A/N: I don't know what I just did. Um, tell me what you think?
Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition Practice Round 1 - Ballycastle Bats
Keeper's Prompt: Dark/Light Forbidden Relationship
Words: 5,998
The first time is an accident.
Her actions are inadvisable, but she harbors no concern; Andromeda doesn't have room to be paranoid. The Death Eaters, while now freely wreaking havoc, have yet to openly attempt an infiltration of the Ministry, but that they eventually will is inevitable. She chooses not to waste her life in the meantime by being overtly scrupulous in her attention to safety. More to the point, she has adopted a highly logical view of the matter: if she dies, if any of them die, is inconsequential, not to mention incredibly likely. She isn't foolish enough to presume that any family will escape this war unscathed. Neither is she particularly concerned for herself; she has never feared Death, only the disorganization that its suddenness brings.
She despises disorganization.
In any case, she will likely be left alone in her travels tonight. Certainly, those who remember her from childhood will know of her decades-old betrayal, but unless her capture is their supreme focus, she is likely to remain reasonably safe. She is cautious, though not overly so. Diagon Alley is familiar even with the descent of darkness, and she has no wish for fear to make it appear unreasonably malevolent.
She ignores the hiss of a beckoning voice from an alley as she passes — a drunken man, no doubt, or a Muggleborn cast to the streets and reduced to begging. In the little grocery, the only shop open at this late hour, she does not speak, acknowledging the clerk's presence only to nod a thank you as she purchases the olives, a midnight snack for Nymphadora — early cravings.
On her way back to the Leaky Cauldron, at the same spot from whence the hiss issued earlier, she is waylaid.
A sharp sound escapes her as a hand, curiously warm, closes tightly over her wrist and yanks her into the alley. She follows up the noise with the beginning of a shriek, which is hastily muffled as she is tugged back against a body, her own figure half-smothered by its heavy robes.
"Morgana's ass; what do you think you're doing?" is the low mutter that escapes her captor. His breath is hot and muggy against the shell of her ear. "The hell you yelling like that for — you want to draw attention to us?" Heart sinking, she takes a moment to steel her nerves.
"Do it quickly then, please," she requests, careful to keep her voice low. She feels a slight twinge of irritation when she can't manage to stop the words from shaking. "I won't be able to keep quiet, so please, don't draw it out." She's not a fool; she knows what happens to people who get ambushed in dark alleys.
Her single regret is simple: Nymphadora won't be getting her olives tonight.
Inhaling deeply, she concentrates on leveling her mind and allowing the protective walls to fall into place. If she survives this, she will still have business to attend to. She won't have the luxury of being emotionally scarred.
To her great astonishment, however, she is shoved away from her captor almost the instant that she speaks; a high, disgruntled sound escapes the man, and she is shocked to realize that he is whining.
"Bella, I told you I didn't like games like that! It makes me feel like a right git," he complains, and in the motion of turning to face him, Andromeda freezes.
Bella.
The man has ripped off the skull-shaped mask he was wearing, and is now watching her with an injured look akin to that of a scolded puppy. She gawks at him in astonishment; he continues to look at her unhappily. For a moment, they eye each other in a strange sort of limbo, and then, suddenly, his mouth drops open, and shock filters into his eyes at the same time that recognition finds hers.
"Rodolphus?"
"Andromeda?"
For a split-second, it's obvious that he's about to curse her, and in all honesty, she can't blame him; they fight on opposite sides in a war, after all, and she's been considered a traitor since the age of sixteen.
She wonders if betrayers are born and not made.
He raises his wand, Crucio on the edge of his lips, then thinks the better of it; the situation he's facing isn't begging a curse. She looks different, he notices, better, without the Mudblood hanging on her arm like a cheap bracelet. He sees that her stiff posture is a little forced, but in the absence of the scum, she's slipped back into her natural presence; tall, haughty, and unimpressionable, though a hint of warmth — a product of her family, no doubt — mingles with the old nobility.
She's changed, that much is no secret; she's a traitor and an abomination, and there are unmistakeable cracks of light slipping through, but he sees the old Andy, too. There are glimpses of the Slytherin who would set fire to the common room and push unwary younger students down the stairs; the girl who thieved and who threatened to inflict misery when apprehended. He sees Andromeda Black, and lowers his wand back to his side.
"I thought — "
"I was her," she finishes for him. She, unlike he, has kept her wand aloft. "Understandable." For a moment, he eyes her with an indecipherable expression, and then abruptly, he turns on his heel and stalks down the alley into the darkness and out of sight. It's a long time before Andromeda can remember how to move her feet.
(The sounds of a young Bellatrix urging her to toddle the few steps to her lap is searing her brain matter until she can hear it sizzle between her ears.)
The second time is also an accident, though of a different sort than the first.
"Bombarda!"
"Stupefy!"
The property is illuminated in the blinding flashes of curse lights; red, green, white, and purple rebound off various surfaces and sail back into the panicked crowd. Many have already Disapparated, the sudden absence of the protective enchantments around the Burrow allowing anyone to invade or escape. She thinks of Voldemort with a shiver, and hopes that he won't consider this event important enough to warrant his presence.
With another inner quaver, this one more deeply rooted, she thinks of Bellatrix, and realizes that she would rather face the man her sister calls the Dark Lord.
"Reducto!"
The throng of figures in dark cloaks swells in rank until it practically spills from the tent like memory off a wand tip. Screams still echo from every direction, though there are fewer than before; either the majority of the guests have Disapparated, or else —
"Avada — "
"Sectumsempra!" Her spell cleanly cleaves off the wand hand of the Death Eater about to utter the Killing Curse. His agonized scream pierces her eardrums; she sees him fall to the ground clutching his gushing arm, the portion of his face visible beneath his mask wrought with pain, and she wonders if he's someone she once knew.
Darting backwards across the tent, she trips over a body slumped partially over a chair. She wonders less about it; there's far less curiosity in the suffering of the familiar. The fascination is more with the malevolent, perhaps an attempt to humanize, to form a clearer understanding.
She doesn't need to understand better; she grew up with them. Sometimes she wonders how it can be possible that she turned out differently. Perhaps, if she had been less proud, less angry, less desperate, she would be standing on the opposite side of the marquee with her childhood companions, donning black cloaks instead of dress robes.
Haughtiness. Desperation. Those are the names she gives whatever it was that drove her to act as she did, a mere sixteen years of age. She refuses to call it bravery; she has never been brave. Proud, yes, and perhaps they amount to the same presentation, but she has discussed this with Ted. He knows quite well that if Voldemort ever came knocking, it would not be bravery that would make her stand in front of him.
(Sometimes she wonders why the Hufflepuffs get all the credit for loyalty. She has never known anyone more loyal than a Slytherin.)
"What are you doing here Bella? You said you wouldn't come!" The cry causes her head to jerk about so swiftly that her neck lets out a sharp crack. Frantically, her eyes search the mayhem for a sign of her, anything; she will not endure a family reunion. Not today.
Then her gaze meets the eyes of the solitary Death Eater standing motionless halfway across the tent, watching her closely, his stillness making him an odd statue in the chaos. Momentarily, bewilderment flickers in his eyes beneath his mask, and they reach understanding at the same moment.
"Cruci — " she braces herself for the pain as a jet of red light sails at her from a massive blonde Death Eater in the middle of the crowd, but the anticipated agony never comes. Blinking away the surprise, she watches blue light extent in midair in front of her, deflecting the worst of the curse so that by the time it filters through to her, she feels only the brief prickling of pins and needles. Confusion makes her frown as she retaliates by blasting the blonde man off his feet. How could . . .
Almost unconsciously, her gaze strays back to the corner of the tent. Rodolphus is still watching her, his wand held aloft, a faint silver glow the only lingering evidence of his nonverbal shield charm.
With a light stinging hex to disguise her gratitude, she lunges for the suddenly present figure of her daughter, and Disapparates.
The intensity of his stare follows her long after the suffocating blackness has vanished and left them sprawled on the lawn of their Muggle neighbor's home.
They pretend the third time is a coincidence (it's not).
"It is unwise to linger in the open in these troubled times."
"I am waiting." She shows no apparent sign of surprise at his sudden presence on the street corner. This is the Muggle district, somewhere he would not ordinarily venture, but she knows that he has been surreptitiously watching her — or at least, with as much subtlety as any Death Eater can manage, which usually doesn't manage to be great. They're a rather dim lot.
"Obviously, you are. For what?"
"For a bus, nosy." Neither of them question the fact of their conversation, one that they most definitely shouldn't be having. They have no explanation, either, for why they are doing so. Perhaps it's the remnants of childhood catching up with them; they did have a number of rather flirtatious exchanges, after all, before he and Bellatrix became betrothed. She was supposed to marry his brother, but had always preferred his company to Rabastan's.
There's absolutely no reason why either of them shouldn't murder the other right here on the street in the evening sunlight, but neither of them do, and so neither of them question it. For one of them to decide against doing so would be curious enough to warrant questions, but when both do, it provides a silent and undecipherable explanation. Clearly, something is amiss, and with that knowledge, both of them are accepting.
"The Knight Bus comes when summoned; surely you know that," he says, unable to imagine what she means by loitering on a street corner in the late evening.
"Don't be daft; of course I do," she retorts. "It's a Muggle bus I'm waiting for." His eyes grow large.
"A Muggle bus?"
"I believe that's what I said."
"But — why?" is the only response he is able to formulate, entirely bewildered. The ridiculousness of the conversation is beginning to set in. Here they stand, another blood traitor Order member and the husband of Voldemort's best and most infamous lieutenant, discussing evening transportation.
"Because I like it."
"You like it!" He's parroting her words out of pure disbelief. Her cold eyes appraise him, and he is reminded chillingly of Bellatrix. With this expression on the younger woman's face, they are truly identical. He doesn't quite know how to cope with this situation; he can't imagine being in any sort of similar circumstances with his half-mad wife.
"Yes, Rod, I like it," she says firmly. The half-intentional use of the childhood nickname causes him to clamp his mouth shut with a loud clack of molars, and somehow, that's the end of his objections.
"Nymphadora shouldn't take the Knight Bus in her condition," she offers a minute later as an explanation. He plays with the handle of his wand, an old habit. The end of the wood is a little worn.
"Nymphadora?"
"My daughter." A gust of wind makes the swings in a nearby playground sway.
"Your daughter," he repeats slowly. Yes, he remembers after a minute, that's right; there was an announcement, many years ago, perhaps a year after she graduated from Hogwarts. Bellatrix burned it up on sight, though only after cackling in disgust at the choice of name. Freaky, hellish sort of modern hysteria getting into peoples' heads makes them think of such things. It's some sort of new madness, Roddy, can't you see?
Madness, indeed.
They don't bother with pretending anymore.
"Better tell your hubby to run, Andy; wouldn't want him to get interrogated by our new Senior Undersecretary, would you?" Andromeda has the audacity to snort, causing some of the patrons of the Knockturn Alley bookshop to look around in alarm. They've placed a dillusionment charm around themselves, and won't be noticed, but the pair of them shrink a little all the same. The use of the protective enchantment lends a seriousness to their strange little rendezvous beyond what either of them care to contemplate. It's been three months, now, of these accidental interactions, with no apparent goal in mind for either of them.
"Umbridge? I've always hated that woman. And don't worry, Rod; Ted will not be subjected to such ludicrous governmental schemes. I shall not allow it." He's picking decisively at his cuticles. He swears the ancient dust settled on the books around them has soaked into his pores. He can practically feel the grime settling into the cracks in his skin, and wonders at centuries of sweat and filth. The odor of musty paper nearly has him in a faint.
"You're concerned for him then, Andy?" The question earns him a slight glare; it's almost overstepping their unspoken rule. They have discussed their spouses before, but always steer resolutely clear of such topics as love and loyalty.
Truly, Andromeda feels a little reckless with Ted gone; she loves him, she does, and she's devoted to him, but they ran away together when they were sixteen. She's forty-four; a little girl no longer. It's been nearly thirty years, and in that time, her girlish fancy has faded in its childish excitement and morphed into an easy companionship. She hasn't the faintest inkling of whether she'll see him again.
She loves Ted; she has a family with him, and twenty-eight years of life built on a comfortable and fun relationship, but there is no risk-taking with him. There is no thrill of new experiences.
That isn't her excuse.
Her excuse is that she's in mourning, grieving the potential loss of a husband persecuted by the entire Wizarding world. They still come from different backgrounds, from opposite ends of the spectrum.
She's long since lost the feeling with Ted — there was once an actual thrill in their relationship, a spoonful of defiance towards the family she half-sought to escape — but buried in the middle of her mind, the shadowed corners (though not the darkest), she's still a pureblood; still a Black.
"Of course I'm concerned for him."
(What's bred in the bone will always come out in the flesh.)
Part of her wants to curse something, but she settles for a drink.
Remus is still conspicuously absent, and while she doesn't pretend to condone his behavior, she can sympathize. She can scarcely imagine what track his mind is running with a baby on the way, a baby with unpredictable genes who has just as fair a chance of carrying the curse as it has of being harmless. She wonders if he, too, has been reduced to hanging about dark and decidedly dodgy pubs in order to quiet his brain chatter. At least the people who bother her here can be generally categorized as filthy, low-life scumbags.
She finds their presence consoling, though whether because they remind her of her superiority or suggest a certain kinship, she can't be sure.
Out of curiosity, she dressed tonight much in the manner of one of them, wondering if eyes would be drawn to her as a result, or whether they would accept her as one of their own.
The former is the case, and she can't decide whether what she is feeling is satisfaction, abhorrence, or some raunchy combination of the two. Ted is sweet, and looks at her like any man would be expected to look at his wife after nearly thirty pleasant years, and she appreciates it. She loves him; she does.
She can't deny the tingle that hungry eyes bring to her skin, either, as goosebumps rise on her arms.
A familiar figure slides onto the stool beside her; she catches the scent of rum and allspice before she sees the scruffy face. Her own hair is scented with the barroom perfume of sweat and liquor and heady lust.
(Bella's shoes are tight; she feels the blisters on her ankles pop, and smiles.)
"Blood traitors without a death wish shouldn't be lurking here." His low hiss is a warning. "Such a dangerous place; such dangerous people. Dangerous times." She knocks back another tumbler of Firewhiskey without blinking. Her left hand twiddles her wand absently at her side, but it's enough to draw his gaze and cause something in those dark eyes to contract. One long finger glides along the bar-top in lengthy, purposeful strokes, leaving a single line in the dust like the path of a snail. They used to practice their spellwork by melting the creatures on the flagstones in the courtyard.
"Dangerous people, indeed." She barks at the bartender for more whiskey. Dark eyes watch the bob of her throat as she swallows, inciting a muted flame between her thighs. The sting of the whiskey dwells higher in the abdomen, and cannot be blamed. Her gaze trails over a dusty traveling cloak. His eyes are burning.
(Bella is left-handed, too.)
"This is foolish." The stairwell is cloistered with their panting. It's fortunate that the stairs are rickety, lest they be tempted to continue their actions here.
"Most things are." The snap of a shut door, the dull clunk of shoes being cast off frantic feet; a single boot remains on and is forgotten in their haste. The bed is creaky — the wall will do.
"If anyone finds out — "
"I'll be incinerated. It's likely to happen anyway; might as well enjoy this while you've got it." Quick hands grow impatient; buttons rattle and are sent rolling across the slanted floor. "I liked that blouse."
"Won't do you much good when you're incinerated, now will it?" There's a sharp gasp, a deep moan stifled with teeth digging bluntly into the junction of shoulder and neck, pulling a hiss from thin lips in response.
"Tosser."
"Traitor. You're awfully reckless for someone who claims to have married for love. Bet sex with the Mudblood's pretty tame." A low growl; a sharp nip to the earlobe.
"It takes someone reckless to marry for love, not to mention purposefully make an enemy of Slytherins."
"You are a Slytherin. Takes someone stupid, I reckon. You turned your back on your family, and your bloodlines, and your — "
"Rodolphus?"
"Bella?"
"Andy."
" . . . Andy?"
"Stop talking."
"You hold your liquor pretty well for a woman." Over the edge of the glass, she glowers so fiercely that he can't help but recoil. Her wand, though not forgotten, is tucked under the edge of the pillow case; a cigarette replaces it, dangling limply between slender fingers. Her shoulders are slumped, appearing relaxed. He remains on edge. There is still immediate danger. "Better than Malfoy, anyway," he amends, not wishing to provoke her. Unclothed, he is wary of the half-hidden wand. Her hand seems twitchy; perhaps it is his imagination.
She scoffs, a dignified sound despite the rasp of smoke-coated lungs.
"Malfoy couldn't hold a Butterbeer unless Cissy drank the other half." She doesn't mind saying Cissy's name; she'll discuss her other sister, but to name her is too familiar.
When he laughs, it's wheezy with inhaling her exhale. He's never smoked a fag in his life.
"The hell are you doing here, Andy?"
"I could ask you the same." Her naked legs are crossed, cold shoulders bare against the iron-frame headboard. He rasps out a cough.
"I'm confused."
"Isn't everyone?"
"You're her sister."
"You're her husband." There's a silence; he watches the candlelight flicker in the dip of her collarbone. A single stretch-mark mars the top of her abdomen, and he's hit with the reminder that she's a parent. The thought makes him feel strangely young. "Do you think of her?"
He blinks.
"Pardon?" Dark eyes roll, and he's reminded irresistibly of school robes and Potions classes, sassy remarks exchanged for the spine-tingling laughs of her elder, the role model she discarded much as she did the single shoe that now adorns the bedpost. Its pair remains on. Somehow, its presence makes the sight of her other foot's bare toes seem strangely obscene.
"Her. Do you think of her when we're fucking?" The last word is dark tripping from her smoke-frosted lips. The lack of viable emotion attached to the query prompts him to answer honestly. He has to distract himself from thinking of her toes. All toes are stubby, aren't they?
"Sometimes. When you make that funny little squeak. She does it too. Rather undignified, I always thought." She looks distinctly ruffled.
"I do not squeak!" He lurches forward.
"Really?" Her thighs are sticky. Fingers twist; the elicited sound is an unmistakably mouse-like.
"All right, all right!" Her eyes are hooded with something more than irritation. It squeezes a grin into his cheeks. "When else?"
"You going to take notes, is that it?" The scorching butt of the cigarette presses into his upper thigh; he yelps, but doesn't jerk away. There will be no mark left behind.
The faint smell of heated skin trickles into their noses.
"It's — I wonder. We're blood. I'm curious what we share, is all." He licks his lips contemplatively, feels the tang in the corners of his mouth.
"Your taste is somewhat the same."
"Somewhat?"
"Hers is sharper. Thicker. But did I not have thirty years' knowledge of that, I would not be able to divine a difference with my mouth alone." He pauses. "Do you think of him?"
"You think of her." His own tongue feels foreign in his mouth. He's never before noticed the sliminess of the backs of his teeth.
"You look precisely the same." The hand that was holding the cigarette has slipped downwards again. Her fingertips are slick and leave damp lines on her belly, trailing over the stretch mark.
"Fair enough."
The scar is scintillating in the lamplight.
"Ted's gone."
"You knew it would happen eventually."
"It's a fucked-up world!"
"Is it really? Or do we merely see it as such?" She moans lowly, tugging her hair. She hasn't sunk to the floor, for which he is thankful. He's spent thirty years with Bellatrix; he isn't accustomed to tears. "Andromeda — "
"You can call me Andy, you fool; I won't spontaneously combust," she snaps, and he realizes that she might not be angry at him, but the consequences of her fury are the same. "Ted never called me that, anyway; if you listened, you'd know that."
"My role isn't to listen, Andromeda," he retorts with something like a scoff that the aura in the room turns into a chuckle. He ignores her correction on purpose.
Her head snaps up; her eyes are wide with something like astonishment. There are partial tears glinting at their corners, but he can see that they're not close to falling.
"Are you laughing at me?"
"Perhaps I am." For once, she has no smooth retort. A stammer trips off her lips like a reluctant child learning to walk.
"Why?" Somehow, he finds the plaintive nature of the question irritating.
"My role isn't to listen, Andromeda," he repeats. He's gotten in her face now, forcing her to look up at him. "My role isn't to form a functioning relationship with you or make you feel validated, or, Merlin's asscrack, to love you. That was his job." She's angry at him now, and he's glad. "You didn't turn traitor for me, Andy," he reminds her. "You don't owe me any explanations, just as I don't owe you an ear for them. It isn't my job to prove to you that your betrayal was worth it. I don't need to treat you well. I have no obligations to you, just as you have none to me. This isn't a damned relationship, Andromeda; it will not do you well to treat it as such."
She's glaring at him now, horribly, and fleetingly, he wonders if she's going to curse him. He realizes that he won't particularly care if she does. She knows he's right, and hates it, and he can't blame her for it.
For a moment, she seems to waver, wand half-raised. He briefly entertains the thought of bracing himself, but before the suggestion can form into a true thought, she's already in action, blasting reductor curses at every object in the room. She clearly doesn't make a conscious effort to spare him, but she somehow avoids hitting him anyway, so that by the time she's burnt the most explosive layer of her anger away, he's standing motionless in the pile of rubble that used to be room nineteen at Knockturn Alley's inn.
Her chest is heaving. He doesn't bother to hide his ogling when his eyes drift there, nor does she pretend not to notice.
"Was it — was it . . . her?" she asks when she finds the ability to speak. "Did . . . did she . . ." Her voice is shaky now, her anger partially evaporated. She tries again, sputtering, but he sees that she can't bring herself to do it; she cannot speak her eldest sister's name, cannot bear to know if she was the one to deal her husband the death blow. She cannot bear to know if one person she once loved destroyed another.
"I don't know," he says, and he doesn't. He has a good idea of the answer, though, and he knows that she does too.
The look that she gives him is almost helpless, but at the same time, it's burning with something between fury and hatred. Perhaps it's directed at him, perhaps it's not; it makes little difference whether it is or not.
Her expression in this moment is perhaps more readable than ever before; it's clear that she feels foolish for mourning her husband before when he was merely out of sight, on the run. He can tell that she feels foolish for fearing Ted's death now that it's upon her. He wonders briefly if, should he be a casualty of this war, Bellatrix will feel the same, but then he remembers the key defining factor between the sisters: Bellatrix fears nothing; Andromeda fears much. Andromeda knows it, and is perhaps proud of the difference.
The truth is the opposite. Perhaps Bellatrix is fearless, and Andromeda afraid, but they share a trait — or perhaps a lack of one: though for an obviously separate variety of reasons, neither of them are brave.
He doesn't mind what Andromeda says; the two may have their differences, but in essence, they are the same. They are exactly the same.
(It doesn't matter; nothing changes either way.)
The destruction is wide and all-encompassing.
She finds a strange sense of poetry in the scene.
Somehow, in the chaos of the final battle's aftermath, after Andromeda has Apparated there with the reinforcements, leaving little Teddy with a Muggle neighbor; after Voldemort has fallen to the floor with the dull thud of a mortal man (anticlimactic, she scolds herself for thinking), they find each other, out of everyone else's sight. Behind the blood-stained, threadbare tapestry, their shared company is uncomfortable and horrific and sad and bittersweet all at once. She just watched one sister die, twisted madness until the very end, and the other abandon everything in the desperation of keeping her family together. She herself has just lost her own. In retrospect, she doesn't know what she was expecting to see, or even if she was expecting anything at all.
Perhaps it was this; perhaps not. She's far too muddled to tell. She only knows that as she watched Bellatrix snap out of existence — the light never left her eyes — and as she watched Narcissa struggle to find her loved ones, and as she, Andromeda, saw her baby girl and son-in-law lying still and cold on the floor, she witnessed the end of a strange, convoluted, yet undeniably incredible era; a wonderfully bittersweet end. In the beginning, there were three — Bella, wildly passionate, protective and fiercely loving of her family; Narcissa, icy and doll-like, vacant porcelain; Andromeda, caught up in visions of families born of the true love that faded to a comfortable yet girlish fancy.
In the end, everything has somehow gotten turned around; Bella, the love buried deep or perhaps entirely lost, mad, and vacant of all but obsession; Narcissa, devoted deeply to the now-most-important thing she could conceive of, family; and Andy, standing alone among thousands of the dead and living: to her right, her daughter, and to her left, her sister, the one who killed her, and somewhere else, her husband; everything that she has given up and given things up for, all of it the result of her love, and all laid to waste.
Andromeda has never been so confused in her life.
She doesn't bother to decipher how Rodolphus is feeling; perhaps it isn't important. He's surely just as bewildered as she is.
For the longest time, they don't speak; they only stand there in silence, listening to the agonizing sound of love and grief and celebration. There is hardly anything to say, anyway; they know that they can't stay together — they never truly were together in the first place. What they were or were not is of no consequence now, perhaps has never been. She has just lost a sister for at least the second time; he just lost his wife. The Ministry will be rounding up the Death Eaters soon. He's not going to go willingly; she knows that, and he knows she knows. Some things will never change.
This will be the last time they see each other; if ever he is released, they won't interact again. She might see his pictures in the newspapers, his figure emaciated by Azkaban or whatever new hellhole the reformed Ministry will eventually establish. If she's called to it, she'll speak against him at his trial. He knows all of it; doesn't blame her. Neither does she for what he will do. As he once told her, they owe each other nothing.
She finds not having an attachment to him strangely freeing; for once, she is unburdened by what was undeniably, at some points, a pursuit genuinely worth the time of her life that she devoted to it. Though it has been strange and puzzling (like so much else), a great part of her has enjoyed their strange volley of interactions. She feels nearly blissful at the realization that their acquaintance has been a free one.
Thinking of the heartache that comes with the other end of the spectrum, her soul clenches a bit, but in the end, most of what she's feeling is glad. Bittersweet has never been a more appropriate descriptor; she experienced the agonizing-yet-wonderful devastation of loving profoundly, and the liberty of enjoyment without obligation. She has found neither to be more or less of anything than the other; in their impact on her, they have been equal. For having been able to experience both, her gratitude is unquantifiable.
"So," she says, watching a group of children reunite around the edge of the tapestry.
"So," Rodolphus echoes. It's almost amusing that single syllables are what they, once so eloquent, have been reduced to. There is nothing more to say; for a while, he will attempt to evade the Aurors, and then will spend the majority of the remainder of his life in Azkaban. She will return home, bury her sister, daughter, husband, and son-in-law, and then, together with her infant grandson, settle back into living.
Life will go on for both of them, in very different ways.
She turns to look up at him, and meets his dark eyes. He is staring down at her as he has since the day they were at the Hogwarts Christmas party at the age of fourteen and he noticed that she was no longer a child. Only now, there is something more adult in his eyes, and at the same time more childish; a recognition of the incredible world they have lived through. The little boy and girl who played hide-and-seek together at parties with Narcissa and Bellatrix, with Sirius, Regulus, Rabastan, and Lucius, are so far, yet so close, a dream from an untouchable parallel universe; close enough to sink into, yet farther in concept than any arm could ever reach. They are a hundred thousand lifetimes away from the people who stand in the rubble of a world that may have finally found a way back to the beginning.
(Taking all the weight off the scales always evens out the balance.)
Long after Rodolphus has gone, she remains behind the tapestry, ready to rejoin the world, yet taking one last moment to savor the last, lingering feelings of old. When she goes back out there, she knows, everything will have changed. Later, when she lowers Bellatrix into the ground, she will feel no such nostalgia as she does now, and though it is partly bitter in its taste, she holds it in her mouth a little longer, dreading the moment that she will have to swallow the feeling whole.
It doesn't matter, realizes Andromeda; in the end, it doesn't matter whether there has been love or not, for it all comes to an end, no matter whether or not she loves.
(Though if it doesn't matter, then she figures that she might as well.)