"Tis a fearful thing, to love what death can touch." - Judah Halevi; Tis a Fearful Thing
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She answers the door all in white. A frothy white nightgown with a sleeve of white crocheted lace that has slipped down to bare a hint of one almost-white shoulder and a hem tied up to show white socks with dirty bottoms.
Gellert looks at her strangely, this apparition in the doorway with wide grey eyes and hair so pale it hurts to look at in the sunlight, and does not know what to say.
But he is saved the trouble of figuring it out because a boy is joining them out from the dark hallway and sweeping the girl away.
"Go play, Ari," He says, pushing his sister lightly back into the rooms beyond.
"No. Don't want," She responds. Her voice is like broken glass so clear and bright but somehow too sharp, and Gellert's eyebrows raise at her shattered speech.
"Please, Ari?" The brother pleads. His hands are too dark and freckled and dirty against the cream of the girl's arms, Gellert thinks. "We can read later, or feed the goats. Is that alright?"
She narrows her flinted eyes at him.
"Both?" The brother asks and is rewarded with a nod.
She looks to Gellert and her lips part - a child's mouth with soft soft lips and little white teeth just peeking - Bye, She mouths and then she's gone, back into the shadows and away from the sunlight that made her glow so brightly.
:+:
Gellert meets Albus after being led into the bowels of the Dumbledore home by the notably less handsome, less brilliant, and rather less pleasant younger brother. So brilliant is the older boy - man, maybe? - that Gellert thinks that the Moerae, Fata, and maybe Merlin's own spirit have divined their meeting.
All in the whirlwind of that one afternoon the pair discover so much and plan for more because their buoyant wildness has no time for kept secrets and the gaining of trust. Within those four walls of Albus' bedroom they dream that they will go far. There is no little brother in the hall, scowling at the closed door. There is no little sister humming in her attic bedroom and drawing pictures in the dust. But then the door is opened and the spell is broken and Albus remembers all these things that were not just moments ago, but Gellert does not care, for there are far more important things than little siblings and family homes, and he will make sure that Albus sees this.
Ariana, he learns but only because he is forced to ask, is the name of the girl in white.
:+:
He comes back again the next day. She opens the door in white. White nightgown and white socks. He wonders if she ever takes the socks off or if she ever wears shoes or if her feet are always in that inbetween state.
"Hello again, Ariana," He says politely, smoothly for he sees she is skittish like his father's horses are, both broken with a hand too heavy. "My name is Gellert Grindelwald, may I come in?"
She stares at him a moment, eyes wide child-lips parted. Then she grins; it's a toothy little thing and a bit crooked but it's nice and Gellert likes it very much.
"Hi," She says finally, the quick word dragging out of her throat in a crackle. The sound is fractured.
She steps aside and lets him in. The door swings shut and the sunlight is gone and she is not in white but only shades of grey now and it makes him a bit sad.
"Is Albus home?" He asks her back as she leads him down the hall.
The walls are dark and they reach high until their tops are all in shadows and not touched by the glow of the gas lamps that are lit even in the middle of the afternoon. She pads across the wooden floor ahead of him in her stocking feet and she is almost silent and her pale pale hair swings long and tangled.
He can see her shake her head in response.
She leads him into a little sitting room. She busies herself with a pretty china tea set in the corner and when she carries it to him all rattling glass and careful steps she looks so proud. This must be what she saw her mother do with guests, he realizes instantly. And when he finds that the cups and teapot are empty he says nothing and pretends to drink anyway because she is grinning again and she is so proud.
"Gellert?" A voice - Albus' voice - filters into the room, preceding its owner. "Sorry I'm late."
"Oh it's quite alright, Albus," He replies. "Your sister and I were just enjoying some tea."
The red-haired youth's head shoots up suddenly and he crosses the room in two long strides to peer down into the very empty teacups.
"Oh, Ari, you didn't -"
"Thank you, Miss Ariana," Gellert interrupts his new friend. "The tea was lovely. I do hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon."
Albus looks at his guest with a startled gaze, but when his sister's crooked little grin stretches into a real smile, he supposes it doesn't matter if there was tea in the cups or not.
"Welcome," She whispers in her little sandpaper voice. "Too."
You're welcome...you too. Perhaps it is all the more heartbreaking that they can understand exactly what it is she wishes to say, but finds herself unable to.
:+:
As he and Albus sit on the floor of the latter's bedroom, spread out like long-limbed creatures in an ocean of literature, he asks another question about the girl in white.
"Ariana - what's wrong with her voice?"
Albus looks to the side, his blue eyes inspecting the loose thread just there on the cuff of his right shirt sleeve.
"She has dreams. Screams all night. I guess it hurts her throat."
"Ok, Al. I'm sorry."
Gellert doesn't know what else to say. He can't understand this prison of duty that his friend has built himself, but his imagination offers him a glimpse of dark hallways shadowed by moonlight and high, shattered screaming echoing off the barren walls.
He leaves Albus' room to fetch lunch from the kitchen and he finds her sitting at the small breakfast table. She perches on the chair with her knees pulled to her chest under her nightgown and her sock-covered toes curled around the edge of the seat.
She is tugging at the ends of her newly-shorn hair, whisping curling around her little chin. Her brothers must have cut it, he realizes. Neither of them knew how to brush her impossibly long hair and Gellert had watched it become knotted and wild over the past several weeks.
"No, no, no," Her splintered voice just barely reaches him.
"What's wrong, Ari?" He asks. He has taken to using her nickname; it seems to make her happy.
"Gone." She pulls and pulls at the fair stands and a few fall away to drift down to the dark wood floor.
"Don't pull it," He warns.
But she is too worked up already and all she must have needed was a ripple in her placid discontent for she is hissing and spitting like a cat and her ruined voice is chanting no no NO NO! and every piece of glass in the room fractures with a sudden pop into webs of jagged lines. Gellert's lips curl into a private grin despite himself when he feels her lovely magic in the air.
"Ari," He croons, trying to pull her back. "I can grow it back for you."
This stops her and her eyes snap to his, grey catching blue. There is something there that tells him she does not believe him.
He brings his wand up to brush delicately at the uneven hem of her hair and the almost-silver strands suddenly tumble over her thin shoulders once more. She throws her skinny arms around his neck and all he smells is soap and dust.
"Thank you." Her voice crackles in little chips of sound just beside his ear. He is not bothered by the harsh noise, he thinks.
He disentangles himself from her wiry embrace and begins to pull the length of flaxen waves into a long plait.
"I did this for my baby sister," He says by way of explanation even though he knows she is not wondering why her brother's strange friend knows how to plait her hair because she is humming something between a song and a purr.
She does not acknowledge him as he collects a meal on two plates that he sends upstairs, but she runs her pale fingers over and over her new hair while she hums and that's enough.
:+:
He does not see her much, Ariana, the girl in white. But one day he is leaving in a rush, magic crackling around him for tensions are running high between him and his brilliant friend, and he comes upon her in the hallway.
Her hair is tangled and matted into a snarled mess that crawls down her back in an angry waterfall of the lightest shade. He is glad that her brothers have not cut it off again. She has her hand - with the long long fingers and the clean fingernails - pressed against the little pane of colored glass on the front door.
"What are you doing, Ari?" He asks, coming to stand beside her.
Her profile seems to blur at the edges, such is the glowing contrast between the bleached image she casts and the dark backdrop of her home.
"Warm," She replies, just a whisper rolling from her little mouth.
She turns and the suggestion of a smile tickles the corners of her lips. She brings her hand away from the glass and takes it to his cheek, and it is warm, but he is cold cold all over except for that cheek which burns. She has rough hands. He did not imagine that, but he did not imagine them at all. Or perhaps he did - soft hands drawing spider nonsense patterns in the dust and pouring tea that is not there. But he likes that they are rough.
:+:
"Whose spell was it? WHOSE SPELL WAS IT!?" Aberforth is shouting. His freckled hands are shaking and his broad chest swells in waves with heaving breaths.
"No." The word tears itself from Albus' gut, clawing its way out of his throat and pouring over his lips like poison. "Did I?" Who he asks the question to is impossible to say. Himself perhaps?
But Gellert knows whose spell it was. Somehow, through the smoke and the lights and the choking smell of ozone twisted and cut through with the reek of dark magic he saw it all. Slowed down to a flash of chopped-up images he will revisit, embracing the pain with a gasp and a sudden clarity that sharpens everything pulling it down until all that can fit in the eyeline of his mind is that moment.
He saw her fling herself from the back door, her long plait swinging around and cracking like a whip and terror freezing in her glassy eyes. He saw her feet flying across the grass, her white white socks growing wet and forming to her toes.
And he saw her throw her own body - like a life preserver to a drowning man - into the madness to shield him from a dark purple spell of her brother's, only to be met with the acid green of a killing curse that seemed to tear itself from his own wand with a power that rolled like thunder and burned like lightning and hit right between her little shoulder blades.
And he saw her body fall without a sound, a girl all in white on smoking ground.
He knows whose spell it was.