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“Your hair,” Gellert comments one night, Albus head in his lap while Gellert reads in silence above him. Silence until now, at least. “It’s long for a man’s. Longer than how many women wear it, too.”
It’s one of those blunt statements he has gotten used to the last few days from his strange but rather wonderful new friend. Casual intimacy, too. He thinks he has touched Gellert more times the past days than he ever had touched Elphias. More than he touched Aberforth, even, whose hand he always had held when they ventured outside together as children, if he were to believe his mother.
Gellert and he were too old for that sort of thing, perhaps, at least out in the open. It didn’t stop Gellert from at times taking his hand in his still, though, and trace the lines of his palms.
The first time they had met, Gellert had kissed his hand to greet him. When they had said goodbye for the day, he had plucked a flower from Bathilda’s garden and placed it behind his ear, caressing his hair in the process. ‘We will be good friends, I am sure’, he had said.
“I do have a mirror, you know,” Albus replies. “Do you think I should cut it?”
“No.”
The sharpness of Gellert’s voice almost makes him flinch. It is something Gellert seems to take notice of, as he quickly adds. “It suits you. Your hair.”
Albus blushes. As always, Gellert pretends not to see.