Very few things in Andromeda’s life came as a surprise. She was a Black, after all, and Blacks were known for their resistance to change at the best of times. She was raised – trained, really – to uphold the family customs, the House of Black, above all else, and so far she was doing a fair job of it. Bella was wild and Cissy was pretty, and Andromeda comfortably occupied the place of the unobtrusive, compliant middle sister.



She could keep up appearances with the best of them. The green and silver trim of her robes indicated that she had not broken her family’s Slytherin tradition, and though her uniform was standard, her expensive boots and delicate goblin-wrought jewelry were a sure sign of the Black fortune. Notes on all things magical peppered the glossy pages of her spell books, and Muggle Studies and Divination were nowhere to be found on her timetable. Of course, she kept a healthy distance from certain unsavory classmates, particularly (but not limited to) the large Mudblood population, though admittedly this was more to avoid trouble with her older sister than because of any deep-seated ideology.



She’d gotten a slight shock the previous summer when her Hogwarts letter included the shiny Prefect badge that was now pinned to her robe; Black women weren’t supposed to be smart, after all. They were supposed to make respectable pure-blood marriages and give birth to respectable pure-blood sons (though Andromeda thought “respectable� was a matter of opinion – her father’s parents had been no more than children when they married, and Aunt Walburga had opted for a husband so closely related that she didn’t even have to change her surname). Mother had pursed her lips and said nothing, and Father shook his head. Bella sneered, though Andromeda assumed her displeasure had more to do with her hatred of Dumbledore, whose rules Andromeda had meticulously followed. Still, a Prefect pin hardly besmirched the family name, and the news of Bella’s betrothal to Rodolphus Lestrange had followed quickly enough to deflect any mutterings from the rest of the family about the impropriety of the Black girls.



No, Andromeda led a very predictable existence. But one year ago, as she sat, just as she was now, in the year’s first Prefect meeting, all that had been turned on its head when she first saw him.



Her stomach, much to her annoyance, did a flip as his face appeared unbidden in her mind. She tried hard to avoid looking at the real thing, but she knew from experience that he would make this task difficult. Sure enough, as soon was the meeting was adjourned, he wasted no time in chasing her down.



“Hey! Andromeda!� he shouted as she tried her best to run away. She didn’t stop, but long fingers found her wrist, and she was trapped. She turned.

“What?� she sighed.



“Had a good summer?�



She couldn’t help it; though she recognized danger, she looked up at him, right into his twinkling eyes.



“What does it matter to you, Tonks?� she asked with a carefully arched brow (a useful trick she’d learned from Narcissa).



“Well you’ve gone so long without laying eyes on me,� he answered impishly. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss me too much.�



“Oh, well, if that’s all,� she scoffed, trying to pull away.



“You haven’t answered my question. How was your summer?�



“I have work to do,� she snapped.



“Then you’d better come up with something quick.�



He was grinning widely now.



“Fine! It was fine.�



“You can do better than that.�



“Alright, I read a book,� she said impatiently.



“Which one?� he asked, genuinely curious. What a Ravenclaw.



“How to Hex Irritating Classmates Until They Can’t See Straight,� she told him. “Can I go now?�



He laughed his big joyful laugh, and she had to concentrate hard on her angry expression lest it break.



“That’s more like it,� he said, letting go of her wrist.



She turned away from him, enjoying the lingering warmth from him fingers, then she silently cursed him all the way back to her Common Room.



Ted Tonks was easily the most wonderful and most aggravating thing in Andromeda’s life. He was the seventh-year Ravenclaw Prefect, and he was funny, popular, and beautiful. And Muggle-born.



He was proud of it too, reading Muggle books and singing Muggle songs as he traipsed around the castles in jeans and worn-out trainers. Even when in uniform he was unkempt, and his schoolbag was full to bursting with crumpled parchments and broken quills – utterly contrary to Andromeda’s pristine eagle feathers and magically color-coded notes.



All of this made her regard for him extremely problematic, and it didn’t seem to bother him one bit. She tried to deny her affection, even to herself, but he wasn’t fooled by her efforts. He made of a game of it, offering to help her study, winking at her across the Great Hall, and (worst of all) signing up for patrol duty with her. He wasn’t subtle about it either, despite the threat of Bella’s wrath. Andromeda’s natural shyness was no match for such buoyancy. She’d had to learn to fight back, but her only real teachers had been her sisters, whose haughty derision did little to win anyone over, and in Andromeda’s case, it didn’t even make Ted leave her alone.



He was going to get her into trouble. He wasn’t doing himself any favors either; trouble with the Black family rarely turned out well for anybody. Bellatrix and her menacing presence may have gone (she’d left school the previous year), but Cissy, who was just two years younger than Andromeda, was sharper than she led others to believe. She’d most certainly tattle at even the slightest sign of inappropriate Black behavior, and that would be the end of Andromeda and possibly Ted as well. So she kept up the charade, even when no one was around to see her slip.



Mother and Father were already working to secure her betrothal to Rabastan Lestrange, Bella’s new brother-in-law. Such a union would at least outstrip Orion and Walburga’s in respectability – not that she would ever give voice to such an opinion. But he was such a cold man. She didn’t like his brother Rodolphus very much (though admittedly he suited Bella) and Rabastan seemed more of the same. They were all three deeply involved with the Dark Lord, and Bella wrote constantly to assure her that a marriage to Rabastan would be “most advantageous.� The thought unnerved Andromeda, and she frankly dreaded the match, trying hard not to think about lay ahead of her and instead focus on her final years of school. It never crossed her mind that she could refuse to marry him and choose a partner of her own; it was her duty, the thing she had been bred for, and she could not fail.



Her feelings for Ted, then, were mere infatuation. They had to be. She told herself this every night as she sank into bed, struggling to pinpoint exactly why. He was toying with her, she thought, young and awkward as she was, and he would eventually get bored and move on to the next girl. Maybe she liked the danger of it and enjoyed the rush (which was silly, Andromeda hated danger). Whatever the reason, their little dance had to end, and she would forget about him. The idea depressed her thoroughly, but it could be no other way. She would drop off to sleep hours later, still imagining his hand on her arm and his beautiful laugh.

A month into term, however, Andromeda’s attempts to rid her life of Ted Tonks were not going well, and it was certainly not for a lack of effort on her part. With her older sister out the picture, Ted had become bolder in his advances, and Andromeda was beginning to think that maybe he really fancied her. Though she made sure to sign up for patrols on nights she knew he was busy, he seemed to show up in the corridors at odd hours of the night on pretences that were most certainly fabricated. Andromeda even went so far as to detail her family history, from the the decapitated elves whose heads now adorned on her Uncle Orion’s wall to Aunt Elladora’s penchant for Muggle-hunting, but Ted only laughed (she realized later that he probably though she’d been joking). She started holing herself up in the Common Room or the girls’ lavatory during her free time – any place where Ted couldn’t find her. Her housemates, and the rest of the school for that matter, could hardly fail to notice his attention to her. Their responses seemed to cross House lines, for the general consensus was that Ted must be mad. The worst of it came just before Halloween when he went so far as to ask her, right in the middle of dinner, to go with him to Hogsmeade. She had refused him at once, flushing at the sight of the scandalized Slytherin faces around her, but his smile never broke. He put his hand on her shoulder and told her gently, “I suppose I’ll see you there anyway.�

“Get your hand off her, filth!� Narcissa cried. Andromeda’s blush deepened.

He didn’t flinch, instead flashing the onlookers his most winning grin before walking back to his friends at the Ravenclaw table, but for the rest of evening, Andromeda could tell he was in a bad mood.

Come Hogsmeade weekend, Andromeda, as much as she wanted to visit the village, decided it would be better to spend the day at Hogwarts and avoid such mortification again. She kept her head under her covers and pretended to be asleep while the other girls in her dormitory got ready for the excursion, yet she couldn’t help but hear their hushed gossiping.

“—but honestly, what is he playing at?� hissed one girl.

“I heard Lucius telling her sister he’d take care of the Mudblood if he bothers her again…�

“Yeah, but you know she hardly gets any attention from boys, she probably likes it,� another answered. The girls laughed.

“Well I just feel sorry for her family, it’s them who’ll pay the price. If word of this gets to them, I guarantee the Lestranges will break the engagement, and where will that leave Andromeda, not to mention poor Narcissa?�

“It’s not as though she’s encouraging him –“

“Anyone with proper wizarding pride would curse the bastard into oblivion for even suggesting such behavior, or at the very least have someone else do it!�

“I’ll bet she’s seeing him in secret. I’ve seen how she looks at him – she fancies him at least as much as he does her. Tonks isn’t the kind of person to go after a girl without a little encouragement, you know.�

There was a collective gasp, followed by an outbreak of babbling (they no longer bothered keeping their voices down) as they filed out the room.

Andromeda’s blood ran cold. If that was what they really thought, she was worse off than she’d even imagined. And Ted – perhaps she should warn him? But that would only elicit more tongue-wagging, of course, and that was the last thing either of them needed. She was sure Narcissa hadn’t written to Mother and Father yet, but her increasingly disapproving looks meant that Andromeda’s time was fast running out.

As soon as she was sure the other girls were long gone, Andromeda tumbled out of bed and headed for the showers, where she spent nearly three-quarters of an hour worrying about what on earth she was going to do next. She was pruney by the time she realized that with Ted in Hogsmeade today, and Andromeda safely drowning herself in the bathroom, no one could possibly have any suspicions about what was between them. She had refused him in front of the whole school, after all, and surely he would have asked some other girl out to save face. She scowled as she imagined Ted cuddling with a faceless girl at Madame Puddifoot’s, but, she thought, at least it would distract him from her.

After she’d dressed and combed her hair, she resigned herself to an afternoon of homework, though she threw her favorite book in her bag with her Transfiguration text in case she got too bored. She felt completely out of place once she reached the library; she practically had to wade through the sea of first and second years who were studying rather too noisily to get anything done. She opened her book in front of her and scratched the title of the essay and her name at the top of her parchment, then began to stare unseeingly at the page.

She’d managed to take in the first couple of pages, and she’d even written a pretty good introductory sentence for her essay, when she noticed the person sitting at the desk across from hers. She and Ted locked eyes for the briefest of moments before she looked away hastily and began rolling up her essay.

“Homework on a Saturday?� he whispered, moving his own things closer to her.

“I – I thought you’d be in Hogsmeade,� she mumbled lamely.

“Well, I was going to go, but the girl I asked didn’t want to go with me,� he said. “It’s not too late, you know.�

“Yes it is! It is too late!� she hissed, slamming her book closed. “I don’t know what I have to do to convince you of that!�

Ted raised his eyebrows at her.

“Time to be a good little Slytherin, is it?�

She gave him her haughtiest glare.

“I am a Black, Tonks, and while that might not mean anything to your kind –“

“Are you serious, Andromeda?� he asked, backing away slightly. “That’s how it is then?�

“That’s how it has always been and will always be,� she replied primly, picking up her book. “Now please, save us both the embarrassment and leave me alone.�

She turned on her heel and marched away, trying to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach. Ted’s shocked face swam in her mind’s eye, and a tremendous wave of guilt rushed over her.

Well, she thought wryly, at least he wasn’t snogging girls in Hogsmeade.