There were days when she wasn't sure she was breathing at all. Those were the days Harry took the baby, and she sat on the porch of her dilapidated house, one her husband always said he was going to fix up one day, and wished that some part of her black soul could just let her cry. And then she'd laugh, because of course her soul was black. That was her name, wasn't it? She had run away from that stain on wizardkind at her first chance, but it seemed that the old legends were true, and you could never really escape your family. If only those legends had been about her real family, the family she had chosen.
How was it fair that her sister, the grey one, had managed to keep her husband and her child, when she, who was supposed to be the white one, had lost both?
At least the black sister had gotten what she deserved. Death, and probably one far cleaner than she did deserve, but Molly Weasley was not one for playing with her victims.
Molly had suffered too, but not as she had. Molly's child was dead, just as hers, but Molly had so many children, all there to keep her standing in the sweeping pain and darkness of her grief.
She had no one. Just the baby, who looked too much like her daughter. And so she didn't breathe.
It was one of these not breathing days that her sister came to her dilapidated house. She saw Narcissa, some part of her knew, but all she could see was the husband and child that weren't still breathing, and the husband and child that were.
"Good Merlin, Dromeda, what are you doing?"
She stared at her sister, still slightly shocked that she was here, that she was real.
"Well, I've come for tea, so let's go inside."
She didn't move, waiting for Narcissa to give up, to leave, to go back to her family.
Narcissa didn't leave. She sat down onto the porch with her, something plebeian and lower class enough to startle her into really looking at her sister.
She had lost weight, and her hair, once a beautiful shade of platinum blonde, was lackluster, vibrantless. Her eyes seemed watery, as if she had an illness, or perpetual seasonal allergies. She wasn't Narcissa, not as she remembered.
Narcissa didn't speak, and neither did she. They both sat, on the crooked steps, staring out at the road, and watched the muggles drift by.
Finally she said, "I'm not breathing." It was quiet, almost as if she hadn't spoken at all and she wondered if she had. But the not breathing had left her with no energy, with no ability to focus. So she went silent.
Then, "Me neither."
This made her sharpen, ground herself. What did Narcissa mean? Why couldn't she be breathing? This selfish grey sister, with her husband and her son and her life. How could she do this? How could she have a claim in grief when she, she had lost everything?
It was only when the echoes from the row after row of houses across the street reached back to her own dilapidated house did she realized she had screamed.
Narcissa, not easily cowed, didn't bat an eye and held out her translucent hand, expectantly. She stared down at her sister's hand, in astonishment, in confusion. Did this sister think she would accept her now, that she would share in her tears and her comfort?
"Dromeda, I'm so sorry for what my husband and son have done to you."
That sentiment, as sincere as she knew it was, because she could see it in her grey sister's eyes, was unwelcome. Unwanted. But something, something happened in her soul, something that cracked it, opened the black exterior to release the pure whiteness below.
As Andromeda cried, sobbed, screamed her anger and grief, her grey sister cried with her. Andromeda really couldn't breathe now, and she gulped desperately past her sobs and cries for air, for release.
Her hand reached out, grasping for Narcissa's, reaching for something to keep her tethered to the earth. Her husband, her Teddy, was dead. He would never fix her dilapidated house, and he would never hold her while she napped in front of the fire. Her Nymphadora, the light of all her days, her haphazard, mess of a perfect daughter was dead. She would never break her great-grandmother's vase again, never fall up the stairs, or sit in her mother's kitchen talking about the mundanities of her day. They were dead. They were not breathing. They would never breathe again.
But she would. She must. To care for her daughter's son, the boy who hadn't had a chance to be a person yet.
She clung to the last remnants of her family, the blood and the chosen, and she knew, it was time to start breathing.