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c. mid to late may 1980 | the english countryside closed thread @halgian | “ where the heart is ”

The safehouse feels smaller than any place he’s ever lived. Smaller than that flat in Paris in 1901, smaller than the room borrowed from Flamel, smaller than the shitty rundown inns he’s been bouncing around with Gellert for the last two months across Europe, with their peeling wallpaper and motheaten curtains. He didn’t think anything would feel more like a tomb than that, laying side by side but never touching on a cramped mattress, staring at paint chips and spiderwebs on the ceiling well into the night.

It’s about the principle of the thing, not the square footage. There are separate rooms, even. Albus wanted to make sure he was comfortable if he ever had to hide, years ago when he purchased the cottage at the first whisperings of war. He expected to use it, yes, but not like this.

Some nights he thinks he’s going to die here, and then remembers he has something he needs to do before then, some greater purpose. Albus is tired. Some nights he sleeps too much, sleeps through the next day, and some nights he doesn’t sleep at all.

Some nights Gellert comes home with blood on his coat and it isn’t that Albus doesn’t know what to do about it and more that he’s not sure if he wants to do something about it. They don’t talk, they just don’t talk, and if there is anything Albus is exceptional at it’s turning a blind eye. The sound of the tap in the bathroom makes him want to be sick. He is going to be sick.

He doesn’t know what time it is except that it’s late-late, pitch black out the sliver of window not covered by the heavy curtains. Black glass like a porthole, underwater, down so deep no light reaches the seafloor. The water is still running in the bathroom. Albus stumbles out of the bedroom in his nightclothes, his own nightclothes, and they hang too long and too loose on Charlot’s small frame.

Gellert has his hands in the sink and blood between his fingers. The water runs pink in the basin. Gellert is Gellert tonight, which means he comes in late with blood on his hands, remnants of a Death Eater Albus very likely taught and also will likely never know the name of. It’s trying times. Albus doesn’t generally wake up, easier to never look than look away. But he’ll spare Gellert the lecture on excessive force tonight. After all, they don’t talk.

He reaches for the potion flask on the counter and manages to knock everything else over in the process, hands shaking. It only takes a wandless wave of his wrist to put everything back in order, and the blood vanishes from the sink and Gellert’s skin, too.

Their shoulders brush when Albus uncaps the flask, but he only holds the Polyjuice in his hands for the moment, doesn’t drink. It’s a spot of paranoia, perhaps, keeping Charlot’s face all the time, even when alone. He might never know if someone’s watching, if a raid is about to happen in the little community, if if if. Albus is tired.

“Good evening.“ His voice is calm, unfaltering, with the same temper and tone as always even as he thinks that he might actually be sick if he tries to drink the potion now. “I see you’ve been... busy.”

#halgian #gellert // thread #t // where the heart is