It was actually quite impossible for Albus to forget that Gellert was German. The soft, faintly exotic continental lilt haunted Gellert's words. Albus tried, with little success, to expand the almost other-worldly quality into some grander sense of other-ness.
Where once he'd been able to extend a fair measure of clemency, to presume innocence in Gellert because he had yet to commit his offenses against Albus, that capacity was waning. And he was hardly sure what to make of Gellert's benign behaviour when his mind made constant allowance for the full spectrum of possibility. It was a matter that still rather baffled Albus, the trouble of why Gellert had fabricated such a farce in Godric's Hollow.
Gellert's true intentions were still veiled from his mind, and it was difficult to assign too much malicious intent to the way Gellert had simply played into Albus's fantasies when it seemed as though Gellert had been quite effectively manipulating him while simply stringing out Albus's one-sided feelings. Too often Albus found himself perfectly ambivalent between what he viewed as his own objective analysis and the possibility that he was utterly incapable of objectivity and thus any conclusions he might draw would be invalidated thanks to bias induced by hurt, or the things that lingered within him with regard to Gellert.
"I've rather fallen out of the habit of marking my birthday with any sort of fanfare," he said, ignoring the consideration that it would be all too easy to regret relapsing. It was a bit consoling, really, the knowledge of just how colourful Gellert's celebratory activities could be. Compared to 1899, this felt almost childishly innocent. Then again, it crossed Albus's mind that he only actually knew half the accounting for birthday celebrations that year.
Resting his glass, again, on the arm of the couch, he asked with a transparent amount of genuine curiosity, "How did you mark your sixteenth birthday?"