Who: Andromeda Tonks, Nymphadora Tonks, Ted Tonks. The Tonkses, everybody. What: Ted (no longer dead) When: Sunday 26 July Where: Wales Warnings: SAD
The morning was a blur Andromeda could barely remember; the disappearance of Ted’s beloved jacket and the ensuing implications of what that meant after all suspects in purloining it were cleared had spawned a flurry of activity that ended with her and Nymphadora stumbling about in the Welsh countryside, desperately looking for signs of him. She was running on a sort of manic, tight energy; every sense hyperaware, every nerve on edge. For hours now, they had combed through the landscape, and she had no desire to rest or eat or stop until they found him. It wasn’t an option; he was lost, and alone, and alive. Her focus, like her sight, was spectacularly tunnel-visioned.
Andromeda had not dared allow herself hope when people began returning from the dead. Hope was something she could and did have for other people, but for years it was something she broadly denied herself (or perhaps the world denied it to her; she didn’t think too hard about it, only frequently reminded herself there was no use in it for her anymore). But then Nymphadora returned. Then Regulus reached out and acknowledged her. Then Draco showed himself to be something different than his parents. Little springs of an emotion she had avoided for years, that bubbled up and fed into it and she couldn’t help but fall asleep sometimes imagining Ted’s warm and comforting presence beside her once more.
It had to be him. It had to. The thought that this was a false alarm and something else happened to his jacket was too much for Andromeda to bear. When the nameless official transferred Ted’s remains into her care, he had handed the blood stained garment back to her and advised her not to look inside the casket with so much concern in his voice that, had she been more in her right mind, she would have immediately suspected his sympathies lay with her rather than the regime he was delivering bodies for. As it was, his tone was enough to make her comply; she never looked, and weeks later when Bellatrix admitted to his murder she was grateful she hadn’t.
No, she wouldn’t think about it; they would keep looking, and they would find him, but as the hours ticked on the stress and the anticipation and the worry and the years weighed heavier and heavier on her, to the point where an idea that she normally wouldn’t have even indulged a second thought on not only merited a quick weigh up of benefits and costs but a verbalisation. “There’s another way we could find him.”
If Tonks were to chart her thoughts for the day out on one of those stupid worksheets they liked to give them during rehab, she would have probably ended up covering the page chaotic scribbles. Less words and named feelings, more raw emotion and rapid thoughts, cycling from one thing to the next, bold in their incoherence. There was no time to attempt how she felt about the possibility of her dad having returned to them, because they needed to find him first, reassure him that he didn't need to be hiding, that the war was over, that he was safe.
(That they loved him, that they had missed him, that they loved him. If she had a proper moment, she might have thought sadly back to the last time she had visited his grave, about a week and a half ago. Might have thought about how she'd traced the lines of his name, glanced over at her own, carved in stone only a few feet away. How she had sat for at least half an hour, babbling like an idiot, with some small hope in her heart that he might hear her, might suddenly appear with some perfect dad advice, or maybe just a hug. But it was as foolish as it was useless. She hadn't been able to hear Teddy.)
Where her antics for the resistance had left her feeling energised, granted a new sense of purpose amidst the haze of awful that had rapidly descended over certain areas of her life (or second life, as it was) this, the thing she was in theory perfectly equipped for, had her feeling sore and wrung out and bloody fucking useless. The tracking part of stealth and tracking had never given her much grief, but she could remember in all her countless revisions and extra test exercises having to prioritise her weaknesses, leaving the tracking part to one side in order to nail whatever it was she kept (very literally) tripping up on in stealth. Had she created another weakness for herself? Was it her fault, that they had been traipsing empty ground with no sight of him for hours?
Tonks shook her head, as if physically dispelling the thought. She was a sucker for self-blame, had been letting it wash over her in quiet waves that she had gotten very good at swallowing back by this point. Her fault Teddy was an orphan, her fault they were practically penniless, her fault, her fault, the one who bloody ran to fight at three weeks postpartum. She could recognise she was twisting the details, blowing up a difficult situation into false statements and pinning it on herself as a way to process. (Annoyingly, those therapy sessions were good for something, even if she didn't participate nearly as much as she should have.) Yet, her ability to notice it felt harder to grasp onto, right in the middle of their search. Her failure to be a good fucking auror and find him felt acutely painful.
Sweat gathered at the back of her neck and ran slick down her back. Even in fucking Wales the temperature felt unbearable. Her mother spoke as she was wrinkling up her nose to shrink her hair shorter and cropped, to keep the heat at bay.
"No, there isn't," she replied, a little too quickly, sounding exhausted and irritated. It was a comment meant more for herself, because she had cycled through every single line of her training that she could remember, was gearing up to cast yet another round of complex detection spells that were likely to be just as fruitless as the last. If there was another way than anything they had tried then she was an idiot.
There was about half a second between hearing herself and feeling guilty. "Sorry. Go on," she said, her voice softer, apologetic.
That initial response instantly had Andromeda’s metaphorical hackles raised, and a sharp reply of her own sat on the tip of her tongue before Nymphadora’s addendum caused her to snap her mouth shut again and take a deep breath through her nose. Generally she was all right at not being cruel to her own child (it was always an active choice, a thousand decisions every day to not be them) but her ability to filter was just as thin as her daughter’s at the moment.
Ted. There was too much at stake to be distracted. Ted, Ted, Ted, the staccato rhythm of her heart. One more breath, then she spoke in a murmur. “There are certain methods of scrying, given the right ingredients, that can produce more accurate results.”
Tonks tilted her head, squinting as sunlight glinted through the leaves and hit her eyes. Of all the things she thought her mother might suggest (most of which she assumed she had already thought of and mentally discarded) scrying didn't even feature on the list. She frowned, her eyebrow shooting up. "Scrying?" And then, a little concernedly, "What materials?"
Andromeda looked off into the distance as she replied, shifting her bag from one shoulder to the other. “Blood,” she said, simply and firmly and not looking at her daughter. “Ours.”
Where Andromeda looked away, Tonks stared right at her. The response to her words was something of a delayed reaction. A blank stare, longer than she meant it to last, and then a sharp intake of breath. “No.” Firmly.
Even though the answer was the anticipated one, Andromeda couldn’t help a little irritable huff when she heard it. Arms akimbo and the faintest scowl on her face, she turned back towards Nymphadora and felt another jump in her veins as she was matched stare for stare. “We’ve been trying your methods and none have worked. It is time to try mine,” she said curtly, and instantly regretted how it came out. This was her child. They both wanted the same thing; Ted. Her next words were deliberately softer, and she let her arms drop back down to her sides. “It’s discouraged but not forbidden. For all we know, every minute is making a difference. I’m certain I could still manage to be a conduit.”
A flash of hurt crossed Tonks' face at Andromeda's initial reply. She swallowed, her throat feeling tight. It was hot, they were exhausted, Dad was back, he was also missing. She knew, logically, completely certainly, that Andromeda hadn't meant anything harsh by it. Still, the frustration she felt at her failure flared up again.
"Mum. No." If her hurt was briefly obvious, her discomfort was wildly blatant. "I'll find him – we. We'll find him. We don't need – no."
Andromeda swallowed too, against the guilt rising up in her stomach. There was no good opening for her to apologise- it was so much easier now, apologising, now that she knew from cold and horrifying experience that I can do it later was never a guarantee. So rather than put it into words, she tried to convey it in a middle ground.
“Another hour. Another hour and you let me try. That’s fair, isn’t it?” She was too tired to keep the pleading note out of her tone, put there by absolute desperate need.
Tonks exhaled, her chest heavy. Another hour was just Andromeda's way of putting it nicely. Another hour and her frustration would bubble into anger, upset, the kind of feeling where she couldn't pull back her sharp remarks. She had tried. She had. Clinging onto her pride wouldn't do anything to help her dad.
"No," with a disgruntled sigh. She cast her gaze downwards, defeated. "No. Fine. We'll – yeah. Do it your way."
“All right,” Andromeda replied, not at all inclined to argue despite the uncertainty of Nymphadora’s agreement. It had to be done. Blood magic of any sort was tricky but at least it was more safe when used for benevolent purposes. And finding Ted, lost in the woods- that was benevolent, wasn’t it?
She hoped so.
Kneeling slowly and angling her legs to ease some of the pressure from her poor knees, Andromeda reached into her bag to pull out the first coin she could find, a muggle pound. A few muttered words and a wave of her wand and it was expanding, flattening until it was a flat, thin metal plate. “I don’t suppose you have a knife.”
Tonks grimaced, her stomach tying itself in knots. There was the unease surrounding blood magic itself, and then there was the more specific unease of her mother doing blood magic. She watched as the coin widened out, silently wondering if she could take back her agreement, but knowing that it wasn't fair and perhaps not even wise considering their lack of luck so far.
With a little sigh she reached into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out a vibrant pink swiss army knife. Mad-Eye was an adamant fan of the things, called them ingenious little buggers, and she had fished this one out from one of the boxes of salvaged trinkets that now comprised her worldly possessions. She handed it to Andromeda.
Andromeda took the little knife and she smiled; Ted had his own little collection of them for fishing and whatnot around the house, and it felt like the exact right implement for the task. Something that bound them together. “Perfect,” she murmured. She pulled out the knife part, then extended her non-wand hand out over the rim of the plate and held the blade near them, pausing for a second.
A memory flashed through her mind, unbidden. Many years had passed since she last attempted this; the last time, she had been terrified of the war and scrying for the future rather than the present. The drops of her blood had condensed from a large splatter to a tiny droplet, which had frightened her even more so until the droplet expanded back into its original size. At the time, it had thrown her off- how could she even begin to interpret that?
But now she knew, didn’t she.
With a deep breath, she banished the thought from her mind because it wasn’t useful here and now. Instead, with a quick flash of metal, she nicked the pad of her finger, wincing at the sting of it as her blood welled up in the wound red and opaque as anyone else’s. As she carefully directed the drops onto a single spot on the edge of the plate, she held the knife back out towards Nymphadora. “Now yours, my darling. In the centre.”
Dora's knees met the ground with a soft thud, her descent down far clunkier and quicker. Twigs poked up, digging into her calves, and she knew when she got up again her legs would be patterned with angry pink ridges. She couldn't bring herself to care, her eyes on the silver pink flash of the knife, the scarlet of her mother's blood. Her turn.
A moment's hesitation, and then she took the knife. At the same time as she pressed the tip of the blade down into her finger she sucked her lip in, and when she nicked it forward and made the cut she bit down. Blood sprung quick (perhaps she had pushed a little too deep) and she quickly maneuvered her hand to an angle where the droplets would hit the centre. With a little huff she then stuck her finger in her mouth, tasting copper.
Andromeda had to work quickly, before the blood began to clot, so she ignored the pain in her finger and the mess the blood would make as she settled that hand into her lap. She ignored the dirt she got on her hand plucking her wand back up from the ground. Her focus was entirely on her spellcasting as she started murmuring the different words, on the single line of thought that ran through her head and her heart: find Ted. Find her father. Find my husband.
Like iron filings pulled by a magnet, Nymphadora’s blood began to split, half of it dancing to join Andromeda’s at the edge of the plate. After a moment of bubbling in place, the rest peeled off towards another spot on the edge, and Andromeda let out a primal noise of accomplishment and triumph once its movement stopped.
“There!” she cried out, already gathering her things back together, hope bubbling in her chest once more. “I don’t dare try to get it anymore specific. But that direction. That’s where he is right now, and even if he moves your spells ought to be able to pick up on signs of him.”
No matter how it may have been procured, the direction was a bright thread of hope. Casting her reservations aside, Tonks couldn't deny the lightness in her chest, just a little bit of that tension and exasperation lifting, enough to grant her a little more mental clarity. Determination spilled into the gaps that hopelessness had left, and once Andromeda had cleaned up the blood and shrunk the coin and Tonks had taken a second to heal both their fingers, they set off.
They continued on, time passing on with each crunch and snap of dried out branches underfoot. Tonks estimated it was half an hour, perhaps a little longer, before her spells finally, mercifully, started giving her results. She had made them stop at a few spots along the way, where she would try again, and was fully prepared for nothing once more when – her wand, flat in her palm, started spinning wildly, practically vibrating. Tonks eyes widened, her throat tight as it came to a stop offering them a new direction slightly west of where they had been following. Adjusting her footing until the wand was pointing straight, she kept on, picking up her pace, walking at double speed. A few more minutes and she stopped, first glancing behind her to make sure her mother was keeping up, and then casting around her. The grass and fallen twigs on the ground started to compress as if being pressed down upon by an invisible force, the imprints matching the size and shape of footprints, before returning to their original state. "He was here," she murmured, eyes fixed on the ground.
Holding her wand up in her palm again, she murmured the same incantation as before. The wand spun like it had previously, but instead of simply vibrating it appeared overcome with energy, shuddering violently against her fingers. Tonks looked from it, to the path the imprints had walked along, to the trees ahead. And then she ran.
Were you to look at Ted Tonks you might not immediately think survivalist, at least not on face value, and in a way you would not be wrong. Ted was the sort to spend a lazy afternoon fishing, or a warm evening roasting marshmallows over a campfire, and not the rugged adventurous type who might climb a mountain just for the hell of it. Fortunately he had been in the country boys club from the ages of eight to thirteen, and he had not even cheated once after learning how to light a fire with magic. After all, if you were going to do a thing you may as well do it the right way. So a few months living off the land was not a complete hardship, though occasionally he would long for a beer or a pub pie. Ooh, what he wouldn’t give for a pub pie.
He’d been alone for a few days now. He had no idea what had happened there – how he’d managed to lose Dean and Dirk and the goblins, not to mention the radio and most of his supplies, and his wand to boot. It was a problem, because without the radio it was impossible to keep track of the state of the war, and without his wand he couldn’t even Apparate to somewhere wizards were about to get his hands on a copy of the Prophet, even if it was safe enough to do, which he doubted. Instead he set up a temporary shelter using a couple of trees as supports, made a rough fishing rod with a stick and the line he still had in one of his trusty pockets, and made the best of it while he tried to figure out how he was going to get word when Harry Potter inevitably saved the world again and it was safe to go home. He wasn’t much of a planner, so it was a bit of a pickle, really.
He thought about his family a lot. Poor Dora, must be ready to pop any minute, and dear Dromeda, no doubt going mad with worry. He hoped they were safe; and his parents, too, elderly as they were. Lots to worry about, and nothing he could do about it. He firmly believed that the best thing he could do was to stay away, that they would all be safer without him and his abominable magic-stealing blood making them a target. That was his only comfort.
At the moment he was sitting in his makeshift shelter with his eyes closed and his stomach rumbling, trying to remember the plot of Blazing Saddles, in order, and pretending he was watching it. He had just gotten to his favourite part (the bit about the beans, obviously) when he heard something nearby; a sound which as it got closer was reminiscent of something or someone crashing through the undergrowth.
Oh dear. This was a dilemma. He’d done his best with the shelter, but it was not exactly invisible to the naked eye. If the approaching noise was a Death Eater or one of their ilk, were he to stay where he was he would be caught with his metaphorical pants down.
As he saw it there were two options; he could try to run, or he could try to face whatever it was. How likely was it that the Snatchers had tracked him all the way out here? It could just be a wild animal. A small elephant, perhaps.
Running was not a good plan. Not necessarily because it was cowardly - Ted could recognise the sense in running away under the right circumstances - but because he was past his prime and a bit malnourished and he knew he would not get far. So he set his jaw, got to his feet and hoped that whatever it was would not be expecting a right hook to the jaw.
He had chosen a dense part of the forest to hide in, and so all he could see was the distant rustling of bushes where something was pushing its way through. Except… no, was it just his hopeful imagination, or was that a flash of pink hair?
“Dora?” he called aloud, without really thinking. Ted Tonks would not have made a good Auror.
Dora heard him before she saw him, her name, those northern vowels, couldn't tell if it was said with any sort of certainty or just plain desperation, but was sure with all of her heart that it was him. Her heart thudded in her chest as she fought her way through the bushes with her bare arms; her urge to get through defied all rational thoughts of using magic to aid her, muted all pain from the scratches and scrapes as she clambered.
And then –
"Dad!" The word was half shout, half heavy exhale of relief. There was time after to register the changes in his face, the evidence of what time on the run out in the wild had done to him. But in that moment she couldn't see any of it, could only see her dad, solid and real and alive. For all she had mentally chided herself about remembering her training and being a good auror, she didn't hesitate for a second before running to fling her arms around him in a hug, crying another loud, "Dad!"
“Dora!” Ted exclaimed, most of the breath bursting out of his lungs as she leapt on him. For all his sudden confusion at her unexplained presence in the middle of the woods, It did feel good to hold her again, lifting her toes a few inches off the ground as her momentum almost sent her sailing over his shoulder. “Oof. All right pet, I’ve got you. What on earth are you doing here?”
Then he frowned, even more puzzled, and put her down to stare at her. Something was missing. “Dora…” he started, looking her up and down, his mind racing as he tried to make sense of it. “What…”
Of course it had occurred to her that if she came across him, her dad would be expecting her significantly more pregnant than she currently was. It was a difficult fact to forget; the memories of how grief had ripped through the whole house, every bit of it made worse by the thought of the grandchild he would never know. Her memories of that time felt hazy, sameish, marked only by particularly sharp images that helped her rearrange them into a timeline into her head. She could distinctly remember a night when she thought maybe it was easing, maybe she was managing better, only for Teddy to keep her awake with kicks for hours and for her to wake Remus with her sobs. It's not fair. Dad will never get to meet them it's not fucking fair.
For all the time it had sat in her head, she didn't have any kind of solution or explanation prepared. Harry had spoken to her so calmly, practiced, understanding. Harry had done it a thousand times. Dora didn't know what to say, couldn't find any words in her throat for a long moment until she struggled out, "He's fine. Teddy's fine – the baby, he –," she swallowed, her head spinning.
"Listen, I – I ran ahead of Mum. I shouldn't have – fuck." Her words stumbled out, only half coherent. "Mum! Mum, we're over here, I found him!" She moved closer to the gap in the bushes, trying to peer through and spot her. Her sprint had been impressive in terms of speed, but the distance itself wasn't that far. The way her wand had been jerking had meant they were close.
Too many hours of walking left Andromeda's knees protesting to the point that it was sheer determination keeping her upright, and not a whole lot of whatever it was that was meant to hold her knees together. When Nymphadora took off at a run, all she could do was walk doggedly and slowly in her wake, pushing plants to either side with her magic as she made her way through the dense foliage.
The shout of 'mum' from some distance ahead momentarily turned her veins to ice, until it was followed by 'I found him' and she nearly collapsed on the spot. Fortunately, her legs seemed to keep going of their own accord, and only moments later one of the bushes was obscuring a shock of pink hair.
In her rush to see past, Andromeda cleared the bush to the side of Nymphadora with such ferocity that it withered away and wilted to the ground entirely in an instant. There was Ted- skinnier, bushier, dirtier, and alive. Her throat closed around itself, mouth open and no words coming forth. Her knees finally gave up their battle and gave out beneath her, hands splayed to either side to cushion the fall and her gaze not once straying from Ted.
Teddy? Ted thought, his frown of puzzlement only deepening as his daughter rambled and then started shouting. “Ah…” he said, wondering if it was such a good idea to yell loud enough to alert any passing Snatchers, but then Andromeda was there in a burst of nonverbal magic, like an avenging Goddess, and he quite forgot to be worried about anything else at all.
As he rushed towards her, wishing he didn’t smell quite so much of fish, he noticed in a vague sort of way that she looked a little strange, as though she’d somehow aged years in the span of a few months. Could it be that he’d been wrong about some of the wild fruit he’d thought to be safe, and he was seeing things? That’d be right embarrassing.
“It’s all right love,” he said, going to pull her back to her feet. “See, no harm done. Told you I’d be fine, didn’t I?”
It was so easy to let him help her up, so normal, so Ted. He stank, and he had the sort of grime on him that once would have made her point towards a shower immediately, and she didn't care. His casual 'told you I'd be fine' made her heart clench in her chest, and she threw her arms around his shoulders and buried her face in his neck to hide the rapidly welling tears in her eyes.
"Oh," was all she could say. It was 'I've been lost without you' and 'oh no, she hasn't told you' and 'I'm overwhelmed' and 'I love you' all in one solitary word. "Oh."
Ted murmured what he hoped were comforting words and patted his wife gently on the back as he held her. His own emotions were a tangled jumble - joy at seeing his girls, confusion and concern at why they were there, and worry that they might at any moment be set upon by Death Eaters. “Okay sweetheart,” he rumbled, rubbing a soothing circle between Andromeda’s shoulderblades. Only Andromeda would wear a floor-length frock in the woods, he thought fondly. “It’s okay, you found me. Though how on earth you managed it, when I’m not entirely sure where I am…” he added, falling back on his lifelong habit of saying whatever came into his mind, “...I’d like to know. And didn’t I tell you not to come after me? I should’ve known you wouldn’t listen, and here’s me smelling of muck and covered in clart, and now it’ll be all down you, you silly hen.”
How funny it was, the joy and comfort Andromeda felt in being called a silly hen. Every word out of her husband's mouth helped to pull her back down to earth. "It's old, anyway," she murmured, giving him a tight squeeze before stepping back. Her hands stayed on his shoulders, like he might disappear if she let go entirely (it had happened before, after all) and she studied the face that had only existed in photographs and her mind for years now.
"Harry. Harry knew where to find you, he crossed your path without your knowledge at some point." Nevermind that was over seven years ago now; it wasn't time for that yet. Even though her eyes still gleamed, the beginnings of a small smile appeared on her face because she was staring at Ted. She brushed the back of her knuckles over his unkempt beard. "Look at you. It'll take hours to shave all of this off. You look like a porlock."
Ah. Harry, well that made sense. From what he’d heard, that boy was always getting into places where you least expected him. He did wonder why Harry Potter would be in touch with his wife, but that could wait. He put his hand over Andromeda’s, sheepishly. “Well, I did have a razor but I seem to have lost it,” he admitted, not offended in the slightest by the comparison. “My wand, too. Bit of a bugger. To tell you the truth it’s all gone rather downhill lately, but then here you are, so nevermind.” He beamed. “I have missed you, love.”
"Oh, Ted. My love." She couldn't help as her smile broadened in mirror of his, even as she felt the telltale stinging in her eyes again because it ached in too many ways for her to begin to care about counting just then. In an act of defiance (towards herself), she replied, "I've missed you too. Every second." To the relief of her pride, despite the circumstances she managed to keep her voice from wavering until the last word. Before her traitorous feelings could announce themselves in more tears, she leaned forwards to indulge herself in kissing him for the first time in far too long, excessive beard or no.
Ted was so happy to see her that he didn’t even feel very subconscious about the fact that his attempts at tooth-brushing over the last week or so had been semi-successful at best. He held her with one arm tight around her waist and the other cradling her tear-streaked cheek, and returned the kiss with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for teenagers in the heart-crushing throes of first love.
The entire world melted away (other than a vague awareness that yes, Nymphadora was still there so perhaps she shouldn't push quite as close up to Ted) as Andromeda did her best to channel seven years of missed kisses into one. She cupped his scratchy bearded face as he did hers, the fingers of her other hand having at some point tangled themselves in the hair at his nape. Every time he moved as if to pull back to do something so mundane as catch a breath, she chased after with her lips; she had a fleeting memory of long goodbye kisses when they were secretly dating, when they had to go their separate ways and she drew out that final moment as long as she possibly could. Just as it was then, she didn't want to be away from his warmth or to face the crushing realities that were waiting for them when they stopped.
Ted found himself going a little weak at the knees at the passion behind his wife’s kiss - although perhaps that was just the hunger. He too found himself remembering younger days, when it had seemed the stakes could not possibly get higher. How innocent they had been then.
“All right, love,” he teased, breaking away enough to wipe the tears away from her cheek with his thumb. It left a faintly dirty streak. “That’s enough of that now, you’ll traumatise the poor child.” He looked up, opening one arm to his daughter and beckoning her in. “C’mere pet. Let’s have both my girls.”
If she had needed to, Tonks would have stayed silently holding her elbows for a long while as her parents reunited. Her slight rocking on the spot was the only indication of impatience, and even that was more a general inability to stay still. She had looked away at the kiss, affording them privacy, but couldn't help the small fond smile and the lump in her throat, the build up of pressure that warned tears. That strange mixture of parental embarrassment (something she had never thought she'd experience from the two of them together again) combined with all the love she had for them, all the sweet memories of their care and tenderness for each other and for her. God, she was a sap.
When Ted spoke she glanced up, sporting a grateful and amused smile. She strode to fit herself inside the offered arm immediately, and as she did the corners of her mouth faltered. There was enough time to get out an, "I missed you so much," before her own eyes were wet and spilling over.
“All right, my darlings,” Ted murmured as he held them both in a double armed hug, and kissed Dora lovingly on the top of her uniquely pink head. The shade was a little duller than the last time he’d seen her. “It’s all okay. Goodness, you’d think I’d been away years.” He smiled. “I sincerely hope you’re here to tell me the war is over? Good thing too, I’d have been out here the rest of my life without the radio.”
While it had only taken Nymphadora's sad voice to prompt Andromeda to rest a hand on her back, it was what Ted said next- 'you'd think I'd been away years'- that had her preemptively rubbing gentle circles with it. The distraction was useful to keep her from openly wincing at his seemingly innocuous comment, but Merlin, they had to tell him. "The war is over," she confirmed, thinking it a fair enough beginning. "I think we ought to sit down. Are you hungry? I brought lemon squares."
At the years comment and the hand on her back, Dora let out a shaky exhale, pushed out slow through pursed lips. “And we won,” she added quickly, glancing from her mother up to her father and then back down. There was very little enthusiasm or cheer in the statement.
“Of course we did,” Ted said, though his very real relief was evident on his face. “Always knew we would.” He blinked in some puzzlement at the look on his daughter’s face. He definitely could murder a dozen or so lemon squares, but this seemed more important. “Are you all right, sweetheart? You look so thin… when did you give birth? A boy, did you say?” His eyes practically sparkled.
She nodded in response to his question, a blatant lie, something to be forgiven for later. Andromeda had a better handle on this, sending them off course with her blubbering wouldn't help any of them. "A boy, yeah." While the thought of Teddy could bring a smile no matter the occasion, the slight quiver of her bottom lip betrayed her. She couldn't answer that first question. Seven bloody years ago, Dad.
"Mum's right, let's sit down, get food. I'm hungry too."
There wasn't anywhere clean to sit, but Andromeda reminded herself (and refused to look to confirm) that she was probably already filthy anyway, so it hardly mattered. Once the three of them were settled on the ground, for which her knees were very grateful, she fished out the tupperware container with its neatly packed lemon squares resting in two layers and separated by a precisely cut square of baking paper. A serviette for each of them, ever the optimist, and she took the smallest lemon square in the top layer before setting the rest of them down in front of her family.
Ted wolfed his way through a lemon square, while Nymphadora ate as she did, taking small bites mostly to look like she was taking bites. When it looked like the imminent hunger was slightly tamed (or, rather, once Ted was helping himself to a second lemon square) Andromeda took a deep, steadying breath and set the square down in her lap. "There's an odd phenomenon happening through the country right now. People- well, witches and wizards, specifically- have been coming back from the dead."
Ted stopped with his second square halfway to his mouth. They tasted deliciously of home, and more importantly of anything other than unevenly-cooked wild fish. The three of them together on the forest floor was maybe the strangest scene ever witnessed, but fortunately there was no one else there to witness it. “There er… what?” he said, frowning as he took this in. “You mean inferi?”
At her mum's words, Tonks had frozen still, not even pretending to eat her bar any more. She felt sick, her stomach swimming. "No," she found herself saying anyway. "No, not like that. People just – wake up, alive again. Come back years later like nothing changed." Her eyes fixed on a spot on the forest floor and glazed over slightly. People. People did that. It felt so removed when she said it like that.
“But how is that possible?” Ted’s head span, and not just from the rush of sugar. “That seems… it must be dark magic, surely? I thought you said the war was over.”
"They don't know. But they're certain it isn't necromancy." She managed a small glance up to look at him, and then had to look away again. Her face felt tight and achey after the crying, had that strange sad expression on it still.
Ted didn’t understand. However strange and disturbing it was if what she said was true, why were they talking about it instead of the fact that his daughter had just had a baby? Or that they could finally all go home? Why did Dora look so upset? ‘What is it, pet?” he asked, reaching over to put his hand on her knee. He glanced over at his wife, disturbed by the strangeness in the air between them. “What’s going on?” he asked, in a worried voice.
"The thing is-" Andromeda began haltingly after a pleading look from their daughter, then shook her head. Already slightly dizzy from the situation, that made her feel genuinely queasy- she had no idea how Harry did this so often. She resolved to give him a small hug when she picked up Teddy. "It's been happening for months now. The people who return- they're called Reoccurred. They come to near where they died, with no memory of it, disoriented."
As much as she wanted to stop there, she couldn't. It wasn't fair to Nymphadora to put it on her, nor was it fair to keep dancing around the topic and worrying Ted further. She reached over and rested her hand on his thigh. "I'm so sorry, Ted. It's 2005 now."
Ted stared at her as he slowly realised what exactly she was trying to say. It’s 2005. Seven years. At least.
He was halfway to a laugh, to a chuckling outburst - you’re joking - but Andromeda would not joke about something like that. His baby girl would not look so sad, so desperate. So instead he sat in silence for a few seconds, letting the impossible truth sink in, his face creased in an unnatural frown. He put his hand over his wife’s, and squeezed it tight as he looked into her face. Little wrinkles he didn’t recognise, lines that could not have deepened so much over the course of only a few months.
“I was wondering what happened to the others,” he said, low. He swallowed. Through the numbness he felt the first stirrings of sorrow, not for himself but for his family. For the lines on his wife’s face, lines of sadness.
Watching the truth of it sink in- the smallest, tiniest piece of the truth of it- opened the pit in Andromeda's stomach wider as she watched Ted, and then Nymphadora, and then back to Ted again. As much as she disliked the gnawing feeling of concern she felt for the both of them, it kept her from tumbling inwards into a chasm of memories of those terrible months.
"I don't know," she admitted, quietly. "They didn't tell me- I don't know how much of it you want to know, from when you left."
Of course he wanted to know what happened, how it happened… but he only wanted to know in a logistical, thorough kind of way, because at the end of the day it didn’t really matter. He had left his family, let them down. And now he was back by some strange miracle, and he didn’t know what to say. He thought about Dean Thomas, just a kid… Ted was supposed to have been helping him. Had he failed at that, too? He sat a few moments more, holding each of their hands, lemon bars forgotten. No wonder he’d lost the damn radio.
“I’m sorry, I don’t…” he hesitated, shook his head. He was thinking in circles. He looked up at Dora, poor Dora, his little girl always. How much did he want to know? Everything. There were too many questions. He fell back on the most important one. “But you’re… both all right,” he said, clinging to this comfort. “And Grannie and Grandda? And Remus? And…” he hesitated for a moment, not entirely sure he’d even heard right earlier, and just now realising the implications of what he was saying, “...Teddy?”
Tonks smiled up sadly, her eyes shining. "Named him after you." Her face crumpled, hair paling out, fuck, hold it tofuckinggether, Tonks.
"Grannie and Grandda are good. Teddy's… loud, energetic, bright blue hair." The attempt at a laugh that followed came out closer to a sound of despair than one of amusement. Still, it helped to list off those bits of him, grounded her in the good, solid reality of her son, who she still had, even if the wrong age. Her hand squeezed around Ted's – the dad she had now too, even if she was about to fracture his heart to pieces.
"Remus and me, we –," she swallowed hard, her voice thick. "We went to fight. There was a last battle and we – I had Teddy a few weeks before –" The words caught in her chest, and she felt dizzy, sick to her core, altogether detached from reality. Her words came out clumsy and repetitive, unable to get to the point she needed them to. "Remus left to go fight and I followed – We…"
It built up like a wave, grief and guilt, thick and heavy pressing down on her. She could feel her heart racing, the tightness in her throat as tears built up. "Fuck," she breathed, looking at Andromeda, eyes wide and pleading, as if to say I can't do it, Mum. And then it crashed over her and she shattered, letting out a sharp sob, turning to her father. "We died, Dad."
Ted stared at his daughter, a wave of grief and horror rising up and threatening to overwhelm him. It made no sense, because she was here, sitting right here in front of him, with her hand in his, she was perfectly real and warm and alive. “What?” he breathed, looking frantically at Andromeda. When he saw no salvation in her expression, no hint that he had somehow not understood, he turned back to Dora. No. Not his little girl. Surely not. But he saw the truth of it in her sudden misery, in her tears. When she was small he had always been there to dry her eyes, to soothe her hurts - even if it wasn’t until some hours after the actual event, given how sporadically he was working and how often she tended to injure herself. But this? This he knew he could not fix, could hardly even fathom. “Oh sweetheart,” he breathed, and pulled her into his arms, tears finally filling his own eyes and streaming down his cheeks. “I’m sorry… I’m so so sorry.”
Dora cried and cried, sinking into the hug. Ugly, loud and distraught sounds, like she was a child again. "We came back. Both of us are back. All three of us –," Remus, her, Ted. A slow trickle over a few months. Lights extinguished flickering on again. For a few, fleeting seconds, she was able to muster up hope and relief, pushing for that bright side that she tried to find in everything she could. But the warmth of his body, the weight of his hug, that feeling of home and comfort and safety enveloping her... she was exhausted with being strong, didn't and couldn't manage it with her dad there and ready to soak up all her pain for her. The brief lightness trailed out and was swallowed up with another sob, her small frame shaking.
Ted held his daughter, putting aside the mind-numbing grief he knew he would eventually have to feel in favour of his paternal instinct; that came much easier, as heartbreaking as it was to hold his child while she shook with real, terrible sorrow. “All right, pet,” he murmured, stroking her back, quickly swiping a rough hand across his own eyes. “It’s all going to be all right. Daddy’s here now.” He looked over her shoulder helplessly at Andromeda, only just now realising what she had gone through - his death, then Dora’s. How was she still standing? In her place he was sure he would have gone mad.
He rocked Dora a little, like he had when she was little, murmuring comforting nonsense just as he had for her mother earlier. “It’s all okay now.”
As Andromeda sat and watched for the second time in her life as her family grappled with the immense emotional pain of coming back and learning some of what had preceded, she couldn't help but spare a thought for her sister in regards to her role as the cause of her crying child and husband. Should Bellatrix ever make the grave mistake of coming back to the mortal plain and the DMLE somehow didn't get to her first, Andromeda would find her, tear the remnants of her shattered mind into the smallest and sharpest pieces she possibly could, and drag her by the hair into the Ministry herself. Her own pain, she accepted as penance for making them targets in the first place; her family's pain was unacceptable.
This thought kept her grounded as she watched helplessly, balling her free hand up in her lap and unable to offer anything more reassuring than a furrowed brow and the squeeze of her hand on his thigh when Ted glanced back at her. He was doing fine on his own (insofar as calming Nymphadora, at any rate) and the sobs slowly quieted, the shaking ceased.
"There, that's better," she added, her own poor attempt at mothering. "You're here and that's what matters." It was as much to Ted (and to herself) as it was to Nymphadora.
Ted held Dora and stroked her hair until the sobs subsided into soft hiccups. When Andromeda handed him a handkerchief, he smiled gratefully at her and wiped first his daughter’s eyes and then his own. It came away pretty filthy. “Yes, we’re all together now,” he said, softly. “I won’t pretend to understand it, just yet, but… at least we have each other.” He patted her shoulder. “Why don’t we all go home?”
"I think that's a good idea," Andromeda began, and the 'but' hung in the air for a moment as she looked down at the hand in her lap. It gutted her to have to introduce more bad (and potentially bad) news into the mix, but for practical reasons it was entirely unavoidable. The hesitancy was there in her voice and on her face when she looked back up at Ted and Nymphadora once more. "But there are two things you ought to know. The first is that we moved a few years ago. For Teddy, so he wouldn't have to hide his abilities." And for herself, so that she stopped seeing the mental ghosts of her family in every corner of the house. "The second is that we need to make sure none of the neighbours see you. The law situation is, unfortunately, familiar."
"There's a register," Dora finally said, her voice hoarse and quiet, and with a strange tone that sounded a hint apologetic – perhaps it was. Apologetic for having to tell him that fact, after all the pain previous government registers had brought upon their family, the very thing that had Ted out in these woods in the first place. And apologetic because she had worked for them. Probably (possibly? she almost wasn't sure, given everything they had put on her and the others since they had returned) would still be, if she was allowed. No matter how much she denounced their bloody system, she was still a cog in it.
"I'm on it. They make you do this course in this centre. It's all bollocks, they say they're rehabilitating you back into the world but they just want to keep tabs on you. But it's compulsory." She sniffed loudly, wiping at her cheeks with the heel of her palm.
Ted’s hopeful smile faded. “I see,” he said, softly. His head was starting to feel uncomfortably full of new and difficult-to-process information. He felt a brief twinge of sadness for his home, where he had lived for half his life and raised his daughter, but it was just a building. He was more concerned about the immediate issue. “You mean I can’t stay.”
Oh, how it broke Andromeda's heart to watch the short-lived smile fade from her husband's face, to hear the tone in their daughter's voice. This Ministry had so much to answer for, and she sincerely hoped both Rourke and Gudgeon woke up gasping for air several times a night under the weight of their poor choices. This should have been a joyful time for the good who were coming back. Instead, it was this. Every time.
Gasping for air was too good for them.
"No. It's only three weeks in the centre, though, and I don't see why we need to have officially 'found' you until tomorrow." She tried her best to keep her voice lighter than she felt.
"Yeah, you can come home and have a proper meal. And a shower." Dora surprised herself in managing a proper laugh, bright and light in her throat. It lasted only a moment, a brief glimpse of sun after a storm, but she savoured the feeling anyway.
"It's shite, and you're gonna miss us all over again." She swallowed, sadness seeping back through her words as she spoke entirely from memory of those bleak days, left alone too long with only photographs of Teddy and her overactive mind for company. "But there's visiting days, and they have these things now, where you can write to people without needing owls. We can stay in touch." Her hand squeezed his again, and she raised an eyebrow as she searched about for something complimentary to say about the place. "They do nice tiramisu at dinner sometimes?"
“Well, I do like tiramisu,” her father said, doing his best to put a brave face on it. He hated the idea of having to leave them so soon after he had got them back, but if he had no choice… better make the best of it. “Don’t worry loves, I’ll be fine. If I can make it for months out here, a few weeks more is nothing. It’ll be over before you know it, eh?” He looked between them. “How about we see about that shower?”