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Andromeda Tonks, formerly Black, which she still has trouble forgetting on the worst of days, considers herself to be a fairly put-together person, able to keep her wits about herself in the direst of situations and her cool even when faced with emotional turmoil.
(“Maybe usually,” says Marina, her friend of too many years, sipping her whiskey, probably the third or fourth one since she arrived. She drinks like it’s a lifeline and has for longer than Andromeda has loved her, but she’s the only one that’s ever cared enough to stay. “But you do have some very specific exceptions.”
“You’re going to die from that,” Andromeda tells her in lieu of an answer, taking a sip of her tea.
Marina laughs, raspy around the edges. “I’ll be gone long before that,” she says.)
(The Dark Mark appears above her apartment three weeks later, the walls painted with her blood, so she’s right, in the end, as she always is—was.
For the first time, Andromeda resents the fact that she can’t sit and listen to Marina tell her, I told you so.)
But waking up in a house she has not been able to visit in a decade, her daughter and husband nowhere in sight when her last memory is of her sister’s manic laugh as she flees through the woods away from her, then walking out of her room only to find her cousin that’s been presumed dead for years in the kitchen is a bit of a stretch, even for her.
Let alone the fact that said cousin, one Regulus Arcturus Black, is currently wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and stirring a pan full of what look like scrambled eggs. He looks up when she enters, black hair sleep-messy around his face, grey eyes bright. “Good,” he says, blinking slowly at her. “You’re awake.”
“Regulus—” Andromeda starts, then finds she has no words yet and sits down on one of the high stools at the island counter. She goes over the previous night in her head. Dinner, riddle-solving with Ted, getting Dora to bed, pouring tea in the kitchen; then a group of wizards inside her house, Bella’s grin, the dark woods around her. After that, nothing at all—certainly not anything involving Regulus.
She watches as Regulus ladles the eggs onto two plates, adds an abundance of bread slices to both, and sets one of them in front of Andromeda. He flicks his wand and a kettle from the stove flies toward the counter, pouring tea into the two mugs resting there. Once poured, Regulus pushes one toward Andromeda and takes the other one for himself, putting it down beside his plate of eggs as he starts to eat.
He nods toward her plate. “You should eat,” he says. “You’ll feel better.”
Andromeda stares and finds she has no energy to stop, which, considering the years of etiquette lessons her mother imposed on her, is a surprise in itself. It’s not so much the fact that he’s here as it the fact that he’s here like this, domestic and relaxed as she’s never seen him, at ease with himself and the space around him. He’s taller, too, and broader, a new weight to him that only age could have brought along. Age that, as far as she knew only a few minutes ago, Regulus never got to experience.
“Am I dead?” she asks, clearing her throat. It’s the only explanation that comes to mind.
He huffs a breath between two bites and looks up at her, brows and the corners of his mouth raised. She doesn’t remember his smiles, however small, coming as easy as they do now. “Not unless I am, too,” he says.
Andromeda blinks. The irony isn’t lost on her, nor him, judging by the remains of his smile. “Well, legally,” she says, slowly finding footing on this rocky ground, “you are.”
Regulus considers, mouth pulling to the side. “So are you.” He points his fork at her and adds, “Legally.”
“And Dora?” she asks, voice barely above a whisper, the name like a jolt of that peculiar thing Muggles call electricity. She can’t believe it’s taken her this much time to ask about it. “Ted?”
Regulus’s eyes darken, mouth settling into a firm line. “Alive but, like you, considered dead to the majority of the wizarding world. And in much worse condition.” He nods toward the room at the beginning of the hall, the one Cissy always claimed as hers because it had the best view. “In there.”
Andromeda makes to stand up but Regulus catches her wrist before she can take a single step. She reaches for her wand, only to find it’s not in the inner pocket of her robes where she usually keeps it. “Where’s my wand?”
“Let them sleep it off, Dromeda,” Regulus murmurs. “Bella got to them before she got to you.”
Andromeda’s heart slams against her ribcage, as if it could jump out and reach Ted and Dora all by itself. Bella’s cruelty has always aged like fine wine and Andromeda dreads to find out what new expanses she’s discovered in the years since they parted ways. “Then let me see them,” she says, ripping her wrist out of his grip.
He draws his hand back, letting it rest against his side, but he doesn’t back down. “Eat first,” he insists with a stubborn frown that is at once familiar and strange; she’s not used to it on his face but she’s seen it plenty of times before on another. “You need it. You won’t be of any help to them like this.” He runs a hand through his hair, the waves an enviable mix of elegant and mussed. “Your wand broke,” he adds in a quiet, careful voice, so much more like the reserved boy she remembers, “when they got to you. I’m sorry.”
Andromeda’s throat closes up. That wand was one of the few constants she had been allowed for most of her life. From that first summer before her first year, through all the years at Hogwarts, through her elopement, her pregnancy, every good and every horrible part of her life. It was the only thing given to her by her parents that she still truly adored.
“We’ll find you a temporary replacement later,” Regulus says. “I promise.” He nods toward the plates, the food probably cold by now. “Now you sit down and eat.”
Andromeda looks up at him. The last time she properly saw him he was only eleven years old, more skin and bone than anything else, all sharp edges and big eyes, small enough she could use him as an armrest. Now he towers over her, looks at her with patient eyes, all that skin filled out, that sharp edges softened.
She collapses onto the stool. “How did you pull it off?” she asks before she brings a spoonful of eggs into her mouth. They’re not bad, certainly worse than she could have made but they might as well be the best thing she’s tasted in years. They’re not yet cold, at least.
He copies her, then takes a sip of his tea. “I didn’t,” he says, shrugging with tense shoulders, which is a contrast that she can’t find strange, not on him. “Sirius did.”
Andromeda is suddenly grateful that she’s sitting down. Her knees might have gone out from underneath her otherwise. Finding out that Regulus is alive is one thing but to know that Sirius, who has despite her best efforts to convince herself and others the opposite always been her favourite family member, is the one responsible for the survival of her entire family, the only thing she still cares about in this wretched world, feels larger than life. She's spent years of anger at the betrayal he seemingly so carelessly executed, not only at her but at his friends. It hurt more than finding out about Bella’s admittedly expected affiliation with Voldemort or Cissy’s marriage into the Malfoy family. She's never been able to put a finger on why exactly.
“Let’s talk,” Regulus says, giving her a soft smile that she might have once thought shy or unsure. “There are so many things you don’t know.”
***********
Andromeda gets used to the old house slowly at first, then quicker every day. It was always a warm, welcoming place but it was slowly falling apart when she last saw it. Uncle Alphard, always a bit eccentric, had never had much interest in keeping a house elf or keeping up the house himself—a trait that was later only amplified by his years-long sickness. But now, with Regulus as the main resident, the house has been fixed up, the rooms put to good use and all of Alphard’s peculiar collections thoroughly sorted through. Andromeda enjoys finding the unfamiliar in the familiar, the little changes that tell her that the shelter of her childhood has become a haven of her adulthood.
Regulus, however, demands a little more adjusting. Andromeda learns quick enough that any change she might have thought superficial at first goes deeper than she could even imagine. There aren’t just the wardrobe change and the growth spurt in play. He’s still distant and considerate, but there is a new sense of strength in him, like his spine has become unbreakable, like it’s been coated in steel and tempered in fire. He dotes on Dora, redresses her wounds, coaxes her to drink her potions and is nothing but patient with her. He’s more reserved with Ted but no less respectful, no less mindful of his newly-obtained injuries – broken ribs, gouged face, cracked spine – and Andromeda can only marvel at the kindness, the one that has despite his mother’s best efforts always simmered inside him, he can so freely give now; there was a time she never would have dared to hope of such a kind fate for her little cousin.
He has his secrets and, as he always has, guards them well, with smooth, easy-flowing movements and an impassive face but Andromeda still manages to catch little glimpses of dark books and large maps he pores over early in the morning or late in the night when he thinks everyone else is asleep.
She doesn’t mind, is quite used to it after years of having to keep secrets herself and even finds comfort in the fact that this is a part of Regulus that hasn’t changed, a part that she still—quite ironically—knows.
*********
Dora, wedged between Andromeda and Ted in the large bed, is just drifting off to sleep when the door to the cottage bangs open. Andromeda’s first thought is that Dora was finally, finally calm enough to have fallen asleep and she is going to kill whomever just woke her up. Then it occurs to her that she might actually have to.
She jumps up and is out of the room before she remembers to grab for the wand Regulus found in the old study. It’s not fit for her at all but it’s better than nothing, especially in a situation like this one.
Ted calls out after her, unable to follow her, but Andromeda ignores him. She trusts him to keep Dora safe while she deals with the intruders or if it comes to the point where he has to take them on by himself. She’ll be damned if she lets her family get hurt again just because her sister has some kind of a desire to get rid of everything she considers to be tainting her past.
But it’s not Bellatrix or even a barrage of Death Eaters that stand in the living room. At first glance, Andromeda almost mistakes the tall, lean man for Regulus; but his hair is too long, his face too pale. He is swaying on his feet and he is much too thin under the cloak he’s taking off. The spike of recognition is more pain than relief.
“Sirius,” she breathes, her wand lowering with the frantic beat of her heart.
Sirius gives her a slow, small smile, an alien thing on his hollow face that was so full of life the last time she saw him. Years have passed since then, long, difficult years for him; she shouldn’t be surprised that he is so, so different now. “Hi, Dromeda,” he says, voice scratching against the walls of her heart. “How have you been?”
Andromeda takes a breath, then another. In between, Sirius throws off his robes with shaking limbs, revealing a white shirt underneath. A white shirt that is, from the side of his ribs down to his hipbone, stained red.
“Sirius,” she chokes out, taking one staggering step forward.
“I know,” he says, glancing at her before he rips the shirt off as well, grey eyes glassy.
For a moment, all she can notice is the ribs pressing up through the too-pale skin, the scars littering the expanse of his torso and his arms, white on white, blades of grass through paper. Then she sees the long, narrow gash down his side, streaming red, and it’s so much worse.
Sirius coughs, a dry, heaving thing, and sways back on his feet. He’s always been a steady boy, unperturbed in the harshest of conditions, resilient where all others failed. It’s the first time Andromeda thinks that that strength will fail him, that he might crumple in on himself.
Funnily enough, that’s what snaps her out of the trance she’s fallen in. She steps forward, wand once again poised but with a different intention this time. “Let me help you,” she says.
Sirius huffs a laugh but he doesn’t stop her as she taps her wand against the wound and murmurs a low incantation, pushing against the will of the wand as it seeks to evade. The gash simmers at the edges, the flesh almost knitting together, but then spreads further back, the blood more like a river now. A leaden ball settles in the pit of Andromeda’s stomach.
“Hardly can be helped,” Sirius says, looking down from the wound towards her with dark eyes. If possible, his face has paled. “It’s cursed, probably.”
Before Andromeda can say he should have told her that before she made it worse, the door bangs open again, this time indeed announcing Regulus with flushed cheeks and wind-tussled hair. His eyes take the scene in within seconds, his hands already throwing off his cloak. “What happened?” he asks, calm despite the situation. He reaches for Sirius and catches him just as Sirius’s knees buckle.
“Bloody Dorcas,” Sirius rasps as Regulus deposits him on the sofa. The plush soft-blue material is dark with blood within seconds. Sirius bares his teeth in what might be a self-deprecating smile, the sound that escapes him almost a laugh. “Knew she’d get me back for Marlene eventually.”
“Talented witch,” Regulus murmurs, turning Sirius onto his side, fingers skimming along the edges of the wound. He reaches for his wand, hidden in the inner pockets of his robes, but Andromeda catches his wrist.
“Magic makes it worse.”
Regulus blinks, swallowing as he tucks the wand away again. “Blood-replenishing potions,” he mutters instead, then gets up and disappears into the kitchen.
“Andromeda,” Sirius says as his eyes flick away from Regulus and towards her, clearing and blurring almost in time with his breaths. He presses his hand over the wound, blood seeping through his fingers. His voice is steady despite all of it. “Right pocket of my robes. There’s a book. Get it.” He coughs, his chest heaving with it, and adds, “Please.”
Andromeda’s eyes burn as she reaches for the robes, blindly digging through the pockets until she grabs a leather-bound book. The thought of losing Sirius just as he’s so close turns over her stomach. She makes to give it to Sirius but he shakes his head.
“Page 23.”
She dutifully flips it open, finding the pages filled with a familiar, elegant script. There are sketches, too, quick but precise, more beautiful than Andromeda would have managed to draw in her entire life. She looks back at Sirius. “These are spells.” Newly invented spells, from the looks of it – Andromeda has never heard of any of them.
Sirius nods, swallowing. “Healing spells, mostly,” he says.
Regulus appears back in the living room, levitating a number of potion vials beside himself. He grabs a dark red one and shoves it at Sirius. “Drink it.” He glances at the book in Andromeda’s hands. “What’s that?” he asks as he hands another potion to Sirius.
“A spell Andromeda will try out on me,” Sirius answers between gulps of the potion. He makes a face and leans his head back against the armrest. His hair lies plastered against his forehead, perspiration gleaming down his neck and chest.
Bile rises in Andromeda’s throat, her fingers shaking. She closes them around the book, refusing to be anything but useful here. She cannot afford to be anything else. “You mean to tell me you haven’t tested it yet?” she asks, managing to keep her voice even.
“Not that one, no. Haven’t had the time.”
“Sirius,” Regulus says, locking his jaw as he glares down at Sirius. They look so alike in the bright room, the lines of their regal faces nearly matching, both of their mouths set in a stubborn frown. “You can’t.”
“What is it going to do?” Sirius shoots back, lifting his chin as far as he can in his reclining position. His voice trembles but his eyes on Regulus’s remain steady. “Kill me?”
*********
After, Andromeda sits by Sirius’s bed, watching the rise and fall of his chest, tightly bound with Muggle bandages. She fiddles with the book, fingering the pattern pressed into the soft leather to set herself at ease; it’s a beautiful, intricate thing – a stag, a dog, a wolf, and a rat, standing side by side, the moon arcing high above them. It’s nearly as peaceful an image as the one before her.
Sirius’s breaths are slow and deep, his heartbeat steady. He is in no danger of dying, at least not from this wound, but Andromeda can’t bring herself to walk away. It’s been so long since she saw him, since she heard his laugh, since she listened to one of his stories. She only now notices the gaping hole in the side of her heart that has existed since she first heard the news.
In the months after Remus and James stopped by for tea, with darker bags under their eyes than Andromeda had in the first year of Nymphadora’s life, Andromeda stayed up for hours at a time, finding ways to berate herself for not having foreseen it, for not doing more to stop it, for not helping Sirius. She was just a renounced heiress back then, struggling with relying on anyone but herself and discovering the difficulties of having a child, but there had been so many occasions Sirius had found the time for them, for her, and she never repaid the favour. The guilt tore its way through her for a long time before she found a way to check it, burying it underneath her love for the only family she had left.
To know now that that was all an illusion is a relief but the guilt has broken through the dam she so carefully built around it, the one that remained firmly intact even after Regulus told her everything, and it now burns like acid, clawing its way into every crevice of her body.
Andromeda takes Sirius’s hand. It’s long-fingered and elegant but even the back of it is flecked with tiny scars. She bows down low over it, forehead touching his wrist, and murmurs, “Je suis désolé, Sirius.” The tears are not unexpected but they feel wrong somehow, too hot and heavy for someone who did so little to help at all. The tightness in her chest eases, though, and her next breath is easier to draw in. So she lets them spill over, lets the acid burn and hopes that tomorrow she can begin to make amends for her mistakes.
*********
Sirius more or less sleeps for the next few days. He wakes intermittently, sometimes murmuring names Andromeda can’t decipher but mostly reaching for the refilling glass of water they deposited on his nightstand. He just lies there, filled to the brim with various potions Regulus practically had to force down his throat, looking more dead than alive even on the best of days.
Dora glides by his room most of the time, drawing back at the smallest of sounds Sirius makes, and Andromeda’s heart aches with the knowledge that her daughter would have been the first to spend her nights watching over her uncle only a week ago. Now, she is just a girl whose normally vibrantly pink hair has remained short-shorn and dark brown since the night she had the misfortune of meeting her older aunt.
She inches her way into the room after a couple of days, drawing herself up against Andromeda as soon as she’s close enough, and watches as Sirius’s eyelids flutter in his sleep. He looks, for a lack of a better word, different than the last time Dora, only five years old then, saw him but when she reaches out to touch the ends of his hair, dark against the white pillows, Andromeda knows she remembers the boy who used to upend her by her ankle and make her shriek with laughter, who spent hours listening to her babbling and answering every one of her concerns with utmost honesty.
“Will Sirius be alright, mum?” she asks quietly, curling into the warmth of Andromeda’s arms in the small armchair. She smells like the sea and chamomile tea Regulus must have just made her. She'll have to remember to thank him later for so diligently taking care of her daughter.
“I hope so, sweetheart,” Andromeda answers, curving her body around Dora’s, and presses a kiss to the top of her head. Here, in the quiet, in the dimness, the memory of Dora’s small body, broken and beaten, is clearer than the daylight skies. Andromeda shudders. She cannot lose another person she loves. She will not. “We’re doing everything we can to help him and Papa.”
*********
There is a tapestry of the Black family tree in the dining room. It is reminiscent of the one at Grimmlaud Place, with the vastness and the pompous names, but this one has no scorch marks. It is strange to see her own name, written out in a slanting, copperplate script, right between Bellatrix and Narcissa’s. She can’t imagine that its twin was so lucky.
It’s the first time Andromeda has even been in the dining room since she came here. She usually avoids it like the plague because she nearly suffocates with the memory of long, stuffy family dinners she had to endure in here but it is the fastest way from the kitchen to the small wooden terrace in the back where Ted and Dora are and she stepped right into the rabbit hole of their beloved family. She readjusts her grip on the tray with tea and glances at her name again, eyeing the golden thread proclaiming her death to have been in 1982. She has yet to step beyond the border of the Fidelius charm guarding the house so it might as well be true, for all anyone in this world knows. Although only a few steps away, the prospect of it seems daunting now that she’s got used to this small haven, unaffected by the war raging on outside.
“I was all for painting over the damn thing but Regulus insisted we keep it,” says a voice from her left and she whirls on the spot, miraculously managing to not slosh the tea all over the place. Sirius stands in the doorway, half leaning against the frame, dressed in a loose shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He grimaces as he pushes off of the frame and steps further into the room, adding flippantly, “Something about tradition and legacy.”
“Sirius,” she says, pausing long enough to put the tray down on the table. She turns back around to find she has no idea what to do next. She’d like to hug him but she doesn’t know how well he would take it, or if at all. The few feet between them feel like a chasm, started by war and gouged by time.
Sirius saves her the trouble and positions himself next to her, shoulder-to-shoulder. She can feel the rhythm of his breathing, just a tad quicker now that he is awake. “At least this one is complete,” he murmurs, reaching out to touch the names of the people whose faces had been burned off in Grimmauld Place. Iola. Phineas. Marius. Cedrella. All names the two of them spent their childhood searching, if only to know what things they had done to have earned to be cast out of their family. Their findings only ever offered a horrible insight into what kind of family they had been cursed with. Andromeda had barely been able to look at her father for weeks after.
Sirius’s finger touches uncle Alphard’s name and stills.
Andromeda’s hand trembles and she clenches it into a fist, tight enough to hurt. Her favourite uncle, the dearest soul she has ever known. “He left me some money,” she says, then adds unnecessarily, “In his will.” She chances a glance at Sirius, finding his jaw firmly set. “Is that why—?”
Sirius nods. “Cygnus flew into a rage when he found out. It was the last straw for him and mother dearest wasn’t about to disagree with him. She didn’t waste her time either.” He scoffs, though the corners of his mouth turn up with it. “Alphard left most of the money to me but he wasn’t about to go out of this world without one last dig at the two of them.” He taps his finger against the tapestry, once, twice, then drops his hand. “Stubborn man,” he murmurs, looking all over the tapestry with dark, grey eyes; eyes that, now that they are not closed or glassy with the haze of pain, Andromeda can barely recognise.
“How are you?” she asks softly. She reaches out a hand and hesitates. She keeps it still mid-air for a moment then decides to damn it all and puts her hand on his shoulder. “Sirius, comment tu te sens?”
Sirius glances down at her. He’s been taller than her for some years now, even before they last saw each other, but he seems small now, stooped over in the kitchen where they spent some of their best years, finally, finally not just groomed to be scions of the House of Black, but allowed to be children. He touches her hand, lightly, with the tips of his fingers. “Ça va.” He looks out the window, his chin lifted as he watches the clouds roll past. “I should go,” he says, the words like a splash of cold water in her face; his duties don’t end here, not by a long shot, and she cannot save him from them. “They’ll be wondering where I’ve been.”
Andromeda doesn’t let herself look down at his forearm where the mark rests, dark and too alive across the veins rising against his thin skin. “Not right now.” She grabs his upper arm again and doesn’t let go as she levitates the tea tray with her other hand. “Come outside, for a little while.”
“Are the others there?”
“Just Dora and Ted. I think they’d both like to thank you while you’re awake.” She pulls at his sleeve gently, bites back the urge to beg him to stay. She’d go in his stead if she could. “Come on.”
Sirius glances at the window again, then sighs and lets her lead him out into the sun. He seems a stranger to it.
*********
Regulus doesn’t settle for days after Sirius has left. He is quicker with his movements, more intense when he studies his books, constantly looking between them and the door from the couch he’s nestled himself in.
“It’s been a hard couple of months for Sirius,” he explains softly when Andromeda nudges him. “I always fear I won’t see him after he goes.”
“Not hard years?” Ted asks from where he’s stretched out on the couch. Like this, underneath a red blanket, he looks nearly as he once did, content and dozing in the afternoon, not confined to the couch and a prisoner in his own body.
Regulus looks up at Ted, his hand almost absent-mindedly reaching up to touch the scar resting across his throat. His fingers move when he swallows. “Not like this.” He taps the corner of a small, dark book resting on the coffee table. “He lost a lot.”
And Andromeda finally sees something that she can recognise in Regulus – the fall of his eyes, stubbornly firm, the way he pulls his mouth to the side as if he’s biting the inside of his cheek; guilt has always been easy to notice with Regulus and she can do little to hold down the wave of her own that whirls up at the bottom of her stomach.
“He’ll be back, Regulus,” says Ted. His eyes are dark and gentle, even with a boy that he never met before two weeks ago, and Andromeda’s chest feels tight with the appreciation for this kind, patient man she was thankfully not stupid enough to let go. “He still has you.”
“Yes,” Regulus agrees softly. “Yes, he does.” He readjusts himself when Dora slots onto the couch between him and Andromeda and only once she’s safely curled against the two of them does he add, “I just hope he knows that, too.”
*********
Sirius comes back, of course.
He puts his hand on Regulus’s shoulder when he comes into the kitchen, quiet and unassuming; he moves like a ghost sometimes, half-there, half-alive, trapped between two worlds and welcome in none. Though Andromeda has seen ghosts who suffered a kinder fate. He goes to draw his hand away but Regulus turns toward him, giving him a slow, sad upturn of lips, and puts his hand over his, squeezing it once, quickly.
“Alright?” Regulus asks after he’s let go.
“Alright,” Sirius says, nodding. He reaches around Regulus to steal a piece of bacon from his plate and bites off half of it. “Bella is still on a rampage so they were all sufficiently distracted.” He looks at the remaining piece of bacon, frowning, then up at Andromeda. “Did you make this?” he asks.
Andromeda nods, still not finding the right words to say anything else, too busy scrutinising Sirius. He seems better and worse at the same time – he’s paler than he was when he left but he holds himself upright now and doesn’t grimace anymore when he moves.
“It’s good.”
Regulus glares up at Sirius. “Are you implying mine isn’t?
Sirius shrugs. “I’m not not implying it,” he says and Regulus shoves him.
*********
Sirius and Regulus filter in and out of the house from then on. Regulus, who used to disappear for scraps of time during the day, now stays away for hours, although he always comes back before the dark has settled in, usually smiling softly at himself or humming under his breath. On some days, even both.
“He has someone,” Sirius says on one of the rare days he’s with them. He’s gone for days at a time and unlike Regulus, rarely spends the night and even then, he is gone before the sun has risen. He spends most of his time with Regulus and his books and parchments, scribbling in the margins, or with Dora, playing chess with her or showing her various wand tricks to entertain her. He is always kind, always patient, but the scars and wounds underneath are visible even on the best of days. Andromeda wonders sometimes if he sees Bellatrix when he looks at Dora with her dark hair and high-cheeked face, or when he looks at Andromeda herself; she doesn’t blame him for getting lost in the pain sometimes. “He won’t tell me but I see him.”
“Are you sure?” Andromeda asks. It seems unimaginable, not because Regulus would be incapable of forming such a relationship, but because it seems almost bizarre that he might allow himself such a comfort, such a liability when he and Sirius are clearly mixed up in something that goes beyond Sirius’s affiliation with Voldemort.
Sirius nods, dragging on the cigarette he’s lit. “I don’t blame him for it,” he says, puffing out the smoke, his voice caught with it. “I had things I didn’t tell him about, too.”
There are so few things Andromeda thinks Sirius has left to keep to himself, to cherish. She cannot imagine the pain he must have felt leaving his friends in the dark and with every loss after it – there can’t have been just a few of them. Her heart aches with the thought of how alone he must have been that first year before Regulus joined him.
“He’s happy,” Sirius says, pressing his shoulder against Andromeda’s briefly. “I can never resent him for it.”
“I’m glad,” Andromeda says and pushes the question bubbling up her throat back into her lungs, squeezed between her ribs, storing it for a day she might get a satisfactory answer. Are you happy?
*********
Days bleed by, then weeks, during which Andromeda learns to exercise a degree of patience she has never known before. It takes hours to put Dora to sleep sometimes, days to help Ted master a new level of mobility, but Andromeda never for one second wishes it were any different; she has them still and that is more than she can ask for.
Sirius examined Ted the second time he came back and his diagnosis, coming from someone who Andromeda has known to be exceptionally talented at healing, offered little hope; but Ted is trying with everything he has, religiously doing all exercises and drinking his potions—the results are defying all expectations.
Currently, he’s learning to use the wheelchair Sirius has procured and magically enhanced for him, using the wheels to propel himself backwards and forwards, back and forth, back and forth. “This is quite nice,” he says, smiling up at Andromeda with tired eyes, set strangely into his thin, scarred face. He’s always been a bit on the stout side, but he’s lost a lot of weight during his recovery, his rehabilitation; it’s not a bad change but the reasons for it are. She misses, sometimes, her cheerful husband and her bubbly daughter but always catches herself before she wishes to go back. There are so many things she has gained now that she would never have managed to see otherwise. It is hard to be resentful of that. “Come on,” he proclaims as he tugs on her hand and then lets go to push himself forward, past the kitchen and towards the front door. “Let’s take it out for a test drive.”
Andromeda follows, opens the door and steps out. It’s a beautiful day, cold but not unpleasant, the sun shining high up in the clear sky. She hasn’t made it a habit to remind herself of it lately.
Ted is a bit unsure in the wheelchair, rolling over the grassy knolls and dips, but it is wonderful to see him enjoy the outside world without having to rely on anyone’s assistance, to be self-sufficient, if only for the time being.
She stands next to him once he’s stopped and reaches for his hand on the armrest. “I love you,” she tells him. “And I’m sorry I’ve caused you so much pain.”
Ted smiles at her, wide and unrestrained, but weak around the edges. He wraps his fingers around her and brings their joined hands up to his mouth to kiss the back of hers. “My Dromeda,” he murmurs. “You’ve only ever brought joy to my life.” He pulls on her hand until she gives and climbs into his lap, curling into his firm torso, into his smell of chamomile and healing potions. He wheels them forward, slowly and unsurely, but Andromeda trusts him enough to keep her eyes closed until he stops. He’s brought them all the way to the end of the path leading to the village below, where Regulus has taken Dora, heavily masked, for the day.
It takes her a moment to realise that they’ve crossed the border of the Fidelius charm and there’s a painful tug in her chest, an old panic finally rearing its ugly head; but it’s Ted and she trusts him. So she noses against the curve of his neck as he wraps his arms around her and she breathes him in, lets the sunrays wash over them. With him by her side, she isn’t afraid.
*********
“How’s Cissy?” she asks Sirius when she finally dares.
He looks up from a parchment, depicting strange, mangled creatures. He and Regulus have been becoming more open with their research, leaving them to lie on the table even if they’ve left their spot for longer than a minute; she thinks they might tell her what they’re up to soon. “Good,” he says, grey eyes unreadable. He takes a bite of the sandwich she’s made him and it seems almost absent-minded or at least not deliberate. Regulus told her Sirius practically has had to have food forced down his throat for months, if not years. “Surviving,” he adds after he’s swallowed the bite; then, even softer, “She fears for her son.”
Andromeda thinks back to the family tree in the dining room, the gold thread tracing down from the line connecting Narcissa and Lucius. “Draco,” she says and he nods.
“He’ll be two soon,” he tells her, a distant look crossing his face; it seems at once caught between reminiscence and regret. “I’d help her if I could but Lucius would kill her before he’d let her go and she won’t risk Draco.”
Andromeda’s throat burns, a familiar sensation by now, older even than Sirius’s servitude. It’s been a constant companion since she last closed the door of her childhood home. Bella, she had little qualms about leaving behind, but Cissy, pliable Cissy who would do anything to please their parents and Bella; she would have taken her with if she had been able to. She cannot blame Sirius for having the same conflict within himself, for failing to come up with a solution when his circumstances are so much worse.
“I’m sorry you’re alone,” she says, leaning back against the counter, gripping the old, hideous wand like it’s her lifeline; she hates it, its history, its character and everything in-between—but it’s all she has right now and it has to be enough.
“I wasn’t always,” Sirius says, the long, elegant lines of his face shifting as he reaches up to touch a small carnation pendant resting just below the hollow of his throat. She has the sudden image of the boy he was, rising from the stool at the Sorting, equal parts elated and terrified. She really thought that he was safe then, that he would get away. “But I am now.”
*********
Regulus teaches Dora to fly on a broom, leading her high up into the sky and guiding her through easy manoeuvres. It makes her laugh, makes her giddy with excitement and she comes back into the house rosy-cheeked and with shining eyes.
Ted reads bedtime stories to her, has her tucked against his chest until late in the night, until she’s been asleep for hours and not mere restless minutes. He kisses her hair and tells her he loves her and doesn’t let go of her unless she asks him to.
Andromeda sings her lullabies until her throat hurts and brushes her hair and plays with her. She shows her all the wonderful things Alphard kept in his house, all the knowledge he kept in his books. She teaches her to dance every ballroom dance she remembers and doesn’t once mind any antiquity Dora breaks.
But Dora’s hair remains dark, her features familiar and painful not because they remind Andromeda of a past she’d rather forget, especially now, but because they are not her daughter’s, who has made it her personal mission to be her own and no one else’s since the day she first figured out how to control her abilities. They are a reminder that Dora lost something – that she was robbed of it – she can’t ever get back.
Then Andromeda goes for a glass of water in the middle of the night and she finds Sirius sprawled out on the couch, a thin blanket over him. He rarely goes to his room to sleep, instead preferring to crash in the living room; Andromeda hasn’t dared to ask him why yet. His chest is rising and falling steadily, his breaths blowing his hair away from his face. He has his arm around Dora, who is snuggled into his chest, her own arm barely reaching up to be wrapped around him. The embers in the fireplace cast a soft, warm light over the two of them, just enough that Andromeda can see that there, just above the swell of Nymphadora’s ear, her short hair glows pink.
*********
Snow melts under the relentless onslaught of the sun and gives way to blooming flowers. The days grow warmer, longer.
Andromeda starts tending to the old garden and Dora, with her hair a beautiful, beautiful pattern of pink and brown, joins her. They work while Ted sits in his chair nearby, reading or simply watching them. Sometimes he tells them stories or jokes; on other days, they are all content to stay in silence, to enjoy all the things that they nearly lost. Here, in the small world they’ve built for themselves, occupied and protected by people Andromeda loves most, they start healing.
*********
The newspapers grow darker and Regulus’s eyes become stormier, his face worn with frowns. He stays inside day and night, digging through old texts that probably haven’t seen the light of day for decades.
Sirius doesn’t come home for weeks.
*********
It’s nearly June when he does. The garden outside is blooming, bright with colours and life, but the house doesn’t light up until he bursts through the door.
“I got it!” Sirius yells. He’s smiling, honest-to-god smiling, when he barrages directly into Regulus and knocks the two of them off-balance, nearly onto the floor. “I got it, Regulus,” he says into his shoulder, muffled and fuzzy with the shock. He’s still grinning when he pulls back but now, so is Regulus.
“How did you get it?” Regulus asks, reaching out a hand.
“I convinced Narcissa.”
It’s not until Regulus takes the small black book from Sirius’s hands that Andromeda even notices he had it. It’s an old, unassuming thing but Andromeda spent nearly half her life in houses where she learnt the hard way that most things weren’t what they appeared to be; even just looking at it makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, her chest heavy with the weight it has brought to the room. Whatever it is, it isn’t harmless.
“What is that?” she asks.
Regulus and Sirius exchange a dark look, an old sort of connection she remembers the two of them sharing since they were children; they have always known best how to exclude others from their conversations without even trying. Sirius’s face remains for the most part impassive, but Regulus’s mouth twitches to the side.
“I’m not stupid,” Andromeda tells them, which they should already know. She was the mastermind behind most of their pranks in their youth, after all. “You’ve already done it now.”
Sirius sighs, a deep, long thing that seems at once strange and usual for him. “Fair enough,” he says, sweeping his hair out of his eyes with practised ease. It’s getting long again; Andromeda should make him sit down and cut his hair. “You should sit down.”
*********
Sirius brings a dagger that Andromeda’s seen in one of the display cases in the study and offers it to her. It’s goblin-wrought silver, he tells her, coated in basilisk venom, a thing a friend of his managed to procure for him. It is one of the few things that can destroy the soul inside the diary.
“Your honours, Dromeda,” Regulus says softly, standing against the wall next to the fireplace. She only now notices the golden chain of the locket resting against his chest, the shape of it obvious underneath his white shirt now that she knows what to look for.
“This is how we end it?” she asks, looking between him and Sirius, unsure at whom the question is directed.
But it’s Sirius, with his eyes like shards of ice, his back like a pillar of steel, that says in a firm, cool voice, “Yes.”
Andromeda nods, steeling herself, grips the dagger and stabs it into the middle of the leather diary. Black ink bleeds out, pulsing in time with the shrill, dull screams that tear out of it. Andromeda dives to the side, the dagger clattering to the ground as she covers her ears. Sirius catches her, pressing her against his chest with a quiet, soothing murmur, the sensation unfamiliar after so many years but Andromeda can’t look away from the horror before her, knowing that it’s a piece of someone’s soul dying, something she caused. Voldemort was, despite everything, human once, too.
The diary heaves one last spurt of black blood, then goes silent and lies there. The weight in the room lifts.
*********
“What else could be a Horcrux?” she asks Regulus the next morning. Ted and Dora are still asleep in their rooms and there’s no one else to overhear them.
Regulus looks up from his breakfast, swallowing before he answers, “Anything. Voldemort seems partial to sentimental items – his diary, Slytherin’s locket, Hufflepuff’s cup, his family’s ring.”
“Items relating to Hogwarts?” Andromeda muses, taking a sip of her tea. “Sword of Gryffindor?”
Regulus shakes his head, eyes sharp. Andromeda doesn’t doubt that everything she might come up with he has already thought of. “Only a true Gryffindor can get his hands on that one.”
“Ravenclaw’s Diadem?”
“In theory. But it’s been lost for centuries.”
Andromeda knows, of course, so she nods and doesn’t mention it again; but something trickles against her mind, an old memory, a passing thought, and it doesn’t let go.
*********
Regulus pokes Sirius, dozing on the couch next to them, while they file through different texts. It’s tedious and gruesome work, Horcrux hunting, and no one can blame him for not wanting to participate in it after having to deal with the Death Eaters for weeks. “How did you convince Narcissa?” he asks.
It makes sense that he would; if Sirius was Andromeda’s favourite cousin, then Narcissa was Regulus’s, the feeling no doubt mutual. Although years apart, they both found solace in the quiet things, the unassuming ones; they have always been the counterweights to Sirius and Andromeda. Regulus must have kept the worry for her despite everything that happened—or perhaps exactly because of it.
Sirius blinks open his eyes, languid. The dark bags underneath them are a horrible sight to behold but not an unusual one. “I mentioned Draco – that it might help keep him safe if she did what I asked.” He makes a face, absent. “I’m not proud of it.”
Regulus glances at him, then back down at the parchment in his hands. “Had to be done,” he murmurs.
“He’s a good kid,” Sirius says, a tinge of fondness creeping into his voice. “Happy.” He adds, to Regulus or Andromeda, she doesn’t know, “You’d like him.”
Andromeda knows he doesn’t mean to hurt them but it stings, the knowledge that he gets to know their nephew, gets to see him grow up while they are stuck here, grasping at dragon’s breath. The darkness rises up in her for a moment, two, then dies down. It doesn’t disappear exactly – but Sirius has sacrificed so much for them and still does, on a daily basis. Having that small reprieve, that one little gift, is the least that he deserves.
He’s happy. I can never resent him for it.
Besides, it is just a matter of time.
*********
Regulus turns twenty-one years old in the hottest week of the summer. Andromeda forgets sometimes, how young they all are, how much they have already suffered.
She bakes him a cake, the cranberry one he so adored as a child. Dora draws him a picture of him, Sirius and the three of them, prouder of it than she ever has been of any other accomplishment. Sirius buys him a set of books and even hugs him, a quick, brief thing that nonetheless makes Andromeda’s eyes sting.
He blows out the candles and Dora asks him, “Did you wish for anything?”
Regulus cradles the back of her head, fingers carding through the purplish hair there. “Oui,” he says, “I did.”
He doesn’t tell them, of course, and Dora is content with that, but he slips out of the house in the evening and Andromeda has an inkling anyway.
*********
Andromeda doesn’t look at the newspapers anymore. She stopped long before Bellatrix came crashing through her front door and the idea is to never start doing it again until she dies or until Voldemort is defeated, whichever comes first—and she’s having her doubts.
But it’s pointless not to look at newspapers when she can just take one look at Sirius when he comes through the door and know how bad it is anyway. Given the fact that most of the media is currently already controlled by the Death Eaters, that way is even more accurate than the Daily Prophet itself. She wishes she didn’t have to know, that she could just curl into the space between Ted and Dora and stay there forever, the rest of the world be damned.
There are people in the rest of the world, though, people she loves, people she knows, people she wishes she could make amends with. Sirius. Narcissa. Lucretia. Her classmates, her colleagues. They’re all fighting, in their own way, she’s sure of it. It seems unfair that she gets to step away from that.
The thing is, she could. Sirius is the Secret Keeper of this house and she knows he would let her if she asked; even if his cover was blown, even if he was tortured to death, she knows he would not give them up and they would all be safe for the rest of their lives.
But at the end of the day, Andromeda knows who she wants under the roof of this house if the worst time comes and it’s not just her small family and Regulus; it’s Sirius and Narcissa and a dozen people in-between. So she covers Regulus with a blanket, kisses the top of his head as he moves and murmurs in his sleep, and brushes Sirius’s hair away from his face, presses a kiss to the edge of the scar across his cheek. Then she settles against them, opens the book again and starts reading.
The war isn’t going to end itself.
*********
“He has the Ministry,” Sirius says with a hoarse voice on a November morning. He came sometime during the night, slept on the couch again. It’s the first thing he’s said since they woke up.
Regulus frowns. “There hasn’t been any indication—”
“Imperius,” Sirius says, shrugging. “Bagnold and most of her office – I don’t know exactly who, though. He didn’t put me on the job.”
“Who then?” Andromeda asks and dreads the answer even before Sirius’s eyes, dull and dark, catch hers.
“Lucius. Bellatrix. Rodolphus.”
“Why not you?” says Regulus. “We wouldn’t—” He rubs a hand across his face, makes a soft, agitated noise. “We were doing so well.”
“I know, Reg,” Sirius says softly. “Believe me, I know.” He worries his lip and sucks his cheeks in; they look even more hollow now, his face as white as death. “He’s sending me to the werewolves.”
Regulus blanches. “Again?”
Sirius’s nod is short, curt, like he’s already resigned. “He wants them ready. He has something up his sleeve, I don’t know what. He’s not telling me. I don’t think he’s telling Bellatrix either.”
One short conversation, a few scraps of information and the world is already infinitely worse than it was mere minutes ago. A lump gathers in Andromeda’s throat. The Ministry being done for was to be expected, of course it was, but it’s worse now that it’s actually happening, when the possibility of the people outside being protected is completely gone, not only because the government has fallen but because Sirius won’t be there either.
“I’ll be fine,” he says, trying for a reassuring smile but his mouth trembles. “They’re not such big bad wolves as they’re painted to be. Preferrable to the Death Eaters, really.”
*********
Dora cries when he tells her, throwing her arms around him and clinging to him long enough that Andromeda has to look away.
Sirius holds her, murmuring soft words to her, shushing and rocking her to the side. “C'est d'accord, ” he says, soft against the wild purple of Dora’s hair. “It’s just a couple months, Dora. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“But it’s your birthday tomorrow,” Dora tells him between sniffles. “I haven’t finished your present yet.”
Sirius blinks, mouth open, and Andromeda wonders if he even remembered – or maybe he didn’t expect that they would remember, that she and Regulus would care enough to tell Dora. Oh, Sirius. “Your presence is present enough, Dora,” he says finally, pulling her into another hug. His head is tucked against hers, his eyes closed, the gentle expression on his face at odds with the strength he’s holding her against him. “Besides,” he says, slowly drawing back, “you can give it to me when I come back.” He pokes her in the belly and that makes her crack a reluctant smile. “Gives me something to look forward to.”
*********
It’s worse, somehow. It’s not like he wasn’t gone before but at least they knew he was around somewhere. Regulus could reach him when the need called for it and it was a matter of days, or weeks, at worst, before he came home. Now, it’s months, an endless stretch of time that only seems to draw on longer with the lack of success their research offers.
Then Regulus says, “A Horcrux can be a living thing.”
Andromeda looks up from her parchment, the image of Ravenclaw’s lost diadem now permanently scorched into her mind, all too familiar, then blinks at Regulus. “What?”
He stretches across the coffee table to hand her the piece of an old text. It’s in Ancient Runes, her brain blanking for a second before it starts translating, but Regulus has already continued by the time she’s halfway through. “The soul can be placed inside a living thing – an animal, a plant, a human, probably.” His eyes are shining when she glances at him. “Sirius said Voldemort found this snake, Nagini. He always keeps her at his side and with his obsession with being the Heir of Slytherin—” He tilts his head to the side, like a cat, giving a slow one-shouldered shrug.
“He made her a Horcrux,” Andromeda finishes, her mouth tugging up at the corners.
Regulus nods, running a hand through his tousled hair. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes twinkling. “We’d have to check— Sirius would have to check,” he corrects, his forehead creasing up, his eyes blinking closed for a second, “but it’s likely.” He takes a quill and scribbles a quick message onto a small piece of parchment lying to the side. He slices the tip of his finger open and presses it to the top of the parchment, leaving behind a bloody fingerprint when he pulls it back. He taps his wand against it, once, twice, then sits back. The parchment disappears in a puff of blue-black smoke.
*********
“What will you do, Andi?” Marina asks, her voice velvet-smooth. She’s sitting on a throne in front Andromeda, leg crossed over the other, her sea-blue dress barely reaching the bend of her knee. Her chest is splashed with red, her brown hair tangled around her bruised face. A tiara rests atop her head, it, too, speckled with red.
Andromeda pushes back the urge to throw up. She’s dreaming, she knows she is, but Marina’s death is still an aching scar; she will never forget the emptiness of her eyes as they stared up at the ceiling painted in her own blood. “I don’t know,” she whispers.
“You? You, Andromeda Black, don’t know?” Marina says with a laugh, a high, breathy thing that sends chills down Andromeda’s spine; it is not the familiar, throaty sound she remembers. “I don’t believe it.”
“You know how you can help. Of course you do.”
“I don’t, I don’t.”
Marina shoots her an unimpressed look, eyes dark. She reaches up to move a stray strand of her hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Where is it, Andi?”
A sob builds up in Andromeda’s throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Marina was always a sharp person, a no-nonsense kind of one, but she never demanded more of people than what she knew they could give.
She shakes her head, fingers gripping the edge of the throne until her knuckles are white as bone. “You know,” she says. “Now you just have to remember where it is.”
*********
They celebrate Christmas without Sirius.
Regulus, rosy-cheeked, drags in a Christmas tree, tall enough to reach the ceiling and make Dora jump around with glee, her hair changing colours every time her feet touch the ground. They adorn it with ornaments Ted and Andromeda, despite her wand acting up, manage to conjure up and spend the day before Christmas baking cookies. By the end of the day, they are all so full they nearly forget anyone is missing at all. Come morning, they are all starkly aware of it again.
New Year’s Eve comes around and that passes without Sirius, too. Regulus sits outside on the cliff until they drag him in and even then, his eyes seem hollow, his voice empty when he says, “I forgot—it’s been a year—more than—since—” He puts his face in his hands and whispers, “Evan.”
It’s a sombre affair, New Year’s Day.
*********
Dora’s birthday is looking to be the same kind of subdued when no one is around in the morning—just the two of them, curled up on the couch while Dora opens the gift Andromeda managed to get for her. Ted and Regulus disappeared down into the village a couple of hours ago.
It should be better, Andromeda thinks. It’s her tenth birthday, the last whole year before she’s set to leave for Hogwarts and she deserves better. The knowledge that she can’t give it to her presses down on her chest, too heavy.
“I love you, little one,” Andromeda tells her, kissing the crown of her head. At least she’s happier now, at least she’s safe this year. At least Andromeda can be thankful for that.
“Love you too, Mum,” Dora says back absently, fingers skimming over the Quidditch book she’s unwrapped. She smiles up at her, though, bright and sudden. “Thank you, I love it.”
Dora is not a naïve child, has never really been, but Andromeda sees how much calmer she is now, how much more she considers everything she says or does and it makes her want to get up and find Bellatrix herself – to do to her the unspeakable things that she did to her daughter, to show her that she took away something from an innocent bystander in the name of something as trivial as blood. But it doesn’t matter to Bellatrix, it never has, and it isn’t worth it, not when both Andromeda and Nymphadora would lose so much with it.
“We’re back!” Ted shouts as he wheels himself into the living room, his lap full of presents. He’s grown stronger in the past months, his muscles building back up once he started moving around; but more important than that, he’s happier and not resigned but at peace with this big change life has brought for him.
“We even picked up a renegade,” Regulus adds, following in after Ted and carrying a load of things, the beginning and end of which Andromeda cannot for the life of her figure out. He frowns at someone behind him. “He’s refused to help us carry the gifts.”
Sirius steps in after him, dressed in clean, pressed dark robes, everything about him sleek and polished. He shrugs, his too-long hair falling in his eyes, and says, “I am the gift.”
Dora shrieks and ricochets herself off of the armrest, slamming into Sirius with enough force to make him stumble back a step; and he is. He really is.
*********
Sirius bends down low over Regulus and her, each of his hands on their shoulders. He doesn’t look unwell, not for a man who was supposed to have been dealing with feral creatures for the past few months. “You were right,” he murmurs, low enough Dora and Ted won’t hear. Andromeda thinks Ted probably knows anyway. “Nagini is a Horcrux.”
*********
Sirius is sitting eerily still for someone who could not be forced to calm down as a child. Then again, there are many aspects in which Sirius has changed and settled; this can hardly be any different. He’s letting her cut his hair, which is, although soft and glossy for the most part, damaged enough she will have to cut off at least a half of it.
“Don’t the werewolves have any tools to keep themselves in order?” she grumbles, sniping off half of a strand. Once it falls in place, it just reaches his earlobe.
Sirius breathes deep. “They live in poverty, Dromeda,” he says, rolling his shoulders back. Through the thin material of his white shirt, she can see a scabbed wound stretching from one shoulder to the other. “They can hardly afford such luxuries.”
Andromeda has, as a principle, made it her main objective in the last decade to be as different from her family as possible. In large part, that involved successfully relearning every ideology Cygnus and Druella had done their best to instil in her. On the rare occasion, however, Andromeda, in her admittedly bull-headed pushing, came to the limits of her own morality, to the grey zone that she could not move out of solely on the basis of being far away from the Blacks’ mentalities. Werewolves and similar dark creatures fell into that grey zone because at the end of the day Andromeda, as a child from a deeply dysfunctional family, felt she didn’t have the ability to make the judgement for herself. She fears such moments most, when she realises that she can escape her family, but some shackles can never be fully stripped away.
Sirius’s voice is soft but rather lost, a boat far out in the open sea. “They’re not bad people, not most of them,” he murmurs into his hands covering his mouth. “Those that are, were bad people before they were ever Turned.”
*********
Andromeda stands in a vast room, with no end in sight. There are piles of trinkets around her, large piles of every little thing Andromeda can think of and yet larger ones of things she couldn’t name to save her life. They are arranged in lines, leaving narrow rows for passage in-between.
She steps forward, down one of those rows, her fingers skimming over the things scattered atop. A book, glasses, a quill. A frame, a wand, a tiara. A piece of string, a wig, a bust.
Marina appears in front of her, dressed as she was the last time, only her hair is woven into a crown of brown and red now, her fingers taut with dried blood. “You are far more foolish than I thought you were,” she says, looking down at her with hooded eyes and curved mouth. “I thought you were the observant type.”
“What are you talking about?” Andromeda asks. She’s tired of these dreams, these nightmares that plague her even in the daylight. If she’s not dreaming about them, she’s thinking of them. She wishes they stopped.
“Where is it, Andromeda?” Marina says, huffing impatiently but not in the way Andromeda is used to. “Where are we?”
Andromeda looks around. The ceiling of the room is high and dark, plain and unassuming, the walls too far away or too covered to be made out. She knows this place, she’s certain of it. She’s been here before. This meant something to her once, once, a long time ago—
And then it hits her. The seventh-floor corridor, the left one—the tapestry with the room that was never not there, the one she hid all the evidence of her relationship with Ted in, then later on of her plan to escape. I need a place to hide my things.
She turns, eyes searching for the thing she should have remembered a long time ago. The wig, the painting, the frame.
It’s resting on a precariously-put set of old, leather-bound books, covered in dust, all the glamour that should have been there long gone; but she knows where it is and what it is. She knows, she knows.
Marina has moved to stand next to her, her breaths steady. The blood has disappeared from her dress, has been washed out of her hair and off her hands. “I knew you’d remember eventually,” she says, fingers curling around Andromeda’s wrist. Her voice is once again the harmony of warm, raspy tones Andromeda knows. “It’s high time the war ended.”
Andromeda is stumbling out of bed before she’s even fully awake.
*********
Regulus grumbles when she shakes him and tries to burrow himself deeper under the covers. The sun is beginning to arc across the sky, far too early yet, but this is important. Andromeda cannot wait when she knows every minute wasted is a minute more that the people she loves have to suffer.
“I know where the last Horcrux is,” she tells him and he’s sat up within the next three seconds.
He looks up at her, grey eyes wide and just the little bit glassy, but his voice is strong. “Where?”
“Hogwarts.”
*********
Regulus sends a message to Sirius, the words smudged with sleep, messy with haste. We know where the last one is. Come as soon as you can.
After it’s disappeared in the burst of smoke, Andromeda asks, “What do we do now?”
Regulus sits down in front of the fireplace and opens a book, the picture of restrained calm. She shares none of it; her body is alive with the need to get up, to pace, to do something. “We wait.”
*********
Hours pass. Then days.
Sirius doesn’t come.
*********
The door to the terrace slips open so quietly Andromeda almost doesn’t hear it. She thinks for a moment it’s Dora or Regulus and she doesn’t even deign to open her eyes. Then she remembers Dora has taken off on a broom, diligently supervised by Ted, and Regulus is sitting next to her, gently rocking the garden swing they’ve settled on for the morning.
She stands up, just a second after Regulus, and whirls towards the door. She’s never felt anger like this before, pulsing in her belly like a fresh seal, scratching against the walls of her throat, as if it might tear them apart if she doesn’t let it out. She hides her trembling hands in the pockets of her dress.
Then she sees Sirius. His hair is a mess, haphazard around his face, his chest heaving with quick, rash breaths. The beat of his heart is not nearly audible but even so, Andromeda can imagine its fast pace just fine. He’s holding their message in one hand, his fingers dark with blood, a stark contrast to his pale face once he brings them up to it.
All the fight drains out of Andromeda.
Regulus doesn’t seem to share the sentiment. “Where have you been?” he asks, voice at once lower and louder than Andromeda’s ever heard him use. “We sent the message nearly two weeks ago.” He pauses, eyes flicking up and down Sirius’s body. “No matter.” He steps forward, grabbing Sirius by the shoulder and shaking him lightly. He cracks a smile, unsure in the face of Sirius’s indifference. “Sirius, we found it. It’s the Ravenclaw Diadem. It’s at Hogwarts.”
That does get Sirius to blink and shake his head, like a dog getting water out of his ears. “Oh good,” he says, voice hoarse. “We can kill two birds with one stone.”
Regulus’s smile fades as he steps back, his arms falling back to his sides. “What do you mean?”
Sirius clears his throat. He looks down at his hands, at the bloodied message, then up at Dora, laughing in the sky. Once his eyes move, they flick towards Andromeda, then settle back on Regulus. “Voldemort has had a spy at Hogwarts since September,” he says, his face crumpling with a desperation Andromeda hasn’t seen on him, probably ever, opening up like a chasm after an earthquake. “He’s going to attack Hogwarts at nightfall.”