It’s really, really, really important to me that Andromeda and Harry connect after the war.
On one side of the coin, you have the boy who lived, except that he’s battered and broken and doesn’t really know how to come to terms with the fact that he gets to live yet. He’s been what everyone has wanted him to be and then some, and now, he quite literally has nothing to do except to think and to dwell. He closes his eyes at night and sees Voldemort; he has to remind himself again and again that he’s gone. (All is well?)
On the other side, there’s Andromeda, who has lost everything that she’s ever loved in one fell swoop and doesn’t know whether to be relieved that he looks so much like her or terrified. She misses Ted—his warm eyes and his loud voice, the way his belly would jiggle when he laughed. She is sick for her daughter. (When she was younger, Nymphadora would always come home drenched in mud, a grin drawn across her rosy cheeks, and Andromeda would scold her, and now she regrets it, even though it’s irrational and stupid and—) There are some days where she can’t breathe.
The war is over, their loved ones are in the earth, and there’s a little boy named Teddy with bright, blue hair and wide, brown eyes that crinkle when he smiles. He unites Andromeda and Harry; he gives them individually and mutually hope and a purpose, and eventually, they are drawn together by more than just their love for him.
There are some days when Harry will come over and just sit on the floor with Teddy, a faraway look in his emerald green eyes. (Rumor has it, that they used to be livelier once upon a time, vivid and hungry, a rival for Lily Evans’s own. Now, they’re flat and empty, and there are lines beneath them that shouldn’t be there because God, he’s only seventeen.) Andromeda will bring him a cup of tea—which is more ceremonial than anything—and join him. She doesn’t ask him anything, doesn’t feel like she needs to. He can talk when and if he wants to talk. When he leaves for the evening, he says, “Thank you.”
She comes across one of Nymphadora’s wedding pictures one day while cleaning. She and Remus are laughing, laughing, laughing, eyes only on each other, and her daughter’s bubblegum pink hair stirs in the breeze. Andromeda can’t take it. She comes undone; she falls apart. Agony carves into her chest like a knife, and she thinks she screams, but isn’t really in the right mind to know. There is the distant thud of a door and then footsteps panicking down the hallway. Harry finds her on her knees in the living room, curled around the portrait. Wordlessly, he lowers himself to the floor. He holds her while she glues herself back together. They stay there for a long time.
It’s not all a sad story, though. Some days, they’re broken, and some days, they’re a little less broken than usual. Some days, they even begin to heal.
They find themselves giggling over swapped stories.
“I swear, Mrs. Tonks, Aragog was at least eight feet tall! A bloody monster!”
Harry learns how to make a mean cake in Andromeda Tonks’s pristine kitchen.
“You’re whipping an egg, not jabbing a troll, Harry. Gentle!”
Just… Harry and Andromeda, guys.
Yes, this is definitely important to me.
