He needed to clear his mind.
Albus had been feeling.....off for the past few days. Too moody, too fluctuating, like the flow and ebb of the tide, except a million times more unpredictable. Happy for the strangest and cheesiest of reasons, suddenly and tempestuously angry, sad like the world's deepest, dreariest dumps. It was a sudden, frightening change for a man so adept to masking his emotions and thoughts. If he was completely honest with himself, he hadn't masked for weeks, hadn't faked for weeks, and Albus didn't know if it was liberating, or the bloody scariest thing that had ever happened to him.
Crap. He was feeling too much.
It was a tumultuous mess, his thoughts. A spinning, out-of-control typhoon, ready to shred and rip every conception he had built about the world, every assumption he had made about its people, every character trait he felt he had possessed. Albus was a man with rules, strict ones, ones he never broke. Except he found himself inadvertently bending and stretching and contorting the best of them, and reacting and acting completely unlike himself.
Resentment brimmed up in him, like a simmering pot of water. Ah, at last, a familiar emotion. It was all their fault. Theirs, Jack and Katrina-Carlotta, and everyone else who had talked to him for the last couple of months. Really talked to him, not his shell. They had coaxed him, from a spot where he was resentfully happy, happily bored and constricted. Forced him to step up and actually participate in life, instead of following the predictable script. Actually being out there was so much more different that imagining it. Now he was open to hurts, to disappointments. It annoyed the hell out of him.
So Albus stepped into Borgin and Burkes, and relished the thought that he was smiling politely (fakely) and conducting conversation with the owner (fakely), and surveying the displays inadvertently, out of sight (secretively). No one knew, or cared. Secrets could still be kept, however small and inane. The thought sent a wave of comfort in his chest.
Then someone caught his eye, robes hinting at the corner of his vision, as the bell tinkled and someone stepped in. Finally, someone to test the strength of his mask, and ensure that the cracks in it were healed. To make sure that he hadn't lost his ability yet. Add to the fact that this would aid in the Rebel mission, Albus stepped up to the newcomer with adrenaline rippling almost gently in his veins, smile intact.
"Mister Krum. I don't believe we are acquainted."