[From Cordeilla, a name appearing in the 12th-century chronicles [1] of Geoffrey of Monmouth, borne by the youngest of the three daughters of King Leir and the only one to remain loyal to her father. Geoffrey possibly based her name on that of Creiddylad, a daughter of Lludd Llaw Eraint in the early Arthurian tale Culhwch and Olwen. This Welsh name is of uncertain meaning.
The spelling was later altered to Cordelia when Geoffrey's story was adapted by others, including Edmund Spenser in his poem The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shakespeare in his tragedy King Lear (1606).]
The Greengrasses always had a bit of a taste for fancy sounding names. (I.E. Her siblings Thaddeus and Floretta.) Cordelia came about in a book that her mother had been reading, and the spelling and fancy sounding name caught in her like a hook. When they had a second daughter, she was quick to suggest the name to her husband. Her father, finding himself favoring his new child, thought the name was perfect for her.
Jane -
[Medieval English form of Jehanne, an Old French feminine form of Iohannes (see John). This became the most common feminine form of John in the 17th century, surpassing Joan. In the first half of the 20th century Joan once again overtook Jane for a few decades in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Famous bearers include the uncrowned English queen Lady Jane Grey (1536-1554), who ruled for only 9 days, British novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), who wrote Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, British primatologist Jane Goodall (1934-), and American actress Jane Fonda (1937-). This is also the name of the central character in Charlotte Brontכ's novel Jane Eyre (1847), which tells of Jane's sad childhood and her relationship with Edward Rochester.]
Jane was, once again, a name pulled from a book that her mother had loved. She’d wanted the children’s middle names to be a lot more simple than their first names, and so Jane sounded like a perfect fit for their youngest daughter.
Greengrass -
The Greengrass family being an old and noble pureblood house, was one that had their name from long, long ago. It originally appeared from a farmer who had begun the gardens and fields that reside at Greengrass manor today. The lawn in front of his cottage had been so perfect, that it had almost started as a joke, before it grew into an actual name, and eventually, the near trademark for the family for centuries to come.
The name of a constellation and a galaxy contained within it. In Greek mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of Queen Cassiopeia. When Cassiopeia boasted that she and her daughter were more beautiful than all the Nereids, Poseidon ordered a sea monster to attack their country. Andromeda was chained to a rock as a sacrifice for the monster. When Perseus arrived to slay the monster, she was saved and he took her as his wife. However, thinking she should not escape her punishment, upon her death Poseidon placed her in the heavens chained to a throne.
Andromeda also goes by “Andy” and, less frequently and usually only by her husband, “Dromeda”
She very much sees “Andromeda” and “Andy” as different personas she puts on depending on how close she is to the person she’s talking to. Andromeda is the ice queen, the perfect eldest daughter of the House of Black, the ruthless Slytherin, the girl with the ramrod straight posture and the flawless manners. Andy is her softer side, the hopelessly in love romantic, the girl who has every Elvis record, the housewife that bakes just to fill the house with the smell of biscuits, the mother to both her daughter and her sisters.
Druella
Andromeda’s mother’s name. Her Rosier grandparents likely meant it to be a form of the Latin name Drucilla, meaning "dewy-eyed" or "fruitful". It is also, in its own right, a Germanic name meaning “an elfin vision.”
Having had a strained and distant relationship with her mother from birth, Andromeda has never used her middle name.
Black
After the color. In Western culture, the color black is associated with darkness and evil, but also with prestige and sophistication. In ancient China, black was associated with water, which corresponds to Slytherin, the traditional house of the Black family. In English heraldry, black represents darkness and ignorance.
The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black is known to be one of the oldest and wealthiest Pureblood families in all of Britain. The family motto is Toujours Pur, or “Always Pure,” and most members of the family took this to heart. Any impurities in the line, be they muggles, muggleborns, squibs, or blood traitors, are quickly pruned from the family tree along with the family members they tainted.
Andromeda is fairly well-known among Pureblood circles as the first Black child of her generation to have been disowned. She happily owns this reputation, especially because it’s equally known that she “left for love” after falling for Ted. She normally drops her name, but occasionally during both wizarding wars she used it as a middle name as a way of protecting her daughter through reminding people of who she was.
Tonks
A patronymic muggle surname from the name Tonk, a diminuative of the Aramaic name Thomas, meaning “Twin”. The muggle Tonks family historically emerged in the Midlands, with the first Tonks on record appearing in 1250 and family history claiming that they held a family seat in the region as early as the Norman conquest.
Andromeda started practicing her signature as a Tonks long before the wedding so that it would be flawless the day after. In fact, it got so into her muscle memory that signing it as Andromeda Black on the marriage certificate felt and looked unnatural. She may have accidentally signed a few documents at her job at Gringotts with Tonks before the wedding, but nobody ever noticed or called her out on it.
The Old French form of Jacob derived from the Latin Iacobus via Late Latin Iac(o)mus. Jacob, in turn, the English form of the Hebrew Ya'akov, meaning "supplanter". In the Torah, Ya'akov twice used deception to steal the birthright of his elder brother Esau. In the Christian New Testament, James is the name of two apostles, one of which is believed to be the person who first brought Christianity to the area that is modern Spain. In the 17th century the Scottish king James VI inherited the English throne, becoming the first ruler of all Britain.
James’ name, however, has a different origin. It is his parents’ Westernization of the Sanskrit name Jayam, meaning ‘victory’.
His mother’s nickname for him is “Jamie”, and she is the only person he allows to call her by this name. Anyone else who attempts it is immediately threatened with violence.
Fleamont
A created name with two potential meanings. Flea from from the Latin fleon, which means to “flee”, while mont is French for “mountain”. Together, “to flee the mountain”. Alternatively, Fleamont could also be derived from Fleaman, which comes from Fleeman, derived from an old Anglo-French word, fleming. Fleming is a term used as a slang term for people born or living in Flanders, a region in Europe spanning across Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and parts of France and Germany, where the population speaks Dutch.
This is James’ father’s name, who in turn was given the name as the dying wish of James’ great-grandmother to preserve her maiden name.
James generally does not share his middle name with others. He doesn’t hide it when asked, but he knows that his father dislikes the name, going by “Monty” all his life.
Potter
The Potter family derives their name from the 12th-century wizard Linfred of Stinchcombe, nicknamed “the Potterer” due to his eccentric nature and absentmindedness. It is additionally a common muggle occupational name for a maker of pots. This commonality was used to publicly justify their exclusion from the Sacred Twenty-Eight. In reality, they were excluded due to a centuries-long tradition of believing in wizarding equality with muggles.
The Potters gained their fortune through Fleamont’s invention of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion. Thus, in addition to not being considered “proper” purebloods, they’re “new money”. James thinks that the distinction is stupid whenever it’s brought up.
First, it was a feeling, dreamlike, surreal. He has slipped into life like it were a worn glove, shaking the dregs from the previous evening’s festivities. Drinking glass of champagne after glass of champagne. Kissing his wife at midnight, and kissing her before they fell asleep together, bundled in familiar blankets even as they were greeted by dawn between the sliver in the curtains.
He woke first, shrugging out of the blankets and letting his feet slip into the slippers that guarded him from the cold hardwood, with how he stepped from December into the dim January morning. That by itself had been odd; he didn’t know if it had been December or January at all. It felt as if he were in a dream, losing track of time and place, living the same season over and over, like the sun always set at the same time with the weather hot and stifling—miserably strange against the chill that permeated the kitchen in its silence.
There was that sensation that he couldn’t shake. It felt as if he wasn’t supposed to be here, like the contrast of the marble countertops against the sunlight streaming into the kitchen was too much for his own eyes to look at. He let out a breath, and it was as if the morning coffee he poured for himself was something that he had done… not before.
Not before, but something he had done already.
This was different than going through the motions.
It felt redundant then to do the same thing he had done already—but still he stepped out of the kitchen and into the breakfast nook, where the windows revealed the exact scene that he remembered. As he watched a robin flutter against the snow that rested on the tree branch, everything felt as if they were clicking into place, like the gears of a clock moving forward, the thin hands on its face ticking as each second passed.
Frank didn’t want to remember.
The string of fate tugged at him in one direction, the only direction, it seemed. To stray from it meant the pursuit of the unknown. But what he did know felt worse: he only has a few years left. Maybe less. Three people had come for answers that he and his wife didn’t have, and they paid for it dearly. Their faces cruel, their tone demanding, but Frank had not backed down an inch until—
He remembered wishing that his bones would shatter under the pain of it, as if his flesh seared under a hot knife slicing into his body at every conceivable angle. In this moment as he sipped at dark roast, brewed to perfection, he couldn’t just ignore how vividly he remembered—
No. He swore he could have just imagined it, but he was certain of what it was. It hadn’t been the first time he had experienced the Cruciatus Curse; he was an Auror, and no stranger to Dark magic.
But there was a sensation that made his skin prickle. He knows that pain well—all too well, somehow when he had woken up this morning—how was it possible that the pain never ended, that the curse lingered, stayed, buried into his flesh and bone as part of him forever?
Frank didn’t want to remember.
There was more to it than that though. Something beyond the pain. Something that Frank could reach for, something Frank had been determined to endure for. They weren’t aspirations... but memories? That didn’t seem right, but it was hard to describe it as something else aside from remembering.
The way things seemed to pin themselves to the same white room, the same woman by his bedside, the same two visitors, over and over—they weren’t clear, and he felt them slip past somehow. His mind felt like rainwater, flowing through the gutter but slipping past the leaves that had fallen from the trees outside.
There was something he was missing, and something that wasn’t here. They weren’t aspirations, but—they couldn’t be memories, could they? Frank aspired to be more than what he expected to become, but it felt as if he were fated to that trial by fire forever, with the inextinguishable flames never quite consuming his body, and his body never quite burning into ashes like one would expect. Still, it was ever present and he had been lost to it—
Frank didn’t want to remember.
He holds a bundle in his hands. He knows he loses the name, and it was as if the name didn’t matter. It wouldn’t in the end, anyway.
There was a warmth like nothing else that radiated from where he held his son, and he remembers his heart beating under his chest—not in the way it pounded when he was on a mission, but in gentle contentment.
They were finally safe. Frank felt as if something had unspooled inside of him when the Dark Lord had been defeated. He could let himself finally think. He could finally breathe. Everything he had worried about disappeared, like the fog that had been disintegrated by sunshine.
He always had his mother. He knows long days of learning magic with her before he started school himself, the moments she let him hold her wand with her own hand guiding his through the motions. He holds his son’s hand, watching tiny fingers wrap around his own, and he imagines a future where he could do the same.
Like his mother had before, he presses a kiss on his son’s forehead. It feels like he could instance of what he had done—or did—before. And there was the snag; he couldn’t decide if this had all been done before, or if that was going to be his decision at all.
Frank didn’t want to remember, but—
Was the burden of this future that had yet to be played out something he had to shoulder alone?
It was like that fog had come back, and there was no sunlight. Everything he had worried about reappeared, somehow—accompanied by more to worry about. He couldn’t help but return to that moment, the most vivid before everything had become like fine sand falling through the hourglass, waiting to be emptied into a gentle pile at its bottom.
If the Dark Lord had never been defeated, would they have come for his family?
He hadn’t been defenseless against the curse biting into him, but he knew how to concede defeat. The greatest aurors of their time, lost to pain—Frank had been determined to endure. But that determination splintered and hairline cracks started at the surface, until the pressure was too much.
Would he have been better or worse off than to where the strings of fate would pull them?
He was strong, but he was no Atlas. He had been reinforced from the inside out, with how his mother raised him to how he had been trained to be the model Auror, a ductility cured unlike any other wizard who had ever lived. There was a way to yield with grace, and he would still be intact—
Frank didn’t want to remember, but—
—except here he was, destroyed in a failure so brittle that there were hardly any pieces left to pick up.
