The Fourth Guest For Tea (Part Two of Two)
Title: The Fourth Guest For Tea (Part Two)
Author: scarysnapey
Warnings: Some sex, non-Grindeldore side relationship.
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~12,000
Summary: After Ariana's death, Gellert and Aberforth have both fled Godric's Hollow, leaving a distraught Albus behind. After a time, he too sets out on his own journey, to return four of Ariana's toy tea cups to the people she had set the table for on the day that she died. His journey brings him face-to-face with his estranged brother, the one man he truly loves, and the one thing he fears the most: the identity of Ariana's true murderer.
A/N: Currently out of town and on a weird internet schedule on top of the time difference, so I'm hoping against hope that I'm posting this somewhat correctly. Fingers crossed. In two parts because it's too long.
Albus materializes at Bathilda’s gate, wondering why he ever said goodbye to his home at all when he would be seeing so much more of it. The rain has stopped at last, though the sidewalk is only just beginning to dry, light spots spearing between the pools of moistened grey. Albus hurries through the gate, wary of any passersby, lest Elphias jump out from behind a bush and grab him.
The streets are empty, though, from Bathilda’s gate to the graveyard in the distance. Albus ignores the beautiful green grass and the way it makes his seem browned and dull. He ignores the new color of the door and the sign that says, ‘Don’t knock; wet paint!’ He knocks, anyway.
Bathilda opens the door immediately, and the annoyed reprimand dies on her lips when she sees Albus standing there.
“Oh, dear,” she breathes. “I suppose you’d best come in.”
Albus does, ignoring also the dirty look she gives the smeared paint on her door. He’ll fix it when he leaves.
Bathilda is too nervous to sit. Instead, she wrings her hands and paces back and forth. “Tea,” she cries. “Would you like some tea? I’ll put on the kettle.”
She’s halfway to the kitchen before Albus actually says something. “Ms. Bagshot, please sit down.” She freezes, and though Albus has known her for many years, he has never seen such an ugly expression on her face. She is not a young woman, but in that instant she looks positively old. Albus stares at his shoes, and Bathilda sits reluctantly.
Albus cuts right to the chase; he has no desire to stay her any longer. Bathilda’s house has always smelled like cats, and today is no exception. “Have you heard from my brother?” he asks.
“No,” Bathilda blurts out. Then the question seems to register, and she turns bright red. “I mean, yes. He owled me a week ago.” She picks at the cuticle of her left ring finger.
“Do you know where he is?”
“I’m not sure if I should tell you…. He-“
“Ms. Bagshot,” Albus interrupts. “Don’t you think that you’ve done enough to drive us apart?”
The color rushes to her face at that. “Excuse me,” she bites out, “for doing a favor for family. It’s not my fault that you decided to lose your common sense over…” she trails off. Albus is almost pleased to see that he’s not the only one having trouble with the name.
He stands abruptly. “I have no desire to overstay my welcome. Can you tell me where my brother is, and I’ll be gone.”
She gives him a nasty look. “He’s bussing tables at the Hog’s Head Pub in Hogsmeade.”
Albus nods and turns to go. Bathilda takes one last parting shot. “The place is an absolute wreck, but I’m surprised they’d let dirt like your lot in.” Albus hears her, but he ignores it. He hastens to the door, keeping his shoes off the good carpeting and everything. He is above retaliation.
“Albus?” Her voice has changed. Albus’s hand is on the doorknob, and he honestly considers walking out.
“Yes?” He doesn’t turn around, but he can feel her standing behind him in the corridor.
“Her table keeled over. In your backyard, you know. It was pretty far sunk into the mud by the time I noticed. I was just wondering if you- you know- did you take the teacups in?”
The teacups in question are burning a hole in his pocket as she’s talking. Albus opens the door. “Yes, I did.”
The door is swinging closed behind them when Bathilda replies. “She would have- Well, goodbye.”
The ‘For Sale’ sign catches his eye at the last second, and he registers with unrestrained sorrow that the words are obscured by a little piece of cardboard with the word ‘Sold’ scrawled on it. Albus Disapparates from the front steps, forgetting entirely about the paint he had planned on fixing.
Hogsmeade never changes. The entire town is a great pit of nostalgia for Hogwarts graduates, and Albus is no exception. In his fragile state, it takes one familiar street for him to realize how bloody lost he is. He stuffs his hands into his bulging pockets and trudges up the street, past shoppers and young children and a couple stray dogs who look happier than Albus feels.
Albus might as well be a ghost for all the attention anyone pays him. He supposes that it’s logical. At this point, so many people have taken a piece of him and then run or died or left him that there is none of him left. That’s why Albus is here, though. He’s come to get another piece back.
When he pushes open the door to the Hog’s Head, Albus realizes that invisibility is not enough to hide him here. Whether Bathilda lied to him, or a week’s time was long enough for Aberforth to be promoted, he is no longer bussing tables. He’s standing by the bar when Albus pulls his hands from his pockets. The bright white rag stills in the glass he’s drying, and Aberforth goes so stiff that Albus considers running.
Instead, he takes a deep breath and heads toward the bar, taking a seat directly in front of his brother. “Aberforth,” he says simply.
Aberforth slams the glass onto its shelf a bit harder than necessary. “How did you find me?” he demands.
“Bathilda told me.”
Aberforth exhales. “Bloody cow never knew how to keep her mouth shut.” He glances over Albus’s head. “Well, if you’re here to murder another little girl, this isn’t exactly the place.”
Albus recoils. He hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but Aberforth is icier than Bathilda. “Aberforth, please….” His voice is weak.
Aberforth frowns. “I get off in half an hour. If you’re still here… I live upstairs.”
Albus is still there in half an hour, staring at the now crumpled picture of him and Elphias. He watches Elphias laugh over and over again. Albus chortles along with him, blissfully unaware of the way that his life was about to veer off the tracks. Aberforth throws the rag to a young blonde woman, who pats him on the shoulder as she ties the apron around her waist.
“Have a good night, Abe,” she says. Aberforth winks at her. Albus watches the entire thing with his mouth hanging open. The grin on Aberforth’s face disappears as he catches Albus’s eye, and Albus closes his mouth. A year ago, he would have teased Aberforth for hours over that girl. A year ago, a lot of things were different.
“I hope you’re not planning to stay,” Aberforth says as they climb the stairs. He fiddles with a key ring, one of the keys is the key to the house that doesn’t belong to them anymore. And the other two are foreign to Albus, as foreign as Aberforth seems to have become. Albus wonders whether he’s fucking the barmaid. She’s pretty. He wonders if that’s why he cannot stay.
Inside the little room that Aberforth calls home, he changes. The confidence, the sturdiness that Albus had witnessed downstairs disappears, and he becomes the broken husk of a man that Albus had made him. He pours something brown into a glass and downs it, just the way that a character in a book would. And then he sits in the chair across the little table from Albus and buries his head in his hands.
Albus is still wearing his coat, but he feels uncomfortable taking it off. That would be too familiar a gesture, one that would be completely inappropriate with this man he does not know. He’s starting to think that he didn’t know anyone, ever, or maybe that it’s impossible to know anybody until tragedy comes between you.
“Aberforth,” he says cautiously.
“Why did you come here, Al?” The nickname crushes Albus’s already broken heart into even smaller pieces. It revives a spark of hope, that maybe someday Aberforth will forgive him. That maybe they can be brothers once again.
“I need to know if you know,” Albus says frankly, and unlike Ariana, Aberforth can give him a reply. Aberforth raises his head from his hands and looks Albus right in the eye.
“Do I know which one of us killed her?” he asks. Albus nods. “Yes, I know.”
There’s silence, and the candles on the counter flicker ominously, and the September wind shakes the shutters, and the barmaid downstairs laughs really loudly. The sounds make Albus a little sick. His hand in his pocket fiddles with one of the teacups. He pulls it out and sets it between Aberforth and him on the table. The perfect china glows orange in the candlelight. “Will you tell me who?”
“Why should I?” Aberforth asks, but he hasn’t looked away from the teacup.
“Because I can make you forget.” Albus sets his wand on the table next to the teacup.
Aberforth’s eyes widen. “I don’t want to forget this.” He grasps the teacup. “Not this.”
“I mean I can make you forget who did it, if you want.”
The barmaid laughs, the floorboards creak, and a bit of dust flutters from the ceiling when someone stomps on the floor upstairs. Aberforth nods, and then he tells Albus exactly who killed Ariana Dumbledore.
Albus is good with memory charms; there is no danger of anything going wrong, but once Albus casts the spell, he’ll have to leave, and there is far too much between the two of them for Albus to go just yet.
“May I keep this?” Aberforth asks, holding the tiny teacup in his palm. Albus nods.
“That’s why I brought it.”
“Oh.”
“I’m so glad you took them in,” Aberforth says finally. “I was so afraid that they’d been out in the rain or stuck in some bird’s nest or some such nonsense.”
Albus nods again.
“She wouldn’t have wanted them to get ruined,” Aberforth continues.
“That’s what Bathilda said.”
“Do you have the other three?”
“Two,” Albus replies. “I left the first on Ariana’s grave, and one is mine.”
“What are you going to do with the last one?” Aberforth asks, but the flash in his eyes says that he already knows.
“There were four of us at tea that day, Abe,” he says quietly. When Aberforth does not respond, Albus decides that it is time to go. He stands, plucking his wand from the table and pointing it at Aberforth’s head.
“Obliviate,” he murmurs, and he watches as Aberforth’s eyes glint, and blissful ignorance claims him. Aberforth will sleep now, most likely, and his eyes begin to slip shut before Albus’s eyes. Albus turns to go, but Aberforth grabs his arm.
“You can sleep here, Albus. Berlin is a bloody long ways away.” Of course, Aberforth would understand immediately. In the whole wide world, Aberforth is the only person who has ever understood Albus.
Albus tells himself that he’s not going to stay, even as he snuffs out the candles and curls up in the armchair. The chair is not exactly comfortable, but Albus falls asleep properly, for the first time in a month, to the steady sound of Aberforth’s snoring, with the little white teacup resting in the windowsill.
Albus is gone before Aberforth wakes. He wipes the salty paths of the tears he cried in his sleep from his cheeks and cracks the door. He slips from the building before the sun has even risen because Aberforth is right: Berlin is a long ways away. Albus plans to go by train, and then boat, and then bloody train again. Making it this way is just something he has to do.
He casts one last look at the pub where Aberforth works now. Albus has no idea if he’ll be working there long, but perhaps someday he will come back, and they’ll visit Ariana’s grave together and buy back the house and be brothers.
In his heart, Albus knows that life’s a fool’s game, and that if he ever sees his brother again, circumstances will be awkward and wrong no matter what happens between now and then. But as the sun peeks over the horizon, Albus steps onto the platform at the Hogsmeade station, and he waits for his train on a bench all alone for hours, and he imagines that Aberforth is wiping down the bar as the train pulls him away.
The trees rushing by remind Albus of first time he had sex. This makes him exceedingly embarrassed because the train feels incredibly public, even though he’s in his own compartment. Anyway, he’s looking at the trees and seeing about pale skin and blond hair and naked bodies when an owl scratches at the window.
The bird is unfamiliar, a fluffy grey thing that seems incredibly irritated about being sent to find someone on a train. Albus opens the window, and his stomach sinks to his knees. He cannot think of a single person who would want to owl him whose owl would bring anything other than dread.
The owl, who upon closer inspection is from the Hogsmeade Post-Office, nips impatiently at Albus’s fingers as he fumbles to detach the letter. It’s bound to be from Aberforth.
Albus is proven wrong, however, because when he unfurls the parchment, it’s his writing that greets his eager eyes. It takes him a moment to recognize the words, but when he does, his stomach does an interested little somersault.
Ian,
I’m still bloody mortified over losing it like that in front of you, though it’s been thirty days (and in your case, thirty more fucks since me), so I’m sure you don’t remember. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m writing this, but I just wanted you to know that even though I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to fuck you again, I think that I kind of do.
Albus
He wonders why Ian sent it back to him until he flips it over, and the reply on the back makes his head spin.
Albus (if that is your real name, and I’m sure it’s not because most people never give out their real names. I do.),
Your letter got me hard. Very hard. Which is saying something since one of my ‘fucks’ left just before I read it, and I’d thought that I was pretty much spent. Apparently not. I wasn’t going to write you because it didn’t seem like you wanted to be written to, but I saw you in Hogsmeade this morning. You were sitting on one of the benches on the platform, waiting for a train, with your hair tied up with that neat little ribbon. Merlin, I wanted to fuck you right then and there.
I can control myself, luckily, but I did decide to write you, and I assure you with all sincerity that this is the creepiest, most stalker-like thing I have ever done, though I don’t mean it that way.
Ian
P.S. Those thirty other fucks were poor substitutes for you.
Albus isn’t breathing, but he stares without seeing with his eyes as wide as bloody saucers, completely oblivious to the large owl who is repeatedly flying into the window, attempting to escape the train.
After a moment he grabs a quill and a book to rest the parchment on; the tent in his trousers means that his lap won’t exactly function as a desk. Albus scrawls a hasty reply at the bottom of Ian’s letter.
He’s sure that it’s a bad decision as soon as he lets the owl go, but it’s too late. His future is wrapped up in someone else’s now, if Ian decides to take him up on his offer.
The owl reaches Ian just as Albus is falling asleep in a speeding train, just a few miles outside Ipswich. Tom watches, fascinated, as Ian counts out a handful of galleons and leaves, bags in tow, for the first time since he arrived several months ago.
He Disapparates with a crack, Albus’s letter folded in his pocket.
Ian,
The road is lonely. By the ferry, outside Felixstowe. I’m gone at noon, with or without you.
Albus (yes, it’s my real name)
The ferry is stupid and awful and crowded because the trip takes only an hour and a half. Each row of benches are packed full of disgusting, filthy Muggles, and Albus can’t help the way his lip curls at the smell of the fat man next to him. Ian sits on his other side, and Albus leans into him, not truly on purpose but because Ian smells like a wizard, and Albus is so disgusted by the sickening masses that there is really no other option.
They don’t talk at all. Close quarters make everyone irritable, and the dumpy old woman with the bright yellow hair who tried speaking to her husband was shushed so bitterly by the rest that no one talked for the rest of the ride.
The race to the train from the ferry is silent too, because they have about ten minutes to get there, and even with a bit of Apparation, the train station is so clogged that Ian and Albus barely make it.
This train is far nicer than the last, and the compartment that Albus and Ian claim has a small cot on one side and a cushy bench on the other. Albus barely has time to fold the teacups up inside his coat before Ian pins him against the wall.
And it’s rough, lip-biting, nail-scratching, sex, after that, as Albus lets Ian tear him to pieces on the creaky little cot on the train that will take them Berlin. Albus wishes that he could bottle the things that Ian says to him because it’s vaguely possible that Albus has never been so taken in by words.
He had been laboring under the impression that he would move to the bench when they were done, if only to avoid being held. But Ian wraps his arms tightly around him afterwards, and Albus couldn’t have escaped if he tried. Instead, he snuggles into Ian’s warm embrace, and when the tears come, he is unable to hide them in his hands.
“Are you going to cry after every time we have sex?” Ian asks, and the implication that they’ll be doing this again makes Albus cry harder. Ian keeps talking. “Al. Do you want to tell me-“
“The man I told you about. My lover. He isn’t dead.”
“So I gathered,” Ian whispered, pulling Albus closer.
“His name is-.” He chokes on the name and cannot get it out. Albus feels Ian give him a reassuring squeeze.
“Because of him,” Albus whispers, “my sister is dead, and he wants to kill more people, and he’s greedy and power-hungry. He’s evil, and awful and without him I feel so empty that I’m about to break.”
Ian doesn’t say anything, and Albus closes his eyes and tries not to think, and, eventually, the steady rumble of the train lulls both men to sleep.
Something is dreadfully wrong with Berlin. The moment the two of them step off of the train, on legs that are too terribly used to travelling to fully comprehend the stability of solid ground, Ian puts his arm protectively around Albus’s shoulder.
“I don’t like this,” he says firmly, and Albus feels stupid when he nods, because the scene before them is decidedly peaceful. The streets are so clean that the cobblestones seem to sparkle. The buildings are well kept and proud, the windows are clear, even the sky gleams as though someone has scrubbed it clean. Birds squawk in the sky above them, trilling and wheeling about. Albus begins walking, and Ian falls into step right behind him, glaring into every alley with narrowed eyes.
When they come to a small café, Albus smiles thinly and tells Ian that he would be more comfortable if he waited here. Ian clearly hates the idea, but he takes Albus’s face in his and kisses him, hard. Albus kisses back, but he feels oddly detached and sickened, and it is only after Ian has disappeared inside that Albus notices his arms hanging limply at his sides.
He pulls the tiniest scrap of paper from his pocket and glances at it. A few words and numbers are scrawled hastily across it. Albus stares with sickening certainty at the address Gellert had left him two months ago, just in case he changed his mind.
Only once he is standing outside the door to Gellert’s flat does he realize what is wrong with Berlin. The shining, resplendent, spotless streets are completely empty.
“Gellert.” The name comes out without protest, though it doesn’t sound quite right. Albus has not said the name in two months, not since he chased Gellert into the road at Godric’s Hollow, screaming the two blasted syllables at the top of his lungs. Now, his voice is quiet, barely audible in the empty corridor outside Gellert’s flat.
Gellert’s face changes, darting from nonchalance to shock to utter glee in a matter of seconds. “Albus!” he exclaims, flinging his arms around Albus and pulling him close. “I just knew you’d come. I just knew it!” Albus does not return the hug, merely stands there and lets Gellert squeeze the bloody life out of him.
Albus has to draw the line when Gellert pulls back and tries to kiss him. He cants his head in another direction, so that Gellert’s lips land sloppily on his neck right below his ear.
“Albus-“ he begins. Albus walks past him, into the flat.
“Let me in, Gellert,” he mumbles, ignoring the way they bump shoulders in the threshold.
“Why are you here?” Gellert asks immediately.
Albus reaches into his pocket and gropes for one of the two remaining tea cups, but the words ‘here, I brought this for you’ sound stupidly inadequate, and he hesitates just long enough for Gellert to get a word in.
“Always a bit slow, eh, Albus?” he grins, and hatred erupts beneath Albus’s skin, filling him.
It’s a fragile little fire, but Albus nurses it to life. “Oh, yes, Gellert. You are capable of so much that I am not. You are a leader, a general, a genius. But you are missing something, and neither of us would ever have realized it if we-“
“Is that what this is, Albus?” Gellert interrupts. For a moment he looks tired. “Are you here about Ariana? The cross you bear for her is touching, truly, but such a waste.”
“You’re going to have to wake up someday,” Albus screams, “and you’ll realize that love is not a game that you can beat or a tool that you can use. You’re going to wake up one day and understand, and by then it’s going to be too late.”
Gellert looks at him, amusement quirking the corners of his lips. Finally he laughs, wiping his eyes with his hand. “Albus, you are so bloody stupid. I don’t see love as a game or as a tool. It is nothing but a weakness. You seek to lecture me about love when that very same thing blinds you now. I can see it on your face; you hope your words will change me, that you’ll lead me from this ruined city.”
Albus croaks, “Ruined?”
“Oh yes. Doesn’t it seem pretty and perfect on the outside? My hand holds it up, but it is mine like a palace on an even grander scale than we had ever imagined. But that is no matter. What matters is that you came back to me, and I have been waiting for so long. You have come back with your love wrapped around you like a cloak, prepared to wield this same love like a weapon, to catch me with it like a net. You have no chance, Albus. Not a bloody chance in Hell.”
Albus just stares.
“You want me, Albus. You want me because I can fill you up in ways that no one else can.” Gellert reaches for Albus’s arm, but Albus shrinks back.
“Don’t touch me,” he spits.
“Oh, Albus,” Gellert chuckles. “My sweet Albus.”
He is positively dirty. Albus rolls out of Gellert’s arms and retches over the side of the bed. He heaves until there is nothing left for him to let go of, and still shame and regret and hatred twist his guts into a knot. Gellert eyes him curiously, with a satisfied, sated expression that makes Albus pull himself from the bed without a word.
He gathers his clothes from all over the flat, and repairs the tear in his cloak that Gellert caused in his haste to get it off of him. What is sickening is not the sex, or that Gellert is a murderer. It’s sick because Albus loved every second of it, because it surpassed anything that Ian had ever made him feel.
The sound of a throat clearing startles him. Albus looks up, fully dressed, only to find Gellert lounging naked in the doorway. He looks thoroughly pleased with himself, and Albus just wants to get out of here as quickly as he can manage. He pulls one of the teacups from his pocket and shoves it into Gellert’s hands.
“What-“ he begins, but recognition comes to him. “Did you really take them in from the rain?” he asks in disbelief. When Albus nods, Gellert shakes his head. “You sentimental fool, Albus.”
“Fuck you,” Albus spits. “Fuck. You.”
Gellert smirks. “Again? Really? I hate to think about what you would retch up if I made you go a second time.”
Albus slaps him. His hand moves faster than he thought possible, and the red welt begins to rise up on Gellert’s cheeks. His eyes narrow in alarm and disgust, and he tries to hand the teacup back to Albus.
“It’s not mine,” he says.
“Yes, it is,” Albus snaps. “You were the fourth guest for tea, the day that she- died.”
Gellert shakes his head again. “No, I wasn’t, Albus. The fourth cup was for your mother, dead and gone as she was. You know that Ariana never really knew it. She set the table for you and Aberforth and your mother, and I just happened to be there instead.” He makes an odd choking sound. “I didn’t even sit down, Albus. Not before… everything.”
Albus stares at him. “Just take it,” he says.
Gellert stares at him for a long time, but his hand folds around the teacup. “Fine.”
“Did you know?” Albus asks. “Do you know which one of us-“
“Don’t you?” Gellert says smoothly, arching a brow, and Albus nods because he does, at least he knows what he and Aberforth believe- believed.
“Tell me,” Albus says quietly. “I’ll make you forget.”
Gellert wrinkles his nose and fills his voice with contempt. “I don’t need to be spared the memory,” he hisses, but he tells Albus, anyway, and lets him raise his wand and make the memory go away.
Afterward, Gellert looks Albus up and down. “I should kill you,” he says, “if you won’t join me.”
Albus is not afraid, merely tired, so he shrugs his shoulders. Gellert mimics the motion.
“Get out of here, Albus. And don’t come back.”
Albus is at the door when Gellert adds, “And don’t go looking for your… friend. He’s already dead.”
Albus flees Berlin quietly, and when he comes to the little café, he does not spare it a passing glance. Gellert has never broken a promise, so Albus knows that he will never see Ian again.
It’s in his office at Hogwarts, what feels like a thousand years later, that he paints the name of Ariana Dumbldore’s killer onto the bottom of his own little teacup in pink glaze. He locks it in a drawer and points his wand at his own head, and with a single whispered word, the knowledge belongs only to that teacup, because not a single living witness can remember it.
He lights a candle once a year for Ian, whose last name he never knew, whose parents he cannot find, who was just another in a long line of mistakes Albus made long after he thought he had stopped making them.
The teacup goes unmoved and unlooked at, and when Albus confronts Gellert again 1945, neither man can remember what truly drove them apart; which of them killed Ariana, or if it was Aberforth, wiping down counters so many leagues away. Their duel is a mess of feelings, of hatred without reason and sorrow and anger and pain, and when it’s over, Albus does not feel the slightest bit better.
Years upon years later, Albus is getting old. He feels it in his bones, and when he goes to meet Minerva outside of Number 4, Privet Drive, he tucks the teacup into his pocket without looking, and when Harry Potter is safely settled into his blankets on the doorstep, Albus Apparates silently into the attic of his childhood home. Some new family lives their now, and he takes care not to disturb anything.
But he leaves the teacup, because he owes it to Harry Potter to try and bury his past, that he might help the boy brighten the future.
A little house in Godric’s Hollow. All that’s left to show that anything of interest ever happened there is a single white teacup in the attic. It is stuck to the wood floor with a permanent sticking charm, one so strong and irreversible that it has never been removed. On the bottom of the teacup, the name of the person who killed Ariana Dumbledore is painted in delicate pink glaze, so that the house can keep remembering long after the world has forgotten.
Albus takes the last secret piece of his life with him back to Hogwarts, and he keeps it on his person at all times. It is a piece of Nurmengard stationary, with a few words written in a familiar script. Albus unfolds it on occasion, and he loses himself in the words and the possibilities of what might have been.
Albus, you won because I loved you.
And what seems like an insurmountable distance away, a Wizarding realtor opens the door to Albus’s childhood home.
“Did you know,” he says conspiratorially to the young couple in front of him, “that Albus Dumbledore used to live here?”
Albus folds up the letter and sighs.
And the realtor offers the couple a cup of tea on a stained mahogany table, which the little old lady next-door had insisted be sold with the house.
Author: scarysnapey
Warnings: Some sex, non-Grindeldore side relationship.
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~12,000
Summary: After Ariana's death, Gellert and Aberforth have both fled Godric's Hollow, leaving a distraught Albus behind. After a time, he too sets out on his own journey, to return four of Ariana's toy tea cups to the people she had set the table for on the day that she died. His journey brings him face-to-face with his estranged brother, the one man he truly loves, and the one thing he fears the most: the identity of Ariana's true murderer.
A/N: Currently out of town and on a weird internet schedule on top of the time difference, so I'm hoping against hope that I'm posting this somewhat correctly. Fingers crossed. In two parts because it's too long.
Albus materializes at Bathilda’s gate, wondering why he ever said goodbye to his home at all when he would be seeing so much more of it. The rain has stopped at last, though the sidewalk is only just beginning to dry, light spots spearing between the pools of moistened grey. Albus hurries through the gate, wary of any passersby, lest Elphias jump out from behind a bush and grab him.
The streets are empty, though, from Bathilda’s gate to the graveyard in the distance. Albus ignores the beautiful green grass and the way it makes his seem browned and dull. He ignores the new color of the door and the sign that says, ‘Don’t knock; wet paint!’ He knocks, anyway.
Bathilda opens the door immediately, and the annoyed reprimand dies on her lips when she sees Albus standing there.
“Oh, dear,” she breathes. “I suppose you’d best come in.”
Albus does, ignoring also the dirty look she gives the smeared paint on her door. He’ll fix it when he leaves.
Bathilda is too nervous to sit. Instead, she wrings her hands and paces back and forth. “Tea,” she cries. “Would you like some tea? I’ll put on the kettle.”
She’s halfway to the kitchen before Albus actually says something. “Ms. Bagshot, please sit down.” She freezes, and though Albus has known her for many years, he has never seen such an ugly expression on her face. She is not a young woman, but in that instant she looks positively old. Albus stares at his shoes, and Bathilda sits reluctantly.
Albus cuts right to the chase; he has no desire to stay her any longer. Bathilda’s house has always smelled like cats, and today is no exception. “Have you heard from my brother?” he asks.
“No,” Bathilda blurts out. Then the question seems to register, and she turns bright red. “I mean, yes. He owled me a week ago.” She picks at the cuticle of her left ring finger.
“Do you know where he is?”
“I’m not sure if I should tell you…. He-“
“Ms. Bagshot,” Albus interrupts. “Don’t you think that you’ve done enough to drive us apart?”
The color rushes to her face at that. “Excuse me,” she bites out, “for doing a favor for family. It’s not my fault that you decided to lose your common sense over…” she trails off. Albus is almost pleased to see that he’s not the only one having trouble with the name.
He stands abruptly. “I have no desire to overstay my welcome. Can you tell me where my brother is, and I’ll be gone.”
She gives him a nasty look. “He’s bussing tables at the Hog’s Head Pub in Hogsmeade.”
Albus nods and turns to go. Bathilda takes one last parting shot. “The place is an absolute wreck, but I’m surprised they’d let dirt like your lot in.” Albus hears her, but he ignores it. He hastens to the door, keeping his shoes off the good carpeting and everything. He is above retaliation.
“Albus?” Her voice has changed. Albus’s hand is on the doorknob, and he honestly considers walking out.
“Yes?” He doesn’t turn around, but he can feel her standing behind him in the corridor.
“Her table keeled over. In your backyard, you know. It was pretty far sunk into the mud by the time I noticed. I was just wondering if you- you know- did you take the teacups in?”
The teacups in question are burning a hole in his pocket as she’s talking. Albus opens the door. “Yes, I did.”
The door is swinging closed behind them when Bathilda replies. “She would have- Well, goodbye.”
The ‘For Sale’ sign catches his eye at the last second, and he registers with unrestrained sorrow that the words are obscured by a little piece of cardboard with the word ‘Sold’ scrawled on it. Albus Disapparates from the front steps, forgetting entirely about the paint he had planned on fixing.
Hogsmeade never changes. The entire town is a great pit of nostalgia for Hogwarts graduates, and Albus is no exception. In his fragile state, it takes one familiar street for him to realize how bloody lost he is. He stuffs his hands into his bulging pockets and trudges up the street, past shoppers and young children and a couple stray dogs who look happier than Albus feels.
Albus might as well be a ghost for all the attention anyone pays him. He supposes that it’s logical. At this point, so many people have taken a piece of him and then run or died or left him that there is none of him left. That’s why Albus is here, though. He’s come to get another piece back.
When he pushes open the door to the Hog’s Head, Albus realizes that invisibility is not enough to hide him here. Whether Bathilda lied to him, or a week’s time was long enough for Aberforth to be promoted, he is no longer bussing tables. He’s standing by the bar when Albus pulls his hands from his pockets. The bright white rag stills in the glass he’s drying, and Aberforth goes so stiff that Albus considers running.
Instead, he takes a deep breath and heads toward the bar, taking a seat directly in front of his brother. “Aberforth,” he says simply.
Aberforth slams the glass onto its shelf a bit harder than necessary. “How did you find me?” he demands.
“Bathilda told me.”
Aberforth exhales. “Bloody cow never knew how to keep her mouth shut.” He glances over Albus’s head. “Well, if you’re here to murder another little girl, this isn’t exactly the place.”
Albus recoils. He hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but Aberforth is icier than Bathilda. “Aberforth, please….” His voice is weak.
Aberforth frowns. “I get off in half an hour. If you’re still here… I live upstairs.”
Albus is still there in half an hour, staring at the now crumpled picture of him and Elphias. He watches Elphias laugh over and over again. Albus chortles along with him, blissfully unaware of the way that his life was about to veer off the tracks. Aberforth throws the rag to a young blonde woman, who pats him on the shoulder as she ties the apron around her waist.
“Have a good night, Abe,” she says. Aberforth winks at her. Albus watches the entire thing with his mouth hanging open. The grin on Aberforth’s face disappears as he catches Albus’s eye, and Albus closes his mouth. A year ago, he would have teased Aberforth for hours over that girl. A year ago, a lot of things were different.
“I hope you’re not planning to stay,” Aberforth says as they climb the stairs. He fiddles with a key ring, one of the keys is the key to the house that doesn’t belong to them anymore. And the other two are foreign to Albus, as foreign as Aberforth seems to have become. Albus wonders whether he’s fucking the barmaid. She’s pretty. He wonders if that’s why he cannot stay.
Inside the little room that Aberforth calls home, he changes. The confidence, the sturdiness that Albus had witnessed downstairs disappears, and he becomes the broken husk of a man that Albus had made him. He pours something brown into a glass and downs it, just the way that a character in a book would. And then he sits in the chair across the little table from Albus and buries his head in his hands.
Albus is still wearing his coat, but he feels uncomfortable taking it off. That would be too familiar a gesture, one that would be completely inappropriate with this man he does not know. He’s starting to think that he didn’t know anyone, ever, or maybe that it’s impossible to know anybody until tragedy comes between you.
“Aberforth,” he says cautiously.
“Why did you come here, Al?” The nickname crushes Albus’s already broken heart into even smaller pieces. It revives a spark of hope, that maybe someday Aberforth will forgive him. That maybe they can be brothers once again.
“I need to know if you know,” Albus says frankly, and unlike Ariana, Aberforth can give him a reply. Aberforth raises his head from his hands and looks Albus right in the eye.
“Do I know which one of us killed her?” he asks. Albus nods. “Yes, I know.”
There’s silence, and the candles on the counter flicker ominously, and the September wind shakes the shutters, and the barmaid downstairs laughs really loudly. The sounds make Albus a little sick. His hand in his pocket fiddles with one of the teacups. He pulls it out and sets it between Aberforth and him on the table. The perfect china glows orange in the candlelight. “Will you tell me who?”
“Why should I?” Aberforth asks, but he hasn’t looked away from the teacup.
“Because I can make you forget.” Albus sets his wand on the table next to the teacup.
Aberforth’s eyes widen. “I don’t want to forget this.” He grasps the teacup. “Not this.”
“I mean I can make you forget who did it, if you want.”
The barmaid laughs, the floorboards creak, and a bit of dust flutters from the ceiling when someone stomps on the floor upstairs. Aberforth nods, and then he tells Albus exactly who killed Ariana Dumbledore.
Albus is good with memory charms; there is no danger of anything going wrong, but once Albus casts the spell, he’ll have to leave, and there is far too much between the two of them for Albus to go just yet.
“May I keep this?” Aberforth asks, holding the tiny teacup in his palm. Albus nods.
“That’s why I brought it.”
“Oh.”
“I’m so glad you took them in,” Aberforth says finally. “I was so afraid that they’d been out in the rain or stuck in some bird’s nest or some such nonsense.”
Albus nods again.
“She wouldn’t have wanted them to get ruined,” Aberforth continues.
“That’s what Bathilda said.”
“Do you have the other three?”
“Two,” Albus replies. “I left the first on Ariana’s grave, and one is mine.”
“What are you going to do with the last one?” Aberforth asks, but the flash in his eyes says that he already knows.
“There were four of us at tea that day, Abe,” he says quietly. When Aberforth does not respond, Albus decides that it is time to go. He stands, plucking his wand from the table and pointing it at Aberforth’s head.
“Obliviate,” he murmurs, and he watches as Aberforth’s eyes glint, and blissful ignorance claims him. Aberforth will sleep now, most likely, and his eyes begin to slip shut before Albus’s eyes. Albus turns to go, but Aberforth grabs his arm.
“You can sleep here, Albus. Berlin is a bloody long ways away.” Of course, Aberforth would understand immediately. In the whole wide world, Aberforth is the only person who has ever understood Albus.
Albus tells himself that he’s not going to stay, even as he snuffs out the candles and curls up in the armchair. The chair is not exactly comfortable, but Albus falls asleep properly, for the first time in a month, to the steady sound of Aberforth’s snoring, with the little white teacup resting in the windowsill.
Albus is gone before Aberforth wakes. He wipes the salty paths of the tears he cried in his sleep from his cheeks and cracks the door. He slips from the building before the sun has even risen because Aberforth is right: Berlin is a long ways away. Albus plans to go by train, and then boat, and then bloody train again. Making it this way is just something he has to do.
He casts one last look at the pub where Aberforth works now. Albus has no idea if he’ll be working there long, but perhaps someday he will come back, and they’ll visit Ariana’s grave together and buy back the house and be brothers.
In his heart, Albus knows that life’s a fool’s game, and that if he ever sees his brother again, circumstances will be awkward and wrong no matter what happens between now and then. But as the sun peeks over the horizon, Albus steps onto the platform at the Hogsmeade station, and he waits for his train on a bench all alone for hours, and he imagines that Aberforth is wiping down the bar as the train pulls him away.
The trees rushing by remind Albus of first time he had sex. This makes him exceedingly embarrassed because the train feels incredibly public, even though he’s in his own compartment. Anyway, he’s looking at the trees and seeing about pale skin and blond hair and naked bodies when an owl scratches at the window.
The bird is unfamiliar, a fluffy grey thing that seems incredibly irritated about being sent to find someone on a train. Albus opens the window, and his stomach sinks to his knees. He cannot think of a single person who would want to owl him whose owl would bring anything other than dread.
The owl, who upon closer inspection is from the Hogsmeade Post-Office, nips impatiently at Albus’s fingers as he fumbles to detach the letter. It’s bound to be from Aberforth.
Albus is proven wrong, however, because when he unfurls the parchment, it’s his writing that greets his eager eyes. It takes him a moment to recognize the words, but when he does, his stomach does an interested little somersault.
Ian,
I’m still bloody mortified over losing it like that in front of you, though it’s been thirty days (and in your case, thirty more fucks since me), so I’m sure you don’t remember. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m writing this, but I just wanted you to know that even though I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to fuck you again, I think that I kind of do.
Albus
He wonders why Ian sent it back to him until he flips it over, and the reply on the back makes his head spin.
Albus (if that is your real name, and I’m sure it’s not because most people never give out their real names. I do.),
Your letter got me hard. Very hard. Which is saying something since one of my ‘fucks’ left just before I read it, and I’d thought that I was pretty much spent. Apparently not. I wasn’t going to write you because it didn’t seem like you wanted to be written to, but I saw you in Hogsmeade this morning. You were sitting on one of the benches on the platform, waiting for a train, with your hair tied up with that neat little ribbon. Merlin, I wanted to fuck you right then and there.
I can control myself, luckily, but I did decide to write you, and I assure you with all sincerity that this is the creepiest, most stalker-like thing I have ever done, though I don’t mean it that way.
Ian
P.S. Those thirty other fucks were poor substitutes for you.
Albus isn’t breathing, but he stares without seeing with his eyes as wide as bloody saucers, completely oblivious to the large owl who is repeatedly flying into the window, attempting to escape the train.
After a moment he grabs a quill and a book to rest the parchment on; the tent in his trousers means that his lap won’t exactly function as a desk. Albus scrawls a hasty reply at the bottom of Ian’s letter.
He’s sure that it’s a bad decision as soon as he lets the owl go, but it’s too late. His future is wrapped up in someone else’s now, if Ian decides to take him up on his offer.
The owl reaches Ian just as Albus is falling asleep in a speeding train, just a few miles outside Ipswich. Tom watches, fascinated, as Ian counts out a handful of galleons and leaves, bags in tow, for the first time since he arrived several months ago.
He Disapparates with a crack, Albus’s letter folded in his pocket.
Ian,
The road is lonely. By the ferry, outside Felixstowe. I’m gone at noon, with or without you.
Albus (yes, it’s my real name)
The ferry is stupid and awful and crowded because the trip takes only an hour and a half. Each row of benches are packed full of disgusting, filthy Muggles, and Albus can’t help the way his lip curls at the smell of the fat man next to him. Ian sits on his other side, and Albus leans into him, not truly on purpose but because Ian smells like a wizard, and Albus is so disgusted by the sickening masses that there is really no other option.
They don’t talk at all. Close quarters make everyone irritable, and the dumpy old woman with the bright yellow hair who tried speaking to her husband was shushed so bitterly by the rest that no one talked for the rest of the ride.
The race to the train from the ferry is silent too, because they have about ten minutes to get there, and even with a bit of Apparation, the train station is so clogged that Ian and Albus barely make it.
This train is far nicer than the last, and the compartment that Albus and Ian claim has a small cot on one side and a cushy bench on the other. Albus barely has time to fold the teacups up inside his coat before Ian pins him against the wall.
And it’s rough, lip-biting, nail-scratching, sex, after that, as Albus lets Ian tear him to pieces on the creaky little cot on the train that will take them Berlin. Albus wishes that he could bottle the things that Ian says to him because it’s vaguely possible that Albus has never been so taken in by words.
He had been laboring under the impression that he would move to the bench when they were done, if only to avoid being held. But Ian wraps his arms tightly around him afterwards, and Albus couldn’t have escaped if he tried. Instead, he snuggles into Ian’s warm embrace, and when the tears come, he is unable to hide them in his hands.
“Are you going to cry after every time we have sex?” Ian asks, and the implication that they’ll be doing this again makes Albus cry harder. Ian keeps talking. “Al. Do you want to tell me-“
“The man I told you about. My lover. He isn’t dead.”
“So I gathered,” Ian whispered, pulling Albus closer.
“His name is-.” He chokes on the name and cannot get it out. Albus feels Ian give him a reassuring squeeze.
“Because of him,” Albus whispers, “my sister is dead, and he wants to kill more people, and he’s greedy and power-hungry. He’s evil, and awful and without him I feel so empty that I’m about to break.”
Ian doesn’t say anything, and Albus closes his eyes and tries not to think, and, eventually, the steady rumble of the train lulls both men to sleep.
Something is dreadfully wrong with Berlin. The moment the two of them step off of the train, on legs that are too terribly used to travelling to fully comprehend the stability of solid ground, Ian puts his arm protectively around Albus’s shoulder.
“I don’t like this,” he says firmly, and Albus feels stupid when he nods, because the scene before them is decidedly peaceful. The streets are so clean that the cobblestones seem to sparkle. The buildings are well kept and proud, the windows are clear, even the sky gleams as though someone has scrubbed it clean. Birds squawk in the sky above them, trilling and wheeling about. Albus begins walking, and Ian falls into step right behind him, glaring into every alley with narrowed eyes.
When they come to a small café, Albus smiles thinly and tells Ian that he would be more comfortable if he waited here. Ian clearly hates the idea, but he takes Albus’s face in his and kisses him, hard. Albus kisses back, but he feels oddly detached and sickened, and it is only after Ian has disappeared inside that Albus notices his arms hanging limply at his sides.
He pulls the tiniest scrap of paper from his pocket and glances at it. A few words and numbers are scrawled hastily across it. Albus stares with sickening certainty at the address Gellert had left him two months ago, just in case he changed his mind.
Only once he is standing outside the door to Gellert’s flat does he realize what is wrong with Berlin. The shining, resplendent, spotless streets are completely empty.
“Gellert.” The name comes out without protest, though it doesn’t sound quite right. Albus has not said the name in two months, not since he chased Gellert into the road at Godric’s Hollow, screaming the two blasted syllables at the top of his lungs. Now, his voice is quiet, barely audible in the empty corridor outside Gellert’s flat.
Gellert’s face changes, darting from nonchalance to shock to utter glee in a matter of seconds. “Albus!” he exclaims, flinging his arms around Albus and pulling him close. “I just knew you’d come. I just knew it!” Albus does not return the hug, merely stands there and lets Gellert squeeze the bloody life out of him.
Albus has to draw the line when Gellert pulls back and tries to kiss him. He cants his head in another direction, so that Gellert’s lips land sloppily on his neck right below his ear.
“Albus-“ he begins. Albus walks past him, into the flat.
“Let me in, Gellert,” he mumbles, ignoring the way they bump shoulders in the threshold.
“Why are you here?” Gellert asks immediately.
Albus reaches into his pocket and gropes for one of the two remaining tea cups, but the words ‘here, I brought this for you’ sound stupidly inadequate, and he hesitates just long enough for Gellert to get a word in.
“Always a bit slow, eh, Albus?” he grins, and hatred erupts beneath Albus’s skin, filling him.
It’s a fragile little fire, but Albus nurses it to life. “Oh, yes, Gellert. You are capable of so much that I am not. You are a leader, a general, a genius. But you are missing something, and neither of us would ever have realized it if we-“
“Is that what this is, Albus?” Gellert interrupts. For a moment he looks tired. “Are you here about Ariana? The cross you bear for her is touching, truly, but such a waste.”
“You’re going to have to wake up someday,” Albus screams, “and you’ll realize that love is not a game that you can beat or a tool that you can use. You’re going to wake up one day and understand, and by then it’s going to be too late.”
Gellert looks at him, amusement quirking the corners of his lips. Finally he laughs, wiping his eyes with his hand. “Albus, you are so bloody stupid. I don’t see love as a game or as a tool. It is nothing but a weakness. You seek to lecture me about love when that very same thing blinds you now. I can see it on your face; you hope your words will change me, that you’ll lead me from this ruined city.”
Albus croaks, “Ruined?”
“Oh yes. Doesn’t it seem pretty and perfect on the outside? My hand holds it up, but it is mine like a palace on an even grander scale than we had ever imagined. But that is no matter. What matters is that you came back to me, and I have been waiting for so long. You have come back with your love wrapped around you like a cloak, prepared to wield this same love like a weapon, to catch me with it like a net. You have no chance, Albus. Not a bloody chance in Hell.”
Albus just stares.
“You want me, Albus. You want me because I can fill you up in ways that no one else can.” Gellert reaches for Albus’s arm, but Albus shrinks back.
“Don’t touch me,” he spits.
“Oh, Albus,” Gellert chuckles. “My sweet Albus.”
He is positively dirty. Albus rolls out of Gellert’s arms and retches over the side of the bed. He heaves until there is nothing left for him to let go of, and still shame and regret and hatred twist his guts into a knot. Gellert eyes him curiously, with a satisfied, sated expression that makes Albus pull himself from the bed without a word.
He gathers his clothes from all over the flat, and repairs the tear in his cloak that Gellert caused in his haste to get it off of him. What is sickening is not the sex, or that Gellert is a murderer. It’s sick because Albus loved every second of it, because it surpassed anything that Ian had ever made him feel.
The sound of a throat clearing startles him. Albus looks up, fully dressed, only to find Gellert lounging naked in the doorway. He looks thoroughly pleased with himself, and Albus just wants to get out of here as quickly as he can manage. He pulls one of the teacups from his pocket and shoves it into Gellert’s hands.
“What-“ he begins, but recognition comes to him. “Did you really take them in from the rain?” he asks in disbelief. When Albus nods, Gellert shakes his head. “You sentimental fool, Albus.”
“Fuck you,” Albus spits. “Fuck. You.”
Gellert smirks. “Again? Really? I hate to think about what you would retch up if I made you go a second time.”
Albus slaps him. His hand moves faster than he thought possible, and the red welt begins to rise up on Gellert’s cheeks. His eyes narrow in alarm and disgust, and he tries to hand the teacup back to Albus.
“It’s not mine,” he says.
“Yes, it is,” Albus snaps. “You were the fourth guest for tea, the day that she- died.”
Gellert shakes his head again. “No, I wasn’t, Albus. The fourth cup was for your mother, dead and gone as she was. You know that Ariana never really knew it. She set the table for you and Aberforth and your mother, and I just happened to be there instead.” He makes an odd choking sound. “I didn’t even sit down, Albus. Not before… everything.”
Albus stares at him. “Just take it,” he says.
Gellert stares at him for a long time, but his hand folds around the teacup. “Fine.”
“Did you know?” Albus asks. “Do you know which one of us-“
“Don’t you?” Gellert says smoothly, arching a brow, and Albus nods because he does, at least he knows what he and Aberforth believe- believed.
“Tell me,” Albus says quietly. “I’ll make you forget.”
Gellert wrinkles his nose and fills his voice with contempt. “I don’t need to be spared the memory,” he hisses, but he tells Albus, anyway, and lets him raise his wand and make the memory go away.
Afterward, Gellert looks Albus up and down. “I should kill you,” he says, “if you won’t join me.”
Albus is not afraid, merely tired, so he shrugs his shoulders. Gellert mimics the motion.
“Get out of here, Albus. And don’t come back.”
Albus is at the door when Gellert adds, “And don’t go looking for your… friend. He’s already dead.”
Albus flees Berlin quietly, and when he comes to the little café, he does not spare it a passing glance. Gellert has never broken a promise, so Albus knows that he will never see Ian again.
It’s in his office at Hogwarts, what feels like a thousand years later, that he paints the name of Ariana Dumbldore’s killer onto the bottom of his own little teacup in pink glaze. He locks it in a drawer and points his wand at his own head, and with a single whispered word, the knowledge belongs only to that teacup, because not a single living witness can remember it.
He lights a candle once a year for Ian, whose last name he never knew, whose parents he cannot find, who was just another in a long line of mistakes Albus made long after he thought he had stopped making them.
The teacup goes unmoved and unlooked at, and when Albus confronts Gellert again 1945, neither man can remember what truly drove them apart; which of them killed Ariana, or if it was Aberforth, wiping down counters so many leagues away. Their duel is a mess of feelings, of hatred without reason and sorrow and anger and pain, and when it’s over, Albus does not feel the slightest bit better.
Years upon years later, Albus is getting old. He feels it in his bones, and when he goes to meet Minerva outside of Number 4, Privet Drive, he tucks the teacup into his pocket without looking, and when Harry Potter is safely settled into his blankets on the doorstep, Albus Apparates silently into the attic of his childhood home. Some new family lives their now, and he takes care not to disturb anything.
But he leaves the teacup, because he owes it to Harry Potter to try and bury his past, that he might help the boy brighten the future.
A little house in Godric’s Hollow. All that’s left to show that anything of interest ever happened there is a single white teacup in the attic. It is stuck to the wood floor with a permanent sticking charm, one so strong and irreversible that it has never been removed. On the bottom of the teacup, the name of the person who killed Ariana Dumbledore is painted in delicate pink glaze, so that the house can keep remembering long after the world has forgotten.
Albus takes the last secret piece of his life with him back to Hogwarts, and he keeps it on his person at all times. It is a piece of Nurmengard stationary, with a few words written in a familiar script. Albus unfolds it on occasion, and he loses himself in the words and the possibilities of what might have been.
Albus, you won because I loved you.
And what seems like an insurmountable distance away, a Wizarding realtor opens the door to Albus’s childhood home.
“Did you know,” he says conspiratorially to the young couple in front of him, “that Albus Dumbledore used to live here?”
Albus folds up the letter and sighs.
And the realtor offers the couple a cup of tea on a stained mahogany table, which the little old lady next-door had insisted be sold with the house.