Until her mid-20s, Andromeda had been under the impression, like her father, that she had trouble controlling her magic and therefore was severely limited in her ability to go after things she wanted. This was not the case. Rather, she didn't exercise her magic and go after things she wanted until it became a bad idea to do so. At least, this is what she came to believe. She believed all sorts of erroneous things, many of them about herself, but just like everyone else, and especially like Bellatrix, she remained ignorant of that. Still, erroneous beliefs helped her make sense of the world, again just like everyone else, and because she had so much impact, they helped others make sense of the world as well. Eventually that would be a good thing, but initially it wasn't.
Penelope Fawley sat in her favorite chair at the bar, the one that looked wildly out of place at the counter with its red velvet seat and high back. It was gaudy, she knew, but its extravagance usually helped her feel cheerier whenever her family or friends dragooned her into coming to this swanky lounge. It was high-class, no doubt, which is exactly why she despised it, though she wouldn't admit it. Theoretically, a pureblood or even a wealthy or powerful muggleborn could get anything done here, and the Fawleys had frequented it regularly ever since she and Alice had been old enough to get in. Being the primary heir of one of the Sacred 28 had its perks, but the time she had to spend schmoozing slimy, brown-nosing witches and wizards was not one of them. Having to put up with one's betrothed carousing with half a dozen other witches from lesser families was also not one of them. That's what she was doing tonight. She hated it, and she was wondering if she was going to end up hating him.
She was busying herself examining her fingernails carefully in the faint glow of a light far above her when someone she had not seen in years slid into the chair next to her. She curled her fingers into her palms and set them in her lap as if hiding something valuable – because where else was she going to put them?
"Hello, Andromeda."
"Penelope."
The woman's lips caressed her name coolly, both similar and very dissimilar to the way they had so many years ago at school – that is, when Andromeda had bothered to address her at all. Once an infamous daughter of the Most Ancient and Noble house, she was hardly mentioned anymore – save Alice on occasion. How far the woman had fallen! Penelope tried to convince herself that she felt superior to the disgraced witch, that she now ironically had the upper hand. Unfortunately, the woman still made her feel small. That legendary auburn hair sprawled gracefully when she tossed it to the side with a flippant hand. Her vaguely bloodshot eyes should have made her look unattractive, but they didn't. This peeved Penelope so she summoned her best pureblood scorn.
"I didn't know you still frequented such establishments."
"Only when I want to spend too much money for poor company." The auburn-haired witch didn't miss a beat. She finished the last of her drink, then nodded toward a collection of couches on the far side of the room. "Speaking of poor company. That's your fiancé, isn't it?"
Penelope didn't look. "I'm sure it is."
"I think that girl might still be at Hogwarts."
A quick glance confirmed that her fiancé was indeed sitting too closely to a teenager, eating a strawberry delicately from her fingers. She averted her eyes again, further perturbed with Andromeda for drawing her attention to it. The other witch suddenly leaned in, the front of her magenta dress diving forward, and seized Penelope's glass of elvish wine. She drained it before clinking it back down and placing her elbow on the counter so that she could both rest her head on it and incline into the searching look she was giving her. She was very close – surely closer than the chair had originally been.
Penelope was suspicious. "How are you, Andromeda?" The woman did not reply. The silence became awkward very quickly. "You have a daughter, right? What's her name?"
The bartender moseyed by and was about to ask them something when the auburn-haired woman shoved Penelope's empty glass at him. "She'll have another one. And so will I. Be quicker than last time."
The man sniffed in displeasure. Penelope was sympathetic to his indignation. She squinted at the godforsaken Black sister. "You're drunk, aren't you?"
"No more than you." The woman's eyes both darkened and glimmered in a way that confused the Fawley heir.
Something was off. "What's going on?"
"What do you mean?" Their drinks appeared again, which captured the auburn-haired witch's attention momentarily.
"No one really knows what happened to you, and you've mostly stayed hidden, except for that thing with Alastair Moody. And I can't imagine why you'd find yourself comfortable with this many purebloods in here." Penelope raised her drink to her lips to shut herself up.
"I want to fuck," Andromeda's hand raised nonchalantly in the air before dropping to point at her. " - you." Those uncanny auburn eyes levelled at her.
Penelope choked on her drink, and she covered her mouth to try to hide it. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
"You are still… just like- the rest of your family, aren't you?" Penelope unhappily struggled with her words.
"I don't particularly care."
The Fawley woman blinked rapidly while tonguing the inside of her cheek. "You're married." Weak.
"You aren't." Andromeda cocked her head again toward Penelope's fiancé. "Yeah, she's definitely still at Hogwarts. I think she was a first year when I graduated. Jordana something…"
"Shut up." Penelope almost barked and finished her drink rather quickly. She felt like an idiot for considering saying yes. She also felt like an idiot for considering saying no.
"Come on, Fawley," the woman rolled her eyes. "Don't pass this up."
Gods damn her. Gods damn herself too.
Absolutely everything about Andromeda Tonks was improper in that moment, and the Fawley family heir knew it. It worked, however, because it was Penelope who paid for their drinks, Penelope who apparated them to her own house, Penelope who undressed the overwhelmingly gorgeous witch, and Penelope who did most of the work to get her off. It was not, however, Penelope's name that the woman unwillingly let escape her lips in a moment of passion.
Andromeda realized her mistake immediately and her pleasure was replaced with a flooding terror. Her wide, horrified eyes fixed on the woman beneath her. She was still bracing herself above Penelope, and her hair hung like a curtain around them, trapping them in the scandal and vulnerability of the moment.
Penelope welcomed her longed-for triumph with glee. She quirked her lips into a sneer. "Oh no, Andromeda," she chuckled lowly. "You are a sick, sick woman. Is that what all this is about?" She twirled two fingers in a pretentious gesture in the space between them.
The woman moved too quickly for her to react, snatching her fingers and pinning them roughly to the bed with unexpected strength and cut off Penelope's cry of pain with a hand wrapped around her throat. She pressed hard; Penelope couldn't swallow or breathe. Struggling only made the auburn-haired witch, so seductive just minutes ago, lean rage into her.
"You - are a fuck-faced whore from a dead-end family. If you ever breath a word to anyone, anywhere, at any time, you will be sorry you lived past this moment," Andromeda hissed.
Penelope wasn't sure she was going live past this moment anyway. Red, silver, and purple spots were beginning to swim in her vision around the woman's face.
"I will make sure everyone believes you killed your fiancé, and I will break your mind to make sure your memories and your jealousy match the crime."
The Fawley heir's eyes widened in fear. She tried to shake her head, but the dark witch – she had to be a dark witch, didn't she? – tightened her grip around her neck.
"Do you fucking understand me?"
Penelope was pretty sure Andromeda was threatening to kill her fiancé, but that hardly mattered since she wasn't sure the woman wasn't going to kill her now if she didn't agree. She sucked in a deep, scraping wheeze when the woman released her. The furious witch was out of the bed, dressed, and sweeping from the house before Penelope could gather herself. When she dared to look in the mirror, she saw fingerprints already beginning to bruise on her neck. She did her part, and carried Andromeda's secret to her grave, long after Andromeda herself (and both of her sisters) died. Her fiancé, however, drowned in a boating accident shortly before their wedding, and she chose to never marry – which is how Neville Longbottom became the sole heir of both the Longbottom and Fawley houses.
The alarm for an incoming emergency patient echoed through St. Mungo's halls, and Andromeda did a quick sweep through the office to see if word been sent ahead of them. Seeing nothing, she entered the main room in time to find Kingsley and a couple wide-eyed aurors fresh out of training levitating three people onto mobile beds at her interns' directions.
"Muggles or wizards?" She snapped into the professional role she compartmentalized from the rest of her life.
Kingsley was out of breath. "Muggles. Another attack. Pretty bad one."
"Are there others coming in?"
"Probably a few."
"Life or limb?"
"Probably limb. These are the worst so far."
Something caught the auburn-haired witch's eye – something she didn't want to be the one seeing. She bent over one of the delirious men and scraped her gloved fingers over something protruding from a shallow wound in his shoulder. With her thumb and forefinger, she carefully extracted a shard of some crystalline material. It crackled and crinkled with an unmistakable electric blue light – her older sister's magic. Kingsley was talking, but her heartbeat grew loud enough in her ears to muffle his voice. She pushed one of the young aurors aside to inspect the next patient and found similar shards in both of his upper thighs and yet another in the forehead of the last one. The pieces pulsed in her palms as she stared at them. This was always the worst thing to treat.
"What happened?" She asked. The shards tremored, and she had a strange longing to try to arrange them into a pattern of something less awful.
"Not entirely sure. A squib in a little neighborhood near the London zoo set off an alarm when he saw Death Eaters apparate in."
A fear she wanted to believe was irrational stabbed through her. "What neighborhood?" There was no immediate reply, and when she raised her head to see the man's mouth hesitating to form words. "Kingsley, what fucking neighborhood?"
He averted his gaze. "Chalk Farm area."
Her sister-in-law's. Dora was at the house for the weekend. The stabbing fear ripped from her gut to her throat and drained the blood from her face. A tidal wave of silver and purple splashed over the waiting room and the front desk. She snapped at one of the mid-level healers to take over as she rushed to the office for her wand. A hurried patronus to Ted's shop told him to meet her at his sister's house immediately. Then she disapparated despite Kingsley's attempts to reclaim her attention.
Ted responded quickly. He landed on the street in front of his sister's house in time to see his wife sprinting up the steps and breaking into the front door without waiting for invitation. Plumes of smoke laced with green still billowed from a handful of houses kitty-corner from them on the next block over which the Dark Mark was beginning to form. He followed his wife into the building and found her swinging Dora up into her arms and already arguing with his sister, brother-in-law, and their son. Ted didn't stop to convince them; he seized his sister and her husband while Andromeda grabbed their nephew. They apparated to their own house.
On the doorstep of the Tonks residence, Andromeda knelt and clasped her daughter to her chest, trying not to sob out loud. The seven-year old felt her mother's heart pound into her and held her tenderly, despite not knowing what kind of thing could make her mother tremble so. The two muggle adults reeled with the dizziness of apparition while their son, apparently unaffected, surveyed his cousin's and aunt's embrace.
"What is – " Ted's brother-in-law was taking big gasps to control a wave of nausea. "What - is going on?"
Andromeda spoke with her eyes closed. "The terrorist attacks we've been talking about. That's what the fires were."
"How did you know?"
"Three muggles were brought into St. Mungo's on emergency. Kings was with them." She looked at Ted as gratefully as she could while he wrapped his arms around her and their daughter. His embrace was almost enough to quell her waning panic and rising anger.
Ted kissed Dora on the top of her head and said, "You all should stay here for a bit."
"How long?" His sister was clearly having trouble processing the danger.
"Not sure yet. Maybe a day or two. Kings will let us know more soon." This made the muggle adults trade incredulous looks.
Andromeda thought very little could make her feel worse about the situation until she saw a column of black smoke stream over her husband's shoulder into the nearby meadow. It coalesced into a familiar figure with mussed curls, and she cursed straight into her daughter's ear.
"Fuck no. Fuck her."
Ted's head drew back in surprise and alarm. His wife was always a terror when she used that tone of voice, and this time it had a new, deadly edge to it.
She pushed Dora into him and straightened up, her wand already out. "Are the wards up?"
"Yes." He nodded.
"Get everyone inside. If the wards break for anyone other than me, set them on fire and apparate everyone to the Forbidden Forest."
Ted didn't think he could apparate four people anywhere, much less to the Forbidden Forest - a place he definitely didn't want to take his family - and he sure as hell didn't want to leave his wife behind in this state. When he tried to protest, she hissed, "Do as I fucking say."
He scooped his daughter up, corralled the rest of the family inside, and locked the door behind them even though the precaution felt trivial. The children beelined to the window, where they smushed their noses and fingers up against the glass, feverish in their desire to see. Ted placed his hand on the window frame and peered out over their heads while the muggle adults gathered behind him.
His wife had not yet touched the wards, but they were already shot through with a striking wash of pink, purple, blue, and red rippling up over the house – not unlike the way Dora's hair had been morphing as of late. He stole a glance at his daughter. She was leaning forward on her toes, eyes wide, and mouth agape at her mother – and for good reason. Andromeda's face was swarming with fury. Her purple and gold magic ricocheted like lightning off the wards. Her spine appeared to lengthen while her shoulders relaxed with an insidious confidence, and she locked hateful eyes on the woman approaching beyond the wards. Was he afraid for or of his wife? Was that his own heavy breathing or his daughter's? Andromeda muttered words he did not know, and a fountain of flames from her wand pierced the earth. It burned the grass and soil in a small radius around her and spread out in a single arc to encircle the house, creating a second layer parallel to the shimmering wards.
"Shouldn't we leave, Ted?" His sister whispered harshly. She hadn't seen the burning, the Dark Mark, or the carnage near her home, and this display from her sister-in-law exceeded what she could imagine about the attack.
He rubbed the back of his neck. "No. You heard her." He couldn't hold the suspicion in his sister's voice against her. His wife did look quite the dark witch. "She knows what she's doing."
"Are you sure we should trust her right now? This doesn't look… safe or…"
"Every bit of me trusts her."
He felt his daughter shift in a way that told him this statement was important to her without understanding why. Her mother - whispered about in public, tiptoed around by family and friends, confronted by Ministry workers at her own home; her mother, who sometimes made the house shake, who sometimes cried when she sang her to sleep, who sometimes slumped listlessly on the stairs; her mother, whom she still recognized now despite the flames, the boiling colors in the sky, the way she was carrying herself, the adults' suspicion, the grand wickedness – she was someone to be trusted.
Ted returned his attention to the window because Dora grasped his hand and squeezed tightly. Andromeda strode through the turbulent wards and the circle of fire with no other care than to keep her loathing eyes on the other figure. The wards and the flames clung to her as she passed, whipping together in her wake, and ripping into wild tendrils when they freed themselves from her.
Bellatrix' wand was not out. She was still scuffed and sooty from the raid, where she'd arrived late to play cleanup for some young recruits who couldn't yet handle themselves against aurors. The mission hadn't been especially remarkable or successful, and she was pretty sure the raid was precariously near where the muggle Tonks' lived. This was why she had apparated to the meadow near her middle sister's house, a decision she was beginning to think she might regret as the woman advanced at her.
Still, neither the turmoil of the Tonks wards nor the scorching fire put her off entirely. She was more nervous about how forcefully her sister was approaching. Other than the one time in the garden at the Lestrange lodge, the Andromeda she knew had never lashed out except when she was out of control, and Bellatrix wasn't particularly ready to match her in either case.
"Andy -"
"You fucking dare to come to my house after that?" The middle Black sister sliced her wand up from the ground, and chunks of earth flew at Bellatrix, who barely dodged them.
"Are they – are they ok?"
"You snake!"
Bellatrix drew her wand and pulled up a shield just in time to send a spell ricocheting into the night. "I wasn't there, Andy. If I'd have known – "
"Fuck you! I saw your fuck-ass magic buried in three muggles in St. Mungo's."
Bellatrix felt her composure breaking with the short-lived lie. "I - I'm sorry. Just hear me out."
"Hell if I ever listen to you ever again!" Spells popped on the dark-haired witch's shield, and a mounting wind tore at its edges as if at mere parchment.
"I didn't have a choice. I was forced to. I did my best to keep it away from them."
A string of expletives launched a barrage of colorful spells. The dark-haired witch had to dive out of the way and cast a new protego to hold back her sister's anger.
"Bullshit! Bullshit! You're violent. You're reckless. It never matters to you who you hurt as long as you get to hurt someone! You don't care about anyone, anything, but yourself!"
Bellatrix would have flinched if she had been standing still, but she was still retreating from incoming arcs of sizzling purple and yellow. "I'm here right now because I care about you!"
"No, you're here because you think you can have everything your way – playing your stupid, violent games and still having me care about you. But you can't!"
"Give me a little bit of slack, Andromeda. We're not so different! We're both just doing our best to live with who we are!" She didn't love feeling desperate, much less sounding desperate, and she sounded very desperate.
"We are NOTHING alike! I was always too weak to actually stand up to you, but not anymore. I'm done with you and your shit. I'm done!"
"Ok, I crossed a line. I get it. I hear you. I'm listening." The protego was taking an unusual amount of effort to keep in place.
"Go to hell! You directly put my family in immediate danger."
Bellatrix' voice sounded high on her sister's wind as she tried to retrieve Ted's words to her months earlier. "Your family is my family, Andy!"
The auburn-haired witch's lip curled. "No, they're not. They never were, and they never will be."
The oldest Black sister felt her throat constrict as she watched her sister disappearing behind a cold hatred. She made a last-ditch effort to provoke her back across the chasm growing between them. "You don't mean that, and you'd regret it if you did! They'll never mean as much to you as I do!"
It was the wrong provocation. The auburn-haired witch spun her wand above her head to cast a torrent of rage at her sister, and her voiced thundered. "If you ever come near my family or hurt anyone I care about ever again, if they don't send you to Azkaban, I will come get you and kill you myself!"
Black flames erupted next to them, momentarily interrupting the deluge of magic. The Dark Lord emerged from them, wand already levelled at the middle Black sister. Bellatrix would always remember this moment as incredibly lengthy, though it couldn't have been. Her sister's wand remained pointed at her, but those burning auburn eyes fixed on the most powerful wizard in oral history, a wizard whom she had scorned and whose wand was now trained on her forehead.
"Andromeda." The man's sneer was almost chivalrous.
The brazen woman was not so. "Tom."
Her sister's diminutive use of the Dark Lord's old name shocked Bellatrix, but he gave no indication of offense. There was only cold magic amassing before him. She eyed the tip of his wand in her sister's face nervously, then flicked her gaze between the two of them before making her third grave error that day, this time turning her wand on the Dark Lord.
"Bella, put your wand down." The man's voice slithered at her, but he cocked his head at the middle Black sister.
"M-my lord, y-you promised." The dark witch cursed herself for stuttering.
"I said put your wand down."
For a moment, the three of them stood fixed in that triangle, each trapped by their own transgressions into pointing their wand at someone they did not actually want to be: the Dark Lord at the object of his unbreakable vow, Andromeda at her complicated sister, and Bellatrix at her mentor and lord.
"Put it down." An edge of annoyance at the dark witch's delay sharpened the man's voice; Bellatrix finally did as she was told. "I did promise, that is correct. Lucky for both of you, I am a benevolent lord, and I deign to keep even the stupidest of my promises."
Andromeda's eyes pulsed with an array of hot emotions. She swung her wand away from her sister to train it on the man. This didn't relieve Bellatrix. The man, however, was unphased. He lowered his own wand while striding towards the dark-haired witch and wrapped a cloak of thick smoke around her. They disappeared in another eruption of black flames.
Andromeda was left alone with her ire, and though it was already seeded with regret, it wouldn't wane in time to fix things before Bellatrix was incarcerated.
They heard about the Potters before they heard about the Longbottoms; everyone did. Andromeda put Nymphadora to bed early and sang her a halting song until the girl was at least pretending to be asleep and then withdrew back downstairs to find Ted on the couch, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. He hadn't cleaned up after work; neither had she. When she curled up next to him, they sat in salty tears, cloying sawdust, the smell of sanitizing spray, bile on her shoes, sweat-heavy robes, and dirt that came from some unknown place. Even her magic picked up an unfamiliar smell as it cycled through colors unusual for her and crept over them both slowly, only subsiding when she repeatedly batted it away with her hand.
At some point, Ted flipped on the television and absentmindedly found a channel playing something trivial just for the noise. Neither of them watched or listened; neither did they speak. What was there to say? Their friends were dead; so was the Dark Lord. Who could celebrate? Who wouldn't be relieved? It was terrible; it was good for Wizarding Britain. The weight of moral contradiction descended on them, as well as the weight of knowing that most people wouldn't dwell on that contradiction if they noticed it at all.
Andromeda's blank stare broke. "We should take Harry." Ted blinked in surprise but said nothing. "They would have taken Dora if it had been us."
This was true, but Ted resisted. "Dumbledore has him. He's planning on sending him to Lily's sister's family."
The woman gave a frustrated sigh. "I remember Lily saying her sister wasn't exactly kind to her about being a witch."
"It's good for him to be with family."
"It's not good for him to be with family if they treat him poorly."
Ted heard his wife's own pain and dropped his head. "Andy, we can't take him."
"Why not? It's the right thing to do."
"No. We can't. You know we can't."
The auburn-haired witch's jaw trembled, and she shifted uncomfortably. "He needs a family who understands and who will help him know who he is, who his parents were."
"He needs stability." The man's words were sharper than he wanted them to be. "He needs stable adults. We can't give him that right now."
She snatched herself away. "We are that!"
"Two of them. You know it's true."
Her husband looked about as miserable as she remembered ever seeing him, but that didn't matter to her. "You fucking asshole. I can't believe you just said that."
He sighed. "He will be safe with Petunia's family. He'll be ok."
"Fuck you!"
She stormed out into the night. He was right, and she knew it. She could hardly parent one child with the way things were going those days, and she'd be damned – she was certain – if she tried and failed to care for another one.
The day the Daily Prophet featured a front-page photo of the Bellatrix screaming about the Dark Lord's return and a report on her delivery to Azkaban, Andromeda disappeared for a week. When Ted finally found her in a muggle hospital bed, she was covered in dirt and the sour odor of beer and sweat. In a few weeks, St. Mungo's let her go, only to re-hire her within the year once she had learned to hide her intoxication well enough to do her job effectively again. After that, it was the worst right before Dora went to Hogwarts, a time during which Ted made hundreds of excuses for his wife's behavior and absences from social events and spent late nights listening to her ramble about her wretched feelings for her older sister. Once Dora was at school, he convinced her to enroll in a muggle outpatient rehab program, and slowly but surely her tempests quieted. She learned to speak of her sisters as one speaks of dead, beloved relatives, and she and Ted regained some sense of normalcy from that. By the time Dora graduated from Hogwarts, Andromeda had been promoted to Head Healer and was well on her way to running all of St. Mungo's. Most people forgot about her addiction and forgave her past indiscretions, and her old reputation of dubious character was replaced with one of forbearance, kindness, and wisdom. She was the perfect pureblood – the one that reminded the wizarding world of the mystery and glory of ancient magic while also moving forward with progressive society to include muggleborn witches and wizards. She stayed away from the public eye as well as people and situations that would provoke her, and she garnered the quiet respect of those who were still skeptical of her and those who were enamored with her – both of which were many.
She found ways to be someone she wanted to be, even if she was not her full self all the time. The feeling of magic scratching at her skin as if at prison walls didn't fade, but she achieved some homeostasis that let her ignore it most of the time. If she let herself think about it, she genuinely believed it would someday kill her, but that day was never today, and she was willing to go on living like this forever.
a/n
I took a long break from this story because I didn't love the way I had initially written this chapter and spent some time on some other things. Here is my latest draft. The last chapter will be posted much more quickly. Cheers to December 2020.
Guest from chapter 14 - thank you for loving it :) broke me too, if i'm honest. and that's why i wrote it.
**never have i ever owned or made money from anything as wonderful as the harry potter world. i'm just lucky to get to play in it.**