Tears blurred Dumbledore's eyes as he sat there on the cold stone, looking for all the world like a grief-stricken child while an air of utter despondency was hanging over his posture.
If some outsider had happened upon this scene and seen Albus Dumbledore—a man of countless legendary achievements, a living legend in his own right across the wizarding world—wearing such a naked, defeated expression, they genuinely wouldn't have known what to make of it.
Bryan's own face, by contrast, remained calm and entirely untroubled, even though Dumbledore had, only minutes before nearly landed him in a great deal of life-threatening trouble.
There are always certain regrets that haunt a person across their entire lifetime.
Bryan had looked into Dumbledore's past. He wasn't especially surprised by the weakness Dumbledore was showing now.
With a small flick of his wand, a low, three-legged stool and a small wooden table pressed themselves down through the overgrown weeds, settling into place. Bryan slowly took his own seat upon the stool.
On the table before him, the cork popped free from the mouth of an aged wine bottle of its own accord, and a trickling stream poured itself smoothly into a waiting crystal glass, the liquid was catching what moonlight came down through the trees and its rich fragrance began spilling into the night air.
"This is Aberforth's Fire Whisky—"
Dumbledore's own crooked nose twitched at the scent.
"That's right—"
Bryan nodded in confirmation.
"I thought we could use a bit of fiery drink to warm ourselves against this cold."
As he spoke, he took a slow sip of the red liquid himself, and its sharp, mellow taste drew a sigh of genuine contentment from him despite everything that had just occurred.
Dumbledore, too, silently raised his glass and took a small sip.
"I think I owe you an apology, Bryan. I nearly ruined everything tonight, through my own carelessness."
Dumbledore mumbled it, his words were still unclear through his congested nose.
"Apology accepted, then."
Bryan said simply.
Bryan's formidable magical power had given him a body considerably sturdier than any ordinary person's, one that paid little mind to extremes of cold or heat under normal circumstances and yet even he found himself feeling a faint, unfamiliar discomfort now in the increasingly bone-deep chill of the rising wind.
He had no real desire to talk further in this moment. He simply sipped his own wine steadily, one mouthful after another, gazing out at the restored, silent shape of the ruined Gaunt house before them both.
The bloodline of the Slytherin family still carried on somewhere within the broader wizarding world, scattered and diluted across generations, but after a full thousand years of continuity, Salazar Slytherin's own direct line was about to come to its final end.
"Don't you want me to properly explain myself, Bryan?"
Dumbledore said, his voice still thick and heavy through his nose.
"If what you mean to share with me is the story between you and your brother, your sister, and Grindelwald—I don't think that's necessary tonight, Headmaster."
Bryan said calmly.
"Ah, I'd forgotten. You already have my past figured out quite clearly—"
Dumbledore lowered his head and took another slow sip of his wine.
"That's not quite it—"
Bryan said frankly, wanting to correct the specific impression.
"But there's no shortage of rumours circulating through the wizarding world about that particular period of your life, Headmaster Dumbledore. I've simply paid attention to a few of them over time, and putting them together with some guesswork of my own, I have a rough idea of what kind of story it was."
"I imagine you must think me something of a fool, then, to have made such a mistake."
Dumbledore's eyes glimmered with fresh, unshed tears; his whole expression turned deeply sorrowful.
"Everyone has a time of youthful recklessness, Headmaster Dumbledore—a time when they believe themselves to be the hero destined to save the world. And it's precisely the rarest, most exceptional talents among us who are most prone to losing themselves in the praise heaped upon them by an admiring world, losing their reverence for the world's dangers in the process, and so falling, eventually, into error."
"But you never did, though. Did you."
Dumbledore wiped carefully at his own eyes with the back of one hand. He looked directly at Bryan as a small smile broke slowly across his face, carrying with it a touch of something like childlike wonder.
"Forgive an old man's candour—I once, seriously compared you to the young Gellert I once knew, and to Tom as well, of course, and to myself in those same years. I measured every one of us against each other, turning it over. Every single one of us was haunted for the remainder of our respective lives by the mistakes we made in the arrogance of youth.
But you, Bryan—you've never once been troubled by anything remotely resembling that, have you. Even now, sitting here, I still find myself genuinely curious about it: a young man, brilliantly gifted beyond any measure, and yet perfectly willing, all the same, to dim his own light and remain quietly unremarkable to the wider world, governing his own entire life with a reason so calm and settled it borders, frankly, on something close to cold."
Dumbledore looked at Bryan with genuine curiosity.
"How did you manage all of this, exactly? I would genuinely like to understand."
Bryan could, in that moment, have easily turned the whole question into a light joke, deflecting the weight of it.
He might have said, for instance, that if Hogwarts hadn't had someone as dangerous as Dumbledore walking its halls, he wouldn't have gone to such trouble to make himself appear so ordinary by comparison.
But the genuine, naked bewilderment sitting in the words of this old man—now stripped entirely of his usual disguise, worn down visibly by the accumulated weight of years and tonight's fresh guilt—moved Bryan all the same, past his usual instinct for deflection.
"I'm not like any of you, Headmaster Dumbledore—"
Bryan said quietly, almost wistfully, his own gaze drifting somewhere distant.
He was a person who had never once known anything resembling an innocent childhood of his own. From the very first day he had come into this world, the soul housed within that frail, newborn infant body had already been that of a grown man.
This fact had always allowed him to face whatever gifts he possessed with a calm, remarkably even temperament that others, understandably, found difficult to properly account for.
"Not like us—"
Dumbledore turned the words over slowly on his own tongue as something strange and unreadable flickered briefly behind his half-moon spectacles for a moment. But he didn't press the matter any further.
Neither of them spoke again for a long while after that exchange. They simply sat together in the raw, biting wind until the bottle between them stood entirely empty.
Clink—
The ring Bryan had been holding between his fingers this entire time, turning it over now and again in idle thought, he now set down gently on the small table in front of Dumbledore.
"I imagine you understand perfectly well already, Headmaster Dumbledore, that nothing in this world can bring the dead back to life."
Staring at the ring as if caught in some trance, Dumbledore's own eyes grew hazy again. His whole haggard body trembled without pause, and he looked as frail and diminished as any dying man standing at the very edge of death's threshold.
"I have spent my whole life regretting what happened that afternoon, Bryan—" Dumbledore's voice had gone hoarse again.
Bryan had genuinely nothing adequate to say in response to that particular confession.
He simply reached out and patted Dumbledore gently on the shoulder instead, and as his own arm came back down from the gesture, he slipped the Elder Wand smoothly free from the pocket where Dumbledore had absently tucked it away earlier.
"I'll hold onto your wand for the time being, Headmaster Dumbledore—"
Bryan said.
"Just in case you're overcome by emotion tonight and do something dangerous."
Dumbledore stared blankly at him for a moment, genuinely at a loss for words at the gesture, his own trembling fingers were already reaching toward the icy-cold ring resting on the table.
Holding the setting carefully, just as Bryan had held it a moment before, Dumbledore lifted the ring up before his own eyes, gazing at it in a state of complete entrance at the dark Resurrection Stone set into its band.
Bryan lowered his own head, his palm was passing thoughtfully over the old wand that had travelled hand in hand with death and considerable bloodshed for so very long across its history, and he felt his own heart stir, if only slightly, at the contact.
It was rather like that first encounter with the Twin-Serpent Staff, when he had let the ambition stirring in the depths of his heart briefly cloud his judgment—this old wand, too, seemed to be trying to tell him something, tugging faintly at his emotions.
But after no more than a few breaths, clarity had already returned to Bryan's eyes.
Even Grindelwald, who had once possessed the Elder Wand, had still lost to Dumbledore in the end. Every single master who had owned the wand before, had, without a single exception, eventually had it taken from them by whoever came after.
To a great wizard possessing a mind like Bryan's, the Elder Wand was nothing more than a burden to carry—not any meaningful advantage.
Compared to its status as one of the three Deathly Hallows, what interested Bryan about the Elder Wand had rather more to do with the fact that it was one of the coordinates.
Bryan raised his head and saw that Dumbledore was still gazing steadily at the ring, entirely lost in his private trance. He tucked the Elder Wand into his own pocket and took a small step back from the table. "Do you know how to use it, Headmaster Dumbledore?"
Dumbledore raised one trembling hand in response. His long fingers covered the Resurrection Stone completely, and he turned it in a slow circle three full times upon its surface.
A sharp crease appeared instantly on Bryan's forehead at what followed. He shifted his gaze rapidly away from Dumbledore, his eyes turned genuinely wary as he scanned the surrounding darkness on instinct.
A certain force had made itself known in that same instant—appearing from nowhere at all, as though some entirely foreign power reaching down from the heavens had suddenly chosen to interfere.
The clear night air around them was swiftly filled with a thin, grey mist, and this particular development made Bryan's own eyes sharpen even further with focused attention.
'The scent of death.'
It was, unmistakably, very much like the same grey fog that had corroded the entire isle of Avalon during his visit there—except that, this time, it carried none of that same lingering sense of malevolence toward Bryan's senses.
'Could it be—could the Resurrection Stone truly pull the dead back out of the time they had already passed into?!'
A flicker of astonishment and doubt appeared across Bryan's own eyes at the possibility.
His own research into this area was far from thorough.
Within the thin, drifting grey mist, a dark, indistinct silhouette slowly began to appear.
"Ariana."
Two lines of clear tears spilled from Dumbledore's eyes at the sight. He threw his arms wide open and stumbled forward unsteadily toward the emerging shadowy figure.
The girl's form, as it fully resolved, was thin and delicate, her long hair was drifting gently in some unfelt current of air.
She carried the fine, gentle features of a young girl on the very edge of adolescence, and the distinctive Dumbledore family's signature deep blue eyes, their gaze remarkably clear and untouched by the world's usual weight—identical, in every visible detail, to the painted girl in the portrait hanging in the Hog's Head.
"Ariana."
Tears streamed down Dumbledore's face as he called out to the slowly approaching golden-haired girl, as though speaking in a dream. "Can you forgive me, Ariana?"
Ariana only smiled gently in response, saying nothing in return, coming to a soft stop some small distance away from him, gazing at Dumbledore with tenderness.
Bryan's eyelids narrowed almost to slits at the unfolding scene, the sharp crease on his forehead was deepening further.
'Who, was Dumbledore actually speaking to in this moment?'
'A mere shadow, given temporary shape by the projection of his grieving, guilt-ridden inner mind?'
That was, in fact, what Bryan had first, reasonably assumed upon seeing the mist resolve into a figure—except—
Bryan pressed his lips together tightly, working through the sensation with careful attention.
That faint, indistinct, barely perceptible—and yet, unmistakably, undeniably real—ripple of a soul. What was that about?!
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