of a large Uncle Sam puppet on the next street over.
“I’ll show you. Come on!”
Albus grabbed his friend’s elbow and guided him closer to the parade.
The crowd gathered was infectious and Elphias and Albus traversed through the parade of protesters with their picket signs and chanting with smiles on their faces. The atmosphere was breathtaking.
Their journey came to an end at the back of a large crowd of people surrounding a stage in the distance. The anti-war rhetoric of the Alliance rang out across the masses, an un-American accent distorted by the megaphone in the speaker’s hand.
“Is that Gellert?”
Elphias’s question fell on deaf ears. Albus was enthralled, enraptured.
“We have deserted them out there! All those men! Those boys! We are leaving them to die! Let’s bring them back now before the war grows old and fades away! Before all that’s left is a distant memory and thousands dead! Bring them back, I say! Let us not abandon them and curse those who return as outcasts among our society! War changes those who go to fight! I say, let us make sure no one is forced into that fight again!”
The crowd cheered as if Gellert were a rockstar crescendoing his way to the chorus. On that stage, he was a god and the masses were his playthings. The refrain had arrived, and suddenly the New York street was filled with the simultaneous shout of, “Bring them back! Bring them back!”
“He should be careful,” Elphias muttered at Albus’s side.
Albus blinked, brought back down to the Earth, and turned toward Elph with a questioning, “Hmm?”
“If he’s arrested, they’ll send him back home,” Elphias explained.
Albus’s heart pulsed rapidly in his chest. He wouldn’t let that happen. He twisted back to the stage where the love of his life pumped his fist in time with the crowd’s chanting.
Albus wasn’t a godly man, but in that moment, he prayed that Gellert would never leave him.
***
A letter arrived at the apartment for Albus in early August. The way Celestina looked at him as she handed it over to him at dinner, the way her eyes crinkled with apprehension, had Albus’s chest constricting. He’d worried ever since he’d left school that he’d be drafted like his brother. Was this finally it? Was this the letter that would take him away from here, from New York, from Gellert?
He wasn’t being drafted. But the news in the letter from home had Albus thinking of leaving New York anyway. He just had to convince Gellert to go with him.
“Thanks, Cel,” Albus said once he’d completed reading the letter from his mother. He gathered up the toast he’d been eating and tossed it in the garbage. It would taste like cardboard on his tongue now. “I, uh— I have to go find Gellert.”
“Of course,” said Celestina. Even though she had no idea the contents of the letter, she clearly knew it was heavy. Sometimes Albus wondered if she had some kind of crazy ESP.
The walk to the Alliance office headquarters seemed much longer than normal and when Albus arrived it was to find the building dark and deserted.
“Hello,” Albus announced to the quiet room that hadn’t been locked up.
He heard some rattling in a back room and made his way there, something disconcerting clawing in his chest. The door was cracked open a bit and Albus was able to make out a group of men standing with their backs to Albus hunched over a table. He swung the door open, the creak obnoxiously loud and eerie.
Three men looked up in alarm. One had different colored eyes.
“Get out of here,” demanded a man. Albus vaguely recognized him as Gellert’s friend Travers. They’d had him over for dinner once a few weeks back.
Albus glanced at the piece of metal on the table and then at Gellert. Then he twisted around and left.
“Albus!”
He sprinted down the building’s stoop.
“Albus!”
He stumbled blindly down the street. His lungs were on fire because he couldn’t fucking breath.
“Albus!”
He blinked back tears as he veered down an alley way.
“Albus!”
There was a grip on his elbow. Albus twisted around, anger pouring out of him. The words that twisted out his mouth were a shock to his own ears. “I loved you!”
Gellert faltered in his pursuit, clearly caught off guard by the statement and the vehemence behind it. “What?”
“A bomb.”
“It’s not what it looks like—“
“It’s exactly what it looks like! And it looks like a bomb!”
“Nothing else is working!”
A stilted silence followed that statement. For some reason, Gellert thought he could take Albus’s hand. Albus wrenched it away. “Don’t touch me.”
“You don’t understand. This war, it needs to end. We can make it end.”
“I’m the one who doesn’t understand? Really? My brother almost died over there!” Albus’s words were biting and cold. “I just got a letter from my mom saying he’s back home, with a brain injury. He hardly speaks, hardly eats. You think I don’t understand? You’re the one who doesn’t understand. You can’t even be drafted!”
“But you can!”
Albus felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
“You can, Albus. And I can’t have you— I can’t— I can’t lose you. I can’t have you go to that hellhole and die there. And I can’t have you come back either and be a completely different person. I just can’t. I can’t.”
Albus was so angry and hurt and confused. He was a jumble of emotions all rolled into one.
“I love you, too.”
Albus felt sick at Gellert’s quiet, hopeful words. He thought back to his use of the past tense at the beginning of this conversation. It felt right. He’d stopped loving Gellert the minute he saw that bomb.
“You’re an asshole,” Albus declared simply. “Go home. Don’t write me. Don’t come back. You’re not the person I thought you were. I never knew you. Not really.”
Albus twisted around and returned to the loft. He called the police, packed up his things, and went home.
He never saw Gellert Grindelwald again.
He hoped it was because Gellert was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Albus couldn’t stand the thought of Gellert in prison no matter how much he hated him.
Probably because Albus Dumbledore could never truly hate Gellert Grindelwald. Not truly.
***
Buddy, you’re an old man, poor man
Pleading with your eyes, gonna make you some peace someday
You got mud on your face, big disgrace
Somebody better put you back into your place
Albus and Aberforth sat side-by-side on the docks they used to spend their summers playing on when they were younger. The water was a lovely shade of blue, the sun gleaming down on them on the beautiful, cloudless day.
Albus would be returning to school in the fall. He wasn’t sure why, but being a musician no longer seemed like the right path for him. He’d never really felt like playing for crowds of people anyway. His songs were only meant for him and the people he cared about.
There was still so much left to do, so much life left to live. But Albus was fairly certain the love of his life had come and gone. There wouldn’t be another man to share his bed. And there wouldn’t be Gellert again, either. He’d probably spend the rest of his days a celibate teacher. It didn’t sound so bad, if Albus was being honest.
Abe was growing stronger little by little. The drugs the medical center had him on helped with the nightmares. Still, on the best of days Aberforth hardly spoke a word. And occasionally there were days entirely spent in Abe’s head, stuck in a jungle no one else could see.
Albus strummed his guitar mindlessly, letting the sound of the sea soothe his aching heart. The words came to him like a prayer.
“Love of my life, you’ve hurt me…You've broken my heart and now you leave me…Love of my life, can't you see?Bring it back, bring it back…”
Aberforth laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder and Albus stopped strumming.
“No,” Abe said, his eyes still staring blankly out over the water. “It’s nice. Keep going.”
So Albus did.