It was impossibly difficult, in the split second after Albus spoke, for Gellert to keep his expression completely immutable. Its youngest Chancellor.... Why tell him this? Why tell him this, unless that Chancellor was Gellert, unless the first wisps of a plan that Gellert was beginning to formulate actually came to eventual fruition? Because it would have been impossible for Albus to have known of Gellert's true designs--Gellert told no one, after all, confided in no one--and without knowledge of those plans, no one would think to lie to Gellert about something like this. But if Albus knew Gellert at all, then he certainly knew Gellert's ideologies. Why inform him of a shift in power in Germany, a shift he thought could be monumental, if not to inform him as to a bit of his own future?
1904. In 1904, Gellert would be twenty, turning twenty-one in early May. A bit sooner than he'd even dared to dream, but he was hardly complaining....
Gellert seized control of his expression, forcing it into something neutral, but not before a flash of triumph flitted across his features.
His lips were still tilted into a polite sort of half-smile when Gellert spoke again, asking a question that was not too closely related to the Chancellorship, but that perhaps might draw more information on the subject out of Albus. Gellert needed to know, but he was not sure, with this effective-stranger, just how overt he could afford to be.