The Goblin, the Snitch, and the Werewolf
Summary: Harry considers the future of the House of Potter. Andromeda considers the past of the House of Black. Teddy is where they collide. It isn't always pretty. Immediately post-Deathly Hallows (SPOILERS!).
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling; various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books; and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made (well, lots of money is being made, but none by me) and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
To Harry's immense relief, it took Ron and Hermione only a few days to remember how to speak to each other without blushing, stammering, or otherwise triggering his desire to flee. Just after their Order of Merlin ceremony (which Harry spent under his invisibility cloak so as to guarantee that the crowd's attention remained where it belonged), they informed him that they now considered themselves boyfriend and girlfriend. Harry refrained, with some effort, from making a reply along the lines of "no fucking kidding," and suddenly their three-way dynamic was as good as it had ever been.
To make things even better, Ginny seemed to have let the incident at Colin's funeral slide into the past, and she began actively seeking out Harry's company. One morning, she came into the Burrow's living room, sat beside Harry, and took his hand in hers. Hermione smiled, which was to be expected, but so did Ron, which was a major improvement over the last several times he'd seen them together.
Unfortunately, Hermione decided to interrupt the blissful moment with a rather bossy declaration. "We have to decide what we're going to do about school. Now."
"We dropped out of school over a year ago. Did you forget?" asked Ron, apparently unable to stop himself.
"Do we have to talk about this now?" added Harry, who would much rather have focused all of his attention of the feel of Ginny's hand in his own. If they were going to have a serious discussion, he at least wanted it to be about Remus, but he wasn't sure how to bring up that particular topic.
"Yes," Hermione told Harry. "And no," she added to Ron. "But we've done what we dropped out to do, so we need to decide whether to drop back in."
"Will they take us if we want to?" Harry thought it was a reasonable question, but the other three looked to be swallowing their laughter.
Ginny squeezed his hand more tightly, and any offense Harry might have been inclined to take at the swallowed snickers vanished. "I hate to break it to you," said Ginny, "but a few people at Hogwarts might still remember who you are, and they might be willing to let you come back there to try for your NEWTs."
"But everyone who we'd want to give us jobs knows who we are, too, and they won't care if we ever made it through NEWT level," Ron added.
Harry shook his head. The idea of going back to school was bizarre, but the idea not having to follow the rules everyone else followed because seventeen years ago his mother had thrown herself between him and Voldemort was repulsive. "We have to go back," he told them. "At least, I have to. You're supposed to have your NEWTs to apply to be an auror, so I'm going to have them."
"That's what I thought, too," said Hermione. "Well, not about being an auror, but I can't imagine not taking my last year of lessons just because there was an… interruption I couldn't do anything about."
"I wonder if they'll let you be Head Girl?" Ron wondered aloud. "We all know you would have got it if we'd stayed."
Hermione looked rather pleased for a moment, but corrected Ron. "Actually, I wouldn't have been let in last year, Head Girl or any other way. They weren't taking Mudbloods."
"Don't call yourself that!" snapped Harry, Ron, and Ginny in unison.
"Why not?" Hermione rolled her eyes and the other three glared. Hermione didn't bother to continue the battle. It wasn't the one she'd intended to fight. "Ron?" she asked.
"Hermione?" he answered.
"School. Harry and I said yes. What do you say?"
Ron groaned. "What's wrong with taking honorary NEWTs? We learned loads last year, without getting detention every five minutes for not being in bed on time or dripping water in the corridors when we came in from outside."
There was a sparkle in the back of Hermione's eyes that Harry had long ago learned was cause for concern. "So if we could take the lessons and still be treated like adults, you would do it?"
"I guess."
"Good! It's settled, then!" Hermione smiled brightly at all of them.
Harry and Ron looked at each other to assure themselves that they had both missed something. "What's settled?" Harry asked Hermione at last.
"I was talking to Professor McGonagall the other day, and she told me that the students in our position have three options. We can enroll like regular seventh years, we can stay away like anyone else over seventeen, or we can audit the classes. That means we see the professors' lesson plans ahead of time, and we only come to class if it's something we haven't covered. So if you think you could do as well as you want on your Defense Against the Dark Arts NEWT without ever going to another lesson, you don't have to go to any lessons at all. We wouldn't be living in the dormitories, so that's no curfew," she smiled at Ron. "And no extra responsibilities, like prefects or Quidditch—we'd spend the time we needed studying, and the rest would be our own, since we wouldn't really be students."
Harry was surprised that Hermione, who had always been rather severe about what she saw as his and Ron's lackadaisical attitude to their studies, would advocate such a thing. "This is really what you want?" he asked her.
Hesitance flickered across her face. "I don't know, but we can't just pretend last year didn't happen. This seems like the best compromise."
Harry nodded. As much as Hogwarts had been the first and only place he had really felt at home, pretending to be a regular student after his recent experiences turned his stomach. "If we aren't living in the dormitories, where will we be living? Do we get flats?"
"Brilliant!" Ron said. "That would be fun. We could go live in Hogsmeade, or Diagon Alley like George. Would we live together?"
A few months ago, the obvious answer would have been yes, but Harry had to admit that living with Ron and Hermione under the current circumstances could get decidedly awkward. Hermione seemed to catch his thought, because she smiled again. "Don't worry, Harry, that won't be a problem."
"What?" Ron wanted to know.
"We won't snog in front of him if we're all living together."
"Oh. Right." Ron lowered his voice. "And no way would Mum let the two of us," he gestured at himself and Hermione, "live together without you there, too." Everyone seemed to accept this as true; that they were all legally adults in no way meant that Mrs. Weasley had no say over their living arrangements. "Still, eighteen and getting my first flat! I don't think anyone we know from our year at school has one yet."
"Sirius got one the day he turned seventeen," Harry said, although he wasn't sure why.
"Sirius was escaping his nutter family, that doesn't count," Ginny said.
Something jolted inside Harry. Both Ginny's voice and Sirius' name had that effect on him, for very different reasons. A rush that was simultaneously warm and cold covered his as he remembered one of the first times he and Ginny had had a proper conversation. It had been his fifth year at school, Ginny's fourth, and Harry had been desperate to find a way to speak to Sirius about the images he had seen in Snape's Pensieve that had led to the end of their Occlumency lessons. He had never shared this story in its entirety with his friends. Now that Snape was dead, and now that Harry knew why he had tried to hide that particular memory from him, he found that he wanted to do so.
He shifted his hand in Ginny's so that their fingers were laced together and turned to look directly at her. "Remember the year Umbridge was at Hogwarts and I wanted to talk to Sirius? You got Fred and George to let me use their swamp and everything as a distraction?"
Ginny nodded, her eyes bright, presumably at the mention of Fred.
"You never asked me why I wanted to talk to him, you just fixed it so I could. I always appreciated that."
"Am I going to find out why now?" she asked, making an obvious effort to sound impish, although her curiosity appeared to be genuine.
"If you want."
"I always wanted to know."
"When Snape was teaching me Occlumency, he'd take memories out of his head and put them in a Pensieve to stop me coming across them," Harry began. "So one day he wasn't there, but the Pensieve was, and—"
"You didn't!" interrupted Hermione, scandalized.
"Of course he did," said Ron and Ginny, who despite recent revelations about Snape's true loyalties seemed to find Snape-abuse a fine thing to recount on a lovely summer morning.
"I did. And what I saw was—well, they had just taken their OWLs. Sirius said he was bored, so my dad started calling Snape names, disarmed him, cast scourgify on his mouth, and then levicorpus, with Sirius and Wormtail laughing, and Remus didn't like it but it's not like he told them to stop."
"That's disgusting."
"Snape probably deserved it. Would've done the same thing if—"
"Anyway," Harry continued, "My mum showed up and made them stop. She hated my dad, said she'd rather go out with the giant squid than him. Then Snape called her a Mudblood, so she left and let them go back to it. When Snape came back and caught me, he said he'd never teach me Occlumency again. I didn't care about that, because I hated it. But I was driving myself crazy—crazier than usual— wondering if my dad was— if maybe he'd forced my mum into marrying him, what my dad and Sirius were really like— so I had to talk to Sirius, really talk to him."
"What did he say?"
"Well, once I got done basically accusing Sirius of being a bully and a thug, he said a lot of people were idiots when they were fifteen and he wasn't proud of what he'd done, and that my mum didn't really hate my dad and that she wanted to go out with him once he stopped hexing people for the fun of it. Remus was there too, he kind of defended Sirius, Sirius kind of defended him, they both talked about how great my dad was."
"You told us Sirius told you to keep up the Occlumency lessons," said Hermione with a hint of reprimand.
"He said that too. I didn't want to tell you what I saw, I guess I thought it was Snape's business and I was ashamed of feeling the way I did about my dad and Sirius. But when Snape died, I realized the memory wasn't so awful to him because of what my dad and Sirius did, it was because he called my mum a Mudblood and that made her give up on him. So it's okay to say now, and," again he turned to face Ginny properly, "to thank you for giving me a chance to hear Sirius and Remus say what they said. I needed that more than I ever needed more lessons with Snape."
"You're welcome," said Ginny in a voice rather thicker than usual, and Harry was glad for the umpteenth time that Ginny was rarely weepy.
"Well," said Ron, a little too loudly, which let Harry know that Hermione actually was crying and was pretending she wasn't, "Want to go to Diagon Alley and see what the flats are like? I need owl treats for Pigwidgeon, anyway."
Harry looked down. It had been almost a year since he'd had an owl who needed treats, but sometimes Hedwig's absence struck him suddenly, just as Sirius' or Dumbledore's or Fred's did.
"You could get a new pet," Ginny suggested, reading his thoughts. "It's been a year."
"Maybe I'll get a toad," said Harry, since Neville Longbottom's toad, Trevor, was about the farthest thing from Hedwig he could imagine. "No more owls. There are post owls to carry mail."
The four of them stood up to get themselves ready for the trip. It was understood that Ginny would come along even though she would be finishing her final year at Hogwarts the proper way, and that made something deep inside Harry very happy.
George stepped out of his bedroom and stopped Harry as he ran down the stairs from Ron's room with his money and his cloak. "Is it okay with you if I go over to Grimmauld Place today?" he asked without preamble. "I need fresh doxy venom, and there might be some doxies there, now that it's been abandoned for a while again."
"All right with me," Harry agreed. "But you'd have to Apparate to right outside the front door, and the defenses Mad-Eye set up for Snape are still working."
Ginny appeared beside Harry and George so suddenly that Harry wondered if she had Apparated. "We'll go with you," she told George, as she caught Harry's eye. "They're snogging again. I might rethink that sharing a flat thing if I were you, Harry."
Considering what had happened the last time he'd been out with George, Harry decided that it was lucky that Ginny had decided to accompany him and agreed to the change in destination without complaint.
When Ron and Hermione followed them to Grimmauld Place not ten minutes later, loudly protesting that they had not been doing anything to justify Ginny's accusation, Harry realized that it hadn't been luck at all—Ginny had been actively looking out for George. Luckily, George had vanished to the attic by then and could not witness Ginny's silent confirmation that she was following George, not fleeing Ron and Hermione.
Hermione had brought along the beaded bag that had served her, Harry, and Ron so well during the previous year, so they used this opportunity return Phineas Nigellus' portrait to its proper place.
"Am I to believe that you have at last deigned to return me to the house of my forefathers?"
In spite of himself, Harry jumped a little. He was used to the subjects of portraits wandering into and out of their frames by now, but Phineas Nigellus knew how to make an entrance, as much as a painted object could.
"Personally, I'd rather live inside that bag than here," Ron muttered, and Ginny giggled appreciatively.
"Exactly the kind of uninteresting, unoriginal remark I have regrettably come to expect from you," sighed Phineas Nigellus. "Is it too much to hope for that you will remove this unsightly stain as well?" He gestured to the blindfold Hermione had placed over his eyes many months before.
"Sorry, Professor Black," said Hermione, who was usually courteous to the painting, although it liked her no better for this. "It was necessary. Finite obscuro!" The blindfold vanished.
Phineas Nigellus used his newly uncovered eyes to glower at all of them. "Dare I ask what you intend to do with my house?"
"It's Harry's house," said Ron and Ginny together, presumably to aggravate Phineas Nigellus further.
"Unfortunately," Harry added for much the same reason. "Do you happen to know anyone in the market for a house full of screaming, disgusting, bigoted decorations we can't get off the walls? Anyone who isn't in Azkaban or on the way there, that is?"
"Insolent!" snarled Phineas Nigellus, and he vanished from his frame.
"You know, that's a good point," said Ron, sinking onto the bed he had used when he and Harry had shared this room a lifetime ago. "What are you going to do with this place?"
"If I thought it would burn, I'd burn it. I can't imagine anyone wanting to live here. Well, I can, but anyone who would want to probably does belong in Azkaban."
"You definitely can't burn stuff off the walls," Ron said. "You weren't here the day Sirius tried it. Fred and George thought it was hilarious, until Sirius' mother's portrait went—well, maybe when we're aurors we can bring the people we catch through here to prove what you turn into if you go that way. If that wouldn't scare them straight, nothing would."
Hermione gave a small squeal and her eyes went very round. Harry and Ron turned to look at her. "That's brilliant," she told Ron. "You're brilliant."
"Why?" asked Ron, who nonetheless looked very pleased at the compliment.
"That's what Harry should do with this house. He should have it made into a museum. Not just to warn people about what Dark magic looks like, but this was Headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix. People will want to see that. Half the reason You-Know-Who got so powerful this last time was because no one would believe the signs, hardly anyone even knew what to look for. This could teach—students from Hogwarts, or even schools in other countries, could come and see why it's wrong to put emphasis on purity of blood, why it's wrong to butcher house-elves, what you should do when you see a wizard starting to go bad. We could make records of what happened while it's still fresh in everyone's mind, so that a hundred years from now no one's forgotten what happens if you let someone like You-Know-Who get a foothold. We'll put the real story out there so the history isn't being written by fools like Rita Skeeter."
Her eyes were blazing now as she looked Harry full in the face. "You should ask Kingsley about it next time you see him."
"I don't know," said Harry, who was reluctant to speak to the Minister of Magic about anything, least of all his real estate quandaries.
"Then I will, if it's all right with you? Please? It's not like you'd want to live here, and it's not like you'd need the money from selling it if you could. It's like— well, like your parents' house in Godric's Hollow," she said with a bit of apology. "Or the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. You see the destruction next to life going on, and it reminds you of what can happen—constant vigilance, and all."
"I'll think about it," said Harry, more to quiet Hermione than for any other reason. He wondered if he should ask what the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was, but decided against it. To cover for his confusion, he glanced at Fabian Prewett's watch. "How long have we been here, anyway?" Time had a way of dragging in Grimmauld Place.
"Long enough that we should check on George," said Ginny. She nodded at Ron. "You go, he's getting suspicious of me."
Ron obeyed, and Harry led Ginny and Hermione into what had once been Sirius' room, vaguely thinking that Ginny might be amused by the teenage Sirius' nerve in decorating his bedroom as he had. They stayed there for a while, as it was easily the most pleasant room in the house, but Ron did not return.
Inwardly irritated at himself for not doing more than a brief check that the house was secure when they'd first arrived, Harry drew his wand and moved toward the stairs that led to the attic. Ginny and Hermione, their wands also drawn, followed.
What they found was no cause for concern after all. Ron and George were seated atop small desks in an attic schoolroom that must have overseen the education of generations of young Blacks who could not be allowed to attend primary school with their inferiors. Another desk held a pile of immobilized pixies, as well as the remains of some other creatures Harry did not want to contemplate as ingredients in the latest product from Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes.
"…Making rude words appear on the blackboard behind the professor when he's facing the class, I don't know," Ron was saying.
"There might actually be a market for that. You need to smart with small things a first year can buy so they'll come back when they're older and have a few more galleons."
"How's it going?" Harry interrupted loudly as he and the girls drew closer to Ron and George. In the aftermath of Voldemort's downfall, it was important to allow your approach to be heard; a hex hurt just as much if it came from a startled friend as if it came from a surprised Death Eater.
"Ronniekins might have more of a head for mischief making than we ever gave him credit for," said George. Even though George automatically used the we which Harry understood to encompass Fred, he seemed more relaxed and happy than Harry had seen him since before the Battle of Hogwarts.
Ron eagerly launched into a description of some of the new products George was considering for the store.
Harry half-listened as he looked around the schoolroom. Like the rest of the house, it had been overturned more than once and had otherwise fallen into disrepair. There were stacks of outdated textbooks both on and off the shelves; the walls and ceiling were covered with French and Latin phrases, most of them centering around the purity of blood, from what Harry could translate. One wall was covered with photographs of the Black children who had studied there.
Harry got to his feet to seek out the most recent of the photographs. He doubted that even up here anything had survived Mrs. Black's systematic purge of anything related to Sirius from her home, but he was rewarded when his eyes fell on the last photograph in the last row.
There were five children in the picture, and despite their almost inhuman solemnity, he recognized them all. The eldest was Bellatrix Lestrange, surely almost ready to leave for Hogwarts. Next to her was Narcissa Malfoy, the only pale face in a sea of darkness, and on Narcissa's other side was Andromeda Tonks, looking even more like Bellatrix than usual when they were both expressionless. Crouched in front of them were two small boys in whose babyish features Harry could make out, if he squinted, Sirius and Regulus.
He wondered for a moment if this was a Muggle photograph; he had rarely seen a magical photograph with so little movement. At last, he saw Andromeda blink; the five children were choosing not to move, as if they were in mourning, as if they knew that they were the last of the Blacks. Regulus was little more than a baby, but seemed already sure that he would set himself a suicide mission and be the first to die. Sirius knew that his cousin would murder him; Bellatrix, too, was well aware that she would be cut down in battle. Narcissa and Andromeda, the survivors, looked sisterly behind the glass frame, but there was knowledge there, too. They were sisters who would never meet as adults, who would never see one another's children.
He was just reaching for the photograph to see if it could be removed from the wall when the wall itself seemed to shake. A familiar voice, speaking in a whisper that was somehow audible many floors above, asked "Severus Snape?"
"Oh no," whispered Hermione. "Someone's here, someone's set off Mad-Eye's curse."
"It might be nothing," Harry murmured, but he drew his wand once more and started down the stairs.
There was a loud rattling sound, and Mrs. Black's portrait awakened. "Leave the house of my fathers, Mudlboods and blood traitors and goblins do not belong here!"
"Goblins?" Harry and the others asked each other as one. They reached the last flight of stairs that led to the entrance hall. "George, Ginny, stay up here," Harry commanded. Ginny looked like she might protest, but Harry shook his head. "We may need an element of surprise, and you can aim curses anywhere down there from up here. Just don't hit us. Hermione, go right. Ron, left." Now he received nods of agreement from the others.
Harry moved quietly down the stairs and continued straight forward as he sensed Ron and Hermione fanning out to the sides. "Protego!" he shouted as soon as he saw movement before him. Hopefully a simple shield charm would protect him, but wouldn't rise the goblins' ire at having a wizard use a wand against them.
When he got a better view of the scene, though, Harry became aware that the shield charm was completely unnecessary. The goblins—for there were three—were tangled in a messy pile on the floor beneath Mrs. Black's portrait. A white, horrible figure was swooping over them, compressing them into a smaller, more contorted lump. It was difficult to determine which limbs belonged to which goblin.
In the time it took Harry to remove his shield charm, he realized that the white shape was the horrible, distorted figure of Albus Dumbledore. "They didn't kill you, Professor Dumbledore," Harry told it. The white shape evaporated into the stale air.
The goblins untangled themselves, managing to imbue a comical image with such menace that Harry considered re-casting the shield charm.
"Now," he asked the goblins, "why are you here? I didn't hear you knock, and I know goblins don't believe in thievery."
The leader of the three was very large for a goblin, nearly Ginny's height. He fixed Harry with a look of the utmost loathing. "You know many things, don't you, Harry Potter?" he asked. "You and your followers," he added with a narrow-eyed glance behind Harry, and he knew that Ron and Hermione had checked the rest of the floor and now stood behind him.
"A few things," Harry agreed. "But not, as I say, why you've come here."
The goblin sneered and threw a role of parchment at Harry's feet. "You have one week to turn yourself over to the Gringotts Council," he informed. "You've been warned, Harry Potter, and I never warn twice." With that, he and his fellows turned and left the house.
Harry reached for the parchment.
"Don't!" commanded Hermione, and she pointed her wand at it, muttering various chants very quickly.
"I doubt it has anything like a hex on it," Harry protested. "That doesn't seem like a goblin's style."
"How would someone who never once opened A History of Magic know what a goblin's style is?"
"I opened it once," Harry defended himself. "When I first got Hedwig, I flipped through A History of Magic until I found a name that seemed right for her."
Hermione looked at him with amusement from the corner of her eye. "My mistake," she said. "I think the parchment's all right, you can pick it up now."
Harry did so. Ron and Hermione peeked over his shoulders; when George and Ginny arrived, they looked, too.
To Harry Potter:
You have violated the sanctity of Gringotts. You may hold that your action was "for the greater good," but the Gringotts Council does not. You will present yourself to the Gringotts Council for a proper punishment, or there will be retribution.
Dordok
Along with the note were several clippings from the Daily Prophet which mentioned Harry, Ron, and Hermione's adventure at Gringotts in a rather flattering light.
"How come the goblins aren't after us?" Ron protested, sounding rather put-out.
"You want a letter like this?" Harry demanded, but Hermione raised her hand for silence.
"That's a good point, Ron, a really good point. If this was just about Gringotts being robbed, they would have warned all of us. It's not like they don't know we were there. We should talk to Bill about this, and we should let Kingsley know, too—and no, Harry, I'm not going to ask him what he thinks about the house before you know how you feel about it."
"All right, then," Harry agreed, both mollified and pleased that Hermione had responded to his objection before he voiced it.
They returned to the Burrow, intending to drop off George and Ginny before contacting the Ministry of Magic, but Kingsley arrived almost as they did.
"Have you had any threats from a goblin today?" Kingsley asked once he had greeted them. He had a deep, calming voice that made the possibility of a full-blown goblin rebellion sound like as curable a problem as an undone shoelace.
"How did you know that?" asked Harry, amazed, as he handed Kingsley the parchment.
"There was a notice of their intention sent to the Ministry, as well as to the Daily Prophet. I've only just seen it. When did you get this?"
Harry explained what had happened at Grimmauld Place, with the others chiming in as they felt necessary.
"You handled that well," Kinsley complimented. "While we're on the subject, Harry, do you plan to join the auror department this summer or are you going to take another year of school?"
Harry was startled. Everything he had said to Hermione earlier that day about wanting his NEWTs before becoming an auror was turned upside down. "I thought there were, well, strict requirements about becoming an auror. NEWTs and personality tests and everything."
Kingsley smiled. "I've administered those personality tests and I have a fair guess as to how you'd do. I've no objection to waiving the NEWT requirements in certain situations, and this is clearly one of those. That goes for either or both of you as well," he added to Ron and Hermione.
"May I think about it?" Harry asked.
"Of course." Again, he looked at Hermione and Ron. "You, too." His dark eyes returned to Harry. "I know I don't need to remind you to be careful in light of this threat. I don't think we're in danger of a real war because I don't think enough of the goblins are willing to get behind an uprising under the circumstances, not with you being held up as a beacon of tolerance for all magical beings. But an attack is an attack, whether it's a part of something larger or not."
That was something he'd learned long ago, Harry thought, as he mechanically voiced his agreement.
To be continued.
Next chapter: There's no time like a wedding to discuss torture.
Inordinately long response to comments from reviews (or: ongoing discussion of how close to canon I'm staying).
Please break up Harry and Ginny!
I don't think their romance is especially important to this story, but I do think the last book made it ridiculously clear that if they break up permanently, it's after they get married and have three children. I don't necessarily like JKR's romantic parings (in fact, I dislike most of them), but I'm keeping them all.
Andromeda is a Slytherin/Ravenclaw!
As I said before, I went with Slytherin because of young Sirius' comment at the end of Deathly Hallows. He tells a disapproving young James that his "WHOLE family have been in Slytherin." A "favorite cousin" close in age and sharing a surname who was not in Slytherin would have warranted a mention here if she existed. Also, as some reviewers pointed out, Professor Slughorn tells Harry in Half-Blood Prince that he had ALL the Blacks except Sirius in his house, and that he would have liked the set.
You put Ted in Hufflepuff?
His daughter was a Hufflepuff, so I'm assuming she "got it" from somewhere. Also, from what little we see of Ted in canon, I think "I'll teach the lot, and treat them just the same," seems to suit him.
Ted was a Muggle, completely non-magical.
I know the key to the Black Family Tree calls him a Muggle, but his daughter and Sirius both call him "Muggle-born" in Order of the Phoenix. While he's on the run in Deathly Hallows, he says he refused "to register as a Muggle-born on principle;" when Lee reports his murder, he doesn't identify him as a Muggle, although he does identify other Muggle victims as such. Finally, when Harry escapes Privet Drive, Ted tells him "I've fixed your ribs, your tooth, and your arm," which would seem to require magic beyond a bottle of SkeleGrow.
The Black Family Tree has a larger age gap between the cousins than what you're using.
True. I cheated there because this is more fun. I also tend to credit the books over the author's interviews/extras, and Goblet of Fire has Sirius referencing being at school with Bellatrix. I don't know if the author has said that Sirius was not a credible narrator, but even if she has, I find it strange to raise interviews higher than the books. Are any of us reading or writing fan stories because the interviews are so wonderful?
Sirius probably wouldn't have laughed at Andromeda.
He didn't. He laughed at the howlers themselves, his own in particular.
Why wasn't Narcissa upset about the Sirius affair?
She knew that in the end it wouldn't affect her very much, and she isn't big on looking as if she's been upset by anything.
Andromeda needs therapy.
No argument here. I would, too.
Andromeda/Harry isn't handling this very well.
True for both of them.
Does Andromeda know that Bellatrix killed Sirius?
Yes. I think that's probably common knowledge.
Will Harry tell Andromeda what Regulus did against Voldemort?
Maybe, if they can manage to have a real conversation.
Where's Remus' body?
That would be telling.
