Himnusz

Thank you to Heart_of_Spells for the excellent beta-work she has done for this story. This was written for Griffinesque's challenge prompt at the HPFC forum. The story is written from Grindelwald's pov.

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Himnusz

"May I go out?" I asked my great-aunt, Bathilda, politely. Politeness. It was crucial to be in her good books given the circumstances of my expulsion and the unfavourable situation at home.

"Such a polite boy!" Bathilda tittered. "Of course you may, dear! You must be right lonely with none but this old, nattering woman to talk to!"

"I am very fond of your company!" I protested, all wide-eyed and heartbreakingly sincere.

She looked pleased, and I congratulated myself for the more than passable deception.

"Them across the sea-" Bathilda grumbled "-they never understand us. I told your father to send you to Hogwarts instead of that Continental school. Did he listen? No! He didn't listen when I told him to come back here and pick one of our lasses. Look what has come of that! Foreign women and foreign lands did no Englishman any good."

My father had passed out from Hogwarts and undertaken a Grand Tour of the Continent. While in Budapest, by the banks of the Danube, he had seen a group of young women dancing the Karikázo. He had watched, enraptured, as dainty feet rose and fell to the rapid rhythm of the wild music. His gaze had been flitting from dancer to dancer, until he was ensnared by the bluest pair of eyes he had ever seen. He had fallen in love with the woman, and then he had fallen in love with the grim land which had borne her. No man had ever sung the Himnusz, our anthem, with more passion and conviction than my late father.

As soon as Bathilda ceased her grumblings, I made a polite bow and hastily slipped out the door. Down the garden path I went, across the street and bound for the desolate acreage a few yards away from the house. There I would craft and practise spells beyond the imagination of idiots who confined themselves to textbooks and theories. One day, one day, I would return home bearing the relics I sought so determinedly. Then I would do away with nosy, judgemental creatures like Bathilda and my Durmstrang teachers who saw me as a being of lesser worth because I was from a poorer land. I would show them what a son of Hungary was capable of. I would summon my father from Death's keep and appoint him the Lord of Hungary. Then I would heal my bedridden mother and have her stand proud and happy beside her beloved's side. She would dance the Karikázo by Danube's waters once again. The world would bow to us.

So deep was I in my musings that I was not paying attention to my path. Little wonder why I bumped into something warm and solid. I took a step backwards and looked down at the angry face of a young boy.

"Watch where you are going, mister!" he complained, in that peculiar broken voice which signals the onset of adolescence.

Bullying always did put me in a better mood. So, with no qualm at all, I drew my wand and flicked it in an exaggerated manner. His hair and nails turned a bright, fluorescent green. He growled and fisted his hands before launching himself at me. The Islanders did always have a fondness for rough-housing. I sighed and flicked my wand again. A mesh of wood enclosed him and he snarled, reminding me of a wild cat in a cage.

"Abe!"

Five years ago, soldiers passing through the town had shown me how to gun down game. I had not liked the smoke or the blood a gun caused, so messy, but I had very much liked the sound of the report. It had scared away the birds and sent a shiver down even the hardiest man's spine. Killing did not give one power over others, but fear did. And the gun's report had stirred fear.

"Abe!"

That voice reminded me of the gun's report in the Carpathian woods. It was a voice that imbued strength and power and courage. I was about to turn my gaze to the newcomer when my eyes widened at the sight of dark bars of iron rising from the earth to imprison me in a dome-shaped cage. I waved my wand to melt the iron, but the magic holding me caged was stronger than mine.

"You will apologise to my brother, sir!"

On the other side of the bars stood an angry young man with the bluest eyes I had ever seen. Tendrils of his fuming magic smothered the air I breathed. His magic was stronger than that of any Wizard I had come across, stronger than even that of those practitioners of Dark Arts who had made Durmstrang their domain. The bars of iron he had conjured from this English earth held me captive. In the great world outside here, there is no place for you had proclaimed the Hungarian anthem which my father had held most dear. My mother had begged me not to leave our homeland. The teller's blood in her had shown her broken cradles. Hungary's beauty had drawn an English son to the Carpathian bosom. Now here I stood, a son of the Danube, in an Islander's cage.

"Albus, I don't need your help!" the boy I had tried to scare mumbled. "If you hadn't ratted me out to the teachers that I am using my wand in the holidays, I could have taken care of myself."

"As your elder brother, I cannot countenance underage use of magic during the summer. If caught, you will be in serious trouble with the Ministry," Albus said ostentatiously. He flicked his wand and the wooden cage I had conjured to trap his brother fell away.

"Hmmm, clever," he murmured. "Takes lesser energy than iron. Strong. I wonder how you visualised the right angles. I find curves easier."

That explained the domed cage, then.

"Oh, very well," the younger sibling muttered. "Praise the bully now!"

"You do look fetching with green hair, dearest brother," Albus said innocently. His cerulean blue eyes were now glinting with the malicious amusement that only sibling rivalry can bring out in men. The younger brother stormed away. Albus laughed softly and then returned his attention to me. I summoned my strength and harnessed my magic to bend the iron bars since melting them seemed infeasible. His blue eyes widened in grudging respect as the bars curved away and I stepped forth.

"Gellert," I offered smoothly, proffering my hand to him.

"Albus," he said with a crooked, strangely endearing smile. His blue eyes were now taking in every detail of me carefully. He fidgeted and started nudging the iron bars with his feet. A large, long-fingered hand came up to shove bright auburn curls away from his face.

Shy, then. How could someone so talented and aware of power be so shy? Or was it my presence that had unsettled him? Curious. Most curious.

"You weren't bullying him, were you?" he asked quietly. Strange that even in his shy demeanour there ran an undercurrent of stoic strength.

"No, no, I wasn't!" I protested. "Why would I?"

He offered me another crooked smile and said, "Good." Then he fell into his fidgeting again. I cleared my throat, dug into the pocket of my coat, found what I had sought for, and extended my open palm towards him.

Then I asked him, "Lemon-drop, Albus?"

Since starting my travels, I had fallen into the habit of leaving sweets of some sort or the other in my coat pockets. I had picked up the lemon-drops from a bakery in Sussex. The sour tang of the lemon-drops reminded me of home, of my proud, stoic people who trudged grimly onwards despite civil war and poverty.

"Lemon-drop?" he queried, frowning.

"You will like it," I promised. Why was I offering something that I considered symbolic of my homeland to a stranger, to a stranger that had defeated me in a feat of magical prowess? Was this surrender?

He snatched it from my palm, just as he had snatched victory from me earlier, then he tore open the wrapper and turned his head away from me in a fit of modesty before eating it. I watched his eyes widen in quiet wonder.

"Well?" I asked.

It was answered by yet one more of his crooked smiles.

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"What are you going to do?" Albus asked, as we lay side by side, panting and sweating after a duel of magic that had ended in a draw.

"Do?"

"Later," he elaborated. "What are you going to do later?"

I wanted renown and acknowledgement, for myself, for my family, and for my land. For that I would make myself the finest Wizard that ever was. Magic was everything. Magic was power.

"I want to be more than this." He gestured at the desolate surround of Godric's Hollow. His blue eyes were pensive and dull. "This is stifling. I cannot bear it, Gellert. I am brilliant. Yet here I am, while others are out in the world and conquering frontiers."

"Albus-"

"No!" he protested. "It is not right, Gellert. I hate this place. I wanted to leave. I wanted to travel, like you are doing now. I wanted to do so many things and now I am stuck here because of her."

His voice had taken on a shade of pessimistic darkness that reminded me of cynical soldiers, always pushed from warfront to warfront, who so intensely despised the politics which necessitated them dying for causes they cared nothing for. And you gave to your sons, tombs within the breast they trod had lamented my country's anthem as it spoke of these strife-weary soldiers whose blood drenched our land. Here now was Albus, with his angry blue eyes and pursed lips, fiercely protesting being interred in this desolate waste when he could be in lands far away seeking laurels of blazing glory.

"Magic is might," I said softly.

Albus raised his head and looked down at me curiously, his features still resentful. I nodded and repeated my words, "Magic is might, Albus. It can make everything all right, you know. All you need is enough magic."

His eyes narrowed and he whispered, "You believe in the legend of the Elder Wand. 'Tis only a folktale, Gellert."

Hungarian folktales came of a nomadic tribe's strange experiences in the Carpathians. Even the silliest nursery-tale held a kernel of truth.

"If it were more than a tale?" I questioned. "What then?"

"It could make Ariana well," he mumbled. "And prove that we are much, much more than all the rest of these normal people who call us pariahs. But it is merely a tale, Gellert."

"It could bring your mother back," I suggested. His breathing hitched and his eyes darkened in reluctant fantasising of the picture I was painting.

"Too much power," he whispered. "The wand's power is beyond any Wizard, they say. The Deathstick, they call it."

"Only in the hands of the inadequate," I scoffed. "You and I are better than them all, Albus. You know it."

"Yes," he rasped. "Yet here we are."

"If we had it, we could be much more than two young men duelling each other on a scorched piece of land in this quaint old village."

"Yes, you are right. We would not be like the rest of them," Albus murmured thoughtfully.

"Quite so. We can help them all. We can use the Wand for the greater good," I declared.

"For the greater good," he pledged.

He was the first person who had supported me without being taken in by bribes or overcome by fear of my magical prowess. He pledged himself to my cause because he believed in it. He was the first to do so.

I had once tripped down a goat-path and tumbled all the way downhill before falling into a patch of coarse grass. It had bruised me badly and knocked the breath out of me. I had stumbled to my feet slowly, grabbed my knees to support myself and laughed my heart out as adrenaline soared in my body. Listening to Albus pledging support was like tumbling downhill once again.

"Why are you laughing?" he asked.

"From where I come from, laughing is what you do when you are happy," I explained in between peals of laughter.

This was met with a rumbling bout of honest mirth. Something twisted deep within me as I heard his laugh for the first time. The deep, rough sound reminded me of cragged rocks and freshly ploughed fields and soldiers playing the Rákószi March.

"You are both mad!" Aberforth Dumbledore proclaimed as he came upon us laughing our guts out. He grumbled and shook his head and left us to our mirth.

"What a glorious way to be mad!" Albus breathed. His eyes were shining pools of azure and his teeth were gleaming in the sunlight. I reached across to tug an auburn lock of hair away from his perspiring forehead. He leaned into my touch and his laughter vanished leaving behind contemplation.

"I was born by the riverside, you know," I told him softly. "My father often told me the tale of Moses, of a babe found by the river who grew up to be a leader. My mother named me after her Magyar grandfather who was slain in a skirmish with the Habsburgs."

"Gellert - the spear, the weapon of your people," Albus murmured. "She named you aptly, you know. You will be powerful."

"So will you," I reminded him.

"My father went to prison and died there after he harmed Muggle boys who bullied Ariana. My mother knitted socks for him even after news of his death reached us." He reached across and placed his palm right over my heart, as if to hold me captive in case I tried to flee. "Then Ariana became worse and my mother died." He glared at me, daring me to pity him. "Now it is only Abe and I, trying to keep her inside and safe. I hate this place, Gellert."

"You cannot," I told him gently, as gently as I had ever tried to be. "This place is a part of you, just as your family is. To be homeless in your country is a terrible thing, Albus. Once, long ago, the Magyars made the mistakes of pawning Hungary to the Turks and the other invaders. Hungary has not forgiven us yet. The land gives us blood and war. Looking everywhere he could not find his home in his homeland, says our anthem, and it is right, you know. We are nomads in a land that was once ours to till and plough."

"You are a patriot, aren't you?" he enquired rhetorically.

"Yes, yes, I am. What do you believe in enough to die for, Albus?"

He frowned.

"Your country? Your ideals? Your religion?" I asked.

He met my gaze squarely before saying, "Not my country, Gellert. I like this country and I am proud to call it motherland. However, I believe that fighting and dying in the name of borders someone else has made is idiotic. Ideals? Will I die for my ideals? I was a Gryffindor at school, you know. We are meant to defend our ideals to death, according to those who swear by the Houses. I wouldn't, though. I am human, and prone to make mistakes. My ideals of today may not be what I believe in tomorrow. I would prefer to withhold my opinion and see how tomorrow unfolds rather than dying for a wrong cause. And no, I wouldn't die for religion too, though my mother was a firm believer."

A man who was not ready to die for some cause was a man who could not be trusted. So my mother had taught me.

"What would you die for, if not for land or ideals or religion?" I urged.

He bent to press his chapped lips on my cheek, drew back, glared at me, and whispered, "I would die for this glorious madness."

It was tumbling down a hill again, falling and falling and falling, endlessly, and I could only manage a shaky nod in assent. He grinned then, a strange, lopsided, boyish grin, and then pounced. We wrestled in the dust until I had him pinned beneath me. His blue eyes were wide open and held a peculiar mixture of surprise and determination. His sweat masked the balmy scent of the summer breeze and the rapid thudding of his heart drowned the thousand voices of caution and fear in my mind. I wanted to think of tomorrows and wands and master-plans. This, I knew well, could come to no good end. He had darkness in him, but he had not embraced it as utterly as I had. He had ambition, yet it remained tempered by his sense of familial duty. He had power, and when we finally stood on opposite sides of the board, this cavorting of today might well prove my undoing.

"Gellert," he breathed, half-pleading.

He was all loose limbs, sharp blue eyes, auburn curls and half-shy smiles. I took a deep breath, marked this as the day which would prove my downfall, and succumbed to the glorious madness that was Albus Dumbledore with nary a single regret in the darkness that was my heart.

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"Beautiful," Albus whispered, running the tip of his wand over my right cheekbone. His magic smothered my senses and his breath warmed my cheek. His wand inched down my chin, down my jaw and pressed the pulse point in my neck. My breathing hitched and my eyes closed of their own accord. His irises would be dark and dilated now, I knew. The wand-tip jabbed down more forcefully and I gasped before throwing my head backwards exposing the length of my neck to his perusal. Surrender. It was dark and shameful and so very satisfying to lie helpless and vulnerable at his mercy.

"Beautiful," he murmured again.

The wand-tip jabbed harder and I shivered as it drew blood. He could kill me. He would paralyse me. He could humiliate me. He could do anything he wanted and I would resist nothing. I felt a drop of blood trickling down the line of my neck and pooling into the hollow of my collarbones.

"Look at me," he commanded. He moved the wand away from my neck and I sighed.

"Look at me, Gellert," he ordered again.

My eyes fluttered open and I groaned as I saw his tongue flicking out to taste my blood that tainted the tip of his wand.

This time, it was my lips that voiced the word beautiful.

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Aberforth, always so self-righteous and practical, refused to see the wisdom in the quest Albus and I wanted to set out upon. Words gave way to curses. He turned my hair green and laughed coldly as I tried to undo it. The bindings over my dark, burning temper broke, and I cast the Cruciatus on the fool who dared stand between Albus and our glorious future. Albus shouted and tried to cast a shield to protect his brother, but his emotions were clouding his mind and his spells were not as potent as they could have been, Then came the girl between our warring wands. She cried and Aberforth shouted and Albus stood stricken. We lowered our wands even as the girl crumpled to the earth as a stalk cut off by the reaper's scythe.

Albus's eyes were lifeless and cold when he asked me to leave. I, who knew him so well, could see the question that ate at his conscience. Whose wand had killed Ariana? I knew, and I suspected that Abeforth knew, but neither of us would tell Albus, and would carry the answer to our graves, for our regard for Albus overrode everything that had happened and both of us knew that, strong though Albus was, he would not survive the truth.

"Before the Aurors and the others arrive," Albus was saying softly. "Before Aberforth rises from grief to contemplation of revenge, begone with you."

"Albus-"

"No," he hissed. "It wasn't meant to be. Mountain, vale - go where he would, grief and sorrow all the same, underneath a sea of blood, while above a sea of flame."

"The anthem," I whispered. Himnusz, my anthem. Albus had memorised it.

"I wanted to please you," he said dully. "You love your country fiercely. I thought, if I recited it to you one day, it would make you look at me the way you look at cragged rocks and falcons and all that remind you of home."

Even then, as he stood wracked by grief and guilt, he was an auburn-headed statue of stoic determination that I wanted to kneel before and surrender to.

"Go home, Gellert," he said. Then he turned on his heel and Disapparated.

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Old. He was old. Weighed down by long decades of responsibility, guilt and grief, Albus Dumbledore was a flame long extinguished, held alive only by the embers of what once was.

"So we meet again," I murmured as he made a bow with flair before raising his wand for the duel.

His eyes met mine then, and they were the same; the same shade of azure that had beckoned me to glorious, mad surrender all those years ago in the desolate waste that was Godric's Hollow in summer. The Elder Wand rested in my grip, smothering me with the heavy, cloying scent of death and power. I held the wand, I was more than my opponent's equal and why, oh, why was I hesitating to strike him down?

He did not hesitate. Long ago, I had thrown my head back and let him draw blood. The Elder Wand forced my power out, battered Albus's defences, and down he fell like a crumpled doll, like Ariana had fallen all those years ago. Something burning clawed its way up my throat and I fought the Elder Wand's bloodlust even as it strove to channel my power for the kill. Blue eyes turned cold and unseeing in death, a gangly body lying limp and broken at my feet, and what would remain? The moment's hesitance was enough for Albus to roll over from his supine position and direct all his might into a spell that ripped through my defences and brought me to my knees in defeat. He shoved himself up and panting, rasped, "It is over."

His eyes were dark blue and his lips were pursed. He was breathing harshly and his wand was trembling in his fingers as he held it to my throat. The Elder Wand rose in my grasp, furious and blazing, and I knew it would kill the man who dared to try vanquishing its possessor. I could not defeat it with my will and magic, but I could let my grip slacken. That is what I did, and it fell to the ground where it lay, a dark streak of ugliness against the blood-rich Hungarian earth.

"What now?" Albus whispered, staring at his shaking fingers. "I cannot take you to any Ministry. They will rip your mind and body until you are as far from humanity as one can be."

"I surrender to you," I said. "Not to any ministry. Avenge Ariana as you see fit. 'Tis the only wrong I have done you. You have no right to be dispense justice in the name of others."

His eyes turned bleak. Then he graced me with a weak, crooked smile and said quietly, "What right have I to avenge Ariana?"

"Take me to my fortress," I whispered. "Take me home."

High in the Carpathians, there stood a lonely fortress which had once resounded with the cries of the tormented prisoners of my regime. Now, against the cragged rocks, etched in lines of black against the Hungarian sunset, the fortress was a veiled widow in mourning.

Albus closed the prison door and performed charms to seal me alive in this tomb. His fingers shook as he extended them through the iron bars. His beard was now the colour of fallen autumn leaves and a far cry from the vibrant auburn that it once had been, and why was I staring at his beard when I had lost everything I had fought to defend? I gritted my teeth and caught his trembling fingers. His eyes were glaring at our clasped fingers and then he said, "Neath the fort, a ruin now, joy and pleasure erst were found-" the rest was cut off with a choking sob, and he dragged my fingers through the bars, and pressed his lips to my knuckles.

"Only groans and sighs, I trow, in its limits now abound," I completed the verse. He clutched my fingers tighter and brushed his lips over my fingertips. "Leave," I murmured.

"I will not return," he told me. "I cannot."

Not even the hungriest waif had stared at food the way I drunk in the sight of Albus's receding figure. Then he crossed the threshold of the castle and closed the huge iron-wrought door, leaving me in the darkness that was to be my lot until the Reaper sought to call me to His side.

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It was not Death who came to be my reaper. It was something far worse than Death. A being warped beyond all laws of humanity, darker than the darkest Wizard, broke into my prison and stood before my prone form.

Voldemort.

Divination was an inexact science but even the weakest Seer of my acquaintance had spoken of the power they saw in the Heir of Slytherin whose ascendant had been rapidly coming to prime according to the divination star-charts even as Albus and I had battled in 1945.

Albus and I had been powerful. We had been drunk on the glorious madness that had been our power. Now here I lay, helpless before a psychopathic immortal, while Albus had shuffled this mortal coil and hastened unto the greatest adventure.

"Tell me what you know of the wand, and I shall be merciful," said smoothly the cloaked figure that stood above me.

"There are so many things that you do not understand," I told the young fool who thought himself invincible, just as Albus and I once had. "Things far worse than death."

Voldemort knew nothing of the agony of two sets of fingers seeking each other through iron bars. He knew nothing of crooked, half-shy smiles and easy surrender and falling endlessly with another into that vibrant land of pain and belonging which the wise men called love. He knew nothing of being an exile in one's own homeland. He knew nothing of the Himnusz that had bound Albus and me closer than any consecrated vow or oath of magic could.

"So ignorant," I whispered, as I stared into the scarlet eyes of my reaper.

I struggled to rise to my feet. Would I crumple at Voldemort's feet as Ariana had fallen all those years ago, like a puppet with its strings cut?

"Atoning sorrow hath weighed down, all the sins of all my days," I rasped as I stood before my reaper, wondering why I felt not even the slightest pang of fear.

A skeletal, robe-encased hand raised a slender wand and soft came the two words I yearned to hear.

"Avada Kedavra."

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External Source Text: All verses quoted in the story are from Himnusz, the national anthem of Hungary.

Rákószi March - a valorous tune which was popular among those who strove to overthrow the Habsburgs.

Karikázo -- is a folkdance popular with Hungarian women.

The Magyars - the ethnic group native to Hungary.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story.

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