A / N : Okay, so I intended to work on my Tangled update today, but someone made it her mission to distract me all day, and as I was walking home in the rain, this struck me and I had to write it down. Remember how I can't control which inspirations strike me when? Yep . . .

Anyway. My apologies about the length, I'm almost sure this is the longest chapter out of all of these, and it's not a recurrent thing, don't worry, but every time I tried to cut more out, I honestly felt it lost something . . . . I would have posted it seperately, but it was written for this and it was so concerned with the Azkaban theme . . .. . Let me know what you think, as always. I've never written Andromeda POV before, but I think I must write way too much Bella and Cissy because this was very nearly titled Andromeda Black. Also, in my stories I have Andromeda as three years older than Bellatrix. It's not important here, but if it shows at all, or aspects of their relationship seem unusual, that's why. Enjoy!

Andromeda Tonks

It rained every time something happened to rock the foundations of Andromeda's little world.

It rained the day her Uncle Sebastian was taken to Azkaban for "making sport of Muggles", and Bella came running to her sisters in the garden to share the fruits of her eavesdropping – information about the nature of Dementors, creatures she had taken a childish yet rather morbid interest in. The girls sat huddled together, hair plastered to their foreheads and pretty summer dresses stuck to their skin, but not one of them felt the rain before long.

"They suck out souls?" Cissy wailed. "But . . . but how?"

Bella grinned, ignoring Andromeda's warning look, and dived at their baby sister. "They grab you like this!" she cried, scooping the blonde girl into her arms and poking her in the stomach, laughing as Cissy screamed in shock. "And then they crack open your chest and tear out your heart and squeeze it," she continued, her eyes sparkling. "And the soul pours out like a waterfall, and it's so bright it blinds everyone who sees it, and that's why Dementors have no eyes . . ."

Andromeda rolled her eyes. She was almost sure this tale had been significantly embellished by Bella, who had a habit of doing that when things got a little too boring for her taste. She watched, exasperated, as Bella chased Cissy around the garden, groaning like a tormented ghoul and making windmilling motions with her arms, in a truly terrible impersonation of a Dementor. The story was probably a lie, Andromeda reflected. But something about it had caught her attention all the same. She stared up at the sky, at the falling rain, and touched a hand to her heart. Was that really where the soul lived? She pictured it as warm bright kernel made of shining mist, cocooned securely in her chest.

What would happen to a person, she wondered, without it?

It rained on the first day of September, the beginning of her fifth year at Hogwarts. Platform Nine and Three Quarters was crammed with bedraggled parents kissing their darlings goodbye, with cats hissing and owls hooting in the rain, and with girls gasping at what the water was doing to their hair. Bella was further down the platform, laughing at Lucius Malfoy, a boy in her year wearing robes which were horrendous even by Andromeda's more merciful standards. Little Cissy was sitting on Bella's abandoned trunk, watching the verbal sparring between the pair with a wide-eyed, horrified expression. Malfoy's father was, as usual, nowhere to be seen, and Bella seemed to have given their mother the slip somehow, and taken Cissy with her. Andromeda laughed and went to board the train. She didn't realize the carriage steps were slippery until it was too late.

She was about to fall onto the tracks when a hand shot out and seized her own, saving her. She looked up.

It was Ted Tonks, a Hufflepuff in her year. She knew him by sight but had never spoken to him. He had changed over the summer, or perhaps she had never really looked at him before. His face had lost its baby roundness, and his hair was longer, and messier. But still. He was a Hufflepuff, and worse, a Mudblood. She ought to push his hand away as though his touch burned, and demand to know who he thought he was, what right he thought he had to touch her. But the words wouldn't come. Andromeda stared at him in open-mouthed silence. The rain, smoke-smelling like the train, fell down upon her as she stood there, half in and half out of the train, her hand still wedged in his. The warm water soaked her robes and made her hair frizz alarmingly, but it didn't cool her burning cheeks. She ought to say something, she knew, but her chance had slipped away too soon – in one swift, effortless movement, Ted pulled her onto the train and dropped her hand.

"You're welcome," he said bitterly, and he walked away.

It rained that June too, on the last day of school, the day he doomed her. She had been packing when the weather changed, and had really only stepped out of the castle for some air. She was confused, and conflicted, and beginning to wonder if she had spent the whole year under a Confundus Charm. To have befriended a Muggle-born was a shameful enough secret, but to wish she could dig her heels into the Hogwarts lawn and will the summer away, so that she could see him again . . . . that was the sort of secret people got blasted off tapestries for. When Ted appeared unexpectedly, the way he always did, Andromeda was soaked with summer rain and feeling furious. Who did he think he was, to make her feel like this? To make her question everything and throw her deepest desires into disarray?

"Go away," she spat, with as much venom as she could muster. "I don't want to talk to you! Do you understand? I've never wanted to talk to you!" Ted said nothing, and his silence was worse than a thousand words. It made her feel sick and cruel, a liar. Before she really understood why, she was screaming at him. "You're just a stupid Hufflepuff, a stupid Mudblood Hufflepuff and you don't know anything about me, or what my life is like, or what I want, or what I could be if I was only brave enough! I don't want you and I don't need you and I haven't listened to a word you've said, all year, because I don't care! I don't care about you, and I don't care about us being friends, and I wouldn't care if you – if you-" She wanted to say 'I wouldn't care if you died', but it was a step too far, a lie her throat would rather close up completely than allow her to tell. She stopped, realizing abruptly that she sounded completely deranged. This outburst was not her, it was Bella, or her father, or someone equally blinkered and belligerant, someone she had once promised Ted she would never be.

He stared at her, watching her catch her breath and fight the tears she could feel building behind her eyes.

"Is that it?" he asked quietly. "Is that everything? The worst you can say to me?"

Andromeda nodded. I don't mean it, she wanted to shout. It's all lies, Ted, I'm so sorry . . . I'm a cow and a snob and you deserve better. But she couldn't say those words, because they seemed, somehow, more frightening than the lies. "Yes," she whispered instead, frozen with something that was almost fear and not quite excitement as Ted moved closer.

"Good," he said. He seemed calm but his eyes were burning. "Then there's nothing you can say to hurt me when I do this."

He pulled her towards him and ran a hand over her cheek, with a hard, triumphant smile. "You're stubborn," he said fiercely, "and a liar, and you push away a helping hand every time I put one out. You'd rather be miserable and wrong than put out a white flag and see what it's like to be happy and right, and for that, I think you're mad." He tightened his hold on her when she twitched, as shocked as if she'd just been slapped. "I also think," he continued loudly, "that you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I think that when you stop trying to be who you think your family wants you to be, you're the best listener I've ever known. And I think I'm in love with you."

Andromeda was still staring at him when he turned her world upside down with a kiss, and she understood that she was doomed.

It rained the day of the wedding. "Come with me then!" she'd screamed. "If blood is so important to you, don't let me leave!" It hadn't worked. Had she really believed it would?

She stood outside, in the pouring rain, unable to decide what she felt. Liberated, or cast out? She hardly heard Ted approach.

"We did it," she said, numb. "We really did it. We eloped."

Eloped. It sounded like something from a love story, but love stories didn't end this way. Love stories didn't end in rejection and rain and crippling uncertainty. Not even Ted's ridiculously implausible Muggle fairytales ended with a teenage girl crying in the summer rain.

Ted nodded. "I know we did," he said softly. Apparently he could hear something in her voice she herself had missed, because he reached for her and as he touched her, the illusion shattered, the shield the rain had given her collapsed, and she began to cry. Her almost-husband held her as she cried, and though he said nothing, she imagined the beating of his heart against her cheek was drumming out the answers to questions she was too terrified to ask. It'll be alright. We'll always feel this way about each other. They still love you. They'll forgive you. You're doing the right thing.

It rained the day they took Bella away. Andromeda hadn't seen her sister in years, at that point, but she walked through Muggle London in the rain, to give herself a chance to think, and ended up walking right into the Ministry, coming to a halt outside the lift. Somewhere deep in the bowels of this place, Bellatrix was being sentenced to a fate Andromeda wasn't sure she'd wish on her worst enemy. Azkaban. She waited by the lift, her finger inches from the button, and then she swallowed hard . . . . and walked away from Bella again.

The newspaper in her hands is soaked through, the ink running and the paper a soggy mess. The headline, about the escape of ten high-security prisoners from Azkaban, is two days old and illegible now. Andromeda knew – she knew – this would happen, but it wasn't until the rain began that she realized the moment she'd been subconsciously waiting for was here already.

It is really raining now, a downpour that puts every other to shame. The sky is black and the water drives down into the earth like something solid, a violent assault. There are splinters of ice mixed in with the raindrops, and a thunderclap masks the sound of her sister's apparition, but it doesn't matter. Andromeda doesn't need to hear her to know that she is here.

Illuminated by the stark glare of a lightning flash, Bella's face seems wilder, harsher . . . . hollowed-out and desperate. Still beautiful, in a stark, savage way . . . . She looks almost lonely, and Andromeda wonders briefly if she is. She raises her chin and looks her sister in the eye, shivering at the emptiness behind Bella's dark irises.

"Have you come to kill me?" she asks.

She expects her sister to flinch at the stark accusation. Bella merely blinks, and says nothing.

They stare at each other. Azkaban. It hangs between them, an unspoken word among so many others. The place has clearly not left her sister yet – an invisible, draining aura seems to cling to Bella like a cloak, unseen but not unfelt, and Andromeda suddenly recalls her sister's childish conviction, that Dementors could squeeze a person's soul out from their heart. Whoever coined the phrase 'follow your heart', she thinks bitterly, was a traitor or a fool.

Bella appears to be thinking something similar. She touches a hand briefly to her heart, and for a moment – just a moment – there is pain beyond all description on her face. Andromeda feels a sudden jolt, something so powerful and breath-taking that for a second she believes she has been struck by lightning. Possessed by this sudden, strange feeling, she takes a daring step forward and lets her hand curl around her sister's, holding it in place.

"I didn't make it hurt," she whispers. "I didn't do this, Bella, I know I didn't do all this. But you have to listen to me, you have to let me try and fix it."

Bella's expression, as she feared, immediately hardens. "It's too late," she says harshly.

Andromeda tightens her hold. "It's never too late," she says softly. "We were sisters, Bella. We could be again. I could love you again, if you let me."

Love. It is the wrong word to use. Disgust flashes across Bellatrix's face, and she takes a step back, breaking free.

"It's too late," she repeats, and she laughs, the laugh of the truly insane. "I can't be saved. I'm damned," she declares, and she sounds almost pleased about it.

Andromeda shivers. The question emerges before she can stop it. "What did you do, Bella? What happened to my sister?"

Bella turns her face to the sky and opens her mouth. When she opens her eyes again and closes her mouth, Andromeda almost swears she hears ice crunch between her teeth.

"I went to him," she murmers. "I went to him when I was so young, and so ignorant . . . . and he showed me everything. The world is rotten, so rotten, and he told me how to clean it . . . I think I wanted to," she muses, "at first. I don't remember. But now I need to. I need for him to need me, don't you see?"

Andromeda shakes her head. "No."

Bella laughs again, and kicks a clump of mud. "No," she says contemplating. "You wouldn't." Lightening flashes again, and Bella laughs in tandem with the accompanying thunder-roll. "You left me," she declares with a giggle, "so I'll leave you. But I have to be fair, you understand?"

Andromeda suppresses a scowl. "No," she snaps. "I don't understand. Stop talking in riddles, Bella."

Bella pulls out her wand and twirls it between her fingers, balancing it. She smiles, and touches a hand to her sister's cheek.

"I think you ruined everything around me," she says seriously, "when you left. So I think it's only fair that I ruin everything around you." The caress turns into a slap, without warning, and she pulls back, her eyes sparkling. "Better run, sister," she hisses. The lightning strikes in triplicate, and Bella screams the last part of the sentence above the sound. "Better run, better hide!"

The third strike blinds Andromeda, and when she looks up her sister has gone, and her words are ringing in her ears.

Better run, better hide. Better run, better hide.