A/N: Written for the 5 Christmas Keys Competition. [Keys: chocolate cake mix, orange, peppermint, humming bird, and a mess.]
Merry Christmas by the way!
Alice Longbottom was an awful cook. She knew it. Looking back, she doesn't even know why she's baking a cake for the Weasley/Potter/Lupin/Scamander/Longbottom Christmas reunion at The Burrow which somehow seems to fit all those people.
She wants to look responsible and independent, especially in front of a certain Angelina Weasley, who Alice was dying to impress. The thing was Alice Longbottom II is the most forgetful girl in the world. So when she left the peppermint-flavored muffins burn, she decided on a chocolate cake.
Her mother was downstairs, in the Leaky Cauldron and her dad was off with Frank, who was getting a new broom.
Wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, Alice looked at the chocolate cake mix that was about to become an actual cake. She reached out for her wand again, and hands carefully slipped around her waist, making her drop the wand that shot sparks in various directions.
"Fred!" Alice exclaimed before bending down to pick up her wand. Fred laughed, grabbed an orange of the table and started free styling with it.
"No 'I missed you' or 'I'm glad I got to see you before the reunion'?" he asked, twirling the orange on his finger. His girlfriend sighed.
"Aren't you supposed to be at the joke shop?" she asked.
"One of the employees took over my shift in the Diagon Alley branch because I saw Victoire and she said she took baby Remus for a checkup in St Mungos and didn't find you there, so here I am," Fred said, still playing with the orange.
"I have a day off today," the exhausted twenty-three year old said. "So I decided to bake something for the- NO!" Fred lost control of the orange and it fell in the bowl of chocolate cake mix, splattering chocolate everywhere.
"Fred!" Alice yelled and stared at the mess.
"Damn, I'm so sorry, Alice," Fred apologized. Alice's expression changed. She laughed.
"I wanted to show your mom that her son is dating a responsible, mature woman," she said with a sigh, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs. "I guess he isn't dating one."
"Is that what this is about? You don't think my parents will approve if I married you?" Fred asked, sitting down next to her.
"Married? What are you talking abou-
In front of her, Fred was on one knee, and that knee sat on a puddle of chocolate. "Alice Longbottom, will you marry me?"
She didn't care about burnt peppermint muffins and chocolate cake mix. The love of her life was on one knee right there, proposing.
"Yes!"