Intermission
Characters and/or Pairings: Alastor Moody and Albus Dumbldore. A slight hint of Alastor/Albus.
Rating: G
Word Count: 4,164
Summary: Alastor's house has been burnt down by a Death Eater on the run and Albus suggests that he spend Christmas at Hogwarts. Set in the 80's.
Warnings: None
Written for hoggywartyxmas
“You’d be playing into his hands, Alastor,” Albus says. Alastor has heard this before, said more incredulously, aggressively, impatiently or pleadingly. Albus sounds as if he knows that Alastor already knows this and may or may not choose to continue anyway. Alastor admits to himself that he does know this already and has made the decision not to continue.
“I wouldn’t be if I didn’t still have that venom in my system,” Alastor says.
“And I’m sure that is why the Fiendfyre. I suspect Blore would not have considered it satisfying to provoke you if he’d expected you to respond with your usual swift efficiency.”
A Death Eater had been apprehended in Norway, having been on the run since Voldemort went out of fashion. He hadn’t been apprehended for very long. The Norwegian Aurors, the British Aurors agreed condescendingly, weren’t used to the Death Eaters’ little ways, and Blore escaped. He lost the taste for concealment, returned to his native land, destroyed Alastor’s home with Fiendfyre and is now on the run, occupying himself meanwhile with owling Alastor the childishly mocking messages that are standard on these occasions and scaring Muggles. He would kill the Muggles, of course, but that leaves a clearer trail and he isn’t quite that impatient to be captured. Alastor only knows about the Muggles because Albus has shown him items in the Muggle newspapers that do sound very much like Robert Blore relieving his feelings by jumping out at people, calling them names and performing mild jinxes. Alastor was at school with Blore. He always did have a lot of nervous energy which he expressed oddly. Alastor knows some teachers considered he and Blore troublesome in similar ways. It always irritated him, because he is a dogged, steady kind of person, while Blore is an erratic, uncontrolled idiot. Not that anyone cares if Blore is anything other than a Death Eater now, and if he is not a dogged, steady Death Eater, then perhaps that is all to the good.
Last month Alastor was bitten by a rare and extremely venomous snake while arresting a Dark Arts supplier. He didn’t die, thanks no doubt in part to the team at St Mungo’s, who the Aurors bringing him in him described as brilliant and maverick in their fight to save him, but thanks also to Alastor’s habit of ingesting poison daily in order to build up his tolerance against the possibility not only of accidents like this one but of being poisoned by his enemies. Not that he had been able to fortify himself against this particular venom.
“That’s the problem with these rare poisons,” he tells Albus. “You just can’t get them. Too expensive and you’re only encouraging the trade.”
“Aren’t you encouraging the trade in the less rare poisons?” Albus inquires.
“A lot of what I take is stuff the Aurors have confiscated. All very tidy and economical. And to a certain extent I don’t mind buying things that are easy to get. Some outlawed potions that call for poisons seem pretty innocuous once you’ve raided a couple of Dark suppliers and people are always going to brew them. But only the real Dark Arts enthusiasts feel they need those little horrors,” Alastor says, thinking of the cobalt blue and scarlet snake he’d only realised was attached to his sleeve when he heard it hissing just before it sank its fangs into him. The Aurors have handed the thing over to a Magizoologist who keeps owling them every time she rules it out as belonging to a particular species and is cautiously excited about the possibility it may have been a stranger to magical science until now. “Now, I’m sure my system was only able to handle it because of my regular measures but if I had been able to prepare specifically for that venom I would be fit as a flea this minute and able to do my job.”
“These regular measures of yours are becoming a little too time consuming, Alastor. You don’t want to get too engrossed in them,” Albus says. “Blore will get himself captured soon enough and clearly he’ll be disappointed that you won’t be there. It will make him feel less interesting.”
“He’s the kind of bloke who always did think he was annoying you even more than he was,” Alastor says. Alastor nearly captured Blore three years ago, not long before Voldemort disappeared. It does annoy him that he didn’t. It does annoy him that his house has been destroyed and that Blore keeps sending him insufferable messages. But he’s not so annoyed that he’s going to decide he and Blore have a special relationship worth making an idiot of himself over. Alastor does know when he is fit and when he is not fit for duty, whatever people think. He’s still experiencing occasional tremors in his wand hand. He feels generally weak and weary and headachey and his reactions are much slower than usual. He’s not up to duelling Death Eaters yet. “Oh well. Perhaps the timing isn’t so bad after all.”
“Yes, I think people who aren’t spending Christmas stalking Robert Blore are generally to be envied,” Albus says. “Why not spend it at Hogwarts, Alastor?”
Alastor is in temporary accommodation provided by the Ministry while it decides whether the site of his own home has been burnt to the ground for ever or can be rebuilt on. The place is perfectly respectable but cheerless and, as he has been telling Albus, much less secure than his own house had been, Fiendfyre notwithstanding.
“There’s nowhere more secure or comfortable to spend Christmas. Think how long it’s been since you had a Hogwarts feast,” Albus urges. He speaks lightly but Alastor can tell he’s expecting to be refused and is prepared to push harder. As it happens, Christmas at Hogwarts does sound rather good and Alastor can’t think of a reason for refusing.
“All right. Nowhere better to put your feet up than the place with the most house-elves in Britain.”
“Excellent! Well, it is really Christmas now, so you may as well stay for dinner and send for your things,” Albus says, beaming.
They are in Albus’s sitting room. Alastor is facing the window looking out onto the Hogwarts grounds and has been watching the darkness fall while they speak. It has now definitely fallen; he can hardly see the grounds beyond his own reflection. He looks, as he often does, stonily impassive with a hint of put out, rather than like someone who has just received a pleasant invitation from an old friend. He cracks a smile which he knows some people think makes his face worse but Albus will be glad to see it.
“Christmas Eve tomorrow,” Alastor says. “Some things I do let sneak up on me.” There was never any question of taking time off for Christmas in wartime. Not for most of the Order. The last few years have involved tidying up after Voldemort but the arrests are drying up now, give or take the odd worm like Blore crawling out of the woodwork. He supposes he has time now to notice that he’s not sure who he might spend Christmas with since his parents died several years ago.
Alastor’s let his decision to take time off now instead of chasing after Blore sneak up on him too. He can’t quite remember now whether he knew he would when he sat down or not. He came to ask Albus about his memories of Blore during the war in order to get ideas about places Blore might be lurking in, and he thinks he has a lead or two to pass on. He also came because he knows he has a way of doing what Albus wants when they talk. Most of the time he doesn’t even need persuading but simply comes to a decision himself through some influence of Albus’s presence. Sometimes, though, he wants to be persuaded by someone he respects, and Albus is the person who fulfils that office for Alastor best. Alastor wonders who does that for Albus. Maybe it’s no one, which seems sad. On the other hand, Albus respects a lot of people, so it might be anyone.
*
Alastor looks at the Hogwarts staff at dinner and decides that Albus-influenced decisions are not always so correct after all. It’s been a while since he had to make small talk. He sees Snape’s face, frozen in a sulk at the sight of him. Alastor’s lip curls. He’s not sure he wants to spend Christmas looking at Severus Snape but knowing that Severus Snape certainly doesn’t want to spend Christmas looking at him is cheering. Perhaps observing Snape a little closer will make him feel a little happier in his mind about Albus’s decision to vouch for him. Or perhaps he’ll spot a crack in Snape’s façade. From where Alastor is sitting Snape is all crack, which makes things challenging.
“How is the Blore investigation coming along, if you don’t mind telling me?” Minerva McGonall asks.
“Oh, well enough. Blore isn’t going to make it hard for us to find him in the end. The only thing to worry about is whether he takes anyone down while he’s being taken in.”
McGonagall sighs. “These deaths that happen after we’ve all decided the dust has settled always seem so unfair. Not more unfair than all the other deaths, of course, but unfair in their own particular way.”
“The Prophet doesn’t bother with them much now. Doesn’t want people to worry about all that kind of thing when we could be spending money on things the newspaper tells us we want. We’re getting slack. Complacent. We should be exercising our vigilance, perfecting it, making ourselves strong for You-Know-Who’s return. But we’re not. We’ll fall into his hand like an overripe plum,” he says, getting poetic. “And go splat.”
McGonagall sighs again. Probably because she, like everyone else, has convinced herself that Voldemort isn’t coming back and is impatient when she hears otherwise. He remembers Fabian Prewett telling him that he must be great fun at parties when he’d been giving vent in a similar vein. They were in fact at a party; a Christmas party Albus had insisted the Order have. It was the worst Christmas of the war but it was the last Christmas that the Prewetts were alive and the Potters were alive and Sirius Black hadn’t turned out to be a treacherous nutcase and the Longbottoms hadn’t been tortured into insanity, so it was quite a good party, and better than an Order party the next Christmas would have been. On that occasion, Alastor didn’t want the wizarding world to be any more electrified than it already was by the seriousness of things, but to have more sense, presence of mind and, above all, vigilance. “We are getting a little complacent, it’s true,” McGonagall says. “But the fear’s there underneath.” There’s a pause. “It was Blore who knocked me off my broom in my last ever Hogwarts Quidditch match, do you remember?”
McGonagall is just a couple of years older than Alastor and Blore. “Yes, I do.” He can see McGonagall shaking her fist now before swiftly regaining her (furious) composure. “If he ever scored a goal it was a lucky mistake. He was only put on the team to zoom around trying to put people off. I don’t know why Comyns didn’t just make him a Beater rather than a Chaser.”
“Comyns’ notion of Quidditch revolved around trying to make the other team lose rather than trying to encourage his team to win. He’d sooner have an extra Beater than the proper complement of Chasers.”
They spend the rest of the meal tearing apart Comyns’ strategy. It’s very satisfying, even all these years later, and takes McGonagall’s mind off her vague disapproval of him. She is, on the whole, tolerant of people’s foibles if only they have capabilities that compensate. Nonetheless, Alastor is always conscious that she considers him not logical enough, or something.
Later, Alastor and Albus return to Albus’s sitting room. Albus’s bedroom leads off it and in other days Alastor would have expected that they’d end up in there. He doesn’t feel much like it today and in any case, it’s been a while. Alastor feels more separate these days. He and Albus were never more than a friendship, really, but there were times, especially during the war, when it felt like a central friendship. Alastor realised early that Albus, for all his gregariousness and appreciation of others, his willingness to give his time and energy, has what amounts to a refusal to be truly known. Alastor has never wanted to blend and meld with someone else. He never had any interest in it and now he is older and stranger and more determined than ever to go his own way and his alone. He recognised that resistance in Albus when he saw it. Part of it is, like Alastor’s feeling, a conviction that no one has anything to give him that’s worth giving up that control over himself. It’s the arrogance which so many are convinced doesn’t exist at all and which so many are convinced does exist but which they persist in seeing in all the places it isn’t. It isn’t just that, though. There’s deep distrust of himself somewhere. Alastor never felt it was his place to dwell on all that. He doesn’t want to feel responsible for other people, after all - not in that way. He doesn’t want to pretend that Albus ought to be someone else when Albus being Albus has worked so well in so many ways. He finds the idea of getting close enough to look directly at what might be Albus’s fear of himself distasteful on both their accounts. But then, Alastor’s magical eye means that he doesn’t have to get too close to things to know that they are there, and in a way knowing people works the same way for him. He doesn’t need to live in people’s pockets to know the important things about them. Albus is the same way and so he and Albus were able to come together at the right moments without any fuss. Then they saw, in the corner-of-the-eye way, that they were beginning to come together too often, and they looked harder at other things. The comforting synchronicity in the parity of what they look for in each other remains.
Alastor knows now that Albus wants to see him alone, possibly simply because it is less likely to happen over the next couple of days and possibly because he has something to say.
“I have heard from one of the guards at Nurmengard. I do hear from some of them from time to time, though not often. I do not ask to know anything from them but I think they feel that I am responsible for putting Grindelwald there and am therefore the master jailor they are accountable to. They don’t report anything of great significance generally. This last letter, for the first time, claimed that Grindelwald is ceasing to hold to his old ideas.”
“Took him long enough,” Alastor says. “I suppose you’d like to think there’s some good in him and that he’s finally found it?”
“Of course I’d like to. Perhaps not so much as I ought.” There is silence as they both stare into the fire for a few moments. Alastor senses that Albus wants something that he knows no one can give him but he doesn’t know what that might be. Does he want Grindelwald to be absolved? Does he want to be absolved himself for some obscure fault? Does he want permission to loathe Grindelwald or to be persuaded to forgive him? Albus’s defeat of Grindelwald seems to stand, to Albus, as a symbol of his own power and the responsibilities and pitfalls attached to that power. “We are old, Grindelwald and I. When I first read the letter I felt that it was too late for Grindelwald to change his mind. Then I realised that I didn’t feel nearly as ancient and incapable of thought and change as I was imagining him - and not as young and stupid, either.”
“His fate isn’t in your hands. You don’t need to decide what he can or can’t manage.”
“Very true. It’s a kind of arrogance.”
“You’ve given that Snape a second chance. Don’t sit around fretting that you’re not forgiving enough.”
Albus looks as if he was going to speak but then doesn’t. Then: “I am very glad Severus does have another chance. He’s so young and there’s so much scope for him to use his life. It is of course much too late for Grindelwald.”
“I don’t know that Snape’s likely to use his life for much besides scaring the kids. But perhaps you consider that a valuable service.”
Albus laughs. “I suppose I must. I was going to say this was all rather dreary and depressing for the season but actually it isn’t. Life goes on, even for Grindelwald.”
“He’s lucky to be in Nurmengard. I don’t think a lot of life goes on in Azkaban,” says Alastor, making things dreary and depressing.
“No, indeed. Of course, the Aurors did their inspection last week. How was it?” The conversation becomes more general and, eventually, more cheerful.
*
The next evening is the Hogwarts staff party. The Aurors had theirs a couple of weeks ago. Hogwarts saves theirs until the last minute partly because it’s best to wait until the students are mostly out of their hair and partly, it seems, because a lot of the staff don’t have anywhere better to be for actual Christmastime. The Arithmancy teacher and the Muggle Studies teacher apparently do have homes to go to. In all honesty the situation is rather similar in the Auror Department but thankfully these things are all less obvious because they don’t live together. Alastor’s first instinct is to shudder thankfully at the idea of living with his colleagues but then he realises how easy it would be for him to annoy his least favourite colleagues and he ponders this cheerfully for a while. The Hogwarts staff is split between those who have made Hogwarts their home and are generally full of good will to those within it, and those who, having made Hogwarts their home because of their inability to cope with the world outside it, are to a large extent unable to deal with the world inside it either.
The latter have been rounded up for the occasion and are skulking resentfully in the corners of the staffroom. Filch has picked his cat up out of people’s way and is clutching both it and a Firewhisky defensively. A charmed floating tray heaped with mince pies nudges his elbow and as he awkwardly tries to bundle the cat and the Firewhisky into the crook of his arm so that he can take a mince pie the cat scrambles up onto his shoulder and stares around at the company with its back arched. Snape is glaring disdainfully at Rolanda Hooch, who is already a little merry and cackling with laughter in conversation with Sprout. Binns floats through the wall and looks around in confusion, having probably the idea that he agreed to be here but not remembering why.
Alastor goes to talk to Silvanus Kettleburn, who Albus and McGonagall have talked of with affection, wary on McGonagall’s part.
“We should start a club,” says Kettleburn, referring to their scars and damaged limbs.
“Oh, I don’t know if I’ll let you join. You must be barmier than me if you manage to turn a cushy teaching job into a way to risk life and limb.”
They compare notes on their injuries. Alastor doesn’t usually care to be questioned about himself but Kettleburn tells him the stories behind his own missing fingers and burns with so much enthusiasm it seems churlish not to reciprocate. He finds himself almost imitating Kettleburn’s fond tone as he substitutes Death Eaters for wild beasts. Of course, he doesn’t feel fond of them and perhaps that makes him barmier and his life less well-spent in some ways than Kettleburn. Not because he doesn’t cherish Death Eaters, of course, but because he’s chosen to spend so much of his time thinking about them.
They get onto Alastor’s current still enfeebled state and the snake responsible for it. Kettleburn asks a lot of questions about it, not all of which Alastor can answer. Before Alastor realises what he’s doing he’s beckoned Snape over to be asked something about venom. A staring match ill-suited for a Christmas party follows between Alastor and Snape, which Snape quickly loses. After answering Kettleburn’s question about the use of snake venoms in potions Snape starts to quiz Alastor on the methods the Healers used to save him. He’s clearly doing his best to make it clear he has the arcane knowledge of a specialist. It’s pitiful but what other defence does he have, faced with an Auror? Albus can say what he likes about Snape seeing the light and having a rich, rewarding life in front of him. Alastor knows what he’s done.
“I have a suggestion!” Flitwick distracts them by squeaking from where he is standing on a table. “Would people like to play Charades?” The group of people immediately surrounding him, which includes Albus, Sprout and Hooch, look as though they have already enthusiastically agreed. There are amenable noises from the rest of the party which the demurrers fail to override.
“What shall the theme be?” McGonagall asks.
“Well, I was talking to Cuthbert about teaching methods,” says Flitwick, “and it occurred to me how splendidly actable so many scenes from history are. So many are portrayed in pictures and tapestries throughout the castle, I’m sure we should be able to guess them!”
Not ten minutes later, Alastor is watching Snape do his best impression of a murderous goblin. It’s very good and he receives a lot of compliments on it. Which murderous goblin from which time period is the question which perplexes the group guessing, though as Snape strides up and down swinging an imaginary axe round his head with more and more vigour. He has to hold his arms over his head in imitation of the flamboyant goblin hats of the fourteenth century before he is set free. Alastor can’t imagine how he allowed himself to be put into that position at all until he remembers Albus telling him of this year’s Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and his tiresome crush on McGonagall. Too tiresome, it sounded, for him to be hired again. He remembers, too, the Prophet’s rumour from a year or so ago, that the Defence job was going to be given to Severus Snape, a man with a dark past. Snape is trying to be obliging.
Albus is both Barnabus the Barmy and the trolls. He is so full of life, Alastor thinks as he watches him. Alastor thinks that the pleasure he takes in so many things is genuine, not a façade he turns to in an attempt to escape his darker feelings. He thinks so and he hopes so. Flitwick is Wendelin the Weird, which is clearly guessed too early for his liking. The Divination teacher, a descendent of Cassandra Trelawney, is Rowena Ravenclaw dreaming of a warty hog leading her to a cliff by a lake, but no one guesses this until later. Trelawney does a great deal of flitting about with a hand to her brow. Everyone wishes they could guess the answer in order to send her away but it doesn’t happen and McGonagall has to put a word in in the end to suggest her time is up. Madam Pince represents the building of Azkaban. It should by rights be hard to guess, yet she turns herself into a menacing fortress so vividly that Alastor can almost see the walls and is the first to shout the answer.
It’s a better party than he expected in the end.
*
On Boxing Day the other Aurors capture Blore. He turns out to have been hiding in the Forbidden Forest, so that if he weren’t going to be sent to Azkaban shortly you could say the Aurors were rescuing him. Alastor is a little put out that he didn’t somehow sense his presence but on the other hand it’s good to think of him perched up a tree or something, hungry and evading terrifying beasts while Alastor was tucking into his Christmas dinner.
“I think it’s time to be getting back now,” Alastor tells Albus. He can help present the evidence against Blore.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay?” Albus asks.
“Yes, yes I have. I wouldn’t like to stay here too long. I’d get soft, having everything done for me. But it was good to get away for a couple of days.”
Rating: G
Word Count: 4,164
Summary: Alastor's house has been burnt down by a Death Eater on the run and Albus suggests that he spend Christmas at Hogwarts. Set in the 80's.
Warnings: None
Written for hoggywartyxmas
“You’d be playing into his hands, Alastor,” Albus says. Alastor has heard this before, said more incredulously, aggressively, impatiently or pleadingly. Albus sounds as if he knows that Alastor already knows this and may or may not choose to continue anyway. Alastor admits to himself that he does know this already and has made the decision not to continue.
“I wouldn’t be if I didn’t still have that venom in my system,” Alastor says.
“And I’m sure that is why the Fiendfyre. I suspect Blore would not have considered it satisfying to provoke you if he’d expected you to respond with your usual swift efficiency.”
A Death Eater had been apprehended in Norway, having been on the run since Voldemort went out of fashion. He hadn’t been apprehended for very long. The Norwegian Aurors, the British Aurors agreed condescendingly, weren’t used to the Death Eaters’ little ways, and Blore escaped. He lost the taste for concealment, returned to his native land, destroyed Alastor’s home with Fiendfyre and is now on the run, occupying himself meanwhile with owling Alastor the childishly mocking messages that are standard on these occasions and scaring Muggles. He would kill the Muggles, of course, but that leaves a clearer trail and he isn’t quite that impatient to be captured. Alastor only knows about the Muggles because Albus has shown him items in the Muggle newspapers that do sound very much like Robert Blore relieving his feelings by jumping out at people, calling them names and performing mild jinxes. Alastor was at school with Blore. He always did have a lot of nervous energy which he expressed oddly. Alastor knows some teachers considered he and Blore troublesome in similar ways. It always irritated him, because he is a dogged, steady kind of person, while Blore is an erratic, uncontrolled idiot. Not that anyone cares if Blore is anything other than a Death Eater now, and if he is not a dogged, steady Death Eater, then perhaps that is all to the good.
Last month Alastor was bitten by a rare and extremely venomous snake while arresting a Dark Arts supplier. He didn’t die, thanks no doubt in part to the team at St Mungo’s, who the Aurors bringing him in him described as brilliant and maverick in their fight to save him, but thanks also to Alastor’s habit of ingesting poison daily in order to build up his tolerance against the possibility not only of accidents like this one but of being poisoned by his enemies. Not that he had been able to fortify himself against this particular venom.
“That’s the problem with these rare poisons,” he tells Albus. “You just can’t get them. Too expensive and you’re only encouraging the trade.”
“Aren’t you encouraging the trade in the less rare poisons?” Albus inquires.
“A lot of what I take is stuff the Aurors have confiscated. All very tidy and economical. And to a certain extent I don’t mind buying things that are easy to get. Some outlawed potions that call for poisons seem pretty innocuous once you’ve raided a couple of Dark suppliers and people are always going to brew them. But only the real Dark Arts enthusiasts feel they need those little horrors,” Alastor says, thinking of the cobalt blue and scarlet snake he’d only realised was attached to his sleeve when he heard it hissing just before it sank its fangs into him. The Aurors have handed the thing over to a Magizoologist who keeps owling them every time she rules it out as belonging to a particular species and is cautiously excited about the possibility it may have been a stranger to magical science until now. “Now, I’m sure my system was only able to handle it because of my regular measures but if I had been able to prepare specifically for that venom I would be fit as a flea this minute and able to do my job.”
“These regular measures of yours are becoming a little too time consuming, Alastor. You don’t want to get too engrossed in them,” Albus says. “Blore will get himself captured soon enough and clearly he’ll be disappointed that you won’t be there. It will make him feel less interesting.”
“He’s the kind of bloke who always did think he was annoying you even more than he was,” Alastor says. Alastor nearly captured Blore three years ago, not long before Voldemort disappeared. It does annoy him that he didn’t. It does annoy him that his house has been destroyed and that Blore keeps sending him insufferable messages. But he’s not so annoyed that he’s going to decide he and Blore have a special relationship worth making an idiot of himself over. Alastor does know when he is fit and when he is not fit for duty, whatever people think. He’s still experiencing occasional tremors in his wand hand. He feels generally weak and weary and headachey and his reactions are much slower than usual. He’s not up to duelling Death Eaters yet. “Oh well. Perhaps the timing isn’t so bad after all.”
“Yes, I think people who aren’t spending Christmas stalking Robert Blore are generally to be envied,” Albus says. “Why not spend it at Hogwarts, Alastor?”
Alastor is in temporary accommodation provided by the Ministry while it decides whether the site of his own home has been burnt to the ground for ever or can be rebuilt on. The place is perfectly respectable but cheerless and, as he has been telling Albus, much less secure than his own house had been, Fiendfyre notwithstanding.
“There’s nowhere more secure or comfortable to spend Christmas. Think how long it’s been since you had a Hogwarts feast,” Albus urges. He speaks lightly but Alastor can tell he’s expecting to be refused and is prepared to push harder. As it happens, Christmas at Hogwarts does sound rather good and Alastor can’t think of a reason for refusing.
“All right. Nowhere better to put your feet up than the place with the most house-elves in Britain.”
“Excellent! Well, it is really Christmas now, so you may as well stay for dinner and send for your things,” Albus says, beaming.
They are in Albus’s sitting room. Alastor is facing the window looking out onto the Hogwarts grounds and has been watching the darkness fall while they speak. It has now definitely fallen; he can hardly see the grounds beyond his own reflection. He looks, as he often does, stonily impassive with a hint of put out, rather than like someone who has just received a pleasant invitation from an old friend. He cracks a smile which he knows some people think makes his face worse but Albus will be glad to see it.
“Christmas Eve tomorrow,” Alastor says. “Some things I do let sneak up on me.” There was never any question of taking time off for Christmas in wartime. Not for most of the Order. The last few years have involved tidying up after Voldemort but the arrests are drying up now, give or take the odd worm like Blore crawling out of the woodwork. He supposes he has time now to notice that he’s not sure who he might spend Christmas with since his parents died several years ago.
Alastor’s let his decision to take time off now instead of chasing after Blore sneak up on him too. He can’t quite remember now whether he knew he would when he sat down or not. He came to ask Albus about his memories of Blore during the war in order to get ideas about places Blore might be lurking in, and he thinks he has a lead or two to pass on. He also came because he knows he has a way of doing what Albus wants when they talk. Most of the time he doesn’t even need persuading but simply comes to a decision himself through some influence of Albus’s presence. Sometimes, though, he wants to be persuaded by someone he respects, and Albus is the person who fulfils that office for Alastor best. Alastor wonders who does that for Albus. Maybe it’s no one, which seems sad. On the other hand, Albus respects a lot of people, so it might be anyone.
*
Alastor looks at the Hogwarts staff at dinner and decides that Albus-influenced decisions are not always so correct after all. It’s been a while since he had to make small talk. He sees Snape’s face, frozen in a sulk at the sight of him. Alastor’s lip curls. He’s not sure he wants to spend Christmas looking at Severus Snape but knowing that Severus Snape certainly doesn’t want to spend Christmas looking at him is cheering. Perhaps observing Snape a little closer will make him feel a little happier in his mind about Albus’s decision to vouch for him. Or perhaps he’ll spot a crack in Snape’s façade. From where Alastor is sitting Snape is all crack, which makes things challenging.
“How is the Blore investigation coming along, if you don’t mind telling me?” Minerva McGonall asks.
“Oh, well enough. Blore isn’t going to make it hard for us to find him in the end. The only thing to worry about is whether he takes anyone down while he’s being taken in.”
McGonagall sighs. “These deaths that happen after we’ve all decided the dust has settled always seem so unfair. Not more unfair than all the other deaths, of course, but unfair in their own particular way.”
“The Prophet doesn’t bother with them much now. Doesn’t want people to worry about all that kind of thing when we could be spending money on things the newspaper tells us we want. We’re getting slack. Complacent. We should be exercising our vigilance, perfecting it, making ourselves strong for You-Know-Who’s return. But we’re not. We’ll fall into his hand like an overripe plum,” he says, getting poetic. “And go splat.”
McGonagall sighs again. Probably because she, like everyone else, has convinced herself that Voldemort isn’t coming back and is impatient when she hears otherwise. He remembers Fabian Prewett telling him that he must be great fun at parties when he’d been giving vent in a similar vein. They were in fact at a party; a Christmas party Albus had insisted the Order have. It was the worst Christmas of the war but it was the last Christmas that the Prewetts were alive and the Potters were alive and Sirius Black hadn’t turned out to be a treacherous nutcase and the Longbottoms hadn’t been tortured into insanity, so it was quite a good party, and better than an Order party the next Christmas would have been. On that occasion, Alastor didn’t want the wizarding world to be any more electrified than it already was by the seriousness of things, but to have more sense, presence of mind and, above all, vigilance. “We are getting a little complacent, it’s true,” McGonagall says. “But the fear’s there underneath.” There’s a pause. “It was Blore who knocked me off my broom in my last ever Hogwarts Quidditch match, do you remember?”
McGonagall is just a couple of years older than Alastor and Blore. “Yes, I do.” He can see McGonagall shaking her fist now before swiftly regaining her (furious) composure. “If he ever scored a goal it was a lucky mistake. He was only put on the team to zoom around trying to put people off. I don’t know why Comyns didn’t just make him a Beater rather than a Chaser.”
“Comyns’ notion of Quidditch revolved around trying to make the other team lose rather than trying to encourage his team to win. He’d sooner have an extra Beater than the proper complement of Chasers.”
They spend the rest of the meal tearing apart Comyns’ strategy. It’s very satisfying, even all these years later, and takes McGonagall’s mind off her vague disapproval of him. She is, on the whole, tolerant of people’s foibles if only they have capabilities that compensate. Nonetheless, Alastor is always conscious that she considers him not logical enough, or something.
Later, Alastor and Albus return to Albus’s sitting room. Albus’s bedroom leads off it and in other days Alastor would have expected that they’d end up in there. He doesn’t feel much like it today and in any case, it’s been a while. Alastor feels more separate these days. He and Albus were never more than a friendship, really, but there were times, especially during the war, when it felt like a central friendship. Alastor realised early that Albus, for all his gregariousness and appreciation of others, his willingness to give his time and energy, has what amounts to a refusal to be truly known. Alastor has never wanted to blend and meld with someone else. He never had any interest in it and now he is older and stranger and more determined than ever to go his own way and his alone. He recognised that resistance in Albus when he saw it. Part of it is, like Alastor’s feeling, a conviction that no one has anything to give him that’s worth giving up that control over himself. It’s the arrogance which so many are convinced doesn’t exist at all and which so many are convinced does exist but which they persist in seeing in all the places it isn’t. It isn’t just that, though. There’s deep distrust of himself somewhere. Alastor never felt it was his place to dwell on all that. He doesn’t want to feel responsible for other people, after all - not in that way. He doesn’t want to pretend that Albus ought to be someone else when Albus being Albus has worked so well in so many ways. He finds the idea of getting close enough to look directly at what might be Albus’s fear of himself distasteful on both their accounts. But then, Alastor’s magical eye means that he doesn’t have to get too close to things to know that they are there, and in a way knowing people works the same way for him. He doesn’t need to live in people’s pockets to know the important things about them. Albus is the same way and so he and Albus were able to come together at the right moments without any fuss. Then they saw, in the corner-of-the-eye way, that they were beginning to come together too often, and they looked harder at other things. The comforting synchronicity in the parity of what they look for in each other remains.
Alastor knows now that Albus wants to see him alone, possibly simply because it is less likely to happen over the next couple of days and possibly because he has something to say.
“I have heard from one of the guards at Nurmengard. I do hear from some of them from time to time, though not often. I do not ask to know anything from them but I think they feel that I am responsible for putting Grindelwald there and am therefore the master jailor they are accountable to. They don’t report anything of great significance generally. This last letter, for the first time, claimed that Grindelwald is ceasing to hold to his old ideas.”
“Took him long enough,” Alastor says. “I suppose you’d like to think there’s some good in him and that he’s finally found it?”
“Of course I’d like to. Perhaps not so much as I ought.” There is silence as they both stare into the fire for a few moments. Alastor senses that Albus wants something that he knows no one can give him but he doesn’t know what that might be. Does he want Grindelwald to be absolved? Does he want to be absolved himself for some obscure fault? Does he want permission to loathe Grindelwald or to be persuaded to forgive him? Albus’s defeat of Grindelwald seems to stand, to Albus, as a symbol of his own power and the responsibilities and pitfalls attached to that power. “We are old, Grindelwald and I. When I first read the letter I felt that it was too late for Grindelwald to change his mind. Then I realised that I didn’t feel nearly as ancient and incapable of thought and change as I was imagining him - and not as young and stupid, either.”
“His fate isn’t in your hands. You don’t need to decide what he can or can’t manage.”
“Very true. It’s a kind of arrogance.”
“You’ve given that Snape a second chance. Don’t sit around fretting that you’re not forgiving enough.”
Albus looks as if he was going to speak but then doesn’t. Then: “I am very glad Severus does have another chance. He’s so young and there’s so much scope for him to use his life. It is of course much too late for Grindelwald.”
“I don’t know that Snape’s likely to use his life for much besides scaring the kids. But perhaps you consider that a valuable service.”
Albus laughs. “I suppose I must. I was going to say this was all rather dreary and depressing for the season but actually it isn’t. Life goes on, even for Grindelwald.”
“He’s lucky to be in Nurmengard. I don’t think a lot of life goes on in Azkaban,” says Alastor, making things dreary and depressing.
“No, indeed. Of course, the Aurors did their inspection last week. How was it?” The conversation becomes more general and, eventually, more cheerful.
*
The next evening is the Hogwarts staff party. The Aurors had theirs a couple of weeks ago. Hogwarts saves theirs until the last minute partly because it’s best to wait until the students are mostly out of their hair and partly, it seems, because a lot of the staff don’t have anywhere better to be for actual Christmastime. The Arithmancy teacher and the Muggle Studies teacher apparently do have homes to go to. In all honesty the situation is rather similar in the Auror Department but thankfully these things are all less obvious because they don’t live together. Alastor’s first instinct is to shudder thankfully at the idea of living with his colleagues but then he realises how easy it would be for him to annoy his least favourite colleagues and he ponders this cheerfully for a while. The Hogwarts staff is split between those who have made Hogwarts their home and are generally full of good will to those within it, and those who, having made Hogwarts their home because of their inability to cope with the world outside it, are to a large extent unable to deal with the world inside it either.
The latter have been rounded up for the occasion and are skulking resentfully in the corners of the staffroom. Filch has picked his cat up out of people’s way and is clutching both it and a Firewhisky defensively. A charmed floating tray heaped with mince pies nudges his elbow and as he awkwardly tries to bundle the cat and the Firewhisky into the crook of his arm so that he can take a mince pie the cat scrambles up onto his shoulder and stares around at the company with its back arched. Snape is glaring disdainfully at Rolanda Hooch, who is already a little merry and cackling with laughter in conversation with Sprout. Binns floats through the wall and looks around in confusion, having probably the idea that he agreed to be here but not remembering why.
Alastor goes to talk to Silvanus Kettleburn, who Albus and McGonagall have talked of with affection, wary on McGonagall’s part.
“We should start a club,” says Kettleburn, referring to their scars and damaged limbs.
“Oh, I don’t know if I’ll let you join. You must be barmier than me if you manage to turn a cushy teaching job into a way to risk life and limb.”
They compare notes on their injuries. Alastor doesn’t usually care to be questioned about himself but Kettleburn tells him the stories behind his own missing fingers and burns with so much enthusiasm it seems churlish not to reciprocate. He finds himself almost imitating Kettleburn’s fond tone as he substitutes Death Eaters for wild beasts. Of course, he doesn’t feel fond of them and perhaps that makes him barmier and his life less well-spent in some ways than Kettleburn. Not because he doesn’t cherish Death Eaters, of course, but because he’s chosen to spend so much of his time thinking about them.
They get onto Alastor’s current still enfeebled state and the snake responsible for it. Kettleburn asks a lot of questions about it, not all of which Alastor can answer. Before Alastor realises what he’s doing he’s beckoned Snape over to be asked something about venom. A staring match ill-suited for a Christmas party follows between Alastor and Snape, which Snape quickly loses. After answering Kettleburn’s question about the use of snake venoms in potions Snape starts to quiz Alastor on the methods the Healers used to save him. He’s clearly doing his best to make it clear he has the arcane knowledge of a specialist. It’s pitiful but what other defence does he have, faced with an Auror? Albus can say what he likes about Snape seeing the light and having a rich, rewarding life in front of him. Alastor knows what he’s done.
“I have a suggestion!” Flitwick distracts them by squeaking from where he is standing on a table. “Would people like to play Charades?” The group of people immediately surrounding him, which includes Albus, Sprout and Hooch, look as though they have already enthusiastically agreed. There are amenable noises from the rest of the party which the demurrers fail to override.
“What shall the theme be?” McGonagall asks.
“Well, I was talking to Cuthbert about teaching methods,” says Flitwick, “and it occurred to me how splendidly actable so many scenes from history are. So many are portrayed in pictures and tapestries throughout the castle, I’m sure we should be able to guess them!”
Not ten minutes later, Alastor is watching Snape do his best impression of a murderous goblin. It’s very good and he receives a lot of compliments on it. Which murderous goblin from which time period is the question which perplexes the group guessing, though as Snape strides up and down swinging an imaginary axe round his head with more and more vigour. He has to hold his arms over his head in imitation of the flamboyant goblin hats of the fourteenth century before he is set free. Alastor can’t imagine how he allowed himself to be put into that position at all until he remembers Albus telling him of this year’s Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and his tiresome crush on McGonagall. Too tiresome, it sounded, for him to be hired again. He remembers, too, the Prophet’s rumour from a year or so ago, that the Defence job was going to be given to Severus Snape, a man with a dark past. Snape is trying to be obliging.
Albus is both Barnabus the Barmy and the trolls. He is so full of life, Alastor thinks as he watches him. Alastor thinks that the pleasure he takes in so many things is genuine, not a façade he turns to in an attempt to escape his darker feelings. He thinks so and he hopes so. Flitwick is Wendelin the Weird, which is clearly guessed too early for his liking. The Divination teacher, a descendent of Cassandra Trelawney, is Rowena Ravenclaw dreaming of a warty hog leading her to a cliff by a lake, but no one guesses this until later. Trelawney does a great deal of flitting about with a hand to her brow. Everyone wishes they could guess the answer in order to send her away but it doesn’t happen and McGonagall has to put a word in in the end to suggest her time is up. Madam Pince represents the building of Azkaban. It should by rights be hard to guess, yet she turns herself into a menacing fortress so vividly that Alastor can almost see the walls and is the first to shout the answer.
It’s a better party than he expected in the end.
*
On Boxing Day the other Aurors capture Blore. He turns out to have been hiding in the Forbidden Forest, so that if he weren’t going to be sent to Azkaban shortly you could say the Aurors were rescuing him. Alastor is a little put out that he didn’t somehow sense his presence but on the other hand it’s good to think of him perched up a tree or something, hungry and evading terrifying beasts while Alastor was tucking into his Christmas dinner.
“I think it’s time to be getting back now,” Alastor tells Albus. He can help present the evidence against Blore.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay?” Albus asks.
“Yes, yes I have. I wouldn’t like to stay here too long. I’d get soft, having everything done for me. But it was good to get away for a couple of days.”