Chapter Six

While Andromeda was staring out of her window for no obvious reason, Ted was feeling lonely. This surprised him very much. Although he had lived alone for some time, it had never particularly troubled him before. Unlike her, he was quite prepared to admit that this was probably connected with Andromeda. What he didn’t know was what to do next.

Since she had left his house almost a fortnight ago, he had invested a great deal of his time in rescuing his robes from behind his wardrobe and making them fit to wear. He had also spent unreasonably long periods of time, given that he had work to be doing, sitting on the log where he had found her and studying her letters. They did not, on the whole, fill him with hope. Admittedly she had written, but he had lost his initial amusement at her acerbic tone. Fearful of offending her beyond redemption, he had hesitated to reply to her last letter. The phrase “would you kindly stop writing” rung in his ears.

Despite the fact that he had always been the one who maintained hope, and believed in them, doubts were starting to creep in. After all, she had lost herself to such a great extent that he didn’t know if his Dromeda could ever be recovered. She certainly did not think so and was clearly attempting to drive him away. So why was he refusing to be driven?

Time passed. He did not write a letter. There was nothing reasonable to write. She knew him well enough to know the things he could have told her, and he knew her well enough to know that she would not listen to things she knew already. With every day he became more convinced that clinging to hope was a wasted effort. And yet...

He couldn’t let go. Because, as Andromeda would have said, he was Ted. He still half believed in fate and fairy tales. He still more than half believed that he could still fix this, if he could only work out the right words to turn back time. To make her listen. He now regretted the tone of his earlier letters. This needed more work than he had thought. And yet writing her reams did not seem like a good plan either. Especially as she had clearly said that she was not interested in his opinions.

He borrowed her habit of listing things in his head and came up with a number of reasons to write to her. Most of them he disregarded as sentimentalism, but always he came back to the fact that he was the only one in her life not remotely interested in getting her married off to some rich pureblood. He was the only one who could give her a different way. And how could she possibly be happy in such a life?

***

She was not happy in such a life. Despite the fact that she had convinced herself that she had not the remotest interest in getting a letter from Ted, she was beginning, almost without meaning to, to take his advice. To re-emerge into her family and pay attention to what was going on. What was going on was that her parents, almost recovered from her flight, were starting to discuss weddings again. To her surprise, she found that she cared. This discovery gave her such a headache that she was forced to beat a retreat back to her room in order to think it through. This resulted in no reasonable conclusion and a headache.

Deciding that no action could be taken until such time as the fog and mush that seemed to have invaded her head subsided, Andromeda gave up her effort to take a little control over her life and retreated to her window.

Ted had not returned her owl. This unreasonably irritated her. An owl carrying no post would have been better than nothing. Although there again, it would have given a silent message of its own, and she wondered whether no news was not good news. Had she not fought for no news? To cut him out of her life and forget that she had ever, in a moment of panic, fled to his door had been her clear aim ever since returning home. So what was she doing now, complaining that he had not returned her owl? It was not as though she needed it at the moment. The headache returned with a vengeance.

Ted also had a headache, brought on by too much time spent staring at her letters and trying to clear his head. Somehow, it never occurred to him that his head might be clearer if only he put the letters down. He hardly ever let them out of his sight, except in moments when he was more than usually convinced that he was being pathetic, at which point he would firmly set them out of sight, only to take them up again minutes later with the odd feeling that they might have changed in that short time. They never had.

Eventually, and predictably more speedily than she did, he came to a conclusion. As things stood, he could either stay silent and risk losing her through lack of contact, or he could speak and risk his neck. Apart from the fact that he refused to lose her in such a way, he had never in his life given in without a fight.

The problem of what to write was eventually solved through lack of choices. His former style had been very badly received, long letters had no chance of working, and he had nothing much to say, except that he desperately did not want to lose her. Not now. But she knew that. It was not worth saying, not after all this time. But what was there to say except things that she knew? There was nothing to tell her, and only one thing he really wanted to know.

Andromeda

He wrote, and then looked at it. If he was risking his neck, he may as well burn every bridge.

Dromeda, are you alright?