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Kendra sat by the window, wrapping herself in the shawl she had knitted recently. Pregnancy had left her in a tired state; with her back aching and feet swollen, she was more than happy to settle near the fireplace as soon as the sun set.
She placed her hand on her stomach, feeling the flutters of life inside her. It was her first time being a mother, and she was more than worried, but equally happy for the life she might get to enjoy with her child.
Her husband thought it was a girl—so sure he was, already set to buy countless frocks and booties for their unborn daughter. Ready to fight anyone for their supposed daughter’s honour and protection, it made her laugh to see him like this, all worried and fretful.
But as bright as he was, she disagreed. A boy, she thought. The signs were there: her skin clearer than it had ever been, her stomach low and heavy down at her hips, and the insatiable need for salt and spice that would either send her to the kitchen or her husband to the markets at midnight to calm her hunger.
And aside from all those old wives' tales, it was because she just felt it was a boy—a prediction made on nothing but motherly feelings. A redhead, perhaps like his father, with blue eyes and a fair face, bright and tall, destined for greatness, who would later marry a girl suited for him and have many children of his own.
But she wouldn’t mind a girl, either—beautiful and elegant. She would teach her knitting and sewing, and they would do all sorts of things mothers and daughters do, things Kendra herself never had the chance to do with her own mother. Yes, a girl too, with long hair, the light of the room, dressed in bright and colourful robes.
Though it really wouldn’t matter. Kendra rubbed her stomach. Whether a boy or a girl, she would love her child with an intensity beyond anything. A mother’s love, they say, is a well that does not dry up.
But nonetheless, she still thought it would be a boy. Later, she might argue with her husband, laugh with him, and say:
“You wouldn’t understand, dear,” she would tease. “A mother’s intuition is never wrong. It’s a boy, I’m sure.”
Her husband, however, would have the last laugh.
Their firstborn was a girl, with red tufts of hair peeking from her swaddle, and big blue eyes stared at her with an intelligence Kendra had never seen in any child.
There, she already knew her baby would be different—different from any child.
Alba Dumbledore, a perfect name for her perfect girl.
---
Alba was a peculiar girl, already learning spells when other children were just starting to speak, giggling and laughing as she made things around her float.
Yet, Kendra would raise her eyebrows and worry. Alba was not like other girls; she would take to wearing her younger brother’s clothes, insist on being a wizard or king when they played—never a princess, never a heroine, never a witch.
Walking hand in hand with Aberforth, wearing shorts and shirts she had bought only for him, Kendra would see how Alba lit up—happier than she ever seemed in dresses and petticoats.
Dresses disagreed with her, and ribbons brought her to tears.
Kendra would sometimes wonder if she was the mother of two boys instead of one.
She would tell herself it was fine. comforted herself by remembering all the times she herself had run with her brothers as a girl, playing rough in the mud, wearing their pants and shirts, and contrasting it with today’s dresses in all pastels, feminine as ever.
Her Alba would be fine. She was not as boyish as she sometimes seemed—she kept her hair long, knitted and sewed with Kendra, making pretty things, liked pretty things.
Right now, Kendra had better things to take care of, such as sweet Ariana, so different from her sister, taking joy in the dresses left untouched by Alba.
There were always differences between sisters, Kendra reminded herself.
Her lovely Alba, her lovely girl, her lovely daughter.
---
His sister was different, Aberforth would consider at thirteen. She was different in many ways—in magic, as he would begrudgingly accept, different in skills, different in beauty—he knew who the prettier of them was, and it wasn’t him for sure—but most importantly, she was… strange.
When they were younger, they would play hand in hand, Alba taking his clothes and wearing them around the village, jumpy and happy.
Once he had gotten angry, seeing her snatch another of his trousers.
“Why do you wear them?” he had asked. “You’re a girl, you have your dresses.”
She had looked at him with annoyance, unashamed, as she sat straight in his clothes.
“Because… I like them.”
“Why?”
For a moment, she didn’t speak; she looked at him, then down at her own body.
“I don’t know.”
Neither would Aberforth know, nor would most people. Whatever feelings Alba was dealing with had not earned themselves a name until a few centuries later. But still, she was blood, so he was forced to love her nonetheless.
“Keep ’em,” he had muttered. “They look better on you than they do on me.”
Alba had smiled, and in that moment, her strangeness didn’t matter at all.
---
By fifteen, there was something wrong with her, truly wrong. That German boy was bad news; he had known, but he had not expected his poison to spread to Alba as well, Alba, who was fine with her womanhood, fine with being called Alba.
That summer, she had walked out of her room, the German behind her, an odd brightness in her eyes.
She had cut her hair, her long, thick hair now an uneven patch of red. He had shouted; he was not privy to womanly affairs, but even he knew the value of her hair, with how much love and care their mother had brushed and braided it, how she had tended it to be as silky and shiny as it was, and here was Alba who snipped that devotion in a minute.
“Albus,” Alba had ordered for the fourth time, her voice low and certain. “My name is Albus now.”
Ariana stood in front of them both, eyes wide and confused. She looked at Alba then, and began to parrot that name like any silly child who didn’t know better—Albus, Albus, and Albus.
But Aberforth certainly knew better.
Alba had gone mad, he was sure; all that time spent with books and wands had driven her to hysteria. She called herself a man now, said she was Albus, denied her womanhood, denied the name their mother had given her.
Gellert—it was his fault, he had confused her. He was here to corrupt Alba and would further exacerbate her delusions.
“I won’t give you my clothes anymore,” Aberforth had snapped. He should have done this sooner, should have put an end to sharing his clothes with her, which had made her think she could be a boy. “Let’s see how you get to play at being a man.” It was the only solution he had found, knowing well enough they had no money to buy new ones.
Let her wear dresses. Let her correct herself.
“Albus doesn’t need your charity,” Gellert mocked the day after, bringing a basket of crisp boots, silk shirts, and leather pants.
“Alba—it’s Alba,” Aberforth had said, his hands clenching at his sides. “She is a woman—she knows it, you know it.”
Gellert had only sneered. “Not anymore.” As if he knew her better than her own brother.
Then, fast as lightning, he had pinned Aberforth down with his wand, eyes cold, voice dangerously soft.
“It’s Albus. Learn to say it. Or else—”
“Stop it,” Alba had cut them off. He had truly looked at her then, with hair short and Gellert’s hand in defiling her more. She seemed no different from any boy he might find in Hogwarts, only taller and fairer.
“You’re mad, Alba,” he had shouted, hands raised in disbelief. “You and he”—he pointed at Gellert—“are both crazy.”
He had told himself that she would come around, embrace her girlhood, start calling herself Alba as she was. That it was all a side-effect from their mother's death, and that company of scholars and wizards she kept at Hogwarts, all of that coming down at her heart
But it seemed fate had other plans for all of them.
---
Ariana was dead, Ariana whom his mother had trusted him to care for; she was lying limp, her blood colouring the floorboards.
“Are you happy now?” he shook Alba again and again, asking her. “She’s dead, —his nails dug in her shoulders—” all because you wanted to live your fantasies out.”
She had said nothing.
“You want to be a man so bad, don’t you?”
His fist had met her nose; it had been easy. Magic had always been too elegant for him, as most things elegant and soft were for Alba; whereas Aberforth was meant for the rougher things in life.
“Here—your first taste at being a man.”
She still had said nothing, cupped her bloody face, packed her bags, and left.
He had let both of his sisters be taken by that German tyrant, one dead and the other who preferred her name dead.
---
He does not want anyone to know of Alba—a selfish desire, for he covets and cherishes sweet Alba as he has coveted and cherished his students, as he has loved many of his daughters here at Hogwarts. He loves her, and he will protect her from the outside world, a world that would blame her for all that happened that long-ago summer. And he cannot let that happen, for Alba was innocent and must remain so. Poor Alba, born into the wrong sex, who cried over the lining of her uterus and the softness of her chest, who ran from mirrors and bathrooms—she is free of sin. She had done nothing wrong.
Alba is a secret shared between him and Gellert, and her whereabouts are known only to gentle Ariana, righteous Aberforth, and dear old Bathilda. She was already dead long ago; Gellert's coming had simply paved her final pyre, taken her with Ariana.
And he cannot write Gellert out of his heart either; that too is not Alba’s mistake. That is Albus’s alone—to love that boy, who had looked beyond her to him. It was Albus who had invited Gellert, for how could he not? It was Albus’s name he spoke, and hence it’s only Albus's blame to bear.
Alba is a lover’s oath taken between him and Gellert, sweet Alba who used to gently nudge him of her existence once every month in youth—in blood, as it often did, as had been the language between him and Gellert. Alba, who exists in the realms lower in his heart and robes. He wants her to remain there, softly curved underneath his clothes and between the summer shared by him and Gellert.
For it was Albus—wretched, selfish boy—who had brought calamity upon Godric’s Hollow. It was Albus, with an ambition like any that bore his sex, who had spread his legs and his heart to the German boy, and wished to be King, to dominate and surpass as is natural between men and boys.
He remembers Alba, and he loves her—he remembers all things that might have belonged to his original sex, and holds them dear in his heart. He lets every “battered”, “ruined” girl seep into Hogwarts, and opens the gates for any scorned pure-blood girl with tears and blood, from the half-blood to the muggle-born whose magic is seen as an unction of devil and dark. He sees Alba in every one of these girls, and he wants them to be safe and happy.
He extends it to the outcasts as well.
“It can be hard, can’t it? Mr Lupin to live in a body that goes against your desires, that calls you once every month.”
“I don’t wish it were that way, Headmaster. I don’t mean to.”
“We all wish it wasn’t, don’t we?”
“But people won’t understand, they don’t think like that.”
“Some do, my boy. Some do, you are not alone in such matters.”
Often he wonders—and he wonders often—whose spell pierced through Ariana’s bird-like chest, caused fate to cut her feeble string and hastily place her with his mother and father.
It would have been easy to blame Gellert, with his charm and face, the hunger he carried from boyhood, so similar to Albus. But Gellert was a boy nonetheless, and in Albus's mind, the boy Gellert is different from the man Gellert; boy Gellert would only laugh in confusion when Albus had told him of the workings of his mind, contradicting his body and his heart.
“You want to be a man?” Gellert had asked. Albus had been hesitant, sure that his friendship with the German boy would be threatened, that Gellert's face would scowl with disgust.
It wasn’t that he did not know the advantages that came apparent with manhood. Albus had been born as the fairer sex, and as such was accustomed to its generosities, knew that men simply had it better—the boys’ club at Hogwarts brimming with magic and prejudice for the scholars and wizards in the upper echelons of wizarding society.
It was wrong to say that was the reason he desired broader shoulders, or why he had screamed when he found blood running down his thighs. It’s normal, Albie, all girls get it; it means you’re growing, his mother had said—but Albus did not want to be any girl; he did not want to be a girl at all. He ran away from bathrooms, from the mirror which showed his femininity, and wanted to be pure of curves and softness. Dresses would tug and cramp him, ribbons choked—born in a body that suffocated him.
So, the burden falls to Albus only, who had cried tears of joy when Gellert’s face came to him, kissed him, and told him that he would love him regardless.
Though he can blame Gellert for paving his name, tucking Alba gently away to make space for Albus.
“What about Albert?—it’s a nice name,” he had remembered saying, the memory etched in his mind.
“Nein—too muggle, very mundane.”
“Or Albin or Alfred”—he had wanted a name similar to his original, one joy he did not wish to deprive his mother of.
“Too simple—you're choosing a name for yourself, pick something good, something powerful.”
They had sat for a while in the attic, Albus’s hand intertwined with his. Gellert looked at him, then his smile widened, his eyes brightened—a quirk he had when thinking of something either brilliant or wicked or both.
“Albus—Albus.”
“What—who, Albus?”
“Your name, Albus. Think of it like Alba—Alba, Albus—it matches.”
Albus, he had repeated that name again and again. Albus, it sounded perfect, a perfect name for a perfect boy.
“My lovely Albus”—Gellert had whispered in his ear, as he fastened the buttons on Albus's shirt. Aberforth had rejected him; it didn’t hurt him, as he said to Gellert, but it did. Aberforth, who had shrugged off the stealing of his clothes, lent him mercy in his “cross-dressing”, as he so called it, with whom he’d spent his fragile infancy and childhood—that Aberforth had denied him. That too is Albus's fault, for being in such a predicament, for forcing all of them into such a state.
But when Albus saw himself in the mirror, hair short, chest flattened by continuous charmwork, and clothes that fit him, a selfish part of him, of Albus, told him it didn’t matter.
Alba had been put to sleep in that attic, her final prayers done by Gellert and him, and from her soil emerged Albus, with pride and ego.
Albus took Ariana too, in whatever way he took her—Ariana, who was the second to call him by his name, “Albus, Albus, and Albus.” He had held her hand and dragged her down with Alba.
He has been a man for ninety-nine years, far more than some men have been alive. Alba lived for seventeen years, while Ariana even less—fourteen summers spent isolated and cramped. Like Alba, he assumes; he hopes Alba takes good care of her sister in the hereafter.
Perhaps he should have let Alba live longer, let her accept the biology of her nature—be wed, be bred to some other acceptable pureblood—perhaps Gellert, who had still expressed desire even after the change that occurred, such was his habit, to fill and conquer. Let her live as a woman for all her life, dressed in ribbons that bruised her and hair that snagged her, if it had meant Ariana could have lived as long as Albus had. The price for such a trade was whatever it demanded.
Though a part of him knows, had he stayed as Alba, he would have joined his mother and father in an early grave. It does not hurt him as much as it should.
Alba would not have survived; she was not selfish, not ruthless. The world would have eaten her alive.
When he had come to duel Gellert, all these decades ago, it had been almost agreed that, should Albus die, he would not want his body to be taken, searched for hands to grapple with evidence of polyjuice that penetrated his stomach, of the charms fixed in his chest, the slight rearangement of his pelvis—he wanted to protect Alba, keep her from prying eyes.
Wanted the people in his life—Newt, Elphias, Minevra, the countless students, and so many more who have a place in his heart, to not know of his birthright. What would they say? He does not want to know.
He does not want to die as Alba, does not want her name carved in his tombstone. Alba deserves better than to be framed for his sins.
“Don’t worry, Albus, Gellert had muttered between a crucio, voice soft and sweet like a boy again—” I won’t let anyone come near you, whether as a corpse or prisoner—it’s up to you to decide.”
He had a way with words, his Gellert who cursed and soothed in the same breath; he would keep Alba a secret.
Somehow, Albus had won.
Locked in a prison of his own making, it left only two people—Bathilda, who was supportive in her own way, and Aberforth.
He hopes they all can leave Alba behind to rest.
---
“The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore — or Alba Dumbledore?”
Albus Dumbledore, Supreme Mugwump, recipient of the Merlin Awards, and Headmaster of Hogwarts, was a renowned figure in wizarding history. However, many deep secrets lie beneath the enigma that Albus Dumbledore was — or, as named at birth, Alba Dumbledore.
Yes, dear reader — you hear that right! Albus Dumbledore, as recent discoveries show, was born female.
This undoubtedly sheds new light on certain phases and developments of his life. Countless questions arise regarding his decisions and choices, both as Headmaster (or Headmistress?) influencing countless youth and as Supreme Mugwump, wielding significant authority.
“Such a sweet girl she was — beautiful and gentle. My dear Gellert loved her so much,” says Bathilda Bagshot, famous author and close friend of the Dumbledores.
The Gellert Grindelwald, the Dark Lord, who plagued Europe and filled hearts with fear.
That Gellert, as our dear Ms Bagshot reports, was close friends with Albus — or Alba — Dumbledore. The nature of this relationship is vague, yet Ms Bagshot’s own words tell of a bond stranger and stronger than ever.
One might wonder how much of the Dark Lord’s involvement influenced Dumbledore’s transformation, and how much Dumbledore influenced Gellert Grindelwald’s progression toward the “Greater Good.”
And that is not all, dear reader. Further reading of my book will peel back the layers of the puzzle that the life of the former Headmaster, or shall we say headmistress, was.
As always, stay tuned for the next publication, revealing the many lies and secrets of the former wizard — or witch — Dumbledore.
---
A grave lies atop a green hill, white in colour and beautiful. The moon peeks through and sheds its light, making the marble glow with divinity and splendour.
The peace does not stay for long.
The Dark Lord Voldemort has come, and he has brought company.
“Poor, poor Alba,” Bellatrix’s voice rings through the trees — “let to rot in her tomb.”
A gaggle of followers surrounds him, all hungry for blood — wolves in human skin, some more than others.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind having a taste — especially now,” Greyback shrills. “I say we take a peek, see what the fuss is really about.”
But Lord Voldemort does not stop; he moves on.
He gazes at the body beneath him, old and lined — a man’s body.
He cares little for whatever sickness Dumbledore had, though he finds it amusing to stand here. In front of the man — woman? — who had chastised him for chasing immortality, for using magic to perfect his flawed body, when she—he—or what else had been doing it long before he had thought of it.
He leans closer, closer — “How does it feel, Alba?” How it feels to have a body that fits you, one to call yours, to forsake your old name and to go for one that truly defines you—not that he ever accepted Voldemort's name. Always Tom, never lord, so why should Voldemort not do the same?.
The wand was fixed firmly in his grasp; he had no reason to stay.
Before he leaves, before his followers even have a chance to defile the body, fire engulfs the tomb, sealing it shut from any curse or hex.
Even in death, Dumbledore had his tricks.
---
Harry thinks it’s strange, unnervingly so, the words he reads over and over again. He squints at the newsprint, willing the sentences to make sense—they don’t.
“It can’t be right—this is bollocks,” Ron scans the article with more intensity than he’s ever given any piece of homework. “What is she even on about?”
“Dumbledore can’t be a woman,” Ron murmurs, the statement feeling absurd even as he says it. “I mean, that’s just impossible.”
“It doesn’t mean he was a woman, Ron,” Hermione’s voice cuts through sharply. “It means he was born one. He transitioned.”
There is a heavy pause. Ron and Hermione both look over at him.
“Harry?” they say in unison.
They walk through the quiet grounds hand in hand, almost like children—which, he supposes, they still are. The war had made them forget that. It feels surreal to be at peace, with Voldemort gone and so many others gone with him.
Harry wonders if that’s what the Headmaster must have felt, too. Strange, he reckons. He tries to put himself in his shoes.
“Imagine if everyone insisted you were a girl when you weren’t,” Hermione had said earlier to a still-bewildered Ron. “If they called you by another name, forced you to be someone you’re not.”
“Well… yeah, I’d hate it,” Ron had replied, finally looking up from the horrible article.
“And stop reading that rubbish—” Hermione had snapped, snatching the paper swiftly from him. “That woman has no right calling him that.”
Harry thinks for a long while about what he would feel. It’s like when Dudley called him a freak. When Aunt Petunia would lock him in the cupboard, any sign of magic frightened her. That deep, clawing need to hide what you are because others find it absurd, because you don’t fit.
Then he thinks it’s not so strange anymore. He is glad, in fact. He hopes the professor felt just as happy as Harry did when he could finally be himself—that he wasn’t weird or freakish… just unique.
“It’s time, Harry,” Ron says softly.
The tomb is marble white. In bold gold letters is written:
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
Chief Warlock, Supreme Mugwump, and Headmaster of Hogwarts.
August 1881 – June 30, 1997
The grave is decorated with flowers and cards—some he recognizes.
One, in rough, slanted writing, slightly damp at the edges, reads: I hope you will be waiting for me, Brother.
The wand feels sturdy in his grasp as he lays it to rest in its final place, alongside the professor. It fits perfectly inside the tomb, as most things of Dumbledore’s somehow did.
“Where do you think he is now?” Ron asks quietly, gazing at the white stone.
Harry looks up, past the tomb, toward the wide, clear sky.
“Somewhere happy.”