It's the oldest rule in the book, that he on whose door you cannot knock does not welcome you in his home, so Gellert lives in a place with only windows for a while.

He doesn't mind.

He gets a cluster of tiny rooms behind a wall that wouldn't budge for all the magic in the world and amasses himself a library that would make some delicate eyebrows rise high up, and he studies most nights until dawn breaks. The world spins on, unconquered. He doesn't mind that either for a while.

He spends a couple of years there, just avoiding thinking of what he had. Of what he killed. Gellert has dealt in death before. He just has never been the one to spread it up until that very point.

He moves on, eventually, travels the world a bit, gets more knowledge, more followers, more power. He doesn't get another friend.

He doesn't need a confidante. He doesn't need a partner. It's the other rule in the book that he who alone conquers, alone shall bask in glory and he'd forgotten it for a time there. He tells himself it's better like this and some nights, he almost believes it, too.

He drifts back.

It's a step by step descent, a slow glide to the starting point on a slippery slope of lies he unravels in his mind, and one morning there he is, reading the news of Albus's Deputy Headmastership over breakfast, again in his doorless place with his books and his loneliness and death clinging to his hands.

And then he meets her.

She's a scuttling little thing, and also a heavily pregnant little thing, and she tries to blend into the wall with the air of someone who's done that all her life and doesn't understand that it might take more effort now there's a belly like a ball attached to her midsection.

There are a hundred girls like her tucked away in the corners of Knockturn Alley. It's not her, per se, that gets his attention.

"That's a nice necklace you're wearing," he says right before she enters Burgin and Burke's, because she's dressed in rags, and malnourished, and doesn't look like she has anything else to exchange, and his already gone. "Would be a pity to sell it but I suppose you must make a life for that kid, right?"

Gellert had spent a summer in Transylvania a long time ago, back when Durmstrang would still have him and summers were long and England far. He'd gone to an aunt who'd married down and fallen even lower because of politics, and Gellert slept in a barn for weeks with a mule that got hooked to a cart each day and whipped until it moved. The eyes the girl turns on him remind Gellert of that – of a farm animal, calf-like and soft and beaten down, that one day got smart and hit back until it killed.

"It was Slytherin's," she said. "You want it?"

"That depends." It really doesn't. There's a thrum of power coming from that thing that's already got him half intoxicated. "What do you want for it?"

She raises her arm. It's skinny and dirty, and the hand she extends toward him has nails with blood and what looks like fur underneath. Her eyes burn.

"An Unbreakable Vow," she says. "That you'll care for my child."

It's a bit of struggle, he finds out, smuggling an expecting woman up a two-stories high window for a bargain he would not have considered had he not been already drunk. A week later, when she dies giving birth, the bargain proves even better. What truly quivers with power, Gellert finds out, it's not the necklace. It's the child.

The world still spins, unconquered.

If he has his way, it won't be for long.

old brainchild that resurfaced yet again. the shower is what makes for weird compositions