Author's Note: I was in the middle of writing this when the clock struck midnight, so one could say I wrote it over a period of two years. It was inspired by a Patty Griffin song, "Making Pies"—hence the reference to Andromeda's pie making. Tonks' cooking habits are unabashedly based on my own: with a former pastry chef for a father, I must have inherited some talent, if I could only keep my mind on baking long enough, and not eat everything straight out of the oven! As a side note, I'm not entirely certain what sprinkles, or jimmies as they're called in New England, are referred to in Britain; if anyone could tell me I'd be most grateful.
Pink Sugar
"And you could cry, or die
Or just make pies all day"
- Patty Griffin
When she is confused, and doesn't know what else to do, Nymphadora Tonks bakes things.
She doesn't profess to be a good cook, seeing as she often forgets what she's put in the oven or on the stove and leaves it to burn, but when she can keep her mind on it for a reasonable amount of time, she is passable. Occasionally, when there is so much turmoil in her mind that she needs some mundane task to centre every bit of her thought on it, her grim ventures at food-making turn out well enough to warrant compliments. She knows this because she brought biscuits (chocolate chip, covered in pink sugar she'd found at the back of a cupboard and dashed on in a desperate bid for seeming light-heartedness) to work once, and people had, one, eaten them voluntarily, two, not made the faces people make when they're attempting not to make faces, and three, praised them without the sort of dismal politeness that she'd learned to associate with her cooking. She is probably the only Auror to pass out pink-sugared biscuits at work; Kingsley Shacklebolt had been the first, but not the last, to point that particular fact out on that particular day. She'd taken the teasing in stride. She isn't like most Aurors, and most of the time this amuses her. But when she takes to comfort-baking, the joking of co-workers is not amusing; it bounces from her thick shell of misery like hexes from a Reductor Charm.
She scoops biscuit dough into uneven, lumpy balls and shakes multi-coloured sprinkles over them, with an uncharacteristic neatness that betrays her unrest. Every glob of dough must have the same approximate amount of sprinkles, or else she has caused something to go very, very wrong in the world. The world of the kitchen is not like the world outside; burns and spills are calamity enough.
After she's shoved the biscuits in the oven, she stands a moment with her hand on the dial. There are spells and other wizarding ways to bake things, but she has never been good at them—refused to learn them when she was an independent teenager denying housewifely duties. This Muggle stove came with the flat she bought when she went out on her own, and she is glad for it, despite its penchant to burn things that even she wouldn't have. She stands against the stove for a very long time, thinking firmly about Mum making pies, but then she remembers the frenzied way Mum had baked after the Potters died and Sirius went to Azkaban. She is not certain whether to smile or blink away tears—the Blacks do not eat for comfort, they bake, though she finds it difficult to imagine her elegant Aunt Narcissa bending flushed over a mass of scones.
The timer begins buzzing shrilly, and suddenly and abruptly, Tonks bursts into tears.
She stumbles against the nearest chair and sits down in it heavily, crushing her palms against her face. "Bloody biscuits," she sobs aloud, and then, "bloody, bloody Blacks!" Sirius—her brilliant cousin Sirius who never grew up—he laughed both of the times he died. She keeps remembering—he smiled, cockily—and Bellatrix—the light—and the curtain—and everything was all right again, but it wasn't, because Sirius was gone and there wasn't even a body to bury. Sirius and this bloody war, she thinks, a little less frenetically now, but she can hear exclamation marks in her mind. And because she's opened the doors already, she thinks about the rest—the deaths, and the terror, and the fear, and Stan Shunpike, locked in the lonely black hell of Azkaban; Azkaban, which killed Sirius first.
And Remus—
Here she manages to stop, standing up (the chair—it is a flimsy one—folds in on itself and clatters to the floor) and scrubbing her eyes resolutely. The timer is still shrieking; she pulls the oven door open and recovers her biscuit trays. On the stovetop, she examines them as they cool. The bottoms are black, and some have stuck to the pans where she has neglected to put grease.
She turns to the remainder of the dough in the bowl on the table, reaching for a handful and absently putting it in her mouth; it doesn't taste like much. The pink sugar is sitting on the counter—she grabs that and parcels it out onto lumps of biscuit dough as she sets them in rows on a newly greased pan.
Maybe, she thinks, it might make up for her hair, at least.
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