Fragments
She's got unwashed blonde hair that glimmers with oil and the fairest skin Andromeda has ever seen—not the sickly milky shade that Narcissa's always takes when she's coming down with a flu, but nonetheless the sort of pale that turns blotchy, bumpy scarlet at the slightest knock of the wrist or scratch of the forehead. Her eyes are cobalt blue and round and wide and sheltered, blinking out at a world that seems to startle her every time she catches hold of it, and her robes can't quite conceal her full breasts and hourglass figure, and her eyes aren't far apart, but the bridge of her nose is wide enough to sometimes make them sometimes look it, an effect that catches an instant of Andromeda's regard every time she sees her. "Eight and a half," declares Fabian, ever the chauvinist, as he catches her looking across the clearing, "but from the looks of it, you'd rate her an eleven."
She snaps out of her reverie. "Nine, and no higher," Andromeda says frostily. Dorcas Meadowes may be a beauty, but there are gentlemen to court and balls to attend and blood traitors to shun, and there's not enough time or space left in the shuffle to waste away after a dumb blonde who wound up on the wrong side of the Sorting in first year.
Professor Kettleburn is lecturing on unicorns today, but only pieces of the lesson catch Andromeda's attention. They are among the physically strongest of magical creatures yet rarely demonstrate their strength: it is as though self-defense is unnecessary to them, as though by merit of their purity alone none but wizardkind would consider crossing them. A beast looks at a unicorn and sees untouchable virtue. A wizard looks at a unicorn and sees the selling price of its horn.
They take to a woman's touch, unicorns, but when Dorcas Meadowes raises a tentative hand to its back, it bucks her off so violently that Madam Pomfrey has to take a look.
xxxx
Narcissa arrives at the Room of Requirement with a swollen face and gashes along her arms and neck. "Jesus, Cissy, I knew Bella was starting to lose it, but when you said that she was dangerous—"
"Forget what I said," says Narcissa crisply. She gets like this when she's frightened, crisp and defensive and haughtier than even Mother when confronted with a Mudblood, and no approach Andromeda has ever taken has caused one of her sister's fronts to waver. "Bella's only flaw is taking her loyalty to the Dark Lord's mission a little too far, if you can even call that a flaw. She was right, anyhow. To take steps towards joining the cause and try to back out would be—"
"Disloyal? Ignoble? Cowardly? Cissy, you're a Slytherin, for God's sake, speak sense. When Lucius finds out about this—"
"Lucius knows," Narcissa interrupts. "He may not like her methods, but he understands her perspective."
Andromeda stops cold, lowers her wand. Narcissa's robes are smoking and stained, but the skin glows pink and stretches taut when tested. "He's emotionally abusive," she says shortly. "It's abuse to allow this to go on, and it's abuse on Bella's part to hurt you in the first place, not that either of us had any reason not to have seen this coming, she's been getting more and more unhinged ever since—"
"She's not unhinged; she's devoted," says Narcissa, stiffening. "You ought not to talk about your own sister like that, Meda."
"She's no sister of mine if she'd stoop to doing this to you just to win the Dark Lord one more supporter," Andromeda says.
"It's nothing that can't be fixed with a half-dozen Healing Charms and a Concealment on the black eye."
"It's crossing a line." Without thinking, she hikes up the sleeves of her own robes and rubs her forearms over and over and over, sickened that after two minutes of spellwork, Narcissa's could look just as healthy, just as naïve.
xxxx
Fabian Prewett is an insufferable Gryffindor and an incredibly unskilled Potioneer, and if Andromeda gave a damn about her course marks anymore, she'd have intervened in his butchered attempt to brew Amortentia an hour ago. "We should get married," she says idly, picking her nails. It always maddens Mother when she comes home for the holidays with her nails picked away.
The suggestion doesn't faze Fabian at all, and he reminds her, "Meda, we've had this discussion before. Just because I'd be a convenient excuse for you to break ties with Bellatrix and hide in the closet doesn't mean I'm interested in being somebody's gay beard for the rest of my life. You know I'd do a lot for you, but I'm not going to—"
"Then I'll find somebody else. Ted Tonks from Ravenclaw's fancied me for years, I could get him to do it, and Aunt Walburga would be even more inclined to burn me off the family tapestry if I were to run off with a Mudblood than a Prewett, I'll bet."
"You'd do that to him? Use him like that?"
Andromeda meets his stare impassively, sweeps her books back in her bag as the bell rings. "Isn't that what Blacks are good for? Exploiting others to save their own skins?"
xxxx
"You're beautiful," Andromeda tells her when the sex is over and is baffled when Dorcas begins to weep.
It takes her a little while to grasp what Dorcas means by transgender—female in every sense of the term but her own self-identification. "I'm not a freak," she swears so fiercely that Andromeda isn't sure whether Dorcas herself believes it. "I'm not a freak, Andromeda, I'm just—I'm a boy."
"Meda."
"What?"
"Call me Meda."
But Dorcas is that much lovelier underneath the robes, her skin sullied with dirt and the wear-and-tear of scratched skin, so unlike the appearances the Blacks always uphold. Andromeda fishes a pair of scissors from her trunk and gently cuts Dorcas's long, hated locks away—peppering her neck with kisses, keeping one arm looped around her waist—and she showers her in unnecessary stories, a one-night stand of counsel sought and faith entrusted. "Cissy says that if I marry Ted and Walburga cuts me off, she'll cut me off, too," she murmurs, voice half muffled by the curve of Dorcas's shoulder. "All those nights when Bella bloody maimed her and I was the one who cleaned her up, and she's just—letting her keep doing it, letting me leave. She doesn't like to admit it, but she's terrified of Bella, Cissy is, terrified to stay, and she isn't in deep enough that she can't yet get out, but if she stays much longer…"
"The same is true of you and Ted, isn't it?" asks Dorcas as she surveys herself in the mirror, running a hand absently through the haircut, getting used to the lightness. "That it's not too late to get out?"
"It's different with me and Ted, I'm not trapped with him," she says, but even as she does, she can't quite bring herself to believe it.
Her memory flashes to a late night with Bella and the Lestrange boy and a couple of Muggles, and she can still see the charred flesh, hear the shrieks and the quiet drip of blood, feel the pain in her chest and the way she staggered backwards, but it's all fragments now, a handful of scenes without any logical links. All Andromeda really remembers is the desperate need to get out, get away; sitting, later, under the stream in the shower feeling so unclean; and the way Cissy found her crying and they promised that Bella would never be able to reach either of them again, no, not ever again, not after this, and now—