Air twisting ice-sharp against her face, she waited, leaning over the parapet of the Astronomy Tower. Below her, Hogwarts’ grounds were invisible in the dark, rolling out to a deeper mass of blackness where she knew the forest lay.
She wished Ted would hurry up so that she didn’t have to think. Perhaps the wind whipping against her face would take away her thoughts with it, carry them through space and time until they dissolved into an all-consuming nothingness. But all it seemed to be doing was carrying away her body heat with her will to be out here, waiting for a tryst with a Muggleborn boy.
Her family would have him maimed when they found out, she knew. It was something she turned over in her head, every now and then: ugly images of Ted without eyes, Ted without hands, Ted without a voice. Without everything that so endeared him to her.
Unwillingly, inevitably, she glanced up at the sky. It had been watching her all this time, she knew: cold, sparkling, beautiful constellations judging her. There was her father, Orion, hunting her lover down. Bellatrix sneered coldly at her, encased within him. Bella, her dearest companion of yesteryear. She would never leave the protection of the family; no matter how much she might stray, she would remain her father’s shoulder, his hand. She would watch as Orion dealt the initial blows, then step in, eyes flushed with the thrill of tormenting something trapped, to deliver the bulk of the pain. Drawing blood with an instrument, firstly. Then, the Cruciatus. And finally, the flesh-tearing curses; the ones that would rid Ted of his summer-blue eyes, his laugh, his hands…
Andromeda shook her head to get rid of the chill. It neither made her warmer nor dislodged her thoughts, but she resolutely turned away from the sky.
If she herself encompassed a separate galaxy — an entirely different world, an entirely different way of living — surely she could escape the fate that the stars above promised her. She could live with her Muggleborn boy in the tiny flat he’d described to her and never let herself go back, no matter what it took. No matter if they took him from her.
It felt impossible. But Andromeda had started to learn that anything worth living did. She would have to carve her way out of the patterns the universe had set her, the patterns drifting luminous above her head: but once she managed to, there was a whole new world out there for her where she could live, freely, warmly, as she had always wanted.