(no subject)
TITLE: Songs They Sang - 1 - Another Kind of War
AUTHOR: eudaimon
PAIRING: Ted Tonks/Andromeda Black
RATING: NC17 for Mr Tonks' fertile imagination.
NOTES: This is the long, plotty Andy/Ted story that I've been talking about writing forever. It's the most, in my opinion, interest canon relationship that we know nothing about. There is no canon for this. This is my version of events. I have taken (or I will take) liberties. This takes place in the same universe, more or less as my other long fics 9 Songs (Remus/Sirius) and 2nd Song (Nymphadora Tonks/Hermione Granger). This, again, is for orlanstamos because, without her input, my Ted would be a very pale thing indeed.
(I own none of this, not even Ted Tonks healthy teenaged imagination. Illustrated, sort of. Andy is Eva Green, Ted is Sean Patrick Flannery. Title from a song by Thea Gilmore. Comments are a kindness. For the record, the frame is set on 7th July, 2005, when terrorist bombs went off on the London public transport system, killing 56 and injuring 700. No disrespect is meant. Ted is just an Englishman and a muggle).
::July::
In his shed, the world ended and began again while his train went around and around. He was kicked back in his chair, too old to lie on the floor, thinking about writing a love letter for Andy (how the world as it was needed more love letters). The world shook and did not shake. He caught it on the radio and turned on the t.v, black and white and stubborn. Begged and wrestled and then sat and watched in horror, in sheer slack jawed horror, as, two hundred miles south, War or something like it started.
It was a kind of war. It was definately war after a fashion.
In the doorway, her hand over her mouth, Andy watched.
"Those poor muggles," she said, softly.
"People, Andy. They're people."
He kept an absent count of dead on the edge of his newspaper. It reminded him of the count which Andy had been keeping for years, since Frank and Alice and what Bellatrix had done. In the back of a soft red notebook, labelled TED TONKS, ARITHMANCY in careful capitals, Andromeda kept a tally of the dead. It made sense, with a daughter who was a soldier. One day, there might be a mark for Dora.
Ted's pencil tore through thin, cheap paper.
There had been another world, once. He remembered it. A world before war.
The world before war had a lot to do with Andy...with meeting Andy for the first time. How had there even been a world without her? Maybe there had been a world, but it was dark, without her to light it (nothing in comparison to the very long night which came afterwards). He'd been fifteen when he first saw her; the stupid house system had meant that she was invisible before then. Not invisible, but hidden in plain sight. Arithmancy. Bloody Arithmancy. Her hair had been ragged and short; cutting charm gone wrong. He'd thought that she was a bloke, until he'd heard her speak, that voice which was both rich and musical, jazz and poetry and fucking Shakespeare. Not fucking Shakespeare...more gentle by far than that. Sonnets. Whispers. Andromeda had a touch of poetry.
And then she'd said his name.
"You."
"Yes?"
"You're Edward, yes?"
He'd blinked at her, stupidly. Edward...Edward? Nobody ever called him Edward. His father occasionally called him Edward, but that didn't count.
'M'Ted,' he said, still lying flat on his back on the lawn in the shade of the tree. It was an Indian Summer. He was fifteen years old and three days.
'But you are that Tonks boy, aren't you?' She was glaring at the piece of paper which she held in her hand. He could see his name glowing there, faintly. Bloody Dumbledore. He'd known that he was getting a tutor for Arithmancy, but had hadn't expected a Slytherin. No, no, a Slytherin would have been okay, would have been dandy, but this snotty cow? He was shielding his eyes from the sun, strong for September. He was wearing cotton, blue and silver twisted together, knotted around his wrist by a pretty girl named named Jane. All of the light was behind her, the short ends of her hair snaking away from her head in relief. He couldn't quite make out her features all at once; her face swam in shadow and blur. Her nose was straight and sharp. She had a pretty, tight mouth. She was wearing a Prefect's badge clipped to her perfectly tied tie.
'The name,' he said, levering himself up onto his elbows, 'Is Ted.'
'I'm here to help, Ted," she said, the corner of her mouth twisting into what he presumed was a smile.
"With what?" She raised an eyebrow.
"You cannot have failed to realise that your Arithmancy is..." She made an exasperated frace. "It's woeful."
"It's stupid, is what it is."
She was tapping her foot. What was the point in having a shoe so shiny?
"You misunderstand me, Mr Tonks. You will be doing better on Arithmancy because I will be teaching you."
He was on his feet. She was nearly as tall as he was; what kind of height was that for a girl?
"What's your name?" He said.
"Andromeda Black." She tilted her chin expectantly, her mouth tight, and suddenly she wasn't quite so pretty, at the mention of her own name.
"Okay then," said Ted, hands shoved deep into his pockets as he turned to slouch away. "Catch you later, Andy..."
And off he went on his merry way.
She kept finding him though, wherever he was, and he'd find himself glared at until he acquiesced, until he sat down and listened while she lectured him on things which made no sense at all. He was just fifteen, and what fifteen year old boys like football and movies and illicit beer. What fifteen year old boys like is a mystery, even to fifteen year old boys. Fifteen year old boys are neither one thing or the other, neither coming or going.
He always felt like Andromeda saw straight through him, to the unfinished mess over which he knotted his blue striped tie.
For the first week and most of the second, he knew that Andromeda hated him. It was in the way that she never looked at him, not straight into his eyes. There was a spot about an inch above his head, his unruly hair, that garnered all of her pale eyed attention. She reminded him of Penguin hardbacks, those little books that his father had read so carefully to him, the Reverend Tonks, who didn't fall so very far from the tree. He remembered the story of Medusa, watered down for bedtime; never look her directly in the eyes, just at the very ends of her hair, snaking against the sky. Andromeda snaked and filled the sky. Before her, before daily Arithmancy in the corner of the library, Ted had taken to being hated with easy grace. It wasn't that it didn't bother him, more that he didn't notice if he was disliked. It would have been easy, he reflected, if she'd spat and torn at him. It was her cool silence that hurt, even years later.
"You are impossible," she snarled, throwing her pencil with such force that it bounced. "This is not that hard, Ted."
"It makes no bloody sense," he said, rubbing the fingers of both hands through his hair which stood up in crazy peaks, scuffing the floor under the table with the toe of his shoe. She dragged him away from a book on Curses of the Ancient world, which was much more interesting, and now he was faced by pages filled with code in her careful hand and it was all driving him bonkers, mad, doo-lally tap.
"What is the fucking POINT..." He threw his quill at the wall, watched in foiled frustration as it fluttered to the ground, spotting ink. "Fuck it all."
"Language, Ted," said Andromeda, not looking straight at him, still focused on a point directly above his head.
"You could look at me, you know...You could...I mean, I know that you hate me, and you probably have some really fantastic reason but fuck it, Andromeda, I have a face."
She blinked. She looked him straight in the eyes and blinked.
"Page forty-two, Ted, if you please. Heart numbers."
He could have sworn that she'd blushed.
-
He was lying on his back on the bed, naked hard. She was standing on the bed, one foot on either side of his thighs as she undressed with her back to him. Her white shirt fluttered across his lap. Her red bra stood out very brightly against her white skin. She bent from the waist, working her grey pleated skirt down over her hips, the silky fabric of her red knickers pulling tight over the curve of her arse. It was a lovely arse. She lifted her feet to step out of the hem, reaching behind herself to unhook her bra. As satin hit the floor with a soft sound, he wrapped his fingers around his own cock, sliding his fist as she turned around to look at him, the waistband of her knickers a tapered v over the soft curve of her belly, her green and silver tie hanging between her utterly perfect breasts. She was utterly perfect. She was flawless.
He hadn't expected anything else.
"Hello Ted," she said, twisting her tie around her fingers, her hips lifted a little, tracing the line of his bare thigh with her toe.
"Get the fuck down here," he said. The words were something of a struggle. She settled across his thighs, his cock fitting snuggly against her, satin frustrating. He pushed up against her as she cupped her breasts, rolling her nipples between her fingers. When he curved his fingers under her, traced his middle finger along the patch of wet on red. When she moaned, he hooked fabric out of the way, needing more of that sound, and pushed a finger inside her, his thumb snug against her clit. She rocked against his hand, moaning and pushing against him.
"Oh, Ted..." She bit her lip, her teeth straight and very white.
He took hold of her underwear with both hands and pulled until the flimsy fabric tore. Andy made a soft, surprised sound, lifting up a little on her knees as he pushed into her, taking hold of her tie and wrapping it around his fist, pulling her down for a kiss. He held her in place with the tie, thrusting into her, breathing the scent of her, kissing deeply and...
And.
He woke up. He woke up sprawled on his back, Connor snoring softly across the way. His hand was shoved down the front of his too big pajama trousers, the trousers which sagged around his hips in the evenings in autumn. Sheets, hands and trousers were a sticky mess. Ted shifted his hips, rubbing at his face with his free hand. All he could think about was red knickers.
"Oh, fucking fuck," he muttered, fumbling with his clean hand for his wand, trying to call a cleaning charm to mind.
-
He wore it sometimes, no rhyme or reason why. He didn't even really believe, when it came down to it - that was his father's thing, not his. It had been his grandmother's, anyway, so maybe it had more to do with her than to do with more suffering and grief that no teenaged boy could ever really understand. He wore it tucked inside his shirt on a length of silver chain and he didn't really think about it, just took it for granted that it was there.
"Let me look at that," said Andromeda, one afternoon, as he scowled down at a page of Arithmancy.
"Hmm?"
"Let me look."
He blinked at her. He seemed to spend a lot of time blinking at Andromeda Black. She was like an irritation in the corner of his eye. He growled at his parchment, scratching out two lines of working. She did it while he wasn't looking at her. She leant forward and wrapped her fingers around it, and her knuckles brushed bare skin and all that he could think about for a moment was Arithmancy sigils written in the heat of her hand.
"What does it do?" she said, bending her head over her curled fingers.
"Nothing," he said, aware of the pressure of the chain against the back of his neck. He was suddenly, inexplicably, hard under the shelter of the jut of the table. Hard because, for a second, Andromeda had touched him.
"What's the point, then?" she said, examining the cross, a tiny portrait of hurt and grace, darkened with age in its creases.
"Sometimes it's just nice," he said, distracted by the memory of her skin against his, however briefly.
"You make no sense, Ted Tonks," she said, tucking his grandmother's cross back inside his shirt and patting his chest. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his erection brushing uncomfortably against the inside of his trousers. The way that she leant over her books cast shadows between her breasts. She had perfect breasts. Tits. He felt a sudden urge to render her less perfect. She was leaning across the table, crossing out working which he'd just done.
"You're just not concentrating are you, Ted?"
"I'm trying, Andy...don't start. Please. Don't start."
"Andromeda, Ted," she said, picking up his pencil and holding it out to him. It had marks where she'd bitten it. He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath.
"Write it down again," he said. He scowled at the list of numbers in Andromeda's neat handwriting, but it was difficult to concentrate with her close, with his necklace still warm from being in his hands. She made life difficult, because she was so distracting, so much more interesting that columns of pencil written numbers. She was poetry in motion, jazz, Shakespeare, George fucking Best. She was at her best when she didn't realise that he was watching her. She walked away from him on tip-toes, timing how long it took him in baby, fairy steps, swinging her long arms for balance. She was a gypsy dancing Goddess in her stockinged feet, her shoes discarded under the table. He touched one with his toe. She was a tight rope walking beauty, with her green and silver tie and a scuffed tear in her tights above her knee. She was beautiful and terrible and she made him hard and really happy at the same time.
"Fuck," said Ted Tonks, with feeling, crossing out his working, starting again
-
With her hair wrapped in a towel, with February painting icy swirls on the glass of the dormitory, Andromeda sat on the bed and contemplated the red envelope. It wasn't a Howler. A Howler would have gone off by now. Howlers weren't her parents' style - they had hands on ways of doing their dirty business. She turned the envelope over. ANDY, written in neat, cramped capitals. Nobody ever called her Andy.
Nobody else.
She slid her thumb nail under the edge of the envelope and eased it free. It was cream card, printed with the word 'amore' in red letters. She looked at it for a moment before she opened it. She'd never got one before. Telling people everything was a muggle fascination.
She'd folded it under her mattress and gone to bed pleased, but she hadn't really remembered in the morning, until she'd seen Ted, watching her sideways and fiddling with the hem of his shirt.
"Can I sit here?"
"What?"
"Can I sit here?"
She was beautiful in the soft light of the Great Hall. She was beautiful in all lights, but that wasn't it, not at all. Her hair was longer, brushing her collar, very black. He wanted to push that hair up from the nape of her neck, to see if she'd tremble or freeze. He wanted to push her. He wanted to see where pushing her might lead. She was so bloody cool all of the time, ice, a sharp day in December. He wanted to melt her, thaw her, make her shout if he couldn't make her laugh. He wanted to apologise for the card, but he didn't. She made him feel small and stupid, and not worth a lot at all, which had less to do with being Pureblood or Slytherin and more to do with being a Black and being distant and being so beautiful in a way that didn't really have to do with being beautiful at all. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, and there was no hall, no audience, no world but for the soft sweep of dark hair at the nape of Andromeda's neck.
"This is the Slytherin table, Ted," she said, looking around her. Fie, pretty girl, on what others think.
"So?" said Ted, swinging one leg over the bench, eyes for nobody but her.
He had never had eyes for anybody but her.
He...
"Dad."
"Dora, I didn't know you were coming." On the t.v, they were bringing bodies out of the wreckage. "I...Holy fuck, Dora, what the fuck happened to you?"
His very brave, very adult daughter was covered in blood and soot and sweat and it was mostly blood and she swayed on her feet before she sat down. He was on his feet and fussing, dabbing at her face with a handkerchief which he'd spat into, trying to find the colour of her skin. His little girl, his Dora-Dragonfly and all of her bright colour was somewhere underneath, he knew it. She sat numbly, tears trickling down her face.
"Have you seen your mother?"
"Came in the back way, Dad. Dad, I..."
"Do you want a cup of tea, Dora?"
"I wouldn't say no, Dad."
"You look terrible, Dora."
"Thanks, Dad."
In the background, the scratchy voice of the news reporter, the one in London, talked about war or something like it, and the sun shone.
It was a beautiful day, the day the world ended and began again.
AUTHOR: eudaimon
PAIRING: Ted Tonks/Andromeda Black
RATING: NC17 for Mr Tonks' fertile imagination.
NOTES: This is the long, plotty Andy/Ted story that I've been talking about writing forever. It's the most, in my opinion, interest canon relationship that we know nothing about. There is no canon for this. This is my version of events. I have taken (or I will take) liberties. This takes place in the same universe, more or less as my other long fics 9 Songs (Remus/Sirius) and 2nd Song (Nymphadora Tonks/Hermione Granger). This, again, is for orlanstamos because, without her input, my Ted would be a very pale thing indeed.
(I own none of this, not even Ted Tonks healthy teenaged imagination. Illustrated, sort of. Andy is Eva Green, Ted is Sean Patrick Flannery. Title from a song by Thea Gilmore. Comments are a kindness. For the record, the frame is set on 7th July, 2005, when terrorist bombs went off on the London public transport system, killing 56 and injuring 700. No disrespect is meant. Ted is just an Englishman and a muggle).
::July::
In his shed, the world ended and began again while his train went around and around. He was kicked back in his chair, too old to lie on the floor, thinking about writing a love letter for Andy (how the world as it was needed more love letters). The world shook and did not shake. He caught it on the radio and turned on the t.v, black and white and stubborn. Begged and wrestled and then sat and watched in horror, in sheer slack jawed horror, as, two hundred miles south, War or something like it started.
It was a kind of war. It was definately war after a fashion.
In the doorway, her hand over her mouth, Andy watched.
"Those poor muggles," she said, softly.
"People, Andy. They're people."
He kept an absent count of dead on the edge of his newspaper. It reminded him of the count which Andy had been keeping for years, since Frank and Alice and what Bellatrix had done. In the back of a soft red notebook, labelled TED TONKS, ARITHMANCY in careful capitals, Andromeda kept a tally of the dead. It made sense, with a daughter who was a soldier. One day, there might be a mark for Dora.
Ted's pencil tore through thin, cheap paper.
There had been another world, once. He remembered it. A world before war.
The world before war had a lot to do with Andy...with meeting Andy for the first time. How had there even been a world without her? Maybe there had been a world, but it was dark, without her to light it (nothing in comparison to the very long night which came afterwards). He'd been fifteen when he first saw her; the stupid house system had meant that she was invisible before then. Not invisible, but hidden in plain sight. Arithmancy. Bloody Arithmancy. Her hair had been ragged and short; cutting charm gone wrong. He'd thought that she was a bloke, until he'd heard her speak, that voice which was both rich and musical, jazz and poetry and fucking Shakespeare. Not fucking Shakespeare...more gentle by far than that. Sonnets. Whispers. Andromeda had a touch of poetry.
And then she'd said his name.
"You."
"Yes?"
"You're Edward, yes?"
He'd blinked at her, stupidly. Edward...Edward? Nobody ever called him Edward. His father occasionally called him Edward, but that didn't count.
'M'Ted,' he said, still lying flat on his back on the lawn in the shade of the tree. It was an Indian Summer. He was fifteen years old and three days.
'But you are that Tonks boy, aren't you?' She was glaring at the piece of paper which she held in her hand. He could see his name glowing there, faintly. Bloody Dumbledore. He'd known that he was getting a tutor for Arithmancy, but had hadn't expected a Slytherin. No, no, a Slytherin would have been okay, would have been dandy, but this snotty cow? He was shielding his eyes from the sun, strong for September. He was wearing cotton, blue and silver twisted together, knotted around his wrist by a pretty girl named named Jane. All of the light was behind her, the short ends of her hair snaking away from her head in relief. He couldn't quite make out her features all at once; her face swam in shadow and blur. Her nose was straight and sharp. She had a pretty, tight mouth. She was wearing a Prefect's badge clipped to her perfectly tied tie.
'The name,' he said, levering himself up onto his elbows, 'Is Ted.'
'I'm here to help, Ted," she said, the corner of her mouth twisting into what he presumed was a smile.
"With what?" She raised an eyebrow.
"You cannot have failed to realise that your Arithmancy is..." She made an exasperated frace. "It's woeful."
"It's stupid, is what it is."
She was tapping her foot. What was the point in having a shoe so shiny?
"You misunderstand me, Mr Tonks. You will be doing better on Arithmancy because I will be teaching you."
He was on his feet. She was nearly as tall as he was; what kind of height was that for a girl?
"What's your name?" He said.
"Andromeda Black." She tilted her chin expectantly, her mouth tight, and suddenly she wasn't quite so pretty, at the mention of her own name.
"Okay then," said Ted, hands shoved deep into his pockets as he turned to slouch away. "Catch you later, Andy..."
And off he went on his merry way.
She kept finding him though, wherever he was, and he'd find himself glared at until he acquiesced, until he sat down and listened while she lectured him on things which made no sense at all. He was just fifteen, and what fifteen year old boys like football and movies and illicit beer. What fifteen year old boys like is a mystery, even to fifteen year old boys. Fifteen year old boys are neither one thing or the other, neither coming or going.
He always felt like Andromeda saw straight through him, to the unfinished mess over which he knotted his blue striped tie.
For the first week and most of the second, he knew that Andromeda hated him. It was in the way that she never looked at him, not straight into his eyes. There was a spot about an inch above his head, his unruly hair, that garnered all of her pale eyed attention. She reminded him of Penguin hardbacks, those little books that his father had read so carefully to him, the Reverend Tonks, who didn't fall so very far from the tree. He remembered the story of Medusa, watered down for bedtime; never look her directly in the eyes, just at the very ends of her hair, snaking against the sky. Andromeda snaked and filled the sky. Before her, before daily Arithmancy in the corner of the library, Ted had taken to being hated with easy grace. It wasn't that it didn't bother him, more that he didn't notice if he was disliked. It would have been easy, he reflected, if she'd spat and torn at him. It was her cool silence that hurt, even years later.
"You are impossible," she snarled, throwing her pencil with such force that it bounced. "This is not that hard, Ted."
"It makes no bloody sense," he said, rubbing the fingers of both hands through his hair which stood up in crazy peaks, scuffing the floor under the table with the toe of his shoe. She dragged him away from a book on Curses of the Ancient world, which was much more interesting, and now he was faced by pages filled with code in her careful hand and it was all driving him bonkers, mad, doo-lally tap.
"What is the fucking POINT..." He threw his quill at the wall, watched in foiled frustration as it fluttered to the ground, spotting ink. "Fuck it all."
"Language, Ted," said Andromeda, not looking straight at him, still focused on a point directly above his head.
"You could look at me, you know...You could...I mean, I know that you hate me, and you probably have some really fantastic reason but fuck it, Andromeda, I have a face."
She blinked. She looked him straight in the eyes and blinked.
"Page forty-two, Ted, if you please. Heart numbers."
He could have sworn that she'd blushed.
-
He was lying on his back on the bed, naked hard. She was standing on the bed, one foot on either side of his thighs as she undressed with her back to him. Her white shirt fluttered across his lap. Her red bra stood out very brightly against her white skin. She bent from the waist, working her grey pleated skirt down over her hips, the silky fabric of her red knickers pulling tight over the curve of her arse. It was a lovely arse. She lifted her feet to step out of the hem, reaching behind herself to unhook her bra. As satin hit the floor with a soft sound, he wrapped his fingers around his own cock, sliding his fist as she turned around to look at him, the waistband of her knickers a tapered v over the soft curve of her belly, her green and silver tie hanging between her utterly perfect breasts. She was utterly perfect. She was flawless.
He hadn't expected anything else.
"Hello Ted," she said, twisting her tie around her fingers, her hips lifted a little, tracing the line of his bare thigh with her toe.
"Get the fuck down here," he said. The words were something of a struggle. She settled across his thighs, his cock fitting snuggly against her, satin frustrating. He pushed up against her as she cupped her breasts, rolling her nipples between her fingers. When he curved his fingers under her, traced his middle finger along the patch of wet on red. When she moaned, he hooked fabric out of the way, needing more of that sound, and pushed a finger inside her, his thumb snug against her clit. She rocked against his hand, moaning and pushing against him.
"Oh, Ted..." She bit her lip, her teeth straight and very white.
He took hold of her underwear with both hands and pulled until the flimsy fabric tore. Andy made a soft, surprised sound, lifting up a little on her knees as he pushed into her, taking hold of her tie and wrapping it around his fist, pulling her down for a kiss. He held her in place with the tie, thrusting into her, breathing the scent of her, kissing deeply and...
And.
He woke up. He woke up sprawled on his back, Connor snoring softly across the way. His hand was shoved down the front of his too big pajama trousers, the trousers which sagged around his hips in the evenings in autumn. Sheets, hands and trousers were a sticky mess. Ted shifted his hips, rubbing at his face with his free hand. All he could think about was red knickers.
"Oh, fucking fuck," he muttered, fumbling with his clean hand for his wand, trying to call a cleaning charm to mind.
-
He wore it sometimes, no rhyme or reason why. He didn't even really believe, when it came down to it - that was his father's thing, not his. It had been his grandmother's, anyway, so maybe it had more to do with her than to do with more suffering and grief that no teenaged boy could ever really understand. He wore it tucked inside his shirt on a length of silver chain and he didn't really think about it, just took it for granted that it was there.
"Let me look at that," said Andromeda, one afternoon, as he scowled down at a page of Arithmancy.
"Hmm?"
"Let me look."
He blinked at her. He seemed to spend a lot of time blinking at Andromeda Black. She was like an irritation in the corner of his eye. He growled at his parchment, scratching out two lines of working. She did it while he wasn't looking at her. She leant forward and wrapped her fingers around it, and her knuckles brushed bare skin and all that he could think about for a moment was Arithmancy sigils written in the heat of her hand.
"What does it do?" she said, bending her head over her curled fingers.
"Nothing," he said, aware of the pressure of the chain against the back of his neck. He was suddenly, inexplicably, hard under the shelter of the jut of the table. Hard because, for a second, Andromeda had touched him.
"What's the point, then?" she said, examining the cross, a tiny portrait of hurt and grace, darkened with age in its creases.
"Sometimes it's just nice," he said, distracted by the memory of her skin against his, however briefly.
"You make no sense, Ted Tonks," she said, tucking his grandmother's cross back inside his shirt and patting his chest. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his erection brushing uncomfortably against the inside of his trousers. The way that she leant over her books cast shadows between her breasts. She had perfect breasts. Tits. He felt a sudden urge to render her less perfect. She was leaning across the table, crossing out working which he'd just done.
"You're just not concentrating are you, Ted?"
"I'm trying, Andy...don't start. Please. Don't start."
"Andromeda, Ted," she said, picking up his pencil and holding it out to him. It had marks where she'd bitten it. He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath.
"Write it down again," he said. He scowled at the list of numbers in Andromeda's neat handwriting, but it was difficult to concentrate with her close, with his necklace still warm from being in his hands. She made life difficult, because she was so distracting, so much more interesting that columns of pencil written numbers. She was poetry in motion, jazz, Shakespeare, George fucking Best. She was at her best when she didn't realise that he was watching her. She walked away from him on tip-toes, timing how long it took him in baby, fairy steps, swinging her long arms for balance. She was a gypsy dancing Goddess in her stockinged feet, her shoes discarded under the table. He touched one with his toe. She was a tight rope walking beauty, with her green and silver tie and a scuffed tear in her tights above her knee. She was beautiful and terrible and she made him hard and really happy at the same time.
"Fuck," said Ted Tonks, with feeling, crossing out his working, starting again
-
With her hair wrapped in a towel, with February painting icy swirls on the glass of the dormitory, Andromeda sat on the bed and contemplated the red envelope. It wasn't a Howler. A Howler would have gone off by now. Howlers weren't her parents' style - they had hands on ways of doing their dirty business. She turned the envelope over. ANDY, written in neat, cramped capitals. Nobody ever called her Andy.
Nobody else.
She slid her thumb nail under the edge of the envelope and eased it free. It was cream card, printed with the word 'amore' in red letters. She looked at it for a moment before she opened it. She'd never got one before. Telling people everything was a muggle fascination.
She'd folded it under her mattress and gone to bed pleased, but she hadn't really remembered in the morning, until she'd seen Ted, watching her sideways and fiddling with the hem of his shirt.
"Can I sit here?"
"What?"
"Can I sit here?"
She was beautiful in the soft light of the Great Hall. She was beautiful in all lights, but that wasn't it, not at all. Her hair was longer, brushing her collar, very black. He wanted to push that hair up from the nape of her neck, to see if she'd tremble or freeze. He wanted to push her. He wanted to see where pushing her might lead. She was so bloody cool all of the time, ice, a sharp day in December. He wanted to melt her, thaw her, make her shout if he couldn't make her laugh. He wanted to apologise for the card, but he didn't. She made him feel small and stupid, and not worth a lot at all, which had less to do with being Pureblood or Slytherin and more to do with being a Black and being distant and being so beautiful in a way that didn't really have to do with being beautiful at all. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, and there was no hall, no audience, no world but for the soft sweep of dark hair at the nape of Andromeda's neck.
"This is the Slytherin table, Ted," she said, looking around her. Fie, pretty girl, on what others think.
"So?" said Ted, swinging one leg over the bench, eyes for nobody but her.
He had never had eyes for anybody but her.
He...
"Dad."
"Dora, I didn't know you were coming." On the t.v, they were bringing bodies out of the wreckage. "I...Holy fuck, Dora, what the fuck happened to you?"
His very brave, very adult daughter was covered in blood and soot and sweat and it was mostly blood and she swayed on her feet before she sat down. He was on his feet and fussing, dabbing at her face with a handkerchief which he'd spat into, trying to find the colour of her skin. His little girl, his Dora-Dragonfly and all of her bright colour was somewhere underneath, he knew it. She sat numbly, tears trickling down her face.
"Have you seen your mother?"
"Came in the back way, Dad. Dad, I..."
"Do you want a cup of tea, Dora?"
"I wouldn't say no, Dad."
"You look terrible, Dora."
"Thanks, Dad."
In the background, the scratchy voice of the news reporter, the one in London, talked about war or something like it, and the sun shone.
It was a beautiful day, the day the world ended and began again.