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When Albus had a spare moment, he would check on the muggle-borns — bring them snacks from muggle shops, take groups of them to muggle sports games they cared deeply about. It wasn’t because he favored them or because he wanted to attend football and rugby games far away from the safety of Hogwarts. He did it out of guilt.
While he protected young muggle-born wizards by allowing them to maintain their parent's cultures, Gellert was slaughtering their cousins. Their grandparents. Their aunts and uncles.
By teaching these children about their history, he was defying Gellert for once in his life. He was half expecting, or perhaps in some twisted way, he was hoping, that the man would show up in the stands of a muggle stadium and find him there. That way, when Gellert spotted him, Albus could stand up confidently, shoulders back and wand drawn, and say; I am not like you anymore. I don’t need you. I will protect them and their families by sacrificing my own life . And when Gellert would stand there, angry and betrayed, he would cast the final spell to lock him in chains.
At least that’s what he told himself he would do because when Albus was alone, he only thought about Gellert. He thought about the curve of his neck, the skin of his ears. Frequently, he found himself thinking about Gellert’s hands, scarred and powerful, wrapped around his waist. And in this fantasy, while his nails were digging into his skin, Albus thought about his lips and how they pressed into his own.
One day, a student noticed he wasn’t fully paying attention to the lesson. It was a Hufflepuff, one of the muggle-borns he was closer with, and the small boy stood at the end of his desk after class and asked if he was alright. That’s when he drew the line. His students could never see him falter.
After this incident, Albus started punishing himself for thinking of Gellert. First, it was stuffing the blood pact away in the bottom of a trunk in his chambers. He had slept fretfully that night, and the one after that, and when the absence of the chain around his neck was so vivid it tore through his veins and dragged him to the box, he crawled on his hands and knees to the wood and cradled the pact in his hands like he was a man on the brink of starvation finding bread. He wept with his knees curled into his chest after casting a silencing charm around his room and allowed the memories to flood in.
On the anniversary of Gellert’s arrival in Godric's Hollow, he had to take off classes. He didn’t want his students to notice how disgustingly emotional he was, so he locked himself in his chambers and thought of that summer. Rolled over under his blankets, he stared at the wall until the tears prickled from behind his eyes and he gave into temptation.
When he finished buttoning up his trousers with a sheen of sweat on his forehead and his heart racing, the guilt was so painful that he nearly had to call Madam Pomfrey for a potion. It only got worse when he found the mirror. He stood in front of it every day after he got off from classes. He spent nights asleep in front of it so he wouldn't wake up alone. So that, even for a moment, the first thing he saw when he woke up was the illusion of Gellert smiling at him.
His addiction to the mirror grew so dire that McGonagall asked kindly, but worriedly, where he was disappearing to and that, if he was having a euphoria elixir problem, she was always there to talk. He reassured her that it was simply a surplus of student papers to grade towards the end of term, but the humiliation drove him to madness. On one last trip to the mirror, Albus stared at Gellert.
“Let me hate you,” he said, but Gellert just smiled at him like he had said something absolutely unreasonable. He was right.
Summer was exponentially worse than the school year. Gellert’s forces were advancing and gaining support across Europe. Muggles were dying. The wizarding community needed Albus Dumbledore, the strongest of them, to fight. And yet, while he spoke to Aurors and the ministry about strategic defense, he felt very much like the weakest of them all. A weak, broken man forever tripping over the worst criminal to ever live.
He stopped eating in late June, not because he was trying to punish himself, but because he simply had no appetite. Aberforth seemed to notice more than anyone else, cold to his brother as always, yet when Albus came for supper, he always had an extra portion on his plate. He ate it. Aberforth stayed quiet. Things were mindlessly agonizing.
That was, of course until an owl appeared at his window with a letter in Gellert’s handwriting asking him to meet at a muggle tea shop. Albus didn’t offer a response, just plainly resolved that he wouldn’t go. It felt like defiance.
Albus went to the mirror that night, like a relapsed addict, and when he woke up the next morning aching on the cold stone floor with Gellert’s eyes staring at him, he wiped the dust off his face and couldn’t resist the real thing.
“You look unwell,” Gellert said. Albus sat down in the chair opposite and poised his hands on the table.
“Missing my students.”
“Those muggle-borns you toddle around with at muggle cultural events?”
So he had noticed. “Some of them, yes. Does that bother you?”
“You have long stopped caring about what bothers me, Dumbledore.”
Albus withheld a wince. “I have long stopped caring about you, Grindewald .” He emphasized the last name, making sure its venom was conveyed through the air as it was in his mind.
“How the mighty have fallen.” Gellert took a sip of his black coffee and stared intently at him.
“Me?” Albus slipped a corner smile, “I’m doing quite well for myself.”
“Us.”
Albus sat perfectly still, careful to maintain his mental walls. His heart racing, he fought back a swallow and frowned, “I was in love with you. I would have done anything for what you call ‘us’. I see now that it was just you.”
“Did I not love you, Albus?”
“No.” Albus laughed, a dark chuckle that was so out of character Gellert even seemed affected, “No. You used me and called that love.”
“Do we not use the ones we love for our own satisfaction? Is love not the ultimate act of both selflessness, and selfishness?”
“I never said I wasn’t selfish.”
“Tell me, Albus,” Gellert leaned forward, lips pressed and eyes intense, “was it good to see me?”
And Merlin, Albus wanted to say yes. He wanted more than anything to lean in, lift up his hand, cup that jaw, and kiss those lips as though there was no war. He wanted Gellert's touch more than he wanted anything else in the world and would burn it for a little more skin — a little more of his sleeve scrunched up, revealing a strong and scarred wrist beneath the fine fabric.
“Not particularly,” he said and felt another piece of the glacier of his soul break off and splash into the dark ocean of pain he was drowning in.
When the school year started and Albus took the new group of muggle-borns to an opera, he once again scanned the seats of the venue for Gellert’s violent presence. He never came.