Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
It's quiet, after they leave, and the house creaks to itself, in the way of a very old house with wooden floors; it has its opinions of the passing generations, but unlike Longbottom House, built of stone and keeping silence likewise, it allows itself to comment. In between the comments, Twelve Grimmauld Place has its own particular silence, that to her ears is reproachful.
Teddy sleeps on, undisturbed by the whispered conference outside his door, and by its breaking up, as Percy and Harry leave for St. Mungo's; outside, the snow continues to fall, an enchanted snow that means to cover everything in drifts of white, to overwrite old sorrows and soften the architecture of this postwar wreckage in soundless, featureless white.
Andromeda has always loved the way that new-fallen snow, in shadowless overcast, has no dimension at all: looking at the ground, you might be looking into a white infinity as deep as a black night sky.
Black as night, black bejeweled with constellations: Black, the name under which she was born, and which she willingly traded for another, more plebeian.
She hasn't been to see Eddie Tonks since the end of the war. She doesn't know if his pub will be open, but it occurs to her that she ought to go look. After all, she's an inheritor of Ted's share in the enterprise, and even from a business point of view … which this isn't. She thinks about the years in which she resented Eddie's influence over her daughter, and smiles bitterly to think that the problem was much, much closer to home. Eddie Tonks provided a haven for Tonks and her friends from school, and he recognized the species at least: schoolchildren. And he did know to warn Charlie and Tonks off anything that would cross the line from mischief into something dodgy, for which she's grateful.
She ought to write to Eddie, at least to give him greetings of the season. A bit late… well, it could be New Year's as well, the first New Year of the peace. She doesn't know how Eddie came through it or even if he did…
She ought to write to Charlie, she supposes, but she's not sure what she ought to say. And it's not as if he'd warned his sister… well, that she doesn't know, not being privy to every conversation in that house (it only seems so).
Charlie had stressed his mum's skill, O's in all the Auror subjects—she would have qualified as an Auror herself, except—
Except she married (and that's not even a disqualification) and started having children right away, and then…
Andromeda knows that she never will puzzle it out, this ugliness that's staring her in the face. She remembers Slughorn's lesson again: whom you give to drink of Amortentia, you send to hell. Of course, the one who resorts to that doesn't love the so-called beloved.
She pokes at the remains of her breakfast, makes another pot of tea. Teddy is too young to notice the disruption of routine, too young to miss Boxing Day with the other children, his distant cousins. The children that aren't born yet—Fleur and Bill's little boy or girl, Lavender's child (if it survives), any children George might father, although to look at him she much doubts that will ever come to pass.
Any children Harry and Ginny might have … no, that might never happen.
She drinks the tea, as much to have something to do as for its smoky savor and stimulating warmth.
Molly Weasley is quite as much a Pureblood matron as her own sister. Yes, and she ought to write to Cissy, oughtn't she… greetings for the new year, and a change of address.
The thin glow of the snowbound square filters in through the windows, and Andromeda does a slow inventory of her belongings. Yes, most everything is here, even the dress robes she wore to the Halloween ball.
Hermione the provident… yes, she has everything, indeed. But how was it she managed it: "An hour before I arrived," she said. Andromeda can't put her finger on it precisely: only something odd about the wording.
She remembers Ginny offering to watch Teddy so she could go to the ball; she remembers her singing to him and pacing with him in the kitchen. Remembers her joking with her brother about the present they got for Hermione… that would have been September, yet there had been that ugly burst of jealous behavior at Harry's birthday party…
At Harry's birthday party, she was drinking Firewhiskey, yes, glass after glass of it, so it might well be that one of those glasses was spiked, for all Ginny seemed to think her mother wasn't noticing.
No, she won't think about that, for the puzzle is far too much like fish-hooks or razor wire, some fiendish tangle built to tear flesh, to dig the more deeply the more you pull at it. So she will back off, gently and slowly, and watch the snow falling outside the window, on Grimmauld Place; watch the eighteenth-century facades grey out in the snow, think about the church bells ringing over a London that doesn't exist any more.
In any case, it's no longer Christmas but the day after.
There are letters to write.
She picks up quill and parchment, and then realizes that it's Eddie Tonks she means to write, and then thinks yet again and dips her quill in the inkwell and begins to write; when the owl arrives, Eddie will know who it is. She doesn't know if he knows about Ted, she realizes; did anyone tell him? and then there's the question… well, there are many questions, and perhaps the best would simply be to ask if she may visit now that the war is over.
And if he did not survive the war…
Well, there's the address, and the instructions to the owl, and she'll know if it returns with the letter unopened: death or refusal, it's all the same, really.
She rather hopes that it reaches him, and that she does not find herself inheritor of a pub somewhere in Muggle London.
Then there is the next letter (a fresh sheet of parchment, a pause while the owl is out delivering Eddie's letter) to Cissy, and that one… well, that one begins simply: "Dear Cissy: You may write to me now care of Harry Potter at Twelve Grimmauld Place, London."
There are other things to say: the conventional greetings in honor of Yule, for which she did not have time yesterday in the excitement over Ginny (but that she is not going to tell her sister) and then the equally conventional wishes of good health and prosperity, to her brother-in-law who clearly has little of the one and less of the other; and then she thinks of foolish, stubborn Draco and there's nothing more she can say. It's all conventional with her sister, but war itself is a convention of long standing.
Who was the third sister, the eldest, dead now but casting a long shadow? The one who died laughing, yes—died laughing at Molly Weasley the unsinkable, brimming over with vitality…
The snow continues to fall. There's no sound in the house but the scratch of quill on parchment, and Teddy's soft, even breathing.
There's another set of greetings, though she might manage those by Floo.
She throws a handful of Floo powder in the flames, sticks her head through, and summons the mistress of Longbottom House. The silent house elf greets her with its unreadable dark eyes (do people come to resemble their elves after enough time? Aunt Walburga's elf Kreacher certainly resembled her, with his mad passion for genealogy and his obsession about wizarding bloodlines.)
There's an interval during which she sees the leaping green flames echoed back, flickering, on those rough stone walls.
Augusta Longbottom comes into the kitchen, after a pause; nods to acknowledge Andromeda's greetings for the holiday. At the inquiry after Hermione, Augusta smiles in a shrewd, amused way, and says only that Hermione and Neville have been … conversing … since just after breakfast and she would not like to be the one to interrupt them. A message can be relayed, of course.
Andromeda says, only to ask Hermione to stop at Grimmauld Place on her way back to Hogwarts.
Augusta nods. There's other business to discuss, of course, but that can wait until after the holidays.
In the quiet house and the quieter snowfall outside, that blankets the modern city and takes it back to the eighteenth century (of an age with the mundane cloak of this magical place betwixt and between), to the days of Elizabeth, to the sharp crackling campfires of a minor Roman encampment on a barbarian river, Andromeda loses track of the passage of time.
She writes to Kingsley, business correspondence, wrapped of course in ancient courtesies and the habiliments of long friendship, inside of which lies the cold steel of what she now wants, requires, demands as the price of the bargain. The money, the arrangement, the fix: now, before the indictments, before the trial. She hears Ted's shrewd, ghostly voice in her ear, warning her to get good value for her efforts, for this will be the last chance, in this quiet interval before the indictments are issued, before the whole business becomes official.
She writes a letter to Molly Weasley at the Burrow, icy and ambiguous in its simplicity, saying only that under the circumstances it is no longer possible for her to continue to accept the hospitality of the Burrow, and extending thanks for the sanctuary granted for the duration.
That letter leaves open a great many possibilities, of course, including the traditional demand for satisfaction of honor under the Wizarding Code Duello. Molly, Gryffindor though she be, is nonetheless a Pureblood witch and will recognize what isn't spoken.
A whisper of ghostly laughter—might that have been Bella, a younger Bella, around the corner of one of those dark corridors?—reminds her that it's the true season of ghosts, the interval between Samhain and Yule, the eighth of the year that belongs to the dead; nearing the New Year, they grow more urgent. Bella, for all her sins, wants vengeance as much as the next ghost.
Andromeda tells her that her earthly business was finished with her Dark Lord, and there's quite enough to be going on with. The business she has with Molly Weasley has nothing to do with Bellatrix, and everything to do with Tonks.
There's the last one, now, the other one who died laughing: Sirius.
Cousin, might-have-been husband, though that would be in a world so different from the one that actually transpired that she cannot recognize it: a world in which they stood side by side in green and black and silver, under the gaze of an infinitely receding gallery of ancestors, silver and skulls back to the eighth century: long-fingered, sharp-faced, with black hair and grey or storm-blue eyes.
He left that world, turned his back on it, and so did she, but they left separately—certainly not holding hands.
(Cissy's eyes, the color of a winter sky before dawn, are not the eyes of the House of Black; not even when they shift, in certain lights, to a calm sea-blue, the blue of some northern sea. But that's another story, which might be settled in some other world, to no one's satisfaction.)
Much to her own surprise, she takes out her quill and parchment, and writes Sirius a letter. It's a very old custom, one she's never observed, but she knows for certain that he fell through the Veil, so he's very definitely on the Other Side; this letter might hope to reach him by the traditional route. She writes it all, what she can say only in privacy to the dead, to a fellow rebel: what Molly said about Hermione ("not our sort," "blood will tell"), Molly's reversal after the weather-working—oh, yes, and little Hermione, the fifteen-year-old girl he had met, a war hero and a weather-worker, if only accidentally, and Harry, his godson, the acknowledged Savior of the Wizarding World, and Voldemort dead (he'll be pleased to know that, for she suspects the Dark Lord, whatever became of the last of him, does not occupy the same part of the afterlife as he) and Bellatrix as well… the rest he knows.
She lights the traditional fire in the shallow brazier set into the center of the ancient writing table, and places the letter in it. "Go, find him," she whispers, as it flares and curls and begins its slow crumpling and writhing into ash.
She doesn't write a letter to Ted or to Tonks… well, they're not so far away as Sirius, and anyway, they know that she misses them. They still turn up in her dreams, night after night … but at least Tonks is not knocking on the window any more, insisting that she's alive.
And this is Sirius' house (no longer Aunt Walburga's) and it's only right to send him formal greetings.
She picks up Teddy from his makeshift cot and walks through the house with him, taking inventory. Her things are all there; Hermione made a rather comprehensive sweep, and if there's something that she missed, Andromeda isn't sure what it is.
Harry has been established in one of the rooms across from the one that Sirius occupied; the door to Remus and Tonks' old room is half-open; she peers in and the bed-curtains are half closed; Ron and Lavender are asleep, she under the covers, he above, sprawled out in the clothes he was wearing last night. He looks much younger in sleep, and she realizes that they've all come to look a great deal older than their years when awake.
The kitchen has been stocked with food;that must have been their errand last night. Harry came back with his hair full of snow; how long had he been standing on Grimmauld Place, staring at the house, or standing however long wherever it was that they went?
When they return from their visit at St. Mungo's they'll be hungry. She knows how that goes: you're absorbed in the problem, and forget your body; and when it's over, you're hungry, that is if you have the sense to realize that, or else you're tearful, quarrelsome, distracted.
The body is much underestimated, she thinks, pulling out the essentials for lunch.
The flames in the hearth flare green and Percy steps through from St. Mungo's.
"Where's Harry?" she asks.
"He's staying on," Percy says, and goes on to explain that Ginny is awake now, quite thoroughly awake, and the two of them are in conference with Derwent, who is gathering an account of everything that preceded this episode. Derwent is taking Pensieve depositions from both of them. It's going to be serious. Ginny is heartbroken and terrified, and Harry is hell-bent on justice.
Andromeda asks him if he would like lunch.
Yes, he would, and he can set to work on it as well; and there will be more people later. Lunch will need to be substantial, both in fare and in scale, so she'll want more than one set of hands, and it will soothe him to work.
There are people with whom you can share a kitchen, no matter how small, and Percy is one of that kind; they confer on the dishes and then set to chopping and dicing. Percy has an elegant way about him, whether he's conducting the work from afar with his wand, or slicing things by hand; she could well imagine him as a Potions Master, watching him dice onions swiftly with a kitchen knife.
It's not good, he says, but Harry is doing his best to salvage things. The key point of it, of course, is when it was that the dosing began, for that's the pivot upon which it all turns. How long has this been going on, because if it's been forever, if it's been since she was ten, then there really is no hope.
He does much doubt that, because there was no reason for it, and she was a child, with a child's infatuation.
He personally suspects that this is a development of very recent vintage, and if he had to guess, he would date it from some time in July, which is to say when Ginny and Molly started arguing about her future, when Ginny was talking about trying out for the Harpies or taking up the Ministry's offer of trainee Auror status. It was the first time that mother and daughter had really clashed, and Molly was not used to being opposed.
Or rather, she was not used to being opposed by her daughter.
And he's angry with his father, angrier than he's ever been, even in the days of their political estrangement, because he did nothing to prevent this—just as he did nothing to prevent Fred and George bullying him, just as he never noticed anything amiss with Ginny, not only this last time, but ever.
There was another clue, too: the look on his mother's face when Celestina Warbeck was on the wireless, singing her old standards, and then the new song came on, The Ballad of Tom Riddle. He'll admit it was a departure from Celestina's jolly bawdiness, but that was no call for his mum's face to go white like that. There are those who flush in extremes of emotion, and those who go pale; and he had thought his mother was of the former, but he realizes that it's because he hadn't seen her extremes.
Andromeda says, "So it appears that we'll be housemates."
Understanding her perfectly, he says that he knows for once that he's failed, having pleased neither mother nor father, failed at least in their terms, but perhaps it's time to think that there are other standards to consider. He'd had a most interesting conversation with Fleur of all people, when they'd met at the Ministry a few weeks earlier.
Fleur said that she'd tried everything, when Bill first brought her home to the Burrow: bowing to Molly, helping around the house, deferring to his brothers, waiting on Harry… until she'd realized that life was too short for amateur theatrics. After Bill was savaged by Greyback, Molly had admitted that, too, but only after a fight, only after Fleur had said in no uncertain terms that she was going to marry Bill, and it hadn't been his face that had caught her fancy; no, it was something that no scar could alter.
Percy looks unutterably sad as he says this, brow furrowed in concentration, and for a moment she sees him twenty or thirty years hence, with the lines of that sorrow permanently etched into his face.
No, she tells him, none of this is going to find favor with Molly, but she rather thinks it's too late to be thinking of Molly, when it's Ginny who's lying in St. Mungo's, and there is no doubt that damage has been done. As for Percy himself, there are those who notice what he has been doing with the unofficial refugee office, even if his parents neither notice nor understand. It's not easy to do that work, she knows.
No, it isn't, he says, chopping a little more rapidly, chopping until the onions are mush and she has to take the knife out of his hand. He's shaking, actually, and she wonders aloud if anyone has said a sympathetic word to him all this time—
Hermione had, the night before. He was stupid and kissed her for it, and she kissed him back—she saw that, didn't she?—until they recovered themselves because really (he wants to be quite clear about this) he might have had a crush on her once, back in the summer, but she doesn't fancy him and he's really never quite gotten over Penelope.
He's sick at heart, still, thinking about the Amortentia in the Firewhiskey glasses, how close a call that had been…
…And there's someone else, but she turned him down—
Andromeda is a little taken aback at this rush of confidences.
--whom he won't name, an older woman. More of a mentor, until he realized he was falling in love with her… absurd though that might be. Certainly, he understands that initial attraction to Hermione, but after the other… Hermione only has it in germ: that brilliance and grasp of the details, a grasp of the essential fact that the universe is composed of details and that grand gestures and hand-waving won't save every situation: what more witches and wizards should know, and don't, which is why their world is such a thorough mess now.
Like magic, those gestures, utterly corrupting. Foolish wand waving, that's what Snape called it, and he was right.
He actually liked Snape's class, and even Snape himself, because that unholy favor to the Slytherins didn't really set in until Harry Potter arrived at Hogwarts, which arrival seems to have sent the erstwhile Potions Master into a permanent state of post-traumatic flashback.
Andromeda sets the food to cooking itself, and insists that Percy sit down.
Percy is apologetic over his own state; he knows he's babbling, knows that the worst of the present crisis is over because he can feel himself disintegrating; it's overwork, of course, and there's not enough time, and the general crisis is far worse than anyone imagines, even Shacklebolt—Merlin help them all if Shacklebolt hasn't read the briefing that he and Hermione sent him—and he does apologize, really, because he's been through this cycle of crisis and collapse more than once—two or three times a week now, really, but he should know better and absent himself when it happens… there's nothing that anyone else can do, so the very least he himself should do is to have the decency to keep it to himself.
Romance is a luxury, in the post-war; better to hold to the solid things, to friendship and mutual aid, because that will get them out alive. Hermione…
Andromeda wonders if he protests too much, until he finishes the sentence.
... Hermione has a time-turner; he's positive of it now. There wasn't time to do all they did, and he knows now where Harry went last night with Hermione. It was to Godric's Hollow, to lay a wreath on his parents' grave, and thence to Grimmauld Place, to provision it for their arrival.
And it does explain why she gets more done than anyone else in the Ministry, and after the holiday he will do some discreet checking about the committee meetings, but he knows she's on the War Crimes Commission and the Committee on the Status of Sentient Magical Creatures, with perfect attendance on both… but he swears he's seen schedule conflicts between them.
Oh yes, and he's seen bits of the draft report, which is amazing; the chapter on Goblin relations is brilliant and the one on the Dementors—not asked for under the original assignment—goes further than anything he's yet seen. The chapter on werewolf regulation covers the subject back to the Statue of Secrecy and beyond… Except that the report offends against the Ministry two or three times in a page, they'd be fools not to adopt it as a text for History of Magic. And it's got all the dirty bits, so it would keep the little monsters awake, even if it were Binns doing the lecturing.
Notwithstanding all that, he's fairly sure that she's on the verge of a breakdown, and he would be an authority on that because he's seen it every morning in the mirror.
The Floo flares once more, and Percy composes himself—for not once in all this, for all the shaking in his voice, did he shed a single tear—as a firm baritone voice calls out, "Twelve Grimmauld Place!" and Neville Longbottom steps through the hearth fire, stooping a little so as not to hit his head, and then holding out his hand so that Hermione Granger can step through after him.
Not a minute later, there's another flare and the clear pale soprano voice of Luna Lovegood calls out the same location, and she steps through, followed in quick succession by Dean Thomas. They've just arrived from their Boxing Day visit at his mother's house.
Percy looks cheerful, now; Andromeda realizes that he's a man of action as much as any of his brothers. The committee has assembled, and the deliberations are about to begin.
