In you Hate was always stronger than Love… There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your Hatred and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there is no room for both passions in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate…Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that.
-Oscar Wilde, De Profundis-


Toujours pur.
Andromeda Black had been repeating this to herself for nearly an hour: since approximately 30 minutes before the Hogwarts Express had made its final and only stop. She had been in a compartment with Bellatrix, the Lestrange brothers, and a few of their friends, whose names Andromeda hadn’t been inclined to pay much attention to.

She wasn’t really paying attention to anyone at all, actually; Rabastan Lestrange, as a third Year, was the closest to her age in this compartment of Slytherins, and she, yet unsorted, felt rather out of place amongst them all. Rodolphus, his head resting in Bella’s lap, had just finished some tale of his own sorting (which had hardly been comforting), and finally taking note of her sister’s anxiety, Bella said, “Oh relax, Andromeda. They just stick a silly old hat on your head, and it’s not as if you need sorting anyway. You’ll be in Slytherin, of course. Toujours pur."

~~~

Toujours pur.
It echoed in Andromeda’s head the rest of the way: onto the platform: into the boats: across the Lake: up the stairs: into the Great Hall.

“Black, Andromeda!�

Up the steps; breathe; sit; toujours pur.

‘Toujours pur?’ a voice echoed. ‘A Black, are you?’ And that was all, until it called out for everyone, “Slytherin!�

Andromeda sat down at the Slytherin table next to her sister, giving a soft sigh of relief. “Told you,� Bella said in a bored tone. “Toujours pur.�

~~~

It was, Andromeda realised later, just about the only thing she was certain of in her life. As a Black, the family motto had been repeated to her since childhood. The Black family defined Toujours pur, and it in turn defined them; it meant that nothing came between the Blacks and purity. Nothing. She remembered Aunt Walburga’s tapestry and its burn marks and thought, Not even other Blacks.

~~~

As time went on, however, Toujours pur came to mean much more to Andromeda. In her first year, it began to mean pure Dedication to her schoolwork, a thing which only increased when, in her second year, it came to mean a pure Determination to not abandon her own moral convictions and join the ranks of Bellatrix, whose gang continually increased its cruel bullying of Muggle-borns. (It was then that Bella began to slowly turn on her, and Andromeda began to spend more and more time attempting to avoid her sister and her friends, which generally meant a large amount of time in the Library, studying.) In her third year, it meant standing up to Rabastan allowing him to hex her rather than her best friend – a Slytherin half-blood; she discovered pure Loyalty.

There were times, particularly in fourth year, when something inside Andromeda rebelled against the thought of any particle of her life being touched by Toujours pur, by something so entwined with the Black family. She wished, then, that she had never been born a Black, never heard of Toujours pur: it was, perhaps, her most miserable year, with Bellatrix and her company of friends growing ever crueller and ever more resourceful in their bullying. What was the good in being pure if prejudice and cruelty came along with it? And she could see that overwhelmingly, that was the only kind of purity the Blacks cared about.

~~~

In her fifth year, with Bellatrix gone, Andromeda began to rediscover kinds of purity that didn’t bring Hate with them. It began with Ted Tonks, whom she’d often run across in the Library whilst avoiding Bellatrix and her cohorts. She’d never been especially friendly toward him, seeing as he was Muggle-born – not that she had anything against him for that, but with Bella already making her life miserable for not attacking Muggle-borns, Andromeda had never thought befriending them would be a particularly wise choice. Bella had a knack for hurting one by hurting the things one loved.

But Andromeda was tired of hiding and tired of not doing what she wanted – so she allowed Ted to befriend her; and a bit later on in term, take her to Hogsmeade. Through Ted, she learned that purity could mean a purity of Self, a truthfulness to whom one actually was and was meant to be, rather than being a name. Ted slowly, patiently broke down walls that Andromeda had built up for self-preservation; and Ted showed her what Good was, and Friendship, and Love.

In seventh year, as Andromeda watched her cousin, Sirius, be sorted into Gryffindor, she realised once more how much Self was more important than a name. And she watched Sirius learn the lessons she had learned of pure Loyalty, Friendship, and Love.

~~~

After graduation, she didn’t even bother to go back to her childhood home: her engagement to Ted had already been reported by Narcissa to their parents, and she was far from welcome there. She told herself she didn’t mind, but when she met Ted’s family, and the first thing his mother did was hug her so tightly and happily that she couldn’t breathe, something inside Andromeda broke a little and it hurt, knowing that Ted would never get this kind of reception from her family. He’d be lucky to make it out of a Black family gathering unharmed.

~~~

A year or so after she married, she sat one night with Nymphadora in her arms, rocking in a chair by the side of her and Ted’s bed: Ted was curled toward her normal place in the bed, his hand near her pillow as if reaching for her: as she held her daughter close and gazed at the man she loved, Andromeda knew what pure Contentment and Joy were.

And it was then she realised that the greatest failure of the Blacks was not that they desired purity, but rather that they lacked imagination when they began to define it.