A Pleasant Taste

Remus should have known better than to accept a homemade treat from a girl who professed to be rubbish with householdy spells. Of course, it would not have done to reject her sweet generosity. Likewise it will not do to let on how positively revolting this gingerbread man is. But Merlin's teeth – if Remus breaks one of his on this gingerbread that is the consistency of one of Hagrid's rock cakes and gives Wolfsbane Potion a run for the title of Worst Taste Detectable By the Human Tongue.…

In his peripheral, he sees Tonks snap the head off a second gingerbread man. She seems unfazed by the hardness, and he wonders if she, like Hagrid, loves her own cooking. But what if she does not? What if she has no idea how awful her gingerbread is? Surely she will be mortified to have shared it with a new acquaintance. Already she has revealed self-consciousness and insecurity about her clumsiness. Remus nibbles at the gingerbread, though his gag reflex chastises him for being noble.

"Ugh!" Tonks presses the paper serviette to her mouth and spits the bite of gingerbread into it. "How yacky!"

Though Remus is relieved not to have to eat any more of the nausea-inducing treat, he has no desire to embarrass Tonks. As she gulps down Butterbeer, he says, "It's not so bad."

"Haven't you got taste buds?" Tonks asks, shuddering. "It's bloody awful! Oy! Kingsley!" she calls to her fellow Auror, talking with Sirius in a corner. "Who made this crap gingerbread I found in the break room?"

Kingsley glances over Sirius' head with a look of mingled amusement and disgust. "Gawain's wife."

Qualms about washing the taste out of his mouth abandon Remus. He gulps down Butterbeer as purposefully as Lady Macbeth washed her hands.

"Gawain needs to keep Mrs. Robards out of the kitchen," Tonks mutters. "Really, Remus, you can't think it's not that bad."

"Wretched," he admits, "but I thought you made it, and I did not wish to hurt your feelings."

The touched look that crossed her features earlier, when he offered to help her off the floor, returns. "You're such a gentleman," she says softly.

Remus rearranges his feet under the table and swallows more Butterbeer. Why does she take such note of his behaviour? He is only doing what comes naturally to him, and surely that is nothing extraordinary.

"If I were a gentleman," he says, "I would not say, thank you for the gingerbread, Nymphadora."

Scowling, Tonks whips her wand out of her robes, striking rather an imperious pose despite the fact that she sits at a kitchen table with a partially eaten gingerbread man before her. "I ought to hex your tongue so that gingerbread's the only thing you taste for the rest of your life."

As they banter about hexes before the Order meeting convenes, Remus wonders if Tonks has any idea what a pleasant taste she, without any magic but her personality, has left in his mouth.