Today is an uncharacteristically lazy day, especially in contrast to the intensity of yesterday's experimenting and the resulting explosions, which have left the garden razed and Gellert's arm in a cast. Today they are sprawled across meadow grass (the garden being too bald and razed to lie on), eating chocolate frogs that trickle over their fingers as they melt in the summer heat. It feels like the pause between fireworks.
"One day I'll see your face on the back of one of these," Albus jokes, unwrapping a chocolate frog and turning the card over to read the profile.
Gellert steals the frog with his uninjured hand and pops it deftly into his mouth.
"Hey," Albus objects, looking up from the card but smiling.
"Here, I saved you half." Gellert leans over, the frog's melting head protruding somewhat disturbingly from his mouth, and Albus takes a bite, doing his best to smear chocolate all over the other's lips in the process.
"Read that card to me," Gellert orders, lying back and making slits with his eyes like a cat.
"Gellert Gabriel Gottfried Gunelius Grindelwald, 1880 to present. Also affectionately known by his minions" (here a slight punch to his head) "ow- sorry, followers as Gellert Gabriel Gottfried Gunelius "Greater Good" Grindelwald. Possessor of the Elder Wand, thought for centuries to be a mythical object - the wand, not the wizard - Master of Death. However, Grindelwald is most famously known for unifying the muggle and wizarding worlds, thus rendering centuries of enforced secrecy obsolete."
Gellert bursts out laughing. "Very impressive. And where are you in this mini biography?"
"Carrying out your dastardly plans, no doubt. Trying to turn muggles and squibs into wizards."
"Hey that was your dastardly idea." Gellert's laughter dies down. More quietly, he asks, "Do you think we'll still be friends when we are old men?"
Albus looks at the boy beside him and thinks what a strange sight it would be for the gold curling around his ears to fade into grey, for wrinkles to crease the skin around his laughing mouth, but he can see Gellert (both of them, if he's not being falsely modest) landing in packets of chocolate frogs someday. He twirls the card in his long fingers.
"Yeah, maybe, if I don't get bored of you once you lose your looks," he says very quickly, and rolls out of the way in time to dodge a vicious stinging hex aimed at his chest, but not quickly enough to miss the second attack: Gellert pouncing on him and landing on two knees and a palm, flashing a triumphant grin before starting to kiss him roughly.
Later they lie apart in the summer heat, panting and slightly dazed.
"Will you come and visit?" Gellert traces the underside of Albus' chin with his fingertips. It tickles like blades of uncut grass.
"I'd like to. I could next summer, before the internship at the ministry." It's almost a promise. "Tell me about Durmstrang in the summer."
"It's pretty. It's still very cold at the end of spring and early summer, freezing actually, because it's so high up, nestled between mountains… But there's a lot of light everywhere. Gleaming mountain caps and ice blue skies, that sort of thing. Sometimes northern lights, if you fly far enough north and are lucky. We'd go skiing in the sun."
"And read by the fire."
"And make out by the fire," Gellert agrees.
Summer ends, and another summer comes. A war comes, a war ends. A hundred years pass.
One morning a snowy owl swoops through an open window and lands, folding its wide wings and dropping the Zeitung onto a heavy oak desk in one swift motion as it has every morning for the past fifty two years. This is how Gellert knows the day has begun.
"Thank you," he calls from stove just across the window, pottering about with saucepans and singing kettles, making breakfast.
The owl regards him expectantly.
He pauses his cooking to place a bowl full of treats on his desk. "Won't you stay for breakfast?" he asks, and the owl blinks and dives for the food, emptying the bowl in a few efficient swallows. Then it spreads its wings and flies off, somewhere, for its next errand.
"I suppose not," Gellert says lightly to himself, and returns to his cooking. He's making tea and toast and pancakes and scrambled eggs today. A feast for one.
It's only later, after he's set every dish on the table and sat down, that he notices today's headlines on the Zeitung. Picks the newspaper up and reads the article once. Twice. Scans the paper for more, but there's nothing, only that one article sparsely laying out the fact of it. The rest of the world, too, is too stunned to speak. The tributes and memories will come later, in a flood.
A solitary quivering tear runs down his cheek, splashes warm and wet onto the paper. The ink bleeds, and the words where the tear has fallen lose form and meaning. Beneath his thumb, Albus smiles his crooked smile sadly in black and white.
All of a sudden Gellert feels the full weight of his age bearing down on him. He sets the paper down and looks out of the window. Nothing for miles, only gleaming mountain caps and ice blue skies, not far up enough for Northern lights. They lived for a hundred years and never did go skiing in the sun.