Stars Fall Down

Disclaimer: The characters here and the world they inhabit are the creation and property of JK Rowling and her assigns.

Early in August, there was a day when Severus noticed that his hostess seemed particularly withdrawn and unhappy. He watched her as he ate his breakfast. She sat and chatted with him, following a pattern they had established early in his convalescence. He noted that she seemed on the point of tears the entire time. After she cleared up his dishes, he captured her hand. "What is it?"

She cleared her throat and shook her head. She looked at his hand beseechingly. He let go, and she slipped out of his room quickly. Something was going on in the house, but he didn't know what it was about. He quickly dressed for the day.

He had been granted greater mobility by the Healers and walked to the door of the sitting room to discover that Molly Weasley, a couple of Order members, and Andromeda's son Tim were there with her. He stepped away from the room and continued to the kitchen, where he poured himself some coffee from a pot kept warm throughout the morning.

He sat and read the paper, only catching a word or two from the other room when the conversation got loud. The baby cried and Tim said that he would take care of him. The young man came to the kitchen and settled at the table with the baby and a bottle.

"I see you're up," said Tim, suspiciously.

Severus decided to answer the words instead of the tone of the statement. "It's painful at moments when I try to bend my knees too much, but I'm getting better."

"It will be good for mum not to have quite so much to do."

"I never wanted to be an imposition. Poppy and your aunt had me brought here."

Tim laughed bitterly. "Dear Auntie Cissy. She's very good at making others do her bidding. How does she do that?"

"There's this look she gets in her eyes, and suddenly it seems as though it would be the worst thing in the world if you don't do what she wants."

"That's almost exactly what mum said."

They settled into an uneasy silence.

"Why are there so many visitors today?"

Tim huffed and thought for a minute, trying to find a reason to refuse to answer. He didn't have one. "It's the anniversary of the day you Death Eaters took over the Ministry. My father left this home the next morning and Mum never saw him again until he was laid out for his funeral."

"I see."

He would have protested that he was not involved in the Ministry take-over, but Severus knew that Tim didn't trust him. He wished he knew how to reassure the younger man. Perhaps there was no reassurance he could offer that would be truly sincere. He had to consider his own wishes where she was concerned.

Severus wanted to ease Andromeda's pain. She had done so much to heal him that he felt he owed it to her. The problem was that in order to ease her pain as he wished to do, he would have to encourage her to let go of the man she had loved for many years. He would have to wait, cherishing the hope that when she had moved beyond her grief for Ted Tonks, she might see that other men existed.

Andromeda saw her guests away and stood at the gate of her garden. She watched them go a little way down the lane and then Apparate, just as she had watched Ted a year before. Severus watched from the door until the rain started. He walked down to hold an umbrella over her. She looked around and gasped in surprise when she saw it was him. "Severus! You'll make yourself sick."

"I saw the umbrella by the door, and I thought you might be getting wet."

She looked up and shrugged. "I suppose I am. Thank you."

"If it's not impertinent..."

"You want to know why I'm standing at this gate and looking down a misty lane."

"The question had occurred to me."

She didn't answer at once. When her voice came, it was quiet. "It was a brilliant, blue-skied day. He knew he had to leave, but I held onto him, hoping for just one more hug, one more kiss, one more caress... " Her hand was reaching over the gate, toward something that wasn't there.

She sighed and cleared her throat. "He knew he had to go, and he was right. The Ministry arrived less than an hour later. Dolores Umbridge was the only person I ever knew who hated Ted. After twenty-five years, she got her revenge upon us, and my older sister came along for the ride. I thought I'd never get Uncle Alphard's things properly put back together. I guess Dolores got even more revenge when he was killed."

"I'm sorry, Andromeda. He was the most likable person I ever knew."

"He was, wasn't he?" She smiled sadly. "I didn't even want to fall in love with him, but he was somehow so appealing. He always had a smile and a kind word for me, even when I acted like a snotty pureblood brat. I needed him to get me out of a jam with Rabistan Lestrange... and then I was lured into his sympathetic kindnesses... and then I needed him in a whole different way."

Her voice broke, and for a minute all he could hear was her gulping breaths.

He slid an arm around her. She startled and looked up at him. "It's just so we'll fit better under the umbrella," he said. She didn't believe him any more than it was true, but she let him hold her. In fact, she tilted her head until she was resting on his shoulder. It was supportive, and that was a comfort.

He was tempted to tell her that he wanted to become what her lost husband had been to her, but he knew it was too soon. It was also untrue. He would never be what Tonks was. Excellent though the man was, Severus Snape didn't really want to be an aging Hufflepuff Ministry hack. He caught a whiff of her hair and resisted an urge to kiss her forehead, which was just about in reach of his lips. It wasn't the right time.

The body within his arm tensed, and she looked up. "Sometimes I get so mad at him."

Severus looked the question and she answered. "He kept saying that things would be fine. 'It'll turn out, Dromeda.' He said it endlessly, especially at the end. He was wrong about that. It's not fine. I'm all alone with an angry son who could use a guiding word or two and a baby whose mother abandoned him."

She broke away from Severus and shouted down the lane. "It's not fine, Ted Tonks! I'm not fine! Shame on you for being wrong!"

The lane didn't answer. She sighed. "I guess I'm as bitter as my son. Nymphadora didn't abandon her baby; she just thought she could best help him by going to the battle that night. Maybe she was right. They won the battle and the war, after all. I used to have to keep close to home because if some member of my Black family ran into me there could be trouble. Now I can come and go as I please, but there's no one to share my freedom with."

Severus stood quietly, holding the umbrella over her as well as he could. If she would allow it, he would try to shield her from this pain. Somehow it seemed that she needed to pass through it.

She turned and became aware of him. For that instant she had forgotten he was there, but now she was embarrassed. She simply did not make scenes, certainly not in front of house guests.

"I apologize. How embarrassing." She moved toward the house. "I think some of the flowering plants will be ready to cut this week. Some of the potions you've been taking might work a little better with fresher ingredients."

She sounded suddenly confident and calm, but he wasn't fooled. He could see the look in her eye, and he had seen her do this before. When he came to make the Wolfsbane, one night at dinner Severus and Ted had discussed the possibility that Nymphadora and Lupin's children would be werewolves.

Andromeda got choked up about it and then suddenly became falsely calm. She remembered some dish that she had borrowed from Molly. She immediately got up to lay it out so that she could visit that evening to return it.

She muttered as she left the room and Severus's host smiled kindly. "She changes the subject whenever she's upset. It's the way she avoids conflict and calms herself down." Then Ted got up and followed his wife from the room. When Severus brought his dishes to the kitchen to lay by the sink, he found the couple standing in the middle of the room. She clung to her husband, who swayed her gently and spoke quiet nothings into her ear.

There was no one to comfort and soothe her now. He didn't know how to do what Ted Tonks had done with such ease, so he just offered his arm. "Come."

She meekly preceded him back up the walk. He didn't put his arm around her but judged it appropriate to place a guiding hand at the small of her back. Her spine was rigid, as though someone had charmed just that set of bones with some sort of targeted Body Bind. Druella Rosier had raised her daughters to be quiet ladies who bore their emotions out of sight of the general public. At least two of those daughters had learned the lesson well.

She went up to her bedroom and knelt at his side of the bed. Putting her head on her husband's pillow, she quietly sighed and sniffled. "I'm sorry, my love. I shouldn't get so angry with you."

She heard his voice in her head. You need to set it aside and move on.

"I can't move on, Ted."

We didn't teach each other how to love so that you could spend your life on a dead man.

"It's too soon. It would be wrong. Please don't make me."

It won't be like this forever. Soon you'll stop being so painfully aware of me and then you'll be ready to let go.

"Please don't leave me."

Ah, Dromeda, I'll never leave you. You know that.

Hermione's study sessions with Professor Snape went quite well, if one was only considering the likely affect to her N.E.W.T.s. scores. Hermione was keeping a second score card in her mind, and that one was not as successful. Professor Snape was entirely too easily distracted. Perhaps it was an effect of the snake venom on his nervous system. He seemed to constantly need Mrs. Tonks to bring him tea or fluff his pillows. It was unnerving to see him this way.

Tonight he wasn't constantly trying to summon her to the room. They had been going over Arithmancy until rather late, and Hermione's only complaint was that he kept looking out the window he was seated near. Of course, it finally gave her an excuse to come see him.

"If I exchange these two terms in the same equation, why does it make such a difference in the result?" She brought him her notebook to look at.

"It's not a commutative operation," he explained without looking. "Really, Miss Granger, if you're asking that kind of question, it must be too late in the evening to study."

She was as close to him as she'd ever been, and her heart was starting to beat faster. If he would just lean toward her... But no, he was looking out the window. It was really an awkward angle, and she probably looked like an idiot. She took a step backwards.

"What's out there?"

"I believe it's the Perseids, tonight. Here, douse the light."

She did as he asked and then came back to kneel beside his chair.

As Hermione's eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she caught sight of Andromeda Tonks in the garden. The older witch was holding a shawl around herself. She stared intently at the sky as her unbound hair fluttered in stray breezes.

"What is she doing?" Hermione thought she looked a bit otherworldly.

"I'm not sure. She's been standing there for quite a while."

As they watched, meteors started to fall, and the witch in the garden held out her fingers as if she was trying to touch them. Suddenly Severus shifted his chair around and put his hand on Hermione's shoulder.

"Come away from the window, Miss Granger. We have no business watching."

"Then what is she doing?"

"What?" he said. He looked distracted, so she asked again. "Oh, she's mourning her husband."

"I don't understand."

"I see that we shall have to review your astronomy, next. Her namesake is Andromeda, the princess that was once chained to a rock, just over there near the horizon. I seem to recall hearing that Tonks rescued her from the Death Eaters in a burst of uncharacteristic heroism. He snatched her away from the serpent like Perseus, just a little way over in the sky. Tonight's the Perseid Showers, the children of Perseus and Andromeda. Therefore, I gather from her posture that she's mourning her husband and daughter."

"Oh," said Hermione, glancing at the window. "It sounds so dramatic and romantic. I figured they just fell in love, and..."

"And what, Miss Granger? Do you naively believe that she walked up to the brother and sister-in-law of Walburga Black twenty-five years ago and said, 'Dad, Mum, this Mudblood and I are getting married?'"

"Well, it does seem unlikely when you put it like that."

A keening sound came from the garden, and the two in the room glanced out the window to see that Andromeda was now kneeling on the ground and appeared to be crying. Severus turned away first. "What does a man have to do to inspire that kind of passion?" he asked under his breath.

"I shouldn't think that you would have to do much at all," answered Hermione, turning slowly so he wouldn't see her face. "You are just as great a hero as Mr. Tonks ever was."

"I wouldn't assume that, Miss Granger. Ted Tonks was an ordinary Ministry hack with a pleasant life who, on at least two occasions, risked everything for the sake of the woman standing outside. I, on the other hand, had nothing to give up when I risked my life. Who took a bigger gamble?"

She couldn't immediately answer. After a minute, she said quietly, "If you both risked everything, how can you really compare it? You're looking at the total quantity when it's a question of proportion."

"You have learned something in Arithmancy, after all." He patted her arm. "Thank you."

She felt herself glowing under that touch and the one by the window. They weren't passionate caresses, but they were progress. She wondered if she could get him to touch her again. "If you had more to risk, like Mr. Tonks, you still would have done it all, wouldn't you?"

Severus looked toward the window again and said, "I'm not sure." He seemed to retreat into himself and become more distant. Hermione never knew what to do when this mood came upon him. Maybe he was tired. He was very much recovered and able to walk around the cottage as he needed to, but weariness seemed to strike without warning sometimes. She left soon afterwards.

The wizard she left behind observed the witch in the garden. He had caught more than a glimpse of the shape of her mourning, and he deemed it appropriate to keep a watchful eye over her. He wasn't sure what could happen, or what he would do, but he would watch and ensure her safety if he couldn't bring her peace of mind.