Chapter 1- Dark Crimson Rose ~ My Love's Like a Red, Red Rose

In the wake of the end of the Second Wizarding War, I often find myself thinking about my childhood.

My mother hated everything about Muggles. To her, they were beneath us purebloods and nothing they invented or created was worth our time. She deemed their scientific advancements insignificant, proclaiming that magic rendered them worthless to all wizardkind, despite the growing industry of Muggle technology adapted for wizard usage. Magical record players, wireless radios, and even automobiles had begun to be sold in stores when I was a child. Each summer I went to Diagon Alley to buy my school supplies, more and more shops that specialized in making and repairing Muggle devices appeared.

Naturally, my parents did not allow my sisters and me to even look at them, fearing that our curiosity would corrupt us and turn us into blood traitors. I thought this mindset was silly, as magical adaptation of Muggle objects and technologies had been commonplace in our world for centuries. But perhaps their fears that we would be corrupted and leave everything we had ever known were justified.

After all, it happened to me.

Despite my mother's prejudice and bigotry, for some reason, she impressed the concept of Muggle Victorian flower language on my sisters and me. Floriography was something she used every day; she meticulously selected flowers based on their meanings for our manor's many vases, the plants for the arbors in her vast gardens, and the floral decorations for the various events we hosted and benefit galas she sponsored. While it obviously came from folklore, flower language was so influenced by the Muggle ideas of romanticism and literature she looked down upon that I couldn't fathom as to how she'd encountered it to begin with. Where did she learn it from? Why did she love it so much?

I don't really remember the specific meanings of most flowers. Instead, I tend to associate people with various plants independent of their assigned significance. Ted was the sunflowers he spent so much time caring for in our back garden, his personality equally bright and warm. Strong and vibrant, Nymphadora was the yellow tulips she insisted on planting by the side of the house when she was six after Ted's mother gave her a bouquet of them for her birthday. Remus was the lupines that were so similar to his name that sat at the edges of our property- fierce, yet also gentle.

And just like the flowers that wither and slumber in winter, Ted, Nymphadora, and Remus are gone, but unlike them, they will never reemerge in spring.

Each time someone close to me has died, my life has changed in some way.

The first death in my life that I vividly remember was that of my cousin, who died when I was sixteen and promptly was posthumously disinherited. Chained by the suffocating shackles of elite pureblood society, she chose to end her own life rather than live one chosen for her by our family. In her final message to me, she encouraged me to be who I wanted, to find my own path. And eventually, I did just that: I fell in love with Ted, married him, and was disowned myself. I had been a secret blood traitor for years, but Ted gave me the strength to stay true to who I was and to finally fully reject my family's beliefs.

It wasn't long after that that we started to lose people we knew in the war.

While Ted and I knew many people who vanished or were murdered during the First Wizarding War, the most crushing deaths to us by far were those of the Prewetts and the McKinnons. Gideon Prewett and Ruth McKinnon had been our best friends at Hogwarts- and our daughter's godparents- and when they died, so did part of us. We never truly recovered from their deaths; it felt like some of my heart had been removed. Ted never expressed his grief in such a way, but I knew that he felt the exact same way. Ruth would never flash her sunny smile at us again, and we would never hear another one of Gideon's witty jokes. Yes, Ted and I had other friends, some closer than others, but Gideon and Ruth were irreplaceable. I never had another best friend again, and I don't think that Ted ever did either.

Soon after the loss of our friends, my father died, which was equally devastating to me. Although we had been estranged for years when he died, he never stopped loving me. I was his favorite child, and during the war, he used his influence in pureblood circles to protect my family from being hurt or killed by Death Eaters. I was extremely grateful for this; without his protection, we almost certainly wouldn't have survived. We were incredibly lucky the war was almost over by the time of his death, and I will always associate the first defeat of the Dark Lord with my father's own untimely demise.

I was not permitted to attend the funeral. I've never even visited his grave. Even if I worked up the courage to do so, I don't think I would want to; doing so would mean coming to terms with the fact that he was truly gone. Of course, my father had been dead for decades, but by not going to his final resting place, I could compartmentalize those thoughts and almost ignore them. His death was the demarcation line between war and peace, and I had absolutely no desire to relive the terrifying events of the latter half of the 1970s- including the deaths of my best friends- ever again.

Sirius' death before the second war was also heartbreaking. Once the Order of the Phoenix reformed and he had settled back in at Grimmauld Place, Dumbledore had graciously allowed us to reconnect with each other. It was something we both desperately needed; I allowed myself to show some vulnerability in his presence, as did he. Sirius' seemingly perpetual jovial manner and silliness almost convinced me that we hadn't spent more than a few weeks apart, even though the amount of time that had passed had been exponentially longer. Our time together was far too fleeting though, and just as I'd started to accept that he was back in my life for good, he was gone.

Ted's death was by far the worst though. I lost the love of my life and the main person who brought me safety and comfort. I was so broken by his death that when Nymphadora and Remus died less than a month later, I was simply numb to the pain. I'm ashamed of myself for not being more physically upset about it, but too many tears had already been shed.

I have no more left in me to cry, no matter how hard I try.

Everything feels empty and meaningless without my husband and child here. How am I supposed to move on when the majority of our lives we were so interconnected with one another? Ted and I were married for most of our lives and relied on each other for almost everything. Without Ted and Nymphadora, there hardly seems a point in striving for anything, not when my ambitions were fulfilled by their existence decades ago.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. All I know is that I'll never get over how they were ripped away from this world long before they should have been. I'm simply going through the motions day after day: waking up, taking care of my grandson, and going to sleep.

Why has everyone been taken from me? Did I do something to anger fate itself? Or is this some sort of cosmic karma for daring to rebel against my family all those years ago?

I'm never left alone now, likely because everyone around me thinks that I'll spiral out of control and stop taking care of myself and Teddy. And I very well might. However, I know that I have to do everything in my power to ensure that I don't, or they'll take my grandson away from me too.

I can't let that happen. If I do, I'll have nothing left.

There's hardly anyone left alive who truly understands me anymore. Most of the people who saw firsthand what I went through as a teenager and a young adult are gone from the world. The people I was closest to are no longer here, and most of my remaining friends and family can't possibly comprehend how debilitating it is to watch the people who raised and claimed to care for me when I was younger support the cause that took the people I loved the most.

All I want is to grieve alone and pick up the pieces of my wilted heart on my own terms. It's hard for me to get up every day, but I have to, not just for Teddy, but because I know that none of the people that have left us behind would want me to wallow in grief and self-pity.

And so, for Ted and Nymphadora and Sirius and Remus and all the others, I suppose I have to try.

I was never good at Herbology, likely because I never had the patience to care for the plants I was responsible for. They survived, but never prospered. Ted was always the one with the green thumb, and he spent hours in our garden tending to whatever plants and flowers he'd decided we would have that year. Unlike my pitiful attempts at growing plants, Ted's flowers were strong and beautiful, just like him and our daughter.

Morbidly, one of the only flowers I actually remember the meaning of is dark crimson roses. Among other things, they represent mourning and grief, their blood-red petals suffocating in their pungently sweet scent, as if to mock my pain. They grew in our garden though, as they were one of my husband's favorite flowers. Ted loved them and thought their color was beautiful, and unlike me, he associated them with romance.

"'My love's like a red, red rose that's newly strung in June,'" he would often sing as he handed me a bouquet of them. He did this several times throughout the year, getting the crimson blooms from either the garden or the local flower shop.

Over time, I began to associate crimson roses with Ted, letting my prior opinion of them fall by the wayside. However, in the wake of his, Nymphadora's, and Remus' deaths, I've received so many sympathy flowers from well-wishers- some knowledgeable about floriography and others ignorant- that each time a crimson rose is placed in a bouquet or floral arrangement, I can't help but reconnect the meaning of grief to the blooms that my husband loved so much. Now, they only bring me pain.

With Ted gone, I am left to care for his garden. And despite my lack of skill with tending to flora, I need to do it in his honor. Besides if there is an afterlife, when I finally get there, he'll never let me hear the end of it if I let his beloved sunflowers and roses die.

I never want to see another dark crimson rose or tulip or lupine again. But I can't get rid of the rose bushes in our garden or the yellow tulip bulbs that sit against the side of the house or the lupines at the edge of the property. I can't bear to destroy one of the only bits of Ted, Nymphadora, and Remus that I have left.

After all, they are proof that they existed.

Hello!

Welcome to this story, which was an idea I had probably over a decade ago that I combined with many ideas that couldn't fit into my previous story, Far Beyond the Stars. I initially just wanted to write a story that focuses on the year after the end of the war, but as everyone just kept ending up at Andromeda's house in my first outline anyway, I decided to combine it with some of my unused ideas and abandoned plot lines to create a more in depth story. I figured that I kind of owed it to Andromeda to build her back up again after totally tearing her apart.

This is not a sequel to Far Beyond the Stars; at least, I don't view it as one. However, I understand that a lot of readers might treat it as such. As a result, I've tried to write this as both a standalone and a sequel story and deliberately am formatting it in a similar style. You shouldn't need to have read the previous work to enjoy this, and I'm bringing over anything you need from that story and integrating it into this one. I'm only human though, so if something doesn't make sense, let me know so I can correct it. There will be characters, references, and alternative perspectives of certain events from that story in this one, but they might end up being slightly different. This is intentional.

Each chapter will be told both from Andromeda's and another character's perspectives (although some couples share a chapter). The current chapter count is 28, but this might go up, as I anticipate a few chapters later on needing to be split due to length. I am planning to update once a week, although this story is incredibly heavy and draining to write so far, so this might change later on.

If you couldn't tell, floriography is going to be a recurring theme in this story. I'm relying on a few sources for interpretation of Victorian flower language, including The Language of Flowers by Henrietta Dumont, Language of Flowers by Kate Greenaway, and the Old Farmers' Almanac. Each chapter will take their name from a flower or plant that I feel describes a character, their mood, or relates to events in the chapter. At the end of each chapter, I'll tell you what next week's flower is so you can guess who's going to show up yourself.

Additionally, the song that Ted sang is "A Red, Red Rose," which is a poem by Robert Burns that has been set to music. There are countless versions of this poem/song out there, and Ted was probably familiar with several of them. I like to think he knew the version by the Simon Sisters, but my personal favorite is the version by Cecile Corbel.

Next week, our first proper chapter will feature the gladiolus flower.

See you soon, and happy reading!