Author's Note: I'm pretty sure that this is my first post on FF since I was a freshman in high school, and I'm in graduate school now, so my writing style has changed a lot. This story will be split into several chapters and will contain eventual mentions of Drarry, although that isn't the main focus by any means. This is not epilogue-compliant, and is slightly AU (both Narcissa and Lucius die in the Battle of Hogwarts). Please review - I definitely welcome feedback as I get back into this kind of writing!
Introduction
Her father had often said that the Black women's love ran narrow and deep.
Andromeda knew that Cygnus Black never meant the words as anything but a malediction. She could remember her father murmuring them as she and Narcissa watched Bellatrix scream about her need to leave Hogwarts and join her Dark Lord, her mother screaming with equivalent fury about her most promising daughter's departure from the future which her parents had carefully planned.
Her mother had tried to entreat her sister with promises of the match awaiting her upon her graduation, the Lestrange boy's hand in marriage. Bella only screamed in return that she didn't want a proper match.
Heirs be damned, she would go help the Dark Lord and if Rodolphus didn't want her for it, all the better.
This was an argument far beyond her father's comfort zone. He simply stood behind Andromeda and Narcissa in as close of an approximation of comfort as a Black patriarch could respectably provide, murmuring his favored rationale for the motivations of his immediate family.
"Narrow and deep."
At the time, Andromeda had envied Narcissa her youth. The eleven-year-old was young enough to get away with clutching her around the waist while Bella screamed, could even shed a tear or two without ending up on the receiving end of their mother's rage.
All Andromeda could do was wrap an arm around her sister, rub her back, and keep her own back straight as she watched her mother and sister verbally spar. And dream, of course. About her upcoming graduation and the life that she would make for herself and Narcissa once they didn't have to return to this god-forsaken home.
Of course, the next time she heard her father mutter the words it was while that dream disintegrated.
She was the one on the receiving end of her mother's rage, and all of her careful plans for convincing Cissy that life would be better outside of the range of Druella's rage were eclipsed by the premature arrival of the rage itself.
She knew that when Bella discovered her relationship with Ted, she would have to be careful. She should have been more suspicious at Bella's easy acquiescence to secrecy, even couched in terms of "if you insist on sullying yourself, I'll let you break the news to Mother," but instead was so elated at her big sister's reaction that she had let down her guard (she had, after all, expected Bellatrix to try to kill her).
It might as well be rule number one of being a Black: trust no one (and family the least).
Bella had of course chosen the worst possible moment to tell her parents. Just as Andromeda had walked over to them after graduation, diploma in hand, Ted watching carefully from where he stood just a few yards behind, talking with his own family of jubilant Muggles (they had loved her as soon as they knew that Ted loved her, and she couldn't even comprehend that kind of acceptance).
All of Hogwarts' graduating students and parents had gotten a front row seat to her disownment. As her mother screamed (she had started with questions, but Andromeda wouldn't lie – not in front of Cissy and Sirius), she could see her father stroking Cissy's back and mouthing the words. "Narrow and deep."
Andromeda had dreamed of creating a life for her sister that inspired her to love and trust more than her closest companions. Instead, she watched her father's words come true in her youngest sister's life as well. Lucius and Draco were the limits of Cissy's world. Even her own sisters had no place in it.
Andromeda had always envied Molly Weasley her full kitchen and fuller heart, but she had played to her strengths, even as the second war loomed and then dawned; even as her own family was swept up in it. She stayed on the edge of the Order; helped Harry Potter escape from Privet Drive; helped her husband escape from the Ministry; lied to Death Eaters to keep her daughter and Ted and Remus safe.
As the Battle of Hogwarts raged, Andromeda Tonks stared down at her grandson and worried that her small family, the love that she had created and fostered and fiercely protected, might be dwindling still.
She spent the night pacing, holding Teddy against her chest as she walked the length of the house. She understood the restlessness that had pushed her daughter to join the fight.
She wasn't much of a fighter, but she would have joined in if not for the child she was holding. She had to make sure that Teddy had someone to protect him come morning.
Of course, morning came, and so did her worst fears. A Patronus, from Charlie Weasley, a dragon which spoke with such sorrow that Andromeda already knew the message which it hadn't delivered. "Mrs. Tonks, the battle is over. Voldemort is dead. Please come meet me in the Great Hall. You can Apparate right in."
She took a few moments before making the journey. She knew from Charlie's message that Dora's best friend must have bitter news for her, despite the good news of Tom Riddle's death which the Patronus had carried.
She dressed for the day, pulled back her hair, and gathered supplies for the diaper bag which Teddy had never previously needed.
Her grandson had never left this house, and now they would go to Hogwarts to find out what had happened to his parents in the battle. Andromeda had a fleeting sense that she should be panicking but pushed it down to focus on the task ahead.
She might be a widow, she might be terrified, but she was still a Black. It wouldn't do to panic before she had even received whatever news awaited her. Teddy needed someone solid.
With this in mind, she Apparated to Hogwarts, ignoring her sinking suspicion that a battle which had felled Hogwarts' ancient wards must have also felled many of its young defenders. She kept her back straight as she stood in the doorway of the Great Hall and searched the crowd for the red hair of Charlie Weasley, ignoring the pitying looks of the few students sitting at the end of what appeared to be the Hufflepuff table.
She saw the rows of bodies before she saw the Weasleys. She looked at her daughter's best friend, standing between the bodies of her daughter and son-in-law, and was frozen between the instincts of the two deepest parts of herself.
Go and weep for your daughter, said the voice she had carefully nurtured and allowed to flourish, all these years. But still (always) was the nagging voice: Blacks don't show emotion in public. You can't tell them you're weak.
Normally, she'd have told the voice (Druella's voice, even now) to go back to hell, but this moment was beating her down to her core.
In the end, she simply froze. She stared at Charlie Weasley and her daughter and Remus and the body of one of Molly's boys and held her grandson and shook her head, just slightly, just enough to remind herself that this was real and here and eventually she would be forced to confront this new reality in which she found herself.
She was eventually pulled from her trance by a soft hand at her back, belonging to a willowy girl who she mistook briefly for her cousin Pandora, who guided her over to the Weasley family. Andromeda wrapped Molly in her arms and allowed herself to be swallowed by the grief that surrounded her. To mourn.
The next few days were filled with a lot of crying and planning. Andromeda found herself saying the word "yes" a lot, nodding along with plans that she hadn't the slightest understanding of while she hoped that whatever was happening was something which her brain would find reasonable when it got back from its grief-induced furlough.
Hermione Granger probably could've convinced her to contribute her entire Gringotts vault to a wizarding space exploration agency and she would've agreed in a heartbeat to avoid having to think. Granger was smart. Dora had always thought very highly of her. Surely whatever she was suggesting was a good thing (and really, from the little Andromeda had gathered, it seemed that Miss Granger had been making plans for the reformation of the wizarding world since the moment she had entered it – there was no way that anything Andromeda could suggest through her haze of grief would be better than that).
Andromeda had a sneaking suspicion that when her brain got back this was all going to hurt much worse, so she wasn't exactly welcoming a return to being engaged with her surroundings.
A few days after the battle, Andromeda wandered away from one such conversation to help Poppy treat the wounded. This was perhaps the only form of helping that she could do without thinking.
The most grievously injured fighters had been taken to St. Mungo's immediately after the battle, but Poppy had given those whose injuries were within her ability to heal the choice to stay and receive care within Hogwarts. Most had chosen to do so – it seemed that no one wanted to be alone with their grief. Within the castle, at least, there was the understanding that each person was walking through some personal hell.
Andromeda had always been a gifted healer. She had, after all, raised the clumsiest witch in the wizarding world. It had taken a rather thorough knowledge of all seven volumes of At Home Healing for the Modern Witch to get Nymphadora through her childhood and adolescence in one piece (following one rather notable splinching incident, she'd had to put Nymphadora right after she'd somehow ended up at home in three pieces).
So, she wandered amongst the beds, mending cuts and re-administering potions and straightening blankets. She let some of the healthier older students who were still mending in bed hold Teddy (she had to agree with Poppy – babies were a wonderful medicine) while she held the hands of those who were not quite so healed.
She wasn't sure exactly how it had happened, but Andromeda Tonks had developed one, singular fixation as she stood in the ruins of her first home and thought about the ruin of her family.
She had learned that every single person she had ever loved in this world, except little Teddy, had died at the hands of Voldemort or his followers. Even Cissy.
She didn't mourn for Bella. If she had ever had love for her, she had banished it so far from her mind that she knew she would never find it again. Sod Bellatrix, who had never once loved her and had, Andromeda knew in the depths of her soul, hated her with such vehemence that she had stolen Nymphadora from her. Her daughter had been one of the best fighters in the Ministry, had fought off swarms of evil wizards as an Auror. Her daughter had deserved a world of love, but had instead been felled by her own aunt, who had been consumed by an unredeemable evil (or perhaps always made of it).
Cissy hadn't been like that. Since childhood, Andromeda had understood Cissy in a way that she would never understand crazed, malicious Bellatrix, and she had loved her for it, even when Cissy had caved to the crushing weight of what it meant to be a Black.
Cissy's poor choices had been the result of love (a misguided, toxic love, but Andromeda could understand that – it was the only love either of them had ever seen modeled, after all). Love for her husband (who now lay dead), but, mostly, love for her son (who was alive, and Andromeda was pushing down thoughts about what she would have given to be in Narcissa's place, to have given her own life to spare her daughter's on this blood-soaked battlefield).
And perhaps this was how she had stumbled upon her fixation, as she stood in the ruins of Hogwarts and tried to avoid the faces of the well-meaning survivors who kept surveying her with so much pity.
Andromeda had to find Draco Malfoy.