Coffee

Coffee

I love the smell of coffee in the morning. Oh, I don’t drink the stuff. Gods, no. But he does.

Did.

I love the smell. The taste was always rather strong for me, even diluted with cream and saturated with sugar. I blame the curse, though my mother used to tell me I was a picky eater before then. My mother drank coffee. She was Muggle born, and got hooked on it during the summers she was home. I associated coffee with her, and with my grandfather, until I went to school.

He was an avid coffee drinker, even at eleven. I don’t know who introduced him to it; perhaps his cousin Andromeda. Of course, students weren’t supposed to drink coffee, but somehow he managed to procure a mug of it every morning. I don’t know how. He’s good at being mysterious about those things.

Was.

I’ve always been an early riser, always up long before him. He would come down from the dormitories, barely alive, but after a cup of coffee — sometimes more, depending on how far into the morning the we had been up — he was suddenly his usual self: charming, sarcastic, outgoing, and overbearing. And more observant than most people care to admit.

It was different on the weekends. No classes on the weekends. Nothing in the mornings, really. On weekends he slept as long as he could and was normal when he woke up, without the aid of the caffeine. He still drank coffee, though. Says he got headaches when he didn’t.

Said.

Later, after Hogwarts, it became a ritual. I would wake, far earlier than him as always, and make a pot of coffee. The owl came with the Daily Prophet and I paid it, and then leafed through it before leaving it on the table for him, neatly folded. Sometimes I tried to make breakfast, but more often than not I just put bread in the toaster oven and jam on the table. Cooking is not something I excel at — too pungent, usually, like Potions. And he is a much better cook, anyway.

Was.

A good while later, after I burned the toast and tried to scrape off the burned parts and finally gave up and put the less-burned side facing up on the plates, he would stumble in and fall into the chair and drink his coffee without a word. He took his coffee sweet then, with sugar in quantities that disgusted even me, and enough cream to turn it the same colour as my hair. His words, not mine.

Then he was gone and I couldn’t bring myself to even walk past the coffee at the grocer’s, because the smell made something inside me clench so tightly I felt ill. For twelve years, I didn’t go near the stuff, because it made me think of him and when I thought of him I lost control. I grew to hate the dark aroma, the shape of a coffee pot, the sound of it being poured — for it does have a particular sound. I wanted to hurl every coffee mug I saw at the nearest wall. Or his head.

And then he came back and Albus sent him to me and I made coffee for him again and realised that I didn’t hate it after all. He got a splitting migraine from it the first week, because he hadn’t had any caffeine for so many years, but he was determined to drink it anyway, to try to make things normal again. He couldn’t drink his coffee the same way, though. That much sugar and cream nauseated him, even after he got past the caffeine headaches, so when I get up in the morning and make his coffee, I don’t worry about making it sickeningly sweet enough, or getting exactly the right shade of brown (my hair isn’t the right colour for reference anymore, anyway). He takes his coffee black.

Took. Took. Said, did, was.

Was.

You’d think it would be easier the second time, losing him. Losing everything in the world that matters. No. It’s harder now, because this time I still love the smell of coffee in the morning.