Work Text:
“TOASTER!”
“Don’t put your hand in it Barty!” Exclaimed Nina. Barty’s long legs had given him a head start into the kitchen that he was already using for disaster. He had found the toaster’s on button, somehow, and was now poking at the glowing red strips inside.
“Why shouldn’t he?” Asked Rosier, as if any answer Nina gave would lead to him actually helping her in her futile attempts to wrest the toaster from Barty’s fingers. He held it aloft, luckily unplugging it with the motion, smirking as Nina hopped to try and reach it.
“That’s, like, how you die.” Said Pandora, sagely, as she set down the recipe book.
“Oh. Boring.” Said Regulus, distractedly, searching the cabinets for a bowl. “Put your hand in it Barty.”
“That’s what she said” snickered Evan.
“Oh shut up Rosier,” said Nina, although she was grinning. She left Barty to his mistakes with the toaster and turned to help Pandora, who had begun a search of her own through the silverware drawers.
“All these spoons are funny shapes Nina,” Pandora said. “Which one’s the tea spoon?”
“Oh, I don’t have one of those,” Nina said airily, with the faint pride of someone whose silverware collection had been amassed in matching sets of, at most, two. “It isn’t asking for a kind of spoon, though, it means a measurement.” She held aloft a pair of novelty measuring spoons from another drawer. “Here, it’s this thingy. They’re labeled.”
“Oh! It’s shaped like a duck! How lovely, Muggles really do have the most wonderful things.”
“Yeah no we- Barty! You can’t put metal in a microwave!” Nina’s exclamation wasn’t necessary, as, despite his efforts over the past minute, Barty still hadn’t managed to actually shut the microwave door with the toaster inside.
“The recipe doesn’t even call for the microwave.” Said Regulus, who had already gathered all the required recipe items that he knew, and was now despairing at yet another muggle term of which microwave was not one.
“What’s a microwave?”
Evan got no response, since Barty interrupted with all the self-concern of a thwarted toddler. “But I want to put something in the microwave!”
“Nina, what makes sugar ‘granulated’?” Asked Regulus, at almost the same time, with the equally powerful self-absorbance of someone clever who has been made to feel stupid by something as mundane as a cookbook one too many times.
“Here Barty, put the butter in.” Sighed Nina, handing him a container. Her attitude was put-upon, but she was grinning, and had clearly been preparing for this eventuality since even before Barty had begun with the microwave. Barty (and through him Evan) appeased, she turned back to her forlorn boyfriend. “It’s this stuff Reg, it’s cuz sugar comes either in tiny tiny cubes or powdered. Wait, Barty, only for 20 SECONDS! What on earth did you set it to!?”
Barty had pressed the button for zero as many times as he could, and therefore set the microwave counting down merrily from 99:99.
“Poor Nina, we’ve made a mess of her kitchen.” Said Pandora to Regulus, as if she had not just leveled the flour over the table and not the container. “This much shouting, it’ll be a wonder if the cake isn't chock full of Gribbits trying to hide.”
“I think Nina likes it actually,” replied Regulus.
Nina was, indeed, engaged in the level of flushed shouting that meant she felt alive and was enjoying herself immensely. Barty had flopped himself dramatically into Evan’s arms, hand to his forehead. Evan was failing to hold him up, crumpling into the counter under the combined forces of Barty’s height and the slippery linoleum.
Evan was saying something, most likely siding with Nina on the extreme importance of properly timed butter melting, and probably chipping in a vote for the superior wizarding methods of achieving such.
The butter was still microwaving, and Pandora had, on the last step, added the flour Regulus had already put in. The oven was still cold, and Evan had now caught himself at the expense of one of the eggs Pandora had set on the counter. It was so toothrottingly domestic Regulus felt almost sick. The ruined kitchen, the mixed laughs and shouting, and Evan Rosier letting a Muggle show him how to reset a microwave. It was everything his mother would have despised, everything Sirius had had, and Regulus had never wanted. Things kept overlaying in jolting bursts, Nina laughing and screaming, Pandora in a frilly apron and a stiff-collared robe, green refrigerators and the sparkling, dripping walls of a sea cave.
“Too many Gribbits is always a bad sign.” Said Pandora, in the tone of voice that said she, too, was seeing the overlay of ebony tables and cold stone walls. She picked up one of the remaining eggs, smile at first sad and then gradually more daring. “We should do our best to be sure we’re thoroughly rid of them, don’t you think?”
Regulus picked up the other egg.
It was much easier with the cold, sticky slick of eggs in his face and hair, to remember what was real. It was, Regulus realized, once Barty started screaming in earnest and Nina and Evan were laughing so hard they could no longer stand, what it was like to have friends. The kind that fought, and cried, and almost died together, and then did all those things again over cake. And the cold, bitter, selfish part of Regulus that had looked at a Dark Lord and thought ‘Sirius never had this’ curled itself up around a new idea: Sirius never had this either. But I do.