Chapter Text
It is in 1903 when it starts to go up for him that Gellert might not come back to him after all.
Aberforth had shouted that at him already during that funeral in 1899, when he had cried against Elphias’ shoulder, correctly deducing who most of those tears were for.
It wasn’t that he didn’t grieve Ariana. But then, that summer, Gellert’s departure had felt far more sudden than her death had felt.
His mother had been convinced she would outlive her. Since he was 10 years old, he had been primed to think that she didn’t have long left. He had been prepared for it, or he thought he was, at least. And yet he missed her. Grieved her. Cried over her.
Still not as much as he had cried over Gellert, and Aberforth knew and hated him for it.
Ariana had always been easier to push back into his mind. But now, when Gellert’s absence from his life more and more seemed to become permanent, it was beginning to get harder and harder to swallow that grief.
He grips the microscope tighter, a peculiar Muggle thing Flamel introduced him to, and tries to focus. He can’t lose his mind again, like he had in 1899. Felt too late for it, in a way. If he wanted to lose it completely, he should have done it immediately afterwards.
Bathilda had stopped him from killing himself, back then. Only recently had he started to feel some sort of strange gratitude. Not particularly because he wanted to live, but because he wasn’t sure where he would end up if he should die.
Sororicide was even a greater stain than suicide. To kill one's own blood. His little sister.
“Albus,” a frail voice calls out. Flamel. He had always sounded so sturdy in his letters. When meeting him for the first time, Albus had felt strangely guilty over that being the man his mother had sent a howler to when he had just started to send him letters. She had been so suspicious of every adult around him. With some, she had been right about their intentions. He remembers a particularly strange letter from a 30 year old woman he received when he was fourteen about wanting to give him children. Another one from a man 50 years his senior who had seen his picture in the news and who had blamed him for becoming filled with ‘strange desires’ as he so called it. Flamel, though, had always been pleasant. He had always been kind. It was rather annoying. It gave him no reason to run away. “You will work yourself into the grave, little friend.”
“Is it late?” Albus asks, not bothering to lift his head. Instead of all those other thoughts, he now was focused on the drops of blood in front of him. Or tried to be.
“Almost midnight,” Flamel responds.
“Not that late, then.”
“I remember seeing you in this exact position when I left this day,” Flamel chides. “Tell me you at least have gone up for a bit of food today. You are far too thin already; Monsieur Rosier already has accused me of starving you once.”
”I have been up,” Albus says. “I washed my hair today.”
“A great feat, I see.”
“That it is,” it wasn’t really an exaggeration. It took quite some time to care for. “I am thinking of cutting it short.”
Gellert had forbidden him from it. He had loved his hair. But he had also grabbed him by it, that day in 1899, and flung him into the wall when he tried to stand between him and his brother. Some strands had been pulled out.
He wouldn’t come back, so he had no say in it anymore, Albus reckons.
Perhaps if he really set his mind to it, Gellert would see him in a vision, bald and ugly, and come to Paris in a hurry to prevent that sight from coming true.
“You will break Perenelle’s heart if you do,” Flamel says after a while. An expected answer. Everyone liked his hair. Everyone wanted to touch it. Aberforth had been angry about it, that Gellert always seemed to have his hand in it. Too familiar, he had said. Mom would be angry seeing it.
But his mother wasn’t there, and Gellert wasn’t here, and he had let Gellert come far closer that summer and now his sister was dead, and the last person of his family hated him. His hair didn’t matter anymore. And perhaps Gellert would care enough to come to prevent him from cutting it.
His mother had cut her own hair short when his father had died.
“Are you still studying dragon’s blood?” Flamel asks him.
“It is my own now,” Albus says. “It behaves strangely.”
He had his suspicions of why.
“Strange how?”
“As if there is something more in there,” Albus says. There was. He couldn’t tell Flamel that, of course. Old, ancient magic. Just the type Flamel specialized in. Bathilda had told him some about Gellert, that he knew. But not all. “I can’t turn it into silver, it does not mix well with dragon’s blood.”
“Peculiar,” Flamel mutters. “Was it clean when you took it out?”
No, not really. “Yes,” Albus says, “I am certain; I wouldn’t make that mistake. Besides, it has acted like this every time I’ve studied it. Just my blood, never any else.”
“Peculiar, peculiar,” Flamel repeats. “You should let Perenelle and me study it in the morning. Perhaps we can come to an answer together.”
He yawns.
Flamel was often tired, Albus had noticed. Age, he thinks. The stone didn’t prevent that. If living forever already was an appalling thought enough, living forever and still feeling the scruples of age made it even less appealing.
He had raised his thoughts on it deep into a bottle of wine, once. After that, the Flamels had felt safe enough around him to let him study the stone too. He had no use for it.
“Will you go to bed soon?” Flamel asks him.
“I’ll be up for some time more.”
He can feel the disapproval from his mentor. But Flamel doesn’t push it.
“Don’t forget to snuff out the candles,” he says finally. “I do not entirely trust these modern inventions yet. Self-snuffing candle, bah! I know a gentleman who put his faith into the oven that was charmed to never light on fire, and he lost his house that very same month.”
“I promise I’ll remember,” Albus says quietly. “Good night, Nicolas.”
Flamel gives him a kiss on the back of his head. He shuffles away.
The candles go out by themselves, hours later. He stays up all night, studying his blood. Composing letters in his head that he’ll never send. I’ll cut my hair, I’ll break our pact, next time we meet, you won’t have any hold on me, if you won’t come back now.
Summer had never felt so far away.