Metamorphosis

Andromeda and her daughter navigate their way through bloodstains and transformations.

Disclaimer: None of it belongs to me.

I.

Labor is difficult, even if you are a witch, and you are exhausted when it all comes to an end. No, not an end, more a beginning of sorts, but at least a respite from the pain. You have looked forward to this moment ever since you can remember, and had long believed—clung to the hope, in fact—that it would finally let you escape from that life you rejected into this one of your choosing. But you had never imagined that you are stuck in a cycle you can never truly escape until the purple little goblin of a baby, beautiful and perfect, is handed, newly cleaned and swaddled, into your arms and opens her eyes for the first time.

Grey. Still caught up in the confusion of leaving muffled swimming darkness warmth for sharp gravity too-bright air, they are storm cloud grey like the ocean under a sweeping fall of rain. Cold and lost and old as time.

Ted's gently confused warm chocolate eyes tell you clearly that he cannot understand why you have burst into tears.

1.

When you are five, it all comes together. You have thrown a temper tantrum, an activity you are shockingly good at, throwing your blocks around the room without hands—no Squib in this family. And when you raise your round red-splotched tear-stained face to meet her ivory cool expression, it clicks. Her face goes paler, so white for a moment that it frightens you, and she has to turn away, pressing an elegant hand against trembling lips.

Your sobs break off into hiccoughs, and your hands fall into your lap. You still feel like crying, but no longer out of frustration. You hate when Mummy looks at you that way, and now you realize why. She was looking at you and seeing someone else. You know, because you heard a name you've never heard before slip out from between her fingers. Bella.

The room feels cold and empty because Mummy is crying in the other room, her long, delicate fingers trying to hold in the sobs. It's your eyes, you know it is; they remind her of something she wants to forget and can't.

If only you had Daddy's lovely warm eyes, laughing like hot chocolate on a winter's morning. Wouldn't it be wonderful, if only you had eyes that don't remind Mummy of anything at all except the Daddy you both love so much? Wouldn't it be perfect…?

You've forgotten all about the morning's storm by the time Daddy gets home for dinner. You run to meet him at the door, as you always do, eager to show him the castle you've made from your colorful blocks. He swings you up into his arms, laughing, and you bury your face into his coat, cold still clinging to the rough wool from the walk home. But his laughter dies as abruptly as your tears did earlier when your eyes finally meet his, and you cannot understand why he turns to pale or why he runs into the kitchen, shouting for Mummy.

II.

Adaptation is harder than you had thought it would be. Lying in your bed through the long lonely nights of Seventh Year, stuck in Slytherin when all you wanted was to be sitting in front of Ravenclaw's fire with Ted, it all seemed so easy. A small house in a small town, evenings and nights and mornings with Ted, and sooner or later, children.

No threat of Father's punishments lingering in the background of every decision, no lectures from Mother about "upholding the family honor," no watching Bella travel further and further down a road that is frightening in its total darkness, no feeling Narcissa grow cold and colder, no worrying over when Sirius' rebellions would lead to an explosion, no feeling a pang at the lostness in Regulus' eyes. No big stuffy, self-congratulatory, pompous parties, no restrictions on friendship and conversations, no more nasty looks from the students from other Houses, no pressure to make an appropriate marriage and ensure that the Black blood, if not its name, will live on.

And life without all that is wonderful. Simple, for the first time you can remember, and there is more delight than you could have imagined in making your own decisions, in not worrying about "what people will say," in arguing with Ted about little things and knowing that he will still love you anyways.

But you find yourself telling Dora to stand up straight and sit still, for heaven's sake, and can't she act like a lady? And you cannot keep yourself from using your daughter's name—the name that you had to give her when you saw those eyes at her birth—like a whip; you sometimes think that the name was the cruelest thing you ever did to your Dora.

And when your lovely little girl comes home from school after First Year and announces that everyone at school calls her Tonks, you cannot chastise her, for who would want to go through life with the weight of Nymphadora, and besides, you are Andie now and have been for years.

2.

There is a certain grace that only a nine-year-old girl, oblivious to everyone around her and wrapped up in her own world, can attain. And so you dance, caught up in spring winds and the flutter of butterflies, pretending to be a princess for once, and not a dragonslayer. You spin on springy moss, laughing and singing a song you make up as you go. And there is nothing else in the world but the motion of wind and your skirt and the music only you can hear.

Mummy had been laughing as she packed the picnic this morning, something she barely does at all since Sirius was taken away, and Daddy whistled all the way to the field with the lone oak tree. It was a perfect day, riding in the Muggle car Daddy had borrowed from his Muggle brother, you bouncing on the seat between your happy parents. You three ate on a blanket charmed out of thin air, a blanket that made you feel like you were lying on a cloud, and then you went to chase butterflies, leaving your parents to talk softly on the blanket. Daddy sprawled out on his back, and Mummy laid her head on his shoulder, and you climbed the tree while the sun set in the west.

But after a while, Mummy sat up to call you back; at first you did not hear her; you were dancing. But then you hear your name, your full name, that dreadfully long, pretentious one that you will never understand, the one that frightens you just a little for reasons you could never name, and you are yanked out of the music.

Because Mummy is standing in the middle of the blanket, her face carefully controlled, a look you recognize from the few times you went with her to Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade and she bumped into "old friends" who sniffed and looked down their noses at her. And she is saying that you have to go, and bending to pack everything up into the basket, forgetting that she is a witch and all she has to do is wave her wand.

You shoot looks at Daddy all through the ride back, hoping that he will share your confusion, but his face is almost as set as Mummy's, and this ride is so different from the last: no silly stories or Daddy trying to sing old Howling Banshee songs or Mummy braiding your hair with nimble fingers. Only silence, tense and taut, and the movement of the road beneath you, and you feeling as though you aren't moving at all.

And you know that you shouldn't eavesdrop, that it isn't polite and that people who do deserve what they hear, but you stand just outside Mummy and Daddy's door after they tuck you into to bed that night, sneaking on silent toes. And you hear her voice, though there are no tears this time, and that is scary: Cissy used to dance just like that. Just like that.

You creep back to bed, and lay staring at the darkness that hides the ceiling, and you think if it worked once…. And you try again, harder this time, pouring yourself into the effort.

The next morning, you trip as you climb out of bed.

III.

Sometimes, as much as you avoid it, you run right into echoes of your old life. The letter that lies on the table, exactly where you dropped it all those weeks ago, the one that said that Reggie is dead. Walking through the gardens around the ruins of the old Muggle castle outside of town and finding a bush of black roses, the reflection of a thousand balls and parties. The rare occasions that Ted brings home the Prophet from work and you catch a glimpse of a face you knew from afternoon teas or Charms classes. The times you run right into someone you knew in that once-upon-a-time nightmare of a life, and as you part ways, you hear them whisper to someone beside them, She's a Black, you know. Has a sister and a cousin locked away You-Know-Where.

Your family is gone, if they were ever really there to begin with, and so you could not go back even if you wanted to. Father died fighting on the wrong side during the War, as you had known he would. Mother went mad soon after, and now tears around the big old house, refusing to be taken to St. Mungo's, attended only by her house-elves. Cissy has wrapped herself up in her little son and her cold husband, and has no other interests now. Reggie died trying to do the right thing, the courageous thing, for once in his life, the poor boy. And Bella and Sirius, the cousin you love and the sister who thinks you betrayed her, are locked away in the same place, for crimes that are far too similar, though you thought their paths exactly opposite.

And it doesn't help that there are mirrors in the house and that there is a little girl who, despite her new eyes, reminds you so much of that life that there are moments, especially when you are tired or ill or worried, that you cannot look at her. So you just close your eyes and pull your baby—who is not a baby now— into your arms and hold her. And the deepest graces are the simplest: she smells like Ted.

3.

You remember your cousin Sirius quite well; better than Mum would ever expect. He used to come quite often for about three years, when you were a little girl, and he was the only member of your mother's family that you ever met. There were always cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents during holidays: Christmases at your Dad's parents' house in London, holidays at the shore with his older sister's family, birthday dinners with everyone packed into your own little cottage. Family was something that you took for granted, and most of the time, Mum seemed to fit into that life so easily that you thought of the Tonkses as her family as well.

Except that there was Sirius.

Mum was different when he was around: happier and more melancholy, and she always brooded after he left. You didn't understand at the time how much he meant to her, that he had become more than just a person, her cousin, her friend; he was now a symbol of so many other things, and when you look back on it, you can't help but see that that must have been a burden for him.

You have that in common.

But you almost completely forget about him in the busyness of your own life, and the memories of Mum's face pale and frozen and her trembling hands and her weeks-long silence after Dad came home that black and blustery November afternoon with the Daily Prophet in his hands and terrible news in his eyes—those memories blow away in the wind.

But somehow you know that Mum hasn't forgotten; the picture is hidden at the bottom of her desk drawer, underneath old letters and advertisements, but you know that she takes it out often and just stares at it and doesn't shed a single tear. And somehow you know that she still doesn't believe it of him. To be honest, you don't either.

And there is a day when you come home from school for the summer, finally having gained permission to bring your red-headed partner-in-crime with you, though Charlie Weasley seems scarcely to belong to the same world as your mother. And when you finally come back down to the ground, and run to lunch with your broom in hand, Charlie just behind you, Mum's voice is almost accusing as she sees your laughing face.

"Why do you have to have Sirius' smile?"

Thankfully, she said it quietly enough that Charlie didn't hear; you doubt you could explain it to him; he has no idea what your Mum's maiden name is. But you heard, and the worlds rattle around inside of your head like bones until you finally sigh in resignation and begin to flip through magazines to find a smile that you like.

One more sacrifice on the altar to the past.

IV.

Other people may not believe it, but to you it is the ultimate truth. People are simply born into one world or another, and no matter how hard they may try to escape, they never really do.

When it is you three—two, more often now that Dora has gone off to school—alone in your little house, simple days blowing by like dandelion fluff in the wind, you can almost forget that truth. But no matter how you want to, you cannot stay in the house forever, and it wouldn't be fair to Ted or Dora even if you could.

But nothing hurts quite as much as seeing Ted with his family: their easy rapport, the thousand arguments that are more for the joy of debate than because of any real disagreement, the casual affection, the little private jokes from the simple days of his childhood. And Dora fits in so well that sometimes you cannot believe that she truly is your daughter. Because while her and Ted's definitions of family may be laughter and love and food and warmth and teasing, yours could not be further away.

Family always meant one thing: blood. Family was about power and tradition and keeping everyone else at bay. It wasn't that you all wanted to be together; it was more that there was no one else who was worthy of being with any of you.

And so, though you smile and laugh and eat right along with all the other Tonkses (sometimes you believe that the name change means nothing at all, because you feel just as Black as ever), you never really feel comfortable. You were brought up to sit straight-backed and not speak unless spoken to, and relaxation is an experience well beyond your ken. And you do love them, you really do, and you know that for some inexplicable reason, they love you, though they really don't have to. But sometimes you know that they feel it as acutely as you do:

You do not belong to this world, and you never will.

4.

When you were little, Mum used to talk all day. As she moved through the house, cleaning and straightening up and writing letters and cooking and reading old books while you lay on the floor with your blocks or your toy dragons, enchanted to fly around the room, or your crayons, she would talk. You don't really remember what she spoke about; it didn't really matter. She did it to fill up the silence, you suppose, but you were a baby, and that is the way that babies learn to speak. You silently absorbed every pronunciation, every word choice quite unconsciously, and you never really realized it until you went to school.

But everyone there teased you about your old-fashioned speech, and for the first time you recognized that you talked different than the other students. Not just that you had a northern accent, distinctly different from the London talk, or that you didn't know the Muggle slang like the Muggleborns. There was something different, higher and more elegant, yet stuffier, about your words.

But despite the teasing, you are still popular and well liked and an excellent student, so there is really no need to change the way you speak. You forget about it, most of the time, only reminded on the rare occasions that the school will gain a new student, a transfer from Beauxbatons or someplace like that. And then the teasing will start up again, but it is good-natured and so you don't really care.

But the day before your sixteenth birthday, you're helping Mum make cakes for the party—helping isn't the right word; impeding is more like, because you've already broken three eggs on the floor, spilled flour all over the table, tipped over the milk jug, and shattered one bowl—and something makes you think of it. You aren't sure what prompts the thought; it's one of those twists in the mind, following the completely illogical progression of thoughts that every person goes through every day, and suddenly you remember that you talk differently.

You are not a tentative person, you never have been. You charge into any situation without a thought beyond a new adventure or helping someone. But you've never been completely comfortable asking your mother questions. You don't mind easy ones like, what year was Hogwarts founded? or can I get a new broom next time we're in Diagon Alley? or how did Dad propose to you? Those questions Mum answers like anyone else's mother, and that is that. But you've learned well over the years not to ask questions about Mum's past; it only causes her pain.

But this question seems simple enough, and so you ask it.

And when you're done, she does not look up from the cake pan she is filling, and all she says is, You don't talk like me. You sound nothing like me. You talk like Regulus.

The changing of the voice is easy: you just focus on subtly shifting the shape and size of your vocal cords, though you have to experiment for a while before you get a sound that is just right. It's the diction that's hard, because really, you have to learn to think in a completely different way, and all you can do is be thankful that Matthew Clearwater doesn't laugh at you in his loud Cockney way when you ask him to teach you how to talk like he does.

V.

Growing older is an uncomfortable experience for anyone, you suppose. Trying to get out of bed each morning and finding yourself popping and creaking all over the place, discovering strands of silver in your hair while you brush your teeth, looking down at your hands in the middle of weeding the garden and realizing that those are definitely wrinkles—all of this is awkward, of course, but if that was all that growing old meant to you, you really wouldn't think twice about it, because, after all, Ted is growing old right along with you, and that is all that really matters.

But that isn't all. Of course it isn't. You're Andromeda Black Tonks, and you've never done things the way other people do.

So to you, growing old means the sudden, sharp realization that comes one day and dogs at you like a stitch in your side after a long run, that you've lived more of your life as Andie Tonks than as Andromeda Black and that this little stone cottage is more familiar than the big haunted mansion ever was. It means knowing that if you ran into Bella or Cissy or Sirius or Reggie on the streets, you wouldn't recognize them.

Because in your mind, they are still young. Bella is still aflush with the freshness of her recent marriage and her new path, Cissy still has a perfect complexion with flowing ice-gold hair, Sirius is still a laughing teenager racing into trouble, and Reggie is still a little boy. None of them make it past about twenty in your mind, and try as you might, you cannot imagine them older. Except for Sirius, whose memory is still too painful to look at dead-on, you have not seen them in over twenty years. You wonder how they picture you, if they ever think of you. You think that they might not.

Growing older means the final dawning of the knowledge that this is your life, and you will never know a different one.

But still, when you find out that Sirius has escaped from Azkaban, you begin to look for him. Not scouring the country or making subtle inquiries with lowlifes or anything assertive. But you find yourself pausing in your work to glance out the window, and you no longer play the wireless when you're in alone in the house in the vain hope that you might hear footsteps or an Apparating pop or the roar of an enchanted motorcycle outside. And for the first time in your life, you hate him, just a little, because of the easy way he has of jerking you abruptly out of the life you have lived for more than twenty years and back to the one you both longed to escape.

And the most painful realization is that Dora may have to hunt him down. Your nightmares are full of dark-shadowed dank-smelling alleys where your little girl holds a trembling wand at the throat of the only member of your family that you ever loved.

You bring it up in conversation one night when Dora is home for the weekend—what would she do if she had to search for, had to capture Sirius Black?

You don't ever remember seeing her so shocked, and you wish that you could have talked about your family more. But there's no going back now. And her voice, so often sloppy and overly cheerful now, is quiet and subdued as she tells you that she has to do her duty, that if she found him, she would send him back to Azkaban, but that she would never, ever kill him—that she loved him, too.

And that is all you can ask, of her and of life.

5.

You cling to your hair as the last bit of you that is really you—or, at least, the you you were born as. You are so comfortable now as a clumsy, brown-eyed, sloppy-smiled, slang-talking tomboy that you almost believe that that is what you really are. You are happy as Tonks, happier than you ever could be as Nymphadora, or even Dora, and so you trip your way through life quite happily.

But you keep your real hair, jet black, loosely curled, tumbling halfway down your back, even if it looks awkward with your wide shoulders and your Keeper's hands. You are awkward, after all; it's your trademark; all the students and even teachers at Auror training think it's the biggest joke: Tonks can't walk through a room without breaking a teapot, but let her loose on a dark wizard and there's no one more graceful. It is funny, you suppose; there's something ironic about the fact that you regain your Black grace when you're chasing down the ones that remind you of the Blacks.

Of course, it gets terribly in the way during training unless you tie it back in a knot, but you let it loose most of the time when you aren't on the job. You always thought that Mum loved your hair; she used to run her fingers through it and get a far away look in her eyes.

But this night, when you come home from dinner, eager for a real meal and real conversation and any semblance of companionship after the emptiness of your little flat, you sit down on the couch beside her after dinner, and she twists a finger in it.

Mum has her hair cut in a bob cut, just below her chin and has for as long as you can remember. You had always imagined her in school with her hair just like that; you thought that she wears it that way because that's the way she always has and she's used to it. After all, there are plenty of pictures, both Muggle and Wizard, of Dad's family scattered all over the house, but there are none from Mum's past. Just a couple of Sirius, who has just escaped from Azkaban, to your eternal confusion, and one of Regulus that you found when you were fifteen. So how would you know what Mum looked like way back then?

That's why you're surprised when you look over at her to find her staring at your hair with such a naked pain in her eyes that you can hardly bear it. My hair was just like this. Just this length, just this color. The first thing your father loved about me was my hair. It was the envy of all the Slytherins.

You've never been so shocked in your life; Mum has never mentioned what house she was in; the only reason you know is because you asked Dad once just before you left for school. He told you, then made you promise that you would never bring it up around Mum. And you never have.

As you walk slowly home from your Apparation point, you come to a decision. You will give it up. The last bit of you that genes or God or fate or whatever gave you. You have to. You should have known it all along, but you managed to avoid it till now. Now you have no choice.

It is the most painful transformation you have ever made. Short, very short. And then you cast about for a color, something you will be able to explain away. And you shove your hand in your pocket for some of that Muggle gum Dad still slips you and pop a piece in your mouth. Before you do, though, you glance at it for a minute.

Alright, why not?

Goodbye, Nymphadora.

VI.

You are all too aware that she does it for you.

Every change, every shift, every metamorphosis is an act of selflessness, each one designed so as to cause you the least amount of pain. And you hate your family and your past for scarring you to the point that you are forced to make your own daughter change who she is so that you can live with yourself.

But you couldn't be prouder of her. She could have used her gifts in a chameleon-like way or to further selfish ends or to gain attention. But she doesn't. You may have failed her in so many ways, but you did right by her in one: you taught her to use each and every gift that she had to fight the darkness. And her fight is so much deeper and purer than your own that all you can do is be so incredibly grateful that she is yours.

She is a far better daughter than you deserve; she is amazing.

You only hope that one day she will be able to forgive you.

6.

You cannot lie to him. He is too noble, too honest, too good for you to ever deceive him. And so you've known from the first moment that you realized you loved him—sitting across from him in an Order meeting, watching him make yet another stupid selfless choice for the good of the world—that you would have to show him sooner or later, because your everyday life is a sort of deception, one that is incredibly heavy to bear.

And so as you lay beside him on the hard, narrow bed that is too small for the two of you, you come to a decision. You sit up, sliding his arm off of your waist to wrap the sheets around you and face him. His eyes are a question, and you answer it by telling him that you have to tell him something.

He is so patient, so good and does not ask anymore, and that is one of the things you love about him. Because this is hard—you so rarely let yourself be as you are even when you are alone, and no one has seen the real you—all of you—since…since the day your eyes reminded Mum of her sister. You know that this is a turning point in your life, a pivotal moment, and how it turns out will determine who you will be.

It takes every bit as much concentration to go back as it did to go forward. You close your eyes, concentrating fiercely: first hair, the easiest; voice and body shape, requiring the most energy; skin and features, straining to remember their earliest form; eyes, the most difficult because they reveal the most.

And when you open them, they are grey, and you are Black.

He does not say anything at all, and you love him more. But he slides his hands through your hair, over your shoulders and face, across your lips, to your eyelids. And then he blesses those places with his lips, whispering that he loves you, that nothing could ever change that.

And what he doesn't say is much more important: he doesn't say I love you no matter how you look or I love you no matter who your family is or I love you even though your looks are a lie. He doesn't have to. You know, somehow, that those thoughts don't even enter his head, that that will never matter to him.

You lean into him, holding locks of your hair in front of your face, examining your hands, gazing at grey eyes in the mirror on the table by the bed. You smile. Your smile.

And when he asks you what you're doing, smiling that way, you just close your eyes.

Forgiving Mum, you say.

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This is not the story I had in my mind when I started working on it several weeks ago, and it comes across more negatively towards Andromeda than I had planned; I truly do love her. But once you're a Black, there's really no escape, now is there? I seem to be rather fixated on my conviction that there is more to Tonks than what we usually see, and I wanted to explore that, as well as what life must have been like for Andromeda after leaving her old life behind.

I'm also not as pleased with this as I wish that I was—I'm not sure that I did it justice. Several patches seem rough to me, especially Part 4. So I apologize that it isn't up to my usual standards, but I hope you enjoyed it anyways.

As always, reviews keep me motivated, so if you can spare the time, I'd love to hear from you.