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DEATH EATER ATTACK AT QUIDDITCH GAME, the Daily Prophet headline read. In the black-and-white moving images, a skull and snake loomed over a burning stadium.
Still, the streets of Diagon Alley were bustling with activity on a busy Friday afternoon. It didn’t matter if the world was ending, people still needed new quills and parchment, money from Gringotts, even the newest racing brooms and fancy gadgets. The day-to-day didn’t stop simply because there was a war going on.
Inside the Apothecary, a young woman with dark, curly hair waited behind the counter, watching carefully as customers perused the shop’s offerings of potion ingredients.
“Is the price on these bezoars correct?” an elderly man demanded, calling to her from a nearby shelf.
Andromeda slipped out from behind the counter and went to investigate.
“Yes, that looks correct.”
“That’s outrageous!” the man complained. “They don’t cost half that in Hogsmeade. What in Merlin’s name would possess you to charge so much?”
“I’m afraid I don’t set the prices,” said Andromeda.
The old man looked at her through narrowed eyes.
“I don’t like your attitude, young lady.”
Andromeda wasn’t sure what part of her attitude he didn’t like. In fact, she rather thought what he had a problem with was not anything she had done but what she hadn’t and couldn’t, which was cut the price in half for him without promptly getting fired. And despite coming from one of the wealthiest families in Wizarding Britain, Andromeda very much needed to keep this job. It turned out, eloping at the age of eighteen was not a decision that led to vast material wealth.
“I’d like to speak with your manager,” said the man.
Andromeda nodded.
“You can certainly do that, but you may need to be patient. He’s in the back working on a custom potion order, and he’ll need to get to a stopping point in the brewing process.”
The customer didn’t look pleased, but he stuck around for half an hour until the shop owner finally made his way to the front counter, only to inform him that the Apothecary in Hogsmeade sold much smaller packages containing fewer bezoars, and that the price he was so upset about was in fact slightly lower when that was taken into account.
“Well, in all my days, I never did see such poor customer service,” the man huffed. “I won’t be bringing my business here again, I can promise you that.”
Andromeda and her boss exchanged an amused glance as he stalked out. They both knew the shop was doing a booming business and would not miss one difficult customer in the least.
The world as they knew it was on the brink of ending, but when Andromeda arrived home, the house was warm and bright, the scent of something delicious filling the air and a faint musical sound coming from the kitchen. There, just inside, Nymphadora sat at the table with a coloring book while Ted stood by the stove, stirring a pot full of chicken soup and humming Celestina Warbeck’s song “A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love” under his breath.
It wasn’t so much that Andromeda intentionally let her guard down; it was more that every wall she put up during the day, every scheme and backup plan, every suspicious thought, vanished into thin air at the sight of him.
She was home.
She was safe.
She was with the one person who would never ask anything more of her than the love and support they had promised each other, the person who had shown her that life didn’t have to be a constant battle or an empty charade.
“Here,” he said, holding out a spoonful of soup. “Taste this for me, will you?”
She smiled and accepted it, savoring the warmth and the flavor.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
Another day at work, another irritating customer. This time, it was apparently Andromeda's fault that some middle-aged witch didn’t know what ingredients she needed for the potion she wanted to brew.
“I might be able to help you, if you tell me what you’re making,” Andromeda said.
“No, no, I’m sure you’d just try to sell me whatever you’ve overstocked on whether it’s what I need or not,” the woman grumbled. “I just can’t remember what it was. Ugh, now I’m going to have to go all the way home and look it up. You know, you really ought to put labels on all these things that say what they’re used for.”
“I’m afraid that would be quite a long list in most cases,” said Andromeda, unable to bite back all the hostility she was feeling. “And it wouldn’t help much if you’d forgotten one, unless you wanted to search every label in the store.”
The woman glared at her.
“Are you going to be helpful or not?”
Andromeda wasn’t sure how much more helpful she could be.
“As I said, I’m more than happy to help you find what you need, if you tell me what sort of potion you’re trying to brew. But I’m afraid there’s not much I can do without the name of the potion, or an ingredients list, or at least some idea of what it’s supposed to do if you’ve forgotten the name.”
“I haven’t forgotten, you stupid girl!”
“Well, if you'd like to come back with the ingredients list, I'd be more than happy to assist you.”
The woman did, in fact, return with an ingredients list, hastily scrawled out in handwritten letters. One glance at the items listed was enough to tell Andromeda exactly why.
“Just so you’re aware, love potions classified as strength level three or higher are only legal with the informed consent of the person drinking them.”
The woman’s eyes widened, and she drew her shoulders back in indignation.
“I didn’t tell you it was for a love potion!”
“You didn’t have to,” said Andromeda. “I’m legally obligated to give out that warning to anyone who purchases pretty much any of these ingredients.”
On her break, Andromeda made her way down the street to the Leaky Cauldron, where she bought herself lunch and sat alone, eating in silence and listening.
“Did you see what they’re charging for telescopes these days? Outrageous!”
“Mum, can we go to Fortescue’s after lunch?”
“No, sweetie, we’ve got ice cream at home.”
“What’s in the Prophet, then?”
“Oh, the usual.”
“The end is coming?”
“Yeah. Everyone’s up to something, these days. Can’t trust a soul.”
Andromeda took another bite of her sandwich, silently disagreeing. There was one person who could be trusted, who absolutely wasn’t “up to something” unless that something involved figuring out how to get their daughter to eat her vegetables for once.
“I’ll bet he gave you a love potion, and you just don’t know it,” Narcissa had insisted during their final month as sisters, clutching Andromeda’s arm so tightly that her nails left bruises on the skin. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing this. You’d never choose that mudblood over your own sisters, Andi.”
But when Andromeda had taken the antidote at Narcissa’s insistence, there had been no change whatsoever. Of course there hadn’t been. Everyone else might be a bunch of ruthless schemers, but Ted was the most gentle and honest person Andromeda knew. He would never betray her trust.
When her shift ended a few hours later, Andromeda’s real work was just beginning. She stepped into the large fireplace in the back room, but instead of going home to Ted, she Flooed directly to the Headmaster’s office at Hogwarts.
The owner of the Apothecary knew perfectly well that she was, as he put it, “one of Dumbledore’s lot.” He liked it that way. He liked having a direct line to the Order, just in case he should ever need it, and he liked even better that Andromeda was a behind-the-scenes sort of person, growing magical herbs and decoding encrypted messages, not the sort who was likely to miss shifts because she’d been injured in combat.
Dumbledore, for his part, liked her job at the Apothecary a lot better than she did. She and Ted were hoping to open their own greenhouse together and make a living as herbologists, but that was not the sort of thing that lent itself to overhearing useful snatches of conversation. It was amazing how many people would say things they would never tell a stranger right in front of a shop employee, as if those who worked in Diagon Alley did not have ears to hear anything but direct questions or complaints.
Case in point: today’s shift. As Andromeda stepped out of the fire, she met Dumbledore’s eyes from across the office with a slight smile on her face.
“May I use your pensieve?” she asked.
As he nodded and opened the cabinet, Andromeda raised her wand to her temple, withdrawing a silver wisp of a memory and letting it fall into the basin. The image rose to the surface: two thirty-somethings in stiff, traditional robes, murmuring to each other as they browsed for snake fangs.
“You’re voting for Malfoy in the next election, aren’t you?” one of them asked the other. “We need more of our people on the Wizengamot.”
“He’s one of us, then?”
“Yeah, but don’t go spreading that around. He’s trying to keep up appearances - keep the family name above reproach, yeah?”
Over the top of the pensieve, Dumbledore looked at Andromeda with a satisfied expression.
“Very well,” he said. “I have long suspected as much, but it’s certainly helpful to have confirmation of it.”
They spoke for a while about the disastrous Quidditch game-turned-battle, and she gave him an update on her crop of dittany, which would soon be ready for harvest. Finally, after half an hour or so, there didn’t seem to be much else left to say.
“If there’s nothing else I can do …” said Andromeda, glancing at the fireplace.
“Actually,” said Dumbledore in a faux-casual tone, “there is something I wanted to ask you.”
“Oh?”
“Please have a seat, Mrs. Tonks.”
“I’d prefer to stand.”
“Very well,” said Dumbledore. “I’m sure you need to get home, so I will be brief. One of the greatest challenges facing the Order is lack of information. So long as we do not know what the Death Eaters are saying amongst themselves, our efforts can only go so far.”
Andromeda stared at him in astonishment.
“You’re asking me to spy for you?”
“You have proven quite adept at gathering information.”
“From eavesdropping on customers, not mingling with the Death Eaters,” she protested. “You can’t honestly think I’d be welcome in their circles.”
“If you were to reach out to your sisters …”
“With all due respect,” she said, “the only way my sisters would be receptive to that is if I brought them Ted’s head on a plate.”
“My dear …”
“No,” she said. “I’ll do what I can for the Order, but not if it means putting my husband or my daughter at risk. That’s asking too much.”
“I’m too soft,” she whispered to Ted that night as they lay in bed, wrapped up in each other’s arms.
His skin was warm against hers. With one hand, he gently tilted her chin upwards so that she was looking him in the eye.
“Why do you say that?”
“I was in Slytherin,” she said. “Which means I ought to be ruthless, right? Use any means to achieve our ends?”
“You don’t have to live your life by high school stereotypes, you know,” he said.
“I know. But … maybe I should be doing more, that’s all.”
He ran his thumb along her cheek and smiled.
“What is it you want?”
“To be with you. To raise Dora. To open our greenhouse and make a living doing something we love. To live in a world where Quidditch games aren’t potential battlefields and nobody cares about blood status.”
“Yeah. That sounds about right.”
“Like I said. I’m too soft.”
“If wanting a peaceful life with the people you love is soft, then I’d say being soft isn’t a bad thing,” he countered. “No matter what’s going on out there, we don’t have to lose sight of what’s really important.”
She smiled, a tentative, bittersweet smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“So what did Dumbledore want from you?”
“To make up with my sisters and be a spy. I told him no.”
“Good. Yeah. That’s too much to ask.”
She leaned forward and kissed him, and in that moment, it didn’t matter one bit what anybody else thought as long as the two of them were on the same page.
They stayed awake longer than they probably should have and lingered in bed late the next morning, whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears.
It didn’t matter. It was a day off for both of them, a day to go out flying with Nymphadora on her toy broom, a day to eat lunch as a family and sit in the living room telling silly stories. It was a day for Andromeda to drop the customer service smile and the informant’s constant eavesdropping, a day for Ted to spend as little time as possible thinking about his mundane desk job at the Ministry, a day when the biggest challenge would be listening to their daughter sing the alphabet song off-key, and most of all, a day to forget about the looming shadow of the war.
This, Andromeda thought as she slipped into a simple everyday robe and made her way down to the kitchen, where Ted was already scrambling eggs, humming the tune to the Puddlemere United anthem under his breath.
This was what she wanted. This was what they were fighting for. There was more to it, of course - politics and outdated traditions and prejudice and Dark Arts - but in the end, for Andromeda, it all came down to this simple life filled with love that she had sacrificed everything for and would never willingly let go of. This was why she had walked away, and she could never go back.