( breathe me )

part two
hold me

Peter is friendly, but not exactly the brightest bulb in the box, nor is he the most interesting. Ted watches the boy's face move from abject terror to fascination (when he shows him a Chocolate Frog card - boy must be Muggle-born) and then to a sort of hunger when they find the right compartment and two black-haired boys are already deeply entertained by something they've discovered in the overhead compartment, a sandy-haired boy is reading in the corner, and a red-haired girl stares out the window.

Only the girl seems to notice when they walk in - "There you are, Peter! I'd wondered if the food person ate you. Did you find anything?" She glances sideways at the other boys. The book-reader looks up and smiles wanly but the others continue ignoring them, whispering to each other. Peter seems totally shocked that he's being spoken to by a real girl (Ted is reminded forcefully and painfully of two days before, in the Owl shop, talking to Andromeda Black), so Ted answers.

"You can't buy food yet, the trolley isn't ready. In about... thirty minutes or so, a witch will come by with a food trolley and you can buy from her. Besides, they'll feed you at the school."

The girl flushes slightly, "I didn't think they wouldn't. It's just, I woke up late this morning and didn't have time for breakfast. Lily," She says, holding out her hand, "Lily Evans. I'm a first year."

Ted grins. He loves it when girls blush at him. And she's cute, even if she's six years younger. "I couldn't tell. Ted Tonks, sixth year." He shakes her hand firmly, and considers sweeping her off her feet, just for fun, but decides not to. After all, she is six years younger than him. "Who are your friends?"

"They're not really my friends. I don't know them very well - "

And then one of the dark-haired boys cuts in. The moment he turns around, Ted sees the resemblance between him and Andromeda Black - this must be the cousin that blonde was looking for. "Oh, come on, Lils, we're gonna be the best friends you've ever had," The redhead looks affronted, but the boy doesn't react. "I can see it now, one day, you wait. You'll be our partner-in-crime, I'll bet."

She doesn't appear to have any idea how to react, so Ted saves her. "Sirius Black, I presume?" The boy jumps, surprised that some random sixth-year knows who he is.

"Uh... Yeah, how do you know that?"

"Your cousin was looking for you earlier. Very... friendly, you know. Sat and talked with us for hours, told us your whole life story."

Sirius looks totally panicked and caught off-guard. "Really? I... are you serious?"

"Not in the slightest. Your cousin is a monumental bitch. I offered to send you her way if I found you and she wouldn't even speak to me for longer than to say you had dark hair and she thought she saw you."

He relaxes. "You talked to Narcissa, then. Andromeda would have accepted the help."

"Really? I didn't get that impression when I met her a few days ago."

Sirius looks confused, "No, Andromeda's nice, and she likes meeting new people. She took me to Diagon Alley yesterday, and we sat and talked to Florean for almost an hour. Andy's a lot of fun. Narcissa's the mean one."

Now Ted is the one caught off-guard. "Are we talking about the same person? Andromeda Black has a reputation of being the coldest girl in Hogwarts. Everyone's afraid of her because she can cut anyone down from top of the world to zero in under three syllables."

Sirius tells him that he has no idea what he's talking about. Maybe she acts different around her family members? But that doesn't make sense, she ripped her sister to shreds in the owl store. Ted tells Sirius as much, and then he looks thoughtful.

"Wait, how many days ago?" Two, Ted tells him, two days (and one hour and fifteen minutes, but he doesn't say that part aloud). Sirius's face clears. "Well, that explains it. Andy and my aunt got into a huge fight that morning. She was probably in a bad mood, that's all."

"A fight? What about?" The word "stalker" suddenly enters Ted's mind, and he ignores it. Sirius shifts a little.

"I dunno. Family stuff. It's all boring, anyway. You wanna see what we found in the overhead rack?"

Lily, behind Sirius, shakes her head soundly. The other boy is still standing on the seat, oblivious, reaching into the rack. The book-reader glances at him for long enough to shrug, and Peter still looks frightened. "Sorry, but I've got to get back to my own compartment. Been nice talking to you. Tell your cousin I said hi."

"Sure thing!"

As he leaves, Lily shouts out, "It was nice meeting you, Ted!"

Heh.

--

Weird, he thinks, later that night. Strange that Sirius went on about how friendly and nice Andromeda was, yet she all-but called him an idiot.

Even weirder, he thinks, even later that night, that he can't stop thinking about the way her lips curved into that disdainful half-smirk.

He can't get her out of his head, and it's starting to really grate on his nerves. She was beautiful, sure, but completely elitist and cruel and no matter what her cousin said, she was - and undoubtedly still is - a total bitch. He shrugs it off.

It takes a few near-sleepless nights, but he forgets about her before the first week of school is over (and thank the stars, too, because his friends were beginning to notice and would surely start teasing him about falling in love with Andromeda Black like a complete moron. Because it would be totally physical, and maybe based a little bit off that tired took he caught in her eyes when she thought he wasn't there, and you can't fall in love with a perception of some really pretty girl, right?)

(Right?)

He shakes her out of his mind, and spends three weeks blissfully unaware of her presence. And then he runs into her in the library. Literally.

He's carrying a huge stack of books (he and all of his friends have been frantically studying for the second Transfiguration test - which is looking to be an absolute horror, turning tea kettles into a certain animal McGonagall assigns you - and he's offered to take all the books they've hoarded and deemed useless back to the shelves. Partly because he's nice and partly because it makes him look awfully good and intellectual in the eyes of that really sexy brunette in the corner.) He isn't really watching where he's going because, one, the books have completely obscured his forward vision, and two, his peripheral is occupied with that brunette and that come-hither look she's sending him.

Naturally, he feels like a fool the moment he feels the force and hears the cry of pain and exclamation and then there are books all over the floor, three particularly heavy ones on his foot and digging into his ankle like all the fires of Hades, and he's on the ground, nursing a severely wounded backside and crushed pride. "Ugh," he mumbles, "What did I..." Andromeda Black is opposite him, frantically pulling books off her foot, face white with pain. "Oh, shit," slips out of his mouth before he can stop it, and then he tries to help her, narrowly avoiding shoving his crotch into the corner of a huge tome on Animal Magnetism (Lucas is not the smartest person in the world).

"Get off, go away, stop trying to help me," she shrieks, and he jumps back. She frees her foot, and even from here, he can see that it's swelling and twisted oddly. She inhales sharply and clutches her ankle, then turns to him, fire burning in her eyes. "What were you doing? Why weren't you looking where you were going?"

He's totally frozen for three seconds, horrified, waiting for the mocking laughter of all the gods and several friends (he thinks he can hear the snickers already), and then the anger kicks in.

Ted has always had a rather bad temper, especially when caught off-guard or embarrassed.

"Why wasn't I looking where I was going? Do you not see these books? The last time I checked, they aren't invisible. I can't see through solid paper and huge transfiguration texts. When you learn how, please, do tell me."

She looks affronted, and Ted mentally curses. She stares at him for a moment, and then her head tilts to the right, fire still glinting in her face. The library, though usually quiet, is now totally silent. He can feel the eyes of every person here, the bated breath, waiting for the axe to fall, as it surely will.

And then it does. "Pardon me, Tonks," she begins softly, and it takes all of his willpower not to wince and supplicate himself at her feet. "But I was under the impression that if you had simply stopped staring at the Ravenclaw on the other side of the room and looked slightly to the left, you would have seen me. But if that's too much for your simple mind to handle, then I am truly sorry for knocking your books over."

Ouch. But it's not as bad as he had expected, not really. And then she continues, loud enough for the whole room to hear, and he thinks he's going to die.

"Or perhaps you were simply fascinated by your tomes on," she glances at the pile surrounding them, and lights upon another one of Lucas's choices, on the anatomy of female hedgehogs, and Ted curses under his breath, "woman hedgehogs. Looking for a potential wife, are we? Well, don't let me get in your way. I'm sure you can find something of value among the pages. Watch out for prickles in the bedsheets."

He can't take this laying down. He can't. He bites the inside of his cheek and searches for some miraculous answer, some really witty reply.

All that comes out is, "I do not want to sleep with hedgehogs."

From behind him, Morgan snorts loudly and barely manages to turn it into a violent coughing fit - Ted makes a mental note to kill him. Andromeda's expression doesn't change. She continues to make perfect (and incredibly intimidating) eye contact, and then all-but shouts, "And my ankle hurts very badly right now, but no, don't anyone bother to help me to the infirmary."

Three boys leap forward and help her to her feet, glaring at Ted and helping her limp out of the library. Ted sits there, surrounded by books, foot throbbing and humiliated, trying to process the fact that she not only called him out on the way he was checking out that brunette in the corner, but then accused him of bestiality and called him an idiot, all in the space of under two minutes.

Andromeda: 5 points (one added for being able to cut him down while in serious pain, and one added as an afterthought, because of the owl store incident)

Ted: -3,564 points (for sheer idiocy, lack of foresight, and an uncontrollable tongue)

State of Ted's dignity: Two or three kicked-around, tortured, dirty shreds.

"Yeah, she knows you, all right." Morgan says, laughing uncontrollably. He can hear Lucas's hysterical, barely-controlled shrieks from the table, where he's sitting with his head on his arms.

"Shut the hell up and get me out of this. I think I broke my foot."

--

The infirmary matron (an ancient, half-deaf woman named Celia Renard, who posses an absolute loathing for all things young, child-shaped, and sickly, with a tangled mass of thin gray hair that sticks out about three inches from her head and has a bald spot the size of Jupiter on the back of it and the most bat-shit eyes Ted thinks he's ever seen) forces him to stay the night, because he did one heck of a number on his foot and there's no sense in trying to walk back to his dorms without being sure he won't re-break it.

Exactly two hours and forty minutes into his prison sentence (as all infirmary stays are called), he thinks he's going to throw himself from the window if someone else doesn't get sick or hurt themselves right this very instant.

He's totally alone in the Infirmary, besides Madam Renard, playing her little "oozing presence" game, which mostly entails glaring at any living creature from a shadowy corner, and Andromeda Black, also forced to stay the night.

He thinks he'd rather be trapped in close quarters with a mass of diseased flobberworms who are hell-bent on snogging him.

Andromeda is sitting idly in her bed, ignoring the world around her, reading a book. Ted, whose friends do not love him and apparently have no concept of the fact that places other than the Kitchen or Common Room exist, have not visited or brought him anything to do while sitting in the cold bed with over-starched sheets and rather sharp smell of what might be ammonia.

After three and half hours of staring at the ceiling and counting the cracks in the stone (eighteen going left to right, twenty-four up and down, and seven diagonal), he loses his patience.

"Look, Andromeda," She doesn't move at all or give any recognition that there's someone else in the room. "I'm sorry about the books, okay? It was an accident."

Silence.

"I just got mad when you yelled at me, but I can kind of see why, because you were hurt. I should have been nicer."

No reply.

"Can we be friends?"

Nothing.

"Please answer me."

Not even a sigh.

"Oh, for the love of Merlin. At least tell me you have my horrible guts and wish I would go die."

"I hate your horrible guts and wish you would go die."

This response takes him completely off-guard (he's noticed that she does this to him a lot) and he stares blankly at her for several long, awkward seconds. Nonplussed, she turns a page in her book and continues reading.

"I said I was sorry. What more do you want?"

For a moment, she doesn't say anything. And then, in one sudden move, she snaps her book shut and turns to him. "Sorry is meaningless, Tonks," she spits, "I don't appreciate anyone speaking to me in the tone you used, especially not after causing me pain, and especially not from a Hufflepuff Mudblood who thinks torturing my Head of House is an enjoyable activity." He recoils, horrified and... hurt, actually. Like a physical pain somewhere in his chest. "And to answer your question, no, we cannot be friends."

There's a long, drawn out silence in which she picks her book up and continues reading. Finally, he regains the power of speech, but not control.

"Pardon me for being alive, then. Your cousin told me you were the nice one, and I had hoped to give you a second chance after our meeting in the owl store. But I don't like being spoken to that way any more than you do, regardless of whose blood runs in my veins or where I come from." She doesn't move, doesn't reply, just stares at the same spot on the page, and he can't stop himself. "You were born into money, obviously, and blood purity, and you think that somehow makes you better than the rest of us. I can earn money myself, thank you, and I don't have to rely on my father's work and I won't have to rely on my spouse in the future because I have personal pride.

"As for purity of blood, I do believe that I had eight OWLs, three of which were Outstanding, which is more than enough to get me a well-paying, good job anywhere I choose to go. It would appear that my heritage has nothing to do with my performance at this school. I'm sorry you don't care about other people and I'm sorry I ran into you and I'm sorry I thought to believe your cousin and give you the benefit of the doubt. He was wrong, I guess. You're just as bad as the rest of those Slytherin idiots who think they rule the universe. And I can't, for the life of me, think of why I thought you'd be different."

With that, he wrenches the sheets over his head and turns his back to her. She doesn't say anything in response.

He just cut down the Queen of Belittlement herself. He ought to feel really accomplished and proud of himself.

All he feels is sick.

--

He wakes up the next morning, alone, with a note on the bedside table on a scrap of parchment, with several lines scratched out and unreadable before finally, at the bottom -

I've acted horribly toward you, and for that, I am sorry. I could make excuses but I don't believe any of them are really good enough or could fully explain the situation, especially to someone who knows little about the politics of a Pureblood dynasty. But I can offer apologies and beg forgiveness.

And then, written as an afterthought and scratched out but still mostly readable - Count yourself lucky for your heritage, Ted. I wish everyday that I

But the rest is opaque, black ink.
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(A/N: This chapter's longer, due to a mistake in editing by yours truly. Almost a thousand words longer, but who's counting? These updates are probably going to come fast because I've already got the chapters written and I'm impatient. Review if you like.)