WILLKOMMEN
Berlin 1945
Leave your troubles outside
So, life is disappointing?
Forget it.
In here, life is beautiful.
The girls are beautiful.
Even the orchestra is beautiful.
-Cabaret
Cheap neon lights danced through the cloud of cigarette smoke. Silhouetted against the gaudy red curtain a can-can line of underage girls danced in skimpy outfits enchanted to light up every few seconds. All of them had too much makeup, their expressions lost in the blinding spotlight. It was one of the last wizarding nightclubs open in Berlin, all the rest driven out of business by lack of patrons or wartime fervor. Watching with a detached interest, he sat at his table, chewing absently on a cigarette, lost in the maze of his own thoughts.
"Albus."
He looked up, the pensiveness immediately replaced by a broad smile, "Sally, they said you'd be coming."
Sheathed in a tiny dress of black satin that revealed far more than it covered, she slid in beside him, pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and took a long drag. "Don't tell me I'll ruin my singing voice. I already have the range of a frog."
He grinned, gesturing around the packed swanky nightclub. "They certainly don't seem to think so. They're all here to see you perform."
She rolled her eyes, smashing the cigarette on the table. "They're a bunch of anti-semitic brainwashed nincompoops who don't know Strauss from Wagner."
Albus leaned forward, taking a sip of his drink. " Remember Wagner's March of the Valkyries, back when we were both at the Conservatory of Music. What was that… 1892? I was on cello, you on violin."
She glared at his taking off her top hat, "That is the past. Whining over it won't do us any good." Sally pulled a cigarette out of her hatband and fitted it between her teeth with the utmost precision. "So why are you here? Business?"
He leaned back, blue eyes suddenly lost in thought. "What else? I'm tracking Grindewald."
"Incidio," Sally muttered, lighting the cigarette clamped between her jaws. She inhaled deeply and blew out a doughnut ring of smoke. "Well good luck, he's holed himself up pretty well. But with the Muggles bombing each other, it doesn't look like he will last much longer."
Albus smiled, staring at her though his golden colored wine, "That's what I'm hoping."
Sally began to pick nervously at one of her fake eyelashes. "Good thing too, there was a rumor going 'round that the nightclubs would be the next thing he'd be closing down." A loud cheer erupted from the audience as the can-can dancers began to rocket multicolored sparks and streams of knuts out of the tips of their wands.
"I've have him… almost pinned down," Albus replied, trying concentrate against the barrage of wild whoops and honkey-tonk piano playing. "And once this is all over and done with--"
"About time too," Sally interjected, puffing her cigarette defiantly.
"Once this is all over and done with," he began again. "If I'm still in more or less one piece, I want you come back to London with me."
Sally sat still for a second, the sound of the club causing her to loose concentration. Then as abruptly as she had fallen silent, she burst out laughing, "London? You sound so final…"
He reached across the table and grabbed her hand, "I'm serious. Come home."
She looked down at the cheap pock-marked table, averting his eyes. When she reached up to take a puff of her cigarette, her hands were shaking. "Come home? Berlin is my home, Albus…"
"London is your home, Sally," he replied firmly.
She reached over and took a sip of his wine. "I've lived in Germany for twenty-six years."
He smiled, dragging the drink back across the table, "And all the German you know is Ich spreche nicht den Deutsch."
Sally gave a small laugh, "I don't speak German."
"Come back," Albus said quietly. "Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in a cheap cabaret?"
Pulling nervously on her other set of fake eyelashes, Sally shook her head. "Live fast, die young."
He smiled genially, "You're hardly young."
"Young enough," she snapped. "Next lifetime I'll be suitably responsible, this one's ripe for wasting."
He shook his head, taking a sip of beer. "How do you know you'll have another one?"
Sally smirked bitterly, "It's a gamble."
"Is it a gamble you can afford to loose?" He raised an eyebrow.
"Stop being so rhetorical," she snapped. It's my life, Albus. No great loss to you if I loose."
"I wouldn't bet on that one," he replied, recognizing his defeat with a simple grin and an awful pun.
She smiled at him through her fake lashes, "So sweet."
"Sincerely sweet," he said, taking another sip of his drink.
"Ah well," she replied, putting the top hat back on. "What else are older brothers for?" Sally laughed bitterly and slammed the cigarette into the table's cheap lacquer. She bent down, kissing him demurely on the cheek. "That's my cue to exit stage left." As he stared at the tiny pile of cigarette ash, she stood up for the last time and walked out of his life.
Absolutely nothing to do with anything I'm supposed to be writing :O), but this scene just came to me in a random streak of inspiration. Please read and review, I love you all and kudos to anyone who knows where Sally comes from.