A/N: Greetings readers! A very happy Advent season to you all! A few notes before we start, just to answer some questions I'm already anticipating.

1) There will be a few spoilers from Fantastic Beasts. This story treats the events of FB as canon. However, if you are not interested in watching those films or don't consider them to be canonical, it shouldn't ruin anything here if you still want to read. There are just a few details about Aberforth that are taken from the events in FB.

2) This story is told out of order. Although I will not specifically title the chapters with when they happen, context clues should tip you off. However, if you're interested in going back and reading the chapters in order once this is finished posting, it would be as follows: 3,4,2,1,5.

3) As far as warnings go, I don't think this earns very many. There is some drunkenness, a bit of vomiting, a scene of birth for an animal, and super minimal cursing. As far as the emotional tenor of the fic, I guess it could probably be called angsty (and I also meant it as a bit of a bleak comedy). It is certainly not an extra fluffy Christmas piece like my 2022 Advent story The Host.

4) The posting schedule will be one chapter a week, released on Wednesday December 4th, 11th, 18th, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day (A bonus chapter!).

5) I originally wanted to call this story "'Gus n' 'Rus" or "'Rus, 'Gus, n' Abe." It sat in my plot bunny warren for months before I pulled it out (quite unexpectedly) and made it into the focus for my 2024 NaNo.

Glad tidings and good cheer!

The Men Who Glare at Goats

Life had reduced down to a series of unpleasant impressions.

He was dirty. That much he could feel from the dried mud crusted to the side of his face and covering the entirety of his hands.

He was cold. Agonisingly cold. Even through his thickest wool cloak. The brutal northern winds were working their fingers under the heavy, protective layers he wore. He felt the brush and sting of icy kisses along every exposed portion of skin.

He was… what was that sensation? A repetitive back and forth along the back of the hand stretched out before him. It might have been wet, but he was a bit damp all over, making it difficult to tell. Something was touching him.

He tried to open one bleary, black eye and squinted up towards the dark shape that had its long neck craned over his arm. Whatever it was was licking him!

He snatched his hand away, only for the beast to follow it and step closer. He had the clear view of a mud-caked cloven hoof, standing right before his eyes before his head dropped with exhaustion once more.

Great. Now it was licking the side of his head. And there was nothing he could properly do about it.

Severus groaned, and it sounded more like a wet gurgle than a proper sound a man might make.

The tip of his long nose was so cold that he was certain it may well fall off, and he was unpleasantly startled when the tongue began probing at his dripping nostrils. This produced a more violent reaction, where he pushed ineffectually against the creature's head and flopped with an absolute dearth of grace onto his back.

"Gerroff! Off!" He whined, slapping at the thing's head.

This produced a bit of plaintive bleating.

"Found yourself a live one, did yeh, Nettles?"

The hooves before his head did an excited little shuffle as Nettles responded eagerly to its master's question.

"Oh. Hmm. I expected he would have been gone hours ago." A leather shod foot nudged against Snape's ribs, but his vision wasn't clear enough to get a good look at the man the foot belonged to. That didn't matter a great deal, however. He knew perfectly well who had found him in the shite-crusted stall that stood out back behind the Hog's Head.

"Usually he sleeps it off before morning."

Nettles bleated in answer.

"Naturally."

The owner of the foot walked away and Snape breathed a sigh of relief. He could leave him well enough alone. It was bad enough that the old man had allowed him to drink as much as he had to begin with—

Snape's brain abruptly shut down and he shrieked in an appalling falsetto that made his throat feel as though it were cracking.

Wet! Wet! Wet! Cold! Coooooooold!

His next thought was that he had finally managed to sit up, even if it was only because he'd been shocked into it when Aberforth had levitated his goats' filthy water trough over him and tipped the icy contents out over his head.

"BUGGERING DUMBLEDOLT!"

"He's still piss't as a newt, Nettles. He's gone and mistaken me for my brother."

"Mistake nothing," Snape spat, using his hands to draw down his soaked hair and face and flinging the hay and unmentionable ick that stuck to him to the far reaches of the pen.

"I'd offer you a hand, but then I'd have to wash my own."

Snape pushed himself into a seated position, his trousers soaked through. He could feel his pants sticking to his skin and knew that it was all a lost cause. It would be a miracle if he could dry himself out before he trudged his way back to the castle. He only hoped that he could manage to avoid being seen by his students. At least it was a weekend.

"Merlin forbid you should ever have to touch a bar of soap," he spat, pulling his hands from the crown of his head, down his hair, and over his face. They worked like a pair of squeegees on a windowpane, and he flung the mud he'd sloughed off of himself to the far reaches, hearing it splatter wherever it landed. He hoped some of it got on Dumbledore's robes.

"You'd have had to have aimed a bit better," Aberforth scoffed.

Taking a deep breath now, Snape tried to roll over so he was on all fours. He resisted mightily the urge to vomit when the motion sent his head and stomach spinning, but eventually he did manage to push to his feet, unsteady though he was.

"Stay... stay out of my head," Snape gasped, pitching over so that his hands were braced on his knees. He gagged a couple of times and then resolved himself to the inevitable. While he mentally prepared himself for the unpleasant task he knew he must do, he felt Nettles the goat brush up against the back of his leg. Once he was steady enough, he pushed the beast away.

"I've got a loo inside. I'd prefer you didn't do that here where the goats'll eat it."

"Couldn't just offer me a potion, could you?" Snape rasped, choking down his bile as it rose up his throat. If he didn't do it himself, it was going to come over him quite naturally.

His eyes were closed, but he could hear Aberforth's approach. A firm hand gripped him by the shoulder and pulled up sharply on his cloak, attempting to get Snape to stand upright.

"I suppose you'll be having to wash that hand now, after all..."

"After all the low places I've seen you through, Severus Snape, you still think you can get fresh with me? Next time I'll leave you where you lie. With your luck, you'll wake up on a Hogsmeade morning with a batch of your pissant students staring at you laying arse up in the goat pen."

"Fuck—it's not... is it?"

"Would that it were," Aberforth grumbled, grabbing hold of Snape's upper arm and bodily manoeuvering him to the back door. "Through here, you fool. The loo's on the left. I don't let just anyone use the facilities."

Snape sneered, but it wasn't at Aberforth in particular. He couldn't yet lift his head without it swimming, so he directed his venom at his sopping boots. "No, only the ones planning on upchucking into your precious goats' feeding trough."

"If you'd done that, I would have insisted you help them finish off the contents. And consider that a rule going forward."

Without another word, Snape was pushed into the tiny stall that dared to call itself a water closet. Instantly, he was beset by the nagging of a particularly vocal magic mirror; even before the door had closed behind him.

"Great Griffins, what's happened to you, man?"

Snape groaned and turned away from the nosy looking glass. He leaned up against the wall with one hand bracing himself, as though he were about to lower his fly to take a piss, but instead of doing so, he merely breathed deeply through his nose and out his mouth, searching for his elusive equilibrium. Once he found it, he went through the same mental preparations he'd once undertaken as a young man in Voldemort's camp. Namely: preparing himself for torture.

Granted, sticking his own fingers down his throat to induce emesis wasn't nearly so bad as enduring a few rounds of the Cruciatus, but it was bad enough that he preferred not to go into it cold.

The retching lasted several rounds until he felt certain that whatever alcohol had remained in his stomach must surely have been gone. He didn't feel any better for it, at least not yet, but he knew that the vomiting was inevitable after the sort of night he'd had, and he preferred to do it on his own terms so he could get on with a day that promised to be hellish.

"You can't leave it like that! Use a charm or something!"

"Use a charm yourself," he choked back, not caring that it wasn't much of an insult and sounded purely juvenile.

"I'll never let you in here for a slash ever again—"

"I don't think that's up to you," he answered, refusing to turn back and look at his own reflection in the mirror. It was always worse when the mirror hijacked your image and put words in your mouth. At least it was in Snape's experience.

He'd never met a mirror that hadn't had a go at him over the state of his hair, and the female mirrors always seemed to like to fiddle with his greasy locks while sporting disgusted looks on their faces. It was disconcerting and rude.

Severus nearly fell when the door to the tiny water closet was yanked open and Aberforth manhandled him once more, this time dragging him out with a hand clawed in his tunic.

"My mirror ain't done nothing to you, Snape. If he says you're not welcome in there again, then that's his prerogative. Now be a gentleman and use a Scourgify."

"Don't tell me—"

"I won't serve you next time you come 'round, unless you pay respect to me and my establishment. And that includes the enchantments."

Sighing now, Snape turned to brandish his wand in a lazy wave over the facilities, watching as the bits of spew that hadn't made it into the toilet bowl disappeared to leave it sparkling.

"There. I trust you'll have my glass of gin waiting and ready for me next time I grace your bar with my presence," he tried to drawl in his normal deliberate way. It didn't quite come out as he would have liked, however. His throat was raw from stomach acid, and he was shivering violently from the cold. He'd been made to speak around his teeth chattering.

"I've got something better for you than that, Snape. Go on now. Upstairs." Aberforth spun him so that he could set his feet upon the narrow steps that led to the first floor. The last time Snape had walked that way was when he'd snuck back away from the public part of the establishment, having followed Aberforth's older brother on his way to interview Sybill Trelawny for the Divination position. He froze upon remembering.

"I've not forgotten either, Snape. And if you don't do exactly what I tell you, I won't hesitate to throw you out on your ear again, you hear?"

"Why am I going upstairs?" Snape asked, wearily. "I'm ok to floo back now..."

"If you leave now, you won't be offered the floo. I'll make you walk your miserable arse back to the castle. It's late enough now that the students ought to be awake, even on a weekend, and they can look their fill upon their miserable ass of a Potions Professor as he dries out and dries up on his own, without any assistance."

Snape paused, not because of the threat, but because of the last words that he'd heard. "Assistance?" He asked, doing his best not to let the touch of greed he felt colour his words.

"Aye. Assistance. Now, boy. I haven't got all day to stand around staring at your dripping backside."

Not wishing to walk back and too intrigued by the offer of a potential cure for his hangover, Snape loosed a deep sigh before he made his way up the staircase, using his arms on the walls at either side of him to brace himself and steady his terribly off-balance gait.

When he made to step out onto the first floor landing, Aberforth prodded him between the shoulder blades, either with his wand or with his index finger.

"Not here. Go up another level."

"The second floor? Why?"

"Because I don't want to waste my morning cleaning up the private rooms after you track mud through them."

"You'd rather I track mud through your second floor?" Snape grumbled to himself, hoping that Aberforth wouldn't actually say anything to him over it. It was reflexive at this point; having to have the last word. No doubt, had old Abe said something witty in response, Snape would have found himself compelled to continue on with his belligerent repartee, until Dumbledore made good on his threat and sent him back up the castle looking like a drowned rat.

"You're not nearly as clever as you would want me to believe," Aberforth snorted from behind him. "You're an ignorant child, you've always been an ignorant child, and from my view I see no indications that you'll ever stop behaving like an ignorant child in the future—"

Snape rounded on him, his head pounding when he couldn't resist his voice rising to just below a scream: "I said to stay out of my damn head!"

He was forced back into a large antechamber on the second floor by a push against his chest, and he found himself lying—for the second time that morning—in a pile of straw. At least this time it was blessedly dry.

"You want me out of your head, boy? Keep me out! I know damn well that Albus taught you how."

"I shouldn't have to... not all the time... 's too much—"

"Certainly it'll leave you with one hell of a migraine now, wouldn't it? And it serves you right too. What business do you have incapacitating yourself, Snape? You ought to be on your toes, man. Always at the ready."

Snape finally got a chance to look around the room he was in. It looked rather like a stable. There were stalls built into the walls, an enormous barrel was halved down the middle and had been propped up in a wooden rig so that it served as a large watering trough, and beside it was what appeared to be the remnants of someone's breakfast, dumped out on the floor. He saw the arse-end of two goats happily knocking their heads into one another as they attempted to chase the same banger around the straw-covered boards. He only narrowly avoided having his head kicked when one of their back legs threatened to fly.

Although he had been there once before, many years earlier, he was still preoccupied by the odd sight of goats occupying the upstairs flat inside a building when he answered, somewhat distantly and without nearly as much heat as his words might normally have held. "It's too much. To Occlude all the time. I'd go mad."

"If you were doing it all the time, I grant you probably would," Aberforth answered as he strode purposefully into the room. He walked up to the pair of goats and patted them affectionately on their withers, a calm expression supplanting the look of severe agitation he'd sported thus far. "But you know that Albus and me come by our talents naturally. If you were as smart of a man as you go around pretending to be, you'd never leave your guard down around either of us."

"Around your brother I never do," Snape contended. He climbed to his feet, finally feeling a bit closer to his normal self, even if his head was still throbbing. At the very least, having vomited up the contents of his stomach had cleared the way for his body to begin fighting back. "You, however? What have I to fear from you?"

"You've never looked upon my arm. What makes you so sure I ain't one of you?"

"One of us," Severus spat, feeling anger suffuse his form and reigniting his feelings of being sick all over again. He wished he could either run out the door or curse Dumbledore where he stood, but instead he did nothing, merely standing there in the goats' quarters while Dumbledore contented himself with scratching the disconcerting beasts on the boney expanse between their eyes and their horns.

"You want to tell me that even you're not one of you, is that right?"

"You have no idea what I am," Severus hissed through his teeth, glowering at Aberforth for all his worth.

"You're a young buck with green horns whose got his dander up and is ready to charge anyone comin' in your pen."

Shaking his head and glowering at the sight of Dumbledore with his strange pets, Snape couldn't help his sigh of disgust. "I'm..."

Aberforth waited for him, his steel-grey eyes boring holes into Snape's person, even though Severus was studiously avoiding his gaze.

"I'm going to head back to the castle. I don't need your help. And I don't need to explain myself to anyone."

"Don't be a fool, boy."

"It doesn't matter what I do now," Snape answered, taking a step backwards towards the door to the stairwell. "You already think I'm a complete dunderhead. Doubtful if I could sway your opinion at this juncture."

"Aye. And so a fool would assume."

"What do you want from me!?" Snape thundered in answer, throwing his hands up. "Because all I want right now is some dry robes and a whole damn plate of bacon. If you're not about to provide that for me, then I see no reason why I should stick around catering to your flair for the cryptic!"

"Settle, boy," Aberforth chided, though it wasn't clear whether he was speaking to Severus or his goat, for he was directing his frown down at his dumb beast rather than at Snape, himself.

"Right, then. I'm off. And by the way, Dumbledore: you can go soak your damn head. See if I ever give you my business again..." he grumbled, under his breath.

"Go in the other room and sit your scrawny arse down, Snape. I'll send to the castle for a pair of robes for you."

"Why?" Severus demanded, crossing his arms over his chest and suppressing the shiver that wanted to break out. He was certain his lips must have been turning blue, for he was so past the point of comfort that he could no longer feel his feet in his boots.

"Right, and take those off too. You can set them by the fire."

When Snape opened his mouth to angrily protest the invasion of his thoughts again, Aberforth merely scoffed at him.

Up against an immovable object—which Dumbledore certainly was—and not as resolved to journey back to the castle in the state he currently was in if there was a more attractive alternative, Severus finally deflated. The young wizard reached up to unclasp his cloak from around his shoulders, feeling the sodden weight of it dropping to the floor where it pooled around his weary frame.

"Not there! You'll get the straw wet!"

"I'm sure that never happens when these stupid things piss where they stand, now does it?"

"Cleaner than you are, aren't they? Pick that up and hang it up—properly—in the sitting room. I'll call Argus 'round to bring you your things."

Having stooped to scoop up the heavy wool, Snape's eyes narrowed as he straightened. "Argus? It's colder than Azkaban prison out there today, Abe—"

"You would know."

"—and Argus's had trouble with his joints recently. Don't ask him to come all this way in that—"

"Argus ain't the only one with arthritis, Snape. And unlike you, he has enough sense in his head not to venture out in a snowstorm the likes of which we've had."

"And you expect him to get here how? He can't floo."

Aberforth smirked unpleasantly at him and shooed him off into the sitting room again, where Snape was left alone to make himself comfortable.

Dumbledore's flat was that, at least. It was very comfortable, indeed. And with a fire roaring in the grate, Snape felt himself begin to warm for the first time since he'd awakened in the goat pen out back.

He moseyed over to the fireplace and divested himself of his teaching robe, which he spelled to float in the air, as though having been hung up on a clothes hanger, and then took a seat on a plush, upholstered chair so that he could loosen the laces on his boots and pull them off of his leaden feet.

It took some doing. His socks were so soaked that they had seemingly formed a vacuum seal, and it required quite a lot of work on his part to yank them off. Once he had, however, he sat back and allowed his bare feet to face the fire, where the flames warmed his soles and his soul.

In the other room he could hear Abe moving about, speaking in a low voice to his goats and presumably feeding them their daily allotment of grains, if the odd word that Severus caught could be trusted.

He fell to a light doze which was only interrupted when he heard a loud creaking from the wall to his rear.

Nearly falling out of his chair, he jerked to attention and grabbed up his wand, pointing it at the source of the noise.

It turned out to be a nearly life-sized portrait of a beautiful, young girl, whose blonde hair had been plaited on either side of her head, and whose clear blue eyes by turns twinkled and then seemed to grow dark with some unnamable emotion.

She held up a finger to her mouth and shushed him, even while she was swung out from the wall.

From behind her, Snape could make out the stooped form of Hogwarts' caretaker, who was shuffling slowly out of a stone passageway that shouldn't have been able to exist, given that they were on the second floor of a half-timbered building.

"Argus?"

"'Lo, Professa'. We heard you were needing a change of clothes. Can't have Hogwarts' only good teacher out catching his death in this weather," the old squib drawled. He flashed Snape an unpleasant grin, complete with the baring of one, golden canine tooth.

"Thanks," Snape rose to assist him in scrambling down from the passageway, and took the proffered bundle of wool and linen. He then offered the old man his seat and conjured up a privacy screen, setting about divesting himself of his wet clothes, all the way down to his pants—which Argus had neglected to bring a replacement for. With a grimace, Snape pulled them away from his skin, figuring that it was better to wear none at all than to allow the seat of his trousers to grow damp.

An attempt at a drying charm—a bit of a hail Mary effort, if he were being honest with himself—resulted only in stiff, unyielding pants that were still as dirty as they'd been, only dehydrated now.

It wasn't that he still wore dirty underpants. In fact, keeping his pants clean had become something of an obsession for him since the disaster in his fifth year. It was that the filthy mud and whatever else could be found in the goat pen had fully saturated the fibres, and now that he'd dried them, it appeared as though the stains had set.

He would likely end up having to dispose of them, and—if he wasn't careful about instructing the house-elves on how to launder his lab-coat, trousers, robes, and cloak—the rest of his clothes as well.

'Hell. I can't bloody well afford this...'

His expression soured, but eventually he decided that a temporary stasis charm on his clothes may well preserve them long enough that a proper stain-removing potion could be applied.

Once he emerged, dry, clean, and still terribly hung over, he dropped into the chair opposite Argus and scrubbed his face with both hands, groaning deeply as he did so.

"We tie one on last night?"

"It would probably be more correct to say I tied on several."

Argus laughed in the wheezing way he did, sounding a bit like a rusty hinge swinging freely, and Severus grimaced when the noise of it hit his ears.

"You know you didn't have to come all this way. I can apparate us back to the gates, but it's a bit of a walk back."

"Why shouldn't we take the passageway?" Filch asked, looking back at where the portrait still stood open. "Only takes five minutes. Much less than slogging all the way through the village and grounds."

Snape glanced over his shoulder, his head feeling like it was lolling on his neck with fatigue as he did so. "I don't trust it. Why should there be a passageway to The Hog's Head from Hogwarts? How long's it been there? Centuries? Or is it new, created by Dumbledore to serve as some kind of bolt hole...?"

Argus cut his eyes at him and then to the door, as though he expected Aberforth would emerge through it. Which he might well have done, given that it was his home. "Which Dumbledore?"

"They're basically the same," Snape spat, rubbing his eyes. It felt as though course grit had lodged itself between his cornea and his eyelid and rubbing it only felt as though he were scratching the lenses of his own eyeball. When he opened them again the room seemed blurry.

"Now, now, let's not be down on our host, Professor," Argus wheedled, his voice oily.

Snape grunted in response. "You've always liked him. I can't fathom why."

"I always liked you too, lad, and probably there's less people that can understand that than why I'd like the man that tops me up with an extra finger of Ogden's whenever I sit down at his bar."

"So that's the way of it—"

"No, it ain't. I don't only like you because of your joint salve."

"No?" Snape posed sardonically.

"You're too bright for everyone, but you've a good head on your shoulders, and you at least tried to follow the rules. And now that you're on staff, you're the only one of those tossers that cares to keep the students in line. If it weren't for you, the lunatics would be running the asylum. I can blame all the teachers, of course, and some more than others, but ultimately it's the headmaster's doin' that things are as bad as they are."

Snape only grunted again. He glanced over at the table beside him and found a crudely whittled goat figurine that was sat atop a paperback novel about chimera hunters. He picked it up and manoeuvered it to and fro between his fingertips, watching how the light of the fireplace seemed to send flickering licks of flame up and down the flat planes that made up the goat's body.

Probably Aberforth had made it himself.

"And before you go getting the wrong idea, I don't hate Albus, neither. He's not got his blessed head on quite straight, if you ask me, but we know where our bread is buttered, we do. Wouldn't have a job in our world if it weren't for Dumbledore."

Snorting now, Snape set the goat back down on the cover of the book. "Neither would I. And I think it'd probably be better that way."

"Why don't you quit, then?"

"Do you think I ought to?"

"Ought to quit or ought to want to quit?"

"To quit." Snape sagged sideways, his exhaustion preventing him from sitting upright even a moment longer. He rested his head on the palm of his hand as he slumped over the arm of his chair. His legs were stretched out before him haphazardly, and he found himself wiggling his long toes in appreciation for the warmth of the fire. "God, do I ever want to quit."

"I'd miss you, Professor, but?" Argus shrugged then, his weathered features contorting into an expression that on anyone else might have been a sheepish grimace. "I dunno that many others would feel the same."

"They'd throw a damn party." Severus sneered, but it was half-hearted. "And I'd join them. And then they'd keel over from the shock of it."

"But you could easily work anywhere, a genius like you? The guild would be happy to have ye. St. Mungo's. Could start your own business. Put old Jigger out of business—I used his salve for years and it doesn't hold a candle to yours. He's a bit of a charlatan if you ask me."

Snape swallowed, his eyes having grown glassy. He was staring at the texture of the stone mantlepiece.

How he wished he could explain to Argus why he simply couldn't quit.

How he wished he could just come out and say that he was being held captive by Dumbledore. The last prisoner of the first war. The first prisoner of the second.

A sideways glance revealed that Argus was sitting at the front of his chair—for he always had a hard time sitting still or properly relaxing—and was rubbing at his swollen knees through the wool of his trousers.

Snape felt a rush of affection for the gnarled caretaker, and he swallowed, hoping he could gulp it down and keep it down in a way he'd not managed to accomplish with the contents of his stomach only an hour or so earlier.

Argus had always been a familiar person to him. Even when he was only just beginning at Hogwarts as a child. He'd always sensed a kinship about them.

Whether it was their mutual respect for the rules and mutual abhorrence for the ones who would so flippantly break them, or whether it was the obvious pride the old man took in his work, Severus had never before managed to pin down.

Now though he was considering something far more disturbing and upsetting.

From the angle he sat at, Argus' wizened face and grim slash of a mouth recalled another person that Snape had known with similar features. A man he'd spent more than a decade trying to impress before he spent the next decade hoping to disappoint.

His father.

That Severus had earned the immediate—and exclusive—approval of Argus Filch as soon as he stepped foot in Hogwarts had been such a surprise to him that he'd never once questioned whether his affection for the older man was a stand-in for someone else.

The wizard forced himself to look away then, before he began imagining there was some sort of father-son relationship there that simply wasn't. That simply hadn't ever been.

He had no father.

The stillness of the room was only complimented by the crackling of the logs before them and the whistling of the wind outside the diamond-paned windows.

The sound of the door when it swung open would have made a lesser man jump, but Severus merely glanced sideways to see that Aberforth had apparently completed his duties in regards to his cloven-hooved pets, and was now beating straw off of the hem of his non-descript, brown robe.

There were bits of it all over him, of course—even a piece sticking out of his grey beard—but he paid it no mind as he shuffled across the threshold.

"Not today, no sir-ee, no," he said, seemingly to the goats behind him who were poking their heads through the doorframe. "Maybe you, Mirabelle, you've been simply delightful. Yes. A very sweet little lady," he actually cooed, scratching Mirabelle in her scraggly goat beard. "Yes, you may come in and keep us company."

Once Mirabelle cleared the entrance he abruptly shut the door in the other goat's indignant face.

"What's wrong with the other one?" Snape asked in a deadpan.

"Who? Piss?"

Severus grimaced. "Piss?"

"Piss is a flaming bellend. You don't want him in here with us."

"I would be too if my master had named me 'Piss,'" Snape snarked as he rolled his eyes.

"You're already a flaming bellend, and your name's Severus bloody Snape. It doesn't matter what I've named him. He was a bastard before all that."

"I remember," Snape answered, rubbing at his temples.

Aberforth strode towards the old cast-iron, wood-fire cooker that was pushed up against the far-side of the room and ignited the space beneath the hob with his wand, setting a kettle atop it once he'd replaced the grate. He glanced over his shoulder at the pair taking up his chairs.

"How was your walk from the castle, Argus?"

Filch shrugged, but offered a grin that no one but a mother could have loved, complete with greying, gapped teeth and what anyone but someone who knew the man well would have thought a rather lascivious stare. "Didn't treat us too bad, it didn't. We owe you for that passageway, Abe."

"Thank the castle. She set it up without my asking," Dumbledore scowled at the tea service he was assembling, his hands busy with finding three mismatched earthenware mugs that he set atop a trio of chipped saucers. "I can only guess at why she thought it was necessary."

Having said that, he looked over and shared a glance with the girl in the painting, both of them appearing sad, before Aberforth tore his gaze away and found Mirabelle's head with his hand. She had stayed at his side as he moved through the room, and she allowed herself to be petted, even as she'd found the corner of the tablecloth and was chewing it with a methodical rhythm.

"I've offered to take Argus back up to the castle with me. How did you get word to him that I needed clothes, anyhow?"

"Sent word while you were still laying out back in the mud. I didn't have a mind to wake you until I had everything arranged. And you'll not be going back through the village."

The unexpected prohibition got Snape's hackles up instantly. He felt gooseflesh rise on his arms, just as hot agitation singed along his nerves. "Why?"

"Dementors all over town, and no one's out and about unless they have a damned good reason. If it were just you, maybe I wouldn't care, but you and Argus? You'd look like a right tasty meal to the likes of Black."

"I wish he'd try," Snape scathed, rising to pace. His bare feet slapped along the warm floorboards. "I'd welcome him to try!"

"Black laid you out more times than you can count on both hands, boy. Don't be a damned fool. And between the hell that he gave you, the hell he gave Argus, and the hell he gave me, I'll not be letting the pair of you take any chances. Just take the passage back. Albus knows where you are."

"Of course he does!" Snape exclaimed, rounding on his host. "Has a right, proper talebearer of a brother to keep him informed of every bloody time his little pet Potions Master decides to try and enjoy a glass or two of gin—"

"A glass or two," Aberforth snorted, shaking his head. He worked his way over to a cabinet and began withdrawing a teapot and a nondescript paper bag. He scooped a few spoonfuls of its contents into the teapot before topping it off with hot water. A second bag found its way into his hand afterwards and he scooped a leveled teaspoon of it into a red-glazed mug. "You had the whole bottle, Snape."

"I paid for what amounted to two bottles," the younger wizard groused. When he'd changed his clothes, he'd noticed that his coin purse was a lot lighter than when he'd left the castle.

Aberforth levitated the tea service with a swish of his wand and directed it to float between the two chairs. "You know my rates. Sit down."

"You're a swindler," Snape spat, but he did, in fact, take his seat. "Charging double for cut-rate, watered down piss."

"And yet you won't go to Rosemerta," Aberforth chuckled, summoning one of the kitchen chairs to himself and grunting as his joints protested him lowering his weight into it. As soon as he'd settled, Mirabelle came and rested her chin on his knee, finding the end of the sash that tied his robe closed and nibbling on it contentedly.

"Better a swindler than a tarted-up floozy," Snape answered, to hoots from Argus. He felt himself grin in spite of his irritation, and he wasn't shy in accepting the red-glazed mug with the adulterated tea. "What did you spoon in here?"

Aberforth smirked at him. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

"I would, yes."

"You think you want to know, but really, you don't."

"Whatever it is, I've had worse," Snape riposted, gamely taking a sip. He grimaced when he tasted the tea mixed with something unpleasantly reminiscent of ammonia-based cleaning solutions. Involuntarily, a small shiver ran through his shoulders and back.

This was met with laughter from the two older men and he couldn't help glaring at them before he took a defiant second sip. Gratifyingly, his migraine was already being beaten into submission by whatever he'd dared to drink.

"You can thank Piss. It's his contribution."

Snape paused before he swallowed his third mouthful, his cheeks swishing with the stuff and his mouth in a pucker. He shook his head 'no,' knowing that were anyone to look into his eyes, they would see the faint pleading expression there.

"Oh, yes. I'm afraid so."

Loud guffaws of laughter from Argus and Aberforth met the sound of Severus' hacking coughs as he attempted to spew every last drop he'd drunk out onto the floor.