A Ribbon of Black by 
ficexchange
Merry Christmas, Sarina (Sarinileni)!
A Ribbon of Black
--
If she shuts her eyes tight enough, all is so black that it’s nearly white.
Everything she has done, everything she has said and proved and wanted and given and cried for –
All that she has loved and loathed and compromised – everything she has fought and stolen and won and felt and touched and created –
Everyone she has spited and praised and heard and seen –
“I’ll see you soon, all right?”
(It’s that nonchalance – )
He offers a weak smile as she opens her eyes and kisses her temple.
She shuts her eyes again, goes back –
--
The brim of the hat reaches all the way to the middle of the bridge of her nose. She wiggles her nose a little and it falls even further. Stupid hat, she thinks, why don’t they shrink the thing? Most first-years have small heads anyway –
“Well, I have more uses than that.”
Andromeda nearly – nearly – jumps from her seat, but after a moment’s surprise she regains her composure. Bella told me about this, she thinks, the thing is self-aware.
“The clever Black sister we have here – yes, you’re very smart. Would make tremendous achievements in Ravenclaw house – ”
Ravenclaw? That’s absolutely impossible…
“Well, then – Hufflepuff? No, you’d eat them alive there, little girl. Gryffindor, then? No, I don’t suppose you’re brave enough – ”
I’m brave! She winces, attempts to explain herself. I don’t want to be in Gryffindor, but I am brave.
“We’ll see, then, yes? Until then, you and that biting mind better join your sister in – ”
--
Her favorite class is Potions.
It’s very methodical – stir fifty-three times clockwise, add a gram’s worth squashed tubeworm, a few drops of hellebore syrup, a spoonful of sneezewort powder. This, she can do – it’s just following directions. She’s been doing that her entire life.
Slughorn likes her, too. Bella says that he’s a crazy old bat, but Andromeda thinks he’s a generally decent man.
She figures she’ll put up with sharing a classroom with Hufflepuffs all year if it means she’ll be the first in her year.
--
Her first kiss occurs when she is fourteen with Lucius Malfoy, outside the broom cupboard near the dungeons, after Potions.
He had been escorting her to Defense for no significant reason except that it was a good and beneficial decorum for a Malfoy and a Black to be seen together. “The Malfoys are a respectable people, Andromeda,” said Mother once, clean and polished fingers holding a wine glass to her mouth. “The Blacks are a respectable people, too. Do you understand?”
“Yes, mother,” she’d replied obediently. She watched her mother’s throat move as liquor traveled into her mouth and she imagined it flooding her bloodstreams.
“Good girl.”
She passed Cissy on the way to her bedroom. “Go to bed, Narcissa,” she whispered, petting her head gently. “It’s the respectable thing to do.”
Cissy giggled, but it was the most halfhearted sound Andromeda had ever heard in her entire life.
--
Her first kiss occurs when she is fourteen with Lucius Malfoy.
“Funny thing your sister said earlier about you,” he’d been saying. He walked slowly, as if the world should be waiting for him without complaint. “Bella called you a – what was it? A prude?”
“What?” Andromeda paused. “What?”
“Yes – that was it.” He smiled almost unkindly. He was amused. “She said you were either a prude or asexual because – well – for obvious reasons, I think.”
“That’s absurd.” She crinkled her forehead in disgust. “Even that she was speaking about me to others – I mean, honestly, has the woman no propriety as to – to – gossip about her own sister! I don’t – ”
“Andromeda.” He smiled again, a bit more personably this time. “She wasn’t gossiping. I don’t mean to cause bad blood here. I asked her.”
“You asked her.”
“I’m only trying to confirm an accusation – an affectionate accusation,” he added with a laugh. The boy was resilient.
“S’not true,” she muttered. She studied his face for an instant – still smiling, terribly handsome, ridiculously well-groomed. His outward appearance was exceptionally reflective of his true character. Hard as a rock. Sculpted as if a masterpiece. “S’not true,” she said again.
“No?” The corner of his mouth twitched.
“No,” she said, and then she kissed him.
--
It’s two days after her incident with Lucius that she meets him.
Staring outside one of the grand windows at the end of a nameless corridor in the castle, she watches the snow float to the ground. The hills of white grow and grow – and even though she has been monitoring the snow for nearly an hour now, she never actually sees the pile rise. From one inch to four, she watches the process, misses it at the same time.
“What are you doing?”
Andromeda squeaks and jumps, wand automatically thrust forward, a cold hand clutching her heart.
A boy with messy honey-colored hair and a blue and yellow tie holds up his hand in surrender.
“Goodness!” she nearly seethes, reclaiming her place on the bench before the window. “Hasn’t your mother ever told you not to sneak up on people?”
“Sorry.” He sits down next to her as if she had opened up an invite to conversation. She shuffles over about half a foot. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I don’t think there really exists a method of not startling a person when that person is isolated in darkness and another person is attempting to approach that person – ”
“Stop.” He does. She closes her eyes. “You’re ruining it.”
No questions. He says instead, “I’m Ted Tonks, by the way. We’ve had Potions together since first year but I don’t believe we’ve ever been formally introduced.”
She says nothing. Gives him a cold appraisal. Gets up abruptly and walks away – even though she does, in fact, recognize him.
(Maybe she catches his eye every once in a while in Potions for the rest of the year. Maybe not.)
--
Andromeda returns to Hogwarts for fifth year with a Prefect badge and a boyfriend named Antonin Dolohov.
It’s the stiffest relationship she’s ever heard of (heard of, because she’s never had her own to compare it to). She draws little warmth when they kiss – she surmises that she is supposed to see fireworks, but she sees nothing of the sort. Maybe hears faint explosions in the background of her mind. Perhaps the cry of the wind as it carries dirty smoke and smoky dirt across the universe. (This is not so romantic, she guesses, but - )
Bellatrix had set them up.
He disappears every Hogsmeade weekend with several other Slytherin boys – and Bella. Once, as he prepares to leave her stranded at the Three Broomsticks, she asks him where he’s headed. Why Bellatrix is allowed to go.
“It isn’t Bellatrix who’s allowed to go,” he murmurs in what she assumes is a placating tone of voice. “Actually, it’s me who’s allowed to go. But that’ll change soon…” He says the last part more to himself than to her, and she rolls her eyes.
“I’m not stupid,” she scowls.
“I wouldn’t accuse you of it,” he replies as he reaches out to stroke her head with a cool hand. “And I wouldn’t ever have to, right, Andromeda?” He smiles then and she is immediately reminded of Lucius Malfoy, or his father, or her father, grandfather – and everyone her boyfriend shouldn’t remind her of.
Silly girl, she thinks, an utterly incomplete thought.
He kisses her forehead and is out the door before she can protest. Outside, leaves fly in a brief flurry of wind and she sees Ted Tonks walk past The Three Broomsticks and into Honeydukes.
( - it’s something).
--
She doesn’t know why she does it.
“I’m Andromeda Black, by the way,” she says, examining the stacks of chocolate bars on the shelves before them.
“Yeah. I knew.” There’s half a smirk plastered on his face when she looks at him.
“Yes, well – about that one time last year – just so you don’t go around spreading rumors that I’m mad in the head or something for staring listlessly out the window – I just – I don’t know.” She takes a second to breathe. “Maybe I happen to like watching snowfall. And it was there. On my way back from the library.” She clears her throat and feels a bit like someone that certainly does not bear the surname ‘Black.’ “Just so – ”
“ – I know. Gotcha.” He does that thing with his hands again. The surrender. She vaguely wonders if this is normal behavior, this constant gesture, a sign for giving in and waving the white flag. She considers asking him – but doesn’t. Without thinking about her mobile functions, she follows him to the front counter as he prepares to pay for his chocolate.
“Look - ”
“Relax. I won’t tell anyone we exchanged words or time or anything,” he exaggerates, chuckling. There’s a dimple in his left cheek – just the left one – that makes her want to leave the shop immediately.
“Good,” she says sternly. She hears him laughing on the way out.
--
She agitatedly asks Bellatrix about what’s going on, the secrets and the meetings and the withdrawal – and for the first time ever, Bella very seriously tells her to mind her own fucking business.
The next day, she fails her Potions exam.
After class, Ted Tonks catches her by the elbow and says, “By the way, I passed with flying colors.”
She wants to ask him who the hell he thinks he is.
She doesn’t.
--
She starts studying in the library more often because she can no longer stand the hushed conversations of the Slytherin common room. It’s getting worse and worse – everything is – and she knows what is happening and she refuses to egg it on. But she can’t argue, she can’t – so she leaves.
Of course no place is ever free of intrusion, not for her, because this is life.
“I happen to be writing my essay on the same topic. Shall I sit?”
She glares. He sits. She inhales and he smells very clean.
How ironic, she thinks, and this is the way it happens.
--
The first time he touches her, there’s a new moon and no stars in the sky.
They’re walking back from the library and she insists they go this way and down that corridor, just so no one will see them. They stop at that window – the same one where he introduced himself – and he says, “Look how dark it is.”
“Dark,” she agrees.
“Nearly black.” A quiet smile pulls at the corner of his mouth.
“Ted – ”
“Stop.” His fingers play with the ends of her ponytail. “You’re ruining it.”
She feels cold glass against her back as he presses his mouth against hers.
Silly girl, she thinks, but there’s no time (no reason) to complete the thought.
--
It sort of comes easily to them, the hiding, sneaking around, secret meetings. Bellatrix is too busy for them and then she’s graduated and not there at all. And Narcissa – Narcissa is easy to fool, and more often than not the girl has her own relationships to worry about. And everyone else – it seems as if secret passages and hidden corridors were invented just for this purpose.
She gathers, though, that maybe it’s easy for her because it’s mandatory for her. But Ted -
“Can’t you just tell them?” he asks one night, exasperated.
“They wouldn’t understand.” She grabs his tie and pulls him to her. Smiles. “Besides, isn’t it more romantic this way?”
And she knows she’s in trouble.
(She waits a few weeks to break things off with Antonin. Andromeda has never been fond of foolishness as a trait.)
--
She is seventeen when she loses her virginity to Ted Tonks in the Room of Requirement.
“Well, the professors are always talking about inter-house unity,” he says afterwards, laughing, a terribly unfunny joke that he finds hilarious nonetheless. She laughs with him because it’s hard not to.
She waits until she’s in her own bed with the curtains drawn to burst into tears.
--
The morning before graduation, she throws up for the first time in about two years.
Narcissa pulls her head back from the toilet by her hair and Andromeda nearly chokes.
“Narcissa!” she gasps, seething. “What the bloody hell – ”
“No! No, Andromeda – I know.” Her sister fixes her with a malicious glare, one worthy of The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, and Andromeda thinks she’s going to be sick again.
“Know what, Cissy?” Her tone is patient. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve. (She might have been waiting for this.)
“I know about you and that filth – that Mudblood you fancy yourself in love with – and I’ve known. I’ve known for a long time and I’ve tried giving you the benefit of the doubt. I told myself you were going through a phase or something – that you’d get over it quickly – or at the very least come to your senses and tell us about him! But you never did – and it’s too late now – and I know. And I’ve told.” That last word triggers her stomach, and she retches again. Narcissa is unsympathetic. “Look at you,” she spits, scathing, and Andromeda can hardly believe her eyes as her sister walks out of the room with a pitying shake of the head.
“Look at me,” she repeats quietly. Silly girl, she thinks, an utterly incomplete thought.
Later, Professor Dumbledore announces “Miss Andromeda Black” to the spectators and there’s the obligatory applause. She catches Sirius’s eye and idly realizes that he’s the only other Black in the room. Her parents are absent and she’s certain she’s seen the last of her sisters.
Sirius winks and she grins back.
After graduation, she meets Mr. and Mrs. Tonks, a lawyer and a teacher, and they say it’s wonderful to meet the girl their son’s been writing about. Andromeda smiles and her stomach stirs a little.
--
It’s just her and him on the train home.
It falls dark and there is silence still.
“You can stay with me,” he finally says, a hum into her hair.
“For how long?” She has to ask.
He shrugs. “Forever, if you need it.”
It’s that casual tone of voice, the one where it sounds like he’s giving in because he wants to.
(It makes things easier. Not good, but easier. She doubts she’s liable to ask for anything more.)
--
Everything she has done – felt – loved – dealt – everything under the sky –
The sky is a dark nothingness, tinged with red. A lunar eclipse lingers overhead. All is silent.
Teddy cries.
Andromeda breathes.