springsmutfairy (springsmutfairy) wrote in hp_springsmut, @ 2008-03-02 12:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | albus dumbledore/gellert grindelwald, fic, slash |
Happy Springsmut, lesyeuxverts!
Author: penknife
Recipient: chiralove
Title: For Blood and Wine are Red
Rating: NC-17
Pairing(s): Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: It's not that Albus doesn't know better.
Warnings: none
Word Count: ~5600
Author's Notes: All quotations (including the title) are from Oscar Wilde, except for the one from Catullus.
The first time Bathilda came to visit, Albus fervently wished she would go away. He had no patience for smiling politely while she talked about his mother and offering her tea with his most charming manner, hoping that Ariana would not wake up. He had left her sleeping restlessly in the sunbeam that slanted across her bed, with Tibby watching her. All the same, his hands trembled as he poured tea into the china cups and made some light remark and wished her gone.
The second time, Ariana was out in the garden with Aberforth, their voices raised in laughter from time to time, and Albus had taken the few quiet moments that offered to return to his correspondence. He'd gotten nothing but polite refusals so far -- everyone would be happy to offer him a position if he could come to London, to Oxford, to Dublin, but as long as he was detained in Godric's Hollow, they could merely offer him their best wishes. Albus thanked them for their wishes and refrained from pointing out that he could hardly live on them.
He put down his quill at the sound of tapping on the door and Bathilda's cheerful, maddening voice outside the windows. He pushed his chair back resignedly and met her at the door, waving Pompey back to whatever he'd been doing before he scuttled to answer it. She was too likely to go look for him in the garden otherwise.
"I hope you don't mind my dropping in," she said, with no apparent care for whether he minded or not. "I was just passing by with Gellert, and I thought, well, he really ought to meet some of our young people, shouldn't he? It can't be that entertaining spending all his time with an old lady."
"I don't know who you could possibly mean," Albus said obligingly, bending over her hand, but he was looking over her shoulder at the young man behind her. His golden hair curled just over his collar, leaving Albus wondering if he was following a Muggle style or a foreign one.
He was wearing black robes that probably suggested to Muggles that he was some sort of priest, although Albus suspected the residents of Godric's Hollow were used to a fair amount of eccentricity in terms of dress and behavior by now. Anything too eccentric would be cleaned up by Memory Charms as a matter of course; old Aurelius Digsby was a retired Auror who specialized in making sure that alarming rumors in the village died out quickly.
They looked very un-priestly on Gellert, which may have had something to do with the fact that he was wearing them over tall leather boots, or simply with the way he moved in them. He had very blue eyes, and he met Albus's eyes over his aunt's shoulder with a faint smile.
"I'm certainly not tired of your company, Tante Bathilda," he said. An easy and casual lie, and not an unexpected one, but Albus was more interested in the sense that Gellert knew he could sense the lie. He was letting Albus keep the eye contact when it would have been as natural for him to look away.
"Please, let me give you tea," Albus said. "Tibby..." The house-elf materialized at his elbow. "Tea for four."
"Won't your sister join us?" Bathilda asked predictably.
Albus turned up his hands in a gesture of casual regret. "She's not well today," he said, glancing at Tibby. "I expect she'll be lying down." Tibby nodded and scurried off toward the garden, where he trusted she would bully Ariana into going upstairs and Aberforth into some manner of dress suitable for company at all. That would leave Pompey to make the tea, though, and he always burned the cakes.
With his usual frustration at the inadequacy of everything, he murmured something noncommittal in response to Bathilda's continued chatter and waved her and her nephew into the parlor. Bathilda perched on the edge of the sofa, and Albus felt like pointing out that it was perfectly clean even if it did smell unfortunately of goat. Gellert took possession of an armchair and stretched out his long legs, crossing one boot over the other.
He glanced up and caught Albus's eye. Albus made no attempt at occluding his thoughts, and merely visualized his tea service in careful and complete detail. The corner of Gellert's mouth twitched.
"The climate here is so much better than at that dreadful school," Bathilda was saying. "It was just ruining his health. That's why I said he had better come to me, and finish up his education on his own, like a gentleman."
"That's right," Gellert murmured, his eyes meeting Albus's. Another lie, and one that clearly created an opening for attack.
"We've a fair library," Albus said instead. "If there's anything you need to borrow."
"I should like that," Gellert said.
There was a clatter at the door, which Albus hoped would be Pompey with the tea and which instead proved to be Aberforth, looking as though he had been wrestled unwilling into his school robes, which at least had the virtue of not being patched and stained. His hair was a tangle and his shoes were muddy, and he had neglected entirely to put on a collar. Albus felt it would make an even worse impression to send him back to make himself presentable, though, so he pretended obliviousness.
"Pompey's coming with the tea," Aberforth said, dropping down into another of the armchairs.
"My brother Aberforth," Albus said to Gellert by way of explanation, or possibly apology.
Gellert nodded, as if he'd contemplated rising to bow and decided that it wasn't really worth the effort. Aberforth nodded back without any of Gellert's grace. Bathilda looked as if she might have been about to comment on their manners, but was prevented from doing so by the arrival of the tea.
The scones were burnt. It suddenly seemed intolerable; no matter what he did, the house seemed to be full of shabby, dirty, ruined things. Gellert toyed with his scones, giving Albus ambiguous glances over his teacup. Aberforth munched in silence, and Bathilda told a long story about the problems she'd been having with her drains.
"We really should be going," Bathilda said after what seemed like an eternity. "It's a pity we couldn't see poor Ariana."
"I'm sure she'll be desolated to have missed you," Albus said. "But she's been terribly weak today, and I didn't want to ask her to dress for company."
Gellert met his eyes in a question, and Albus didn't return to contemplating the convolvulus teapot. Yes, that's a lie.
"I'll come by to look at the books," Gellert said.
"Feel free," Albus said, and wondered if Gellert knew how his heart raced at the words.
He spent the evening with a stack of books, trying to soldier on with the research he'd barely started after leaving school, confident in the knowledge that he could pick it up after his grand tour. It had seemed like a small thing then to put it all away for months, but now after only a few weeks he couldn't remember what he'd meant to say. He turned his quill round uselessly in his hand.
The pile of letters on the corner of the desk created an accusatory distraction. There were bills that he could pay, but only at the price of watching their small account at Gringotts shrink and melt away. There were letters of rejection, ranging from the apologetic to the dismissive, and a few letters from other scholars, most in the cheerful expectation that they wouldn't actually find him still wasting his time in his mother's house surrounded by goats.
He regarded the pile, feeling momentarily unable to face actually answering any of the letters. He took up the most impossible to answer, a letter from Elphias postmarked from Rome. There was a cheerful little sketch of the Coliseum in one corner, although it contrived to give the impression that the building would immediately fall down.
Most of the time there's no real sense of the past, he'd written, it's all ringed round by new buildings and mobbed by people on package tours. But every now and then, it takes you that way, and you can see what the ancients saw in this place, despite the heat. It's really a terrible hotel, half falling down, but I tell myself I'm not here for the plumbing …
He went on in the same vein, and Albus could imagine all too well the hotel with its crumbling plaster and its tiled patio, and the buildings worn down to bare stone by time, standing like beautiful bare skeletons amidst the color of the modern city. He should have to imagine them, as at this rate he would never see them.
He knew that was overly dramatic. He could Apparate to Rome if he wanted, and walk among the ancient ruins for an hour. At only the small price of Aberforth's accusing look when he returned, and the chance of domestic chaos. And as long as he had no desire to spend money on food or drink while he was there, and no desire to sit up late with a friend quoting ancient poetry and laughing--
He turned the letter over in his hand. Of course it was sensible of Elphias to go on without him. An admirable lack of sentimentality. Albus did not blame him in the slightest, and set the letter aside with every intention of writing back to assure him of it as soon as he could be sure that his tone would not reveal more than he meant to reveal.
When he came down later intending to make himself a cup of tea, Aberforth was sitting in the kitchen, his feet up on the table, reading a grubby newspaper. Albus looked at him wearily. It seemed pointless to insist that Aberforth go and sit in the parlor rather than hanging about the kitchen like the house-elves.
"Ariana was asking for you," Aberforth said sullenly without looking up.
"I'll go up to her," Albus said, putting the kettle back on its shelf and abandoning the hope of tea.
"She'll be asleep by now."
"I said I'd go up," Albus said, keeping his tone mild with an effort. He found her not asleep, but sitting in the window, her bare feet tucked up under her nightgown like a child's, her hair falling loose and tangled down her back.
"Hello, love," he said, brushing his hand over her hair. "Hasn't Tibby been?"
"I want Mummy to do my hair," Ariana said stubbornly. "Tibby always tugs at it so." Albus refrained from pointing out that if Aberforth didn't let her run wild during the day, she wouldn't need snarls combed out of her hair. Instead he murmured a charm over her hair himself and watched at least the worst of the knots undo themselves.
"Can't you sleep?" he asked.
"I want to go out and see the goats," Ariana said.
"It's night-time, love," Albus said. "The goats will all be asleep."
"I like them when they're sleeping. I like the way they breathe."
"You can feed the goats in the morning," Albus said. She didn't seem in too bad a state tonight, and he thought it would probably be safe to go to bed without entrusting her to the vigil of one of the house-elves. The worst she seemed likely to do was go out and sleep in the goat pen, although in the eyes of their neighbors that was probably a sin equivalent to murder and mayhem.
It probably wasn't worth the risk of having one of the neighbors come knocking. "Pompey," Albus murmured. The aged house-elf appeared at the word, glancing unsurprised at Ariana. "One of you should sit with Ariana tonight."
"Pompey will be watching the young mistress," Pompey said. "Tibby will be sleeping by now, and Pompey does not like to be waking her unless the young mistress takes poorly."
"I don't want him," Ariana said. "I want Mummy."
"She wouldn't want you to sit up and wait for her," Albus said.
"I shall," Ariana said, putting her chin on her knees. "Do you think she'll bring me strawberries?"
"I expect there can be strawberries tomorrow," Albus said. He started to kiss her hair, but she shrank from the sudden movement, as she sometimes did, and instead he only smiled wearily at her. "You mustn't sit up all night, love."
"I won't," she said, and he had the door already open when she added, "Only until Mummy comes home."
Gellert came by the house the next day, late enough in the morning that Albus had almost given up and gone down into the village after Ariana's strawberries. Pompey came and found Albus in the library to tell him Gellert was there, and Albus had a sudden unreasonable wish for a mirror. He straightened his collar with hurried fingers, wishing his robes something other than plain brown wool -- it had seemed absurd to put on green or purple for the village, even though he had been hoping --
"Will Master Albus be wanting tea for three, then?" Pompey asked.
"I will not," Albus said. "Give Aberforth and Ariana tea in the kitchen, please. Mr. Grindelwald and I will be in the library." He hesitated, and then added, "Please don't disturb us unless you have to."
He found Gellert in the foyer, examining the family portraits curiously.
"I take it you came to borrow some books," Albus said.
"Something like that," Gellert said, turning to him. He looked like a Renaissance portrait himself, his blond hair making a halo round his face. The foyer felt too small and close suddenly. "I read your paper in Transfiguration Today. The one about the essentially temporary nature of transfiguration."
"Oh?" Albus said, feeling pleased.
"I think you've got it all wrong."
"I think you might have misunderstood my point," Albus said very politely.
"I think you misunderstand mine," Gellert said. "All magic is temporary."
"You're lying about that," Albus said. "Why, I wonder?"
Gellert laughed, looking delighted. "Are we being as honest with each other as all that? Why, I wonder?"
"Come and see the library," Albus said.
Gellert roamed around the library, stretching on his toes to look at the books on the top shelves. His midnight blue robes brushed his calves when he did, swirling around the leather of his boots. "I'm particularly looking for anything about the history of wandmaking," he said.
Albus raised an eyebrow. "If you wanted to be apprenticed to a wandmaker . . ."
"I wouldn't have come to the country," Gellert said. "But then it wasn't my choice."
"What happened at Durmstrang?"
Gellert picked up a book apparently at random and turned it around in his hands. "I put theory into practice," he said.
"I don't understand you," Albus said.
Gellert grinned. "Are you saying that because you're not as intellectually arrogant as I think you are, or because you want me to believe that you're not?"
Albus turned up his hands. "You tell me."
"I'm not that good a Legilimens," Gellert said. "And I've really seen enough of your teapot. Can't you find anything interesting to think about when you're trying to be distracting?"
"Would you prefer poetry? Da mi basia mille, deinde centum . . ."
"That's not the best of Catullus."
"Tell me what was wrong with the Transfiguration paper," Albus said, aware that it might matter what other poems of Catullus they were discussing but not yet willing to follow up that line of conversation.
"Everything," Gellert says. "I liked the one on the seventh use of dragon's blood, though."
"It's a somewhat dubious use," Albus said.
Gellert shrugged. "That doesn't matter," he said, as though it didn't.
By the end of the afternoon they had their heads bent together over a book, tracing out the history of certain famous wands through various holders in Romania. "I'm still not sure where you're going with this," Albus said, although he had to admit that at the moment he hardly cared. Gellert's shoulder was against his, his sleeve tracing patterns against Albus's own when he turned pages.
"That would be telling," Gellert said.
Albus leaned back and looked at him sideways. "And who else is there for you to tell?"
It was a guess, he told himself, or else the voice of his own loneliness speaking, not a way to use the glimpses he'd gotten of Gellert's thoughts against him. It was only a guess, and the proof was in his own moment of worry that he'd pushed too far before Gellert looked up at him, angry pride in his eyes, and said, "No one."
At dinner that night Ariana pushed away her food, and Albus remembered with a sinking feeling about the strawberries. All the same, he hadn't exactly promised, and it was such an absurd thing really. Aberforth spoke only to Ariana, pointedly ignoring Albus, and eventually Albus pushed away his own plate with its congealing pools of sauce and retreated to his study.
He had answered all the letters of the day, and sending more this evening would seem overly forward, as if he needed contact with other scholars far more than was seemly. Instead he took down a book from the shelf, his hand finding not the latest in the series on theoretical Transfiguration he'd meant to read but poetry instead.
Muggle poetry, but there were fewer wizarding poets, and none that suited his mood at the moment. In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks/A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom. A sphinx would be most likely to eat him at the end of her vigil and lick clean the bones, Albus thought, but then he wasn't sure Wilde would disagree.
He'd lightly mentioned the man's reputation to Elphias once, hoping the veiled question would lead them somewhere, but all Elphias had said was that he didn't see that the lives of great men bore upon their work. He'd agreed at the time, feeling sure that once he left school he could arrange his life as he liked and keep it a private matter. He'd looked forward already to a whole year in Europe, where there was no one to mark or remember what he did.
Now, though, he was all too aware of the weight of his responsibilities. He was hardly in a position to risk his connections and his reputation, when his brother and sister depended on his ability to provide for them. Someone might yet express a desire to employ him despite his inability to leave his family's home, but adding even the rumor of an indecent affair would make him entirely unwanted.
He turned his attention back to poetry with an effort.
Who were your lovers? who were they who wrestled for you in the dust?
There was a tapping at the window, and when Albus opened it, an owl dropped a note into his hand. It's a quest, the note said, and below the words was a circle inscribed inside a triangle by the same neat, strong hand.
Albus picked up a quill, trying to keep his attention on the words rather than the way that hand must have looked writing them, fingers curled around the quill, perhaps licking a smear of ink from a fingertip. Tell me more, he wrote.
The moon was high by the time he finally went upstairs, and when he looked into Ariana's room, he found her sleeping, curled up barefoot on the blankets, her fingers stained red. His breath caught for a moment until he saw on the windowsill the discarded hulls of wild strawberries.
He looked into Aberforth's room as well, wanting to thank him for the strawberries and the brief hours of domestic peace, but Aberforth was asleep, too, with one of the baby goats in his bed, his arm around its flank. Albus wasn't sure what would happen if he woke him -- for one thing, he'd have to say something about the goat -- and so he just let the door shut between them again. His father might have known what to say, but he was in prison, and always would be.
Gellert came by in the morning, leaving Albus frantically unsure how to manage without simply sending him away. Ariana was in the parlor with Tibby trying to keep her busy knitting, which was fine for the moment but could end in any way from Ariana coming to show him the fine muffler she had made him to the knitting bursting into flames. "We could walk along the fields," Albus offered.
Gellert didn't seem eager for fresh air. His robes that day were a deep scarlet, the color of claret. It gave a faint pink cast to the curves of his ears and the line of his chin, and turned his hair brassy in the sunlight. "I'd rather see more of your library," he said.
"All right," Albus said, and locked the door behind them when they went in. "I've been thinking about what you said last night about the Elder Wand."
Gellert glanced pointedly at the locked door. "Is that all you've been thinking about?" He stepped in close enough that Albus could feel the warmth of his breath, and looked up to meet Albus's eyes.
Albus filled his mind with the written page and dry letters set in type. He did not wear his scarlet coat, for blood and wine are red. He had been so careful to wrap himself up in dry print that by now he should be made more of paper than of flesh and blood. It ought to have become habit by now to deny that he wanted things he couldn't have.
"What are you afraid of?" Gellert slid his hands up Albus's arms, very deliberately. "We can do whatever we want."
Albus grasped Gellert's arms and kissed him, pressing their bodies together, too many layers of dry cloth between them except where their mouths touched, hot and wet and real. He could feel himself getting hard at the barest touch, straining for more. There was no particular taste to the kiss, and all the same he found himself thinking of wine.
He reached up to tangle one hand in Gellert's curls, tracing the angle of his cheekbone with the fingers of his other hand, wanting to explore every inch he'd ever wanted to touch. "I won't let it be something I never dared."
Gellert smiled, not a particularly kind smile. "Are you afraid of me?"
"I'm not afraid of anything," Albus said, although his mind was running hurriedly over possibilities for what Ariana and Aberforth were currently doing, and trying to calculate how long they would stay safely occupied, and what he would do if there were a knock on the door.
"Then prove it," Gellert said. He unfastened one of Albus's cuffs, turning the cuff link around in his fingers so that it caught the light. "I want to see you naked."
"It's daylight," Albus said.
"Are you ashamed?"
He suspected he was ashamed, even if he wasn't afraid, but he reached down and unfastened the other cuff link without looking and dropped it into Gellert's outstretched hand. He was shaking already, and when Gellert's hands went around his throat to unfasten his collar studs, he turned his head, his mouth brushing the line of Gellert's jaw.
"You want this, too," he said, tangling one hand again in Gellert's hair.
"I want you to prove you're not afraid of me," Gellert said.
"You want someone to love you," Albus said. "You want someone to worship you." When their eyes met he was sure for a moment that it was true, replaced by deliberate thoughts of hastily-sketched figures coupling as if in an obscene cartoon.
"Is that what you call wanting to fuck me?" Gellert said. One sketched figure bent another over, putting its oversized phallus to good use, and then evaporated as the eye contact broke.
"Is that what you want me to want?"
Gellert toyed with one of the buttons of Albus's robe, undoing it very slowly with graceful fingers. Albus felt they both had more buttons than he wanted to deal with, and murmured a charm to undo them.
"Precipitous," Gellert said, sitting on the arm of a chair to take off his boots.
"I'm in no mood for Gordian knots," Albus said, sliding off his own shoes. "And you haven't answered my question."
In answer, Gellert shrugged off his robes, leaning naked against the chair, one elbow draped across its back. "What else am I to believe you want right now?" He was beautiful as a classical statue, if classical statues posed mockingly like girls on the music-hall stage.
"Wisdom," Albus said as lightly as he could. "The secrets of life and death. To be wearing better-looking socks."
"And?"
Albus removed his clothes by way of an answer, including the offending grey wool socks. It felt something like undressing in the dormitory at school, trying -- once he had realized that not everyone shared his uncomfortably acute interest in whether the other boys were watching -- to behave as if it was no consequence who saw his body, indeed as if his body were no consequence.
It was hard to do that when Gellert drew his fingers down the plane of Albus's stomach, and impossible when Gellert stopped with his fingers resting in the nest of copper curls above his prick. "Worship me, then," Gellert said.
"I thought you wanted something else," Albus said mildly.
"Suck my prick," Gellert said. "Get down on your knees and suck it, or I swear ..."
When he went down on one knee he could press his mouth to Gellert's nipple, which didn't seem to have the same effect it did when he played with his own at night, not until he bit. Gellert let out a ragged breath and said something in German that sounded obscene. Albus couldn't help wishing he'd figured out a means of translation before they started.
He went down on both knees, although he wasn't entirely sure he liked it. He raised his chin, thinking it felt a little much like surrender, but then here was Gellert's prick close enough for him to breathe on it, swollen and red, and he had to taste. It tasted odd, but he opened his mouth and pretended he was sucking on something sweet and took as much of it as he could in, as if he were stopping his mouth with his fingers in an effort at silence.
Gellert had a handful of his hair and was running it through his fingers. "And they're taking him to prison for the color of his hair," he murmured in English before returning to his soft, breathless litany of foreign obscenity.
I thought you said you didn't read Muggle poets, Albus thought, but it was hard to concentrate on anything but wondering if he was doing it right. He had his hands cupped round Gellert's buttocks, exploring the curve there with his fingers, the hot cleft between them opening up to his questing hands. Gellert swore and thrust, nearly choking him, and then spilled hot and bitter into his mouth. He swallowed it down, refusing to balk at the cup he'd asked to drink.
Albus worked his fingers into the cleft of Gellert's arse, finding the place that yielded to the pressure. "I'll fuck you," he said softly. He was picturing it already, his prick where his fingers were, the ache in his balls turning to mounting pleasure --
Gellert laughed and licked his lips. "What if I say you can't?"
Albus turned away, feeling as if someone had poured cold water down his back. He got to his feet, awkwardly, not reaching for his robes because there was no point in trying to deny the fact that he was naked and entirely exposed. "Of course not."
"Wait," Gellert said, in a different tone, as if he saw some door closing between them that he hadn't taken seriously as a barrier. "I didn't mean it."
"Do what you like," Albus said.
Gellert traced the curve of his cheek with his fingers, a touch that might have been meant as comfort or simply exploration. "Who did you want that you couldn't have?"
"A friend," Albus said. "It doesn't matter."
"It won't matter now," Gellert said, and Albus found himself closing his eyes and turning his face against Gellert's soft hair.
After a long moment he drew back, the weight of everyday cares starting to settle on him again. "I don't see how we can get upstairs without being interrupted."
In answer Gellert knelt easily in front of the chair, resting his elbows on its cushion. It seemed impossible in the shabby, familiar study, as if someone had painted an obscene masterpiece across a faded postcard. He spread his knees and Albus knelt behind him, unable to keep from trembling. He spread Gellert's buttocks with his hand, digging his thumbs in, and Gellert tensed.
"Don't they teach household charms at Hogwarts?" he asked a bit sharply. "Use oil."
It took Albus what seemed like an eternity to find his wand, and pressing its tip between Gellert's buttocks nearly made him lose control of himself. He did the spell wordlessly, tracing a fine line of oil around the puckered opening, and then sliding the tip inside. Gellert's breath caught, and for a moment Albus couldn't move, all too aware of his power, and of the way it made his heart pound.
Then he drew the wand away and dropped it to the hearthrug, laying at least that power by. He took his prick in hand and tried to take aim. It seemed impossible, as though it would surely be painful even with the oil. He pressed in, meeting some resistance, and suddenly desperately unwilling to stop despite it.
"Careful," Gellert demanded, but Albus couldn't move carefully, couldn't keep from jerking his hips. He wanted to bear down with all his weight, and tried to hold still instead, moving only in breathless hungry jerks, but some part of him didn't want to be careful; he wanted to take everything he'd wanted since he first knew these vices existed, everything he'd ever been denied.
He tried to hold still, but one more rhythmless thrust of his hips wrung it from him, and he groaned and withdrew, the summer air cold against his suddenly bare skin.
"I'm not sure that's entirely the theory," he said after a moment, unsure whether this was going to fall apart into laughter or harsh words at any minute.
Gellert's forehead was still bent to his arms. He raised his head and laughed under his breath, but in a way that seemed to be inviting Albus to share the joke. "The problem isn't theory so much as execution, I think," he said. "I still have high hopes for the future, though."
Albus sat down on the hearthrug, still naked, and considered him. "How often have you actually done this?"
"Twice before," Gellert said. "It wasn't exactly perfect either time."
Albus shook his head at him and brushed blond hair away from the curve of Gellert's cheek fondly. "You could try doing the same to me," he said. "I think I can stand imperfection."
"I'd rather attempt the perfect," Gellert said, but he took Albus's hand and put it on his naked thigh, and after a moment Albus moved his hand upward, seeking the soft curls he knew he would find.
Later, with the moon high outside and the candles burning down, he wrote for the impatiently waiting owl to carry, Tell me what happened at Durmstrang.
The reply was what he expected: Tell me why you don't want me to meet your sister.
Come and see me now, and I'll tell you, Albus wrote. He didn't expect anything, but after a while he heard soft footsteps on the lawn, and then a soft shower of pebbles against the window, falling like a spatter of rain.
He went to the window and threw it open, and Gellert climbed in without complaint. Albus closed and latched the window and turned to see Gellert rifling through the books on the table, picking one up and turning it over in his hand.
"Why Wilde?" Gellert asked. "He's only a Muggle." He tossed the book in the air and caught it, crumpling pages in the process.
"You've read him, too," Albus said.
Gellert shrugged. "I've read a lot of things." He wrapped his hand around a bunch of pages as if he meant to tear them, a deliberate provocation that Albus tried not to pay more attention than it deserved.
"They put him in prison," Albus said. "And I don't think that it was right --"
"They're rarely right," Gellert said. "How can you expect them to be?"
"If there were some way …" Albus began, not entirely sure he wanted to carry the thought through, or not entirely daring to.
"If we made the rules, they'd be better ones," Gellert said, an answer to the question Albus hadn't quite asked. He was entirely sure that Gellert believed it.
He suspected that he believed it himself. "I'll tell you about Ariana," he said, and he didn't let himself question why Gellert smiled like there was something he had won.