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They had not noticed the sun set. It was still bright after all, and Gellert’s bedroom faced the east. It was only as the words before Albus’ face began to blur into the parchment and he had removed his glasses for the third — no, fourth — time to rub his eyes, that he blinked suddenly and looked around the room, to realise they were sitting in semi-darkness.
“Goodness, is that the time?” he murmured, feigning a yawn and sitting up from his seat on the bed.
“Is what the time?” asked Gellert, not moving from the desk where his nose was almost touching the parchment he was writing on.
“I don’t know. Dusk, I suppose.”
“Ah, l'heure bleue?”
“Oh là là.”
Gellert smirked at the effect his speaking in any other language had on his English companion. Albus blushed and smiled too. Neither of them saw the other’s, as both were too shy to look up.
Albus softly closed his book, returned his glasses to his nose after a cleaning more out of habit than necessity, then wandered over to the desk where Gellert sat with his writings.
“I suppose it is rather blue,” he said, placing his hand on the back of the chair and leaning over the desk to peer out of the window.
Gellert watched him do this, eyebrows raised in slight amusement. Albus glanced down, and quickly away, blushing again in the dark. Since Gellert had arrived in Godric’s Hollow Albus had found himself suddenly existing in his physical body for what might have been the first time, half wishing to be wholly invisible, half longing to be seen.
He turned quickly, and sat against the desk instead. “Did you know—?”
“—That there are three types of twilight?” Gellert interrupted, chewing on the end of his quill with a mischievous smile. “Yes, you might have mentioned it before.”
“Well, what’s really interesting—” Albus barrelled along anyway, “—is that now that it’s midsummer it’s never fully nighttime.”
Gellert made a face at him, slouching back in his chair.
“No, really,” said Albus, nodding. “It’s true.”
“It can’t be true,” Gellert argued, waving his hand. “It’s blue out now — navy blue. It will be fully night in no time.”
“No, it won’t, it will only be astronomical twilight.” Albus beamed. “Isn’t that fascinating?”
The pause suggested it wasn’t. The wrinkled nose suggested a disapproval of the whole thing entirely. “What’s the definition of astronomical twilight, then?”
“When the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon,” said Albus, raising a finger smartly. “The geometric centre of the sun, specifically, although that’s rather obvious.”
“But what is it? What does the sky look like? What distinguishes it from night?”
Albus paused, then fished his notebook from his back pocket — Gellert, unnoticed, watched the movement of his hips as he did. Albus muttered to himself as he flipped pages. “Hum, hum… visibility of stars and celestial bodies… sky no longer lit by the sun…”
He trailed off, paused, then shut his notebook quickly. Gellert snatched it from him and twisted in his chair, hoping Albus might clamber over him to get it back, but Albus only thumped him and sighed. Wishing to save face, Gellert leapt up himself, turning the notebook around to shove under his friend’s crooked nose. “In some places, indistinguishable from night! Ha!”
“In some places. Not here, I imagine.”
“And why not here?”
Albus looked around, frowning innocently. “Well, it’s… it’s very dark here.”
They looked at each other’s faces for a moment in the dim light. Truthfully, it wasn’t that dark. Not yet, anyway. There were still colours, although most of them seemed to have bled into varying shades of blue and ochre by now. Albus’ hair and eyes were still distinguishable, when Gellert looked close. His own hair, to Albus, was incandescent.
Gellert found himself warm, almost restless, from standing so close to his friend. He placed his hands on the desk and leaned over to peer out the window instead, just as Albus had done a moment before. Albus’ eyes raked over him while he wasn’t looking, jumping to his face as he turned back around.
“We shall have to test this hypothesis of yours, you know.”
“It’s not a hypothesis, Gel, it’s widely—” It occurred to Albus that he was arguing against what might have been a very rare opportunity, and corrected, “Oh, yes — we really must.”
Gellert placed the small notebook on his desk, spreading the pages. He dipped his favourite quill and poised it ready. “We shall stay up ’til midnight,” he said, beginning to write.
“Not exactly midnight, though,” said Albus. “It would have to be the midpoint between dawn and dusk. Or, the midpoint of astronomical twilight, really.”
“Well, when’s that?”
Albus turned and leaned on the desk next to his friend, their shoulders bumping. As an unspoken rule, they were always touching, whenever, wherever possible. Gellert passed him the notebook and quill, the two of them fumbling a little on purpose so as to glance touches of hands — both thinking themselves terribly sly for the manoeuvre, whilst both failing to notice the slyness of the other. Albus flipped back a few pages, to his data on the time of the sunset these past few weeks. “Well, I forgot to record it tonight. But last night the sun set at thirty-four minutes past eight. And the night before that it was… thirty-four minutes past eight.” He paused, going down the list, and looked up again sheepishly. “I think we can safely assume it was thirty-four minutes past eight.”
“Very precise,” said Gellert, with a little sneer. Albus sneered back.
“So that would make solar midnight… twenty past midnight.”
Gellert whistled. “Why, twenty whole minutes! I’m glad we sorted that out.”
Albus was not listening, face falling as he checked and double checked his calculation.
“Are you game?” said Gellert, nudging him with his elbow. “I am if you are.”
“I should really be getting home, though…”
Gellert thought about this, turning to face his friend more fully. He cocked his head. “Or you could stay.”
Albus’ eyes flicked up, dubious. They had a brief exchange without words, not so much Legilimency as over-familiarity and a good grasp of each other’s micro-expressions. The gist of it was this: it’s already late — dark, even — so just stay the night, and then you need only drop home in the morning or whenever we wake, to say oh, my, didn’t you hear me come in last night? I certainly did come in, rest assured, but I was up again so early with ideas that I just went straight over to Gellert’s again, first thing, and that’s why I wasn’t here when you all woke up. And that’s definitely all there is to that story.
Albus was still in two minds about the whole thing.
Gellert’s voice was low when he spoke again. “Just… stay.”
Albus was single-minded on the matter. “Well, really, I have no choice but to stay. It’s the twenty-first, so tonight’s the best night for the experiment. The only night, you might argue. So, really, I must stay. For science, that is.”
Gellert chuckled, but stopped abruptly. “Hold on — it’s the twenty-first?”
“Yes?”
“It’s the twenty-first of June? It’s midsummer’s day?”
“Well, currently it’s midsummer’s night.”
“Midsummer’s astronomical twilight,” Gellert corrected, and Albus grinned.
“Well, I’d say it’s more like nautical twilight right now,” he mumbled, checking the sky for any remaining light from the sunset. “But, yes, it is the solstice, anyway. Why does that shock you?”
“I don’t know. Feels like I should have known. Like we should have danced naked in a field and sacrificed a goat or something.”
Albus thought briefly about that, and started blushing furiously. “N-not Blanchette, I hope.”
“Not Blanchette,” agreed Gellert, though somewhat regrettably. “She is sweet, but I do fear your brother’s goats would be first to go.” He paused a moment. “On second thought, I wouldn’t even wait ’til the solstice. Any excuse would do.”
Albus thumped him, but was smiling so fondly he might as well have endorsed the whole thing.
“But I suppose it’ll do just to stay awake, see if it gets dark, and then go to sleep.”
“But how do we tell if it’s fully dark?” asked Albus wistfully.
“If we can see the stars?”
“No, no, it’s astronomical twilight, Gellert. By definition we will see the stars.”
“Then let’s say… if it’s too dark to see each other.”
Albus glanced at Gellert. It had already gotten dimmer as they talked, his friend’s bedroom now wreathed in blue tinted shadow. “Really,” Albus said, almost whispering, “we’ll be needing some sort of control experiment. Because right now we have no context for what dark really is, compared to other times of the year. So we shall have to do the experiment again, at the equinox, perhaps. And the winter solstice, too.”
Gellert knew he wouldn’t be staying in Godric’s Hollow until the equinox, let alone another six months. But it was quite possible that the two of them might be somewhere else by then — although, in that case the experiment was ruined unless they travelled strictly along the current line of longitude…
This digression also happened via telepathy, although it was getting harder with the darkness and the inability to see the full range of each other’s expressions, especially around the eyes. Albus wondered briefly at which point his vision might switch to shades of grey, when the darkest blue would become black, and how soon then would Gellert’s one dark iris become indistinguishable from the pupil? Gellert caught the end of this thought, and in response he asserted that Albus’ pale powder blues were still quite conspicuous. Only then did he remember that he was supposed to be rooting for total darkness, and then where would those eyes be?
“We digress,” said Gellert aloud, and suddenly they were both having a hard time looking at each other with all this talk of eyes. Reading each other’s thoughts was never verbatim, even at the best of times, intonation and intent always getting lost, but they could share basic ideas that way and were getting better at it — although that came with its own set of problems. For example, Albus was now mildly panicking that Gellert had sensed the shy fondness he’d harboured when thinking of his heterochromia. Meanwhile, Gellert was certain Albus had picked up on the reverence with which he’d described the blue.
They stood in silence for a moment, the line of contact between their bodies burning like a beacon.
“Well, we should get some light in here, at least,” said Gellert, although he didn’t reach for his wand.
“Oh, but won’t we need our eyes to be adjusted?”
“How long to wait, then?”
Albus removed his pocket watch and they both squinted at it together. “Quarter past ten now…”
“Two hours?”
Albus winced, looking up to gaze out of the window again. “Well, the sky is mostly dark already. So…”
“And what shall we do for two hours in the dark, Al?”
He really had not meant it to sound so suggestive. He cleared his throat quickly and Albus let out a few puffs of breath. They still could not quite look at each other, though if they’d only skimmed the tops of each other’s minds they’d have known their thoughts were wholly aligned.
“We’ll just… talk, I imagine,” said Albus. He coughed slightly, and it sounded extraordinarily polite.
Gellert did not say anything.
“Gellert,” said Albus. “Oh, Gellert, how are we to know when it’s twenty past midnight, if it’s already almost too dark to see my watch?”
“If it’s too dark to see your watch then it will be too dark to see each other, thereby proving the point one way or another.”
Albus frowned. He’d been strangely looking forward to the two of them staring at each other in the pitch black. Staring at a watch was less fun, somehow. “No,” he began, “because although it might be too dark to see the detail of the hands, we still might see the shape of the watch itself, and therefore, it wouldn’t be fully dark, would it…?”
Gellert had given up at this point. He stared dully out the window, dropping his hip and thrilling at the strange rush of excitement at the smallest shift in their bodily contact. It was curious, that thrill. He was so very curious about it.
“—But we could judge it by the time we see the first stars, I suppose, plus or minus—”
“Are those clouds?”
Albus blinked, leaning against Gellert as he peered out. “What — where?”
Gellert put a hand on his friend’s shoulder, drawing him closer to angle him better as he pointed with his other hand. “See?”
Albus leaned even closer, but only because of the parallax issue of following someone else’s pointed finger.
The beacon burned hotter. They both squinted out blindly.
Yes, there were clouds.
“That’s a shame,” said Albus quietly, glancing sideways at Gellert. “We’ll just have to judge it by eye.”
Gellert turned his face to gaze back at him, his hand on the shoulder seeming to squeeze of its own accord. “It’s alright, isn’t it?”
Their faces were very close. Both hearts beat rather fast. Their eyes did not meet, as both were lingering much nearer the bottom half of the other’s face.
In a flash Gellert’s perplexity at all these strange feelings transformed into a fevered annoyance. He dropped his arm quickly.
“Can’t we get into bed, at least?”
“What?”
“I’m tired.”
“But what if you fall asleep?”
“Not that tired.”
They chanced another glance at each other’s eyes. It was getting steadily darker — darker by the minute. Both minds were obscure — clouded — guarded.
“I’d probably be too excited to sleep, anyway,” said Gellert breathily. He paused, panic gripping him, and some strange boldness he couldn’t place. “Because of the experiment.”
“Oh, yes,” replied Albus with equal fervour. “It is… terribly exciting, isn’t it?”
Gellert nodded, uncertain of the undertones, and they both somewhat robotically detached themselves from each other’s sides to make for the bed. The blue room suddenly felt much colder.
“I’ll borrow a nightshirt, then?” asked Albus, as Gellert began unbuttoning himself.
“Ah, er. No, actually.”
Albus was struck dumb, not comprehending such an answer, and a little preoccupied by the shadowy torso being revealed to him across the vast distance of the bed.
“Yes, I don’t have any, I sleep in the nude,” said Gellert a little loudly, trying for confident and settling for crass.
“You—? Oh, o-oh I see.”
“It’s alright, isn’t it?”
Gellert was stripping fast, trousers and underpants whipped off in seconds, and practically diving under the covers to cower there alone with his hammering heart.
“O-oh, yes, o-of course…” replied Albus, fumbling with suddenly uncoordinated fingers at his buttons. Feeling simultaneously like a bird and a behemoth, all fluttery nerves and clunky limbs, he managed to undress and place his glasses carefully on the nightstand. Trying to remind himself how to breathe, he gathered his clothes into a bundle, hovering uncertainly by the bedside.
Gellert studied him, eyes barely peeking out from under the covers, but the mood changed when Albus started untucking the sheets from the foot of the bed and placed his balled up clothes there as a pillow.
Gellert rose onto elbows, eyes straining in the slight light from the window. “What are you doing?”
“Hm? Oh, tops to toes. This is how Aberforth and I used to—”
“Just — come here, you blithering idiot.”
Albus paused, squinting at Gellert in the dark, or squinting at least where he thought Gellert’s eyes were. It was rather more difficult without his glasses. After a moment, Gellert sat up, took him by the arm, and tugged him down to lie beside himself.
They lay there, hearts pounding, listening to each other’s fast breaths.
“It’s alright, isn’t it?” Gellert whispered. He’d managed to wrap an arm around Albus’ shoulder before his head touched the pillow and — Merlin, what was he doing?
“It’s — oh, it’s nice, Gellert.”
Albus had never known his body like this, the way he knew it when Gellert held him. Half afraid he’d discorporate, half dying to be felt.
What was he thinking?
“Do you have enough blanket?” asked Gellert, adjusting it and tucking it closer around Albus’ shoulders, letting his hand brace the flesh when he thought he could get away with it.
“Oh yes,” said Albus, blushing in the dark. He could barely move for the bliss, though in that bliss he was aware of parts that moved on their own.
“I wouldn’t want you to be chilly.”
Albus laughed a little. Gellert was trembling himself, but not from cold. He let his free hand fall onto Albus’ arm, tentative at first, then letting the full weight press down. He had little idea what he was doing — what he was trying to do — but he hoped if he kept going he might find out.
The thought seemed to come independently to each of them, though perhaps it was one and the same.
What shall we do for two hours in the dark?
They both decidedly ignored the thought.
“Can you still see me?” asked Gellert, rubbing his thumb gently on Albus’ arm.
“I can see your outline, I think. Oh—”
Albus had reached over, misjudged the distance, and knocked his hand into Gellert’s head. He froze up briefly, but did not remove his hand. Gellert’s thumb was still stroking his arm, encouragingly now, and so Albus let his fingers drift along Gellert’s brow and into his hair.
Albus swallowed thickly, and the sound seemed cacophonous to him. Gellert could only hear his own shallow pants. Albus blinked his eyes, trying to discern Gellert’s features, to no avail. It was too dark now. But still not fully dark.
The silence in the room was deafening. No vague semblance of thought or emotion passed between their eyes.
They had never really discussed before how they could seem to have these conversations without words, without speaking, without even magic, it seemed. They had never cast any spell, never intentionally encroached or explored the grand structures of each other’s mind. They were fortresses, both. Castles with lofty towers, endless staircases, grand halls and dungeons — too many dungeons. The entrance hall was open to visitors — to each other, mainly. The rest was locked up tight.
“I can’t see your eyes,” muttered Gellert. “Can’t tell what you’re thinking.”
Thank goodness, thought Albus sadly. You wouldn’t want to know.
It was easy enough to hide the truest thoughts away. They were both well-practiced at that, and getting better by the day. Easier still to allow only the passage of shallow thoughts, to have chats in the doorway, so to speak. But it had never been discussed — neither willing to broach the subject of delving any further into the depths. They were both sure they could have, if they’d wanted to. But these things went both ways.
Gellert squeezed Albus’ arm, shifting forward until their foreheads knocked together.
Albus’ breath picked up. “W-what are you doing?”
Gellert inhaled sharply. It was a good question, but one for which he had no coherent answer. It was just an urge — an instinct he had no awareness of, no comprehension of — and realising with dismay that this experiment he was doing was a double-blind. What was the hypothesis, anyway? What was he trying to prove? Albus was the one with the ideas, the theories, the did-you-know question of the day. Gellert was only good at arguing. Get good at that, and you could convince anyone you were a genius.
“Is it alright?” he breathed.
“Is what alright?”
“Can’t see your eyes,” he repeated. “Thought this might work…”
Albus shut his eyes tight, feeling Gellert’s breath on his face as they touched each other gently and felt their skin prickle where their foreheads touched. After a moment of forgetting how to breathe, Albus said, “It doesn’t — of course it wouldn’t—”
“You — you must tell me what you’re thinking, then, Albus. You must.”
Albus shook his head.
“I’d say it myself but I don’t… quite… know.”
It wasn’t really conversation, the way it worked, more like flashes of feeling and primal knowledge. It wasn’t words or even images, just thought, just understanding. Albus swallowed again. It would be easier, truthfully, to say it that way, to know it, if they could just… feel it… feel it from each other, just to be sure…
Albus stifled a sob. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s… unspeakable.”
Gellert felt a thrill in his chest now, different from the thrills elsewhere in his body, a little more like hope. “But not unthinkable, is it, Al? Not unknown.”
Albus made a little ‘oh’ sound. But he couldn’t — oh, he couldn’t…
Gellert paused, blinking firmly a few times and desperately trying to penetrate the dark to catch where the black shadows flashed grey in the whites of his companion’s eyes. “You do know… don’t you, Albus?” He breathed out slowly. “I thought you knew everything.”
“I was just—” Albus shuddered, feeling the truth bubble up like bile only to catch in his throat. “I was just thinking — that this was perfect. That we should be like this always. Close like this. When we leave here we should get a place somewhere — a place of our own. One big room, full of books and armchairs. A big desk full of parchment, and as many quills as you can fit in it. A-and,” he swallowed, heart leaping almost out of his chest, “just one bedroom. One bed. So we can always be… talking, like this. We can always be…”
Touching, he thought, or was it Gellert’s thought in his head? By then it did not matter. Gellert’s arms had squeezed around him and now they were cheek to cheek — gasping — clutching at each other and rolling until they were chest to chest — groaning. And, oh, how they fit, how they seemed to slot together — legs tangling — hands groping. Hardness bumping between bellies — then nudging — rubbing. Giggling now. They followed each other’s laughs to their mouths and kissed breathless — fast, urgent kisses — then as they sunk into it, breathtakingly long.
They did not talk, did not think, had no more need for conversation, nor mind-reading either. It was spoken now, what had been thought, known and unknown. It was not a hypothesis anymore. The experiment had proven itself.
They did not notice the darkest point of the night pass them by. Their eyes were shut tight, after all, and by the time they opened again — fluttering eyelashes and sated, sleepy smiles — the room was tinted a dusty dawn blue.