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1.)
He's a boy. Just a dumb boy clearly desperate for the attention of a girl ten leagues beyond him. In the hallways, he spends his time tripping over his own comically long, spindly limbs in pitifully obvious attempts to get as near to her as possible. His mouth works fast while his mind plays catchup, she can tell by the way his eyes slowly trail her face as his mouth goes a mile a minute, always complimenting and spilling jokes in equal measure. Sometimes she sticks her nose up at him like her upbringing tells her she ought.
And sometimes, when she's too exhausted to play the part she'd been cast in upon birth, Andromeda laughs.
2.)
"You're beautiful."
You're a liar, she wants to reply. She's spent far too long studying her own reflection in the mirror to be swayed. Her features are too harsh to be considered truly feminine, she's sort of like Bella in that sense, except Bellatrix at least has her own macabre charm to her with her raven black curls and the perfectly shaped cupid's bow to her lips. Her skin isn't clear like Narcissa's-- not nearly. Freckles spread themselves sparsely over her nose, around the apples of her cheeks, and her eyes always seem to look a little too haggard and tired for someone as young as she is.
Instead, Andromeda bites her own unevenly proportioned upper lip, trailing her eyes along the length of Ted's round jaw, noting the way his lips instantly tug upwards into a smile at her blatant scrutiny. She meets his eyes-- much brighter than hers, so blue and earnest and young. She has to wonder how those eyes can look at her and see anything but Andromeda Black; unarguably the plainest and most underwhelming daughter of Cygnus and Druella. It seems to be all anyone else can see.
"Hey," a hand reaches up and cups her cheek gently and suddenly all she can see is pure blue. Ted's grin wavers, eyes darting up and down, drinking in her expression with a sort of aptness she's still not quite used to. "What are you thinking?" he asks, the warmth of his hands on her face still very much real and sending her insides spinning.
Andromeda quirks a barely there smile. A tentative, much smaller hand reaches up to wrap around his own, and she holds it in place at her cheek, turning her eyes up at him and it's then she thinks she might understand because when she looks at Ted she doesn't see a muggle-born, or a goofy Hufflepuff boy who lives life like it's one big joke. She sees the very things she lacks; the things she's always wanted most. She gets the barest glimpse of what life could've been if only she'd been born to anyone but Cygnus and Druella Black.
And it feels just like sitting in the sun.
"You're beautiful," she tells him, fully enjoying the way he squawks indignantly before kissing him quiet.
3.)
The names accompanying the letters requesting her hand never begin and end with 'T' and that's when Andromeda knows she cannot stay.
4.)
They marry at twenty.
Instead of a dress made of fine silk, the kind a proper daughter of the Black family should wear on her wedding day, Andromeda wears some secondhand rags she'd sewn together in-between shifts at a muggle pub down the road from their shared flat. Ted wears one of his father's suits. They sign the appropriate papers down at the Ministry, just the two of them, and that's that.
Back at their flat, they share more than a few drinks with Ted's parents and dance to the entirety of an old favorite record of his.
No more running, she thinks, gazing at his sleeping form later that very night. This is it.
The future she'd thought she'd never get.
And with her palm pressed to his slowly rising and lowering chest, she's so, so glad for it.
5.)
It's over breakfast one grey morning that she unthinkingly blurts out, "I'm pregnant."
The newspaper clutched between Ted's hands drops slowly.
Silence.
Irritation swells in her gut, her face going pink in embarrassment at her own abruptness. "Well? Aren't you going to say anything?"
Those blue eyes blink once, twice, and then three times before the crooked, unstable kitchen table is pushed aside in a blur and she's lifted into strong arms and swung about the kitchen merrily. "I can't believe it!" Ted beams, and Andromeda fastens her arms around his neck, startled laughter bubbling from her own lips. He eventually puts her to her feet and grabs both of her cheeks between his hands, pressing a firm, lingering kiss to her forehead. "I love you. I love you. I love you!"
"You worried me for a minute there," she says fondly, running a hand over his stubbly jaw.
"I love you," he reaffirms, as if there were ever any question.
"So you may have mentioned once or twice."
"We're going to be parents, 'Dromeda."
"Yes."
"Are we ready?"
Images of her own parents reluctantly spring to mind. Her mother's howling, her father's quiet judgement and lack of presence. The stifling atmosphere of her cold, sterile home. Bellatrix's cruel laughter, Narcissa's nervous tittering. The expectations laid upon them all from the very moment they were born. Then, she looks at Ted and it all dissipates, like it was all just a bad dream barely recalled. And now instead she quite easily envisions blond haired, chubby-cheeked toddlers running free in a long, open yard and holidays spent in laughter rather than stony silence.
She buries her forehead into his chest, wraps her arms around his waist and squeezes. "Yes. I think we are."
6.)
It isn't until Nymphadora is in her arms, a tiny, wailing little thing that already owns her entire heart, that Andromeda fully realizes what it is that her own parents had done to her. And so the tears come rather unexpectedly, streaming by the dozen, and the Healers smile pleasantly enough, telling her kindly that the hormones would be doing that for a while. Ted knows better, though, as he always has.
"You're not your mother," he tells her, as serious as she's ever heard him. "Our Dora's going to be so loved."
With a barely repressed sniffle, she corrects, "For goodness' sake, Ted, it's Nymphadora."
7.)
Nymphadora was not quite the chubby-cheeked blond baby she'd envisioned for those painstakingly long months. In fact, though she was born with a rather plentiful tuff of chestnut hair atop her little head-- just like her mother -- it certainly didn't remain that way for long. The colors came and went. Blue throughout the terrible twos burst into a fiery red as her first double-digit birthday came around. And once she began at Hogwarts? Bright yellow-- for Hufflepuff pride, of course. And then, naturally, the dreaded teenage years brought with them that cursed bubblegum pink.
Andromeda Tonks never thought she'd see the day where she'd miss that pink awfully.
"He won't even speak to me anymore."
And Andromeda Tonks might just hex the stupid out of Remus Lupin for unwittingly taking it away.
"Darling," she smooths back the chestnut curls on her daughter's head. "Things like these have a funny way of working out when you least expect them to. Have your father and I taught you nothing?"
"We're--We're not like you two, okay?" Nymphadora sniffs miserably, bringing her knees to her chest. Andromeda doesn't even chastise her for having her muddy boots on the sofa. "You and dad were destined or something. You were always supposed to be together; you're mum and dad! This-- I'm-- He called it a crush, Mum! I'm twenty three years old, I don't have crushes!"
"Look at it from his perspective, sweetheart. You're twenty three and he's..."
Nymphadora's expression goes furious, then. "I don't care what he is! I don't care how old I am! I just care about him, why is that so bad?"
That's when she sees it clearly; the face that once belonged to an Andromeda of years long past, the one that made the decision to abandon her family and everything she'd ever known for the boy who spent years just trying to make her laugh. Nymphadora is in love and feeling the kind of hurt that a mother is helpless to fix. A bandage can't mend a broken heart, after all.
"Remus is a fine man," Andromeda says, finally, and her daughter slumps once more, the fight fleeing her tensed body.
"He is."
Of all the things she could've given her daughter, she considers it a small blessing--and a curse-- that it was her stubbornness that stuck.
She greatly suspects this is far from the last time she'll hear of Remus Lupin.
8.)
At Nymphadora's wedding, Andromeda finds herself tucked into Ted's side; the one place where the world had always felt right. And although Nymphadora's hair has long since faded back to that striking pink, and although Remus is looking at her daughter as though she hangs the stars in the sky, Andromeda can't help but feel a twist of dread in her gut. Her mother's voice echoing in the back of her head:
'You'll regret letting that heart of yours make such prudent decisions, Andromeda. It may not be today, or tomorrow, or even in the next ten years. But you will."
A kiss is pressed to her head, then, and her eyes lift up to find Ted staring down with those blue eyes she adores so much. "I suppose we did alright, then, hm, 'Dromeda?"
Nymphadora beams up at her new husband in-between quick kisses pressed to his mouth, jaw, cheek, whatever her eager lips can reach.
Andromeda's lips pull into that trademark barely there smile. "Yes. I suppose we did."
Still, the dread grows.
9.)
"Someone's gotta look after Dora, love."
And it should be her husband, Andromeda inwardly seethes, and I should not be forced away from mine.
A thumb brushes her lips, slowly edging away the scowl beginning to form. She turns her head, afraid to let him see the storm brewing in her eyes, the fear. Gently, Ted tilts her chin back towards him, smiling that same goofy grin that had won her over slowly but steadily all those years ago. She wants to fight him on this. She knows she can't.
"You'll stay safe," she demands, "And you'll come back to us."
He lifts her hand and presses a firm kiss to her knuckle. "Every time." Then, he chuckles boisterously, though Andromeda is hardly fooled. Just as well as he knows her inside and out, she's learned his ways. "At least I get to look forward to coming back and meeting my grandchild, hm? Who would've thought we'd ever get this old?"
She splays a hand over his heart, swallowing the lump forming in her throat but maintaining some composure. "And we'll get even older once this is all over with. Imagine that."
"That we will," he agrees, meeting her troubled gaze fondly. His fingers sweep back the slightly greying hair back from her face and tuck strands of it behind her ear. Her eyes shut of their own volition at the tenderness and familiarity of the gesture. When her eyes open, he quietly declares,"You're beautiful," and for a moment he looks just the same as the silly sixth year Hufflepuff who would sing praises of her beauty back in school whilst tripping over his own feet in the same breath. They're still just two kids in over their heads and nothing's changed at all.
Time has not touched them. It never could.
10.)
Teddy is a culmination of every ghost this war has left her with. He's his mother's son, without a doubt, with the way his hair changes with the seasons and his moods. He's got his father's eyes, the ones she'd witnessed go wide oftentimes in complete awe of her daughter.
Her mother always said she'd regret letting her heart rule her. It isn't until long after her own hair starts fading from chestnut brown to ashen grey and her grandson's smile slowly morphs through the years into Ted's sunny grin that she fully understands that this is perhaps the only maternal advice her mother had ever given to her in earnest.
It takes quite a bit of time for her to finally understand, for her to be able to see through her anger and grief, but eventually it strikes her suddenly as these hard earned lessons tend to do.
Her mother was wrong. So very wrong.
To regret any of it is simply unthinkable.
Edward had always promised he'd come back.
Andromeda only has to glance at her grandson to know he never truly left,
and never would again.