“Who will love you when I’m gone, Albus?”
He leaps, down, towards the cold wind torrent that is biting his skin. For a split heartbeat he considers not Apparating; simply falling from the cliff of that mountain, of that castle and that platform that had shattered him so helplessly inside. Easily, effortlessly even.
Just like the Blood Pact, the crimson and sapphire little lights that floated so carelessly out of its sheath of wrought silver, and then the Pact cracked, the lights vanished, and the sound of lightning crackling and glass breaking hits him like a sonic boom. So easily. So effortlessly.
But no, Albus had not even blinked, barely spared a glance at the shattered capsule. It had not seemed like a pain to him, he had not paled nor had his eyes widened in terror.
He thinks of the Pact, and time seems to slow as the ferocious wind furiously pushes up against his torso.
No more, never to be no more, no possibility nor memory of regaining now. He is now truly the Black Wizard of the century and there is nobody, nothing there that can stop him.
No more laughing blue eyes nor vision sharp as the half moon, no more scolds nor sharp reprimands, no more of that piercing vision that he could just see right through his body and soul. He could all just leave this behind, all of this behind him, he knows he can, just like that, with the sound of shattering glass and shattering heart.
It’s like a shard of that silver plunged into his throat and now stays there quivering, refusing to slide out no matter how he tried to extract it. No matter how he gripped his neck, tightened his fingers, choked himself until his breathing was shallow and his lips were blue.
Each breath is a new stabbing pain.
Not Apparating would be a relief, the way he would simply smash down on the rocks below the cliff and lose consciousness forever in an instant is an inviting thought, and he barks out a low laugh that is cracked and dry. That would be making it too easy, too effortless for them. For him. For Albus.
He knows that the day of the final match will come and he will not die before then.
A last chance, a last strand of pathetic hope that he is desperately holding onto like a drowning man to a piece of wood, that this just might somehow just work out alright.
Like he’d told him so many times 30 years ago in that room, on that bed, kissing him tenderly on the lips and caressing his soft, smooth skin. Hearing him murmur out sweet nothings at his touch and snuggle into his lap. Hearing his laugh and seeing him smile.
“Trust me Albus, everything will turn out just fine. Just you and me, safe and happy together.”
The fight, the lights, the fire in the sky and that last final scream of agony and fury as the killing curse did not hit its target but instead the raven-haired girl that had come down the stairs, her brows a pale alabaster and a soft frown upon her slightly freckled face. The freezing of her lips into an O, and then the time slowing as she was slowly but forcefully propelled back by force and hit the wall with a sickening snap of her spine. He watched, arms folded, cold and uncaring, Albus’s fevered rush to her side, the panicked shouting, the hysterical howling, the falling to his knees and sobbing out incoherent apologies to some higher being to give his only sister in his life back to him. The slap of Aberforth that resonated through the broken walls of the house and remained howling with the wind, the dry, marrow-freezing wind.
Albus’s glasses had cracked straight into two halves and went flying, as blood gushed out of his nose in huge waves and dripped down to the floor. His head turned towards him, the watching him, leaning against the wall as if with not a care in the world and there was glazed tears in his eyes.
“Get out.”
30 years, 30 years of torturous waiting, plotting, rising, massing, rallying, creating and spurring massive slaughter and destruction from his followers, 30 years of agony, 30 years of waiting to see him, eye to eye.
Their hand clasped onto each other’s hearts as their wands calmly pointed to each other’s foreheads in deadly momentum.
Nobody made a move.
All was still, all was silence, the only sound existed in the world was the shallow breathing and the slight trembling in his voice as he spoke.
“Are we going to kill each other, Gellert?”
Fire crashing against the roaring waves of the ocean as their gazes met in sharpened ferocity over the tips of their wands.
In his there was desperation.
He could feel the steady heartbeat pulsing in his fingertips, could see the rosy lips breath out the words that stabbed like knives at his heart, and the memory of what they felt like upon his snatched at him, threatened to suffocate him in their pale white clutches.
The soft cinnamon curls bouncing against his shoulders as his arms wrapped around him, his tender caresses down his spine that always sent shivers of electricity and warmth down his whole body.
Time slowed.
And then the Pact broke.
All gone.
All gone.
It hurt like nothing before and it drained all his will to remain upright and standing.
The pain tore him apart.
Now, falling, the wind whipping at his hair, he thinks that he knows his fate, and it should have belonged to the sapphire-eyed man that had pushed him off the cliff. To his heart, to his beloved with all his soul, his body, and his mind.
“Who will love you when I’m gone, Albus?”
A ghost of those desperate words tears out of his lips as he gives into his heart, twists his body in the air and spreads his arms as if attempting to embrace the cold hard stone. The familiar feeling of an iron fist squeezing his lungs into nothing rushes into him as he manages to Apparate just a few inches from hitting the ground.
Maybe just a few years later. He could wait.