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It's goose this year, God help him.
The thing was practically foisted on him, if anyone cares to ask. Maisie Figg who bought half his cheese and a weanling buck from him in autumn was raising the little buggers for Christmas, and she threw one in to stand for four galleons when they settled their year-end accounts. So, instead of the plain old pie and mash he'd usually be making this time of year, there's a ten-pound bird plucked and gutted and hanging in his cold room, waiting for an oven.
"I certainly can't imagine you going to the trouble otherwise," Minerva says after listening to his explanation.
Any tilt is kept strictly to her lips and out of her voice, so Aberforth lets it lie. "If someone wants a jolly holiday, they'll be over at Rosmerta's. I never do good business on Christmas Eve, and anyone who does turn up won't want reminding."
"I certainly can't imagine," Severus chimes in, his nose still buried in a stack of essays, "that the wholesome sight of holly and candles will persuade any of your clientele to mend their ways."
Aberforth lets that lie too, although he could rightly say a thing or two about what Severus Snape knows about his clientele. It's only a few boughs of holly anyhow, cut from a crop of bushes out behind the inn. He only did it so Minerva wouldn't see the place bare and tut as though the responsibility for decorating was somehow left to her as it inevitably was at the school. Besides, he'll wager that Severus's weakness for tradition extends to Christmas trimmings. In the empty and shuttered place with every table to choose from, the lad just happened to sit between a pair of posts where the holly climbs to the ceiling in garlands, with a view of the green-heaped and candlelit mantel.
It's winter, that's all. A little grudging fuss for guests. That's part of the business.
They aren't spending Christmas Eve together in any sense of the phrase except for the bare bones of fact. Shared holidays are the territory of love affairs, not a funny little arrangement that always feels as though it should require more drink than it does. If anything, this is the opposite of spending Christmas Eve together. It's taking a break from it. The equivalent of stepping out the back door for a smoke, only in the form of a meal for three people whose livelihoods call for more attention to the holidays than they'd otherwise muster.
Someone settled their tab with poultry, was all he wrote to Minerva, with no dead robins or tidings of comfort and joy. Bring the lad and his hollow legs over for lunch tomorrow to take it off my hands? There's a table reserved if you're still up to your ears in marking.
Then, to the hollow-legged lad in question: Stuck with a goose too small for the dinner service and too good for the likes of my customers. Expect the Gryffindor tots are riled up on sweets and their head of house could use some peace and quiet. Convince her to come over for lunch tomorrow?
The only special care taken was going down the post office for discretion's sake. He doesn't know if Albus would recognize his owl, but he wonders about it. Wonders if Albus knows they're here. Wonders, with a certain unkind satisfaction, if this counts as cuckoldry if you squint.
"Can you dice an onion?" he asks around the time that Severus has unstopped his second pot of red ink and is threatening harmony by encroaching on Minerva's side of the table.
It earns him a withering look. "Of course I can."
"Good, because I can't." He nods toward the kitchen as Minerva uses the opportunity to recover the disputed territory for her tome of a lesson plan.
Severus heaves a grievously put-upon sigh but comes with him, never truly sorry to be in demand if it means he's best at something. Minerva is a deputy headmistress, not a house mother, and Aberforth's not daft enough to order her into the kitchen. He'd be just as foolish, however, not to foist off his chopping on a potions teacher.
The kitchen is already thick with the smell of roasting fowl stuffed with pork sausage, apples and chestnuts. Fat sizzles and pops in the oven, soon backed by the sharp percussion of a knife on the cutting board as Severus makes short work of the onion for the bread sauce, followed by the garlic. You couldn't call him pretty—striking might be the better word for it—but Aberforth could pull up a chair and watch him work all day. He himself bludgeons breadcrumbs at the table as Severus swiftly grates a nutmeg without losing a speck of it before moving on to pitting cherries for the tart with unerring jabs of a darning needle.
"Whatever my brother's paying you, I'll double it," he says.
The wind must be blowing in the right direction. Instead of bristling, Severus snorts and the corner of his mouth rises. "I might take you up on that offer."
Northward, Aberforth notes for future reference. The wind is throwing itself at the front of the inn with the cold wail it picks up when it comes skimming over the lake. You don't get a picturesque dusting of snow or a silent night when the wind's blowing north. What you get is a sea of white with drifts lapping halfway up your front door like the tide's come in. The roof threatens to billow, and star-sized snowflakes cling wetly to the other side of the steamed-up windowpane.
He'll unbar the door if anyone comes knocking, at least if it's some pregnant girl on a donkey, but for the moment it's not a bad day to be closed.
"Now there's an idea," he says, loud enough to carry to the public room. "Let me find some."
A man's got to work to make Severus Snape blink. Aberforth has his own ideas about why it is that surprise makes the lad go still as a snake, but this bit of nonsense on his part only warrants a split-second pause and a sideways glance with one black eyebrow arching.
Aberforth winks and takes down a bottle of the good stuff: some Ardbeg from out Islay-ways, old enough to be leaving Hogwarts on its own. He pours two glasses, one a little higher than the other, and sets them on a tray. They're joined by his stash of Dinah Puddifoote's shortbread, which he transfers from their repurposed toffee tin to one of his few pieces of good china.
'Go on,' he mouths, putting the tray in Severus's hands and giving him a little shove out the kitchen door.
The lad is halfway to the table when Minerva looks up with a smile of pleased surprise that could make a seasoned rogue scuff his boot-tip.
"Oh, Severus. How thoughtful."
Aberforth would put a sickle on this prompting an eye-roll, but even from behind he can see how Severus's back straightens and his shoulders square up. For someone with more than his share of slyness who obviously likes being told he's done a good job, he's shockingly poor at getting himself what he wants. The why of that is none of Aberforth's business, but he doesn't mind occasionally setting up a shot and letting the lad pop the quaffle through the hoop himself. Especially when the only sight more satisfying than Severus at work is Minerva at her leisure.
She's not an idle woman by nature, Minerva, and Aberforth lingers in the doorway longer than he needs to, watching as she sets down her quill in favour of the whisky. She leans back in her seat and inhales what he knows to be a touch of sweetness over smoky peat. Parts her lips. Takes a mouthful. Closes her eyes.
Cook's prerogative, Aberforth takes his own drink straight from the bottle as he starts the bread sauce simmering and sugars the cherries.
When there's a lull in the wind, he catches the murmurs and mutters from the other side of the door. "Tsk," and "Oh, really now," from Minerva. "Dunderheaded little—" and "Are they actually getting more stupid every year?" from Severus. This is interspersed by an occasional flurry of mingled indignation and amusement contending with the weather whenever they sniff out a plagiarist.
"I read this essay last year. It wasn't any better when it had her brother's name on it."
"That's because stupidity tends to run in families."
"Severus." A pause. "True in this case, but it's hardly a universal rule. Does this passage look familiar to you?"
"No, but he's gone from misspelling your name to using the word 'conjectural' correctly in a sentence and properly employing a semicolon. Fail him."
The pair of them are sitting shoulder to shoulder, heads bent over a spread of maimed essays and pitting their students' shoddiest sentences against each other in some sort of cockfight of illiteracy when lunch is served. He's seen them closer by far, pressed up against the railing there, and in his bed, and in three of the other rooms upstairs. They look up guiltily all the same, like a pair of rival cats caught unexpectedly cuddling on the hearth.
He carries the goose on its platter to the next table over so they don't need to move their papers, then carts out the rest of it and sets three places.
"This looks wonderful, Aberforth," Minerva says, lightly touching arm as he pulls out a chair for her.
He's quick enough to pull out a chair for Severus while he's at it and merely harrumphs, having already explained that this is only the result of Maisie Figg's dickering.
It's a fine goose, though. Even he has to admit it as the golden-brown skin crackles under the carving knife. Minerva passes around the carrots and parsnips, and Severus stealthily samples a roast potato when he seems to think neither of them are looking. Aberforth considers putting the wireless on, but it will only be carols on the WWN today. The next thing you know, someone could get the wrong idea and start thinking about presents and parlour games and all manner of things too fraught for a tired old bastard, a widow, and whatever starveling thing the lad might be.
Instead, it's nothing but the publican's hospitality from all of them: here's what's on the table, take it or leave it.
He tucks into his lunch, content with the flicker and snap of a log burning hot in the fireplace. The low moan of the northward wind at the door, shut out for now. The muffled quiet of a snowy street beyond, and the compliments for the bread sauce giving way again to grumbling about grammar and the youth of today. It's only a Thursday, he thinks, but it's a happier one than it has any right to be.