Every hero dies a tragic death.
It has been seven long years she knows, fourteen journeys in this scarlet train and nothing stopping her from going insane other than the incessant rain and the rhythmic tap of her fingers on the sill. What would normally annoy her, make her want to smash vases and break mirrors, now seemed like her only chance of redemption, and with that blessed sweet escape from herself.
For in her mind it all comes down to one simple equation, the train means home and home means Bella. Andromeda hates the train.
***
The world outside is grey and bleak, shattered glass frosted over in one endless monotony with bursts of red and gold, except it is an illusion, she slowly and contemptuously shakes her head. Andromeda, you great fool, do you still think that there is red and gold? If perhaps she had taken one look in the mirror then, she would have seen the red and gold.
It is still pouring outside and every raindrop seems to be tearing her, one at a time they are all breaking her down till her face is a mask of perfect poise and her eyes show only
pain.
It seems so strange to her that there had been a point when the very concept of laughter hadn’t been so absurd, when Sirius had still been with her. When she shuts her eyes tight she can still him, no matter how much she has told herself to forget, (or rather hoped to forget, but she doesn’t know that), and it’s a thought lurking in the darkest recesses of her mind, rising unbidden when she doesn’t want it to. All she wishes for is that she can run away from everything. But running away is the coward’s way out, and facing the world is dangerous.
Perhaps everything you were told was wrong,
Perhaps you should have been just as strong,
But you were a coward, weren’t you, Andromeda?
She certainly isn’t a hero.
In the fall, when the world is dying, she goes to see Sirius.
It is an act of pure selfishness, to see him pushing his long hair out of his eyes and inviting her in, when all she does is stand outside and watch how his mother pointedly ignores the both of them, how Regulus always seems to be lurking at the foot of the stairs looking at her and Sirius with what might well be hero-worship and how Sirius in his single act of defiance is turning his back to them all.
She thinks that he is dying too.
Perhaps you should have worried then,
And not an eternity later,
When you watched him slip away.
Two decades later, but has anything really changed? He is still a Black. And as he slowly falls into the veil, ever so gently, and just out of sight, it seems that all time has frozen still, and his motion is shattering her heart into millions of little pieces that are thrown into the wind.
When she hears the news, she turns around, carefully slamming the door behind her. Foolish person that Sirius was, she thinks bitterly, He had his hero’s death.
And then she falls into a dead faint.
He stands above her, watching as she slowly, languorously falls. He thinks that he has just seen the world falling.
Perhaps you should have fainted then,
And never woken up,
It would have been a safer world,
She steps out of the train and walks slowly, mindlessly even, through the bleak streets of old, dead London, her feet tapping on the narrow, cobblestone path in a way that reminds her of only death and despair and the bitter taste of regret, swirled with her tears and a drowning world. It seems that time itself might have stopped. When everything else has stopped or died, why wouldn’t it?
The train she left so far behind is her act of defiance this time. For once it isn’t Sirius, or even Bella who is standing up, it is she and the irony makes her laugh.
Perhaps you shouldn’t have laughed then,
You wouldn’t have had to cry.
Later when you saw him die.
She is the final survivor in a war that was lost before it began.
Andromeda is filled with an uncontrollable mirth, the strangest desire to laugh which she has only when the world is crashing down. And it’s building up within her, in an ever rising spiral of emotion which just seems to be going up and up and up and up until she…
breaks.
And for what must be the first time in her life- she cries.
Perhaps you should have lived on then,
And seen the world change,
It’s always been this distant thing,
It rises and falls again.
Thrown Into The Wind by wendelin the wierd
Chapter Notes: Yes, the 'he' mentioned halfway through the chapter is Sirius after death. Let us all avoid the confusion.