A/N: Hi loves! I'm slamming back into the HP fanfiction fandom with a Tedromeda fanfic and I've been working on it for over a year already so I promise it'll get finished - I've devoted way too much time and heart to let it slide now. Ted & Andy are honestly the purest, sweetest couple but I haven't seen a fanfic that's captured the full extent of their relationship and I hope (I HOPE) this one will. Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Ted or Andromeda or any Harry Potter characters/universe. All of that lovely loveliness goes to JKR.

Chapter 1

-September, 1969, 5th Year-

Beside Andromeda, the heat of the potions classroom was getting a little much for Ted Tonks, who'd already shrugged off his cloak and pulled off his sweater. His abandoned clothes now lay on the floor, gathering dust as he rolled up his sleeves.
Andromeda felt something inside her chest give a sharp tug and, in surprise, dropped the boomslang skin she'd been holding so gingerly.

"Bollocks," she said, scowling. The ingredient she hated most in the world was now taunting her, its slimy scales splattered all over her patent-leather shoes.

"Bollocks? I think I missed that ingredient," Tonks replied. He smiled at his own joke as he crouched down and picked up Andromeda's boomslang skin from the floor (much more calmly than she would have done) and chucked it into the rubbish bin. "Need another piece?" he asked.

"No, it's all right," she said, blinking as Ted turned away from her. He peered into his potion with the look of someone who was a little bewildered at the contents of his pot, then shrugged and began to stir. It was disconcerting - usually mudbloods weren't so keen on her, but Ted Tonks was nothing but friendly.

"Know that I didn't choose to sit here with you," she said after a moment - she wanted to make things perfectly clear. "I came here late, and this was the last seat available. Otherwise I would never be caught dead sitting with a mudblood, especially during OWL year, and-"

"I understand," Ted said, chopping (unevenly) a bubotuber root, a new edge to his voice. "I mind my space, you mind yours, and we don't interact."

That shut her up for awhile.

She was decidedly not angry about it - she was just so shocked that a mudblood had spoken to her in such a kind-but-firm tone that she didn't have a response for it.

She wasn't even sure if she was supposed to take offense or not - what did you do when a mudblood told you they "understood" and basically ordered you to do the very thing you wanted to do in the first place?

'Probably,' she thought, 'This would upset anyone else.'

Who was Edward Tonks to tell Andromeda Black to mind her space, anyway? It wasn't as if she was bothering him. It wasn't as if she wanted to speak to him in the first place - why was he so self-centered anyway? Nothing about his life was so interesting as to attract a Slytherin pureblood's attention. It wasn't as if Andromeda Black lay awake during the wee hours of the morning wondering what went on in Muggle households, no. Maybe only one wee hour. Or two.

"Edward," she said after many minutes of thought along this vein (which also meant many minutes of ignoring her potion, which now smelled of burning metal and had started sparking at intervals), "What's a telly?"

"A telly?" Ted paused, fingers poised over his cauldron (he seemed surprised enough at her voice to forget that she didn't want him speaking to her).

Andromeda rolled her eyes in mock exasperation, her voice gaining strength now that she knew she wasn't going to be ignored. "Are you deaf? Yes, what's a telly?"

Ted set his badly-mutilated bubotuber stem down and looked far ahead, as if he could see past the Hogwarts grounds and all the way home, where a his muggle device rested on a little stand in a sitting room.

"Well," he said, eventually, "It's like a box with photographs on it, but they tell a story. Like a book but in pictures, and bigger."

"Oh."

"My favorite programme is probably one called Doctor Who," Ted volunteered, though he wasn't looking at Andromeda as he stirred his potion (which had turned a sublime, light-green shade, quite a contrast to Andy's orange, sparking thing). "It stars a time lord who travels throughout the galaxy and... well, generally he makes things go-"

BOOM!

Both Andromeda and Ted jumped back as Andromeda's potion turned into a pyrotechnics display, clumps of Druble wings and Gillyweed flying out of the cauldron as a large portion of it shot straight up to the ceiling and stuck there (to drip and glob back onto the table at intervals).
The small percentage of the class that had turned around at the noise (explosions tended to happen fairly often in the Potions classroom) stared for one frozen second before resuming their work.

'Fuck,' Andromeda thought, and groaned aloud. "Blast it all!" She swore and kicked a leg of the table with her foot, scuffing the toe of her shoe in the process and half hoping that some higher power would simply strike her down where she stood (next to a mudblood and covered in russet-orange slime, that is).

"A little late to be making that demand," Ted said pleasantly, the very picture of calm, tapping the rim of Andromeda's cauldron with his wand and eradicating its foul-smelling contents.

"You forgot to add your boomslang skin, Miss Black!" This was Slughorn, the flabby potions master. "It acts as a damper for this rather violent concoction. In fact, in Boris the Blubbery's creation of the potion, he blew a minimum of four holes in the walls and ceilings of his home per day."

Andromeda huffed. "Why are we making a potion that's certifiably insane!?" She snapped under her breath.

"Certifiably insane?" Ted echoed, his tone carefully measured, like the batter in a mud pie. "I wouldn't say that. Bit obnoxious, maybe, kind of scary, very hot... but not insane, I don't think."

"What?"

Ted shrugged, and the easy smile that was ever-present on his face only grew. "Never mind," he said.

"...Right," Andromeda replied, brow furrowed in confusion.

"So, Miss Black," Slughorn said, the jolly tone of his voice making Andromeda's scowl only deepen, "You'll look on with Mr. Tonks for the time being, yes?"

"Do I have to, Professor?" She whined (if she'd been alone, maybe she would have complied, but when surrounded by a host of your classmates, one could not simply 'look on' with some mudblood).

"Technically, my dear, you do not," Slughorn said, a smile on his pudgy, perspiring face, "But that will give you no better than a zero for today's lesson."

And so, rolling her eyes, Andromeda gave Ted's workspace her attention.

"All right, the next ingredient is… five blue-bearded dragons' eggs."

Nodding to show he'd heard her, Ted gathered the marble-like eggs in his hands and dropped them into the pot, where they made quick plunk! sounds as they hit the water.

Deciding that moping about her own destroyed potion was a silly idea, Andromeda and Ted had quickly settled into a routine: Andromeda would tell him what to do, and he'd do it. He had a knack for talking, though, that kept Andromeda from seeing him as an underling - and there was also the fact that her potion had ceased to exist a few minutes prior, while his had stayed perfectly intact.

"Where do blue eggs come from?"

"What?"

"Blue eggs," Ted repeated, a little bit louder. "Where do they come from?"

Andromeda raised an eyebrow at him (it was right in the ingredients' list, wasn't it?).

"Er - bearded dragons?"

"From sad chickens."

Andromeda stared at him (trying not to laugh out loud at his so-awful-it-was-funny joke).

"That is… the saddest thing I've ever heard in my entire life."

"Sad as sad chickens?"

And then she couldn't help it - she smiled.

"...Maybe not quite."

He smiled back - a grin wide as a cracked nut - and for some reason something tumbled inside of Andromeda's stomach.

Both fifth years quickly tore their eyes away from each other and busied themselves with their books.

"All right, what's last, then?"

"Well… could you pass me a knife?" Andy asked, ready to slice up the last ingredient (she'd learned earlier that Edward Tonks was particularly awful at chopping and demanded he let her do it for the rest of the period).

Ted shot her the most serious look (the only serious look, really) he'd given her all morning.

"No."

"Oh. Okay," Andromeda said. She put a complacent smile on her face as she suppressed the weight that had just gathered in her chest and tried to refocus on the task ('So much for meeting an actual nice person for once in my life,' she couldn't help thinking).

"...Haven't you ever heard of sarcasm, Andromeda?" Ted asked, and Andy looked up to see him holding out the knife for her, its blade shining silver in the dusty light of the potions classroom, a bright smile on his face.

"Andy," Bella said, in a singsong voice, almost ten hours later, "I heard you've been unfortunately paired with that hideous Mudblood Ted Tonks."

"Mmhm," Andromeda said, continuing to cut her slice of chocolate cake as if nothing out of the ordinary had been said (because really, it hadn't). "For an entire year." She rolled her eyes for the effect it would have on Bella and Narcissa, and they both delivered, smirking at each other and then at Andy.

Andromeda put on lots of subtle shows, she knew, but her sisters were usually her only audience. In fact, Andromeda couldn't remember a time in the previous term that she'd had so much as a one minute conversation with anyone in her year. Ninety percent of the time she was flanked on both sides by her two sisters, and then other people rarely approached them. It came with the social status.

The dinner conversation had moved, as Andromeda was trying to figure out if she'd been nice to anyone at all in the last year, to the new chandeliers Mother had bought that day. Finding everything about her house extremely uninteresting (because her family never stopped talking about it), Andromeda looked around to see if, amid everyone eating, there was anything interesting to watch. Perhaps a Hogwarts ghost had decided to teach a few students how to dance, or something similarly strange.

Ted Tonks caught her eye across their respective House tables and gave her a bright smile, parting his lips to reveal a slice of an orange peel for teeth.

Andromeda giggled against her will.

"What're you laughing at, Andy, for fuck's sake?"

"A Hufflepuff just tripped over his own feet," Andy covered, breaking eye contact with Ted to focus on Bella's much closer, much more serious face.

Boom. Reviews are chocolates (leave some for me?)