A Correspondence Between Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald by M’lah Sihfay
Summary: As two men try to rebuild we read the letters between 1951 and 1997. Approx. 9,500 Words.
Guest Rec’d By: Christy (ChristyCorr – insofar that it was on her Livejournal and I jacked it and put it here.)
Why You Should Care: I’m not a huge slasher and I’m not a big Albus/Gellert fan at all, but I really like this fic. It’s got these fabulous nuances – epistolary styles in general are tricky because you’ve got to show the character, but it’s not like speech where things are blurted out – in letters everything is weighted and thought through. There are clear characters here and I really like that. The way the two rationalise themselves through the first war, the second war – every moment of weakness and strength and the way that neither can ever stop writing, can ever break away. There’s a theme throughout the fic of being ‘broken’ by events and it’s eloquently and interestingly expressed.
Why You Might Not Care: I want to go through this fic and cut out every slightly graphic moment. They’re few and far between, but they’re there and they’re pointless. But it’s a slash fic, and the slashers need their kicks from somewhere, I guess. Probably rated R for the occasional mention of boysex.
Awards: 2008 Hourglass Award, Admins’ Choice — Slash Romance
Coffee and Chocolate 
This is incredibly good. Angel– I admit I went and took this out of “Drabbles” because it’s not really drabbles. It’s a story entire in letters, and they very clearly require the one before it to make sense.
But it’s very, VERY good. The characterisation, the situation, and they all read like real letters. Splendid. Absolutely top-notch.
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Oh, I’ve read that series a while back, and I have to disagree about the graphic moments being pointless! It’s not about the slashers getting their kicks, because wireless_lizard has wrote “Hallowing Lions” for that.
The graphic moments are there, because Albus and Gellert had a relationship, two months of insanity, two short but intense months a century ago where they were intimately together, but never after that. Some relationships start out slow and then settle in, but Albus and Gellert, both people isolated by their intellect, ‘got on like a cauldron on fire’ and then their honeymoon period were abruptly, violently, severed.
The letters were Albus and Gellert grasping through the distance of ink and paper at what they had before, what they’ve lost and missed and denied (judging by the long period of lapses years long when they didn’t write each other) each other and by the world.
I don’t think the letters would have had the intense impact without the graphic moments, because sex is a part of life, a base part that even people like Einstein have. It’s a physical and intense connection they have and then lost. It’s something they definitely didn’t have through the distance of letters, it’s part of what Gellert missed. It’s also what, as Blanche said in A Streetcar named desire, an anti-death, the graphic moments were of something good they had before all the death.
The present of it, therefore, makes the conclusion of the letters series, that much more jarringly painful, when Albus is dead and gone and feel no more of this world.
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