She is fourteen and alive with her catch - a bowl of fruit smuggled from the kitchens. Her sisters will chide her, but she doesn't care enough to turn and go back. She is fourteen and feels invincible the first time she sees him, gangly, curly-haired boy with big, Slytherin-green eyes and an easy smile. He seems good-natured, but she cannot let her guard down. Not in front of Hufflepuffs.
(Not that there's anything really wrong with Hufflepuffs, just that they're not brave enough or smart enough or clever enough to be in the other houses, so they just get lumped into "hard-working" and learn to love yellow. It isn't their fault, really, but a Black should never be seen in the company of any sort of inferiority. She's always hated that decree, but breaking it now would be a mistake.)
She gathers herself, standing straighter, and arranges the bowl of fruit before walking haughtily by him. He smirks and watches her, but she refuses to acknowledge his presence by anything other than the practiced hmph of a higher being passing cockroaches. As she stalks off, she hears his voice, mocking -
"You don't have to be rude."
And she decides to hate him, whoever he is, for the rest of her life, because he knows nothing of rude. She is fourteen and alive, clutching a bowl of dying once-flowers and hating a Hufflepuff for seeing through her mask. Even though he really didn't.
--
She is fifteen and he's sitting next to her in Potions. His name is Theodore (Theodore? What kind of name is Theodore?) and he's annoying and friendly and cute and gets all in her personal space. She tells him that her name is Andromeda, and that she will be forced to cause him great harm if he dares call her Andy again, but he just grins and starts calling her Meda, then. She asks Professor Slughorn if he would please give her a new partner, but he refuses and Theodore laughs.
"You'll have to do more than that to get rid of me, Meda!"
She sends him her perfected Aunt-Wallburga-Black-Ice-Glare, but he isn't looking to see it. Violently - or as close to violently as a lady can ever be - she continues making her potion, until he insists that she's doing it all wrong. She hisses angrily at him that she knows what she's doing, but he keeps saying that she'll mess it up.
She realizes halfway through that she has been doing it wrong, and faces a dilemma - either swallow her pride and fix the problem and endure Theodore's smugness over being right, or keep her dignity for another half-hour and keep going as she is and then endure Theodore's smugness over being right. Rather than face the rest of the class believing her to be a shoddy potion-maker (which she is, despite all of her mother's insipid lessons), she decides to fix it. Theodore, strangely, doesn't comment.
--
"You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, but you're one hell of a bitch." It's Theodore, or Ted, or whatever the hell he's going by now. She is fifteen-and-a-half and has just received a letter from her mother telling her to make friends with the young Master Malfoy, for no apparent reason, but Andromeda is not stupid. Her mother is planning a wedding, it would seem. And Young Master Malfoy (as everyone seems to call him) will be a wonderful match for the middle Black daughter, the not-as-pretty-as-Narcissa-or-Bellatrix Andromeda, who sleeps hard and won't hear him go in and out of bed at night.
She is in no mood to listen to Theodore-Ted-Teddy-Whatever Tonks. She wants to scream, or to hit something, not be insulted by a Hufflepuff who can't remember her full name. "Leave me alone," she says tersely, and continues walking, "I don't see why you insist upon following me around all the time, like some sick puppy. I am not interested in the infatuation of a pathetic Mudblood."
For a moment, she thinks she's stung him hard enough to make him go, but to no avail - he walks up behind her. "See, it's things like that. I'm not sure I believe you. I mean, you're obviously in a bad mood - actually, you look like you're about to cry - and I don't remember ever saying I was infatuated with you. Just that you're amazingly beautiful, which you are. But that doesn't mean anything."
She just keeps walking, trying desperately to ignore him, letter from her mother clutched tightly in her (beautiful, elegant, manicured) fingers. She blinks back tears she didn't realize were in her eyes; she absolutely loathes Lucius Malfoy and his hideous family. How could her mother do this, without even considering her wishes?
"I don't think you really hate me as much as you say. You get mad at me all the time, sure, but you never actually tell me to go away."
"I believe I just did," she hisses, and he turns to her, suddenly alarmed.
"You are crying!"
"Leave me alone!"
He does.
--
She sits next to Lucius Malfoy the next day at breakfast who smiles airily at her and offers her the toast before telling her bluntly that her sister is much prettier.
Delicately, she takes the toast and smiles her sweetest, most demure smile, before telling him that the gamekeeper is more handsome than he is. He laughs because he is supposed to laugh, because it is a joke. But there's no warmth to his laughter, no mirth. He is angry, and she does not care.
Her mother sends her a furious letter the next day (for a Black would never stoop to the indignity of a Howler, at least, not in such a public place. Andromeda knows one will be waiting for her in her dorm). It says all the same things, over and over down the entire letter - don't put the family to shame, be a good daughter, don't you dare insult Master Malfoy like that again, he is a very good and respectable Pure-Blood man to marry, blah, blah blah. She tears it up and puts her name on the list to stay at Hogwarts over Christmas break, right under the name Theodore Tonks.
--
He sits beside her at Christmas dinner and she pretends that she got wonderful, expensive gifts from her family (annoyed that she had refused to come home, they didn't send her anything.)
--
She is sixteen and little cousin Sirius is sorted into Gryffindor. She makes eye contact as he passes, and he grins at her. She can't help but smile, even though Sirius has a terrible future coming for him. The Black family isn't known for sheltering rebels. And even though she knows that someone - if only Narcissa - will tell them, she decides that it won't be her. She'd keep his secret, if it could be kept.
Everyone's too surprised to clap, so she starts. It dies quickly, though, and the Hall seems worse for her trying.
Across the hall, a gangly, curly-haired boy with big, Slytherin-green eyes smiles at her, though. She ignores him and watches as Brown, Ophelia is sorted into Ravenclaw.
She doesn't want to think of how Aunt Wallburga is going to react to the news that her son isn't a Slytherin, and instead chooses to sully his good name with blood traitors and Mudbloods. She thinks that even death may not be able to stop her Aunt's rage. All because of a house assignment? But such is the Black dynasty. Sirius will be ostracized, just as she will be forced to marry Lucius Malfoy and Narcissa will be forced to spend the rest of her life entertaining stuffy old ladies. They all suffer the same fates in the end, just in what order and how severely depends on the image in the frame; the face behind the mask.
She is a slave, and she's never fully realized this until now. She is a slave the way Sirius is refusing to be. She has played dutiful daughter and taken their etiquette lessons and poured their tea and wine, all for this prospect - a future of more of the same.
She meets Ted Tonks's eyes.
--
He wasn't expecting it. She asked to see him late at night, behind the greenhouses - find a way out, she said, you'll think of something. I'll be waiting. There's something I need of you. He was expecting homework help or possibly even a favor like sneaking into Hogsmeade or something to that effect. He wasn't expecting her to kiss him. And when she does, he looks as her suspiciously and asks why this is so important, why was she acting like this was a favor, something he would regret?
"Because you will regret it," she says quietly, and doesn't elaborate.
And she's wrong, because he doesn't regret it, but it comes back to haunt Andromeda later when her sister catches her and sends and owl home to their mother. She wakes to a Howler the next morning, shrieking - so loud the entire dorm wakes up - about my daughter consorting with Mudbloods and how dare you and no child of mine and other things she tries very hard to ignore. Her dorm-mates stare at her, aghast, as she simply stands and brushes her hair while her mother wails in the background.
It is simply a front, though. She walks into the bathroom and collapses against the door, sobbing. She is surely not strong enough for any of this. Too weak to defy, too strong to be a puppet, she can do nothing but watch.
--
She is seventeen and newly graduated when he asks her to marry him. He says he's in love with her and promises to take her away from her horrible family and never make her pour tea or entertain old ladies or wear ridiculous old dresses and she hates herself for running away. But she can't answer him, because to say yes would be to sever her ties with the only things she's ever known but to say no would be to condemn herself to a lifetime of misery.
And she can't choose - jump off the cliff into the unknown, or let the tiger eat her? She can't decide, so she lets her sister drag her away and doesn't answer. When she glances back, he's still watching.
Later, he tells her that this is why he decides to try again, when she's alone. She's in Diagon Alley and has just finished talking to Sirius - telling him to ignore the way his parents are treating him and just do what he thinks is right - and is feeling rebellious and reckless. So she says yes.
It's the worst mistake of her life, and she wouldn't change it even if she could. Her parents yell and shriek and call her filthy names like blood traitor and shameful whore and things even worse, until tears prick at the corner of her eyes and she hates them all. But they tell her to go back and give that disgusting Mudblood back his ring or find her own place to live, and so she leaves. In a fit of rage, with too-small-for-his-age Sirius standing in the doorway with wide eyes while an even smaller Regulus cries behind him, she snatches her wand and storms out the door. Her sister doesn't even glance at her.
Sirius runs after her and gives her a huge hug. She tells him not to listen to anything they say and he salutes her.
She is seventeen and alive.