The characters do not belong to me, they belong to JK Rowling.
Prompt: Darkness
Pairing: Andromeda and Ted
Darkness
Sometimes, Andromeda thought of her life as being divided into two sections: darkness and light.
The darkness had been her childhood. All the years spent amongst the stars of the Black family. Where being graceful was more important than being kind. Where being beautiful was more important than being sane. Where dark magic was a hobby to be dabbled in. Where judgment was to be passed on anyone without the right blood, the right wealth, the right position.
But light…that was Ted. His laugh was loud and infectious. He loved a bad joke and all of her jokes were bad, or so he said. His smile was broad and sunny. Just the sight of it was enough to warm her heart like a ray of sun on an upturned face. His love of Muggle and Wizarding literature, his need to share it. He should have been a fat old Literature professor, he told her once. His delight in magic as simple as levitating a feather.
In the beginning, Andromeda had learned so much from him. To let go of her prejudices. To laugh naturally and often. To view the world in color. She could never understand what he had seen in her, she felt as though she had nothing to offer him but darkness and cold.
"Why is darkness a bad thing, Annie?" Ted asked. "What is light without darkness?"
Then he had kissed her and kissed her and she knew that she could never go back to her world of darkness.
She had never been able to completely let go of her rigid upbringing. Andromeda's manners were stiff and formal, used to subtly cut a person down, as opposed to Ted's simple ways that were meant to put a person at ease. She often longed for the city and all its cultures, but lived quietly with Ted in the village he had grown up in, straddling the Muggle and Wizarding worlds. She had never been able to accept his Muggle religion and church, though she knew there to be an afterlife and God.
But she learned to keep a garden, where he would do all the hard work and she would do all the dirty work and together they created something beautiful. And she learned to love Muggle movies at the local cinema which was a magic she had never imagined. And she loved the family he gave her in the form of his parents and sisters.
And she loved the being they created by combining his light and her darkness: their Nymphadora. She had Ted's optimism and Andromeda's cutting wit and a spunk that was all her own. And she was theirs, their little girl.
But now Andromeda lay in her empty bed, curled around his pillow, with no hope of seeing him again.
There would be a third section to her life...
This one, she feared, would be lived in darkness.