To anybody who read the story under the same name yesterday, I apologise! I posted the wrong version like an idiot. This is what happens when you save too many drafts of the same thing to the same folder.

Chapter Information

Title: Some Even Fall To The Earth

Pairing: None yet...

Rating: T, for attempted suicide, mild swearing and substance abuse.

Quote: "When we can't dream any longer we die." ― Emma Goldman

Disclaimer: I own nothing related to Harry Potter and make no profit from this story.

Sometimes I vanish from this world. Just for a little while, I always come back. I don't know where it is I go to when I'm not here, but I know it's a frightening place – I can see it in Teddy's eyes when I come crashing back down to cold reality. They look scared, then relieved, then happy, then sad. That's a lot of emotions to go through in a split second. Perhaps he is the mad one.

No. I am not mad. I am… different. But the same. Scarred like everyone else, just a little more so and with a different way of dealing with the healing process, that's what Madam Pomfrey tells me when my non-madness lands me in the Hospital Wing.

There is only so much the Human mind can deal with before it begins to shut down, the last desperate attempt at self-preservation. My limit came the night I met my guardian angel.

4 October, 1969

He hurtled through the corridor, not stopping to apologise when he knocked over a fellow prefect on night rounds, his heart pounding painfully in his chest. The boy could hardly breathe, his body screaming desperately for him to stop but it was impossible. Professors called for the student to stop, their orders went ignored as he carried on towards her. Skidding into the stairwell for the Astronomy Tower, he began taking the stairs two at a time, clutching at the bannister for dear life as he raced higher and higher, until… there she was.

Standing up on the very edge, soaked to the bone in the pouring rain and only a footstep away from certain death, the girl stood looking lost and frightened; then she turned and gave him that look, the one that made his heart stop then begin beating so rapidly he thought it would burst.

"What… what are you doing here?" she whispered, confused and swaying slightly as she clutched onto the side. A nearly empty bottle of firewhiskey lay on the ground at his feet. "You need to leave; you're going to ruin everything!"

Theodore took one cautious step towards her, all he wanted to do was run forwards and pull her away from the sheer drop but he knew that would scare her into doing something rash. Instead, he held out his hand and spoke as calmly as he could, though his voice trembled with panic, "Come down. Please. I can help you… or … or I can find people who can. But please just come down; you don't want to do this."

"Don't tell me what I want!" she snapped.

Her gaze burned through Theodore and he knew it was hopeless before she said anything as she turned back to look out at the starry night sky.

"My goal in life was to be able to fly… properly fly, no broomsticks…"

"Please, come down…" he begged. His hair was plastered to his scalp, droplets of water ran down his face and right through his clothes.

"I want to fly," she whispered, tears glistening in her chocolate coloured eyes. A cold wind blew across, sending her wild hair blowing around her, "I want to be free. You have to leave!"

His mind went into overdrive in his panic. I don't know what to do, oh Christ, please don't jump... where the hell are the Professors when you need them? Please, please, don't... He took another step forwards, his breath coming in agonising gasps. For the life of him, he couldn't remember her given name and mentally kicked himself, he knew her sisters of course, Bellatrix and Narcissa Black, everyone knew them. She had been in his Potions class for three years damn it, why couldn't he remember her name? Not that they had ever spoken until now, Slytherins and Hufflepuffs as a rule didn't really interact much, for reasons that were obvious.

But Houses didn't matter now.

"Look, Black, I can help you with whatever it is-" he began desperately and she started to laugh, a horrible unhappy sound that filled the air and chilled him to his bones.

"You? Help me? No one can help me, least of all a mudblood Hufflepuff like you!" she replied still staring down at the drop below. Her knuckles were almost translucent in their effort to keep a hold of the wall beside her.

"I'm not leaving," Theodore replied stubbornly, taking another step forward. After six years at Hogwarts, the pureblood's insults ran off him like water off a duck's back. He knew what game she was trying to play and he was refusing to join in.

She twisted round to shoot a fierce glare at him and announced, "Well I am."

The wind whipped through him, howling loudly and causing him to squint but he still saw it happen.

"No!" he yelled and bounded forwards to try and catch her, but it was too late as she stepped off of the edge and hurtled down towards the hard earth waiting below. And for a moment, when he couldn't tear his eyes away, it really did look as if she was flying. A sob escaped his throat and he couldn't move as he watched her plummet towards her death, a death he had no way of preventing.

And then, all of a sudden, she stopped, suspended in mid-air ten feet above her goal. He gripped the wall tightly, not daring to believe his eyes as she drifted slowly downwards until she lay unconscious in the courtyard below. Wrenching himself away from the edge, he tore down the stairs, stumbling in his haste several times.

God, if you're really up there like my mother says... please...

She lay unmoving, her eyes shut and her hair splayed round her head like a halo as he reached her side and collapsed to his knees, weak with adrenaline. Hesitantly he placed a cold hand on her shoulder and shook her slightly.

"Black? Can you hear me?" he asked urgently, checking for any obvious bloodstains or broken bones jutting out. Her eyes flickered open and connected with his. There was something... off about them, like she was seeing something else while she stared at him.

"Black?" he whispered.

She opened her mouth, and let out a blood-curdling scream that carried in the wind, loud enough to send him falling off balance and, unfortunately, sprawled across her. A light in the distance began bobbing quickly towards them as the girl clawed at him, tears rolling across her cheeks into her hair as she sobbed, "Get off of me, please just leave me alone!"

Bewildered, Theodore scrambled backwards just in time to see Professor Slughorn rushing towards them brandishing his wand.

"What is going on here, Mr Tonks?" he asked, looking shocked as he hurried to the sobbing girl's side. "Miss Black? What on earth has happened to you?"

"Please..." she was still crying, "Please don't touch me."

Aghast, Slughorn looked over at Theodore who began shaking his head fervently, feeling nausea rise up as he realised what his potions professor was thinking.

"No, this ... this is definitely now what it looks like," he said desperately, "I was trying to help her!"

"Come with me to the hospital wing, this girl needs urgent medical attention," Slughorn said, his voice unsteady. "I will call Professor Dumbledore... he will decide how to deal with this."

"Professor, I swear!"

Protesting his innocence all the way to the residence of the new school matron, Madam Pomfrey, he could see his life and future slipping away from. He would surely be expelled and have his wand snapped, ending all prospects in the magical world. He could end up in Azkaban with the dementors... His palms were cold and clammy with sweat as the Headmaster arrived while the nurse fussed over her patient, who had grown quiet again. Slughorn recounted his discovery of the students to the older wizard who watched Theodore with grave eyes over his half-moon spectacles.

"Thank you, Horace. If you would be so kind as to fetch Narcissa Black and tell her Andromeda is ill," Dumbledore replied to the distressed potions master. Nodding distractedly, the rotund wizard muttered,

"Of course, of course, she will want to be made aware, I'm sure."

He hurried away, leaving a sweating and shaking Theodore with the headmaster.

"I didn't do it," he whispered, staring at the ground which was moving slightly before his eyes, "I'll swear on anything you like, I was trying to help her. She ... she fell off of the Astronomy Tower but something happened and she just stopped in the air... I saw her from the courtyard below when I was doing my rounds and I went up to tell her to go back to her dormitory... but she fell. Then I ran back down and she screamed and-"

Dumbledore raised a hand and Theodore fell silent. A gasp from behind Theodore caused him to spin round in time to see the deep purple bruises running up Andromeda's thighs that Madam Pomfrey had just uncovered as she stripped the wet clothes from the shivering girl.

"Albus... she's been..."

The nurse turned to stare at the Hufflepuff prefect who promptly vomited on the floor under the stare of the two professors and then fainted, darkness closing in on him as he collapsed heavily.

And so started the tale of Andromeda Black and Theodore Tonks.