Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
Posting schedule: I am posting the first two chapters of In Which the Princess Rescues the Dragon at the end of November 2009. Chapters will be posted weekly thereafter.
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The Burrow is crowded at breakfast. Molly is a dab hand at housekeeping charms of all kinds, but Andromeda feels impelled as a guest to pitch in with prep, since the gathering includes nearly all of the Weasley children, with the addition of herself, Teddy, Harry, Hermione, and Harry's school friends Luna and Dean, who have been staying at Shell Cottage. Charlie Weasley has been staying on as a favor to Bill, some business to do with Gringotts and retrieving a dragon. Andromeda isn't sure she heard that right, but it's hard to make out much of anything in the clamor that is a meal at the Burrow.
Molly is in her glory, since she loves a full house, and the war is over—well, except for this last bit with the werewolves, which she's sure is an isolated incident. It will be no time before the Aurors have that sorted and life can return to normal. Andromeda looks up at the clock over the kitchen sink to see that none of the hands point at Mortal Peril, which is the chief reason for Molly's elation.
To Andromeda's astonishment, Molly and Arthur appear to be in the midst of a second honeymoon. She makes eyes at him at the breakfast table and talks about their elopement during the First War with Voldemort.
The other day, Andromeda was sitting in the yard feeding the chickens, when she saw them sneak into Arthur's shed, the one where he does his puttering with Muggle things, and emerge about an hour later looking flushed and ruffled. Snogging like school kids in there, no doubt.
Luna looked up and said, "Oh, they're in love." Dean, who was standing by watching them, looked flustered. Luna has been showing Dean how to feed the chickens, and collect their eggs, as well as other chores to do with the rearing of chickens. He's a Muggle-born city boy, a Londoner, and his only previous dealings with chickens and eggs were in their perfected form as breakfast or dinner. They're an odd pair, she with her pale skin and wide blue eyes and long flaxen hair, he tall and gangly with dark skin and short hair the texture of lambswool. When they're not doing farm chores, they trot off together somewhere with sketchbooks.
Molly told her that they've gotten to be quite good friends while staying at Shell Cottage with Bill and Fleur. Ron and Hermione enlarged on that theme: they were recovering from their imprisonment in the cellar of Malfoy Manor, in Luna's case, a good four months. Hermione tells her that Fleur is an absolute genius at healing spells, not to mention the gentle art of feeding-up; both of her patients were well enough by May to acquit themselves with honor at the Battle of Hogwarts. Luna, Hermione and Ginny between the three of them took on Bellatrix and held her at bay until Molly stepped in and dueled her to the death.
Score one for the homebodies, Andromeda thought. Not to mention the mother tigers. Molly isn't to be underestimated if you touch her children. That protectiveness goes both ways, of course. Nymphadora and Andromeda had the misfortune to hear of Ted's death on the clandestine Wizarding Wireless program 'Potterwatch,' and that was the moment that she knew that her daughter would be off to battle as soon as she was delivered of her child.
Watching Molly and Arthur is hard, because she keeps thinking of what she and Ted would have been doing in their place. Ted would have been talking over all of the little dramas to be seen at the ceremonies and dances and home life that had ensued in the short weeks since the war. Ted loved a good gossip while he was tinkering in the yard, or in bed with her after Nymphadora was asleep. People underestimated him because he looked like an ordinary bloke with Mugglish habits (Lily Evans had told her a bit sniffily, lower-class Mugglish habits), but he was one of the most astute political observers she's ever met, and in the wizarding world, the line between personal drama and political maneuvering is so thin as to be nonexistent. That's how they had fallen in together at Hogwarts, with him asking her to explain this or that odd wizarding custom. She remembers the first time she looked at the rumpled, sleepy-looking Hufflepuff boy with the shaggy fair hair and realized that he was actually quite fanciable. The rumpled look put her in mind of a bed just vacated after lovemaking.
Which she wasn't supposed to know about at seventeen, but when your baby sister is carrying on with her all-but-official fiancé under your nose in the Slytherin common room, it's hard to miss. Later, she recalled to Ted that Lucius Malfoy managed to look icy and disdainful even with his girlfriend's hand up his robes. More things she wished she hadn't walked in on. Even twenty years later, it still gave her a little shiver of revulsion, because she'd never liked Lucius and it was oddly repellent to think of her sister doing that with him. Ted laughed, and said something about Lucky getting lucky, yet again, in spite of himself, and he wasn't surprised that the git didn't even look properly appreciative when the Princess was bringing him off, since he probably figured he was entitled to that along with worship in a more general sense. Then Ted gave her a big warm kiss and a squeeze on the bum and said that he, on the other hand, was more than appreciative…
She and Ted had to sneak around, since they were in different Houses and she already knew that the match would be far from approved. On the other hand, her mother approved of Lucius, rather excessively in fact, and was happy to turn a blind eye to him and Narcissa having long unsupervised conversations in the little room off the ballroom, or taking long walks—or long broom rides. (Andromeda still can't believe her mother didn't know the current Hogwarts translation of that locution.) Not that it mattered from the point of legal propriety, because the marriage contract was signed before they were out of Hogwarts, in fact in Narcissa's fourth year. How they managed that one with the Ministry, given that both parties were minors, had much to do with Druella Black and Abraxas Malfoy being of the same mind on the question and having more than enough pull in the correct quarters. Questions were not asked when it came to an alliance between two such ancient and respectable Pureblood lines.
Which brings her back again to the note folded in the pocket of her robes. Cissy and Lucius in Azkaban. Not a picture it's easy to imagine, given how soigné and supercilious the two of them have always been. Interned under the state of emergency, it said in the Prophet. Along with Luna's father Xenophilius, it appears. The note didn't say anything about the expectation of a reply, but she can't help thinking that there ought to be something she should say, if nothing else to acknowledge that yes, she does remember that she has a sister. Bellatrix, of course, hadn't been her sister these last twenty years and more, and seems to have become more inhuman with the years—not that twelve years in Azkaban with the Dementors helped her case, of course.
She remembers the grave and courteous nod that Neville Longbottom gave her on the platform at the Order of Merlin awards ceremony, notwithstanding she looks just like the sister who tortured his parents into insanity. Some people can tell the difference between her and Bella, at least. And now, quite fortunately, Bella is dead. If it were anyone else, she'd feel guilty at the coldness of the thought, but it's more a matter of a leaden worry being lifted from her soul after three years of nearly constant apprehension. Bella and her Dark Lord, both of them gone in the same day, thank Merlin. The warmth of her feeling toward her late sister was not increased by learning that Bella had been given orders to "prune the family tree," and had gone forth quite deliberately to do just that. It's not clear who Ted's killer was, but multiple witnesses attest to Bellatrix Lestrange having killed both Nymphadora Tonks and Remus Lupin. Bella would have killed Teddy, too, if she could have gotten her hands on him.
Well, now she and Teddy are safe, or that's what everyone is saying.
Except for the extrajudicial score-settling, which seems to have set in within a week or two of the Battle of Hogwarts. Not that it's being covered in the Prophet, of course—that rag's always been dead useless. Ted used to say you'd get as much sense from the Daily Mail, and that Rita Skeeter could go to work for them with only the slightest of Muggle retrofits. That was hilariously funny, of course, given that Rita prides herself on her impeccable Pureblood pedigree.
No, she heard about the Hogwarts situation from Ron and Hermione, who tumbled in through the Floo rather later than expected, the day that Hermione was to have been at Hogwarts talking with the Headmistress about her academic timeline. Apparently there had been three killings in Hogsmeade alone, and an unsuccessful murder attempt in Hogwarts itself, involving a gang of kids from Hufflepuff House. Hermione had been late to meet Ron at the Three Broomsticks; he'd been worried sick, and then it turned out she'd been at the Hogwarts hospital wing with Neville Longbottom and the would-be lynching victim. They'd apparently rescued him, administered first aid, and then waited for Madam Pomfrey to come back from Hogsmeade.
As she patched it together from Ron and Hermione's conversation, Pomfrey had been coming out of the apothecary in Hogsmeade when she was hustled to the scene of the triple assault in the High Street. She had been unable to save the victims, three seventh-year students from Slytherin House. They'd been hit with a Dark curse that produced propagating razor-sharp cuts, successively cutting deeper and deeper into the body, and they died of massive blood loss. Hermione remembered all three names: Pansy Parkinson, Greg Goyle, and Blaise Zabini.
Ron was venomous about how Pansy Parkinson had deserved what she got, since she'd been ready to turn Harry over to Voldemort. Hermione was protesting that Pansy had let her mouth run away with her. She was scared, she said, and she was a stupid cow, always had been, but that didn't mean that she deserved to be sliced to bloody shreds in the Hogsmeade High Street.
But what had Ron in an absolute lather was that Hermione had been late to meet him, producing all sorts of nightmarish worries, because she'd been attending to the fourth victim, whom she ought to have left to his fate. Andromeda is a little taken aback at Ron's ferocity—he's usually hot-tempered but not vicious—until he says, "That bloody little inbred git would have left us to it, and the world's better rid of him. He sold us out twice just that night at Hogwarts, or maybe you don't remember. I suppose you wanted to make it a magical three times that Draco bloody Malfoy owes us his worthless life."
So it was her nephew, Cissy's boy, that the Hufflepuff kids had tried to kill. She waited until Ron went storming off to organize himself some dinner, because they had arrived well after the usual meal time. Then she asked Hermione about it. Ron's girlfriend could be depended on for calm and deliberation—funny, because she was Muggle-born and ought to have had more animus about the Clone than Ron did. Apparently, the boy had taunted Ron since first year, using all the things his father had said about Arthur Weasley, but all he could manage in Hermione's case was the epithet 'mudblood' and stupid remarks about her hair and her teeth, which Hermione shrugged off as generic.
Hermione explained that the children in the gang had been orphaned by the Death Eaters and they had set on Draco as the last seventh-year Slytherin standing, even though, by Neville's testimony, he hadn't been particularly active in the Carrows' torture regime during the last year at Hogwarts. His erstwhile pals, Crabbe and Goyle, had made a name for themselves with their sadism, and she supposed that the kids assumed that it had been under Draco's orders. Hermione's personal theory is that Draco's problem is that he's far too visible and where he hasn't made enemies by his own actions, he's inherited those of his now-dead friends. Goyle was killed that day in Hogsmeade. She's not sure if it was coincidence that both attacks happened on the same day; she actually suspects so, since the Hogwarts attack was in a very different style—a mob throwing miscellaneous hexes as well as Muggle-style physical violence, rather than a single unknown assailant who threw a Dark curse and then melted back into the Hogsmeade crowds.
Cissy would be worried sick if she knew. Andromeda still remembers the few times she's seen her sister with Draco, glimpses in Diagon Alley for the most part, and the boy always seemed younger than his age, whining and pulling on his mother's robes. The mob assault on an only son is nothing to write to an Azkaban prisoner about, even absent the Dementors. She realizes another thought later that somewhere in there she's made up her mind to write to Cissy, even though she's not sure what to say. The war is over, she supposes.
She goes up to her cubbyhole under the eaves to write the letter, which she entrusts to Ron's little owl Pigwidgeon. He only has to fly as far as London; Owl Post to Azkaban proceeds from there to the prison by a special relay through the Ministry censors. Cissy should have her letter within a day.
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