The splash of the ferryman's oars
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"...death is coming for me as surely as the Chudley Cannons will finish bottom of the league this year..." But how did Albus break this fact to Aberforth?
One-shot, pre-HBP.
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The door of the Hog's Head was permanently in need of oiling. To most people, this merely meant it squealed protestingly whenever opened. But if you should pause to think and feel while pushing it, the door in very truth pushed back, as if it wanted to be quite sure you really did want to come in before it opened. It seemed to be particularly determined to be sure that Albus Dumbledore should want to come in: it took him three pushes with his unfamiliar-to-door-pushing right hand before the door opened.
Normality flooded out with the blast of warm air. The Hog's Head had not changed, despite his troubles with the door. A strong smell of goat, straw, stale beer; dim light from grubby lanterns; and a quiet murmur of voices from the few other patrons.
Albus was glad it was not crowded. His hand was – healed, as far as Severus could make it, but the effectual loss of it was still not something he was quite used to. In a crowd, pushed or jostled, it felt unbalanced. And yet, when there was no-one there, when he stood alone, it still felt unbalanced; the strange lost coldness ever present. As if Death himself, as with the three Peverell brothers, crept softly, waiting, at his side.
With an involuntary shudder, Albus stepped in out of the cold and dark.
Aberforth didn't look up until Albus stopped right in front of the counter. Then he raised his head and his eyebrows in one swift, standard gesture. "The usual?"
"Please." The usual was one half-pint of mulled mead, slid across the counter with a surly grunt. Then Aberforth would stand there and fold his arms, watching; and Albus would stand there and drink the mead; and sometimes the two brothers would find something to say to each other.
It was, Albus knew, not much of a brotherly relationship, but over the many months of many years it had at least become what passed for cordial between them. He no longer had to vary the time or day of his visit to prevent Aberforth avoiding him, and Aberforth's watching gaze was no longer a glare. There was, in a way, something very reassuring in being raked with that light blue stare of the Dumbledores – on a normal day. He was not entirely sure about its scrutiny tonight.
Aberforth shuffled back with the steaming mulled mead, and pushed it across the counter. Albus fished in his pocket, and slid the standard monthly Sickle back across the counter, albeit with his right hand not his left. Aberforth's hand clapped down onto it as ever, and then stopped.
They looked at Albus' right hand, paused in its reach for the mead. They looked at the blackened fingers poking out of the lengthened sleeve on Albus' left arm. And Aberforth spoke: "What?"
The Hog's Head was not exactly the ideal spot for a detailed explanation of the doings of Tom Riddle. All the walk down here Albus had tried to think of an answer to what he had hoped as well as dreaded would be Aberforth's inevitable question; turning out thousands of ideas and rejecting them, until the Hogwarts front drive must be strewn with the ghosts of bad ideas. Now, under his brother's familiarly critical gaze, the answer came readily.
"I was caught in one pie too many."
It had always been a constant complaint of Aberforth's that Albus tried to get too many fingers in too many pies. But at this justification of his point, Aberforth didn't seem to have his usual reprimand to hand – excusing the pun. He just stared a little longer at the blackened fingers.
"Is that as bad as it looks?"
Strange, that a man who had spent his school career being written off as stupid, who preferred blows to hexes and duels to words, could be so wise – and able to say so much in so few words.
"A year," said Albus. "At the most."
For a long, long while the bar, the whole pub, seemed as silent as Aberforth; as though some sound-excluding charm cut the two of them off from the normal, noise-making world just as the injury left Albus cut off from the normal, two-handed world.
Then there was a sudden sliding noise. Aberforth had jerked his own left hand, and sent the Sickle back across the counter. "No charge," he said gruffly.
There had always been a charge. Whether it was to keep matters on a purely objective business basis, or because Hogwarts Professors get paid much more than bar-tenders, Albus wasn't sure. But he had always paid. "What-?"
Aberforth shrugged. "Choke on it."
For one moment, leaving aside all practical considerations, Albus had a vision of himself doing so, leaving Aberforth as the true master of the Elder wand. He would defy all who came for it by punching them on the nose and eventually end its power by absent-mindedly feeding it to a goat. Then he looked up, and for another long, long while the two light-blue gazes of the two surviving Dumbledores met, unspeaking at least in words.
"Thank you," said Albus at last.
"Your mead'll go cold," Aberforth grumbled back, shoving the drink further towards Albus and folding his arms with a huff.
"It's still warm," said Albus lightly. It was, indeed; a deep, spiced warmth that seemed to spread through him right to his – cursed hand on one side, fingertips on the other. He drained the glass, set it down on the counter, and slipped the sickle back into his pocket. "Good night."
And the warmth stayed with him, all the way back up to the castle, quite overwhelming the strange lost coldness that followed, waiting for the time he must say the word or fall to Tom Riddle's long-buried curse. Because Aberforth, for the first time in all these years, looked up and nodded curtly. "Good night."
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