Work Text:
A hug is nice but it doesn’t fix everything, even if it’s the first hug you’ve had from someone in a whole epoch, two wars and two peaces in between. Especially if it’s the first hug of the rest of your lives.
Cissy knows it and Andromeda knows she knows it. Cissy’s hair has streaks of white in it now and her face is lined but she still looks too much like their mother and she still sets her jaw like she used to do before family dinners.
“Come in,” Andromeda says. “I suppose I ought to be surprised how you found this place, but it’s been found before and anyway we never meant it as the safehouse.”
Cissy winces. “I’m sorry about that.”
“What, did you tell them where to find me?” There’s a bit of a sardonic tone that comes out at this, the voice the girl Andromeda once was used and her little sister copied. Andromeda knows Cissy sold Sirius down the river for her son, but she wants to think Cissy wouldn’t sell her sister. And anyway it’s not like the Death Eaters didn’t have all sorts of ways of getting information. (And anyway Cissy warned her, in the last war and then at the beginning of this one.)
“No,” Cissy says, with a weary sigh, like she’s expelling a whole war’s worth of weight. “Do you believe me?”
“I know your tells, still,” Andromeda says.
“I’m an excellent Occlumens,” says Cissy, almost offended. “I fooled the Ministry into letting Lucius go. I lied to Severus Snape, which is-was- harder than lying to the Dark Lord.”
Andromeda shoots her a razor-sharp grin and steps aside from the doorway to leave Cissy room to enter. “And?”
“And you taught me everything I know,” says Cissy, mock-defeated. It’s funny how easily they slip into the banter they had as girls, and Cissy seems to know it by the little smile that peeks out. She steps into Andromeda’s house for the first time ever.
“Tea?” This is one thing Andromeda has found Muggles and magicals have in common: their little ritual of tea.
Cissy’s smile drips like moldy walls. “It’s so neat in here,” she says instead of answering, eyes darting across a framed picture of Ted and Andromeda with their arms around each other and to a messy painting she must not know was made by a five-year-old Dora.
“What did you expect?” says Andromeda dryly. “A living room that looks like the roof of Gringotts does now?” She’s a bit miffed, at the almost-implication that her grief would have so thoroughly destroyed her that she would no longer keep her home clean.
“I wasn’t implying anything,” Cissy says, shifting her posture ever so slightly and her jaw setting again.
“You’re Narcissa Cygnet Black,” and Andromeda almost forgets to add the “Malfoy. You’re always implying something.”
“I take my tea with one cream and no sugar,” Cissy sighs. She used to take it with three tablespoons of sugar and Andromeda is just a little bit thrown. Enough of it must show on her face for Cissy to add, “The Dark Lord wouldn’t have sugar in the house. He said it was for blood traitors.” She looks at the floor and her voice goes a bit distant, a mirror image of the way Andromeda’s does sometimes.
Andromeda can’t help but let out a laugh at the absurd image. The laughter seems rusty on her tongue. “What, like garlic and vampires? Was sugar the Dark Lord’s secret archnemesis?”
“The Dark Lord was quite mad by the end,” says Narcissa wryly as Andromeda spells the teapot.
“I sort of got that when he attacked Hogwarts,” says Andromeda, and she tries for a joke but it curdles in her throat like rotted milk.
Cissy just nods, and it hurts to see her so obviously lost for words when Narcissa Black is someone who is hardly ever lost for words. It’s just another pinprick, the grief at how her losses fill so much space Narcissa is afraid to add words, but sometimes Andromeda thinks she could bleed to death from pinpricks like that Russian tsarevich that Rasputin the mad seer saved the life of.
“How’s the- er, the baby?” Cissy says after what could be another eternity. “I saw you with him.” Luckily, she doesn’t say where.
“Harry has him,” Andromeda says offhandedly. “He’s trying to give me a break.” Then she sees Cissy’s confusion and remembers that of course Narcissa has no idea what she’s talking about, doesn’t know her well enough to know why she’d be giving her grandson to Harry.
“Dora and Remus- Remus Lupin, Sirius’s friend?” She makes sure to give Narcissa a frame of reference and doesn’t entirely mean to make an ostentatious reference to Sirius. But she means it just a little.
“The Defense Professor,” says Narcissa. “The werewolf. I know.” Then, like a peace offering, “Draco said he was a good professor, though he didn’t admit it when he had him.”
“He would be. The kids- Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny- all loved him. I meant to say, Dora and Remus named Harry the godfather. He’s been helping out a lot. Surprisingly good with Teddy, for someone so young.” And doesn’t that hurt, sometimes, that Harry Potter, a boy who was no one to her, is still here to raise Teddy when his parents aren’t.
“Ah. Out of curiosity, who’s the godmother?” Cissy’s tone is measured, careful.
“There are two, actually. Well. Were. Dora’s friend Penny Haywood was one- they asked Chiara Lobosca, a mutual friend as well, but she turned them down, and Penny said yes. I suppose Chiara didn’t think she would live through the war. It just goes to show- she’s alive, and Penny died in the battle.” Andromeda is proud of herself for the way her voice doesn’t break at “died in the battle” and then abruptly guilty.
“And the other one?” Of course, Cissy knows when Andromeda’s avoiding a subject. Even with years between them.
“Tea’s ready,” Andromeda mumbles, and levitates it towards them. “Enjoy your sugarless wonder.”
Narcissa just raises her eyebrows, before taking the teacup and sipping from it daintily, just as their mother taught them.
“It’s you,” Andromeda says, and watches Cissy’s throat move, almost spitting out her tea.
“Why on earth would they do that,” she says flatly.
“Because your being his godmother would give Teddy an infinitesimal chance of surviving if the Dark Lord won, which was better than he had as the son of a half-blood Black whose metamorphmagus talent was a living testimony to the lie of pureblood supremacy and a werewolf who had survived the first war as an Order member,” says Andromeda, bluntly. “I advised them to and they took my advice because I knew more about the Death Eaters than either, even Remus, and they loved their son.”
“Oh,” says Narcissa, and then, “They were- you were maybe even right. Bella hated that baby but she loved me,” and Andromeda has a horrible flash of Teddy, Bella’s favorite knife perched over him like a mobile.
“I know that,” Andromeda says, and it comes out sounding like a Killing Curse. “I hope I won’t regret what I told Dora and Remus to do.” She is maybe too bitter and Cissy gains a deep frown.
“As do I,” says Cissy in a small, guilty voice, the one she used to use when she borrowed Andy’s clothes without asking or scratched one of their records.
“You can see him,” Andromeda says, a peace offering of her own. “I’ll supervise.”
“I did raise my own child,” says Cissy, bristling.
“As did I,” says Andromeda, carefully enunciating each word, and Cissy droops like her namesake flower. “You were her godmother too.”
“Fine,” she says. “You’ll supervise, and I won’t kidnap him and use him for potions ingredients.”
Andromeda lets out a horrified snort. “God, Cissy, you never really learned to soften your humor, did you. The rest of you, yes, but you can sure still make a Black-dark joke.”
“I did have to keep some of myself,” says Cissy dryly. “Otherwise I’d just blend into nothing. Like terrible wallpaper, or mother.”
“Cissy!”
“I did learn from you,” Cissy says. “How to laugh through the pain and horror.”
“How to go for the jugular,” says Andromeda, because she has always been honest with herself.
“Did you teach- Dora?” says Cissy, suddenly hesitant.
“No,” Andromeda says. “Well, maybe she got a bit of my sense of humor. But I never taught her to sharpen her words and if I had she wouldn’t have listened. She took after Ted more. She was always kind. Too kind, maybe.” The end gets a bit maudlin, wistful, as Andromeda always gets these days when she’s not crying or screaming.
“Better too kind than not kind enough,” says Cissy quietly.
“Maybe,” says Andromeda. “They would have said so too, Dora and Ted. It’s so strange to hear you say something like that when you’re nothing at all like them.”
“What were they like?” says Cissy. “Dora and Ted.”
“You’ll never really know,” says Andromeda wearily.
“I know,” says Cissy. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Well, if it’s Honesty Hour here at the last repose of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, which is surely turning in its collective grave to have its two last daughters sitting in a Muggle neighborhood and not cursing anything, I suppose I ought to tell you that’s why I let you in. Because I don’t have them anymore and Harry and his friends are lovely and the Order is lovely but they will never be Dora and Ted,” says Andromeda, and it hurts to hear it said out loud. “And now I have nothing else but you.”
“You’re Draco’s godmother,” Cissy says, after an awkward pause where they both don’t look at the photos on the mantelpiece or where Dora’s combat boots are neatly arranged by the doorway as if she’s just upstairs and will step into them easily.
Andromeda is briefly surprised, but then again Cissy did send her the Patronus that time and is here at her doorstep. “Why? because, to be honest, you were Dora’s godmother for the same reason as Teddy.”
“Survival,” Cissy says, nodding. “You were still my sister, Andy, and I wanted you to have a connection to my son. And this seems to be Honesty Hour, so I thought that if Lucius and I were killed you would take him in, then. Probably would have done better than I did.”
“I can’t know that,” Andromeda says. “That I would have been a better parent to Draco- or that you would have been a better parent to Dora, for that matter. It’s no use chasing after what if. Trust me, I know.”
“I know,” Cissy echoes. “I’m- I’m sorry, Andy. Did I ever say that? But I am. When I found out your husband- Ted, I ought to say his name I suppose- died, I wanted to write you.”
“I’d say you should have, but I’m not that stupid,” Andromeda says. “It’s the thought that counts, and oh god I have just been transfigured into a greeting card, kill me now.”
Cissy bursts out laughing. “Remember how whenever Mother threw a garden party there would be a whole wave of singing envelopes to her sitting room and we had to silence the bedrooms and you and I swore that we would never, ever send singing envelopes to anyone?”
Andromeda smiles at the one person in the world who ever knew that story, and who miraculously is not dead like everyone else she treasures memories of seems to be. “Did you keep to it?”
“I incurred the displeasure of Iridia Parkinson for it, but I did,” Cissy says. “And then singing envelopes went out of fashion and I did not gloat a whit.”
“I don’t think I ever had the occasion,” Andromeda says. “Ted and I got married in a registry office with two of our least incapacitated patients as witnesses, and after that what would I have invited people to? Come to the Tonkses for a super-fun war party?”
“A registry office,” says Cissy, disbelieving.
“There was a fan that kept breaking down, and I had to hold my wand in both hands to stave off the urge to fix it. The patients looked at me like I was crazy,” Andromeda says, smiling wistfully at the reminiscence.
“You could have had me,” says Cissy, and Andromeda’s smile abruptly fades. “As a witness. To your wedding. I would have done it.”
“Funny,” says Andromeda, mirthlessly, the old wound reopening. “Given I would have invited you if you had just asked.”
“And you never wrote to me so I never could ask,” Cissy says, with that knife-sharpness they share.
“How could I have written to you, with the family screening owls in? I always assumed you would contact me if you wanted to,” says Andromeda, almost spitting fire. She is surprised at how when the words are out of her mouth her tone sounds like it could be Bella on a sane day.
“You could have snuck a letter in, like we snuck in the Quibbler- in with a different letter, or you could have gotten around the wards- you’re still alive and you’re a Black that married a Muggleborn, of course you could have, or, or, you could have caught me on the bloody street!” Her words grow in intensity til by the end she is nearly shouting. Cissy never loses control like that, but then she’s just been through a war, after all, knows how the Dark Lord takes his tea and put her husband back in Azkaban and can probably count exactly how many times her son nearly died.
“If I’d caught you on the street someone would have seen and I couldn’t take that risk. I couldn’t have- have waylaid a Black owl or broken family wards or whatever because they could paint that as a crime,” says Andromeda. “Sirius found a way to contact me and contact me he did.”
“And I talked to Sirius for hours in a coffee shop in 1979- 1979, when the war was at its height!” Cissy has managed to moderate her voice but it’s still strident, angry. Her teacup shakes on the table in a miniature earthquake.
“What did you even talk to Sirius about,” says Andromeda, though she can guess if she tries. “You did help kill him, after all.” The last line deflates Narcissa.
“Crossword puzzles,” she says. “And the Dark Lord would have killed my son if I disobeyed him, and I wasn’t even close to the main reason he died.”
“You seem to have told Harry differently,” says Andromeda, without the wry tone she would normally use.
“Because I go for the jugular,” says Narcissa, and she sounds tired now. The teacup settles. “Even if I hate it. I use all the weapons available for me.”
“I mean, Harry seems to like you now,” Andromeda says with a shrug. “He ‘admires your courage and integrity in helping give closure to families of victims at personal cost’.”
“Harry Potter is too good for this planet,” Cissy says, with surprising quiet conviction. Andromeda had expected her to go for a quip, but then Cissy is all the same and different. She can’t tell where the fault lines are, what parts of her sister have changed in their absences of each other.
“Do you remember,” Andromeda says after a pause to consider her words, “how we used to play Indoor Quidditch at Grimmo?”
“Yes,” says Cissy. “You were the Seeker, and I was the Keeper, and Aunt Burgie’s bedroom door was the goal and Araminta Meliflua’s horrid place setting was the snitch.”
“Dora said that place setting got smashed somehow,” Andromeda says, with an almost overwhelming pang at her daughter’s posthumous participation in this impossible conversation.
“Good riddance,” says Cissy. “That thing was a blight on this earth and the family honor."
“Don’t call it a blight on the family honor, I am offended to be compared to that thing,” says Andromeda, and Cissy first frowns and then smiles.
“And we used a balled-up set of Uncle Ri’s old clothes for the quaffle after we smashed that twelfth-century vase. And you were the Seeker, you found the Golden Snitch every time and I always thought you would dive into the floor, but somehow you never did. And I stopped the goals and made sure the house didn’t get too smashed up.”
“Yes,” says Andromeda, “That’s exactly what I was trying to say. Bella was the Beater when Her Imperial Highness”- and she is gratified by Cissy’s unladylike snort at the old nickname even as it rolls her stomach over and over til it settles- “deigned to play with us mere mortals. And Sirius was the Chaser, because he was always chasing one or the other of us and I still can’t decide who he was most like. And also he was good at scoring goals.”
“I still blocked plenty,” says Cissy, smiling fully now. “Reggie played Chaser too, once he was old enough, because Siri did.”
“I like how quickly you got this metaphor,” Andromeda says with a hint of joking.
“You’re still my sister,” says Cissy, with a quick wry grin- a grin, on Narcissa Cygnet Black Malfoy. “Always have been. Even though we failed to acknowledge it.”
“We’ll drive each other insane if we don’t acknowledge that we were both at fault,” says Andromeda. “Because, here’s the thing. We’ve been playing Indoor Quidditch all our lives. This whole conversation has been Indoor Quidditch except we both keep forgetting how to play, or maybe playing too well.”
“You always liked grand metaphors,” says Cissy, a touch wistful.
“And we can’t smash up the house. We have to have rules, like we used to, we have to relearn them,” says Andromeda, feeling a bit silly about the metaphor but also, somehow, passionate.
“This is just an excuse for your true love, rules,” says Cissy.
“More like my true love was breaking the rules,” says Andromeda.
“Making up rules just to break them,” says Cissy.
“Quite,” says Andromeda. “Now, I guess we have to- to recognize that we can’t win a game of Indoor Quidditch in just one session.”
“The snitch was always hiding in the attic, and anyway this is all a metaphor and there is no snitch, and there isn’t even a literal snitch,” says Cissy, with a smile that makes her look younger.
“It’s a process,” says Andromeda. “Like grief,” and that hurts to say.
“I saw her,” Cissy says suddenly. “We can’t keep dancing around that. At the battle. I didn’t even have my wand, I gave it to Draco. There were these two little girls- maybe fourteen- and she was trying to protect them when I saw her. And then later I saw her body and her husband’s together- almost holding hands. I should have tried to help, or run when the Dark Lord came to the Manor, or something.”
“I should have gone,” says Andromeda, the heaviness of the words almost crushing her. “Someone needed to watch the baby but there were other people. I’m not a fighter and so I didn’t go. And I heard about the Gringotts dragon thing, and so I took Teddy- when they didn’t come back- and went to stand in Diagon Alley. There was this other woman there, and we fell to talking. Her daughter was a student at Hogwarts, I think a Slytherin seventh year though I might be wrong. And then, at four in the morning, or thereabouts, this great Patronus swoops in front of her and says ‘Mum, I’m safe and he’s dead’. It was a phoenix. And I said, ‘your daughter has a lovely Patronus’ because there was this whole group of Patronuses arriving, a whole constellation of them, and they glittered in the dawn light. I’ll always remember that sight.”
“The Dark Lord hit the Great Hall floor just as dawn broke and it took me a physical effort not to cheer,” says Cissy.
“I didn’t even register that,” says Andromeda, guilt and grief all jumbled together. “I just kept looking for Dora or Remus’s Patronus and eventually I had to go home and then at around noon Harry Potter knocked on my door and told me about the bodies that were holding hands and I handed him Teddy and went to the Hogwarts Infirmary because I knew it would be a madhouse and they would need a trusted Healer. And I checked all the beds just in case one of them had Dora.”
“I spent the whole battle looking for Draco,” says Cissy. “And I can’t believe you don’t hate me for finding him.”
“Maybe a little,” Andromeda says, and Cissy laughs wetly. “I think I saw him, actually. They had him brewing potions because they were so desperate for supplies.”
“I told him to,” Cissy says quietly. “I couldn’t look for you, I just couldn’t, and so I ended up finding Kingsley Shacklebolt and I asked him ‘what do you need to know?’ and I haven’t heard from anyone ever since and I can’t bring myself to care.”
“Iridia Parkinson’s not exactly a loss,” Andromeda says, trying for lightness.
“True,” says Cissy.
“I remember, hearing that radio broadcast,” Andromeda says, a final confession. “We won the war, it said, and I was so angry I blew up the wireless.”
“You destroyed an innocent object in rage,” says Cissy, clearly aiming for a joke but the Quaffle doesn’t quite land. Andromeda gives her a tiny smile for effort.
“Because I thought, who ever wins a war,” she says.
“No one,” says Cissy. “It’s almost like Indoor Quidditch,” and Andromeda has to laugh then, through a blanket of tears.