FIC: Andromeda
Title: Andromeda Retrospect
Genre: General
Rating: PG-13? Mentions of sex and illicit substances, nothing graphic
Summary: Least creative title in the history of titles. Could be seen as a sequel to Show Me. Or not, if underage lesbian incest isn't your bag.
***
Andromeda has always been impulsive. As usual, she isn’t certain that she’s going to go through with it until it’s done and she’s away.
***
The first time, she was high on freedom for months. She was voracious for Ted. They did it in every room of his parents’ house, any time they thought they wouldn’t get caught. She even brought his sister Lydia into their games. And then it was the Muggles - Lydia’s friends - muggle parties, muggle lovers, muggle potions.
She had been like a goddess to them, radiant and transcendent. They were vulnerable to slightest whiff of seductive magic. It never even bothered them that she could never remember their ridiculous muggle names. Of course in those days everyone was already half-confunded on muggle drugs.
It was a novelty, of course, but it wore off quickly. Andromeda had escaped her family to be more fully herself - not to hide behind obfuscating, obliviating charms, not to feel overwhelmed and bewildered by the confusion of muggle devices and muggle jargon, the noise they always craved.
So she and Ted created their home out in the countryside, just one muggle village nearby. It was romantic at first, nesting, housekeeping. No house elves. No interlopers between Ted and herself. And then Nymphadora was born.
And then it was Ted and herself and a screaming baby with no help, no family, no visitors except Ted’s insipid siblings and his insipid friends. Andromeda remembered dinner parties with conversation so monotonous and predictable... she could have hexed someone. She would spend hours getting everything ready - the house, the grounds, her appearance, the menu - only to ache with boredom and isolation once the guests arrived. Were they too wary of her to let show any dark secrets or were they all really so dull?
That must have been about the time she rediscovered the hippogriff figurine. Buried at the bottom of one of her trunks, Andromeda glimpsed its faint shimmer and almost hesitated to touch it. It had been a gift from her parents, the day Bellatrix was born.
Two gifts, actually, two figurines, identical, consolation perhaps for the peace that had been lost: one gift to Cissa and one to herself.
Days, nights Andromeda was tempted, so tempted.
A touch, a word.
Andromeda knew an assortment of spells she could have used. To signal. To sound. To connect.
She set the hippogriff on her dressing table. Hundreds of times her wand was in her hand and the right words on the tip of her lips.
Narcissa.
Sister.
Wondering if at the same time, in her stone mansion, if Cissa had unearthed her own figurine and was itching to reach out with her own spell. Watching and waiting for her figure to hum and glow.
But Andromeda would never be the first to give in.
And neither would Narcissa.
Instead she took to practicing her curses on the encroaching village. The muggles had started to build something - something horrid and noisome and foul-smelling, the ugliness of it even visible from within their wards - a factory. A series of industrial accidents befell it, and then the factory was no more.
Ted had long lost his novelty by then, but they still had Nymphadora. Their daughter was a joy, a wonder. It was as if Andromeda had conjured her out of every dream she had ever wished for herself. The girl had a wild streak, to be sure, willful and energetic like her mother, although thankfully she was never the hellchild Bella had been. And her powers… Andromeda had never imagined such powers. Of course it might have had something to do with all the muggle acid she took during her pregnancy.
As Nymphadora grew Andromeda saw to it that she was raised with every asset Andy had ever wanted for herself. She was as strict as her parents had been at times, cobbling together what she could of the best parts of her own upbringing. But without the same rigid, outdated rules, without the same absurdities. Without the shouting and chaos and then icy, brittle silence.
Ted might bore her, but he was a loving, consistent, understanding father. And spouse, for that matter.
Andromeda still read the newspapers. She wouldn’t hide, wouldn’t flinch. That was how she knew of Narcissa’s marriage, her status, her house. Even gossip about Bella’s loyalties. She watched them in their black and white, unfocused photographs, watched them enslave themselves to the Dark Lord. Pathetic, desperate fools.
No matter how powerful they grew, Andromeda could never lose her contempt. It was all so… undignified. Fighting the rising tide, the changing times. As if they could turn back the ages.
Andromeda read the papers, start to finish, and then she meticulously unfolded them and spread them on the floor of her stable.
Just as well she and Ted kept well out of it, left to themselves in their country retreat.
Killings and curses on the horizon like distant thunder... But they were all but forgotten. They were safe.
It was after the war that she started breeding Thestrals for the Ministry.
She remembered taking Nymphadora with her into the village. She had polyjuiced herself into a muggle nurse, and Dora was under an invisibility spell. They went to attend on an old man on his deathbed. The girl had needed to see, to understand, death.
Andromeda might no longer be a Black, but she wouldn’t shield the girl from anything.
Not from the heart of things, anyway.
And then after what had seemed just a short time of home tutelage, Nymphadora was at school. Not too far away in Scotland, although Andromeda had seriously considered Durmstrang. Ted was the one to put his foot down. He wouldn’t send his daughter to board so far away.
It was through the papers as well that Andromeda first learned of Draco. A family portrait next to some aristocratic announcement, the boy looking like a shard of Narcissa that had broken off, but with a faint trace of a scowl, some of the brutality he must have inherited from his father. Narcissa looking like she had indeed lost a piece of herself.
And the hippogriff still sitting silent and cold on Andromeda’s dressing table.
Narcissa had born a child. Flesh of her flesh. And she had never reached out to her older sister.
Andromeda was itching for a change. With Dora safely away at school she started traveling. She even met some of her old school friends haunting the various wizarding capitols abroad - the ones who hadn’t been killed or imprisoned during the war, the ones who ventured to acknowledge her. She took a lover or three. She improved her thestral stock.
Andromeda was the one who rode them, trained them, but Ted had turned out to be surprisingly adept at caring for them. Something so gentle and reassuring in his nature.
They had found a new rhythm by then.
Andromeda still traveled but she had made one good friend closer to home, a botanist witch named Hortensis with a wicked home brew. Not quite as wild as the potions Andy had experimented with in her youth but still imparting some interesting effects on the mind.
Funny how it never once occurred to her to try to see Bellatrix during all those years. Her wild, lost baby sister. Not when she floundered as a teenager, not when she threw herself at the Dark Lord, not when she was captured, condemned.
Even Sirius, her favorite cousin. It had surprised Andromeda to see on which side he had landed in the end, and she felt a painful twinge at his punishment, but then those were mad years. Lies and spies and killing green. Families torn apart, never mind her own defection.
Everyone had gone mad one way or another.
She knew, somehow, although they stayed well out of politics... When Nymphadora applied to become an Auror, she knew. It settled on her cold and heavy, the certainty that war must come. Must come again. But Andromeda never would have stopped her daughter. In a way perhaps this is what she had been preparing her for her whole life.
To go out into the world. To act. To be. Unconstrained.
It happened quickly, sparks and licks of conflict and then the conflagration. In the hollow aftermath Andromeda once more opened the paper and saw that Narcissa Malfoy had been condemned a Death Eater and was sentenced to life in Azkaban.
She read the whole paper, as usual, unfolded every article, and placed it on the floor of her stable to be soiled by her thestrals.
Narcissa. In Azkaban.
In the evening Andromeda stared at her porcelain hippogriff.
She thought of all the spells she had held in her hand, in her mouth, all those years, yearning to conjure a connection.
Too late.
Three months later, she told Ted she would be off traveling. She told him that she would return.
She locked her personal suite with an assortment of tricks and traps and puzzles, the sort she used to force Nymphadora to solve, even when the girl whinged and pouted and stamped her foot.
She stopped by to see Hortensis and they spent the whole night polishing off a bottle of her latest brew, sitting on a hillside under an ocean of stars.
Without quite thinking about it Andromeda approached her stable and shushed her strongest, most reliable beast, pulling him by his reign out into the dawn.
She wasn’t certain she was going to go through with it, but then they were riding, and then they were flying, and then they were hours out over the sea, urged on by Andromeda’s wakefulness and her warming charms and by the songs she sang out of key.
French love songs, muggle coven chants, even some old, tragic lullaby her mother had crooned.
###
It isn’t difficult to enter Azkaban.
It does take her a while to find the right cell. She's growing dizzy herself and somehow wretched but she realizes that she's searching for a negative, a lack. Finally she find her. Narcissa sits quiet and composed, a white shadow in the corner, unlike most of the other inmates who rage and writhe and cry aloud.
Even after the years that have passed, even though the shadows of Narcissa’s face shift and fade after countless cosmetic charms, Andromeda still has no trouble recognizing her sister.
She looks like a ghost of herself. Glimpses under the shadows - tired and worn. Her bones are Andromeda’s bones, their mother’s bones.
Narcissa sits quietly. Andromeda lowers herself down onto the cold stone beside her.
They do not speak.
After a while - hours? - Andromeda takes Narcissa’s hand.
Andromeda feels the dread and the cold and memories swirling out of her, around her. Echoes of her father shouting… her mother closing up like an impenetrable box… and Bella… tiny, so tiny, smiling… Before the shouting began again.
“Those who loved him,” Narcissa says. “Those who... yearned... for what he offered... were the lonely ones… the hungry ones. Bellatrix… Evan… Severus…”
She does not move when she speaks. She does not lift her gaze.
“I… was never lonely. After you left… I was alone.”
Narcissa scarcely moves when she is awake. She hardly speaks. She barely breathes. Andromeda only knows when she has fallen asleep because she her torso shifts, and moans surge out of her throat like vomit.
She moans names. Bellatrix. Lucius. Severus. Draco.
Draco. Draco. Draco.
She hiccups faint sobs in her sleep.
When she wakes, Narcissa’s brows only draw tighter and tighter while she looks ahead of her at the emptiness of her cell.
Andromeda sits beside her, Narcissa's cool palm resting in her hand.
Narcissa never looks at her.
Andromeda knows she can escape any time.
Her thestral is still waiting for her.
Whenever she decides to leave.
Whenever she decides
To let go
Raise herself up
And leave.
Shadows press upon her like dreaming.
Like drowning in a deep, cold sleep.
She sits beside Narcissa and holds her sister's hand.
***
Genre: General
Rating: PG-13? Mentions of sex and illicit substances, nothing graphic
Summary: Least creative title in the history of titles. Could be seen as a sequel to Show Me. Or not, if underage lesbian incest isn't your bag.
***
Andromeda has always been impulsive. As usual, she isn’t certain that she’s going to go through with it until it’s done and she’s away.
***
The first time, she was high on freedom for months. She was voracious for Ted. They did it in every room of his parents’ house, any time they thought they wouldn’t get caught. She even brought his sister Lydia into their games. And then it was the Muggles - Lydia’s friends - muggle parties, muggle lovers, muggle potions.
She had been like a goddess to them, radiant and transcendent. They were vulnerable to slightest whiff of seductive magic. It never even bothered them that she could never remember their ridiculous muggle names. Of course in those days everyone was already half-confunded on muggle drugs.
It was a novelty, of course, but it wore off quickly. Andromeda had escaped her family to be more fully herself - not to hide behind obfuscating, obliviating charms, not to feel overwhelmed and bewildered by the confusion of muggle devices and muggle jargon, the noise they always craved.
So she and Ted created their home out in the countryside, just one muggle village nearby. It was romantic at first, nesting, housekeeping. No house elves. No interlopers between Ted and herself. And then Nymphadora was born.
And then it was Ted and herself and a screaming baby with no help, no family, no visitors except Ted’s insipid siblings and his insipid friends. Andromeda remembered dinner parties with conversation so monotonous and predictable... she could have hexed someone. She would spend hours getting everything ready - the house, the grounds, her appearance, the menu - only to ache with boredom and isolation once the guests arrived. Were they too wary of her to let show any dark secrets or were they all really so dull?
That must have been about the time she rediscovered the hippogriff figurine. Buried at the bottom of one of her trunks, Andromeda glimpsed its faint shimmer and almost hesitated to touch it. It had been a gift from her parents, the day Bellatrix was born.
Two gifts, actually, two figurines, identical, consolation perhaps for the peace that had been lost: one gift to Cissa and one to herself.
Days, nights Andromeda was tempted, so tempted.
A touch, a word.
Andromeda knew an assortment of spells she could have used. To signal. To sound. To connect.
She set the hippogriff on her dressing table. Hundreds of times her wand was in her hand and the right words on the tip of her lips.
Narcissa.
Sister.
Wondering if at the same time, in her stone mansion, if Cissa had unearthed her own figurine and was itching to reach out with her own spell. Watching and waiting for her figure to hum and glow.
But Andromeda would never be the first to give in.
And neither would Narcissa.
Instead she took to practicing her curses on the encroaching village. The muggles had started to build something - something horrid and noisome and foul-smelling, the ugliness of it even visible from within their wards - a factory. A series of industrial accidents befell it, and then the factory was no more.
Ted had long lost his novelty by then, but they still had Nymphadora. Their daughter was a joy, a wonder. It was as if Andromeda had conjured her out of every dream she had ever wished for herself. The girl had a wild streak, to be sure, willful and energetic like her mother, although thankfully she was never the hellchild Bella had been. And her powers… Andromeda had never imagined such powers. Of course it might have had something to do with all the muggle acid she took during her pregnancy.
As Nymphadora grew Andromeda saw to it that she was raised with every asset Andy had ever wanted for herself. She was as strict as her parents had been at times, cobbling together what she could of the best parts of her own upbringing. But without the same rigid, outdated rules, without the same absurdities. Without the shouting and chaos and then icy, brittle silence.
Ted might bore her, but he was a loving, consistent, understanding father. And spouse, for that matter.
Andromeda still read the newspapers. She wouldn’t hide, wouldn’t flinch. That was how she knew of Narcissa’s marriage, her status, her house. Even gossip about Bella’s loyalties. She watched them in their black and white, unfocused photographs, watched them enslave themselves to the Dark Lord. Pathetic, desperate fools.
No matter how powerful they grew, Andromeda could never lose her contempt. It was all so… undignified. Fighting the rising tide, the changing times. As if they could turn back the ages.
Andromeda read the papers, start to finish, and then she meticulously unfolded them and spread them on the floor of her stable.
Just as well she and Ted kept well out of it, left to themselves in their country retreat.
Killings and curses on the horizon like distant thunder... But they were all but forgotten. They were safe.
It was after the war that she started breeding Thestrals for the Ministry.
She remembered taking Nymphadora with her into the village. She had polyjuiced herself into a muggle nurse, and Dora was under an invisibility spell. They went to attend on an old man on his deathbed. The girl had needed to see, to understand, death.
Andromeda might no longer be a Black, but she wouldn’t shield the girl from anything.
Not from the heart of things, anyway.
And then after what had seemed just a short time of home tutelage, Nymphadora was at school. Not too far away in Scotland, although Andromeda had seriously considered Durmstrang. Ted was the one to put his foot down. He wouldn’t send his daughter to board so far away.
It was through the papers as well that Andromeda first learned of Draco. A family portrait next to some aristocratic announcement, the boy looking like a shard of Narcissa that had broken off, but with a faint trace of a scowl, some of the brutality he must have inherited from his father. Narcissa looking like she had indeed lost a piece of herself.
And the hippogriff still sitting silent and cold on Andromeda’s dressing table.
Narcissa had born a child. Flesh of her flesh. And she had never reached out to her older sister.
Andromeda was itching for a change. With Dora safely away at school she started traveling. She even met some of her old school friends haunting the various wizarding capitols abroad - the ones who hadn’t been killed or imprisoned during the war, the ones who ventured to acknowledge her. She took a lover or three. She improved her thestral stock.
Andromeda was the one who rode them, trained them, but Ted had turned out to be surprisingly adept at caring for them. Something so gentle and reassuring in his nature.
They had found a new rhythm by then.
Andromeda still traveled but she had made one good friend closer to home, a botanist witch named Hortensis with a wicked home brew. Not quite as wild as the potions Andy had experimented with in her youth but still imparting some interesting effects on the mind.
Funny how it never once occurred to her to try to see Bellatrix during all those years. Her wild, lost baby sister. Not when she floundered as a teenager, not when she threw herself at the Dark Lord, not when she was captured, condemned.
Even Sirius, her favorite cousin. It had surprised Andromeda to see on which side he had landed in the end, and she felt a painful twinge at his punishment, but then those were mad years. Lies and spies and killing green. Families torn apart, never mind her own defection.
Everyone had gone mad one way or another.
She knew, somehow, although they stayed well out of politics... When Nymphadora applied to become an Auror, she knew. It settled on her cold and heavy, the certainty that war must come. Must come again. But Andromeda never would have stopped her daughter. In a way perhaps this is what she had been preparing her for her whole life.
To go out into the world. To act. To be. Unconstrained.
It happened quickly, sparks and licks of conflict and then the conflagration. In the hollow aftermath Andromeda once more opened the paper and saw that Narcissa Malfoy had been condemned a Death Eater and was sentenced to life in Azkaban.
She read the whole paper, as usual, unfolded every article, and placed it on the floor of her stable to be soiled by her thestrals.
Narcissa. In Azkaban.
In the evening Andromeda stared at her porcelain hippogriff.
She thought of all the spells she had held in her hand, in her mouth, all those years, yearning to conjure a connection.
Too late.
Three months later, she told Ted she would be off traveling. She told him that she would return.
She locked her personal suite with an assortment of tricks and traps and puzzles, the sort she used to force Nymphadora to solve, even when the girl whinged and pouted and stamped her foot.
She stopped by to see Hortensis and they spent the whole night polishing off a bottle of her latest brew, sitting on a hillside under an ocean of stars.
Without quite thinking about it Andromeda approached her stable and shushed her strongest, most reliable beast, pulling him by his reign out into the dawn.
She wasn’t certain she was going to go through with it, but then they were riding, and then they were flying, and then they were hours out over the sea, urged on by Andromeda’s wakefulness and her warming charms and by the songs she sang out of key.
French love songs, muggle coven chants, even some old, tragic lullaby her mother had crooned.
###
It isn’t difficult to enter Azkaban.
It does take her a while to find the right cell. She's growing dizzy herself and somehow wretched but she realizes that she's searching for a negative, a lack. Finally she find her. Narcissa sits quiet and composed, a white shadow in the corner, unlike most of the other inmates who rage and writhe and cry aloud.
Even after the years that have passed, even though the shadows of Narcissa’s face shift and fade after countless cosmetic charms, Andromeda still has no trouble recognizing her sister.
She looks like a ghost of herself. Glimpses under the shadows - tired and worn. Her bones are Andromeda’s bones, their mother’s bones.
Narcissa sits quietly. Andromeda lowers herself down onto the cold stone beside her.
They do not speak.
After a while - hours? - Andromeda takes Narcissa’s hand.
Andromeda feels the dread and the cold and memories swirling out of her, around her. Echoes of her father shouting… her mother closing up like an impenetrable box… and Bella… tiny, so tiny, smiling… Before the shouting began again.
“Those who loved him,” Narcissa says. “Those who... yearned... for what he offered... were the lonely ones… the hungry ones. Bellatrix… Evan… Severus…”
She does not move when she speaks. She does not lift her gaze.
“I… was never lonely. After you left… I was alone.”
Narcissa scarcely moves when she is awake. She hardly speaks. She barely breathes. Andromeda only knows when she has fallen asleep because she her torso shifts, and moans surge out of her throat like vomit.
She moans names. Bellatrix. Lucius. Severus. Draco.
Draco. Draco. Draco.
She hiccups faint sobs in her sleep.
When she wakes, Narcissa’s brows only draw tighter and tighter while she looks ahead of her at the emptiness of her cell.
Andromeda sits beside her, Narcissa's cool palm resting in her hand.
Narcissa never looks at her.
Andromeda knows she can escape any time.
Her thestral is still waiting for her.
Whenever she decides to leave.
Whenever she decides
To let go
Raise herself up
And leave.
Shadows press upon her like dreaming.
Like drowning in a deep, cold sleep.
She sits beside Narcissa and holds her sister's hand.
***