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When the knock on the door finally comes Andromeda is so desperate that she can barely keep herself from running forward and flinging the door wide open, whatever the cost. Instead she reminds herself of her defenceless grandson sleeping in her arms and how she promised to protect him. She carries the Teddy into the nursery, places him in his crib and seals the room behind her. Then she raises her wand, walks silently down the hallway and pauses with her hand on the heavily enchanted lock.
She will open the door and only have a chance to see a flash of that awful pink as Nymphadora throws herself into her mother's arms. Remus will watch the reunion in silence, looking battle weary but still smiling in the way that magically makes him look so much younger. They will all go inside and wake up Teddy who will blink and screw up his face indignantly at them. She will make them all a nice pot of tea and describe how Teddy had both his grandfather's hair and smile for a few hours, and they were silly to stay out so long and miss it. But it will be alright because there will be plenty of other chances to see it, plenty of time.
Time seems to pause for a moment and Andromeda's heart stops with it. She wants to pretend for a moment. She wants to be the little girl who believed her family would live happily ever after. But it is already too late because in her heart she already knows, even as she summons the last of her courage and opens the door to face the truth.
Kingsley Shacklebolt is standing alone waiting, his eyes full of sorrow.
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Some part of Andromeda still wonders why the world could not have simply stopped turning at that moment. If she was a weaker woman she might have given up then but although the Blacks are known for many things, cowardice is not one of them. Andromeda has spent most of her life trying to escape from who she is, but she understands now that she will always be a Black at heart, just as her daughter was and just as Teddy is. Your own blood is something you can never leave behind, even when your name is not on the family tree but this realisation no longer frightens her. Her family have torn themselves and each other apart but something has ended now, died along with most of her family and despite everything Teddy has already lost, she knows he has the chance to grow up free from the nightmares of those who went before him.
Teddy has always been fascinated by his family. At first it was the photographs that had been there as long as he could remember. There were pictures of Ted and Andromeda stretching across thirty years of marriage, pictures from Dora's childhood and, his favourites, pictures of him as a baby with his doting parents, taken during those few precious weeks they had together. Later these were joined by other pictures Andromeda found; Sirius and Regulus as the children she used to baby-sit, followed by Remus and Sirius in their Hogwarts robes, eyes twinkling with mischief, and even some of those strange, unmoving photographs of Ted's muggle family. At first Andromeda worried that filling her house with images of the dead would not be healthy for her grandson, but Teddy was thrilled to be given faces to go with the names he had heard and she could not deny him that. In fact she wonders now if perhaps it was worse for her, because sometimes seeing those familiar faces around her home almost lets her pretend she is not the only one left.
Of course it was only a matter of time before the pictures were not enough for Teddy, just as they never could be for her. Next Teddy wanted stories, begged them from her and Harry and his parents' friends with a hunger that was heartbreaking to see. He once complained to his grandmother that it was not fair that Victoire had a huge family of her own while he just had to share hers. Andromeda did not how to explain to a five year old that life is sometimes horribly unfair, and so she just watched how he carefully turned his hair Weasley-red before any visit to his adopted aunts and uncles. The next summer she took him to Hogwarts for the first time. Teddy stood solemnly in the castle grounds, holding his grandmother's hand while she traced a finger over the names etched into the cold stone. Kingsley had been meticulous when it came to memorials and the lists covered not just those who died at Hogwarts that night but everyone lost throughout the Second War and even some less obvious casualties from much further back. Andromeda pointed out Teddy's parents, then the grandfather he was named for and finally Sirius and Regulus Black, side by side again at last. She is proud of her family at last, but this is the cost.
She has always tried to instil this pride into her grandson, almost like her mother once taught three little girls to be proud of a family tree on the wall of a gloomy room. In Teddy's case, it helps her task that he does not know about his entire family. There are things he is still far too young to hear, horrors that his parents died to keep him innocent of. When he is older though, she knows he has the right to know, even if might never truly understand. There is a small chest that has spent several decades locked in the attic of Andromeda's home and now it is carefully locked in a cupboard in her bedroom. To many people that would hardly seem like progress but to her it is a step that means a lot. She has opened it a few times over the years, mostly to slip in some particularly memorable editions of the Daily Prophet, but someday soon, when she is feeling just a little stronger, she is going to open the lid again and look through the contents properly. She does not know why she took so many mementos of her old life with her when she left her parents' house but she is glad of it now. Of course she has her memories, the ones that haunt her on her bad days and comfort her on others, but when Teddy is older she can show him what she has left of childhood.
Perhaps it is impossible for anyone who was not there to understand, but it seems very important that he knows that once upon a time the Blacks were a family. They can never go back to that time. She sees Cissy in Diagon Alley from time to time and they acknowledge each other with curt nods, two strangers left behind, with Bella's ghost hovering between them. Too much has happened for them to ever go back to who they were, but she knows that once upon a time she was one of three and her sisters were a part of her. She needs Teddy to know that she mourns that part of herself just like she mourns everything else she has lost.
…