Running

Lincolnshire, August 1971

"Andy!" she hears him yelling, muffled by the pouring rain and the distant but loud bolts of thunder.

Why does it have to be raining, she furiously asks everyone and no one at all. It's not as if it isn't dramatic enough with her running across the estate in nothing but by now soaked summer robes and him rushing after her. Part of her is surprised that he is, even now, and this part wants to be happy for it, wants for this display of chivalry and devotion to make everything else go away. But another part, the recently and painfully born part that refuses to ease its grip of her, that perhaps never will, refuses to be carried away, brought back to the house and to the future their parents and they themselves have been staking out since forever.

Part of her still desperately wants to, but she knows she can't. Not this time. Not again. Not ever.

She has stopped running and is standing in the middle of an overgrown and never cared for field somewhere between the house and the road leading away from it. She has never walked that road, they have never come here that way, but she is going to have to leave that way now even though she has no idea where exactly they are or where the village is. Because she is never setting foot in the main house again, not even to walk straight into a fireplace, and she doesn't think she will be able to Apparate without splinching herself all over Lincolnshire.

And where she has to go, she can't Apparate either. Muggle Manchester would not be accustomed to it.

"Andy!" she hears him again, this time closer.

"Andy," he pants, "what the hell are you doing?"

She bites her lip.

"Go back inside, Dareios," she says, trying to swallow the sobs. Blacks don't cry in public, not even in front of the men they love and are set to marry, and she knows that. But it matters very little, she realises with a pang. Once she has left tonight, she won't be a Black any longer. Then she can cry all she wants.

"But - " he begins, stepping closer, and even though she knows Yaxleys don't cry either, she can hear his voice crack.

"Just go back," she sobs, shaking his hand off her shoulder.

"No," he says, more forcefully now, grabbing her arm and turning her to face him.

"Not without you."

"But I can't stay here!" she screams, knowing she might as well have hit him.

"It's not right!" she continues, sobbing now and shaking him off her again and taking a step back in the muddy earth.

Anger flashes through his eyes, and he follows.

"You've been listening to the Mudblood again," he snaps angrily, and she winches like she always does when they say that these days.

"Haven't you?" he insists, attempting to grab her arm again.

She almost laughs between the sobs, because she is so tried of this argument that they have had all summer, or ever since she became a Prefect and became acquainted with Ted Tonks and had her life slowly turned upside down and finally tipped over the edge.

"It's not about him," she says quietly, because he needs to understand this.

"Yes it is," he hisses, advancing on her again.

"You've been making a fool of me for years with him!"

"No, I haven't," she cries, one final time cursing her sister and Rodolphus for continuously feeding his insecurities.

"All year, when I wasn't there and you were with him - "

"I was not!" she yells out in desperation. She hadn't been. Not like he thinks and fears and has nightmares about, because he loves her that much and she knows it - but it's no use denying that she and Ted had more uninterrupted conversations with Dareios not around.

She had had more time to think with him not there, and they both know it. He has feared it all along - for longer than she has, he has feared this day, this argument, this goodbye. In the past months, she has come to fear it too, and all summer they have merely been waiting. Pretending, and waiting. While everyone else had spent the past weeks celebrating that yet another lot of them were out of Hogwarts, ready for the world they had been planning for years now, the two of them had desperately been trying not to see the end.

He had proposed a week before his initiation, fearing that the other way around would have ended it all sooner. When she had realised it, she for the first and only time in her life wished that he had been more like Rodolphus and she like her sister, who had no qualms about their priorities and the other's place in their lives.

But they weren't like that, and she hadn't even walked out right away. Because she has loved him since she was a very young girl, and didn't stop even when she could no longer face taking his left hand. She had taken his right instead and kept focusing on perfecting their life together. For a while, it had almost worked.

"It's not about him," she says again, calmer now, looking him straight in the eye even though her heart has broken a little every time she has all summer.

"It's not. It's about this," she continues steadily, mentally gesturing at the estate that has come to symbolise everything that is wrong with her world.

"You know that."

"But I can't leave you here," he says, desperation in his voice and not listening to her properly. Not wanting to, even now.

"Yes, you can," she says quietly. "And you will. Either you come with me, or you leave me here."

She says the last breathlessly, not knowing what will happen. She has never made him choose before, only compromised herself until she reached this point in the middle of the Lestrange fields.

"I can't do that," he says slowly, almost bewildered.

"Yes, you can," she cries, taking the two steps that separate them and grabbing onto his robes.

"Please, Dareios," she begs like she never has in her life, "please come with me!"

He looks away to the side, staring into the compact darkness as her heart beats furiously.

"No," he finally says. "I can't."

"But -" she begins, heartbroken even though she knows she shouldn't be surprised.

"No, Andy," he says firmly, turning back to face her. "I can't. This is my life, my family -"

She wants to scream that it's hers too, that her sisters are up in that house right now along with his, probably watching this scene from a window, and that she has never known anything else either. But that she still knows that it isn't right. That it can't be. That she - they - have to leave even when it means leaving everything except the soaked robes they're wearing behind.

But she doesn't. Because he knows. Because he doesn't agree.

She lets go of him and steps back again, and he looks desperate again.

"I love you, Andy," he says, begging in his turn.

"I know," she whispers, and she still loves him too.

Slowly, she reaches for the ring on her left hand and pulls it off. But when she holds it out to him, he refuses to take it.

"No," he says flatly.

"Please," she says, not withdrawing her hand. But he shakes his head.

"It won't make me stay," she says quietly.

"Then you can throw it away too," he says hoarsely.

The field swims before her eyes as she pulls back her hand and gently puts the ring in her pocket. She will have to send it to him later, it is an heirloom and she can't keep it even though it probably would pay her way up to Manchester.

After busying herself with her pocket and staring at her feet until she can focus her eyes again, she finally looks back up at him.

"Goodbye, Dareios," she whispers softly.

He bites his lip and nods stiffly, and by a sudden, desperate inspiration she throws her arms around him. She half expects him to push her away, but he doesn't.

They stand there, in the middle of the field with mud up to their ankles and wet grass to their knees, and she sobs against his shoulder for the last time. After a moment's hesitation he pulls her tight to him and buries his face in her hair as he always does, and she lets her hand find the thin golden chain that she gave him long ago and that he wears around his neck even though Evan and Rodolphus have tortured him about it for years.

They stand there, locked in a final embrace, until her tears run dry and his hands on her back have stopped shaking.

Slowly, she straightens herself, pulls away and steps back. His face is tear streaked and unreadable, but he doesn't say a word.

She takes a few steps more before turning around and breaking into a run across the field, mud splattering over her legs and her soaked hair plastered over her body. The world is quiet as she stumbles and sobs towards the road, only briefly stopping when she hears voices from where she left him.

For a brief moment she turns around to see him standing in the same spot she left him in, but now accompanied by two others, by their voices carried to her by the wind easily identified as those of Evan and Rodolphus. They tug at and yell at him to come inside until he budges from his spot and lets them drag him towards the main house, where the front doors are standing wide open, letting in the storm and out enough light to lit up the whole yard.

A dark and a light shape, as tall as she and in robes like hers are standing in the doorway, following the struggle for Dareios down on the lawn. Andromeda stands frozen and stares at them hungrily until Rodolphus and Evan successfully have pulled Dareios inside and out of sight.

Then the darker of the two slams the front doors shut, and Andromeda turns and runs away from the only world she has ever known, and the only one she knows for certain is wrong.