Disclaimer: Don't own Harry Potter, don't even wish I did because I can guarantee it is in much better hands with Ms. Rowling.
A/N: Sorry for this. The plot kind of got away from me and I don't mean that in a good "it got more complex" way, I mean that in a "this thing has no plot" way. So sorry. Also, title taken from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.
Dedication: To Ehwies, for being fabulous. Sorry it took so long, I was out of town and expecting to be back earlier but my family changed plans and so I'm submitting this at like an hour till the deadline. Hope you had a good holiday and happy new year. Love you bunches!
Time Yet
Bellatrix's funeral does not heal her sisters, but it is a start.
Andromeda goes to her sister's funeral.
It's held late on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and it's only attendants are her and Narcissa and a short, balding official who recites mechanical, untrue words over dampening earth.
She and Narcissa stand on opposite sides of the grave and they do not speak. At the end of the service Narcissa looks up and gives Andromeda a nod.
It is a start.
Bellatrix was a dark child, haughty, the warrior of her name even as a small child. She was small and fierce and their traditional mother never knew quite what to make of her.
Andromeda was in the middle, average and ordinary and almost simple-minded in comparison to her sisters. If Bellatrix was all black and Narcissa was white, Andromeda was only grey, caught in between.
Narcissa was beautiful, otherworldly in her perfection even at her birth. Her sisters stood hovering around her mother's bed, her father off in his office somewhere, long since grown bored of the stream of daughters where he had wanted sons. Bellatrix was bored by the squalling mass of infant, unaffected by her beauty, but Andromeda stared into those piercing blue eyes and vowed to protect her.
The day Andromeda leaves her family home, she severs all contact with her parents and her extended family (barring Sirius and Uncle Alphard, who separately send her letters congratulating her on her triumph over the "Noble and Most Ancient House of Black"; they both put it in quotes like that and the part of her that is still a Black, that will always be a Black, automatically searching out weaknesses, does not let that escape her notice and files that information away. The Black family has always used sarcasm as a shield.). She does not stop speaking to Bellatrix though.
She and Bella exchange scathing letters almost every day. Each morning her and Ted's owl brings the post and there is almost always a letter or more often a howler awaiting her from her sister containing her usual drivel on the evil of associating with muggles and muggleborns and, in the later years, going on and on about her Dark Lord and the rightness of his goals. So she begins each day with her sister's voice even if it is angry and distant. It is a pointless exchange and no changes are made to either her or Bella's views, but they continue it incessantly for years, and when she has Nymphadora and even Bella's insults stop coming, she cries.
She sends Narcissa a card each year on her birthday. It's always returned, unopened the next day.
Narcissa is the one to reach out after the funeral. It is suprising as she has always been the haughtiest. Up-turned nose and spoiled attitude resultant from her place as youngest and inarguably most beautiful Black child.
But she does. She sends a generic card offering her condolences on the death of her daughter (her Dora, and it still burns, still aches to think of that bumbling mess of pink hair and charming smile and goodness is gone, extinguished and all that's left of her is the tiny bundle she now holds, who looks too much like Dora as a baby for her to be able to look him in the eye when she tries to soothe him).
Under it, in the neat script that is entirely Black, entirely Narcissa, she writes the name of a muggle tea shop and a time.
She signs it Cissy.
Cissy is the one she failed to save. Bella was always beyond persuasion, to proud and stubborn to listen to anything that could be classified as disagreement. But with Cissy, she might have had a chance and that hurts more then she would like to admit.
She goes to the tea shop and meets her sister there. It is stiff, uncomfortable. They speak in halting sentences on the weather and Narcissa asks stiltedly after Teddy.
Andromeda does not want to admit it, she is not a quitter afterall, just as proud and Black as her sisters even if she hides it better, but she thinks it might be too late for her and Narcissa.
Then, in a voice so quiet as to almost not be heard, Narcissa whispers, "Sorry Andy." She looks at the table pointedly. "Sorry about your husband."
And then she continues on as if nothing has happened and Andromeda allows herself to hope.
Bellatrix's death is not an immediate fix, it does not immediately bring back together two sisters who have not spoken in years, whose feelings for each other are a complicated mess of love and guilt and anger and bitterness.
The first time Narcissa holds Teddy, a part of Andromeda wants to reach out and grab him from her, pluck him from her arms and keep him safe, but Narcissa looks down at him and smiles, murmurs, "He's beautiful." And Teddy giggles in her arms.
They start having weekly tea at Andromeda's house. Draco comes too sometimes, and Andy gets to meet her nephew and get to know him. Andromeda invites Harry one day and then Molly Weasley to distract her from her grief and then people just start to come by and one day she and Narcissa are sitting in armchairs by the fire with their friends chatting beside them and Teddy in Cissy's arms and Andromeda begins to feel that hole inside her that first ripped when she left the house and grew when Ted and Dora and Remus passed, begin to heal.
She's not better yet, but this is a pretty good start and Andromeda has time.