Bella,

I did what you told me to. I broke up with Ted. Things are completely over between us. He won't speak to me. I think he hates me. I hope you're happy.

Love always,

Andromeda

Dromeda,

I knew you'd do the right thing, darling.

Love always,

Bella

Andromeda hadn't meant to sign her letter to Bellatrix with 'love always.' She hadn't even realized she'd done it until after she'd already sent it. She'd done it out of habit, as a sort of instinct. It was how she and her sisters had always signed their letters to each other, ever since they were little.

"Well, Andromeda sure moved on fast," Ted's friend John said the next morning at breakfast.

"What?"

"Look behind you. She's sitting with Radulf Selwyn."

Ted spun around in his seat. Sure enough, Andromeda and Radulf were sitting across from one another at the Slytherin table, their heads bent close together as they both examined an article in the Daily Prophet.

Ted turned back around and stared down at his cereal, his appetite suddenly gone.

"Cheer up, mate," John said, his mouth full of toast. "You're well rid of her in my opinion."

Ted didn't reply.

"I mean, you two broke up last night and she's already gone back to Mr. Future Death Eater over there. What does that say about her?"

Ted shrugged. He honestly wasn't sure what that said about her. He wasn't sure about anything when it came to her anymore. She'd lied about loving him, lied about everything.

"I just really loved her," he whispered, more to himself than to John.

John just patted him on the back. "Cheer up," he said again. "And guess who's totally checking you out right now?"

"Unless it's Andromeda, I don't really care," he said sadly.

"No, you git. Tammy."

Ted glanced down the table to where Tammy Dobbs was sitting with her friends. She was a sixth year Hufflepuff with a…bit of a reputation. Sure enough, she was looking right back at him, a pouty little smile on her glossy lips. She gave him a wink and then stood up, sauntering over to where the two of them were sitting.

"Hello, boys," she purred, sitting down across from them and leaning forward to display her ample...assets.

"Hello!" John said enthusiastically, a dopey grin on his face.

She ignored him, focusing her blue eyes on Ted instead. "I hear you're newly single," she said, her voice low and seductive.

"I, erm…yeah," he replied, squirming in his seat.

"You should accompany on the Hogsmeade trip next Saturday," she said. "I could…help you get your mind off things."

"I don't really think that's a good idea," Ted replied. "Andromeda and I just broke up and I'm not really ready to – Ow!"

John had kicked him under the table. Ted glared at him, but he merely shrugged and shot him an Are-You-Crazy-Say-Yes-Right-Now look.

Ted looked back at Tammy. She was gorgeous, no doubt about it. But in a completely different way than Andromeda. While Andromeda had a natural, classic beauty about her – pale skin and curly chestnut hair that fell in waves down her back – much of Tammy's appeal seemed to come from a bottle. She was all peroxide and self tanner and caked-on makeup. None of her seemed quite natural. Back in their early years at Hogwarts she had been a scrawny little thing with mousy brown hair and freckles. But then in their fifth year, she had come back to school looking like this. Ted remembered hearing girls whispering in the corridors as she passed by, making catty remarks and speculating about whether her breasts were real.

Still, Tammy was nice enough and Ted figured that it couldn't hurt to get his mind off Andromeda. She had moved on already, so why shouldn't he?

"On second thought," he said, "that sounds like fun."

"Oh, believe me," she replied, "it will be."

"You're one lucky bloke," John said, after Tammy had gone back to her friends. "I heard she gets down on her knees on the first date and spreads her legs on the second."

Ted tried to imagine doing anything with a girl who wasn't Andromeda, but couldn't. Still, he knew he would have to at some point. He couldn't just become a monk for the rest of his like because some girl had broken his heart when he was seventeen.

"That's vulgar!" their friend Cecilia said, sitting down in the seat Tammy had just abandoned. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, John Abbott, talking about the poor girl like that."

John's face turned red. "Sorry," he muttered.

John and Cecilia were utterly in love with each other, but both of them were entirely too dense to do anything about it.

"I can't believe Ted is dating Tammy Dobbs," Andromeda said through gritted teeth, a few weeks later at lunch.

Radulf glanced over his shoulder at the Hufflepuff table. "She seems too clingy," he said. "I couldn't deal with it."

"She follows him around like a lovesick puppy dog all the damn time. It's pathetic!"

Radulf chuckled. "Somebody sounds jealous."

"I just don't understand why he would go for someone like her. She's so...so…blonde."

"Blonde?" Radulf's eyebrows shot up.. "You don't like her because she's blonde?"

"His muggle ex-girlfriend was blonde too," she replied, her eyes still glued to the Hufflepuff table. "Maybe blonde girls are his type. I'm surprised he didn't go after Narcissa instead of me."

"I don't think Lucius would have been pleased about that," Radulf said. "He needs to keep Narcissa around to ensure that his future son is blond."

"How do you think the Malfoys do it?" Andromeda asked, temporarily distracted from Ted and Tammy. "How do they only have blond sons?"

"Maybe there's something shady behind it," Radulf replied. "Like if they have a girl, they sell her on the black market."

"Or they feed her to wolves," Andromeda added with a giggle.

"Maybe they just hide their daughters in the cellar," Radulf suggested. "Maybe Lucius has sisters and they've all been kept a secret for years." He paused. "Maybe there are a few dark-haired boys down there too."

"Yeah, they probably feed them stale bread crusts and rainwater."

It was moments like this that Andromeda was glad that Radulf was her friend. It was nice to have someone who could distract her from the debacle that was Ted and Tammy and all the horrible alliteration of their first names.

The next morning, Ted made his way to Potions class. He was a little early because he wanted to go over the questions he'd missed on his last test with Slughorn.

"'Scuse me," he said irritably when he reached the door to the classroom and discovered it was being blocked by a giggly couple. He didn't look up from his parchment, but stood waiting for them to relocate.

"Radulf," a girl's voice said. "I have to get to Transfiguration. I don't wanna be late."

Ted's head shot up. Sure enough, Radulf Selwyn was leaning up against the door to the Potions classroom, whispering something in the ear of a sixth year Slytherin girl whose name Ted had forgotten. The girl gave another giggle and then slipped away, disappearing around the corner.

"I need to get in the classroom," Ted muttered. Radulf was still blocking the door.

"Door's locked," Radulf replied. "Slughorn's not here yet. I was wanting to talk to him too."

"Really?" Ted snapped. "Because you looked a little preoccupied with that girl."

Radulf's lip curled, gazing at Ted with an expression that one might use to look at dog shit on the bottom of their shoe. "I was waiting for Slughorn, and Patricia came along to keep me company. Not that it's any of your business."

"Should you really be letting Patricia keep you company when you have a girlfriend?" Ted asked angrily.

Andromeda was such an idiot. Why had she gone back to this creep? He hadn't respected her the first time they had dated and he obviously didn't respect her now.

"What the fuck are you on about, Tonks?" Radulf asked. "I don't have a girlfriend."

"I'm not stupid, Selwyn. I see you with Andromeda all the time."

"Andromeda?" Radulf said, a bemused expression on his face. "She's not my girlfriend. We broke up last year, Tonks. Thought you would have noticed, considering you dated her after me."

"But, you two are back together," Ted sputtered. "Aren't you?"

He tried to remember if there'd been any sort of confirmation that Radulf and Andromeda were a couple again, or if it all been speculation.

"No," Radulf replied. "We're definitely not."

"Oh, well I –"

At that moment, Slughorn appeared.

"Professor!" Radulf exclaimed, the tone of his voice changing from annoyed to charming faster than Ted had thought was possible. "I need to t talk to you about my test. You marked number seven wrong, but I think that if you take a look at it again, you'll find that…"

Radulf and Slughorn disappeared into the classroom, leaving Ted alone in the corridor, clutching his own test.

"So I explained to him why I thought my answer for number seven was actually right and he ending up agreeing with me. I got the points back."

Ted rolled his eyes, listening to Radulf and Andromeda's conversation that was taking place behind him.

"Radulf's such a fucking know-it-all," he muttered angrily. "It's like it's physically impossible for him to even consider that he might have answered a question wrong."

Tim chuckled. He had gone back to sitting beside Ted once India had dumped him. "But he never does answer a question wrong," he pointed out.

"I'm sure that's not true," Ted replied.

"I'm not."

Now that Ted knew that Andromeda and Radulf weren't actually a couple, he began to notice how obvious this fact had been all along. He must have really been blinded by jealously to consider it as a possibility. Nothing they did actually seemed affectionate. Back when they had been dating, they were always very touchy feely. Radulf always had his armed draped over her shoulder or his hand entwined with hers. He'd carry her books and snog her in the middle of the hallway, much to the annoyance of basically everyone else.

But now they walked down the corridor side by side, neither of them actually touching in any way. They looked like two people who spent time together simply because they enjoyed each other's company, and maybe even, at least in Andromeda's case, needed each other's company, depended on it. But that was it. There was nothing romantic there anymore.

Secretly, this made Ted very happy.

"Do you love me more than Andromeda?"

Ted froze, completely caught off guard. He gazed down at Tammy, who was laying beneath him, staring right back at him, a hopeful look in her eyes.

He didn't say anything for a long time. He didn't know what to say. It wasn't that he didn't know the answer to the question, it was that he didn't know how to tell a girl no, of course he didn't love her more than another girl.

Finally, after a long silence, Tammy sighed heavily. "Never mind," she murmured. "It doesn't matter." She placed her hands on either side of his face and pulled him closer, engulfing him a deep kiss.

He kissed her back, slipping her nightgown over her head. Leaning in to kiss her again, he spotted a sort of sadness in her eyes, an emptiness that he'd never noticed before. He realized that Tammy was probably the kind of girl who was never loved by a guy more than some other girl. She was always the toy. The rebound. The girl that guys flirted with. Or snogged. Or shagged. But they never carried her books. Or bothered to write to her over the summer. They never loved her. And maybe, just maybe, that actually bothered her.

Andromeda was in a bad mood. The night before she'd had a wonderful dream. She and Ted had been sitting down the lake, throwing food into the water for the giant squid, giggling and snogging instead of doing their homework. It was like everything was back to normal, like she'd never broken up with, never broken her own heart.

But then she had woken up.

And now she missed him more than ever.

She was already five minutes late to Transfiguration class, having been held up by Peeves, who had thought it would be funny to hide in a suit of armor on the second floor and throw bottles of ink at everyone who passed by. Fuming, her mood was worsened when she arrived at the staircase and found that it was being blocked by a group of giggly sixth year girls who had decided to congregate there, obviously in no hurry to actually go to class. Worst of all, one of them happened to be Tammy, Ted's bimbo girlfriend.

"Excuse me!" she said loudly. "Shouldn't you lot be in class?"

None of them paid her much mind, just continued giggling over whatever asinine things empty-headed blonde Hufflepuffs giggled over.

"I'm the Head Girl!" she snarled. "Do you all want to end up in detention?"

She sounded slightly mental, even to her own ears, but she was beyond the point of caring.

The girls shot her various nasty expressions, but all turned and walked away, heading to remedial Muggle Studies or wherever it was they belonged. All except Tammy.

"Get to class!" Andromeda barked.

"I am," the girl replied, rolling her eyes. "Merlin's beard, did you forget to take your medicine this morning or something?"

"I'm going to count to ten," Andromeda said through gritted teeth. "If you're not gone, I swear to Merlin, I'll –"

"I don't know why you're being so hostile anyway. You dumped Ted, remember. It's not my fault he moved on."

Andromeda opened her mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the appearance of Ted.

"You're not in class either?" she snapped, rounding on him. "Why the hell not?"

"I had to help Hagrid with something," he said calmly. "Relax. You sound like lunatic."

"That's not my fault," she replied, crossing her arms over her chest. "Dealing with your slutty girlfriend put me in a bad mood."

This wasn't technically true; she'd been in a bad mood before. But Tammy had definitely worsened it.

Ted's expression darkened. "What did you just call her?"

"I called her a slut," Andromeda hissed. "Because it's true."

"You're a bitch," Ted replied.

She winced at the venom in his voice, but stood her ground.

"I'd rather be a bitch than a slut."

"I hate to interrupt," Tammy said from behind them. "But we really should all be getting to class."

Andromeda had forgotten she was there.

Ted glanced over Andromeda's shoulder at Tammy. She looked small, standing there by herself, listening to the horrible things that were coming out of Andromeda's mouth, the things she probably heard all the time, the things he'd never realized probably actually hurt her. That look from the night before, the sadness in her eyes, was back.

Perhaps, he realized, it had always been there. Maybe he'd just never noticed.

There was a lot of hostility in this chapter. I apologize for that.

I hope this chapter was completely horrible. I really struggled with writing it for some reason. None of it was coming naturally at all.

On a completely different note, I started a new story about Teddy and Victoire called Mine Again. I'd love it if you guys read it and left me a review (Sorry for the shameless plug. Feel free to ignore it).