Albus couldn’t help his faint smile, although he knew his sister wouldn’t see it from her position in the sweep of his shoulder. “Perhaps we should write to her.”
Another second passed before he felt his sibling’s shaking still, and she gently peeled herself away from him. Albus let her go, and quickly found himself faced with an expression of pure concern. The eldest Dumbledore raised his eyebrows questioningly, sliding his hands into his pockets, and then freezing when he heard Ana’s words.
They didn’t speak of their Mother very often. Albus wasn’t sure why – it was just the way things were. He remembered, as vividly as he remembered anything, the scene when he had found them both. The house wrecked. Their Mother laid motionless on the floor, like a broken doll with the breath literally snatched from her lungs. Ana had been curled closely to her side. Their blonde hair had all been tangled together like a bizarre halo on the rug.
“Ana,” Albus finally said, his voice taking on a new urgency. “That was an accident.” He hesitated, before taking her elbow and pulling them over to the side of the corridor, away from where the portrait still wailed silently in her frame. Releasing Ariana’s elbow, Albus slid to sit on the floor, leaning back against the cool, uneven stone of the wall. “You didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I didn’t know…”
He had been about to say that he didn’t know she remembered it. But now he thought about it, he didn’t know why she wouldn’t. Gaze on his sister’s delicate features, Albus tapped his fingers absently along the fissures in the flagstone at his feet. Tiny, pink-tinged daisies sprouted in the cracks where his fingertips had touched. He’d loved his Mother. She had frustrated him, at times, but he had loved her.