For More Somber Affairs
I am collecting all my stories that have been left to drift in the wind. Like calling home children or something. (From RS Small Gifts a million years ago)
Title: For More Somber Affairs
Author: rev02a
Written for: lotrwariorgodss
Rating: PG-13, sexual references
Prompt: Cookie baking
Summary: Sirius's attempt to act like an appropriate Muggle for Lily after her mother's death
Sirius came home carrying a Flourish and Botts sack and immediately disappeared into the back bedroom. At first, Remus thought nothing of it. But some time later, he noted that the flat was extremely quiet.
Not a good quiet.
The kind of quiet that signaled “surprises” (like an entire litter of puppies in the bathtub) or “mischief” (like that time with the entire East Side’s electricity) or “sulking” (like that time after that really stupid prank with Snape and the Willow); no matter the reason, Remus surmised, it probably was not good.
He stood with difficulty, vigorously rubbed at his stiff knee, and limped down the hallway. The moon was waning (finally), but Moony’s last escapade had left Remus’s leg broken and slow to mend. The door to Sirius’s office was mostly open, so Remus didn’t knock when he entered. Sirius was perched on the edge of his desk, chewing on his thumbnail, and reading a fairly large book. Remus moved into the room, grabbing onto the doorframe for balance when his shuffling threatened to land him on the floor.
“Moony!” Sirius exclaimed, after noticing Remus. He jumped to his feet and grabbed Remus by the bicep and helped him into a chair.
“Where’s your cane, mate?” Sirius asked affectionately, brushing Remus’s fringe from his forehead.
Remus made a dismissive wave, suggesting that he’d abandoned the annoying device somewhere in the flat. He focused in on the spine of Sirius’s newest text: Muggles And Why They Do the Things They Do: The Wizard’s Guide to Crossing Traffic, Making Coffee, and Generally Not Making an Arse of Himself.
“Padfoot,” Remus began carefully, “what are you planning?”
Past images of Sirius inspecting a feather duster or Sirius attempting to understand the rules of rugby flooded back to Remus. Adventures in Muggle culture were often colorful with his boyfriend. Whatever was in store, Remus simply hoped it was easy to clean up.
“Erm, well, Moony, my darling love-cucumber-“ Sirius began.
Remus raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Love-cucumber?”
“-It’s charming.”
“It’s disturbing.”
“Mr. Potter calls Mrs. Potter his ‘sweet kumquat’.”
“And you thought this was… affectionate?”
“It’s tender.”
“No, Pads. It’s unfortunate.”
Sometimes Remus wished that Sirius had grown up in a normal household where he was shown some sort of conventional affection. Without it, he’d been forced to spend his latter years piecing together some sort of definition of love-as with many things involving Sirius, it was mildly unhinged.
“Fine,” Sirius huffed, “I’ll think of something else.”
“Something less phallic, if you please.”
Sirius grinned wolfishly. Remus rolled his eyes.
“Back to your plan of world domination now, please,” Remus asked in a put-upon sort of way, waving his hand at the abandoned book.
Sirius shook his head and squatted down between Remus’s knees as if he were kneeling before a child.
“Nothing like that. Remember what a fool I made of myself at your father’s funeral?” he began and Remus smiled indulgently.
“It wasn’t that bad, Padfoot,” Remus soothed.
Sirius hopped up and began to pace the floor, gesturing wildly.
“Yes, it was! I bowed to your grandmother! I brought a pair of sickles to line the coffin and you and your mother a new pair of shoes!”
Remus smiled again, genuinely this time.
“My Mum was charmed, Sirius. You did what any wizard would have done… you helped pay Dad’s passage for the boatman and we both got a new pair of shoes-you know that’s supposed to symbolize stepping out into a new life? -It was a good thing, Sirius,” Remus soothes, reaching for Sirius.
Sirius turned to face his lover and ran a hand across his face.
“Well at least your dad was a Muggleborn. But if I made these mistakes for Lily’s family-“
The words dropped off and Remus understood suddenly. The days had grown steadily grimmer and bloodier. The body count from this past weekend had tallied at thirty or so; among the number of dead was Lily’s mother. Without her daughter’s magic, she had simply fallen to the Death Eaters without much a fight.
“It isn’t too different, Padfoot. We’ll wear suits and-“
“-and we need to cook something.”
Remus blinked in surprise. “Ugh, what?” he asked in confusion.
Sirius marched over and grabbed the book up from its resting place. He flipped to a marked page and began to read. “It is often tradition for the bereaved to receive gifts of meals from their friends and family. These gifts begin at the reception following the graveside ceremony (See page 987 for Funeral and Graveside Rituals and Etiquette) and continue for many days after. Appropriate offerings are casseroles, soups, salads, afters, and drinks-“
Sirius quit reading abruptly and snapped the book shut again.
“So we need to cook something.”
Remus blinked dramatically. “Like what?”
Sirius looked panicky for a moment.
“What did you want at your Dad’s service?” he asked quickly.
Remus rubbed at his upper lip and then tapped on his teeth with his thumb. “Biscuits.”
Sirius nodded vigorously. “Right. Biscuits then. C’mon, Remus, we have work ahead of us.”
In 1387, a witch by the name of Bakeraton created a series of kitchen spells that could conjure most baked goods from the end of one’s wand. While the spells were mildly difficult, they were nothing compared to the Animagius transformation. Therefore, if truly inclined, Sirius could have conjured biscuits, Remus concluded.
But Sirius liked difficult.
This probably accounted for why Sirius and he were dressed in Muggle clothing and entering Marks and Spencer. Remus had fought to leave the Muggles out of this, he really had. He had sunk so low as to floo his Mum and request a cookbook.
Sirius, however, was really being difficult (because he liked difficult). He looked at the title “Cooking Like the Muggles: Yummy Cuisine without Magic!” and flipped through the sections that reviewed the wizard or witch on their first aid spells and fire extinguishing charms. He hummed as he peered at the photographs.
Remus knew he was beat before Sirius said a damn thing.
“Remus! This isn’t authentic!” Sirius whined.
“Sure it is-“
“Lily will know we used magic!”
“Padfoot, there is no magic in this cooking!” Remus exclaimed, flipping to the section that explained how to operate the cooker as some form of evidence.
Sirius leaned in and squinted at the instructions, then vigorously shook his head. “The book was written by someone who knows how to use magic. Lily will know!”
Remus planned to argue about Lily’s ability to read minds, but resigned himself to fighting off the holiday crowds in search of a more “authentic” recipe book when Sirius threw him his coat.
The mob of holiday shoppers blocked the path to the escalator but Sirius shoved his way through, while he pulling Remus along behind him by the coat sleeve. Remus called out apologies, but it didn’t really matter. These people were already certifiable to be out a week before Christmas in the height of Death Eater activity (not that these Muggles had a clue about the Death Eaters). The shoppers gave little mind to two young men pushing their way up to the first floor.
Remus knew the trip would be eventful when Sirius got distracted by a life-size nutcracker solider and an off-color dressing gown. They spent a good forty minutes in the store before they even located the small electrics.
“Oooh! Moony! Look at this!” Sirius squealed, poking at a stand mixer.
“Nice, Pads. But we don’t have electricity,” Remus replied while scanning the rows for recipes books.
It didn’t take too much longer to find the cookbooks (Remus cast a locating charm when Sirius was distracted by the shelves of blenders), but the actual choosing of the book was another ordeal altogether. They spent a good few minutes attempting to persuade the book to offer them a sample of the baked goods in the photograph before another patron looked at them strangely. (That was about the same time that they remembered that the book contained absolutely-no-magic, per request.) They squabbled about which book they would purchase (“This one. It has a good-looking bloke on the cover, Pads.”) before they settled on the book that Remus had selected (“And people say that I’m the shallow one, Moony.”).
From his limited experience of Muggle cooking, Remus determined that would need a bowl, a baking tray, and lots of flour. Sirius, having attained all of his Muggle baking skills from looking at the fit bloke on the cover of their new book, ascertained that they would be in need of an apron.
“I will not wear that,” Remus asserted, looking at the little frilly apron that Sirius was holding up.
“Why not?” Sirius asked, wickedly. “It’s dead sexy.”
“It has orange roses and lace on it, Sirius.”
“It’s like negligee. And you’d look good in orange.”
“Do you remember the agreement we came to about lingerie?”
“You seemed to forget about that rule the other day with the nurse kit-“
“Sirius, you are intentionally playing my fantasies against me-“
Sirius held the apron up as if he was tying it around his waist. Remus swallowed audibly.
“Right. Let’s buy that, shall we?”
Sirius’s barking laugh was heard across the store.
About an hour or two later, Remus and Sirius found themselves fortified into their flat’s kitchen armed with sugar, eggs, and a dead sexy apron tied around Sirius’s middle. Remus flicked through their cookbook’s biscuit section taking in the recipes and the options open to them.
Sirius leaned over Remus’s shoulder and pointed at a photograph of Christmas tree shaped sugar cookies dressed in icing and colored sugar.
“Those,” Sirius announced.
Remus’s brow wrinkled in concern. “Sirius, we’re going to Lily’s mum’s funeral, not a Christmas party. Those aren’t really appropriate-
“Should we do shrouds instead?” Sirius asked, with a “don’t-answer-that” quark of the brow.
Remus shook his head and began listing off the ingredients Sirius would need to add to the bowl.
Once they had begun they found that baking was fair easier than expected; in fact, it was much like preparing a potion. With that in mind, Remus messed up a fairly simple step from the start and spent a fair amount of time fishing eggshell out of the bowl while Sirius laughed at him.
Remus leaned over the bowl, humming grumpily at the shell as he attempted to capture it under his fingernail. There was a sensation across the back of his neck, as if something were lightly brushing the little hairs of his neck in an attempt to catch his attention. Remus raised his head in concern. At that moment, the eggs that Sirius was levitating over his brow cracked and rained yoke down upon Remus’s nose.
“No magic, Pads!” Remus yelled, grabbing for his own wand.
Sirius shrieked, rather femininely-which might have been attributed to the apron secured around his waist-and ducked as a volley of bicarbonate of soda launched across the kitchen. Sirius hunkered behind the island in the center of the kitchen and continued to cackle about his stealthy-egg-attack-brilliance. The charmed leavening agent hovered, regrouped, and then dive-bombed with deadly precision. Sirius shrieked again and Remus snickered victoriously as he wiped egg-sludge off his face.
Sirius leapt up from behind the island and Remus guffawed at his genuinely ghastly powdery-white face.
“You cheating wolf!” Sirius yelled, shooting a spell at a stick of butter.
The butter fought the transfiguring spell for only a moment before it shuddered violently and changed into a tiny yellow cannon. Remus sputtered and then attempted to run out of range of doll-sized, butter-scented cannonballs. As the report from the first attack sounded, Remus’s left foot slipped in some egg white and he hit the tile floor with a thump and a curse. He grabbed for the nearest object to regain his balance; unluckily, he grasped that day’s paper, which was currently serving as a tablecloth.
The newsprint fell toward the floor, bringing with it the canister of flour. The flour tipped end over end and spit its contents out across Remus’s back, shoulders, and arms. Butter cannonballs exploded over Remus’s head, leaving dripping and oily spots in his hair. Sirius crowed in victory from the other side of the kitchen.
Remus reached up and grabbed a wad of the melting butter and rolled it in the spilled flour before charming it to become a heat-seeking missile. Sirius yelled as four flour-butter-balls-of-doom coursed toward his head. He ran circles around the island trying to exhaust these strange foes. As is the case with some objects created of magic, however, the balls developed intellect.
The balls froze in mid-attack, turned to one another and then ran the opposite way-straight into Sirius’s face and chest with shouts of “kamikaze!” Remus rolled backward on the floor laughing at Sirius’s surprised face, now splashed with yellow and white spots.
Sirius shook his head and then dove across the kitchen and landed on Remus’s stomach. Remus grunted at his lover’s weight in his gut. They lay there in the center of raw egg, butter, and flour laughing and looking at one another with pure adoration.
In the following clean up disaster, they would discover that they were wearing most of their ingredients. That discovery would, of course, call for a shower, which would be distracted in the usual fashion, which would usually carry on for some time. Hours later, they would join Lily as she buried her mother and they would grieve with their sister. And while she was sad, Lily had to admit that she was more touched that her friends had successfully baked her biscuits without (much) magic. (And many hours later, she would tease Sirius mercilessly about a certain apron, but that was neither here nor there.)
Title: For More Somber Affairs
Author: rev02a
Written for: lotrwariorgodss
Rating: PG-13, sexual references
Prompt: Cookie baking
Summary: Sirius's attempt to act like an appropriate Muggle for Lily after her mother's death
Sirius came home carrying a Flourish and Botts sack and immediately disappeared into the back bedroom. At first, Remus thought nothing of it. But some time later, he noted that the flat was extremely quiet.
Not a good quiet.
The kind of quiet that signaled “surprises” (like an entire litter of puppies in the bathtub) or “mischief” (like that time with the entire East Side’s electricity) or “sulking” (like that time after that really stupid prank with Snape and the Willow); no matter the reason, Remus surmised, it probably was not good.
He stood with difficulty, vigorously rubbed at his stiff knee, and limped down the hallway. The moon was waning (finally), but Moony’s last escapade had left Remus’s leg broken and slow to mend. The door to Sirius’s office was mostly open, so Remus didn’t knock when he entered. Sirius was perched on the edge of his desk, chewing on his thumbnail, and reading a fairly large book. Remus moved into the room, grabbing onto the doorframe for balance when his shuffling threatened to land him on the floor.
“Moony!” Sirius exclaimed, after noticing Remus. He jumped to his feet and grabbed Remus by the bicep and helped him into a chair.
“Where’s your cane, mate?” Sirius asked affectionately, brushing Remus’s fringe from his forehead.
Remus made a dismissive wave, suggesting that he’d abandoned the annoying device somewhere in the flat. He focused in on the spine of Sirius’s newest text: Muggles And Why They Do the Things They Do: The Wizard’s Guide to Crossing Traffic, Making Coffee, and Generally Not Making an Arse of Himself.
“Padfoot,” Remus began carefully, “what are you planning?”
Past images of Sirius inspecting a feather duster or Sirius attempting to understand the rules of rugby flooded back to Remus. Adventures in Muggle culture were often colorful with his boyfriend. Whatever was in store, Remus simply hoped it was easy to clean up.
“Erm, well, Moony, my darling love-cucumber-“ Sirius began.
Remus raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Love-cucumber?”
“-It’s charming.”
“It’s disturbing.”
“Mr. Potter calls Mrs. Potter his ‘sweet kumquat’.”
“And you thought this was… affectionate?”
“It’s tender.”
“No, Pads. It’s unfortunate.”
Sometimes Remus wished that Sirius had grown up in a normal household where he was shown some sort of conventional affection. Without it, he’d been forced to spend his latter years piecing together some sort of definition of love-as with many things involving Sirius, it was mildly unhinged.
“Fine,” Sirius huffed, “I’ll think of something else.”
“Something less phallic, if you please.”
Sirius grinned wolfishly. Remus rolled his eyes.
“Back to your plan of world domination now, please,” Remus asked in a put-upon sort of way, waving his hand at the abandoned book.
Sirius shook his head and squatted down between Remus’s knees as if he were kneeling before a child.
“Nothing like that. Remember what a fool I made of myself at your father’s funeral?” he began and Remus smiled indulgently.
“It wasn’t that bad, Padfoot,” Remus soothed.
Sirius hopped up and began to pace the floor, gesturing wildly.
“Yes, it was! I bowed to your grandmother! I brought a pair of sickles to line the coffin and you and your mother a new pair of shoes!”
Remus smiled again, genuinely this time.
“My Mum was charmed, Sirius. You did what any wizard would have done… you helped pay Dad’s passage for the boatman and we both got a new pair of shoes-you know that’s supposed to symbolize stepping out into a new life? -It was a good thing, Sirius,” Remus soothes, reaching for Sirius.
Sirius turned to face his lover and ran a hand across his face.
“Well at least your dad was a Muggleborn. But if I made these mistakes for Lily’s family-“
The words dropped off and Remus understood suddenly. The days had grown steadily grimmer and bloodier. The body count from this past weekend had tallied at thirty or so; among the number of dead was Lily’s mother. Without her daughter’s magic, she had simply fallen to the Death Eaters without much a fight.
“It isn’t too different, Padfoot. We’ll wear suits and-“
“-and we need to cook something.”
Remus blinked in surprise. “Ugh, what?” he asked in confusion.
Sirius marched over and grabbed the book up from its resting place. He flipped to a marked page and began to read. “It is often tradition for the bereaved to receive gifts of meals from their friends and family. These gifts begin at the reception following the graveside ceremony (See page 987 for Funeral and Graveside Rituals and Etiquette) and continue for many days after. Appropriate offerings are casseroles, soups, salads, afters, and drinks-“
Sirius quit reading abruptly and snapped the book shut again.
“So we need to cook something.”
Remus blinked dramatically. “Like what?”
Sirius looked panicky for a moment.
“What did you want at your Dad’s service?” he asked quickly.
Remus rubbed at his upper lip and then tapped on his teeth with his thumb. “Biscuits.”
Sirius nodded vigorously. “Right. Biscuits then. C’mon, Remus, we have work ahead of us.”
In 1387, a witch by the name of Bakeraton created a series of kitchen spells that could conjure most baked goods from the end of one’s wand. While the spells were mildly difficult, they were nothing compared to the Animagius transformation. Therefore, if truly inclined, Sirius could have conjured biscuits, Remus concluded.
But Sirius liked difficult.
This probably accounted for why Sirius and he were dressed in Muggle clothing and entering Marks and Spencer. Remus had fought to leave the Muggles out of this, he really had. He had sunk so low as to floo his Mum and request a cookbook.
Sirius, however, was really being difficult (because he liked difficult). He looked at the title “Cooking Like the Muggles: Yummy Cuisine without Magic!” and flipped through the sections that reviewed the wizard or witch on their first aid spells and fire extinguishing charms. He hummed as he peered at the photographs.
Remus knew he was beat before Sirius said a damn thing.
“Remus! This isn’t authentic!” Sirius whined.
“Sure it is-“
“Lily will know we used magic!”
“Padfoot, there is no magic in this cooking!” Remus exclaimed, flipping to the section that explained how to operate the cooker as some form of evidence.
Sirius leaned in and squinted at the instructions, then vigorously shook his head. “The book was written by someone who knows how to use magic. Lily will know!”
Remus planned to argue about Lily’s ability to read minds, but resigned himself to fighting off the holiday crowds in search of a more “authentic” recipe book when Sirius threw him his coat.
The mob of holiday shoppers blocked the path to the escalator but Sirius shoved his way through, while he pulling Remus along behind him by the coat sleeve. Remus called out apologies, but it didn’t really matter. These people were already certifiable to be out a week before Christmas in the height of Death Eater activity (not that these Muggles had a clue about the Death Eaters). The shoppers gave little mind to two young men pushing their way up to the first floor.
Remus knew the trip would be eventful when Sirius got distracted by a life-size nutcracker solider and an off-color dressing gown. They spent a good forty minutes in the store before they even located the small electrics.
“Oooh! Moony! Look at this!” Sirius squealed, poking at a stand mixer.
“Nice, Pads. But we don’t have electricity,” Remus replied while scanning the rows for recipes books.
It didn’t take too much longer to find the cookbooks (Remus cast a locating charm when Sirius was distracted by the shelves of blenders), but the actual choosing of the book was another ordeal altogether. They spent a good few minutes attempting to persuade the book to offer them a sample of the baked goods in the photograph before another patron looked at them strangely. (That was about the same time that they remembered that the book contained absolutely-no-magic, per request.) They squabbled about which book they would purchase (“This one. It has a good-looking bloke on the cover, Pads.”) before they settled on the book that Remus had selected (“And people say that I’m the shallow one, Moony.”).
From his limited experience of Muggle cooking, Remus determined that would need a bowl, a baking tray, and lots of flour. Sirius, having attained all of his Muggle baking skills from looking at the fit bloke on the cover of their new book, ascertained that they would be in need of an apron.
“I will not wear that,” Remus asserted, looking at the little frilly apron that Sirius was holding up.
“Why not?” Sirius asked, wickedly. “It’s dead sexy.”
“It has orange roses and lace on it, Sirius.”
“It’s like negligee. And you’d look good in orange.”
“Do you remember the agreement we came to about lingerie?”
“You seemed to forget about that rule the other day with the nurse kit-“
“Sirius, you are intentionally playing my fantasies against me-“
Sirius held the apron up as if he was tying it around his waist. Remus swallowed audibly.
“Right. Let’s buy that, shall we?”
Sirius’s barking laugh was heard across the store.
About an hour or two later, Remus and Sirius found themselves fortified into their flat’s kitchen armed with sugar, eggs, and a dead sexy apron tied around Sirius’s middle. Remus flicked through their cookbook’s biscuit section taking in the recipes and the options open to them.
Sirius leaned over Remus’s shoulder and pointed at a photograph of Christmas tree shaped sugar cookies dressed in icing and colored sugar.
“Those,” Sirius announced.
Remus’s brow wrinkled in concern. “Sirius, we’re going to Lily’s mum’s funeral, not a Christmas party. Those aren’t really appropriate-
“Should we do shrouds instead?” Sirius asked, with a “don’t-answer-that” quark of the brow.
Remus shook his head and began listing off the ingredients Sirius would need to add to the bowl.
Once they had begun they found that baking was fair easier than expected; in fact, it was much like preparing a potion. With that in mind, Remus messed up a fairly simple step from the start and spent a fair amount of time fishing eggshell out of the bowl while Sirius laughed at him.
Remus leaned over the bowl, humming grumpily at the shell as he attempted to capture it under his fingernail. There was a sensation across the back of his neck, as if something were lightly brushing the little hairs of his neck in an attempt to catch his attention. Remus raised his head in concern. At that moment, the eggs that Sirius was levitating over his brow cracked and rained yoke down upon Remus’s nose.
“No magic, Pads!” Remus yelled, grabbing for his own wand.
Sirius shrieked, rather femininely-which might have been attributed to the apron secured around his waist-and ducked as a volley of bicarbonate of soda launched across the kitchen. Sirius hunkered behind the island in the center of the kitchen and continued to cackle about his stealthy-egg-attack-brilliance. The charmed leavening agent hovered, regrouped, and then dive-bombed with deadly precision. Sirius shrieked again and Remus snickered victoriously as he wiped egg-sludge off his face.
Sirius leapt up from behind the island and Remus guffawed at his genuinely ghastly powdery-white face.
“You cheating wolf!” Sirius yelled, shooting a spell at a stick of butter.
The butter fought the transfiguring spell for only a moment before it shuddered violently and changed into a tiny yellow cannon. Remus sputtered and then attempted to run out of range of doll-sized, butter-scented cannonballs. As the report from the first attack sounded, Remus’s left foot slipped in some egg white and he hit the tile floor with a thump and a curse. He grabbed for the nearest object to regain his balance; unluckily, he grasped that day’s paper, which was currently serving as a tablecloth.
The newsprint fell toward the floor, bringing with it the canister of flour. The flour tipped end over end and spit its contents out across Remus’s back, shoulders, and arms. Butter cannonballs exploded over Remus’s head, leaving dripping and oily spots in his hair. Sirius crowed in victory from the other side of the kitchen.
Remus reached up and grabbed a wad of the melting butter and rolled it in the spilled flour before charming it to become a heat-seeking missile. Sirius yelled as four flour-butter-balls-of-doom coursed toward his head. He ran circles around the island trying to exhaust these strange foes. As is the case with some objects created of magic, however, the balls developed intellect.
The balls froze in mid-attack, turned to one another and then ran the opposite way-straight into Sirius’s face and chest with shouts of “kamikaze!” Remus rolled backward on the floor laughing at Sirius’s surprised face, now splashed with yellow and white spots.
Sirius shook his head and then dove across the kitchen and landed on Remus’s stomach. Remus grunted at his lover’s weight in his gut. They lay there in the center of raw egg, butter, and flour laughing and looking at one another with pure adoration.
In the following clean up disaster, they would discover that they were wearing most of their ingredients. That discovery would, of course, call for a shower, which would be distracted in the usual fashion, which would usually carry on for some time. Hours later, they would join Lily as she buried her mother and they would grieve with their sister. And while she was sad, Lily had to admit that she was more touched that her friends had successfully baked her biscuits without (much) magic. (And many hours later, she would tease Sirius mercilessly about a certain apron, but that was neither here nor there.)