Charlie went to see her a few weeks after the funeral, her daughter's funeral, not his brother's. Those were the only two he'd had the time or the heart to attend, in spite of having decided to leave Romania—at least for a while—to tend to his family. He would think of her occasionally and wonder how she was faring, but then something would happen, another visitor offering condolences, or his mother asking him to perform some chore and the thought would slip from his mind. The real trouble was that he wasn't actually doing much for his family, simply because there wasn't much to do. They sat around, talking about things, occasionally skirting close to the issue of Fred, or the way that George seemed like an empty shell, but there wasn't much more to do other than shake your head at the senselessness of the whole thing.

Worse yet was when people came by to observe that he'd died a good death, died valiantly, bravely, died fighting, died laughing, and wasn't that the way he'd want to go? Which was really stupid because Charlie was quite sure that Fred wouldn't have wanted to go at all. So he'd nod politely and make some inane remark while his parents dealt with it; they were much better at this sort of thing, anyway. But in trying to get those sorts of thoughts out of his head, occasionally his mind would turn back to the woman at Tonks' funeral. She'd borne little resemblance to the attractive, elegant, somewhat intimidating woman who always put spice cake on the tea tray whenever he visited Tonks over the summer simply because she remembered how much he'd enjoyed it the first time they met.

As a kid, he remembered wondering how she and Tonks could be related—they were so very different. But this woman looked quite a bit like Tonks had the when he'd run into her two years before, pale and wan and defeated, though she certainly was clutching the bundle of blankets to her breast with a great deal of strength.

And there, Charlie later came to realize, was the resemblance: the courage to go on when it seemed impossible.

So, one day, when a particularly annoying Ministry sycophant came by with trite words about his father's loyal service over the years, Fred's sacrifice, and Merlin knew what else, Charlie had had enough. He found himself at Dora's front door, wishing he'd thought of what he was going to say and wishing he'd stopped long enough to put on a nicer shirt.

Andromeda opened the door herself, looking at him in confusion.

"Hullo, Mrs. Tonks, I'm sorry to bother you but…I just didn't get the chance to say hello at the…er-"

Great, he thought. Bring up the funeral, why don't you? Do the very thing you were trying to escape from. "How are you?" he asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

Andromeda stared at him incredulously, and he wondered how many times he or another family member had been asked that, with the asker probably hoping to hear that they were okay, thanks for asking, hadn't had their hearts ripped out of their chests, actually—allowing the asker to walk away and feel as if they'd done something good.

The thing was, though—it was a sincere question, no matter how absurd the circumstances, and perhaps Andromeda sensed this, because she answered. "I'm—not well at all, actually. But I'm alive, and you're here, so why don't you come in for tea? I might even be able to dig up a bit of that spice cake you were so fond of, Charlie."

"I didn't mean to impose…" he started, but he stopped himself, suspecting the invitation was at least as sincere as his question had been.

Andromeda led him to the kitchen, offering him a seat on a stool at the counter, which only reinforced his suspicions. The kitchen was for family where as the sitting room was for guests, he knew. As Tonks' friend, he had probably been somewhere in between.

She leaned against the spotless worktop as she waited for the pot to boil, looking him up and down and laughing under her breath. "It's hard for me to imagine you grown up, Charlie. I see you as that quiet little boy with the bottomless stomach and the cowlick."

Charlie reached back to pat down the back of his head in an involuntary gesture and grinned at her accurate assessment. "Yeah, I could eat, I'll give you that. Dunno where it all went, actually. I sure as hell didn't have that growth spurt everyone promised me I'd get."

Andromeda's eyebrow arched as her eyes darted to his arms and chest, and once again, Charlie wished he'd thought to put on a decent shirt. This one was worn and snug, and hardly appropriate for condolence calls, though he didn't want to call what he was doing here that. "Yeah, I suppose I grew the other way, didn't I?" he said, instantly regretting it. He was pants at polite conversation, really, but she simply smiled in response, her subsequent exhalation of breath a poor imitation of the hearty laughter he remembered.

And anyway, the only thing they had in common was Dora, and she was a tough subject to bring up, wasn't she? "So, I heard there was a baby."

This time, Andromeda's smile reached her eyes and Charlie realized that Dora had inherited her mother's eyes, too. "Yes, Teddy. He's napping now, so you've caught me at a good time. I was just cleaning."

Charlie had noticed the cleanliness of the house, even more so than when he had visited before. It had struck him as odd, considering that she was (essentially) a single parent with an infant. He'd wondered where she found the time. It was certainly a contrast to the Burrow, but he suspected that it was a matter of principles with Andromeda. Her world might crash around her shoulders, but cleanliness was a battle she would win, even if it came (as seemed apparent in the circles under her eyes and the color of her skin) at the cost of her precious moments of rest.

He shook his head. "Hard for me to imagine Dora as someone's mum. I was just getting used to imagining her as someone's wife." And it was true—he'd seen her at the wedding, done the obligatory congratulations and tortured her by telling her new husband (a decent enough bloke, apparently, if a bit tweedy) silly stories about Dora's adventures at school—but in reality he'd found the whole thing surreal. It was strange enough for Bill to be getting married, but he wasn't quite ready for Tonks to be a grown-up.

Fuck it, he wasn't ready for her to be dead, and he realized how stupid he must have sounded, referring to her in the present tense. He felt an urge to apologize, for his blunder, for Andromeda's losses, but it seemed a bit redundant. What the hell was he doing here, anyway?

"I was thinking," he said. "I mean, I'm sure you've got people coming here all the time, offering sympathy, offering casseroles, saying something like, 'if you ever need anything' though they know you're not really going to accept, right? It doesn't really mean anything, does it? The thing is, though—I'm feeling strangled in that house. I'm used to doing something all the time, and all they ever do is sit, and worse yet fuss over me. What we really need is a game of Quidditch or something to help us get the mad out of our systems, but that would be…well sort of disrespectful, maybe. So I was thinking—I mean, hell, I'm probably going to bollix this up and not say the right thing, but you'll have to bear in mind that I don't do as well with people as I do with animals. The way I see it, though, you're taking care of this baby and you're probably tired and sad and your husband is gone, and I was hoping—I don't know—maybe there was something you were putting off, like the roof was leaking or the fence needed repairing, or you need wood chopped up. I'm sick of feeling bloody useless, you know? Even if you just needed to take a nap, or a shower, and not have to be listening for the baby with one ear. I wasn't here when Dora needed a friend two years ago—my mum told me about it later—maybe I can do something for her now. I just…how the hell can she be dead? I just don't get it, you know?

Charlie clenched his jaw and chanced a look at her. Her hand had halted on its way to the teapot and her eyes were suspiciously shiny.

"You don't have to…" she started, but he stopped her.

"Please. I'm going mental, I've got to do something or I'm kill someone."

"Oh. Well…" she said, clearly struggling. "I think…come to think of it, I don't know if I got a proper shower today. Or yesterday for that matter. And of course you had several brothers, so I'm sure you'd know how to take care of him if he woke up?"

Charlie nodded.

"And then, if you really want to, I don't suppose I'd object to having the wood chopped and brought in. I haven't had a proper fire in ages; not since Remus was here."

She left the room some moments later, and after a time, Charlie heard the water running somewhere in the back of the house. He made himself comfortable in the kitchen, listening for the chime of that sensor Dora's husband had reportedly come up with to let them know if the baby was stirring. He ate the biscuits that Andromeda had set out after apologizing for the lack of spice cake. Afterwards, he wandered around the house for a bit, glancing over the old photographs of Dora and Ted. He hadn't known Tonks' dad nearly as well as he had her mother, but they'd got along all right once Ted realized that Charlie didn't have designs on his daughter.

He was expecting the baby to wake up any minute now, so he went to use the toilet, washing his hands afterwards. It was then that he noticed that the faucet wouldn't shut off completely no matter how far he turned it. This was the sort of thing he'd meant to do, so he crawled under the sink to turn off the valve beneath. Loosening the fixture with a spell, he took the faucet apart and repaired the gasket. Once he put it back together, the drip was gone, but he'd also noticed that there was a damp patch in the cabinet under the sink, meaning there was probably a leak there, too.

Grateful for a useful task, he was so wrapped up in what he was doing that he nearly crashed his head into the pipe above him when Andromeda came into the room.

"You certainly don't waste any time," she observed.

"Almost finished," he said in the general direction of her feet.

When he emerged, he noticed that her hair was slightly damp and combed away from her face. Her color had improved under the hot water, her face was pink and freshly scrubbed and the effect had taken years off her face. This was more like the woman who had tsked over Dora's hair whilst patting it affectionately at the same time.

"Teddy seems to be sleeping longer than usual," she remarked. "But I appreciate it. I never get to really enjoy a shower any more. Every little noise I hear…I used to hold off until Ted got home when Dora was little, she used to get into such mischief."

Charlie smiled. "That she did."

He turned on the faucet to demonstrate the success of his endeavor, and she tried unsuccessfully to brush at the dark, rusty stain on his shirt with a towel, finally saying, "I can't send you home to your mother like that, dear. Let me at least wash it for you."

Charlie was in no mood to rush home, so he agreed, getting ready to yank off the shirt unselfconsciously. Andromeda stopped him. "No, let me get you something to wear in the meantime. I don't think you'll quite fit anything of Remus' but I might be able to dig up something of Ted's."

When she disappeared, Charlie looked out the window in search of the woodpile, and when she returned with a crisp, pale blue shirt, he set it aside. "Just gonna get it dirty chopping wood. Maybe later, right? Might as well get on with it."

She nodded in response, and he spent the next thirty minutes happily engrossed in physical labor. It really had been just the thing to work out his frustration, and the pile of firewood was oddly satisfying to look at. Once he had it stacked by the back door, he returned to the living room, halfway through the act of tearing his damp shirt off when he noticed Andromeda on the sofa, a book opened on her lap and an extremely vivid infant doing his best to tear at the pages. Andromeda was staring at him, open-mouthed, and he figured she was worried about him tracking mud on her clean floors. "I'll just…let me clean up a bit and change shirts, I'll bring this one back to you next time."

"Keep it," she said, and he had to strain a bit to hear her. "No one's in any hurry to get it back, and it—it matches your eyes anyway. It matched Ted's too, though he never got the chance to wear it. I suppose what I mean is that it's better it goes to you than sitting around here. But you'd probably think it was a bit old-fashioned."

"No," Charlie replied, wondering when he'd ever heard her say so much at once. "It's just the sort of thing Mum wishes I'd wear to Sunday dinner."

Andromeda rolled her eyes a bit and laughed, which didn't make a lot of sense to Charlie, but he was a bit embarrassed to be standing there all sweaty and filthy when she managed to make even a spit-covered jumper look elegant. Although he suspected it was probably cashmere or silk or some such posh thing.

He felt better when he returned, not quite her equal, but not a rough laborer any more, and it hit him what it was that had changed between them. All of a sudden, he'd stopped thinking of her as his friend's mother and started thinking of her as a regular person, but when he did that, at least after she'd washed away some of the exhaustion in her face, it must've hit him that she was in a class far beyond him. Charlie had never believed in all that class rubbish, but when someone carried themselves with natural grace and confidence, it could be bloody well intimidating.

He wanted to just leave and give her her privacy, but the baby in her lap caught his attention, and he felt the need to at least introduce himself. After all, he did plan on going back, and perhaps the tyke would respond better to a relative stranger taking him from his crib on some future occasion if he looked vaguely familiar.

"Hullo mate," he said, squatting down on his haunches and offering up a finger for grabbing purposes.

"You look like your mum, I think," he said. "The shape of your face, anyway."

"He's got Remus' eyes," Andromeda added. "And Ted's smile."

Charlie wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, she might have taken comfort in knowing that bits of them were living on, but on the other hand, the constant reminders would have to be painful. And then he wondered what he was doing, here, thinking he of all people had an obligation to help her through something unendurable.

Maybe it was just that he thought someoneshould. He didn't know why she was coping alone right now. Maybe she'd pushed away everyone because of pride or a desire for independence. Maybe the scope of her tragedy was too much for people to deal with, they didn't know what to say to make it better. Maybe the facts that her husband was Muggle born and her son-in-law was a werewolf made her something less of a sympathetic figure. After all, there were still those in the Ministry who felt that someone—even a war hero—was less worthy of honor for having married and made a baby with a dark creature.

He determined then and there to help her whether she liked it or not. "So, er, I was thinking that maybe one of these days if you'd like to get away for a few hours, I'd come and hang out with Teddy."

"I don't think-"

He shushed her. "Tonks would have definitely taken advantage of me, if she was still around. I've not stopped being her friend just because she's dead, right? And besides, when I first got here, you looked like hell. I've seen that look before on Mum. It can't have been easy taking care of seven of us, especially the little ones. I know sometimes my dad would send her off for a few hours to shop or have her hair done or who knows what—maybe even sleep on a park bench, and she'd come back a different person. More patient, definitely. So it's better for him, too, right?"

"I suppose you're right," she conceded. "Well…Tuesday would be lovely, if you're free."

"I'll be back," he promised, touching the baby's bright hair affectionately. Unable to resist the impulse, he stroked Andromeda's cheek lightly afterward. She flinched at the touch, but he tried not to take it personally. It had been stepping over the line, he supposed, but he was certain it had been an innocent gesture on his end.

Murmuring an apology, he got up to leave. "You might want to think about what I said, too. About doing things around the house, I mean. I don't mean to imply that you can't do it yourself, but if you don't have to…"

Andromeda followed him to the door, and just before she closed it, he caught her touching her cheek where his hand had been. Probably can't wait to wash her face, he thought, even though he knew it was probably an unjust assessment. She wasn't a snob, even if she'd been brought up as one. Maybe she'd just got used to not being touched. Or maybe she was sick of being touched because she always had a baby in her arms.

Anyway, it probably had been inappropriate and it sure as hell wasn't something he was going to do again. She'd smelled really nice, though.