The Beginning

This story ends with a smile.

If Andromeda paid more attention to beginnings than endings, she might have realized that this story begins, in a sense, with a smile. But, as it was, even as a child she would flip books open to their last page—their last sentence, their last word—and whether it was written in English or Ancient Runes or Gnomish, she would linger her eyes on that ending before so much as glancing at the title page. It was rather more difficult to do this if someone was telling the story to her, though, and this resulted in much begging on Andromeda's part whenever the Governess gathered her and her sisters for story time.

The three girls sat on the floor, Narcissa cross-legged in Bellatrix's lap and Andromeda stretched out on her stomach, swinging her feet through the air, all of them intently regarding their Governess, Miss Roquemore.

"Today's story is called 'Gretchen and the Muggle Village'," intoned Miss Roquemore melodramatically.

"Ooh, another one about Muggles," Narcissa whispered, clapping her hands together.

"How's it end?" Andromeda blurt out.

"Now, now, patience, Andromeda, you'll find out in due time," Miss Roquemore smiled indulgently.

"I'm not impatient," she quickly replied with a pout. "I just like to know what to expect."

The governess started telling the story, introducing Gretchen as a fine witch of noble upstanding who, on a dare from a malignant spirit that haunted her manor, decided to venture into the nearby Muggle village.

Even though she and Bellatrix were officially too old for story time (Bellatrix was going to be a Hogwarts student in only a few months, after all), Narcissa was young enough to still be allotted story time and the Governess always allowed Narcissa's two sisters to also join; they were certainly active participants in the story-time.

"Do these Muggles live in pig sties like the ones in the last story?" Bellatrix breathlessly asked, eyes wide with curiosity.

"Gretchen," Miss Roquemore theatrically replied, "Was quite surprised to notice that the Muggles lived with their farm animals, even allowing the pigs to stay inside their houses."

"Ooh," Narcissa whispered again as the story went on. "How disgusting."

They had just reached the portion of the story where Gretchen, after healing an injured Muggle out of the goodness of her heart, was about to be burned at the stake for being a witch, when the girls' father entered the room.

"Hello, Mr. Black," Miss Roquemore abruptly interrupted her story telling.

"Good day, Miss Roquemore. Bella, we have guests, could you please help me entertain them?"

"M-me?" she glanced at her two sisters, a baffled expression on her face. It was always Mother and Father's role to entertain the guests, them being considered too young to officially entertain yet.

"Yes, you," he replied impatiently. "Mr. Lestrange is here to discuss business matters with me and he brought Rodolphus with him. It wouldn't do to have one of our guests bored, and Rodolphus is only a year older than you." Bellatrix nodded and he clapped a hand on her shoulder.

"How does the story end?" Andromeda asked, whipping her head from Bellatrix to the Governess as soon as the former had left the room.

"Let's wait until Bellatrix returns before we finish the story. It's the polite thing to do," Miss Roquemore lightly replied.

"Why's Rodolphus here?" Narcissa eagerly asked, her interest in the story temporarily averted to other matters.

"You heard Father, Rodolphus is here with his father," Andromeda promptly replied, clearly much more interested in Gretchen's fate than Bellatrix's.

"But Rodolphus has only ever come over for big gatherings, adults never want children around when they're doing business," Narcissa insisted, turning towards the Governess for a conclusive answer.

"Well, maybe your father and his father wanted Bellatrix and Rodolphus to meet."

"But they have met before. The Lestranges come over all the time," Narcissa stubbornly stated.

"Not all the time, just sometimes," Andromeda interjected, starting to clean her fingernails out of boredom. When were they going to get back to Gretchen and whether she was burned at the stake?

"Maybe your parents and his parents want them to really meet, though," Miss Roquemore repeated mysteriously.

"What does that mean?" Narcissa eagerly climbed into the Governess's lap, as though she was about to be privy to a strictly confidential secret. Andromeda started counting the cracks in the hardwood floor, deciding that if she couldn't hear about Gretchen this was the next most interesting activity.

"Your sister is growing up, she's going to be a young woman soon," the Governess quietly spoke as Narcissa looked up uncomprehendingly. "When girls grow up they get married and it's traditional to introduce them to the best fit right when they're around Hogwarts age."

"So…so…" Narcissa scrunched her eyes close in concentration. "Bellatrix is about to go to Hogwarts. If she's being introduced to the best boy, then that means Rodolphus is the best boy. Does that mean they're going to get married?"

"Only if they want to. Marriages aren't forcibly arranged anymore. But," Mrs. Roquemore added, "Rodolphus is an excellent match for her. The Lestranges have almost as much prestige as your family, and when he grows up he'll have the means to comfortably provide for her."

Narcissa nodded approvingly but Andromeda was too intent on counting the cracks in the floor (one-hundred and twenty-three, one-hundred and twenty-four, one hundred and twenty-five) to notice the conversation for longer than a second. After a few minutes the words had already started to dribble out of her ears and a few years later, when Mrs. Lestrange visited for tea and brought her son Rabastan along there was not a trace of the conversation left in her memory.

"Andromeda, please help me entertain our guests," her mother gently but firmly stated. "Why don't you give Rabastan a tour of the house?"

"But the Lestranges have already seen our house—"

"Andromeda, please do as you are asked," her mother interrupted before smiling sweetly towards Mrs. Lestrange.

With an embarrassed shrug towards the boy, the two left their parents while Andromeda started giving a tour of the house in a monotonic drone. "This is the west-facing foyer. The fireplace is done with continental limestone and was re-done after an errant house elf chipped one of the stones a few decades ago. It connects to the west wing of the library through this door."

"Have you bought your textbooks for Hogwarts yet?" Rabastan interrupted, evidently deciding he could only fake interest in the tour for a few seconds.

"Do you start in September too?" she abruptly dropped her adopted tour guide voice.

"Uh huh," he uttered, distracted as he looked around the library. "You know, I bet I can run down to the end of the library faster than you can."

"What? No you couldn't!" Andromeda immediately retorted. "Not that—not that we're allowed to run in the library anyway."

"What about..." Rabastan looked at the bookcases which stretched from the floor to the very high ceiling above them. "I bet I can climb to the top of the bookcases before you can! And there are even ladders, so that must be allowed."

"But we're not allowed on the ladd—no fair!" By the time she had finished her sentence, Rabastan had already started to clamber up one of the ladders, hand over hand pulling against the aged but carefully polished wood.

Within seconds Andromeda had sprinted to another ladder and started to recklessly tear up it, because she wasn't about to be beaten in her own house. "You have to touch the ceiling to win!" Rabastan blurted out once they were meters above the ground and still had several meters left to climb. His hand stretched out desperately stretching and bending every which way, his fingers mere centimeters from the plastered ceiling and Andromeda felt a burst of glee—he was too short to reach the ceiling, even from the very top step of the ladder. With a victorious smirk, she leisurely climbed the last few steps pointedly stretched her arm towards the ceiling and—

"You can't reach the ceiling either!" Rabastan burst into laughter at the several centimeters separating Andromeda's fingers from the ceiling. "Well, that was a rather anticlimactic contest, I guess we'll have to call it a tie," he grinned and the embarrassed blush to her cheeks faded slightly.

"I bet I could hit you with a book from here," Andromeda blurt out, intent on proving her skill in something. "I won't, because my mother and father wouldn't like that, but I bet I could."

He gave another grin, and with a mischievous glint to his eyes added. "Want to hear a story instead?"

"How's it end?"

" 'How's it end?'" he repeated, clearly confused.

"Yes. How's it end? What's the last sentence?"

Rabastan tilted his head and thoughtfully bit his fingernail for a few seconds. " 'They were never heard from again.' That's how it ends."

By the time he finished his story of the boy and the girl who had gone exploring in a cavernous library only to be eaten by one of the books hiding unsuspectingly on one of the shelves, their mothers had finished tea and with a brief farewell, the Lestranges had left. Several weeks later, when Rabastan and Andromeda were both sorted into Slytherin, they grinned at each other from across the table; from that point their relations with each other mostly consisted of the scraps of interaction common between housemates and classmates.

"Could I borrow your History of Magic notes from Tuesday's class?"

"Did you doze off again?"

"Is that a yes?"

"What'd you get for question three on the potions homework?"

"Which part? Part a? Part b?"

"Both of them."

"I'd avoid the charms corridor on the fourth floor if I were you."

"Why? Did Peeves do something?"

"Yes, and let's just say the end result is it smells something awful."

"Who do you thinks going to win the Quidditch match this Saturday?"

"I don't know, I'm not really into Quidditch; I'm not even sure if I'll go."

"Aw, come on, you have to go. You can come with me and Rodolphus."

"McGonagall was sure in an awful mood today."

"I can't believe she gave Greengrass detention, he was barely talking at all."

"I know, heck, we talk more in class than Greengrass does."

"Have you heard? Slughorn is making us switch partners for the upcoming trimester."

"What? That's so annoying, Ettabelle and I work so well together."

"It really is. Do you want to pair up? I'd hate to end up stuck with someone like Byron Bulstrode."

Andromeda was standing nearby the restricted section, her eyes scanning over books related to their potions project, when a voice whispered in her ear "You have to be careful; never know if one of the books might eat you alive."

She jumped, startled, and whipped around to see Rabastan's face. "Huh?" she whispered in response, utterly confused.

"You know, like in your library? Or, I mean, the Blacks' library, I suppose," he returned the whispered tone with a glance towards Madame Pince.

"Uncle Orion's library eats people?"

"No, I mean, not literally," he gave an awkward laugh. "Remember when I saw you the summer before we left for Hogwarts? I told you the story about the books which ate people?"

"Oh, that's right! Merlin, that was two, almost three years ago, I can't believe I forgot that."

He put a hand on her shoulder and teased, "It's alright, you're just becoming an old lady. Fourteen already, that's ancient."

"You're one to talk, aren't you fourteen, too?" she grinned, not bothering to shrug his hand off.

"Nope! Few more months; I'll be fourteen before we start our fourth year." His voice had evidently broken the whispering level, for Madame Pince shot him a withering look. "I should leave before Pince throws me out," he grinned, and Andromeda thought there was something rather pleasant about his smile.

"You should tell me more stories sometime. You're a good story teller," she hastily whispered as he turned to leave.

"Anytime," and there was that smile again.

The next time he told her a story, though, it was not her who requested it but rather him who abruptly volunteered it. "There was once a witch who was walking through the halls of Hogwarts after dinner," he started, walking to catch up with Andromeda on her way back to the Slytherin common room from the Great Hall

"How's it end?"

"They get detention."

"Does it involve a poltergeist?"

"That it does. And the ghost of Salazar Slytherin, too."

She laughed, "Salazar Slytherin doesn't have a ghost!"

"Well, in this story he does," Rabastan playfully retorted.

The school year was over before Rabastan could tell Andromeda many more stories, and he and she both fiddled with parchment and quills over the summer debating whether to write each other, but neither did and the next time they saw each other was after the start of the year feast.

"How was your summer, Andy?" he greeted her in the common room that night.

She turned towards him with an incredulous look on her face. " 'Andy'?"

"Um, Rodolphus said that's what Bellatrix calls you," he faltered.

"It is," she replied with a bemused look on her face before adding in a quieter voice, "I don't like when Bella calls me that, though. It makes me feel too young, like a child or something."

In a conspiratorial tone, Rabastan replied, "When I was really little, Rodolphus used to call me Rabbie, and it'd drive me up the wall. Once I accidentally made his shoes disappear when he did that, I was so annoyed."

"You can call me Ann, if you like," she quickly blurt out. "Nobody calls me that, but it's shorter than Andromeda and I think it sounds more dignified than Andy."

Bellatrix and Narcissa both separately raised their eyebrows when they later heard Rabastan consistently referring to their sister as "Ann", but otherwise declined to comment.

"Hey Ann," he started, plopping into the chair next to her. "I have another story for you. It ends with 'She smiled and said yes.'"

Putting her potion's essay down, she gave him an intrigued look. "Alright, go on."

"There was once a Hogwarts student who wanted to go to Hogsmeade for the Halloween Hogsmeade outing, and he had his heart set on asking this one witch—"

"Go on," Andromeda spoke, a smile spreading across her face.

"She was the most beautiful witch in all of the land. And not just beautiful, but well-mannered and intelligent and hard-working, too." He paused here and gave her a hopeful look.

"And?"

"And, uh," he faltered, clearly expecting Andromeda to reply at this point. "And the wizard who was doing the asking was also, uh, dashingly handsome"—he coughed at this—"and not exactly at the top of the class, but pretty up there—"

"And did he accidentally drag his tie in his pumpkin juice earlier today?"

"Hey, I cleaned that up," he frowned, looking at the tie of his school uniform.

"She smiled and said yes."

"What?" he blurt out, looking up from his tie.

"That's how your story ends. 'She smiled and said yes'," Andromeda uncontrollably grinned. "So I'm finishing it for you."

…

A/N: Note that this is a two-shot; the second half should be going up tomorrow. Also, I'm doing this for Jackson Frost's "Failed Relationship" challenge at the Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenge Forum. Constructive criticism always appreciated!