Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.

Notes: Whoa. This fic kind of…exploded. WARNING: Gellert is a maudlin bastard. :D I actually can't tell if he's too, well, emotional, so feedback would be greatly appreciated. :)

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Those were fever days, were they not, my Albus? I remember them now only in lightning flashes, because year after year of this room with its dead solitude would numb even the most brilliant soul; I remember those days in the wet press of your smiling mouth, and in the red shine of your hair as it spilled over my trembling body. I remember the plans we made those days, those days when the future ran hot in our blood and we saw endless possibilities stretching before us.

Oh Albus, we were so young. So powerful. So perfect. I looked you in the eyes the day we first met and knew I had found a kindred soul; do you remember the way we joined together in body and heart and mind, your thoughts bleeding into mine as I pushed you down to the floor and lowered myself onto you? Maybe it is mad, but at times I think I still feel you inside me, and at times I think I still feel your mind brushing mine, and at times I think I still hear your heart's frantic beating against my ear. Maybe it is mad, but then, I suspect I am losing more than a little of my mind here. Slowly I am losing everything but the lingering brand of your touch from those long-ago days.

I don't know what you tell yourself now. I don't know if you tell yourself that I blinded you with beautiful, empty words of a future that never could be. I don't know if you tell yourself that you were misguided, that maybe we were one, but it was only fleeting, and everything now is for the best.

All I know is this: if you are as honest with yourself now as you were with me the day you whispered in my ear, "At times I think you are my own soul caught in another body," then you will tell yourself that everything I believed you believed as well, and the plans we made for the new world fell first from your sweet tongue, and you will tell yourself that you did love me, once. That is only the truth.

I am sure you will refuse to remember or acknowledge what I murmured into your skin all those years ago, which is this: we could have been magnificent. We could have raised this world to levels no one but us has dared to imagine; we could have shaken the ground with the thunder from the very sky; with you by my side, we could have rent time itself asunder. Albus, my love, we could have been gods on this miserable earth.

Age is a terrible thing in its desolation. To see something as a wreck of its former self brings only grief; for this reason I am glad you no longer come to see me. I believe it truly would kill me to face you as I am now, a broken man clinging to memories like a childhood blanket he cannot release.

I think I would not mind seeing you grow old, silver touching the edges of that fierce red hair I once tangled between my quick fingers; but maybe it is for the best. Maybe it is right that you live in my mind a strong, proud seventeen: I hold you there as you were that beautiful summer when we needed no one but each other. I choose not to remember you as my captor, my betrayer, the one who threw me into this place that is slowly taking my mind.

I told you then that I hated you, and maybe I even believed it at the time. Maybe you even believe it now. But the truth is that I still love you, Albus, and in this whole miserable situation, that is the saddest thing of all.

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