As a Grindeldore fan, what do you think their dynamic was like as a couple that summer? Passionate? Soft? Secretive? What do you think they talked about day to day? Why do you think neither of them can get over each other?
okay so have you ever heard of Leopold and Loeb
because understanding them is imho the key to understanding Grindeldore.
there's something immensely isolating about being smart, and both Albus and Gellert evoke this very well. there is a certain level of smartness that once crossed will kind of separate you out from The Group, because no one knows how to relate to you, and you are often discouraged from relating to them so that you can better pursue your Genius Goals, and in many cases your earliest experiences make people raise eyebrows at you and go "huh! oh! okay!" and you feel like a freak. you don't always reap the benefits and only the benefits of being a child prodigy. people think you're very strange and they pedestalize you from a very young age. even as an adult you hear people go "oh you're so smart" because they're categorizing your experiences and their experiences into two different categories.
and if you're queer, it becomes even more isolating. particularly if what you've learned to value about yourself is your intellect - if you have few friends but many admirers, if your family loves you but doesn't understand you. a lot of people classify "giftedness" in children as a delayed social education (you are learning academically while your peers are learning socially, and then you switch at puberty) and I don't really agree with this (for many reasons but not least because Albus and Gellert are not gifted children, they are college dropout who nonetheless is smarter than every active academic in their society levels of self-study intelligent) but I think it's a useful framework for examining how they are.
they can't make friends easily. Albus is a weird prodigy who rockets to the top of the class and makes the news before graduation, and who almost escaped to go on a grand tour of Europe before being dragged back home by his mother's death. Gellert got thrown out of school for... something. possibly something queer, since we do know that Durmstrang teaches what could be called the Dark Arts and that's somehow why he was expelled officially? but he's out.
he goes to stay with an aunt who's the only person who'll take him, in a foreign country where no one speaks the language he grew up speaking (insert obligatory aside about how German was the language of intellectuals and science and philosophy in the late 19th century). and he meets a boy. a boy who notices him. a boy who speaks German, presumably, as Albus is canonically a polyglot, or who can rig up a spell for them to speak to each other by way of magical translation.
and this boy understands him.
this boy knows about all the things he knows about. this boy can keep pace with him. this boy shares his insecurities and his discomfort around the industrialization of the world and the encroachment of Muggles on wizarding enclaves. this boy knows that the current world government is more interested in keeping its population compliant and controlled than in making everyone's lives better. this boy gets it. and they're geniuses, and the world sucks, and everyone's talking about nationalism and great men, and the intellectual climate of Europe is breeding eugenics and fascism in its waters.
and why not take over the world, really? the world is full of problems. the world is full of problems we are smart enough to solve.
and he's beautiful. he's gorgeous. he lets you take him apart in stolen hours and afternoons of passionate, frantic lovemaking. he soothes you when you're grieving over being uprooted from your home country. he dreams of the future and you can see a world you both built together in his eyes. he is, also, just slightly better than you. and you know it. and you can't help melting for him.
I think they talked about politics, about revolutionary theory, about Muggle and wizarding philosophy, about all the sciences and pseudosciences that built the 20th century, about the industrial revolution and how it ruined wizards' lives, about how liberation for one oppressed class (gay men) is liberation for wizards. about how they could fix the world by making it in their image.
it's hard to get over meeting your other half. it's even harder when you both know each side has a point. they can't get over each other because that's the other half of my soul over there and he's trying to serve me divorce papers from inside our shared ribcage.
