"Our Best Back Pocket Secret," Andromeda/Ted, R Title: Our Best Back Pocket Secret Author:kethlenda Characters/Pairing: Andromeda/Ted, implied Bellatrix/Andromeda Summary: She had forgotten how to smile, Andromeda Black. Rating: R Warning(s): implied incest Originally Written: 1/06 Notes: none, really
She had forgotten how to smile, Andromeda Black. Of course she curved her lips in the right way for her parents’ wealthy friends, laughed politely at the other girls’ jokes, but a real smile is the sort that comes without thinking and has no regard for whether it’s proper or whether it flatters the dimple in your left cheek.
The first time Ted Tonks smiled at her, she felt her face take on an unfamiliar shape. She felt her cheeks burn, felt like she didn’t quite fit in her own skin anymore. She felt her eyes sparkle. If you had asked her the day before, she could have told you: it’s impossible to feel your own eyes sparkle, that’s just a figure of speech.
In the broom closet at the foot of Ravenclaw Tower, she told him she was dirty. Her blood was poisoned, tainted, by a thousand years of incest and hatred and Dark Magic. She didn’t deserve him.
“You’re not tainted, you’re beautiful,” he said, voice turning low and husky as he pinned her against the wall and slipped inside her. Her hands traced the lines and curves of his face in the darkness, but memory is a cruel thing, and in the pitch-black she remembered—
musty and mildewed, that room at Grimmauld Place, Bella’s long thin cruel fingers in the dark, Bella’s hair falling long and heavy across her face--
She reached up and brushed the mop’s filthy tentacles from her face, forced consciousness back to the here and now, tasted deeply of Ted’s lips as the scent of sex rose to compete with the cloying fake-cherry of cleaning potion.
Andromeda decided she didn’t much like making love in the dark.
May, beneath the endless sky: they rolled together in the wet clean grass as the red-tailed hawk gyred against the infinite blue. The sun blessed them, burnishing Ted’s light brown hair to purest gold. The bird cried, high and exulting, as Andromeda’s body arched to meet Ted’s, and as she came she thought of wings, felt she was soaring herself.
Later, as the sun drifted toward its setting and the two of them lay spent, she watched the sky turn to blood and remembered: I know about wings. I know about flying too close to the sun, and melting wax, and then the fall.
They quarreled the night of the Leaving Feast. She told him it was over, had to be over.
“Why won’t you fight for it?”
“My family—“
“Defy them!”
Father would kill you and Bella would kill me and even if they stayed their hands, I would never make you happy. You were born to walk beneath the blue summer sky; I was made for the shadows.
“I cannot,” she said.
Grimmauld Place was dank and chill even in summer, smelling faintly of mold mingled with the London smog. She thought of the eternal skies that sailed over Hogwarts, and then tried not to.
One morning in July, she woke early, seized by a sudden wave of nausea, and needed no Healer or Mediwizard to tell her why. A half-blood child in this family. What would it be? Ridicule? Infanticide?
She had spurned Ted, thinking it a selfish thing to follow her own heart and risk ruining Ted’s life, but the rules had changed. Now the selfish thing was staying here, sacrificing an innocent to the childhood she herself had known—or worse.
Andromeda left a note, and made a rope of bedsheets, and slipped away by night. It was raining, so she took her cloak, but nothing else but her wand and Ted’s letters and the clothes on her back.
He was bleary-eyed from sleep, all striped pajamas and confusion, until she drew back her sodden hood and he saw her face. His eyes lit up, and a smile spread across his face, slow and wide as sunrise.