Teddy rapped a bit nervously on the door of the house he grew up in. He knew it upset his gran to talk about the past, but he felt he had to. Delphi Rowle, Lestrange, Riddle whatever the hell her name was, was the daughter of gran's sister, Bellatrix Lestrange.
The fact that they were cousins struck him, suddenly. Over the next few months he was about to suck every memory she had from that little skull. It made him nauseous. He considered going back home, to Victoire, and pretending that this was all just a bad dream. That Harry, goddamned Harry, had never shown him the girl, pathetically tied down in her cell.
But then the front door opened and he saw the warm smile of his grandmother, the woman who raised him.
"Oh Teddy, dear, what's wrong?" she asked, her voice, stained with worry. Teddy might be able to change his features but no matter what face he wore, Andromeda Tonks could always read his feelings, without fail.
His smile faltered. He wasn't even in the door and she knew he was upset. "Um, it's nothing gran, just hoped to stop by for a spot of tea, and, maybe, maybe a wee chat, too. If you're not busy-" he added, hastily.
"Why, yes," she started, as if almost sensing the foreboding questions Teddy would soon ask, "come on in dear, I'll set the kettle on."
Teddy found himself in the sitting room he had played in as a boy. He remembers Harry visiting him here, giving him his first broom stick here. Little pictures of him and Harry and Andromeda moved in their frames on many of the walls. A small one of his parents waved out at him from the small antique cupboard in the corner. Another, beside it was of a younger Grandma Andromeda and her husband, his Grandpa Ted.
He jumped a bit, startled as his gran was suddenly there, placing the steaming cup of tea before him. He studied her and even now with her iron gray hair and the wrinkles that lined her eyes he was disturbed to find the resemblance between her and the daughter of the Dark Lord.
She sighed and sat beside him. "Tell me what you want to know, Teddy."
Her frankness caught him off guard. When he was younger and asked about the past she was quite resistant to discussing it. He got bits and pieces of the story and knew she had his mum quite young and fell out with her nutty pureblood family for marrying grandpa. But aside from that he knew quite little about her family. He knew his mum and dad died in the Battle of Hogwarts when he was just a baby, but he had never asked her for details. And she had never provided them.
He didn't know what to say. It just all tumbled out. "Well, it's something with work, gran, and well Harry, too. I can't really say-oh Merlin's beard, if anyone should know." He was frustrated. He knew he shouldn't reveal the details of the assignment.
"Teddy," she, prompted, her old, worn hands grabbing his own, calming him down a good deal, "just ask me your questions. If anyone has a right to know, it's you."
She smiled at him encouragingly but he noticed her eyes looked a good deal wetter than they had when he had arrived.
"What happened between you and your family? I mean-you were a Black, right? Like, um, Bellatrix Lestrange," he asked, right before gulping down a large sip of tea.
"Yes," she almost laughed, darkly, "I was a Black, a member of that family who thought they were royalty just because they were pure," she said the last word with unhidden disgust. "My parents, they believed it was better to be dead, than to be impure. So when I told them I was pregnant and marrying a muggle born at seventeen you could guess how they reacted. My aunt Walburga burned me off the family tree and nearly the whole lot never spoke to me again. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I would do it again, even as hard as times got." She paused to take a sip of tea, though she kept one hand steadily held in that of her grandson.
"There were my two sisters, of course, they made respectable marriages and can still be found on the family tree today I expect" she continued, her hand beginning to tremble slightly in his, "Bellatrix, who you mentioned, the elder, the wild one, and Narcissa, the younger, the beauty. We loved each other fiercely as we grew up together. Despite our differences, as girls we were nigh inseparable. Bellatrix was the protector, the fighter. If anyone ever made Narcissa cry they would find that there was hell to pay from one of Bellatrix's curses. I was the mediator, the only one who could calm her down, even as a child. And Narcissa, we always thought her to be the delicate, the weak one, though it seems she was the only one strong enough to protect her child from Voldemort. But that is beside the point," she said, looking wearily at the photo of his mother on the cupboard, "Anyway, when I left, Bellatrix would claim to her pureblood friends that she and Narcissa had not laid eyes upon me since my face was burned from the Black Family tapestry. But it was a lie. One night a few weeks after I had left, Ted, your grandpa, he was working late, and she stormed into the house. Her hair was wild and tears streamed down her face. She shouted at me, screaming how dare I leave her alone. How I should have fixed things, got rid of the child. She said we could have kept it a secret. That I should never have run away with that mudblood. She yelled and cried and rammed her fists into my back as she sobbed and embraced me. Bellatrix Black loved as fiercely as she had hated. It was when Ted got home that I first understood how true that was. As much as she loved me. She hated him. She hated him for being, as she called him, a mudblood. And I suspect, even more for taking me away. She pulled out her wand and fell away from me, ready to hurt the man I loved. It was only when I turned my own wand upon her that she turned away. That was the last time I saw her."
She walked over to the cupboard and open one of the drawers, she pulled out a dusty old spell book and flipped pages until a photo fell out. She handed it to him.
Three girls sat on an old, very fine looking sofa, one stared, unwaveringly into the camera, with dark hair and fine features, the next, seated in the middle flipped through the pages of the book, ignoring the photo and very much resembling the other dark haired girl. On the far right was a small blonde girl, younger than the two on her right though seemingly in possession of the same, finely carved features he saw beside him in the face of his grandmother. These, of course, were the young sisters Black. On the back "Bella" "Andy" and "Cissy" were inscribed in swooping, fine script.
Seeing his gran and Bellatrix, so young in the photo, he could only think of Delphi, tied to that bed. Resembling her mother so clearly.
Andromeda picked back up, "Bellatrix and Narcissa did ignore me for what remained of her life, at least. I watched from afar as she unraveled. Rodolphus, her husband, it seemed couldn't have children. She couldn't find something new to love until she found him. Voldemort. She had found someone to love as fiercely as she had me and someone to hate the people she had learned from birth to be lesser than her, even more. Lesser than human. I heard about how she killed and tortured for years and I never felt like more of a coward. I could have confronted her. I should have tried. But I was scared, I wanted to pretend I wasn't ever like her. That I wasn't a Black. And I paid the price for that. For my cowardice."
She paused and looked Teddy directly in the eye, he felt his heart pounding in his chest, "It was Bellatrix Lestrange who killed your mother at the Battle of Hogwarts."
Teddy thought he felt his heart stop. He knew his mother was killed but he had never learned by whom. Was fate laughing at him. Giving him some kind of crazy karmic justice for his mother by having him obliviate Delphi Rowle. Should he tell his grandma, he wondered. But he glanced at her sadly eying the photo of a young Bellatrix and herself in his lap and decided he could not tell her right now. He had stirred up old feelings enough for one day, he thought.
He bid her goodbye, and thanked her profusely for telling him what he wanted to know. He told her he would be away in Wales for a while for work and that he would owl her once he was settled in.
