"Trust me, you shouldn't want anyone like me on your back."
"Maybe I don't want anyone like you on my back," His eyes darkened as he stepped closer, confining me tighter into barely any space as my back pressed against the wall.
"Maybe I want you. U...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
trigger warning: gore/blood/strong language
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NOT YET A CORPSE, STILL HE ROTS was what anyone would believe if they looked at him, here and now. A man, devoid of his wand, his powers, his strength—bound up in heavy and rusted iron chains he had had no will left perhaps to toss and turn in. A man who used to be more than that once, a dark wizard with prestige and self made honor, carving rivers for his own respect with the blood of those who did and did not fear him.
You could never tell once, if it was fear that he wanted from people, or if he just wanted their lives for the plain satisfaction of it.
Not yet a corpse but still he rots. That was not it. I knew better than that. Gellert Grindelwald would never rot if he had life left inside of him. He would never rot if he was still capable of breathing. He would never rot if his heart was still beating—regardless of where or why, or when.
The single thick shard of moonlight—considerably wide—from the square window fell on the ground, inches in front of my feet. I was drenched in the darkness the moon had neglected—and so was he.
With his back against the wall under the high up window, knees pulled up to his chest, the once mighty dark wizard sat with his head resting on the wall behind him. I couldn't see him, my eyes only allowing me a faint outline of his hunched form and stealing from me the right to look at the worn details of the man I had despised for longer and harder than the entire world had.
He had sensed my presence, I knew that. The heavy iron chains binding him shifted the tiniest bit, as though he was straightening himself, or straining to make my form out. I knew he couldn't see me as well, but I knew he didn't need to. The small movement of iron rang in the silence of the cell.
"Do you feel like a young goddess?"
His voice was guttural and low, and it took me hurtling back into memories stored away and locked at the back of my brain. Snippets of conversations, snippets of his anger, snippets of his joy—everything I had overheard, words drenching out past his lips, furious and firm in every case to a little girl who seemed to know and expect nothing else from such a man.
"Answer me," He spoke again, and I stiffened, before realizing that there was no fury in his tone—just a contentment that seemed like it did not belong.
His French was just as I remembered too, curt and a little rough around the edges, making him sound demanding every time he spoke. Gellert Grindelwald's mother tongue was the rich slew of waves of Hungarian. He was born there, before his younger brother—my grandfather's—birth in France two years later.
The dark wizard believed in embracing the tongue of the land he had opened his heterochromic eyes in, and despite no other in our family speaking that language, I heard him spew it out often enough in his anger.
