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Tweak says, "Mind if I borrow your date?"

DO NOT EAT TOM RIDDLE'S SNAKE (

missmegan) wrote,
@ 2009-09-01 14:38:00

one hundred prompts; family; andromeda.
A non-requested ficlet for the third person sample of Andromeda Tonks at Causa Mortis because I gave up on trying to come up with one on my own.

WORDS; 1,582.

Andromeda had been sitting in her room for past three hours after having a discussion- no, an argument- with her family on her recent engagement to Ted. They refused to support what they considered a "horrid" or "ridiculous" notion, and had plainly told her that she was forbidden from speak to Ted again, firmly putting the matter to rest. By all rights, Andromeda should have said "Yes, father." and actually meant it, but Andromeda wasn't so sure that she could actually keep herself from doing as her parents told her.

She loved Ted, she knew that. Despite the fact that yes, she was only seventeen, and yes, Ted was her first boyfriend (well, now technically fiancé but she hadn't told her family that she'd said yes when he'd proposed), and yes, she was aware of the fact that when it came right down to it, she didn't have a real say in who she married, or what she did with her life in general it felt like, but Andromeda didn't think she could stand being smothered like this anymore, and she just wasn't quite sure that she understood why her parents wouldn't allow her to do what she liked.

Andromeda had discovered, over the course of the last few years, that there was a whole new world outside the place of pureblood wizarding society. Yes, she had been aware of it before, but she hadn't really realized what it was beyond "the people you can't associate with" and "the places you can't go". It was a fine world, not all that different the wizarding world- as far as she was concerned, anyway. It just didn't have magic. Muggles and muggleborns weren't inferior to wizards, they just didn't have any magic, and while a lot of people picked that as a reason for their inferiority, she doubted they realized the fact that while wizards had magic, muggles had technology.

Things like televisions with pictures and sounds in a little box that were just for entertainment. Photographs that didn't move. Books on thousands of topics, most of them not filled with spells and things or magical theory, but just whatever they thought was important. And while most wizards would find all these things completely, and entirely uninteresting, Andromeda found them absolutely fascinating. Perhaps because it was just so different from the world she knew, but she wanted to be a part of that other world.

Leaning against the glass of the window, looking down on the front garden below her bedroom window, she sighed. Who had ever thought that getting engaged would be so complicated? It was almost like- no, it was that they'd basically given her a choice. Her family, or the boy she was utterly in love with.

Her family wouldn't be changing their minds about the matter anytime soon, Andromeda could be quite sure of that. And how could she even consider leaving her family, all she had ever known, just for one boy?

Love. That was why.

Swinging her legs off of the cushion at her window sill, finding that she was still wearing her shoes. She'd been up here for hours since dinner, one would have thought that she would have remembered to take her shoes off, but she hadn't bothered. She'd been too busy thinking about what to do.

She quickly walked over to her dresser, picking up a quill, and taking out a piece of parchment. Her quill hovered over it for a long moment. What would she write? "Oh, I like Ted, so I'm going to completely disobey your wishes and marry him. Hope you can come for tea some time!" Or maybe, "Love trumps family, oops." Or even, "You're coming to the wedding, aren't you? Great! Bye!" She doubted any of those would go over well. Not that anything she could ever say would make what she was doing alright. She was disobeying them, they wouldn't "take it well" no matter how she said it.

A drop of ink hit the parchment, and she sighed. Maybe they'd understand, come to accept what she was about to do, someday. Maybe not tomorrow when they found the letter, maybe not in a few weeks when she didn't come crawling back, maybe not within the next couple of years, but eventually they'd surely understand. She hoped, at least.

And with that desperate, fleeting hope in mind, she wrote the letter. She didn't address it to anyone in particular, whoever found it would share it with the rest of the household. Perhaps a house-elf would find it in the early morning, and frantically tell her father. Or her father would hear her sneaking out and she wouldn't even get out the front door. Or Narcissa would hear her leaving on the Knight Bus, and wake their parents. Anything was possible. Well, anything other than the notion of her family being overjoyed with her letter and inviting her to a party at a muggle restaurant where they would dance and sing and all be wearing pink, as that was summarily very unlikely.

She wrote that while she knew that they didn't approve of her relationship with Ted, she was in love with him (why she thought that would sound at all mature was beyond her), and hoped that one day they would understand her reasons for doing what she was about to do. It was fairly short, and it was to the point. Signing it, Love, Andromeda, she folded it in half, and set it on the dresser while she gathered some of her things.

What to take, and what to leave was not as hard as she would have thought it would be. She couldn't take many of her clothes, they were more suited to a young pureblood lady and would be entirely out of place in the muggle world. She couldn't take all of the jewelery she had, and carefully picked out a necklace that her mother had given her, and a couple of other things she cherished. She tucked everything carefully into the trunk she had once used for school things. A few books, a hand-mirror that had apparently been a family heirloom, her parchment and bottles of ink, her favouite quills, general things she felt she wanted to keep.

Mimsy the cat, a cat she had had for ten years, had died the year before, and so Andromeda didn't have to worry about tucking her into her cat carrier, which sat quietly in the corner of Andromeda's room, she having refused to have it thrown out. Thinking of Mimsy reminded her that it had been Ted who had helped her bury the old cat on the Hogwarts grounds. It had been Ted who had comforted her with the loss of whom she had considered her best friend. It only reminded Andromeda that, yes, she was really leaving her family, and yes, it was the right choice.

Having packed what she could, she waved her wand, cast the spell to have it float behind her, and grabbed the letter to her family. She stopped, and picked up the slender, jewel encrusted, silver engagement ring that she had set on the dresser some hours ago. It felt somehow wrong (rebelliously wrong) to think of putting it on while still in her family's home, but with a goodbye letter in her other hand, a packed truck floating with her, did it really matter?

Decidedly she slipped it on her ring finger, somehow finalizing what she was doing. With that in mind, she let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, and stepped into the hall outside her room. The house was all asleep by now, it was sometime past midnight by now she guessed. Andromeda quietly went down the stairs, going into the dinning room, and setting the folded letter on the table there.

She was tempted, for half of a moment, to snatch it back up, run upstairs, go to sleep, and pretend like nothing had ever happened, but she didn't. She walked to the front door, unlocking, and opening it, stepping out into the warm summer night air. The sky was clear, the stars shining brightly. It was odd. She felt that it should be pouring rain down on her, wasn't how these things went? A girl leaves her family in the dead of night in the cold rain, running away.

Instead, she was calmly leaving the house, walking out across the garden until she reached what serviced as a road (more or less), and let her trunk float down to sit beside her. She held out her wand, calling for the Knight Bus, and sat down on the trunk as she waited for it to come for her. It took a long while, but she then heard the bus come around a corner, and come to a stop in front of her, the doors opening up, and a not-so respectable man with long hair and bags under his eyes looking at her.

"Just you, miss?" He asked in a gravelly, loading her trunk into the bus, and helping her step inside.

"Yes."

"It's not very good for ladies your age to be out this late alone, you know."

Andromeda sat on one of the beds, telling the driver where Ted lived with his parents, and sat there quietly as the bus hurried along it's path before finally speaking.

"I'm not alone. I'm going to my fiancé's place," she paused, "To where my family is."

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