𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐚 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤

❖

Once, she would not have considered him worth a second glance.

Now, to her great and persistent inconvenience, she noticed everything.

Hogwarts’ library was not the sort of place where feelings happened. It was a place where books kept their spines straight, where dust fell in slow motion, where students drowned in ink and obligation and the steady rustle of turning pages. It was a place where the walls whispered of diligence, of order, of boys and girls who knew better. Quite frankly, it should have been a refuge. A sanctuary.

But, as of right now, it was neither.

It was a trap—woven from silence, from ink-stained pages, from the unbearable weight of noticing.

Noticing him.

Edward Tonks.

No—Ted, she reminded herself, because that was what he preferred. Edward was too much. Too formal, too rigid. Ted was ordinary. Unassuming. A name without pretence or polish, built to be called across school corridors and laughed over at firesides.

Ted. A name so unremarkable it became an inconvenience. And yet… it had a way of lodging itself in her thoughts, turning up in places it had no business being.

Andromeda told herself she was here to study. That had been the plan. That had always been the plan. The books, the essays, the bright, shining path of achievement stretching before her—that was where her focus belonged. Even with the winter holidays approaching, the O.W.L.s demanded it. Her future demanded it.

But Ted made it impossible to focus.

Not that he knew it, of course. It wasn’t as if he were deliberately conspiring to make her life difficult. He wasn’t scheming or plotting or setting clever traps to draw her gaze. He was simply there. In her peripheral vision, in the quiet space between thoughts, in the utterly galling way he ran his fingers through his hair whenever he was lost in thought.

Honestly, what right did he have? To exist in such a maddeningly present way? To breathe so audibly? To make her stupid brain notice things it had absolutely no reason to notice?

Utterly unacceptable. Infuriatingly so.

Oh, how much easier it would have been if he had only been unpleasant.

If he had been arrogant, boorish, cruel—if he had given her even the smallest excuse to dislike him—perhaps she could have dismissed him outright. Perhaps she could have folded him into the category of people who did not matter, who could not matter, and gone on with her life unbothered.

But, sadly, Ted was none of those things.

Andromeda had spent her entire life learning how to fit within boundaries—how to shape herself into something palatable, polished, perfectly contained. To measure every word before it left her lips. To smooth out every impulse before it could become a mistake.

Ted existed as if those boundaries had never been drawn in the first place.

Sitting side by side, he was always leaning in slightly too close when pointing out a passage in their textbook, the scent of ink and something warm—something inexplicably, unfairly pleasant—lingering in the air between them. His fingers never quite stayed still either; drumming against the table, offbeat, a little too fast, a little too loud—so much so that, somehow, impossibly, she had learned to miss it when it wasn’t there.

And, of course, the questions.

Always.

Curious ones. Clever ones. He never ran out of them. Never hesitated to ask. Never once considered that some things were better left unanswered.

That was the problem, really.

It was hard, she was realising, to not think in Ted’s presence.

Because he was comfortable.

In his own skin. In the world.

In her space.

And that, in the end, was the real danger, wasn’t it?

She had been raised on careful distances. After all, as a Black, space was a matter of propriety. Of etiquette. Of safety.

Yet, Ted Tonks did not believe in careful distances.

Or maybe he did, but he was awful at keeping them.

She could have ignored him. Should have.

She should have forced herself back to her notes, back to the paragraph she had read a dozen times over, back to where her mind was supposed to be, not drifting somewhere else entirely.

But, distressingly…

Her fingers remained still against the parchment.

Her eyes did not move from the same line.

And not a single word was sinking in.

Because all too easily, she noticed.

The slight furrow of his brow when he was stuck on a problem. The way his mouth curled into a half-smile when he figured it out, as if, for a moment, the world had fallen into place. Even the way he looked at her sometimes—like she was something to be understood, rather than something to be placed.

It should have been insignificant. Those small, absent details. The things one noticed in passing, observed but unremarked.

And yet, they lingered, refusing to be dismissed.

The candlelight flickered, shifting shadows along the walls—another small, absent detail, waiting to be noticed.

Suddenly, yes, she noticed that too. The way it softened the edges of the room, how it gilded the world in quiet warmth—the way it made a mess of his hair, turning fair strands gold at the tips, like a boy written into an old story, some fairytale knight who had never been told to be careful with his heart.

It was unfair, really, how effortlessly he belonged to the moment.

The way he leaned back slightly in his chair, as if nothing in the world could reach him here, in this place, in this space between them. Or the way his voice dipped low when he read aloud, always softer than she expected, smoothing over sharp words and Latin incantations like they weren’t meant to be spoken but sung.

Then there were his hands.

Ink-stained at the tips. Long-fingered. Moving absently over the parchment, tracing the edges of a thought before committing it to ink.

She noticed. She always did.

And the grin—that grin—wide and open, bright with mischief, like sunlight through shifting leaves: warm, dappled, just out of reach. It held no pretense, no careful mask, only the effortless joy of someone who had never been told to hide what he felt. There was something disarming about it, something that unsettled the careful order of things. Not because it demanded attention, but because it did not. It simply was. Unfiltered, unburdened, existing as though the world had never taught him otherwise.

Each time she saw it now, she wondered, briefly, how it must feel to smile like that. How it must feel to trust the world enough to do so.

Had she ever really looked before? Or only now begun to see?

Because once acknowledged, it was impossible to ignore.

Was there anyone who could see it and… really not notice?

Was there anyone who could see it, and not be a little…

(A breath, a thought she should not have.)

…enchanted?

Another breath.

Merlin.

That was a dangerous thing to wonder about.

“You alright, Dromeda?”

The words floated toward her, breaking the surface. She blinked—suddenly aware of herself again, of bones and breath and the ridiculous thud-thud-thud of her own heart, fluttering in its fragile little cage.

Had she just been elsewhere? Daydreaming? Of all things?

Andromeda blinked again—because, apparently, she had forgotten how.

How long had she been sitting here, staring, thinking, letting the candlelight flicker against the light brown sweep of his hair? Too long. Unforgivably long.

“What?” The word came too fast, tripping over itself, barely a thought before it was spoken. A stone skipping over water. “Oh. Yes. Of course.”

The moment it left her lips, it felt false. Hollow. Something dusted off and worn for the occasion.

A distraction—that was what she needed. Something firm. Tangible. A wedge of reality between her and the absurd, unthinkable direction her thoughts had begun to drift.

Her eyes met his—dark brown to light.

“You have ink on your nose.”

“Hm? I s’pose that’s why you keep looking?”

Ted’s mouth curved—just slightly, just enough. He swiped at his face absentmindedly, fingers already smudged with words that had left his hands hours ago.

“Gone?”

“No.” A pause. A sigh. The ghost of a smile on her face, almost. “You’ve made it worse.”

Ted exhaled through his nose, then hummed, tapping his fingers against his chin in exaggerated consideration.

“Well. This is a disaster.”

He shook his head in mock disgrace.

She arched a brow. “Is it?”

“Oh, absolutely. A catastrophe, really. Think about it—I could be wandering around like this for hours, oblivious. A marked man.” He swept an arm through the air in some grand, tragic flourish, the movement as broad and careless as the rest of him. “All of Hogwarts will whisper in the corridors, write terrible articles about my downfall. ‘Ted Tonks—Ink-Faced Buffoon.’”

Andromeda huffed—meant to be disapproving, but a laugh caught at the edges, betraying her.

“Then do try to contain the devastation.”

“That depends,” he said, grinning now, the corners of his eyes crinkling in that way that made something inside her twist—faintly. Unfairly, too. “Tell me, will the great Andromeda Black do me the honour of saving my dignity?”

The hesitation lingered a beat too long.

A more sensible girl might have smiled distantly and returned to her studies, allowing Ted Tonks to suffer the natural consequences of his own absentmindedness. But before that eminently practical instinct could take hold, Andromeda was already reaching for her wand, and really—what was one more indulgence?

She didn’t hurry. Made no show of it. Just a careful, casual loop of her wand, sketching the spell through the air. A final downward flick, two muttered words, and the magic unspooled—a breath of amber light spilling onto a nearby parchment.

It trembled. Paused. Considered.

Then, with the slow inevitability of something yielding to fate, it softened, blurred—became cloth.

Andromeda plucked it from the table, leaned in toward Ted, and—against all better judgement—let her fingers skim along the sharp cut of his jaw.

She cleared her throat. “Hold still.”

He did not hold still.

Not even a little.

Instead, he leaned in further—the barest inch. A movement so infinitesimal, so excruciatingly deliberate, that she almost didn’t believe it had happened at all.

Except she felt it.

The sudden closeness. The heat of him. The way his breath grazed the sensitive skin of her wrist, as if testing the limits of her restraint.

Oh, that insufferable—

“Oh?” His voice dropped, playful, almost too easy. “I feel like this is a privilege. Should I be honoured?”

Andromeda swiped at his nose with perhaps more force than necessary. Ted let out a soft, surprised oof, laughing, but—crucially—he did not move away.

Her mistake.

Because now she could see everything.

The way his lashes flickered, the exact shape of his grin—wide, dimpled, unapologetic. The warmth of his breath against her skin.

A single degree closer and—

—She yanked her hand back. Too fast.

The handkerchief slipped from her grasp, fluttering straight into his lap. Heat lingered at her fingertips, where skin had brushed skin. A line had been crossed. A foolish, fleeting thing.

Ted went utterly still.

Thud.

She swallowed.

He did too.

“Dromeda,” he murmured, low, something unreadable threading through his tone.

A heartbeat.

And then—the grin was back. Wide, unabashed, as if whatever had just passed between them had not actually happened at all.

He lifted the handkerchief with an exaggerated flourish, pressing it to his chest with mock reverence. “I’ll cherish this always.”

Andromeda stared.

And then, to her eternal and unrelenting mortification, she felt the unmistakable warmth of a blush creeping up her throat.

No.

Absolutely not.

She snatched the handkerchief from his grasp so quickly it nearly tore.

“Stop talking.”

Ted laughed.

Andromeda, horrifyingly, did not hate the sound.

Ten or so minutes later, she was walking the halls of Hogwarts, her enchanted dragon-leather bag slung over one shoulder.

Ted was still there.

Falling in step beside her.

As if this was simply how things were now.

Both of them had been unceremoniously evicted from the library.

Madam Pince—sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, and still adjusting to her new post—had quickly appeared and made her feelings on their presence abundantly clear. The library, she had informed them, was a place for scholarship, not chatter. A place of learning, not incessant whispering and disruptive nonsense.

Andromeda had murmured an apology, Ted had grinned through it all, and the entire interaction had only further solidified her belief that Madam Wetheridge had been the nicer (and superior) librarian.

At least Madam Wetheridge hadn’t possessed the eerie ability to remind Andromeda of home.

They continued down the corridor. Ted’s pace was an easy amble—the sort of unhurried, loping stroll that suggested he’d cheerfully take the long way to anywhere, provided the company was good and the walls weren’t actively on fire.

Until he stopped.

“Do you hear that?” Ted asked.

She did.

A thrum.

Not footsteps—spells.

Sharp cracks of displaced air, the unmistakable scrape of anger in voices pitched too high, stretched too thin. Laughter, too—the brittle, ugly kind—distant but clawing steadily closer.

Ted took off running.

Andromeda followed.

There was little choice, in the end.

They rounded the corner.

And stopped dead.

Smoke clung low to the floor—thin, grey coils curling about their ankles like something half-alive. The wall to their right had exploded. Or imploded. It hardly mattered. The effect was the same—jagged stone and ancient mortar scattered in violent, haphazard constellations across the corridor.

A Hufflepuff Prefect—seventh year, she thought distantly—was slumped against the opposite wall like a discarded chess piece. Blood threaded a slow line from one nostril. His wand lay in splinters beside him, as if the world had decided to end his day with particular spite.

Two boys still stood.

Aggressive stances both. Neither looking much like victors.

One wore green-trimmed robes. Slytherin. Pale, sharp-faced, with the unpleasant poise of someone very used to sneering downwards. The other was a Ravenclaw—dark-haired, wild-eyed, wand shaking in a grip tight enough to break bones.

The air between them crackled—not with magic now, but worse. With words.

And words, Andromeda thought grimly, had always cut deeper.

“…filthy Squib-loving blood-traitor—”

“—rather that than sit at pure-blood tables licking crumbs for approval—”

“—shouldn’t even be here, dragging Hogwarts down—”

Andromeda felt something cold settle low in her chest.

She knew this argument.

Everyone knew this argument.

It wasn’t new. It wasn’t clever. It was as old as the walls themselves—same script, same spite—just different voices stumbling their way through the lines.

Already, a crowd had gathered.

Of course it had.

Hogwarts was full of them these days—little pockets of rubberneckers, all staring wide-eyed at the slow splintering of their world, as if horror only counted if you had a front-row seat. Right now, they were probably the only reason this mess hadn’t yet managed to devolve back into spells and violence.

Probably, she thought darkly. Not definitely.

“That’s the second fight this week,” someone nearby muttered, low, the words almost swallowed by the general hum of the crowd. “It’ll get worse, mark my words.”

Andromeda thought the sentiment should have sounded more alarmed. But there it was, flat and matter-of-fact, as though another corridor duel at Hogwarts had become inevitable—something to sigh about, shake your head over, and carry on ignoring.

“Honestly, he had it coming,” a voice hissed from somewhere just behind her shoulder. Female. Younger. Far too pleased with itself. “Everyone knows his parents are Mudblood and Squib sympathisers.”

“Sympathisers?” another voice whispered, sharper, more eager. “I heard they were at that rally in Diagon Alley. Standing with them. Right out in public.”

“My mum says they’ve apparently been sending Galleons to those werewolf rights groups,” someone else added darkly. “Imagine. Werewolves.”

“Oh, Father had it right, I think,” another voice cut in—older, drawling with casual cruelty. “Should’ve rounded the lot of them up while the Aurors had the chance. Send them to Azkaban before they get ideas.”

A rougher voice made a noise of agreement, like a chicken with something stuck in its craw. “Can’t just let people go around spreading rot like that. Undermining proper wizarding families. It’s disgusting. Why hasn’t the Ministry stepped in properly yet?”

“They will,” another voice muttered, low and certain. “Sooner or later. You’ll see.”

More words. More whispers. More poison dressed up as common sense.

Pointless.

Tiresome.

Andromeda tuned them out, letting her eyes drift back toward the two figures still squared off at the centre of it all.

The Slytherin was still talking, his words crawling with something low and mean, while the Ravenclaw’s face had turned an even deeper red. His jaw had gone tight too—a fine line of compressed rage that could crack open at any moment.

Something in Andromeda prickled.

If this went on, they’d start hurling hexes again soon.

She glanced over at Ted. “Should we—?”

Ted looked like a boy whose entire world was on fire, and who had just realised the flames were spreading. Something inside her twisted, faintly. She didn’t like it—that expression. It didn’t belong on his face, didn’t suit him. But that was the world now, wasn’t it?

Before either of them could move, a brisk, clear voice rang out through the chaos.

“That is quite enough.”

The crowd parted like water, murmurs fading to a reluctant silence as Professor McGonagall swept through, her presence alone enough to dispel the lingering aggression. Her gaze was sharp, imperious—the sort that suggested she knew precisely who had started this particular bit of chaos and had very little patience left to waste.

“Everyone not immediately involved in this disgraceful spectacle,” McGonagall said crisply, “will return to their common rooms immediately.”

No one argued.

Andromeda felt Ted’s hand brush lightly against hers—just a touch, barely there, but reassuring enough.

But even as she turned away, she could hear the whispers starting again, carrying through the corridors, following her, trailing in her wake like the hiss of a snake.

▣

Winter at 12 Grimmauld Place tasted like quiet.

Not peace—Merlin forbid—but quiet. The heavy, upholstered sort. The kind that settled in the walls and sat in the corners like an elderly relative nobody had the nerve to shoo out.

Outside, London sulked beneath its usual miserable sky, blanketed in snow thick enough to look picturesque from a distance and inconvenient from absolutely everywhere else.

Inside?

Stillness. Polished wood. Quiet ticking clocks. A lot of velvet doing absolutely nothing useful.

It was the sort of scene that would look perfectly, lovingly framed in oil and hung in a tasteful parlour—provided, of course, you didn’t look too closely at the expression on anyone’s face.

Andromeda sat in the Black family library, legs crossed neatly at the ankle, wand spinning slowly between her fingers. Across from her, very straight-backed and very serious, sat Antares—five years old, though at times he gave the distinct impression of someone going on five hundred.

A book lay open in his lap.

Fundamentals of Charms.

One of the old ones, naturally. The sort that smelled like dust, aged parchment, and the long-suffering disapproval of several dead ancestors. Its pages were yellow. Its margins were cramped. Its explanations were long-winded enough to require their own tea breaks.

Most children would have cried looking at the thing.

Antares was reading like he intended to send the author corrections.

Which, frankly, shouldn’t have surprised her. He read and understood faster than some people she knew—classmates, yearmates, perfectly competent Hogwarts students who still sometimes stumbled over footnotes while Antares devoured whole chapters like they were going out of fashion. At five, he looked ready to outgrow the sort of books they handed to first-years.

There was an ease to it—not showy, just... inevitable. Like breathing. Like of course he could. He was a Black, wasn’t he? What else were they supposed to do with themselves if not surpass expectations and make everyone else feel slightly inadequate while doing it?

At this rate, she suspected he’d attempt to complete the entire Hogwarts curriculum before he ever set foot in the castle.

That was just how his mind worked, really.

Everything was a problem to be solved. Preferably efficiently. Occasionally with style. Usually to someone else’s mild horror.

Andromeda had long since given up trying to decide whether that was a good thing.

He’d had that look—that faintly frowning, faintly curious, occasionally terrifying expression—since before he could walk. Since before he could talk. Possibly since the womb, if prenatal sulking was something magic allowed. There was always seemingly something turning in that small, dangerous little mind of his.

Turning. Ticking. Never still.

She supposed it was a side-effect of being a child genius.

Or his Sight.

Or—perhaps—just a side-effect of being a Black.

They were all a bit like that, really.

Just… not usually so small, and so serious about it.

It was perhaps inevitable then, given the way his mind worked, that reading alone wouldn’t be enough to hold his attention.

Not for Antares.

Not when there were spells to practice. Concepts to test. Objects to break.

Which was, naturally, how Andromeda now found herself spending the better part of her winter afternoon watching (and helping) her youngest cousin systematically destroy the same unfortunate teacup.

Again.

And again.

He’d been at it for the better part of an hour.

“Break,” Antares murmured calmly, his small fingers flexing and curling with the word, shaping magic into motion without so much as glancing up from the open book sprawled across his knees.

Crack.

The fine china between them split clean down the centre—rim to base—with the quiet inevitability of a thing that no longer expected any other fate.

Andromeda repaired it without looking.

A small, precise flick of her wand. Muscle memory.

“Reparo.”

The cup flowed back together—obedient, uncomplaining, and, by this point, probably resigned to the fact that it was living in some quiet circle of hell designed specifically for crockery.

“It’s getting worse,” she told him, their conversation carrying on without so much as a ripple.

“The fighting, or the stupid?” Antares asked, still not looking up. It was the sort of thing that might have sounded cutting—if it hadn’t come in the small, matter-of-fact voice of a five-year-old.

“Both.”

“Hm.” A pause. A turn of the page. “Break.”

Crack.

“Reparo.”

For some time now, they had been talking.

It was not, all things considered, the sort of conversation Andromeda would have expected to have with a child of five. In fact, had anyone suggested—even a year ago—that she might one day spend a precious holiday afternoon seated opposite one, exchanging news of Hogwarts and its latest absurdities, she would have laughed. If she told anyone else in her life (anyone not a Black, at least) about this arrangement, there was, she suspected, every chance they might laugh too. After all—how much could a five-year-old possibly understand?

The answer, as it happened, was rather a lot.

In Antares’ case, at least.

A great deal more than was entirely reasonable.

With him, she found, words came easily. More easily, perhaps, than they did with anyone else in the family. There was no need to measure her sentences before they left her lips. No need to smooth the sharp edges away, or soften a point until it became safely palatable.

She and Antares, Andromeda thought wryly, were surely of a kind—both carved into particular shapes by a world that demanded, above all else, careful words.

It was only natural, then, that here—at last—they could let their guard down.

Thus, here they sat.

A girl not yet out of Hogwarts. A boy barely out of the nursery. A library, a book, a teacup. Engaged in something which, impossibly, no longer surprised her.

It was peculiar, of course. Andromeda was more than ready to admit that.

Then again, most things about Antares were.

But like the rest of her family, she had grown used to it—in the way one grows used to the creaks and groans of an old house. The small absurdities that, given enough time, ceased entirely to feel absurd.

Of course, the way he sometimes paused—mid-conversation, mid-page-turn, mid-spell—if she happened to mention a name he did not yet recognise, could still raise an eyebrow or two. Not for the action itself—no, that part had long since settled into the pattern of things—but for what always followed.

Because Antares had a way of knowing things.

Small things. Large things. Things Andromeda herself did not yet know, and sometimes would rather not. Things that, by all rights, no five-year-old ought to know at all—let alone recite with such quiet, unnerving clarity.

It never lasted long, those moments. Only a heartbeat or two. But long enough to notice.

Long enough for her to see that particular stillness come over him—the kind that was neither childlike nor especially natural.

Antares didn’t frown or scowl or squint like he was thinking very hard.

He simply... stilled.

Utterly.

His bright blue eyes would lose their focus—not in the loose, drifting way of a daydream, but with the suddenness of something pulled sharply out of step with the present.

He didn’t look at the floor. Or the ceiling. Or even through her.

He looked—elsewhere.

It was, Andromeda thought, rather like watching a door close behind someone.

And for those few, brief seconds, the boy sitting opposite her wasn’t really there at all.

She had seen that look often enough now to know its shape. The look of someone who was not so much seeing—as being shown.

And soon enough—always—he would return.

Quietly. Calmly. As if nothing in particular had happened at all.

He would come back to himself with that small crease of the brow he reserved for mildly uninteresting things—and supply her with information.

Dry. Precise. Faintly indifferent.

As though reading aloud from a very dull book.

And she would listen.

Because it was always correct in some way.

After that?

Well.

The conversation would move on.

As it always did.

Really, that was the thing about Antares.

Everything with him settled into routine sooner or later. Even the things that, by all rights, ought never to feel routine at all.

Like his displays of magic.

There had been a time, and not so very long ago, when watching him perform his small feats of wandless magic would have left her—if not speechless—then certainly impressed.

“Break.”

Crack.

“Reparo.”

Neat. Tidy. A small, perfect loop of spellwork. To the eyes of anyone less familiar with the boy, or his peculiar talents, it might have seemed wondrous. Or alarming. Or both.

But after the fiftieth time, the hundredth, the thousandth, it had simply become... ordinary.

No more startling than Kreacher appearing soundlessly at her elbow. No more remarkable than a door swinging shut on well-oiled hinges. Or the measured tick of a grandfather clock in the quiet of an old house.

Just another peculiar feature of the boy that, in the end, she had grown used to.

So here they were.

He broke the cup. She repaired it.

He turned a page. She talked.

He answered from time to time.

That was just... how things were.

“It’s getting ridiculous now,” she said, flicking her wand almost without thinking as the cup split cleanly down the middle again. “Reparo. Used to be little things. House stuff. Where people sat, who people sat with. Looks across a room. Nasty comments if some students were unlucky enough to walk past the wrong group.”

Pause.

“Break.”

Crack.

“—Reparo—Now it’s hexes in the corridors. Bloody duels before breakfast.”

Another pause.

“And the worst bit?” She gave a small, humourless huff. “Nobody even looks surprised anymore.”

“That’s the bit that gets me, I think,” she went on, quieter now. “Not the fighting. Hogwarts has always had some juvenile fighting. But the way people barely blink. Like it’s nothing.”

Antares turned a page. “Predictable,” he said, in that small, even voice of his.

Not unkind.

Just... factual.

As if human folly were no different to weather patterns.

“Break.”

Crack.

“Reparo.”

Andromeda snorted under her breath. “Maybe. But predictable things are supposed to be avoided, aren’t they? That’s the whole point of knowing better.”

He didn’t answer straight away. He rarely did, when he was thinking.

Another page turned.

Another quiet hum of thought.

“Some people,” Antares said eventually, “are very committed to being stupid.”

It was ridiculous, really—hearing that from a child of five.

And yet.

Here, in the echoing stillness of 12 Grimmauld Place, in the soft repetition of breaking china and the softer repetition of repair, there was very little to argue with in that.

“Break.”

Crack.

“Reparo.”

Andromeda exhaled through her nose. A thin, sharp little sound, like a puncture rather than a sigh. She frowned at the teacup between them as if it were personally responsible for the state of the world.

Unfair of her, really. The thing had suffered enough.

Still, Antares wasn’t wrong. He rarely was. That was the trouble. Or perhaps the tragedy. At five years old, he had already grasped the kind of quiet, unkind truths most people carried with them like splinters—things to flinch from, to bury, to smooth away in company.

“Yes,” she said softly, half to herself. “I suppose it is.”

“Mm.”

The cup broke again.

She repaired it again.

“Sorry…” She hesitated, the word catching awkwardly against the back of her throat. Then, after a moment, she sighed properly—loud and deliberate—and let it fill the space between them. “I think I’m just venting now.”

Antares looked up.

Really looked up.

Andromeda found herself blinking back at him, faintly startled by the novelty of it—the rare, unfiltered attention of a boy who sometimes thought in brackets and ellipses. No frown. No scowl. No weary little crease between the brows that meant you’d said something inefficient.

Just… looking.

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Simply blinked once, very slowly, like an owl considering whether or not you were edible.

Then he nodded. A small, definite thing. As though to say: Go on, then.

When he finally spoke, it was in that peculiar little voice of his—so calm, so straightforward, it took a person a second to realise it was kindness.

“It’s alright,” he told her. “You can talk at me if you like.”

Andromeda almost laughed.

Not because it was funny.

But because—oh, Merlin—it was kind.

Ridiculously, unexpectedly kind.

And she hadn’t realised, until that moment, how very little kindness she’d been surrounded by lately.

It left something raw in her chest. Brittle at the edges.

For a while after that, neither of them spoke. The house stretched around them—not heavy, exactly, but watchful. Like the slow exhale of something ancient, holding its breath.

“Break.”

Crack.

“Reparo.”

Again.

And again.

Funny, she thought, how easy it was to fall into a rhythm like this. A little loop of destruction and repair, as neat and unbroken as a clockwork mechanism. There was a sort of peace in it. Or perhaps just the appearance of peace—which, in this family, was usually the best you could ask for.

The teacup broke.

She mended it.

It broke again.

Like that was all the world ever did.

And wasn’t that the thing? That was the part that stuck under her skin—more than the slurs, or the spells, or the fights in Hogwarts corridors. Not the damage. But the way no one seemed surprised by it.

As though cruelty was inevitable.

Expected.

Old as stone.

The words slipped out before she could stop them.

Soft. Almost careless.

Almost.

“Do you think,” she said slowly, watching the teacup knit itself whole beneath her wand, “the Wizarding World will ever get better?”

Antares didn’t answer straight away.

But he watched.

Watched her. The cup. The space between them. The long, quiet line of her question sitting there like something fragile and terribly out of place.

When he did speak, it was quieter than before.

But not uncertain.

“Better how?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said—too quickly, too brittle. “Less... cruel, I suppose.”

Less like this, she didn’t say.

Less like us.

The words sat there—so thin and fragile—and behind them, she could feel it creeping in. The real question. The one she hadn’t meant to bring into this room. The one that hadn’t stopped turning over in the back of her mind for days now, weeks maybe—like a small stone caught in the lining of her pocket.

Not about history. Not really. Not about bloodlines or old family feuds or the great grinding machinery of power that had chewed through generations before her and would chew through generations after.

But about...

About people.

About a boy who smiled too easily and sat too close to her in the library. About a boy who had a way of looking at her like he hadn’t learned yet that he wasn’t supposed to.

Ted Tonks.

There it was.

As stupid and unmanageable as ever.

Would there ever be a world for boys like him? For girls like her who—Merlin help them—noticed?

Or were they all just caught in the same tired pattern—break, mend, break again—like cups that would never quite hold water for long?

Antares looked like he was considering.

“It might,” he said finally, “but not soon.” A pause. “Not if people like how it is.”

And that, of course, was the thing.

Wasn’t it?

Just when she thought he might let the conversation drift—when she thought the moment had passed—he tilted his head, birdlike, and asked in that very small, very quiet voice of his:

“Is this about the boy you like?”

The horror that climbed her throat made no pretence at grace. “That— I—”

Antares blinked at her, perfectly mild.

As though he hadn’t just picked up the private, crumpled little corner of her heart and held it up to the light like a seashell at the seaside.

“It is, isn’t it,” he said, with the quiet satisfaction of someone solving a very simple puzzle.

Andromeda closed her eyes briefly. Exhaled through her nose.

“Antares,” she said flatly, “you are five.”

He nodded, as if this was both true and entirely beside the point.

“You should talk at him too, you know,” he added serenely. “That helps.”

She stared at him.

Then—horrifyingly—she laughed.

Soft. Helpless. A little bit doomed.

He looked down at his book.

“Break.”

Crack.

“Reparo.”

And after a moment—so quietly she almost missed it—Antares spoke again.

“Andromeda,” he said. Still reading. Still perfectly calm. But something in the weight of it landed differently.

“You know… if you really like him… if you truly like the boy...” He hesitated—just for a beat. “...If you really, really do—and something happens because of it—I’ll always be on your side.”

The words hung there.

Unadorned.

Like a bell still ringing in the bones long after the sound was gone.

Andromeda sat with them—sat with him—and felt something in her chest ache in a way that was almost sweet.

Eventually, she smiled.

Wry. Sad. The kind of smile found at the edge of a photograph, or the edge of a crowd—the part that didn’t quite belong, but stayed anyway. Quietly. Stubbornly.

She let the weight of his words settle between them—not fragile at all, but solid in the way stone was solid.

“Thank you, Antares,” she said softly.

She didn’t say anything else.

But the smile lingered.

And so did the feeling.

“Break.”

Crack.

“Reparo.”

▣

Power liked to gather in certain places.

Not by chance, and never by kindness—but the way salt gathers on stone, layer by invisible layer, until one day the walls taste of it.

The Midwinter Gala was such a place.

Andromeda knew that. Everyone did, if they paid attention. Winter, in their world, was never simply winter. It was the season of games played out in public rooms. The season of reminders.

Every year, some house or another among the Sacred Twenty-Eight would stage its own small theatre of dominance. A chance to parade wealth. Broker allegiances. Sometimes, even bruise reputations beyond repair.

And the rest would come.

Because attendance, like deference, was expected. For those who cared, anyway.

This year, her family had decided, it would be them hosting.

A choice, as Bellatrix had told her (with no small satisfaction), had little to do with tradition—and everything to do with opportunity. The political climate was shifting. The new Minister for Magic was still finding her feet. And the Blacks intended to ensure she found them on Black-owned ground.

Her family was moving early.

Before loyalties hardened. Before policies settled. Before Eugenia Jenkins—newly appointed, freshly vulnerable, and very much not Nobby Leach—could surround herself with people of her own.

(Leach, of course, had gone the way all inconvenient men go when the wrong people stop needing them. Ill health, they said. Andromeda wondered whose definition.)

If Jenkins could be bent, they would bend her. And if not? Then whoever came next.

The Blacks planned for generations.

Not for simple governments.

Bellatrix had been very pleased with herself when she said as much.

That, Andromeda thought, was probably warning enough.

Now, her family did not host galas often. They didn’t need to. Scarcity was power too.

But when the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black chose to host—properly, publicly, with all the weight of their name behind it—there was never any doubt about the nature of the night.

It was the kind of night where there would be no air left for anyone else to breathe.

Her parents’ countryside estate had been chosen for the occasion.

Partly for its grandeur. Mostly for its convenience.

It was, after all, one of the few Black properties untouched by the recent outbreak of increased secrecy measures, protective charms, and quietly vicious enchantments that had been springing up over the rest of their holdings.

Whatever strange madness Antares had worked upon the family, this place had, for the most part, been left alone.

For now.

No one had explained it to her.

They never did.

But that hardly meant she hadn’t noticed.

Just for the occasion, the estate—never home, not to her—had been transformed.

Marble shone beneath enchanted winter light. Ice-white blossoms floated slow circuits through the air; not real, of course, but beautiful enough to deceive the inattentive. The scent, too, had been contrived: cedar polish, pine boughs charmed not to shed, and the faint, cloying sweetness of expensive perfume—all layered over stone like a disguise. Overhead, the chandeliers hung like frozen stars—suspended without chain or wire—their silver light falling not like dust, but like a net, catching on hair, on shoulders, on the quick, secret flicker of eyes.

It was extravagant, naturally. And cold.

Fitting, then, that someone had charmed the floor to look like ice.

Not slick. Not treacherous.

Just that perfect, impossible shimmer: glass-clear, dream-thin. A surface that recorded nothing, left no trace, swallowed every step as if no one had passed that way at all.

Even the music was soft. Impeccable.

Nothing out of place. Nothing loud enough to interrupt the hum of conversation, but there to remind you that everything, here, had been arranged.

Andromeda sat near the edge of it, draped in green and silver robes worked fine enough to catch the light, layered in jewellery both decorative and not, including the necklace turned discreet emergency portkey at her throat, suspended in stasis ready to be activated at a word. A recent precaution, given to her and her sisters; one she had been told to keep on her person at all times. Not that anyone expected it to be used, but… well. One could never be too careful these days.

Her little cluster of Slytherin housemates—and a few carefully invited others—sat nearby, arranged neatly at the edge of the room like a floral display. Presentable. Decorative. Placed where they would neither offend nor be forgotten.

Honestly, if she could help it, she would not be moving from her seat for the rest of the night.

She had done enough.

More than enough.

She had been introduced, smiled at, and examined from every possible angle. Danced with strangers whose names blurred at the edges, whose hands rested for just a fraction longer than polite. Potential husbands, perhaps, if her parents had their way.

Her cheeks ached from smiling.

Her ears, too, from listening.

A drink was cool against her palm. Her robes too warm. The silk clung faintly to the inside of her elbows, where the heat had settled and stayed.

Across the floor, someone laughed too loudly.

It sounded like teeth.

“You’re sulking,” said a voice beside her, dry and amused.

Andromeda turned her head just enough to meet Narcissa’s eyes. Her younger sister regarded her with the particular, effortless malice only siblings ever quite mastered.

“I am not,” Andromeda said, the tiniest, pettiest hint of a scowl in her voice. “I’m sitting.”

“You’re sitting like someone in mourning. There are at least two boys over there plotting their futures around your cheekbones.”

“Then they can plot elsewhere.”

Narcissa hummed.

“Are you quite sure you wouldn’t like another dance?” her sister added, smiling in that small, perfect way that never quite reached her eyes.

“They’ll have to look somewhere else,” Andromeda said, lifting her glass to her mouth without so much as a glance towards the would-be suitors.

The bubbles caught at the tip of her nose, fizzing sharp against her tongue—a minor relief, at least, in a night with few others.

She set the glass down on the table beside her and exhaled slowly through her nose.

“I’m not dancing again,” she said. “Not tonight.”

Not unless—and here, traitorously, absurdly—her mind betrayed her.

Not unless it was Ted.

But of course, Ted Tonks was neither present, nor invited.

Naturally.

A fresh peal of laughter—closer this time, too sharp for real amusement—drew her reluctantly back to the present.

Andromeda turned her head again, casting a glance at the little court of Slytherins sprawled nearby, lounging in artful disinterest.

Last she had bothered listening, they’d been pulling apart the new Minister—Jenkins—with the usual nonsense about cursed artefacts and hidden bloodlines. Someone had floated the idea of a bewitched broomstick. Someone else a Squib cousin buried in the Department of Mysteries.

All very thrilling.

Now, though, the tone had shifted.

Something quieter.

Meaner.

“—heard from my parents that Dumbledore’s gone soft in the head over them,” said Marius Nott, all sharp elbows and sharper opinions. “Helped them slip away. The family with the werewolf.”

“The one with the little half-blood boy?” a younger voice asked, eager to catch up.

“Half-blood nothing,” Nott sniffed. “He’s a monster now. Greyback saw to that.”

Someone let out a low whistle. Someone else made a soft noise of theatrical disgust.

“Australia,” Nott added with faint disdain, as though the very idea offended him. “That’s where Dumbledore apparently sent them. Smuggled them out under the Ministry’s nose. Whole family vanished like smoke.”

“Oh, I heard about this,” piped up another—Agnes Selwyn, all bright eyes and no original thought. “My mother thinks Dumbledore’s trying to make an army out of them. He’s definitely got some scheme for it. Some big cause, or something.”

Someone snickered.

“Ran like cowards,” Mulciber added from somewhere nearby. “I’d have done the world a favour and put the creature down.”

Their laugh was small, and ugly.

Andromeda let it pass over her.

Let it pass through her.

There was no shortage of venom in the world tonight. No scarcity of small, mean men and women, gnawing on the edges of tragedy like dogs at a bone. Let them, she thought. Their teeth would never reach far enough to matter.

She closed her ears to them.

And lifted her eyes.

Across the floor—across the silver-bright stretch of enchanted ice, beneath the chandeliers shining like frost—the children danced.

She had almost forgotten them.

Forgotten, perhaps, that the game began young.

That here, in places like this, childhood was not a sanctuary.

It was a rehearsal.

Still, there he was.

Antares.

She hadn’t even seen him pulled into the little swirl of children near the centre of the room; the well-bred, well-dressed offspring of old families, all encouraged—expected—to imitate their elders with the kind of stiff, performative grace that was less about joy and more about the shape of propriety.

But there he was, all the same. Moving with some small, deliberate echo of the adults around him.

His partner was a French girl, probably a few years older: spun gold, pale-skinned, eyes shining like the finest things always were. She was grace, distilled and rehearsed. And still—still—she dulled beside him.

Truly, Antares outshone her without effort.

Andromeda found herself watching, unwillingly entranced. His steps were small, neat—not quite perfect, but close. He looked as if he’d had instruction, or at least watched the adults with the same quiet attention he brought to everything else.

It wasn’t just that he was beautiful. Or eye-catching.

(It was more than that.)

Antares Orion Black, at five years old, already looked and moved like someone born to be observed.

There was something impossibly poised about him. Ethereal. Self-contained. Like a painting that had learned to walk. He did not fidget. He did not stumble. Even there, in that awkward little imitation of adulthood, surrounded by children playing at courtly graces, Antares wore his role like a second skin.

She could see it already—the line of him, the shape he would take, the inevitability.

He was not a child in the way other children were. The pallor of him—milk, marble, old bone—made him seem incorruptible and already, somehow, untouchable. Like he’d never be allowed to get dirty because the world itself conspired to keep him untouched. That fine-boned face—delicate, but never fragile—only compounded that feeling of otherness; that sense of something too pure and too bright to ever be ordinary.

A boy made out of marble and starlight.

…And his eyes…

Bright. Pale. Impossibly blue. As if some colder sky had been broken apart and poured into them. Not flat, not empty, but endless; deep enough to catch the light and hold it there, glittering like distant stars caught beneath glass.

There was an artistry to him. That was the word that came to her every time she looked at him. Artistry. Not nature. Not accident.

Even now, even small.

And that was just the surface.

She could see, with the dry inevitability of foresight, the man he would become. What the world would see in him, when the last softness of childhood melted from his face.

He would grow up to be… devastating.

A handsomeness that would not invite admiration.

But simply command it.

Already—and her sisters agreed with her on this—even Sirius and Regulus, handsome boys in their own right, were beginning to pale beside him. Not by fault. Not by lack. Simply by proximity. Simply by existing in the same frame.

Even the other children—pure-blooded, perfect, painstakingly raised—blurred now into scenery.

Really, he was the subject.

And they were just carvings on the base of the statue.

He was the work of art.

A storybook prince, everyone who had met him tonight said. Something out of a tale. A beautiful child with a face so fine, so perfectly turned, you could almost believe it spun from moonlight.

And Andromeda found that she agreed.

“Our darling cousin is going to be breaking hearts left and right when he’s older,” Narcissa murmured from beside her—half-amused, half-resigned. There was the faintest trace of wistfulness in it, the private sort only sisters shared. She was watching him too, as spellbound as the rest.

Andromeda huffed under her breath. “Older?” she said dryly. “Look at him. If he isn’t already, it’s only because half of Britain hasn’t met him yet.”

A beat.

Another glance toward that impossible figure on the floor.

Then, wryly… helplessly…

“Merlin help us all.”

Eventually, the little dance ended as it always did—a slow, careful spin and a perfectly practiced bow.

Antares took the girl’s hand—the barest brush of his mouth against her knuckles, a gesture old as stone and thrice as dangerous. The French girl went pink to her ears, swayed faintly on her polished little shoes, and giggled behind delicate fingers.

Narcissa stifled a snort.

Andromeda tried very, very hard not to laugh out loud.

The girl looked as if she might faint. Or perhaps burst into tears. But Antares—oh, Antares—was perhaps the worst of it. He was so polite. So perfectly composed. And so utterly detached. He didn’t even look at her. Not properly. Not like boys sometimes did—hopeful, uncertain, pleased by their own daring.

He’d made the gesture. And the gesture itself had been flawless.

But Antares himself?

The boy was already elsewhere. Unbothered. Untouched. As though he had been carved that way—a prince in miniature, too distant to even notice the worship at his feet.

A small shadow moved at the edge of the floor—a boy, a few years older, cut from the same fine-boned, golden thread. The girl’s brother, probably. When he arrived where the children were, his narrow eyes tracked Antares with a kind of speculative wariness.

Too late, darling, Andromeda thought dryly. My little cousin has already won.

Bellatrix arrived not long after, sweeping in like a thundercloud in silk, all sharp smiles and sharper eyes. She caught Antares about the waist in one fluid movement, hoisting him onto her arms with the casual confidence of someone entirely unbothered by propriety.

The boy was too well-bred to wriggle.

But Andromeda saw the faint line of exasperation at the corner of his mouth. Again, it made her want to laugh, in spite of herself.

Bellatrix was saying something low to the French duo—something that earned both a blush and a scowl—before turning, Antares still perched effortlessly against her frame, to make her way back across the floor.

Towards them.

Or she would have.

If not for Rodolphus Lestrange.

And Lucius Malfoy.

Who stepped, as if by accident, into their path.

Andromeda’s gaze narrowed slightly. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised.

Lestrange—all dark hair and darker eyes, wearing that tired little sneer some pure-blood sons never quite learned to outgrow—looked thunderous. Bitter in a way that didn’t come from insults.

No.

This was the bitterness of losing.

Their family had broken off the betrothal contract just recently. Respected family or not, Lestrange was out. Bellatrix had not seemed to care—had laughed, even—but Lestrange, it seemed, had not found it quite so funny.

Malfoy was beside him, pale and smooth as ever, his own sharp eyes flickering between Bellatrix and the boy she carried.

Pathetic, Andromeda thought.

They were probably there to rattle her sister. To posture. To remind Bellatrix that men like them still thought the world ought to belong to them. As if her sister would be intimidated. Or even inconvenienced.

Bellatrix stopped before the two boys. Said a few things. Smiled like a wolf with very sharp teeth.

“Come on,” she murmured to Narcissa.

Her sister—cool-eyed, unbothered—rose beside her with the unhurried grace of someone long since bored of this particular theatre.

They began to cross the floor.

But even as they approached—even as that quiet, brittle tension of pure-blood politics began to twist tighter between the small gathering at the centre of the room…

…Antares moved first.

Or perhaps moved wasn’t the word at all.

He changed.

Shifted—not in body.

But in presence.

The weight of him changed.

Tiny, perched in Bellatrix’s arms—and yet, somehow, he might as well have been seated on a throne.

Everything about him simply seemed to sharpen.

The light caught in his hair—that black sheen like a raven’s wing in moonlight—and struck his eyes, made them flare brighter, made them cut like diamond against glass.

He turned his head. Just slightly.

And looked directly at Rodolphus Lestrange.

Not like a child looking at a man.

But like a king regarding an insect.

They were halfway across the floor when Andromeda blinked a few times.

And, immediately, something was different.

It wasn’t sight. Not exactly. Not like glamour or enchantment.

It was feeling.

A tilt. A shift. The unmistakable wrongness of walking into a place meant for other people.

The floor beneath her feet—that enchanted sheen of false ice—felt longer now. Not a simple surface, not a ballroom at all, but something grander, something shaped like a corridor to nowhere, or perhaps to something greater.

A hall.

A throne room.

High-ceilinged. Endless. Heavy with shadow, sharp with light. Cold—not in temperature, but in the particular reverence of spaces built to make people feel small.

Andromeda’s steps slowed—not really by choice, but by instinct, like something in her bones knew better than to rush forward into this space.

Because this was no longer a party.

The world around Antares Orion Black did not feel like a gathering anymore.

It felt like a court.

Not by shape.

Not by stone.

But by spirit.

All too suddenly, her little cousin no longer read as a child carried idly by his elder, or even as a boy at all.

He read like a sovereign—perched in stillness, untouched, humoured by attendants only because he had chosen to be magnanimous tonight.

Even Bellatrix—brilliant, wild, imperious Bellatrix—stood not as cousin or guardian, not in this moment.

But as an escort.

As an attendant.

As if her place—like everyone else’s—had always been at Antares’ side, within his shadow, beneath his gaze.

As though the world had merely been waiting for her little cousin to notice it.

Andromeda could feel it now—the impossible centre of this space.

Malfoy was speaking.

Lestrange was standing.

Men, pure-blood scions, near full-grown and certain of their own importance.

But neither man owned the centre.

Neither man owned the weight of the room.

Neither man wore the crown.

It belonged—unmistakably, irreversibly—to the boy who had not yet reached his sixth year.

Andromeda glanced at Narcissa, raising an eyebrow.

Her sister’s brow was faintly creased, eyes narrowed in thought. The kind of look that meant: Are you seeing this too?

She was.

They both were.

They knew what this was. Or thought they did.

They’d felt it before—now and then, when they were younger, caught up in their cousins’ elaborate, ridiculous games. How sometimes, without warning, the game would start to feel real. Not just pretend—but weighted. How the parts they were meant to play would settle a little too easily over their shoulders. How the rules, the stakes, the words would stick.

The cause had always been Antares.

Everyone said it was accidental magic. Probably was. His imagination, slipping loose at the edges, pulling the rest of them along whether they wanted to be there or not.

But even then—even back then—it had never felt quite like this.

Not so focused.

Not so much.

This was new.

“Oh,” Antares said.

The sound itself was nothing at all—small, even, light as a single bell-note falling through distant air. A child’s voice, high and untouched by scorn or fury, simple and ordinary in every way but one.

It stopped the world.

The words should not have mattered. The voice should not have mattered. But what came with them—the weight, the certainty, the breathless stillness they left in their wake—settled like frost on glass.

“You,” Antares said again. As if tasting the word and finding it soured past use. As if it disappointed him simply by existing.

And then—quiet, absent, devastating—he added, “I see you still haven’t learned your place.”

It was not the kind of line that came from children. Not usually. Not ever.

It was not crafted to wound. It did not need to be.

It existed simply to remind.

And if it cut—and oh, it surely cut—it was only because the world itself had already shaped it to do so.

Antares did not sneer. He did not mock. There was no theatre to him at all. Only the unadorned, terrible patience of someone for whom the world had seemingly always bent without being asked to.

Across from him, Lestrange stiffened.

“Excuse me?”

Her baby cousin moved his gaze—not quickly, not sharply, but with the slow inevitability of something older than pride—and passed it over Lestrange as one might pass over a blemish in stone. Not to linger. Not to mark. Only to confirm what was already understood.

He looked at the boy more than a decade or so his senior—and in that long, unbroken glance, clearly declared him irrelevant.

It was ridiculous how much sheer volume of contempt Antares managed to convey in the simple weight of his gaze. Not exaggerated. Not forced. Nothing a child should know how to do. The kind of disdain that came not from pride, but from bone-deep certainty.

Andromeda could only imagine the thoughts inside her cousin’s head.

You are small.

You have always been small.

And I will not pretend otherwise.

“Why are you here?” Antares asked.

No anger.

No scorn.

Just quiet, open puzzlement, as if wondering aloud how the furniture had learned to speak.

Andromeda thought, distantly, that any other child—in any other life—might have earned laughter for such a line. Might have earned indulgence. Might have been sent back to their mother with a gentle rebuke for presumption.

But not Antares.

Not here.

Not in this space where the world had already begun to bow beneath him.

Across from him, Lestrange sneered—sharp-edged, brittle, the only weapon left to a man already half-drowning.

“You think you can speak to me that way, little boy?”

The words hung there.

Tried to bite.

But they had been said in the wrong place, to the wrong person, at the wrong time—the futile swing of a blunt knife in a room that had already gone quiet for the hanging.

And Andromeda—watching, still, as the air drew itself close around her cousin like a mantle of something old and powerful—knew, with the terrible certainty born of blood and legacy both, that Rodolphus Lestrange had already lost.

He just had not realised how completely.

Antares looked at him.

Steady. Certain.

He did not bristle.

He did not blink.

“Don’t embarrass yourself,” Antares said.

Simple.

Plain.

Deadly.

Then—that small, knife-clean addition:

“You are not a threat.”

He might have left it there.

He might have turned his face away and allowed silence to finish what pride had begun.

But Antares, being Antares, seemed to be quite patient in his cruelty.

He tilted his head—no sharpness, no triumph—only that soft, dreadful patience that did not belong to the young.

“And you,” he added, almost kindly, “should not pretend that you are.”

He paused then—probably long enough to unmake a man.

“My cousin,” Antares continued, as if it were nothing more than fact, as natural and inarguable as winter, “will not be marrying someone like you.”

Another pause.

“Someone,” he said—voice light, effortless—“who cannot even tell when they are out of their depth.”

And then came the line—the line that would be remembered long after pride had cooled and faces had turned away.

“Truly,” Antares added, gaze cool, voice soft, “after you got yourself marked, to imagine yourself in the same breath as her…”

A small shake of his head.

Measured.

Final.

“You are not fit,” he said, “to be the dust beneath her heel.”

And that—anyone else might have thought—would have been enough.

It was enough.

But Antares—patient, perfect, merciless—turned his head.

Turned it slowly.

Turned it deliberately.

Until his gaze found Lucius Malfoy.

He regarded him not as a threat. Not even as an equal.

But as a curiosity.

“And you,” Antares said—soft, unbothered, exact—“would do well to choose your company more carefully.”

The air held still.

Waiting.

“There is ambition,” Antares said—and here, the smallest curve of his voice, as though instructing something young, something that had yet to learn how the world worked—“and then there is reach.”

He paused—not cruelly.

Almost gently.

“And reaching,” he finished, with a gaze like polished glass, “does not mean grasping.”

Andromeda wondered, with the distant clarity of someone watching a storm they had no power to stop, whether this was how Antares believed all conversations ought to go. It was difficult, after all, to argue with a five-year-old who spoke like the reading of a will. But what struck her—what stayed with her more than the silence, more than the coiled, airless weight in the room—was the simple, unremarkable fact of who had caused it.

A child.

Small enough to still be carried, slight enough to be overlooked—and yet there he sat, speaking with the kind of certainty grown men spent their whole lives chasing, and rarely found.

And something in that settled cold beneath her ribs.

Not fear, not exactly. But recognition. The unsettling understanding that the world did not often give power to those who knew how to carry it quietly.

It might have ended there.

It should have.

But pride, Andromeda had long since learned, rarely knew when to bow out gracefully.

She caught the movement before her mind had quite registered it. The rushed, graceless sweep of a hand going for a wand. And for a split second—for the first time all evening—something in her stilled, not with awe, but with genuine, startled disbelief.

Surely not, she thought, blankly.

Surely not here.

Surely not now.

But there it was. Plain and appalling. The flash of wood sliding into Lestrange’s grip; the crude, instinctive response of a man who had lost in every way that mattered, and could think of nothing better to do than reach for violence like a drowning man clutching at stone.

Andromeda inhaled sharply, half a second from drawing her own wand. But she never got the chance.

Once more, Antares moved first.

He merely lifted one small, chubby hand. His wrist loose. His fingers curling lazily through the air between them, a gesture so absent it might have been mistaken for idleness, for boredom, for nothing at all.

And then, softly—with neither hurry nor heat—he spoke.

A single word.

“Break.”

The effect was immediate.

Violent in its simplicity.

The wand in Lestrange’s hand—dark wood, glossy with polish—gave a single, high, splintering sound. And then, with all the indifferent obedience of something that had simply forgotten how to be whole, it fractured. Tip to hilt. Splintered down its length with a jagged, brittle crack.

It fell to pieces in his hand.

The sound of it—that bright, snapping violence—struck through the hush like glass shattering on tile.

Fragments clattered against the enchanted floor, scattering in uneven skids, brittle and broken. A few pieces came to rest at Bellatrix’s feet.

She, Andromeda noted distantly, did not move. Not to startle. Not to flinch.

Lestrange swore under his breath, staring at his empty palm as though struggling to comprehend the sudden absence of power.

And then, looking up, his face twisted into a snarl. Rage rising fast and useless. His fingers twitched in pure, helpless reflex. As though, for the first time in his life, he understood exactly how fragile his power had always been—and in whose shadow he now stood.

Antares regarded him without expression.

“You,” Antares said. “Are not to approach my cousin again.”

There was no threat in it.

There was only law.

And after a beat—one heartbeat longer than necessary, one fraction colder than mercy—he finished.

“Get out of my sight.”

Andromeda, almost against her own better judgement, glanced sideways at Bellatrix.

She had never seen her sister look happier.