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Her French was fractured now, decades of separation from her homeland filling her instead with words in German, English, Greek, Mandarin, and the occasional Arabic. Infinite life unfortunately did not equate to infinite memory.
The boy knocking at the door to her husband's workshop early in the afternoon reminded her of thousands of others with his questions, hundreds more with the softness of his touch and his hair, but none of the boys before him had been invited inside by Nicolas to stay for more than a few words. His long auburn hair sparkled in the sun as he spoke with her husband on their front porch. She supposed he wasn't truly a boy anymore; some would call him a man in the prime of his wizarding life, but she could see he'd left his prime in the heart of another long ago.
Albus, he'd said his name was. Perenelle wasn't sure how many weeks he'd stayed, tinkering and learning, or whether he'd left and returned several times. Time was Nicolas's forte. Sometimes she would catch the boy, the man with the auburn hair, watching the way she and Nicolas worked together in harmony and the pain lining his face would bleed into her own heart.
The next time a boy knocked at their door, Perenelle was the one who'd answered. Nicolas didn't leave the house often anymore, not since his five hundred and seventy second birthday. But that day he'd been away for an extended time, so she was caught off guard. This boy reminded her of thousands of others with his questions, hundreds more with the softness of his touch and his hair, but none of the boys before him had eyes that made her feel as if she were three hundred years old again.
When she didn't have the answers he wanted, Tom, as the boy had introduced himself, seemed to turn to stone for a few moments. The lie that she was flattered he thought she was one of the Flamels rolled of her tongue with practiced ease, but surely he was mistaken. The Flamels had lived in this home two hundred years ago before moving to the plains of the new America. Perenelle had rejected men before him, many with less devious intentions to her person and her husband's work, but this one felt different to her. A desperation bubbled below his surface, one that did not sit well within her bones.
The next time the boy, now a man who'd seen and done too much, returned to the mountainside, she and her beloved husband slept beneath the ground as he razed their home to the ground out of spite.