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The Devil which deceiveth the whole world was cast into the abyss.
Woe to the inhabitants of the earth! For the Devil is come down unto you.
— The Book of Revelation
London — August 1945
Grindelwald has fallen.
The phrase resounded from every mouth in Diagon Alley and blared out from the front page of the Prophet, above a grainy photograph of the Dark wizard himself kneeling wandless and restrained at Albus Dumbledore’s feet. Tom seized a copy from a grinning newsboy and simply stared—at the shock of the headline, at the description of the duel beneath it, at the astonishing expression on Grindelwald’s face: gazing up at Dumbledore with something very much like awe.
Not quite awe, though. There was something else, in that expression—something Tom could not identify, and that failure of identification nagged at him with the needling irritation of a problem he ought to be able to solve. Grindelwald was defeated. Grindelwald was kneeling. The most feared Dark wizard of the century, brought to his knees by a Hogwarts professor. And yet—the face in the photograph did not look like the face of a man who had lost. It looked like the face of a man who had found something, or surrendered to something that was not defeat.
Tom stared at the photograph until the newsboy asked if he was going to pay for it.
Throwing down the paper and ignoring the affronted glares of those he shoved aside as he pushed through the cheering, celebrating crowd, Tom made his way back to the deserted entrance of Knockturn Alley, and strode at once to a familiar bar across the street from Borgin and Burkes.
He needed a drink.
The Pandemonium Pub was dim and shadowed, with skulls of varying shapes and sizes adorning the walls: it was owned by the Mulciber family, and the Mulciber family had a long and storied tradition of exotic magical trophy hunting. Entirely illegal, of course, but Mulciber Galleons went far at the Ministry—and fear of the Mulciber reputation went still further. The Ministry’s willfully blind eye made Pandemonium a highly convenient locale for covert meetings between Tom’s shifts at Borgin and Burkes.
Or, as it so happened, post-work stress relief.
“Mulciber!” Tom flung his cloak into a seat at the empty bar as his old school friend rushed over from the back room. “Get me a glass of elf-made cognac, and then get me a Muggle to torture. Or a Mudblood, for that matter—I’m not currently inclined to be particular.”
Mulciber merely gaped at him, wide-eyed. Tom felt a muscle twitch in his jaw.
“Did I stutter? If you’re going to make me repeat myself, perhaps I’ll just torture you.”
Panic flared in Mulciber’s eyes. “My Lord,” he hissed out under his breath, so low Tom strained to hear, “we have… company.”
Tom followed Mulciber’s panicked gaze to a shadowed table in the far corner, and froze at the unmistakable sight of the pub’s sole patron: Albus Dumbledore himself, raising a half-empty glass of firewhiskey with a wry greeting. “Hello, Tom.” He gestured to the empty seat across from him. “Would you care to join?”
For a single, crystalline instant, Tom’s mind went entirely blank—a sensation so unfamiliar and so profoundly unwelcome that he had to suppress a physical recoil. Then his thoughts reassembled themselves with their customary speed and precision, cataloguing the situation with the cold efficiency of a filing system: Dumbledore, here, alone, on the night of his greatest triumph. In a Dark pub in Knockturn Alley, surrounded by skulls, drinking firewhiskey in the shadows. Not at a Ministry gala. Not at Hogwarts, basking in the adulation of colleagues and students. Here, leaning forward with something like anticipation. As if Tom was exactly the person he most wished to speak to, on this night.
Tom stepped toward the table, coiled and tense.
Dumbledore looked—older. That was Tom’s first concrete observation, and it surprised him: it had been only three years since Tom had graduated from Hogwarts, but Dumbledore seemed to have aged a decade in the interim. The auburn hair was streaked more prominently with grey; the lines around his eyes and mouth had deepened; the blue gaze, still bright, still piercing, carried a weight that had not been there before. He wore plain, dark robes rather than the flamboyant professorial garb Tom remembered—subdued, almost austere—and his crooked nose cast a long shadow across the table in the lamplight.
The most powerful Dark wizard of the past several centuries had been brought down not by the combined might of the world’s Auror forces, not by any institutional power, but by a single man. One wizard, acting alone. Which meant that Albus Dumbledore’s personal magical ability was now the most significant strategic fact in the wizarding world—more important than any army, any government, any law.
Grindelwald had fallen, which meant the man across from Tom was the most dangerous person alive.
“An odd choice for a victory party,” Tom managed to say evenly, hand resting over the wand in his coat as he lowered himself into the offered chair.
“Is it?” Dumbledore smiled faintly. “I should think a pub full of Dark artifacts and Dark wizards would be a perfectly natural destination for a man who has just spent three hours dueling one.” He glanced around at the skull-adorned walls. “Though I’ll grant you, the decor is somewhat more… confrontational… than the Leaky Cauldron.”
“The clientele are likelier to curse you than to cheer you.”
“Present company included, perhaps.”
“A joke among friends,” Tom said pleasantly.
“Of course.” Dumbledore took another sip. His hand, Tom noticed, was not entirely steady. “Your sense of humor has been missed at Hogwarts. Horace, in particular, asks after you with great regularity.”
Tom felt the familiar flicker of contempt at Slughorn’s name—that fawning, credulous man who had handed him the secret to immortality over crystallized pineapple—and smoothed it away behind a smile of warm nostalgia. “A generous friend, indeed. Please pass along my regards.”
Dumbledore’s blue eyes rested on him with an expression that Tom had spent seven years attempting to decipher. It was not the suspicious, searching look that Dumbledore had turned on him at the orphanage, all those years ago—the look that had made eleven-year-old Tom decide, with an instinct sharper than any spell, that this was the one man in the world he must never allow to see his true self. Nor was it the cool, distant wariness of their later years at Hogwarts, when Dumbledore had watched him from across the Great Hall with the quiet vigilance of a man observing a dangerous animal through glass.
This was something else. Something Tom might almost have called sadness, if he hadn't known better.
“I confess,” Dumbledore said, setting down his glass, “that I was not expecting to see you here tonight. I would have expected you to be celebrating with the rest of the wizarding world.”
“I might say the same of you.”
“I find I am not in a celebratory mood.”
Tom studied him—the lined face, the shadowed eyes, the unsteady hand on the glass. “Surely defeating Grindelwald warrants some small measure of satisfaction.”
Dumbledore was quiet for a moment. “Some victories,” he said at last, “feel rather more like losses.”
“A curious perspective, from the man who just saved the world.”
“The world,” Dumbledore said mildly, “has not been saved. A war has ended. That is not the same thing.” He swirled his glass, watching the amber liquid catch the lamplight. “The Muggles are still fighting their own war, of course. The magical one is concluded, but the damage—” He stopped. “The damage will take rather longer to repair.”
Mulciber materialized at the table’s edge with the requested cognac, and Tom accepted it without acknowledgment, taking a slow, measured sip.
“There are some who say,” Tom said slowly, watching Dumbledore’s face, “that the Muggle conflict should be left to run its course. That we should let them destroy themselves.”
“And there are some who say our fates are bound together,” Dumbledore said quietly. “We share the same world, do we not? And some of us share the same blood.” He raised his glass, and Tom felt a muscle tick in his jaw. “I met a Seer, once,” Dumbledore said after a pause, “who claimed that this is only the beginning—that greater threats would follow, and that the magical and Muggle worlds would be drawn closer together, not further apart.”
“Grindelwald is a Seer." Tom was unable to entirely hide the spark of fervent interest he always felt, when it came to Seers. "Or that is what is said.”
“Yes,” Dumbledore said softly. “That is what is said.”
“A shoddy Seer, then, not to See his own demise.”
Something flickered across Dumbledore’s features—too quick to identify, gone before Tom could catalogue it. “The future,” he said after a moment, “is never fixed.” He turned his glass slowly on the table, leaving a wet ring on the dark wood. “It always comes down to choice.”
“You chose to fight him,” said Tom. “After years of refusing.”
“I did.”
“Why now?”
Dumbledore met his eyes, the full force of his attention focused on Tom with an intensity that felt almost physical—a pressure behind his Occlumency shields, not an intrusion but a presence, like standing too close to an open furnace. Then it was gone, and Dumbledore was looking mildly at his firewhiskey again.
“Because the cost of inaction,” he said, “finally exceeded the cost of action.”
It was a politician’s answer—smooth, abstract, empty.
“You beat him handily, in the end." Tom would not be so easily beaten. "No doubt the very Earth would tremble, to see you go to battle with a worthy adversary.”
“Do you think Gellert Grindelwald unworthy?”
A strange pause between forename and surname, as though he had been about to stop at Gellert. Even Grindelwald, then, was to be given the condescending first-name treatment by Albus Dumbledore. Tom suppressed a snort.
“Gellert Grindelwald is a fool. He had power—extraordinary power, by all accounts—and he squandered it on ideology. On speeches and manifestos and grand, futile gestures.” Tom turned the cognac glass between his fingers, feeling the facets catch the light. “He wanted to persuade, to reform. As if the world has ever been transformed by anything other than force.”
“You would be surprised,” Dumbledore said, “by what transforms the world.”
“I would be surprised by very little, after seeing you bring Grindelwald to his knees.” The needling frustration of the photograph, of that inexplicable expression, of the impossibility of Dumbledore making Grindelwald kneel. “Might as well have made him suck your cock, too.”
The silence that followed lasted long enough for Tom to regret the words—a lapse of control, and Tom did not tolerate lapses. He had wanted to provoke a reaction, and had revealed his own agitation instead.
Dumbledore's hand had gone still on his glass—perfectly, unnaturally still. When he spoke, his voice was mild, but something behind his eyes had shuttered, had turned very cold. "Vulgarity doesn't suit you, Tom."
Tom recalibrated. “My apologies, Professor,” he said smoothly. “I was merely expressing admiration for the thoroughness of his defeat.”
Dumbledore’s icy blue gaze was steady, and entirely impenetrable. “I do not enjoy humiliating my enemies.”
“Only if those enemies are children, then.” Tom smiled his most knife-edged smile. “I seem to recall a certain child whose wardrobe you set on fire.”
“An unusual child,” Dumbledore said quietly, “who had been terrorizing other children. The fire was instructive, not punitive.”
“Is that what you call it?” Tom arched a brow. “How very pedagogical.”
A long, considering pause. “You are not my enemy, Tom.”
The declaration was so unexpected—so presumptuous—that Tom felt a flash of genuine fury beneath his composure, hot and bright. Not his enemy. As though Tom were beneath the designation. As though the man who had killed his father and grandfather and made three Horcruxes before the age of twenty were simply a wayward student who needed to be guided back to the light.
“How fortunate for me,” Tom said, silk over steel.
“I mean it quite sincerely.” Dumbledore’s gaze had not wavered. “I would perhaps consider you the most gifted student Hogwarts has ever seen.” A fractional pause. “Myself excepted, naturally.”
“Naturally,” Tom said between gritted teeth.
“You have a mind of extraordinary power, and a talent for magic that I have encountered only once before in my lifetime.” He said this without any apparent intent to flatter—his tone was detached, clinical. “Which is precisely why I find it… regrettable… that you have chosen to spend your gifts selling Dark artifacts to petty criminals in a secondhand shop.”
“My current employment is a temporary arrangement.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Dumbledore took a slow, careful sip, and swallowed. “You have always had larger ambitions.”
“You disapprove.”
“I am… concerned.” The word was chosen with care, weighted with something that Tom might have mistaken for genuine feeling, if he hadn’t known Dumbledore’s gentleness was simply another form of strategy. “Ambition without conscience is a dangerous thing, Tom. And power without limits is most dangerous of all.”
Tom felt himself smile. “You sound like God in the garden, Professor. Are you familiar with the Muggle scriptures?”
“I am.” Dumbledore set down his glass with a quiet click. “Are you?”
“One learns many things in a Muggle orphanage. Perhaps you know this verse: God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” He leaned forward, feeling the words coil on his tongue like Parseltongue. “‘But the serpent said, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” Dumbledore had gone very still. Tom allowed himself another small smile. “The Dark Arts are forbidden fruit, Professor. The more you restrict any kind of knowledge, the more tempting it becomes.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Dumbledore said softly. “It is never easy to resist temptation.” He raised his glass again, eyes never leaving Tom’s. “But resist we must.”
“What are we resisting, precisely? Knowledge? Power? Our own nature? The serpent in the garden told the truth—eat the fruit, and your eyes will be opened. It was God who lied, who kept them ignorant, who feared what they might become without limits.”
“An interesting interpretation,” Dumbledore said mildly. “I notice you’ve cast yourself as the serpent.”
“Who better?”
“Who indeed.” Dumbledore’s voice had dropped—barely above a murmur, now, and there was something in it Tom had never heard before. “Grindelwald saw himself as a liberator—he stated, many times, that the established order was a prison, and that he was destined to tear it down and build something greater in its place.” He paused. “He was not necessarily wrong about the prison. He was catastrophically wrong about the building.”
Tom felt a prickle of irritation at the comparison. “I am not Grindelwald.”
“No,” Dumbledore agreed. “You are not.” He said it with a strange, almost wistful emphasis, as if confirming something to himself. “Grindelwald had a vision of what the world could be—however twisted, however destructive, it was a vision born of genuine conviction. He believed, truly and passionately, that what he was doing was right.” Dumbledore’s gaze found Tom’s, and held it. “I don’t believe you care about the world at all.”
It was true, of course. Tom did not care about the world. He never had.
A silence stretched between them—longer than the last, and differently weighted. Mulciber had retreated so far behind the bar that he was practically in the storeroom. The skulls on the walls grinned their fixed, eternal grins.
“Tell me this, Professor,” Tom said at last. “Grindelwald was the most powerful Dark wizard in living memory—unconquered, unstoppable—and you defeated him. Alone.” He had to know: “How?”
Dumbledore’s blue gaze burned into Tom’s with an intensity that made the back of his neck prickle, and for an incendiary instant, Tom had the sensation of standing at the edge of something vast—a cliff, a chasm, an answer that might reconfigure everything he understood about power.
“Love,” said Dumbledore.
Tom stared.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You asked how I defeated Gellert Grindelwald.” Dumbledore’s voice was quiet, and entirely serious. “The answer is love.”
Tom waited for the qualifier, the elaboration, the strategic context that would make the word mean something other than what it appeared to mean. It did not come. Dumbledore simply sat there, looking at him, and Tom felt something unprecedented: the complete and total failure to comprehend what another person was telling him.
Not the word itself—Tom understood the concept, could identify its symptoms in others, could flawlessly simulate its effects. Love, to Tom, was a lever, a vulnerability, a tool.
It was not a method of defeating the most powerful Dark wizard in the world.
“You’ll forgive me,” Tom said, after a pause that lasted slightly too long, “if I find that answer… insufficient.”
“Most people do.” Dumbledore smiled—a real smile, this time, warm and weary and edged with something that might have been grief. “And yet it is the only answer I have.”
Dumbledore was either lying or delusional or playing some deeper game that Tom could not yet see. Love was not power. Love was the absence of power—the surrender of control, the abdication of self.
And yet.
That look on Grindelwald’s face. Kneeling, defeated, wandless—gazing up at Dumbledore as if he were the sun.
Tom pushed the thought away with the same practiced efficiency he applied to every unwanted intrusion on his ordered mind. If Dumbledore's great weapon was one Tom could not wield, he would simply find Darker, more powerful weapons that Dumbledore could not. Or would not.
And if Dumbledore would not tell him the entire truth, about his duel with Grindelwald... someday, perhaps, someone else would. A Seer, locked away in a tower.
Setting down his half-empty glass, he stood. “My congratulations,” he said shortly, “on the victory.”
Before he could step away from the table, Dumbledore spoke again.
“You are leaving England soon.”
Tom felt a cold jolt of surprise—he had discussed his impending departure with no one outside his innermost circle—but kept his expression carefully neutral. “What makes you say that?”
“You have the look,” Dumbledore said simply, “of a man who has outgrown his cage.”
There it was again—that casual, intrusive intimacy of being seen, of being known, of being read so effortlessly by a man he had spent seven years trying and failing to deceive.
“Safe travels, Tom,” said Dumbledore.
Tom hovered at the edge of the table, very still. “You’re not going to try to stop me?”
“No.” Dumbledore raised his glass—nearly empty now, the firewhiskey reduced to a thin amber film at the bottom. “I have never been able to stop people from becoming who they are.” He took the final sip, and set the glass down with quiet finality. “I merely warn that the fruit may not taste quite as sweet as you imagine.”
Tom looked at the old man in the shadows—the tired eyes, the crooked nose, the unsteady hands, the bruised gaze, the immense and terrible power—and felt the dim, unsettling recognition of a force that operated by rules he did not understand, that drew its strength from a source he could not access, that had brought the most powerful Dark wizard in history to his knees.
The moment passed. Tom smoothed his features into a polite, impeccable smile.
“Goodbye, Professor.”
“Goodbye, Tom.”
He crossed the pub without looking back, pushed open the heavy door, and stepped out into Knockturn Alley. The night air was a cooling balm against his skin, and his mind was already working—sorting, discarding, refining. Turning his face to the dark, starless sky, he began to plan.
Behind him, in the shadowed interior of the Pandemonium Pub, Albus Dumbledore sat alone among the skulls, and did not order another drink.