Author's note: Enjoy!

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights

Hogwarts: Assignment 9, Celtic Studies Task #8 Use the language of flowers as inspiration.

Content Warnings: Canon prejudice, separation, and character death

The Flowers Will Speak For Us

Slow down, we've got time left to be lazy

All the kids have bloomed from babies into flowers in our eyes

We've got fifty good years left to spend out in the garden

I don't care to beg your pardon

We should live until we die

-The Gambler, fun

She was bracing herself over the kitchen sink, squeezing her eyes shut as tightly as she could and trying to keep it together, when Ted's arms slipped around her waist. She felt his nose press into her hair as he leaned into her.

"Don't cry, love," he said softly. "I reckon Dora's right. It'll be better if I disappear for a while, until this Muggleborn trial nonsense wears off. It will."

"I know," she said quietly. She knew that their daughter was right, of course. She wasn't as convinced that this would all blow over quickly; she was a daughter of the most noble and ancient house of black, after all, no matter how far from the tree this particular apple had fallen. She knew how old, how dark, and how deeply-rooted hatred and violence was in this world.

But she shouldn't scare Ted. He was the one who would be hunted by the Ministry, after all. He was the one their daughter had shown all her Auror survival skills to, while their son-in-law shyly suggested defensive spells that could complement them. He was the target of that hate that made her squeamish and sick and tense. He always had been; she'd simply been foolish enough to think that they were past that now. They should have been, shouldn't they, after thirty years of marriage?

"I just… I hate the idea of going backwards," she explained quietly. "It will be like being at Hogwarts again, stealing kisses in the Room of Requirement and passing notes in invisible ink and praying that nobody caught on to how in love we were. I hate the idea of… of being without you, again. Of having to pretend that I don't know, that I don't love, everything about you."

Ted moved her long curls out of the way and propped his chin on her shoulder.

"You won't be totally without me," he said.

"I know," Andromeda said quietly. She fiddled with her wedding ring. "Nymphadora is going to be absolutely restless and overbearingly protective."

"Yes," Ted laughed. "But that's not what I meant. I made you something."

"What?" Andromeda asked. "When?"

"Today."

"Why? You should have been practising or studying with Dora…"

"Because I love you," Ted said, kissing her cheek again. "And I don't want to be without you either."

"What… what is it?" Andromeda asked.

"Come," he said, tugging on her hand to bring her around to the back porch. When they'd retired from their days at St. Mungo's, they had invested in two wooden rocking chairs and a small round table, so that they could read outside and have a place to rest their teacups. There was something new by her chair, now: a simple wooden flower box, hanging on the porch railing, packed full of rich, dark soil.

"What's this?" she asked.

"A fancy bit of charm work," Ted promised.

"You never liked charms," she reminded him. It was one of the only classes Hufflepuff and Slytherin had had together while they were in school.

"No, but I made it work," he said. "And I was always good at Herbology."

"That's true," Andromeda said. That was the other class they'd had together. His favourite one, actually—it was the reason he'd gotten interested in healing in the first place. She'd been looking for a career so wholesome and sanctious that her family wouldn't say no.

He wrapped his arms around her again. "Do you remember how we'd leave each other messages? With the flowers you wore in your hair, the ones I grew during class, or the petals you'd decorate your finished potions with?"

"Of course," she said. They'd fallen back on a language nobody would know or recognize, one of flowers and blooms that had always been meant to be cryptographic and secretive—just like the first pangs of their lives together. They took turns checking out a Victorian floral dictionary from the library to signal to one another, taking notes on the margins of their other textbooks or essays.

"If the world wants to separate us a little longer, we'll just have to do it again," Ted reasoned. He kissed her ear. "They didn't manage to split us up then, when we were so much younger and so much more foolish. They won't manage it this time either, love."

He reached for the wand tucked in his back pocket and pointed it at the box. Flowers bloomed—pink ones, with many layers of petals topping one another. She gasped at the magic, since it was beautiful charm work indeed, and wiggled out of his arms to go investigate closer.

"Pink camellias," she said, searching through her memory. "The ones that mean 'longing for you.'"

"Exactly," Ted said, crossing the space between them to wrap her in his arms once more. He squeezed tightly. "Because I miss you already."

The first morning she woke up alone, without Ted at her side, it hurt even if she'd known perfectly well that he'd be leaving one night this week. They'd agreed that she shouldn't know exactly when, so that she could plead surprise in case she was ever questioned. She'd kissed him goodbye every night for the past week and tucked extra rations in the backpack he'd had waiting in the closet, like the adventuring protagonist of some novel.

She wrapped her robe around herself and gingerly made her way downstairs, feeling like an intruder in her own house, as if she was walking a shop or museum after closing hours. She was careful as she pulled back the curtain to look outside, trying to manage her expectations and hopes. But when she saw flowers dripping out of the box on the patio, a smile broke across her face and she rushed to examine them. She laughed when she recognized the white gardenias piling onto one another—gardenias, secret love. They'd used that one quite a bit, actually. She had. It had felt like a small rebellion to wear gardenias in her hair during summers in London or at pureblood balls and occasions. She'd been screaming the truth, safe and secure in the confidence that nobody around her would know anything about long-forgotten Muggle traditions and lore.

Today the gardenias felt like a miracle. She even plucked one from the box and tucked it behind her ear as if she was still a schoolgirl, and she even thought for a moment: we were born in this storm and we will weather it again. This will be alright.

As the days went on, she kept track of the blossoms that appeared in her box when Ted didn't magically reappear on her doorstep—with that easy smile on his face, leaning against the door with that easy, relaxed posture of his, with his hands tucked in his back pockets, perhaps. In her dreams he did just that; he appeared and smiled and said Voldemort's fallen, love, it's done. That was a truly distant dream, of course—since Nymphadora had told her father to go into hiding, things had only gone downhill and gotten uglier. She must have known, probably through the Order, just how grim the future seemed. Andromeda tried to remind herself that that was a blessing.

The Ministry had sent letters demanding Ted appear in court, and then people to search the house multiple times—at first Aurors and then Snatchers (after the Aurors weren't cooperative enough, she suspected). They never found a sign of Ted, of course. Andromeda swore she had no idea where he'd gone, that he'd simply picked up one night and left. Nymphadora had helped her fold all of her father's clothes and things into boxes, as if they were forsaking him, to build up the act. Years of lying about being in love with a Muggleborn boy had prepared her for this, no matter how distressingly easy it was to slip back into the routine. But even when they slipped Veritaserum in her teacup, she honestly had no idea where Ted was or where he'd gone. That had been an important part of the plan.

But the flower box never stood out to anybody who came looking and so it stayed where it was, the flowers blooming just as brightly and colourfully even as autumn approached and even turned to Winter. And the flowers that graced its soil most often were red chrysanthemums, in deep hues and with so many petals that Andromeda could have wasted whole days counting all their petals if she'd wanted to. Their message was much more straightforward: I love you.

Well I knew that, she wanted to laugh as she ruffled Ted's hair. No need to go to all that trouble to tell me.

It was still so nice to see them.

It didn't take long before she started desperately wishing that Ted's clever flower box worked both ways. She wished that she could send a message back to him so badly, she ached with longing. But they had agreed that it would only be more dangerous; what if the house was searched and the authorities found it? Not only would Andromeda be tried for treason (though she wagered that she'd be given to Bellatrix as a prize if anything), but it would give them a clear line to Ted.

But sometimes she looked at the flower box and mused about what message she would send Ted if she could. Chamomile—patience in adversity? What about goldenrod—encouragement, good fortune? Maybe white hyacinths, for loveliness and prayers. Wallflowers, for faithfulness in adversity, blue salvia to say I think of you, Edelweiss for courage, or maybe red roses for a simply "I love you…" The list was long. She'd used all of them before and she would give anything to use them again, but she was thankful that at least she had messages from Ted. She knew that Dora didn't have that, and she saw how it weighed on her. She'd always been her father's little girl and he'd always been much better at talking through her problems with her and offering an open ear without being quite as protective and worried as Andromeda. And with the whole world falling apart around her, with the Order underground and Remus's sickness and the Auror department slowly being brought into the Death Eater's fold… well, she felt that Nymphadora needed something of the sort.

"Your father's doing well," she whispered one day while they stood in the kitchen after Remus cooked Sunday dinner, doing the dishes.

Nymphadora's eyes widened and she turned to her mother.

"Mum," she said in an equally hushed tone, as if the sanctity of her childhood home couldn't be trusted. "Mum, if you have a way to him don't tell me anything at all. Don't tell me a single thing that they could want to extract from me. I'm already rattling with secrets and it's not safe, especially not when I'm—"

"When you're what?" Andromeda asked, frowning.

"Fuck," Nymphadora said. "I wasn't supposed to tell you without Remus."

Then she realized that she'd been the only one who had drunk wine over dinner. It had been white too—her and her daughter's favourite…

"Nymphadora Tonks," Andromeda gasped.

"Lupin," she corrected her.

"Well I suppose it must be, mustn't it?" Andromeda said—which made her daughter laugh for a minute even if tired, anxious tears welled up in her eyes a second later. It was just another excuse for Andromeda to wrap her daughter up in her arms.

And that night, the ache to send a message back to Ted was nearly painful. It burned in the pit of Andromeda's stomach, because now she knew without question what she'd send back. Yellow orchids and white roses, a dozen each at least, even if she was scared out of her mind for her daughter and maybe even her grandchild since there was so much she didn't know. But she did know what the flowers would mean and she did know that she wanted Ted to know all about it: New beginnings.

The Victorians had sometimes sent entire bouquets to one another—when their thoughts were complicated, when one flower alone couldn't encompass their grief or woes, or to create a meaning out of multiple blooms when one wouldn't do—like a constellation in the stars. This was why her heart broke when she saw the marigolds appear. For all the pep in those yellow and orange blossoms, their meanings were somber. Despair. Grief. But it wasn't just the marigolds, since they came with red columbines, which screamed trembling; troubled.

Frustration and sorrow clogged Andromeda's throat when she thought of all the things she couldn't help Ted balance—the loneliness, the fear, the anxiety, the discomfort, the uncertainty… She plucked the marigolds from the flower bed and walked to the stream in the park, dropping the blossoms one by one in the water and letting them float away. It wouldn't help, of course she knew that. But what could she do?

The peonies appeared on their anniversary in a delicate shade of pink that matched how the cold tinged Andromeda's cheeks. They were framed by small purple heliotropes that grew in clusters. Happy life, they said. Eternal love, they promised. That was certainly what he'd given her before all the flowers had come, and she wished she had a surer way to pray for it all to come back to them in the end.

You too, Ted, she thought fervently as she pressed a few petals between the pages of a heavy book. You deserve a happy life too. Please make it home so you can finish what you started.

The morning when she found the flower box empty… no, not empty, worse than empty. Yesterday's flowers were still in it, daisies that had signaled hope, but they had darkened and dried and shriveled up in the box. That was why she knew, even before Remus and Nymphadora came.

"I'm sorry I couldn't come earlier Mum, I couldn't leave," she said. The colour had drained from her features. "I—if I'd have left they'd have come after all of us, hunting us down, so I couldn't tell you as soon as I heard—as soon as they brought me the damned paperwork filing for the bounty."

"He's dead, isn't he?" Andromeda said quietly.

Dora gathered her in her arms and whispered her apologies again and again until she lost the composure she'd used to hold herself together all day. Andromeda lost hers too.

"Mum!" Nymphadora said when she stepped onto the porch. Well, waddled onto the porch—which was really her only movement, at just about nine months pregnant. "Bloody hell Mum don't do that to me! We were looking all over the house, I thought something had happened…"

"I'm sorry, love. Just lost track of time, I wasn't expecting you two yet," Andromeda said from where she was kneeling. There was dirt under her fingers because she hadn't been able to make herself put on Ted's gardening gloves, but she didn't care. She was almost done.

"It's alright," Dora said. She twisted to yell over her shoulder, "Remus, I've found her!" Then she turned back to watch her, leaning on the doorframe, one hand resting on her belly. "What are you doing, Mum?"

"It's spring," Andromeda said. "It's time to plant things." She had no intention to touch the rest of their backyard, she'd hardly have the ability to manage a gardening project of that size, but this felt manageable.

"What are you planting?" Dora asked, nodding her head towards the flower box.

"Pink carnations," Andromeda said simply. I'll never forget you.

WC: 2642