Greater Good

For goddessa39, without whom I suspect that this would have stayed in fic limbo for at least another three months.

At one point I had 1600 words that made no sense at all so I deleted all of it except the first sentence and started over. It was one of the most painful things I ever did. Truth was my first attempt to write this. Don't ask me how I went from Dumbledore to Ginny. I don't know myself.

Gay!Dumbles is technically canon so I'm running with it.

Published: 12/07/11

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride and Albus would have found absolution in a young man's eyes. He doesn't. Gellart's eyes are still shining and blue as he speaks hate. Funny you that never realized before.

It starts somewhere else. And ends another place entirely.

Albus is eight and in love with the muggle girl who lives across the street, five houses down. You show her magic pulling little flames into existence from nowhere. She is taller then you and she knocks your hand away as you offer them to her. She calls you a freak and runs away crying. You will regret this moment for the rest of your life. Not because of what occurred then but because of what happens next.

Your mother makes you apologize to the girl (whose name you cannot remember, but should given what she sets in motion.) and your mother chats with her mother on the front porch when you apologize for being a wizard. The words taste like ashes on your tongue. You resent her, your mother for making you apologize to a muggle.

Your mother is proud for all that she is muggleborn. She slaps you when you return home, tells you not to ever put her in a position where she must apologize to a muggle again.

You learned secrets and lies at her knee and you are terribly proud. Why not? You are a wizard a strong one if the early displays of magic decide anything.

You're a goddamn fool. It takes you six decades to realize that and at that point your path is set in stone, lined with granite.

That muggle girl, the one you loved, she tells her older brother about the flames dancing on your palm. He and his friends watch your house. They are teenagers large and intimidating. Ariana was playing in the backyard dancing pulling ribbons of magic to dance with her. They swirled and sparkled. Your father was at work, your mother apparated to Diagon Alley, leaving you in charge. Abe and you are in the house and your little sister is alone.

You don't even hear her screams.

It's not guilt that consumes you. It's disgust. You have no sister. And then you have no father.

You go to Gryffindor because the hat believes you to be too shortsighted for Slytherin, too ambitious for Ravenclaw. Hufflepuff was never even an option.

You are powerful and you devote yourself to the pursuit of power. (Looking back you wonder what exactly differentiates you from the Dark Lords you devote your life to putting down. You don't think about this for very long content in the knowledge of your superiority.)

You have no sister. But when you return home during breaks you sit beside your sister and watch her knit (one, purl one). Aberforth is her favorite brother and you are barely tolerated but you can watch her knit for hours. She puts her magic into it and it makes her less volatile. For Christmas and your birthday you receive socks. Thick woolen socks the patches of individual threads gleaming like gold or giving off glitter or color-changing continuously. You have no sister.

At Hogwarts you network. Find the connections necessary to place yourself highly in life. By the time you are fifteen the school's social life revolves around you. By the time you are sixteen you are a black hole dragging in everything in Hogwarts. You taste life through the comforts your allies (you never call them friends) bring to you. This is only right. You are stronger then them. They bring you books, music, wine, food, gifts, (the whole world. All you have to do is smile.)

You are likeable. It's easy enough. A smile and twinkling eyes, a couple lines of perfectly generic advise. Your hair doesn't quite work with the image you are cultivating but the contrast allows you breaks from character not that they appear often. Ginger hair skips grey entirely, going straight to shining white. In fifty years the image you will make will be striking.

The hat called you shortsighted. Sixteen and arrogant you believe you've outrun prophecy.

Sixteen and arrogant and one of your friends offers you a Dark Arts tome.

Seventeen and the world at your feet, you buried your mother yesterday and you feel nothing.

Abe resents you. Ariana is mad. Is any wonder that you try to avoid your house as much as possible? You meet him through a mutual acquaintance and he smiles much the same way you do at those you are cultivating. Gellert Grindelwald has plans. You listen. His plans are brilliant. He intends to change the world with plans so much grander then your own. You would have changed the world one person at time. He intends to change the world all at once in a stroke of magic and power and create something… beautiful.

The ends justify the means and you are working for the greater good.

When you are together power rolls off you, bouncing back and forth, magnified. It's like heat, the suns rays on your face, matches burning close to fingers.

He is beautiful. Handsome and clever and when he smiles he is beautiful. You love him three days after meeting him. You are in love with him within a week. You would follow him anywhere within two.

That summer you are inseparable. He is cultivating you, you realize this but you don't care. It feels genuine when you are with him.

You cross at least four of your personal and moral boundaries during those sun soaked days. If only it was always like this. Then you introduce him to your family. Abe resents him. In the few moments when he can catch you without Gellert, he points out all the facts you conveniently ignore. Gellert was expelled from Drumstrang for experimenting with the blackest of arts. He had a thing for muggle baiting. You take to pretending Abe does not exist.

Far harder is ignoring the study Gellert puts into your little sister. (You have no sister.) Ariana is pretty, brilliant in her moments of lucidity. They become more common when Gellert is with her. She is broken and proof of everything Gellert believes in, a reason for hate. Proof muggles are lesser creatures to have broken her.

You watch him watch your sister (insane broken beautiful) spin. He combs his long fingers through Ari's hair and you ache because he loves her. You hate your sister, an unworthy feeling.

The revolution. It was for her. For a century you try to lay your guilt on your sister's grave. Bitter and jealous with a lifetime of mistakes behind you, you make the same mistakes again. History repeats with you aiding it.

Your sister died in the summer. She's been dead for ten years but she died in the summer, this summer in 1899. The fight is. Abe angry over the idea of them bringing Ariana on their quest. Gellert insistent that she comes with you. She will be safe and when it's over she won't have to hide. You say nothing standing between the two. Abe calls him cruel and manipulative and you step in knowing that it is true. You still take Gellerts side.

Gellert and you against your younger brother. He does not stand a chance. Words are thrown a lifetime of resentment between the two of you then curses. Gellert watches triumphant. This was his aim all along.

You never saw her running down the stairs. This is truth. Your spell kills her, not Gellert, as you will later tell the world.

Your sister is dead, fallen back, her expression peaceful. Her hair spreads around her a halo and the grief in Gellert's eyes is real, the first uncalculated emotion you have ever seen from him. Your sister is dead. She died in the summer but you have had no sister for the past ten years. You just burned all your bridges in a fifteen-minute fight.

Your brother will never forgive you and neither will Gellert. In this they are united.

You nearly threw away what you built for him. For easy smiles and calculating blue eyes and a man in love with your little sister.

Sometime during this summer the Greater Good has been engrained into your patterns of thought. You move on with a crooked nose, a gift from your brother who is unlikely to ever speak to you again.

Life is easy for you. Perpetual motion eases your heart so you make a point of becoming great. Perhaps one day it will be enough. (Enough to bring Gellert back to you.) To the west there are whispers of a man rising.

He does not care. Then again Dumbledores have always been particularly good at lying to themselves.

Albus takes the job at Hogwarts the same year Gellert begins his campaign to change the world. He is likable and easygoing. His students love him and he plays chess his students, pointing them towards jobs where their aptitudes will serve them well. His favorite students he points towards Germany and rumors of power.

You give Gellert two decades because you want to see this world that they would have built.

You meet Tom Riddle in between, and for a moment history swims forward and you see yourself in this handsome, clever, charming boy. More importantly you see Gellert in this boy.

You are too harsh. In retrospect you know this. You saw the fading bruise on his face and said nothing. You allowed this to happen because you could not find it in you to care for a desperate, angry, manipulative child. You are doomed to repeat your mistakes, the hat's prophecy.

You reject the boy and isolate him during the summer with a few well-placed words to Dippet. You try to limit the harm he will do and only increase it. If you can cared for him, seen him placed where he would be cared for you could have changed the future. Instead you repeat the past.

Time slips into three decades and is halfway to four before he can bring himself to face the man he loved.

For the greater good, Gellert says, smirk still firmly fixed upon his face. The signs of age on his face are few and far between. He asks how your brother is doing. He says nothing of your sister.

The fight is brutal and angry. You were betrayed but you cannot bring yourself to kill him. You are sixty and your hair is white, and you offer him imprisonment in his tower. Time to ruminate on his regrets. He only has one. (A girl with golden hair and blue eyes similar to yours.)

Tom Riddle graduates the year you defeat Gellert (who never becomes Grindelwald to you.) and disappears. You are weary but still find the time to go to Nurmengard on the day she died with intention of hurting him. On this day when he was free there were always flowers on your sister's grave.

Life goes on and passes you by.

In the seventies Voldemort rises on the ashes of Tom Riddle. You have trained a generation and they belong to you body and soul. You have made your mistakes twice and you will not see them repeated.

So you organize a group, call them Order of the Phoenix for the shining white wizard you have trained yourself to be. If only they realized just how close you came to being the enemy. They belong to you petty and brilliant and young. You will (have) change(d) the world.

You love them as your children and think it is only right to keep them in the dark because is that not what parents do? Lie to protect their children. It is incredibly easy to contain information and you alone can see the chessboard sprawled between Tom and yourself.

Halloween the year you turn one hundred is an anomaly. Unpredicted. You do not like the feeling of surprise.

So you overturn your lieutenant's objections and place the boy with his muggle relatives with the understanding that he will have ten dark and difficult years ahead of him. Abused children make the best followers and the boy needs to follow you to his fate.

You train your second generation waiting for your weapon to be welcomed back into the fold.

The first time you see him in ten years the impression of a bruise on high cheekbones is fading, much like Tom Riddle. For a moment he sees nothing in Harry's eyes and is terribly afraid. He cannot afford another deviation from the game.

Then the awareness fades from Harry's (Lily's) eyes (another terribly cruel manipulation of his) and he is left yet another empty-headed child in awe of his surroundings. You catalog the shift and observe. But seems to be an outlier as the boy remains unaware of everything, heedless of the casual way he threw Harry into the path of Hagrid and the Weasleys, to ensure a Gryffindor saviour.

The mirror shows only Harry and this frustrates you. He is not supposed to be happy. The other option does not occur to you until it is far too late.

You leave the school purposely on the night an attempt on the stone will be made, a test for your pawn (who thinks itself a knight). You have been dangling hints in front of him all year. The run goes better then you thought it would. Harry proves himself, Voldemort is banished another year, and all went to plan. You give Harry meaningless words. Perfectly empty advice, something you perfected while still a teenager.

It is incredibly easy manipulating this boy. Secrets and lies learnt at your mother's knee and you create something extraordinary. A hero.

You are not certain when exactly you realize his movements do not match with your intended plan. Perhaps it was third year when he saves Sirius Black (who you condemned to Azkaban because he would have interfered with your plans for the chosen one). Sirius was supposed to die then and prevent Harry from freeing himself from the Dursleys. Or even earlier when he chooses the muggleborn girl over the youngest son of the Weasleys.

No, that isn't right. You ignored them as minor breaks from plan (you call it free will and allow it when it doesn't change the plan).

You notice only when the complete break occurs. By that point it is too late. Granger leaves the school and you point the Weasleys in his direction, still aware of what's to come.

The note says, "You can go fuck you Greater Good."

A lifetime of mistakes compounded by seven words. A magically powerful number.

You used the phrase Greater Good only once around Harry. He extrapolated from that your plan, thoughts, history even. You wonder where he learned to disassemble so thoroughly.

You'll ask him when you find him.

Damn. It's finally FINALLY written and sorta cohesive and not awesome or anything but ok. Um. Let's see I own nothing. Dumbledore is difficult for me to write because I'm very conflicted about him. Rowling said he was the "epitome of goodness" but his actions are very much that of a manipulators. He is difficult to write and the black-white morality of the Harry Potter books, leaves his character a bit flat so I gave him a bit of nuance.

I specifically didn't go into Dumbledore learning Dark Arts because I've read the fanfic theories and only a few do it justice, none of the ones I like would have worked well with this story. Just keep in mind that he did.

This concludes the main story of Altered Perceptions. Other perspectives might be posted later as individual stories. One is already up (that's Truth if your interested.)

Comments are useful, flames are not. Give me your thoughts I'd like to hear them