Chapter Text
“Hullo?”
“Harry,” Teddy’s voice crackles as it comes through, like it always does when he calls from the manor. “Andromeda, er…” For a moment there’s only static.
Harry plugs his ear against the music playing from the tinny supermarket speakers. It’s too early in the morning for this cheery shit. The bloody flip phone he uses is the only kind that can intercept calls coming from magical residences, but it’s a pain.
“We can’t tell if she’s conscious or just—” The end of the sentence is garbled, and followed by a series of lost words. “Please.”
“What? Ted, I can barely hear you.”
“I need your help—at the manor. Hurry.”
Harry drops his basket. A can of beans rolls and clanks against another.
By the time the sound has attracted an attendant, the aisle is empty.
***
High up on the cliffsides of the Cornish Coast, Castoff Manor perches like a gargoyle guarding paper pink sky from cobalt blue sea.
Dew sinks through the sides of Harry’s trainers as he rushes up the hill.
The only thing he can make out is the nightdress, Andromeda’s favourite, being circled by a team of Healers. It’s tangled around her legs, soaked through, even though the sky is cloudless.
Teddy stands beyond them all, a fist pressed to his mouth.
When he gets there, all Teddy squeezes out is, “Not dead.”
And that’s all Harry needs to know.
A few years back, one of the gardeners died of hypothermia. It was the strangest thing—middle of summer, dry as bone, afternoon sun still clinging to the cliffside. His robes were discarded over the bluebells.
Harry thought the worst when he saw her. Even now, he can imagine the rumours that will burn through pure-blood society in the coming weeks.
They’ll say Andromeda lost half her mind—delayed curse damage from the war. That her mother lied, lay with another man, and Andromeda is succumbing to Muggle diseases like the filthy half-Blood she is. That someone dragged her out there with the Imperius Curse, forced her to the ground.
They’ll say those things because no one but Harry will hear the words Teddy says next, an hour later, in a whisper meant just for him.
No one had to do anything at all. She jumped in the well.
Harry glances back over his shoulder as if to confirm some sign—a torn piece of fabric on the wooden exterior, or a puddle in the grass surrounding it.
But if there was water, the ground drank it up greedily, and now the well sits perfectly still; a child on its very best behaviour.
Harry’s never bought into the stories about Castoff. The lilting piano melodies that lure inhabitants onto the roof at night could be bird songs. Voices in the walls are no stranger than talking portraits.
But the stories about the well have always struck him much harder. Little boys drowning inside, young women hanging themselves on the rope. He’s heard that if you get too close, all the sound in the world stops, and the only thing left is the siren song of your heart, ba-bum, ba-bum, urging you closer.
He’s found himself before, once or twice, stepping closer without meaning to; his eyes locked on the crooked and brooding thing, swaddled innocently in the middle of the property
If Andromeda truly jumped in the well, Harry doesn’t know how she survived. She wouldn’t be the first person staying at Castoff to die that way, not that anyone wants to speak of those things.
They prefer their stories about adulterous wives and minds fraying day by day until they finally snap, and Harry and Teddy will prefer to let them have at it.
Sometimes though, when they hire someone truly clueless to look after Andromeda, they’ll end up telling a story in the nearby pub—of water ice-cold and refreshing, of dirt packed walls so welcoming and warm, of rocks at the bottom soft as beds.
It’s no question of believing Teddy. That’s the only sensible thing to do.
Harry’s never needed a reason to jump, either.