Title: Toast
Rating: G
Genre: General
Characters: Voldemort, Amara Jugson, Bellatrix Lestrange, Lucius Malfoy, Dumbledore (mentioned)
Summary: Written at a time when, hey, everything I had churned out was a little depressing. 'Twisted and deranged', my sister might call it. But meh, this one's brighter. Actually a bit silly at the end. About Voldemort's favourite food (Ooh, guess what that could be!). On shot.
Additional Copyrights: Amara Jugson to Veetee

He's always liked toast.

It's just one of his things. You'd only be able to figure it out if you were one of his close Death Eaters, or something. Because you'd notice that he was always doing it.

Voldemort ate toast. He ate a lot of it. Any type of toast, really, usually with butter and almost always with jam. It didn't matter on the amounts, he just liked it.

It wasn't only because he liked the taste, though. He liked the memory. To a man with few nice memories, that was something important.

He liked toast because more than half a century ago he would eat it with his friends. He'd eat it at school, and in the summer. To him, toast was his youth; toast gave him memories of chilly October mornings, or summer morning and afternoons. You know, early in the day.

To an old man who is condemned to walk at night, memories of the sun are awfully tempting.

He eats his toast with Amara a lot, and sometimes Bella and Lucius, because they understand where he's coming from. They're smart like that.

Voldemort knows about the power of food. He knows about the power of a lot of things. He's one of those older people - older than Dumbledore, even - because it's like he's been way back in the past, with the Druids and sacred snakes and faerie arrows.

Amara tells him that he's real old, and she says it very seriously, even though he might be offended at the thought of aging. But he knows that she's saying that, on the inside, he's ancient.

Voldemort's been everywhere. He's been to Japan and Egypt, America and Canada, New Zealand and China and Mexico. And he says that toast has the flavours of all those places, because he ate it everywhere, and a little bit of that place went into the toast when he ate it.

Bellatrix… Bellatrix gets it and so does Lucius; of course they're not old, or at least not real old like Voldemort. They're children on the inside, because they remember that eating a sandwich in the forest is like no other sandwich in the world; and frozen berries in your drink tell stories of sun and summer on your tongue.

Voldemort, though, he just sticks with toast. Amara likes to give him jam for Yule, stuff like that. She says it's because he should always remember, "Because I can't."

Voldemort likes to eat jam and toast. Jam and toast that he's made himself. Not that he'd make the bread or jam or anything, but he'd burn the bread and put on the jam and butter, and it's one of the few things he can cook without burning down the Death Eater's headquarters.

Because eating toast is like no other experience in the world to him. It's not dramatic but it's special, and few things to him are special, except maybe some of his Death Eaters.

And you can't eat Death Eaters because they aren't available at the supermarket.