the usual || k&a
In an ideal world, Aberforth would give people their drinks and they would quietly drink them and leave in a reasonable amount of time, refraining from engaging in conversation and certainly not having the audacity to either say their name enough or have others say it to the point that he had no choice but to pick up on it over time. In an ideal world Aberforth probably wouldn’t be running a pub- as far as professions went, bartending wasn’t exactly conducive to being left well alone, after all. And yet he was making do with what he had, and ideally people wouldn’t expect him to be their best friend just because he’d given them a pint. Aberforth stared expectantly at the wizard fumbling for his change in front of him. The boy looked barely out of Hogwarts, and sounded it too- it’d been painful to watch as he’d ambled up to the bar and made a stumbling attempt at nonchalance in ordering his drink. Aberforth had let the glass hit the bar with a solid thump and a slosh of alcohol just to break up the stream of words and spare them all the pain of that particular slowly crashing train. The boy finally fished out the correct coins and handed them over to Aberforth with a smile. Aberforth met it with a blank stare, sticking the money in his pocket so as to not break eye contact. The kid scurried off to a corner satisfyingly quickly.
“Alright, anyone else? Or are you just taking up space in my pub for no particular reason?” Aberforth spoke, turning on his heel to look down the bar, gaze skating over the handful of people who were hunched over drinks at various stools down its length and catching on a familiar face.
Unlike many of the young pests the Hog’s Head was occasionally overrun with, Katherine Pyrites wasn’t particularly chatty. She didn’t run around demanding attention, often sitting and drinking in front of an open book and keeping to herself. But as a consequence of the amount of time she’d spent in the place, Aberforth had learned her name. He couldn’t really bring himself to resent her for it, however. As far as regulars went, she wasn’t completely annoying.
He was in no particular rush to close the distance between them, a fact made abundantly obvious by the way he straightened a shelf of mugs and tucked a cloth through a cabinet handle on his way down the bar. He braced a hand in an absent gesture against the support pillar that came down like the trunk of a dented and darkened tree, the bar built around and on either side of it. “What’ll it be, Pyrites?”
@madebybigshadows
