It was horrible, worse than horrible. The hot temperature burned the roof of his mouth while pinpricks of individual taste buds seem to physically recoil into his tongue. It tasted like something had crawled into his mouth and died, like something you'd have to dig out from under an empty land at midnight. Spitting was his first impulse, with retching following a close second. It had looked a hopeless black, but somehow tasted even blacker.
But with his eyes still screwed shut, Harry willed himself not to spit it out, not to give his guardians the satisfaction. He couldn't bring himself to swallow either, so instead he let his mouth be laid siege to by this warring faction.
Except it wasn't warring. It wasn't fighting Harry half as much as Harry was fighting it. The liquid swilled around his mouth, dispassionately inspecting what it found. It seeped its taste, its darkness, into everything, but once the initial shock wore off the taste started to surprise him. It had first tasted like blackness, like night, but then it changed in his mouth. It changed to dark walnut wood or ebony, it changed to the charred delight he associated with hot crisp bacon on a snowy Sunday because he was only allowed to keep the burnt bits, it changed to the time of night when his tormentors were all asleep and he could softly push back his door, stretch his legs out into the hallway, and let the scent of a hundred night time smells into his cramped space. The scent of it in his pillow was almost as good as sleeping out in it, where air flowed all around you and the nearest wall was whole yards away.
Source: Return to the Fire (If you dislike slash, you may want to give the story a miss, but you will miss some incredible writing if you do.)
We brought the half & half into work with us today, but I think I'm going to stick with black with sugar for a while.
This entry was originally posted at http://mrs-sweetpeach.dreamwidth.org/269036.html.