The words are as gentle as it is possible to make the news, but they tear through Andromeda as sure as Kingsley had stabbed her with knives.
"Andromeda, I'm so sorry. I don't know how to say this... Remus and Tonks are dead."
Her response is irrational and instinctive. "No they're not. No...no they're not. I saw them a few hours ago.
"I wish they weren't Andromeda, believe me, I wish... But is there anything I can do for you?"
"No - No, I think - I think I need to be alone right now, thank you."
As soon as Kingsley Shacklebolt shuts the door behind him, Andromeda sinks down with her back against it, rests her head on her knees and finally lets herself grieve.
She cries for Ted, long since dead and beyond her reach the moment he ran away, and she wishes for the years they might have had, watching their grandson grow together. Her grandson, Teddy Remus Lupin. She cries for him, orphaned, and never to know his parents. She cries for Nymphadora, her beautiful daughter, so stubborn, so fiercely loyal, so very Hufflepuff. And she cries for Remus, too, who had somehow found a place in her heart as he had in Nymphadora's. Most of all, she cries for herself. She has never felt more alone in her entire life, not even when she turned her back on her family for good. At least she had Ted then, and now he's been taken from her, just like everything else she loved.
Some part of her rebels against the truth, refuses to believe the words that have been replaying themselves over and over in her head. Remus and Tonks are dead. Remus and Tonks are dead. Dead. Gone. Never coming back. "No," she sobs, "No, it's not possible. Not them. Please, not them!" She'd seen them less than 24 hours ago, they'd been alive then, she'd seen them and spoken to them and now they were gone and the world just wasn't right anymore. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. All wrong. The world is wrong and it feels as though it will never be right again.
The pain is unbearable and all she can do is rock back and forth and cry, until eventually she runs out of sounds. For the most extreme emotions, no sound is enough. No sound could possibly express the utter emptiness inside her, the hole that her loss has carved. Her thoughts are a mess, her whole being is a storm of hurt and nothing else exists, nothing else matters, nothing. This pain seems like it will never end, but it will. She recognises that whilst she may not be truly happy ever again, she will not always be this grief stricken. And yet, how can she ever smile again?
Teddy's childish wail eventually penetrates the fog her mind has become, and she remembers that there is someone who needs her, here. He is hungry, and it is her job to feed him. One thing at a time. First, wipe your eyes, she thinks. Next, stand up, slowly, not too fast. Breathe deeply, in and out. This is what her life will consist of now, baby steps as she figures out how to adjust to her own brokenness.
Her weakness, as she sees it, is frustrating. She's a Black, in breeding if not in nature, and Black's do not crumble so easily. Then again, she doubts they've ever felt this intensely, either. Fighting her feelings is futile, and she learns to be patient and gracious with the fragility of her own recovery, difficult as it might be. It's the only thing she can do.
The war may be over, but Andromeda has another battle to face, one that sometimes seems greater than any that has come before. She, just like everyone else in the Wizarding world, has to rise from the ruins this war has left behind and move forward, pain and all. For as long as she lives, Andromeda will remember the sound of Teddy's piercing cry, and remember it fondly as the one thing that distracted her, if only temporarily, from her own misery. Her grandson, and that one insistent cry, gave her a reason to keep going.