Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Thank you for all the reviews, I was very flattered by the response to my little story.

Chapter 2- First Term

"Where are we going? I thought the Great Hall was that way..." I protested, trying to keep up with Bella's long strides.

"It is, we're not going to the Great Hall," she answered shortly.

"But...what about breakfast?"

She didn't answer, only continued along an upper corridor, and at the end of a hallway stopped so suddenly I ran into her.

"What are we doing?"

"Waiting."

"For what?"

She didn't answer, and I wasn't sure what to do. I wasn't used to this side of Bella, with her curt answers and her face set in a look of grim determination. A moment later I did see what, or rather who, we were waiting for as he stepped out from behind a portrait down the hall from us. The one blight on my happiness at finally being there had occurred the night before, when Sirius say under the sorting hat for far longer than usual, so long that a strange silence fell over the hall and the Slytherins, who fully expected him to joins us, began whispering to each other. When the hat had finally declared "Gryffindor", no one had looked more surprised than Sirius himself, who carefully avoided our eyes as he made his way to their table, where all the little mudbloods scooted away from him in fear. Now as he came out of his common room, his red and gold tie looking somehow wrong with his classic Black features, Bella jumped out and grabbed him by the collar, dragging him down a deserted corridor and then releasing him hard, so that he stumbled backwards several steps.

"What the-" he began, but she cut him off with such venom that we were both struck dumb.

"What the hell happened?" she spat.

"It's wasn't my fault!" he hissed back. "I told it I should be in Slytherin, I argued and argued, but it wouldn't listen! It's not my fault!"

"Do you know what kind of people are sorted into Gryffindor? Blood traitors, mudbloods and muggle-lovers! Is that what you want to be?" She snapped. I had never seen her like this. I had seen her get angry, of course, but her rage was usually directed at some unlucky house-elf, not a member of the family and certainly not Sirius, he had always been her particular favorite. He cast a confused look at me and I made a helpless 'what can I do' gesture.

"They're not all mudbloods! James Potter is in my dormitory, his family is pureblood!"

She made a derisive sound. "Yeah, new liberal purebloods and muggle-lovers."

"I told you it's not my fault!"

Sirius was tall for his age and they were nose-to-nose now. "You disgraced the family!"

"Bella Shh! Someone will hear!" I whispered urgently, hearing voices from the hall that led from Gryffindor's common room.

It was bad enough that Sirius had been sorted into the wrong house, but even worse would be for everyone to see Bella laying into him for it, and Sirius was not without a Black temper himself, he would only let her go so far before he fought back. If nothing else, our family had to present a solid front. Besides I wanted badly to distract her, her wand was in her hand in a distinctly threatening gesture. It had always been her way to throw around hexes before she thought. She glanced down to where the voices came from and took a step back, and then in typical mercurial fashion, all the anger seemed to leave her. She sighed.

"At least it wasn't Hufflepuff."

Sirius seemed to finally take a breath again too. "Yeah, I guess."

"What did you say to the hat?" I asked him curiously, as we started toward the Great Hall and breakfast by tacit agreement.

"That I was supposed to be in Slytherin," he replied simply.

"And what did it say?"

He gave a twisted, humorless smile. "It disagreed."

Bella didn't forget about what she considered Sirius's betrayal of the family, in fact she referred to him exclusively as "the Gryffindor" after that, but they seemed to have formed a truce and went back to their usual good terms. With that first crisis passed, I threw myself into my classes. Good grades were expected, not because our parents cared about our education, after all if we married well as expected we wouldn't need any skills other than being charming and witty at cocktail parties. In the view of our family, being at the top of one's class was just another demonstration of the intellectual superiority of purebloods.

Within a few days I had established myself as one of the top students in my year, with grades even better than Bella's. She did her homework sporadically, as the mood took her. If she felt disinclined to do it, she could always charm one of her many admirers into doing it for her, but she always came through with a brilliant grade on tests.

The sorting hat might have been right, I probably would have done well in Ravenclaw, but I would have hated being separated from Bella even only as far as a different common room, and I was not uncomfortable in Slytherin. In some ways it was as Machiavellian and hard-edged as its reputation, but in some ways we formed a strange sort of family. There was loyalty among Slytherins, whatever it might have looked like to outsiders. Perhaps our fights were more ruthless, our curses darker, and our grudges more dearly held...such were the lessons we had unconsciously learned from our parents, but we were not without friends and even love. The children of the old pureblood families, we had known each other all our lives through our parents. We shared a common past and it seemed inevitable that we would share a future as well.

It was not until the end of my first week I had my first Defense Against the Dark Arts class. I had been looking forward to it, because I knew it was Bella's favorite class, though she seemed drawn mostly to the theory behind the spells she was supposed to be learning to defend herself against.

Professor Temer was a slight, delicate looking man who had once been a well-known curse-breaker, until he got on the wrong side of a Sphinx during an expedition in Egypt. He'd apparently made his share of enemies chasing down thieves who stole treasure from the ancient tombs, and he seemed to be always ready for an attack and jumped at the slightest sounds. He had a sort of perpetually surprised look, as though at a loss to explain how he had ended up teaching eleven-year-olds about defending themselves against pixies and hinkypunks. While probably competent enough at curse-breaking, his social skills left something to be desired.

"All right, enough talking, settle down," he announced as we filed into the room, followed by some uncomplimentary muttering about first years. Immediately, I noticed a new group of students, this time in the blue-striped ties of Ravenclaw. We'd already had potions with Gryffindors and herbology with Hufflepuffs, so it appeared our double defense classes would be combined with Ravenclaw. Not that it mattered, we tended not to mix with other houses.

Rabastan Lestrange was grumbling audibly about how this class would probably be a waste of time as well, until the Professor fixed him with a glare. Though not a particularly driven student, he was establishing himself as a leader in Slytherin. Partly because they were an old pureblood family and partly because everyone was a bit afraid of his older brother Rodolphus. He also promised to be very good-looking as he got older, and so was already a bit of a heartthrob among the younger girls in the house.

Annabelle, one of his many admirers, nearly ran me over to sit near him at one of the long desks, and so I resignedly took a seat across the aisle from her in the front row, barely noticing as one of the Ravenclaw boys sat on my other side.

The Professor read through the names, occasionally glancing up at the faces that went with the names he recognized, and he seemed to know the names of most of the Slytherins. As he set the list aside, he said casually "All right, let's see your wands then."

And then suddenly he whipped around, with a shower of harmless but impressive sparks, and in a flash his wand was at the throat of the little boy next me, who froze. Having seen more than my share of impressive wand work, I didn't flinch and stayed impassive, but the unfortunate Ravenclaw, who had been rummaging through his bag to find his wand, gulped visibly and went white.

"What's your name boy?"

"Edward Tonks, Sir." To his credit, his voice did not waver.

"Well Mr. Tonks, you're dead." He did not lower his wand, but his eyes swept over the rest of the class. "Lesson number one: Always know where your wand is."

I was glad my own wand was sitting on top of my desk, clearly visible with my hand resting on it lightly. Finally the Professor lowered his wand, and Edward Tonks gave an audible sigh of relief. I turned to give him a smug look, but before I could do so, the world suddenly went dark.

With a gasp my hands flew to my eyes, and found a blindfold.

"Miss Black," came the Professor's voice. "Tell me, how many windows are in the room?"

I froze, I hadn't been paying attention to the room, what did that have to do with dark arts anyway? I wondered for a moment if I could fake it, and then decided I had no idea. I was about to admit that, when a voice breathed next to me ear "six." It was so light I barely heard it, but it was good a guess as any.

"Six, Sir."

"Very good Miss Black," he said, vanishing the blindfold. "Lesson number two: Always be aware of your surroundings, especially your escape routes. Five points to Slytherin, Miss Black." He glanced around the class again. "Why is no one writing this down?"

In the scramble to get out parchment and quills, I gave a quick glance at the Ravenclaw boy next to me. "Er…thanks."

He shrugged. "No problem. Not really fair, takin' us off guard like that." He looked at me with frank curiosity. "What's your name again? I mean, besides "Miss Black?"

"Andromeda."

He blinked. "People actually call you that? You don't have a nickname or anything?"

"It's a tradition in my family." I replied haughtily.

"Right, well, okay. People call me Ted."

"I've never heard of your family," I said, wondering where he came from.

"Well, no, you wouldn't. I'm the first ever to come here."

I stared as I realized what that meant. I had been so sheltered that I had been under the impression that I would somehow be able to tell a mudblood apart from the rest of the population, only to discover at Hogwarts that they looked exactly like any other witch or wizard. When I'd mentioned it to Bella she giggled and said "Well, it's not as though it's stamped on their foreheads Andy. Don't worry, you'll be able to tell."

I didn't have time to respond, as Professor Temer surprised Theo Nott with a mild stinging hex, and then told us rule number three, always be ready for an attack. Our homework was to write two rolls of parchment on how to define "dark arts", and I saw the confusion on my own face mirrored on the faces of my classmates. To me the Dark Arts were something that my father and his "associates" discussed behind closed doors, or Bella with her dark head bent over an old book she had sneaked out of his library. They were not necessarily something to be condemned, just not to be freely discussed. I left class deep in thought until I heard someone say my name. I turned and found Ted Tonks.

"Are you going to the Great Hall, because it's-"

"Andy, who's that?" Bella had come around the corner with Elizabeth Rosier.

"Andy! Ha, you do have a nickname!" Ted Tonks said proudly, unaware of the darkening of Bella's face that was a danger sign.

"Only I can call her that," she said evenly. "And she doesn't associate with mudbloods."

He smirked. "You've got to be kidding."

"Do you know who I am?" she said, taking a step toward him, wand in her hand.

"No," he replied simply. Elizabeth giggled.

"Bella, Andromeda, is this mudblood bothering you?" Rodolphus Lestrange emerged from a nearby classroom and immediately looked delighted at the prospect of teaching a young mudblood a lesson. The contrast in size between the two of them was almost comical, and Ted looked like he was finally catching on that he might be in over his head. As annoyed as I was that I'd been caught by my housemates talking to a mudblood, I didn't think Ted quite deserved an introduction to Crucio.

"Like a mudblood could bother me," I said dismissively. "I'm fine, let's go to lunch."

Bella shrugged and pocketed her wand, and I saw her wink at Rodolphus before we walked away.

"Frank Longbottom says your family is trouble," was the first thing Ted Tonks said to me in my next defense class. It seemed I was going to have to sit next to him the entire year, and so I had decided that I would simply ignore him and instead talk across the aisle to Annabelle, who had apologized profusely for leaving me to sit next to a mudblood, citing her undying love for Rabastan as her excuse.

"Frank Longbottom's family is all muggle-lovers," I retorted. "His Aunt even ran away with a muggle." I knew that only because I'd heard my mother and her friends gossiping about how far the family had fallen. I realized I was talking to him again, and I had resolved not to do that. "Leave me alone."

"Or what? You'll set your sister's boyfriend on me again?"

"He is not her boyfriend!" I hissed, wondering why that made me more angry than anything else he'd said. He looked a little taken aback, but then turned back to the front of the class as the Professor called for attention.

It was impossible to avoid Tonks completely. Professor Temer had no concern for my sensibilities when it came to assigning partners and always set me to working with him on any assignment that required two. That was only in one class, but it quickly became obvious that despite the disadvantage of being raised as a muggle, he was battling me for the top grades in nearly every class in our year. Never one to back down from a challenge, especially thrown down by a muggle-born boy, I only studied harder. He never talked to me outside of class.

He was popular enough, usually seen with Frank Longbottom and his mates, and he rarely spoke to me outside of class, but in class he never lost the chance to make a comment. He seemed more amused than anything at my attitude about mudbloods, and it drove me mad that he didn't take me more seriously.

I felt only slightly better when the end of term exams were finished, and I had the top grade in the class, barely edging him out.

"Don't look so smug Andy, it's only one term in one class," he said as I packed up after the last class.

"Don't call me that."

"Wait 'till next term," he promised.

"Sure, I'll really lose sleep over that," I retorted. "Face it, you just can't keep up."

The night before we were supposed to go home, I had left packing until the last minute, and at midnight I was still trying to fit everything in my trunk. My potions book had been left in the common room, and so I crept down in the darkness to get it. In the common room, a chill had swept through as the fire burned down low. Someone was sitting in front of the fire, forgoing the couches and armchairs to sit on the hearth rug, and I recognized the heavy black hair falling down her back. Bella was sitting unnaturally still for her, with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, staring into the fire.

"Bella?"

She turned, and in the faint light I saw tracks of tears on her face. She made no attempt to brush them away, only said faintly "Oh, Andy…"

"What's wrong?" I asked, forgetting my book and going to drop to my knees next to her. She turned back to the fire and shook her head slightly.

"Nothing," she murmured, and then was silent. I thought she wasn't going to say anything else, when she spoke in a whisper. "It's all just so dark, Andy."

"What is?"

"The things I think about."

I didn't really know what she meant, and I didn't know what to say. I knew her, I thought I knew all her thoughts and to me she was brilliant and charming, beautiful and golden. I didn't see any of the darkness she already saw in herself. Instead of arguing with her, I merely sat next to her and put my arms around her. She leaned against me and sighed, burying her face in my shoulder, and we stayed there most of the night.