Springfic: "The Stepping Stones" for redsiodaslair
Title: The Stepping Stones
Author: Liliths_Requiem
Recipient: redsiodaslair
Character(s): Andromeda Tonks, Charlie Weasley, Molly Weasley, Narcissa Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy, Draco Malfoy
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4,199 words
Warnings (highlight to view): Adultery
Summary: After the war, Andromeda tries to put her life back together. Unfortunately, she’s missing all the pieces.
Author's Notes: I really hope you like this redsiodaslair, and I’m sorry if it’s too dark/sad for you. Thanks for the challenge, I think I’ve fallen in love with these characters.
Betas: My wonderful friend Danii, who never gets bored of my writing.
I. Molly
The first time Charlie suggests it, Andromeda laughs at him. Never mind that it’s the first time she’s laughed since she found out Ted was dead, she’s too focused on the fact that Charlie Weasley thinks he can mend her family’s greatest schism just by smiling at her the right way. Maybe that worked with her daughter, but Andromeda was born and raised a Black, and therefore she remains impervious to the charms of Wizards. “No,” she states, looking him dead in the eyes, “Tell Narcissa she can go to Hell.” With that she slams the door and looks for solace in the way the bang reverberates through the empty house. She tries not to be disappointed when all it brings is Teddy’s tears.
The night she found out Ted was dead, Andromeda cried for seven hours, thirty nine minutes, and forty six seconds. It was the only time in her life that she can remember crying. The tears were freeing and suffocating at the same time, and she couldn’t figure out if she was floating or drowning. She didn’t know how to live without Ted and without her sisters. She may have given up one for the other, but she didn’t know how to go on without both. Nymphadora had been her only consolation then, and now she is gone too.
Sometimes, at night, she can hear Teddy crying but she doesn’t go to him. The boy has to be tough if he’s going to survive in this world. Besides, despite the dirt in his veins and the lycanthropy that she hasn’t completely written off yet, Andromeda’s grandson has the blood of a Black and will be brought up as such.
Really? The tears remind her that he’s still alive, while everyone else is dead or dying.
The house is too big for only her and a child, and the sensible part of her thinks they should burn everything to the ground and sell the land. Maybe move to France and live with Aunt Diane for a few years. She’s one of the few of her mother’s relatives to actually know up from down. Besides, it would be nice to get away, to run from everything and turn her back on everyone. It isn’t as if anyone here needs her anymore.
Except maybe Molly, who even though they never knew each other well at Hogwarts has become a very close friend since the formation of the first Order of the Phoenix. They had both been turned down because they were expecting, and some how that disappointment had infused a bond between them yet to be broken. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Charlie was born only a week before Nymphadora pushed herself free of Andromeda’s womb. Maybe it was the way neither of them could hate Bellatrix, despite what she had done to both their hearts. Maybe it was just a necessity. Everyone needs someone during a war, and with both of their husbands working for the Ministry, they had found comfort in each other.
She goes to Molly once a week, on Thursday afternoons. She brings Teddy and leaves the boy with Harry, who still lives at the Burrow despite having his own home. Molly says she asked him to stay, as the house is painfully quiet now that Ron’s moved in with George and Ginny’s away at school. Somehow, Andromeda thinks Harry needs the companionship just as much as her friend. She knows from experience that war can make silence eternally unbearable.
Molly hasn’t cried since Fred died. Everyone’s expecting her to break one day, but it’s already been six months and there is nothing. When she hears his name she stops breathing for a moment, Andromeda sees it in the other woman’s eyes that the simple motion of pushing air from her lungs and pulling it back in is forgotten for a moment due to the sharp pain that shoots through a mother’s body when they find out their child is dead. Andromeda’s told her more than once that letting it out may make some of the pain go away.
“I don’t want to make the pain go away. You haven’t cried, what does that prove?” the question is said like an accusation, and Andromeda knows she’s guilty of clinging to the pain like a final prayer, as if she deserves this. The only thing Molly’s stubbornness proves is that, on some level, she’s as fucked up as Andromeda is. But then, anyone who knows the woman’s past could have told you that. Only a person bordering on insanity could have put up with Andromeda’s older sister for so long.
They have tea and talk about Percy and Audrey’s wedding plans. The young couple only just met, but the desperation of a war lingers in the air long after the last battle, and Andromeda can sympathize only because she’s been there before. Of course she was pregnant at the time, which Audrey isn’t, and hope still seemed like a futile emotion kept alive only to continue the human race. Still, she’s known the middle Weasley boy since he was born, and she hasn’t seen him this happy in years.
“Next week, then?” she asks, just as she’s about to leave. Molly doesn’t bother arguing this time. It’s pathetic, the way her generation has resigned itself to its fate and stopped fighting. Maybe losing everyone you love does that to people, but Molly only lost four people to this godforsaken war. (Five, if you count Alice, but she doesn’t like to count Alice because Alice isn’t dead, like everyone else is.) Maybe killing someone you love does this to people, but Andromeda’s watched others kill their kin and their lovers and return unscathed. It’s probably the Gryffindor gold that still runs through her veins like blood but is much thicker and harder to push from her heart that causes Molly to be so placid these days.
She gathers Teddy and heads towards the door, intent on apparating away before she breaks Molly’s gaze. She’ll feel guilty if she blinks, because that’s one more second where she wasn’t there, wasn’t reassuring and constant like she has been all of these years. She keeps trying to make up for Bella’s mistakes, but Molly refuses to forgive and forget and she won’t accept any retribution. It’s not like Andromeda can give the ginger haired woman what she wants anyone. It’s not like either of them remembers what it’s like to be in love.
II. Lucius
The second time Charlie asks her, they’re sitting in the veranda sipping tea and watching Teddy play in the garden. It’s late fall and the leaves are just barely hanging on to her oak trees for dear life. Charlie watches a golden leaf makes its way to the earth before turning to her with a smile on his face and pain in his eyes. It’s funny how the pain hasn’t changed since her daughter died. To Charlie, Nymphadora Tonks died the night she married another man. To Charlie, Nymphadora Lupin never existed.
“Talk to her,” he suggests, his hand moving towards his wand just in case. Andromeda’s flattered that he still thinks she’s quick enough to disarm him on equal footing, but she doesn’t go for the wand that’s holding up her hair. Instead, she puts down the saucer with a firm clank against the glass tabletop and allows the hex to exist solely in her eyes. He falters, which is amusing and flattering, because it means she’s still got it. Some of it. Enough to scare a Gryffindor child at least. “All I’m asking is a conversation.”
She’s tempted to ask why, but she knows that’s all a part of his plan. Watching a Gryffindor try to act devious is probably the most disturbing thing she’s ever been forced to witness. She almost feels guilty for that thought, as after two wars and growing up in the Black Manor she’s sure she’s seen much worse, but then she realizes that blood and gore and death never meant much to her. It’s failure she’s never been able to stand, and Gryffindors are chock full of that. “No.” The word hangs in the air between them like a shield and for a moment she wonders if Charlie will turn around and leave her the hell alone.
Teddy starts babbling and it jolts them both out of the moment, effectively shattering all of her defenses. Her face softens and her age shows, but she refuses to bow her head to a Weasley. “Just…let it die, Charlus,” she tells him, while picking up her grandson, “Everything else has.” He only shakes his head and leaves, which wasn’t quite as dramatic as she was expecting, but just as sad.
She knows what regret tastes like, she’s had the aftertaste stuck in the back of her throat for years. Like a bad bruise that never goes away, she doesn’t remember when she first bit in to the pomegranate and she doesn’t remember who held the fruit out to her, so red and luscious and inviting. All she knows is she’s met with the devil himself on more than one occasion, and if Lucifer didn’t burn brighter than any other star, than Lucius Malfoy sure as hell does.
He’s standing next to Bella’s gravestone the first time she sees him after the war. His hair, once the same color as the sun refracting off fresh fallen snow, has grown gray and is receding from his forehead like a surrendering army. He’s getting old, but then she’s been old for ages and she had never seen him coming. “Lucius,” she calls, with the same desperation as she did thirty years ago, and he startles like he’s seeing a ghost. She wonders, fleetingly, if he’s seeing her or Bella, but she realizes that this doesn’t matter. Either way he’s seeing someone that doesn’t exist anymore.
“Miss Black,” he replies, because even when he was sticking a wand in her face and calling her a filthy mudblood’s whore he refused to acknowledge her married name. “It’s been a while.”
She tries not to falter, but he’s the only one who has ever been able to get her on her knees. “Eighteen years.” The reply is brusque and bitter, but there’s pain beneath those words and she’s sure he can sense it. “The night your darling son was born.” She wants to spit on him for leaving her and sleeping with her sister and destroying her entire family. A part of her knows Bella and Sirius and baby Reggie would still be alive if it wasn’t for the man in front of her. As painful and final as that thought may be, when he opens his arms she runs to him without hesitation. Maybe, just maybe, she hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be in love.
He holds her like he’s holding on to the star she was named for, hugging just tight enough to get burned but not tight enough to keep her there. She knows he feels guilty for everything he’s done to her and she knows he feels nothing for all the sins they say he’s committed. She invites him back to her home and leads him up the stairs to the bed she shared with another man for more than twenty years. She wonders if Ted ever smelt Lucius on the bed, despite her Outstanding on her Charms NEWT she never was the best in that class. Then she stops wondering because Lucius is kissing her and she can feel the stars exploding inside both of them. She wants him to spend the night, but she doesn’t want to deal with Narcissa in the morning.
He surprises her when he stops buttoning his cloak and looks her dead in the eyes. “You should talk to her,” he tells her, with more sincerity and more pain that Charlus Weasley will ever know in his entire life. “She misses you.” The emotion in his voice is enough to make her cry, but it isn’t enough to make her break. She bites back the tears and bites through her lip, but she only shakes her head in response.
“Don’t ask for things I can’t give you, Lucius,” she tells him, trying to shake off how dirty and pathetic she feels, sleeping with her sister’s husband and fucking the one man she promised she’d never touch again. “You’ve already taken everything else.” She knows many women have said those words to him, to Sirius, and to every other man with unearthly beauty and eyes the color of melting mercury, but she doesn’t think any girl in the world means it as much as she does right now.
He doesn’t kiss her goodbye and he doesn’t look back to catch her eye one final time. She knows, somehow, that she’ll see him again. Even if everything else has died and been buried, Lucius Malfoy remains the phoenix who continuously rises from the ash. He belongs to someone else now, and she doesn’t want to deal with that.
III. Draco
The third time Charlie brings up her sister’s name, Andromeda slaps him clear across the face and smirks at the fingerprints that welt along his cheek bone. She’s proud of herself for not reaching for her wand, even if she is a little flustered about the fact that she was provoked to physical violence by a man her daughter’s age. She wants to escape from his shocked gaze, but she’s at a wedding, and the one thing she doesn’t want to do is draw attention away from Percy and Audrey and towards her. It’s the first happy moment in Molly’s life since Fred died, and it would kill Andromeda to ruin that for her friend.
Instead, she waits until the end of the ceremony before sneaking out from underneath Charlie’s ceaseless gaze. A part of her thinks the young man is simply looking out for his ex-girlfriend’s mother, and she surrenders to that part because anything more than that is too much to stomach. She doesn’t understand why it is Charlie is so adamant that she makes up with her sister, but she has too much pride to ask. Even after twenty five years, the Black pride cannot be washed away.
She sneaks into the kitchen and is more than surprised to see Lucius’s son there. Some nights she still wonders if the boy is hers as well, because the time tables match up and he looks so much like his father that who is mother really is remains a mystery. She isn’t sure she wants to claim ownership of the young man, mainly because he caused Dumbledore’s death. Then again, like father like son, and she’s sure he’s a good man underneath it all. She sits down across from him and takes the Firewhiskey from his hand, pouring it into her own glass.
“She’s dying,” he tells her, his words slurring against the back of his lips and coming out almost unintelligibly. For a moment, she contemplates asking him to say the words again, but she’s pretty sure she won’t be able to handle hearing them a second time. “That’s why Weasley’s so set on you talking to the bitch. She’s dying.”
It’s strange, she thinks, for Draco to refer to his mother in such a way. Children have no respect for their parents these days, and a part of her thinks that this is what is wrong with her daughter’s generation. She wonders if she can still call Draco a child, after everything he’s seen, but she knows that war does not always bring maturity, regardless as to how far into one you get. “I assumed,” she says, not lowering the glass from her drying lips. She doesn’t think the whiskey will be strong enough tonight. She doesn’t think there’s anything in the world that will help her sleep tonight. “How long does she have?”
The words come out so easily, when really they should be fighting against everything to stay trapped inside of her. If she doesn’t say it out loud than that means none of this has to be real. It’s too late now, she thinks, putting the glass back on the table with a force fierce enough for it to shatter in her hand. As the glass cuts into her hand she bites back tears and whispers, aloud, “It’s too late now.”
Draco shakes his head and mutters a healing spell. The glass falls away and the blood dries and for a moment she’s grateful that he defied everyone’s expectations and decided to become a healer. “It isn’t too late,” he tells her, keeping his eyes, so much like his father’s, on her. “She has a month or so before it’s over. The doctors think…” he falters, the same way she watched Lucius faltered when he told her about the affair, “They think she tried to kill herself and failed.”
“She was perfect at everything else, Malfoy,” she tells him, trying to break his gaze but finding it impossible to do so, “She may as well have failed something.”
She gets up from the chair and pushes it back under the table without breaking eye contact with him. Blinking, she looks away and makes her way out of the room, desperately trying not to look back and see if he is watching her leave. Anyone else would have taken her silence as a sign of indifference of strength, but Draco has her blood in him, and she knows he sees right through her façade to the pain boiling underneath.
IV. Narcissa
Charlie is standing in the door way three days later, holding baby Teddy in his arms and all but pushing her out of the threshold of her house. “It’s imperative,” he tells her, a sense of pure belief in his words that makes her strength falter and for a moment she wants to run back inside and hide in her room until Narcissa is dead and she can forget that her sister, that her entire family, ever existed.
“You’re sure you don’t mind watching him?” Andromeda asks, fighting to keep the desperation in her voice unnoticeable. Her daughter’s best friend always was a bit too much of a Slytherin for his own good, however, and she knows that the pity in his eyes means he knows she’s loosing her mind. “I can stay home if you would like.” He shakes her head and all but pushes her out the door. The finality that surges through her when the wooden door slams behind her is enough to shake her to the core. Twenty five years ago she said goodbye to a sister she swore she would never see again. Even if it feels as if she’s died twice since that night, she doesn’t believe a thousand life times will ever make up for what Narcissa did to her.
She apparates to Malfoy Manor, a place she knows quite well considering the multitude of nights she spent hiding in Lucius’s room while he convinced his mother that there were no girls in his bed. She wonders, as she makes her way past the peacock gardens and up to the door, if Narcissa ever had to hide beneath his satin sheets with her clothes pulled tight against her and the laughter threatening to spill every time Mrs. Malfoy screamed that Lucius was an ingrate. She wonders, as she rings the door bell, if Draco has that room now, and if he can smell her and his father on the mattress every night before he goes to sleep.
Lucius opens the door, and the shock in his eyes is enough to make her want to turn around and flee. But that would be admitting defeat, and she is not about to let her sister win this round. Whatever obstacles Narcissa may have devised to get Andromeda to turn her back again weren’t going to work. After all, everyone needs closure. “I’m here for your wife,” was all she said before she moved past him gracefully and made her way up to the master bedroom. She didn’t pause to knock when she got to the door, and when she saw Narcissa for the first time, maybe her step faltered but she didn’t stop moving until she was at her sister’s side. The words she has practiced for days, words of hate and pain and disgust, die on her lips as she finds herself staring into sickly blue eyes, and wiping bile-covered strands of hair from Narcissa’s insipid face. “Oh Cissy, what has this life done to you?”
Maybe it shouldn’t have been so easy, maybe there should have been screaming and yelling and hexes that flew across the room and reverberated off walls and hit the opponent dead on; but Andromeda didn’t have time for that. Instead, she fell against her baby sister with all the maternal affection she knew and locked them up together in a world of potions and healing words and memories that, even if long untouched, would never be forgotten. The next three days are spent in darkness, with only whispered stories about Kreacher, and Bella, and baby Reggie to pass the hours and Narcissa tries to heal and Andromeda remembers how to breathe again.
It takes seven days before she allows anyone other than Lucius and Draco to visit her sister, but a week after her unexpected arrival Andromeda brings home a Mediwitch who owes her and favor and forces her to look at Narcissa now. They claimed she was helpless, that there was no way for her body to heal after what she had put it through, but Andromeda knew better, and she knew a Black never surrendered to death until they were good and ready to do so. There’s shock on Healer Jones’s face when she realizes that Narcissa Malfoy will pull through after all.
Two wars, too many deaths, and a Chosen Boy, and it’s only now that Andromeda starts believing in miracles.
V. Andromeda
“It’s beautiful out here,” Narcissa tells her as they collapse upon one of the benches Lucius had installed as soon as he was informed that his wife would live. It’s a wooden bench made of oak and decorated with the Black family crest, two dogs on their hind legs pressing paw to paw. It’s quite the gift, so Andromeda refrains from telling her sister that it looks tacky or her lover that he doesn’t have the money for such extravagance anymore. She’s tired of being cruel just for the sake of cruelty; she’s spent too many years doing that.
They’ve been doing this every day for the last six months, and every day Narcissa says thank you with a tone that implies she’s grateful for many things other than the fact that Andromeda saved her life. She likes to walk in the garden with Teddy, because he walks slowly enough for her to keep up with him and he’s always stumbling up against something new. Andromeda thinks that, had Lucius really loved her and Narcissa really loved him, they would have had many more children together. Unfortunately, barrenness was too easy of an excuse for them to stop their matrimonial duty, enabling Lucius to pine for her sister for eighteen years.
They don’t talk about that. In fact, there are many thing which they do not talk about. Like Bella’s death, or the fact that Regulus had come to Andromeda the night before he died and begged for help only to be turned away and told to “Go talk to you whore of a cousin, I’m sure Narcissa would be more than willing to help you one way or another.” The fact that Sirius died at Bella’s hand goes ignored as they discuss modern politics and the newest novels over tea in the rose garden. Andromeda thinks that, by ignoring the entire twenty five years that passed, she can make the anger go away. Narcissa knows that by holding back Andromeda’s only setting herself up for an explosion. And so the blonde waits, every day, for that moment in which all the pain will boil up inside of her sister and explode like a horrible potion gone wrong.
So Narcissa bites her tongue when she finds Andromeda’s mouth around her husband’s cock five days after the doctor’s tell them that the poison’s out of her system. She doesn’t complain when Andromeda assumes the role of wife to Lucius and mother to Draco. She stole this life from her sister twenty five years ago and she’ll be damned if she gets angry because Andromeda is claiming what is rightfully hers. Instead, the blonde will simply sit on the oak wood bench with the dogs and watch her life be reclaimed by its rightful owner. She’s held the spotlight for too long; it’s time for Andromeda to step out from the shadows and claim her space amongst the stars.
After all, Andromeda is the name of an immortal, ever burning star; while Narcissa was born to wither and die, just like the flower she was named for.
Author: Liliths_Requiem
Recipient: redsiodaslair
Character(s): Andromeda Tonks, Charlie Weasley, Molly Weasley, Narcissa Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy, Draco Malfoy
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4,199 words
Warnings (highlight to view): Adultery
Summary: After the war, Andromeda tries to put her life back together. Unfortunately, she’s missing all the pieces.
Author's Notes: I really hope you like this redsiodaslair, and I’m sorry if it’s too dark/sad for you. Thanks for the challenge, I think I’ve fallen in love with these characters.
Betas: My wonderful friend Danii, who never gets bored of my writing.
I. Molly
The first time Charlie suggests it, Andromeda laughs at him. Never mind that it’s the first time she’s laughed since she found out Ted was dead, she’s too focused on the fact that Charlie Weasley thinks he can mend her family’s greatest schism just by smiling at her the right way. Maybe that worked with her daughter, but Andromeda was born and raised a Black, and therefore she remains impervious to the charms of Wizards. “No,” she states, looking him dead in the eyes, “Tell Narcissa she can go to Hell.” With that she slams the door and looks for solace in the way the bang reverberates through the empty house. She tries not to be disappointed when all it brings is Teddy’s tears.
The night she found out Ted was dead, Andromeda cried for seven hours, thirty nine minutes, and forty six seconds. It was the only time in her life that she can remember crying. The tears were freeing and suffocating at the same time, and she couldn’t figure out if she was floating or drowning. She didn’t know how to live without Ted and without her sisters. She may have given up one for the other, but she didn’t know how to go on without both. Nymphadora had been her only consolation then, and now she is gone too.
Sometimes, at night, she can hear Teddy crying but she doesn’t go to him. The boy has to be tough if he’s going to survive in this world. Besides, despite the dirt in his veins and the lycanthropy that she hasn’t completely written off yet, Andromeda’s grandson has the blood of a Black and will be brought up as such.
Really? The tears remind her that he’s still alive, while everyone else is dead or dying.
The house is too big for only her and a child, and the sensible part of her thinks they should burn everything to the ground and sell the land. Maybe move to France and live with Aunt Diane for a few years. She’s one of the few of her mother’s relatives to actually know up from down. Besides, it would be nice to get away, to run from everything and turn her back on everyone. It isn’t as if anyone here needs her anymore.
Except maybe Molly, who even though they never knew each other well at Hogwarts has become a very close friend since the formation of the first Order of the Phoenix. They had both been turned down because they were expecting, and some how that disappointment had infused a bond between them yet to be broken. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Charlie was born only a week before Nymphadora pushed herself free of Andromeda’s womb. Maybe it was the way neither of them could hate Bellatrix, despite what she had done to both their hearts. Maybe it was just a necessity. Everyone needs someone during a war, and with both of their husbands working for the Ministry, they had found comfort in each other.
She goes to Molly once a week, on Thursday afternoons. She brings Teddy and leaves the boy with Harry, who still lives at the Burrow despite having his own home. Molly says she asked him to stay, as the house is painfully quiet now that Ron’s moved in with George and Ginny’s away at school. Somehow, Andromeda thinks Harry needs the companionship just as much as her friend. She knows from experience that war can make silence eternally unbearable.
Molly hasn’t cried since Fred died. Everyone’s expecting her to break one day, but it’s already been six months and there is nothing. When she hears his name she stops breathing for a moment, Andromeda sees it in the other woman’s eyes that the simple motion of pushing air from her lungs and pulling it back in is forgotten for a moment due to the sharp pain that shoots through a mother’s body when they find out their child is dead. Andromeda’s told her more than once that letting it out may make some of the pain go away.
“I don’t want to make the pain go away. You haven’t cried, what does that prove?” the question is said like an accusation, and Andromeda knows she’s guilty of clinging to the pain like a final prayer, as if she deserves this. The only thing Molly’s stubbornness proves is that, on some level, she’s as fucked up as Andromeda is. But then, anyone who knows the woman’s past could have told you that. Only a person bordering on insanity could have put up with Andromeda’s older sister for so long.
They have tea and talk about Percy and Audrey’s wedding plans. The young couple only just met, but the desperation of a war lingers in the air long after the last battle, and Andromeda can sympathize only because she’s been there before. Of course she was pregnant at the time, which Audrey isn’t, and hope still seemed like a futile emotion kept alive only to continue the human race. Still, she’s known the middle Weasley boy since he was born, and she hasn’t seen him this happy in years.
“Next week, then?” she asks, just as she’s about to leave. Molly doesn’t bother arguing this time. It’s pathetic, the way her generation has resigned itself to its fate and stopped fighting. Maybe losing everyone you love does that to people, but Molly only lost four people to this godforsaken war. (Five, if you count Alice, but she doesn’t like to count Alice because Alice isn’t dead, like everyone else is.) Maybe killing someone you love does this to people, but Andromeda’s watched others kill their kin and their lovers and return unscathed. It’s probably the Gryffindor gold that still runs through her veins like blood but is much thicker and harder to push from her heart that causes Molly to be so placid these days.
She gathers Teddy and heads towards the door, intent on apparating away before she breaks Molly’s gaze. She’ll feel guilty if she blinks, because that’s one more second where she wasn’t there, wasn’t reassuring and constant like she has been all of these years. She keeps trying to make up for Bella’s mistakes, but Molly refuses to forgive and forget and she won’t accept any retribution. It’s not like Andromeda can give the ginger haired woman what she wants anyone. It’s not like either of them remembers what it’s like to be in love.
II. Lucius
The second time Charlie asks her, they’re sitting in the veranda sipping tea and watching Teddy play in the garden. It’s late fall and the leaves are just barely hanging on to her oak trees for dear life. Charlie watches a golden leaf makes its way to the earth before turning to her with a smile on his face and pain in his eyes. It’s funny how the pain hasn’t changed since her daughter died. To Charlie, Nymphadora Tonks died the night she married another man. To Charlie, Nymphadora Lupin never existed.
“Talk to her,” he suggests, his hand moving towards his wand just in case. Andromeda’s flattered that he still thinks she’s quick enough to disarm him on equal footing, but she doesn’t go for the wand that’s holding up her hair. Instead, she puts down the saucer with a firm clank against the glass tabletop and allows the hex to exist solely in her eyes. He falters, which is amusing and flattering, because it means she’s still got it. Some of it. Enough to scare a Gryffindor child at least. “All I’m asking is a conversation.”
She’s tempted to ask why, but she knows that’s all a part of his plan. Watching a Gryffindor try to act devious is probably the most disturbing thing she’s ever been forced to witness. She almost feels guilty for that thought, as after two wars and growing up in the Black Manor she’s sure she’s seen much worse, but then she realizes that blood and gore and death never meant much to her. It’s failure she’s never been able to stand, and Gryffindors are chock full of that. “No.” The word hangs in the air between them like a shield and for a moment she wonders if Charlie will turn around and leave her the hell alone.
Teddy starts babbling and it jolts them both out of the moment, effectively shattering all of her defenses. Her face softens and her age shows, but she refuses to bow her head to a Weasley. “Just…let it die, Charlus,” she tells him, while picking up her grandson, “Everything else has.” He only shakes his head and leaves, which wasn’t quite as dramatic as she was expecting, but just as sad.
She knows what regret tastes like, she’s had the aftertaste stuck in the back of her throat for years. Like a bad bruise that never goes away, she doesn’t remember when she first bit in to the pomegranate and she doesn’t remember who held the fruit out to her, so red and luscious and inviting. All she knows is she’s met with the devil himself on more than one occasion, and if Lucifer didn’t burn brighter than any other star, than Lucius Malfoy sure as hell does.
He’s standing next to Bella’s gravestone the first time she sees him after the war. His hair, once the same color as the sun refracting off fresh fallen snow, has grown gray and is receding from his forehead like a surrendering army. He’s getting old, but then she’s been old for ages and she had never seen him coming. “Lucius,” she calls, with the same desperation as she did thirty years ago, and he startles like he’s seeing a ghost. She wonders, fleetingly, if he’s seeing her or Bella, but she realizes that this doesn’t matter. Either way he’s seeing someone that doesn’t exist anymore.
“Miss Black,” he replies, because even when he was sticking a wand in her face and calling her a filthy mudblood’s whore he refused to acknowledge her married name. “It’s been a while.”
She tries not to falter, but he’s the only one who has ever been able to get her on her knees. “Eighteen years.” The reply is brusque and bitter, but there’s pain beneath those words and she’s sure he can sense it. “The night your darling son was born.” She wants to spit on him for leaving her and sleeping with her sister and destroying her entire family. A part of her knows Bella and Sirius and baby Reggie would still be alive if it wasn’t for the man in front of her. As painful and final as that thought may be, when he opens his arms she runs to him without hesitation. Maybe, just maybe, she hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be in love.
He holds her like he’s holding on to the star she was named for, hugging just tight enough to get burned but not tight enough to keep her there. She knows he feels guilty for everything he’s done to her and she knows he feels nothing for all the sins they say he’s committed. She invites him back to her home and leads him up the stairs to the bed she shared with another man for more than twenty years. She wonders if Ted ever smelt Lucius on the bed, despite her Outstanding on her Charms NEWT she never was the best in that class. Then she stops wondering because Lucius is kissing her and she can feel the stars exploding inside both of them. She wants him to spend the night, but she doesn’t want to deal with Narcissa in the morning.
He surprises her when he stops buttoning his cloak and looks her dead in the eyes. “You should talk to her,” he tells her, with more sincerity and more pain that Charlus Weasley will ever know in his entire life. “She misses you.” The emotion in his voice is enough to make her cry, but it isn’t enough to make her break. She bites back the tears and bites through her lip, but she only shakes her head in response.
“Don’t ask for things I can’t give you, Lucius,” she tells him, trying to shake off how dirty and pathetic she feels, sleeping with her sister’s husband and fucking the one man she promised she’d never touch again. “You’ve already taken everything else.” She knows many women have said those words to him, to Sirius, and to every other man with unearthly beauty and eyes the color of melting mercury, but she doesn’t think any girl in the world means it as much as she does right now.
He doesn’t kiss her goodbye and he doesn’t look back to catch her eye one final time. She knows, somehow, that she’ll see him again. Even if everything else has died and been buried, Lucius Malfoy remains the phoenix who continuously rises from the ash. He belongs to someone else now, and she doesn’t want to deal with that.
III. Draco
The third time Charlie brings up her sister’s name, Andromeda slaps him clear across the face and smirks at the fingerprints that welt along his cheek bone. She’s proud of herself for not reaching for her wand, even if she is a little flustered about the fact that she was provoked to physical violence by a man her daughter’s age. She wants to escape from his shocked gaze, but she’s at a wedding, and the one thing she doesn’t want to do is draw attention away from Percy and Audrey and towards her. It’s the first happy moment in Molly’s life since Fred died, and it would kill Andromeda to ruin that for her friend.
Instead, she waits until the end of the ceremony before sneaking out from underneath Charlie’s ceaseless gaze. A part of her thinks the young man is simply looking out for his ex-girlfriend’s mother, and she surrenders to that part because anything more than that is too much to stomach. She doesn’t understand why it is Charlie is so adamant that she makes up with her sister, but she has too much pride to ask. Even after twenty five years, the Black pride cannot be washed away.
She sneaks into the kitchen and is more than surprised to see Lucius’s son there. Some nights she still wonders if the boy is hers as well, because the time tables match up and he looks so much like his father that who is mother really is remains a mystery. She isn’t sure she wants to claim ownership of the young man, mainly because he caused Dumbledore’s death. Then again, like father like son, and she’s sure he’s a good man underneath it all. She sits down across from him and takes the Firewhiskey from his hand, pouring it into her own glass.
“She’s dying,” he tells her, his words slurring against the back of his lips and coming out almost unintelligibly. For a moment, she contemplates asking him to say the words again, but she’s pretty sure she won’t be able to handle hearing them a second time. “That’s why Weasley’s so set on you talking to the bitch. She’s dying.”
It’s strange, she thinks, for Draco to refer to his mother in such a way. Children have no respect for their parents these days, and a part of her thinks that this is what is wrong with her daughter’s generation. She wonders if she can still call Draco a child, after everything he’s seen, but she knows that war does not always bring maturity, regardless as to how far into one you get. “I assumed,” she says, not lowering the glass from her drying lips. She doesn’t think the whiskey will be strong enough tonight. She doesn’t think there’s anything in the world that will help her sleep tonight. “How long does she have?”
The words come out so easily, when really they should be fighting against everything to stay trapped inside of her. If she doesn’t say it out loud than that means none of this has to be real. It’s too late now, she thinks, putting the glass back on the table with a force fierce enough for it to shatter in her hand. As the glass cuts into her hand she bites back tears and whispers, aloud, “It’s too late now.”
Draco shakes his head and mutters a healing spell. The glass falls away and the blood dries and for a moment she’s grateful that he defied everyone’s expectations and decided to become a healer. “It isn’t too late,” he tells her, keeping his eyes, so much like his father’s, on her. “She has a month or so before it’s over. The doctors think…” he falters, the same way she watched Lucius faltered when he told her about the affair, “They think she tried to kill herself and failed.”
“She was perfect at everything else, Malfoy,” she tells him, trying to break his gaze but finding it impossible to do so, “She may as well have failed something.”
She gets up from the chair and pushes it back under the table without breaking eye contact with him. Blinking, she looks away and makes her way out of the room, desperately trying not to look back and see if he is watching her leave. Anyone else would have taken her silence as a sign of indifference of strength, but Draco has her blood in him, and she knows he sees right through her façade to the pain boiling underneath.
IV. Narcissa
Charlie is standing in the door way three days later, holding baby Teddy in his arms and all but pushing her out of the threshold of her house. “It’s imperative,” he tells her, a sense of pure belief in his words that makes her strength falter and for a moment she wants to run back inside and hide in her room until Narcissa is dead and she can forget that her sister, that her entire family, ever existed.
“You’re sure you don’t mind watching him?” Andromeda asks, fighting to keep the desperation in her voice unnoticeable. Her daughter’s best friend always was a bit too much of a Slytherin for his own good, however, and she knows that the pity in his eyes means he knows she’s loosing her mind. “I can stay home if you would like.” He shakes her head and all but pushes her out the door. The finality that surges through her when the wooden door slams behind her is enough to shake her to the core. Twenty five years ago she said goodbye to a sister she swore she would never see again. Even if it feels as if she’s died twice since that night, she doesn’t believe a thousand life times will ever make up for what Narcissa did to her.
She apparates to Malfoy Manor, a place she knows quite well considering the multitude of nights she spent hiding in Lucius’s room while he convinced his mother that there were no girls in his bed. She wonders, as she makes her way past the peacock gardens and up to the door, if Narcissa ever had to hide beneath his satin sheets with her clothes pulled tight against her and the laughter threatening to spill every time Mrs. Malfoy screamed that Lucius was an ingrate. She wonders, as she rings the door bell, if Draco has that room now, and if he can smell her and his father on the mattress every night before he goes to sleep.
Lucius opens the door, and the shock in his eyes is enough to make her want to turn around and flee. But that would be admitting defeat, and she is not about to let her sister win this round. Whatever obstacles Narcissa may have devised to get Andromeda to turn her back again weren’t going to work. After all, everyone needs closure. “I’m here for your wife,” was all she said before she moved past him gracefully and made her way up to the master bedroom. She didn’t pause to knock when she got to the door, and when she saw Narcissa for the first time, maybe her step faltered but she didn’t stop moving until she was at her sister’s side. The words she has practiced for days, words of hate and pain and disgust, die on her lips as she finds herself staring into sickly blue eyes, and wiping bile-covered strands of hair from Narcissa’s insipid face. “Oh Cissy, what has this life done to you?”
Maybe it shouldn’t have been so easy, maybe there should have been screaming and yelling and hexes that flew across the room and reverberated off walls and hit the opponent dead on; but Andromeda didn’t have time for that. Instead, she fell against her baby sister with all the maternal affection she knew and locked them up together in a world of potions and healing words and memories that, even if long untouched, would never be forgotten. The next three days are spent in darkness, with only whispered stories about Kreacher, and Bella, and baby Reggie to pass the hours and Narcissa tries to heal and Andromeda remembers how to breathe again.
It takes seven days before she allows anyone other than Lucius and Draco to visit her sister, but a week after her unexpected arrival Andromeda brings home a Mediwitch who owes her and favor and forces her to look at Narcissa now. They claimed she was helpless, that there was no way for her body to heal after what she had put it through, but Andromeda knew better, and she knew a Black never surrendered to death until they were good and ready to do so. There’s shock on Healer Jones’s face when she realizes that Narcissa Malfoy will pull through after all.
Two wars, too many deaths, and a Chosen Boy, and it’s only now that Andromeda starts believing in miracles.
V. Andromeda
“It’s beautiful out here,” Narcissa tells her as they collapse upon one of the benches Lucius had installed as soon as he was informed that his wife would live. It’s a wooden bench made of oak and decorated with the Black family crest, two dogs on their hind legs pressing paw to paw. It’s quite the gift, so Andromeda refrains from telling her sister that it looks tacky or her lover that he doesn’t have the money for such extravagance anymore. She’s tired of being cruel just for the sake of cruelty; she’s spent too many years doing that.
They’ve been doing this every day for the last six months, and every day Narcissa says thank you with a tone that implies she’s grateful for many things other than the fact that Andromeda saved her life. She likes to walk in the garden with Teddy, because he walks slowly enough for her to keep up with him and he’s always stumbling up against something new. Andromeda thinks that, had Lucius really loved her and Narcissa really loved him, they would have had many more children together. Unfortunately, barrenness was too easy of an excuse for them to stop their matrimonial duty, enabling Lucius to pine for her sister for eighteen years.
They don’t talk about that. In fact, there are many thing which they do not talk about. Like Bella’s death, or the fact that Regulus had come to Andromeda the night before he died and begged for help only to be turned away and told to “Go talk to you whore of a cousin, I’m sure Narcissa would be more than willing to help you one way or another.” The fact that Sirius died at Bella’s hand goes ignored as they discuss modern politics and the newest novels over tea in the rose garden. Andromeda thinks that, by ignoring the entire twenty five years that passed, she can make the anger go away. Narcissa knows that by holding back Andromeda’s only setting herself up for an explosion. And so the blonde waits, every day, for that moment in which all the pain will boil up inside of her sister and explode like a horrible potion gone wrong.
So Narcissa bites her tongue when she finds Andromeda’s mouth around her husband’s cock five days after the doctor’s tell them that the poison’s out of her system. She doesn’t complain when Andromeda assumes the role of wife to Lucius and mother to Draco. She stole this life from her sister twenty five years ago and she’ll be damned if she gets angry because Andromeda is claiming what is rightfully hers. Instead, the blonde will simply sit on the oak wood bench with the dogs and watch her life be reclaimed by its rightful owner. She’s held the spotlight for too long; it’s time for Andromeda to step out from the shadows and claim her space amongst the stars.
After all, Andromeda is the name of an immortal, ever burning star; while Narcissa was born to wither and die, just like the flower she was named for.