Fic: Flying Lessons
Jun. 24th, 2021 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoAuthor: phantomtomato
Recipient:kellychambliss
Title: Flying Lessons
Pairing: Rolanda Hooch/Andromeda Tonks
Request/Prompt Used: Andromeda decides to arrange early flying lessons for Teddy
Rating: PG-13, very lightly implied sexual content
Word Count: ~2k
Summary: Andromeda takes Teddy to flying lessons so Harry doesn’t get that, too.
Notes: Andromeda-centric.
I take Teddy to flying lessons on Sundays.
Harry said he would do it, but Harry is twenty-two and I am Teddy’s guardian. I should be more generous with Harry—it is obvious that he is seeking family—but Teddy is all of the family I have left and Harry Potter is a god more than a man and I fear that if I am not jealous of my grandson’s time, I will lose him on the altar of that deity.
So I take Teddy to flying lessons on Sundays.
I leave after the lessons start for the first month. It is such a novelty to have time for myself during daylight on a weekend, and so I kiss Teddy goodbye, watch him long enough to see that one of the staff takes him in, and I head out.
In week five, the late spring weather is warm. I have a thermos of tea—Ted taught me to steal the best ideas from Muggles—and a paperback about a family of sisters who killed themselves. The Muggles made it into a film, but it was too soon after the war to contemplate seeing something so grim. Four years on, I can just barely read it. Two of us are still breathing, but Cissy and I seem as dead as Bella.
I won’t think of her family’s fate. They are still here. Mine are gone, except for Teddy, and so I take him to flying lessons.
He flies, poorly, as I sip tea and read my book. Dora was as awful on a broom as Ted. I have no certain memories of seeing Remus fly, but I have no certain memories of Remus other than screaming at him after he left my daughter and, later, seeing his corpse lying next to hers. When Teddy asks about his father, I tell him that Harry would love to answer. Harry resents that I favor my daughter, but he didn’t know her. He favors that old wolf, and he is too young to understand the necessary balance, so I tell Teddy of his mother, Harry tells him of his father, and no one speaks of their relationship to each other.
I like to think it would not have lasted, but then, I was devoted to my Ted. Dora had more of me in her than she liked to admit.
As I watch, Teddy takes a spill off of his broom. He’s only three feet up; mothers beside me gasp, but they are young and on their first child and still overcautious. I trust the staff to handle it.
The woman who catches his wayward broom and dusts him off isn’t someone I expected to see. Her name had been on the advertisements for the lessons, but I thought that was marketing, like when we visit Fortescue’s and it is a teenager from the Fawley family (it’s the nose; Fawleys have a very small nose) who scoops my mint chip. But, no, it’s Rolanda, in the flesh, picking Teddy up from his fall.
She looks good—great, actually, for a war-hero in her fifties. Those of us who survived are a miserable lot. I had been pretty, once; my hair is now prematurely grey and I keep finding my hips where I expect them not to be. Cissy went the opposite direction. She is disappearing into herself.
Rolanda is dominating. She is short, wide, and hard. Her arms are nearly as defined as they had been at seventeen, when I watched her on the Slytherin quidditch team, bullying players from other houses off of the quaffle.
I had been eleven and pretty and spoiled beyond belief. Bella had disdained quidditch, so I had, too. I went with my friends only to sit in the most visible seats and be seen flipping my hair artfully at the boys who stared. I had thought Rolanda, the girl who played on the notoriously male-dominated Slytherin team, was awkward and ugly.
She is effortlessly lifting my grandson back onto his broom. She is in control of her body. I cannot imagine this woman running her hips—and I should know my hips by now, I have not been that skinny girl for decades—into the kitchen counter as she prepares her dinner.
I can’t even flip my hair artfully anymore. I chopped it off a year after Dora died.
At the end of the lesson, I go up to Rolanda to thank her for handling my grandson’s tumble. She laughs and scrubs a hand through her hair (short, spiky, like Dora wore it at eighteen) and says it’s her job. It’s no trouble.
We are about to do the awkward dance of all of those who survived the war on the right side. People look at me with more pity than most because in their eyes, my loss tally is three. In my eyes it is also three, but the third is my sister, not my son-in-law. I let them assume it is my grief, and not my anger, that keeps me quiet.
“Teddy is a promising flyer,” Rolanda says, because she cannot say that it is his parents who should be here to see him learning, socializing with the other parents of young children.
“No, he isn’t,” I respond, because Rolanda was a Slytherin, too, and her loss tally must include those whose names are not on the memorial at Hogwarts. “Harry wants him to be,” I admit.
Rolanda nods, and I remember that she must have taught Harry as well. I expect her to talk to me about Harry Potter. Everyone does, when they remember our connection. He is not easy to access, and I see him every week. He is a god of this world, and I feel more like his oracle than a grandmother who must time-share her only living family (Cissy is alive but she seems not to be) with him to keep his favor.
I am unfair to him. Harry is twenty-two and depressed and trying to build a family around the ghost of a dead man who nearly abandoned his own.
Instead of talking about Harry, Rolanda asks, “Will you stay during practice next week?”
She looks me up and down. I pretend to note the number of pages remaining in my book.
“If the weather holds,” I say, coyly, “I might.” I have no hair to flip, but in this moment, I dearly wish that I did.
—
Ted had been it for me. I was sixteen when I said yes to his invitation, seventeen when I pushed him into a broom cupboard, eighteen when I left my family for him, and nineteen when I bore our child. I was thirty when I realized I’d had other choices. Black women were single-minded in our pursuit of our goals, and while Bella had chased her freedom in a revolution and Cissy had chased her comfort in a sure bet, I had chased my youthful notions of romance in the form of a handsome Muggleborn man. This is not to say I regretted Ted Tonks. I still love him dearly. I still miss him every waking hour of my life. He showed me my heart when I had been raised not to know it, and he gave me decades of devotion and an irreplaceable daughter.
I bear three losses from this war. Bella is the oldest, and Dora hurts the most, but Ted was the one who understood me. I never expected to look for another to fill that role.
So when I fret in front of my wardrobe on Sunday morning, I know I am in trouble. My trousers are all too professional for sitting in a field. I haven’t ever owned a Muggle skirt. Robes are falling out of fashion for casualwear after the war, as though prejudices can be changed by forcing Twilfitt’s to carry the same brands as Harrod’s. I want to appear approachable and modern, but the low-cut denim favored today isn’t amenable to my present body.
I sigh and suit up like the woman that I am: cashmere shawl and silk blouse and high-waisted wool trousers tucked into tall leather boots. I look like ostentatious wealth. Despite Ted’s tempering influence, I only ever managed to dislodge the blood prejudice, not the sense of my social class.
Teddy wears a shirt with a dinosaur on it and shorts with an elastic waist. I am trying to do better by him; Dora would have wanted that.
I kiss his forehead in goodbye before he runs off to join the other children lining up for brooms. I lay out my blanket on the grass, thermos and book at the ready, and am surprised when Rolanda joins me.
“You look nice,” she says as she sits. I pet my cocoon of protective wool self-consciously.
“Aren’t you teaching?” I ask, kicking myself for being snide as soon as I say it. I never learned to flirt. Ted liked that I was mean.
Rolanda laughs at me and I relax.
“I supervise,” she says. “My name is more of a brand than a promise of personal attention, and the younger staff still have fully-functioning knees.” She winks at me. “Not that mine don’t still know how to bend when they need to.”
She’s crass, and it’s not even a good line, but I smile helplessly at her boldness. Ted had been bold. Dora had been bold. Bella had been bold. I am drawn to outspoken people.
Rolanda asks me what I’m reading, and I tell her about the book. She says it sounds depressing. I say that it is, and it isn’t; it makes me hope that my sisters and I meant as much to someone.
“You’re not dead,” she argues.
I don’t mean to be morbid, but I tell her that I feel as though we are. Bella is in the ground. I am a vessel for a god’s son. Cissy is disappearing into the shadow of her married name.
“You might try a romance novel next,” she suggests. I shrug rather than admit she is correct.
We sit and she tells me about her life, perhaps sensing that I would not be open to talking more about my own. I learn that she has retired from Hogwarts. I assume it is the memorial that chased her away and she corrects me. It is the Carrows. They were her niece and nephew.
I take her hand and we watch the children fly.
—
On Sunday, I take Teddy to his flying lesson.
Rolanda looks at me, from my short hair to my expensive sandals. She plucks at the cardigan of my sweater-set.
“I can leave Katie in charge for the day,” she offers, “if you don’t mind having dressed so nicely for nothing.”
I hesitate, clutching my bag to my hip. I’m not surprised to find my body there, this time.
She’s bold like Ted and she wears her hair like Dora did. She loves family like Bella.
She’s physical like none of them. She’s alive, and she thinks I am, too.
I take her hand and I’m not sure that we finish the apparition before we’re kissing. I pull her through my house and she doesn’t stop to search the photos on the mantel for Harry’s face. She’s too busy watching mine. When we reach my bedroom she undresses me with reverence for the clothes; I hang her jeans and she laughs but grabs another hanger for her sweatshirt.
Rolanda shows that her knees still work when she sits between mine. She helps me learn my body again, and I feel alive. I must be. I have so much I want to learn about making love to her.
I hold her to me when we’re through, afraid that the spell will break and I will be left with a pumpkin for my carriage. She kisses me languidly for a minute more and then pulls back, laughing at my neediness.
“You take your grandson to my flying lessons every Sunday,” she scolds. “If you want to see me sooner, you need only ask.”
I think I will.
phantomtomatoRecipient:
kellychamblissTitle: Flying Lessons
Pairing: Rolanda Hooch/Andromeda Tonks
Request/Prompt Used: Andromeda decides to arrange early flying lessons for Teddy
Rating: PG-13, very lightly implied sexual content
Word Count: ~2k
Summary: Andromeda takes Teddy to flying lessons so Harry doesn’t get that, too.
Notes: Andromeda-centric.
I take Teddy to flying lessons on Sundays.
Harry said he would do it, but Harry is twenty-two and I am Teddy’s guardian. I should be more generous with Harry—it is obvious that he is seeking family—but Teddy is all of the family I have left and Harry Potter is a god more than a man and I fear that if I am not jealous of my grandson’s time, I will lose him on the altar of that deity.
So I take Teddy to flying lessons on Sundays.
I leave after the lessons start for the first month. It is such a novelty to have time for myself during daylight on a weekend, and so I kiss Teddy goodbye, watch him long enough to see that one of the staff takes him in, and I head out.
In week five, the late spring weather is warm. I have a thermos of tea—Ted taught me to steal the best ideas from Muggles—and a paperback about a family of sisters who killed themselves. The Muggles made it into a film, but it was too soon after the war to contemplate seeing something so grim. Four years on, I can just barely read it. Two of us are still breathing, but Cissy and I seem as dead as Bella.
I won’t think of her family’s fate. They are still here. Mine are gone, except for Teddy, and so I take him to flying lessons.
He flies, poorly, as I sip tea and read my book. Dora was as awful on a broom as Ted. I have no certain memories of seeing Remus fly, but I have no certain memories of Remus other than screaming at him after he left my daughter and, later, seeing his corpse lying next to hers. When Teddy asks about his father, I tell him that Harry would love to answer. Harry resents that I favor my daughter, but he didn’t know her. He favors that old wolf, and he is too young to understand the necessary balance, so I tell Teddy of his mother, Harry tells him of his father, and no one speaks of their relationship to each other.
I like to think it would not have lasted, but then, I was devoted to my Ted. Dora had more of me in her than she liked to admit.
As I watch, Teddy takes a spill off of his broom. He’s only three feet up; mothers beside me gasp, but they are young and on their first child and still overcautious. I trust the staff to handle it.
The woman who catches his wayward broom and dusts him off isn’t someone I expected to see. Her name had been on the advertisements for the lessons, but I thought that was marketing, like when we visit Fortescue’s and it is a teenager from the Fawley family (it’s the nose; Fawleys have a very small nose) who scoops my mint chip. But, no, it’s Rolanda, in the flesh, picking Teddy up from his fall.
She looks good—great, actually, for a war-hero in her fifties. Those of us who survived are a miserable lot. I had been pretty, once; my hair is now prematurely grey and I keep finding my hips where I expect them not to be. Cissy went the opposite direction. She is disappearing into herself.
Rolanda is dominating. She is short, wide, and hard. Her arms are nearly as defined as they had been at seventeen, when I watched her on the Slytherin quidditch team, bullying players from other houses off of the quaffle.
I had been eleven and pretty and spoiled beyond belief. Bella had disdained quidditch, so I had, too. I went with my friends only to sit in the most visible seats and be seen flipping my hair artfully at the boys who stared. I had thought Rolanda, the girl who played on the notoriously male-dominated Slytherin team, was awkward and ugly.
She is effortlessly lifting my grandson back onto his broom. She is in control of her body. I cannot imagine this woman running her hips—and I should know my hips by now, I have not been that skinny girl for decades—into the kitchen counter as she prepares her dinner.
I can’t even flip my hair artfully anymore. I chopped it off a year after Dora died.
At the end of the lesson, I go up to Rolanda to thank her for handling my grandson’s tumble. She laughs and scrubs a hand through her hair (short, spiky, like Dora wore it at eighteen) and says it’s her job. It’s no trouble.
We are about to do the awkward dance of all of those who survived the war on the right side. People look at me with more pity than most because in their eyes, my loss tally is three. In my eyes it is also three, but the third is my sister, not my son-in-law. I let them assume it is my grief, and not my anger, that keeps me quiet.
“Teddy is a promising flyer,” Rolanda says, because she cannot say that it is his parents who should be here to see him learning, socializing with the other parents of young children.
“No, he isn’t,” I respond, because Rolanda was a Slytherin, too, and her loss tally must include those whose names are not on the memorial at Hogwarts. “Harry wants him to be,” I admit.
Rolanda nods, and I remember that she must have taught Harry as well. I expect her to talk to me about Harry Potter. Everyone does, when they remember our connection. He is not easy to access, and I see him every week. He is a god of this world, and I feel more like his oracle than a grandmother who must time-share her only living family (Cissy is alive but she seems not to be) with him to keep his favor.
I am unfair to him. Harry is twenty-two and depressed and trying to build a family around the ghost of a dead man who nearly abandoned his own.
Instead of talking about Harry, Rolanda asks, “Will you stay during practice next week?”
She looks me up and down. I pretend to note the number of pages remaining in my book.
“If the weather holds,” I say, coyly, “I might.” I have no hair to flip, but in this moment, I dearly wish that I did.
—
Ted had been it for me. I was sixteen when I said yes to his invitation, seventeen when I pushed him into a broom cupboard, eighteen when I left my family for him, and nineteen when I bore our child. I was thirty when I realized I’d had other choices. Black women were single-minded in our pursuit of our goals, and while Bella had chased her freedom in a revolution and Cissy had chased her comfort in a sure bet, I had chased my youthful notions of romance in the form of a handsome Muggleborn man. This is not to say I regretted Ted Tonks. I still love him dearly. I still miss him every waking hour of my life. He showed me my heart when I had been raised not to know it, and he gave me decades of devotion and an irreplaceable daughter.
I bear three losses from this war. Bella is the oldest, and Dora hurts the most, but Ted was the one who understood me. I never expected to look for another to fill that role.
So when I fret in front of my wardrobe on Sunday morning, I know I am in trouble. My trousers are all too professional for sitting in a field. I haven’t ever owned a Muggle skirt. Robes are falling out of fashion for casualwear after the war, as though prejudices can be changed by forcing Twilfitt’s to carry the same brands as Harrod’s. I want to appear approachable and modern, but the low-cut denim favored today isn’t amenable to my present body.
I sigh and suit up like the woman that I am: cashmere shawl and silk blouse and high-waisted wool trousers tucked into tall leather boots. I look like ostentatious wealth. Despite Ted’s tempering influence, I only ever managed to dislodge the blood prejudice, not the sense of my social class.
Teddy wears a shirt with a dinosaur on it and shorts with an elastic waist. I am trying to do better by him; Dora would have wanted that.
I kiss his forehead in goodbye before he runs off to join the other children lining up for brooms. I lay out my blanket on the grass, thermos and book at the ready, and am surprised when Rolanda joins me.
“You look nice,” she says as she sits. I pet my cocoon of protective wool self-consciously.
“Aren’t you teaching?” I ask, kicking myself for being snide as soon as I say it. I never learned to flirt. Ted liked that I was mean.
Rolanda laughs at me and I relax.
“I supervise,” she says. “My name is more of a brand than a promise of personal attention, and the younger staff still have fully-functioning knees.” She winks at me. “Not that mine don’t still know how to bend when they need to.”
She’s crass, and it’s not even a good line, but I smile helplessly at her boldness. Ted had been bold. Dora had been bold. Bella had been bold. I am drawn to outspoken people.
Rolanda asks me what I’m reading, and I tell her about the book. She says it sounds depressing. I say that it is, and it isn’t; it makes me hope that my sisters and I meant as much to someone.
“You’re not dead,” she argues.
I don’t mean to be morbid, but I tell her that I feel as though we are. Bella is in the ground. I am a vessel for a god’s son. Cissy is disappearing into the shadow of her married name.
“You might try a romance novel next,” she suggests. I shrug rather than admit she is correct.
We sit and she tells me about her life, perhaps sensing that I would not be open to talking more about my own. I learn that she has retired from Hogwarts. I assume it is the memorial that chased her away and she corrects me. It is the Carrows. They were her niece and nephew.
I take her hand and we watch the children fly.
—
On Sunday, I take Teddy to his flying lesson.
Rolanda looks at me, from my short hair to my expensive sandals. She plucks at the cardigan of my sweater-set.
“I can leave Katie in charge for the day,” she offers, “if you don’t mind having dressed so nicely for nothing.”
I hesitate, clutching my bag to my hip. I’m not surprised to find my body there, this time.
She’s bold like Ted and she wears her hair like Dora did. She loves family like Bella.
She’s physical like none of them. She’s alive, and she thinks I am, too.
I take her hand and I’m not sure that we finish the apparition before we’re kissing. I pull her through my house and she doesn’t stop to search the photos on the mantel for Harry’s face. She’s too busy watching mine. When we reach my bedroom she undresses me with reverence for the clothes; I hang her jeans and she laughs but grabs another hanger for her sweatshirt.
Rolanda shows that her knees still work when she sits between mine. She helps me learn my body again, and I feel alive. I must be. I have so much I want to learn about making love to her.
I hold her to me when we’re through, afraid that the spell will break and I will be left with a pumpkin for my carriage. She kisses me languidly for a minute more and then pulls back, laughing at my neediness.
“You take your grandson to my flying lessons every Sunday,” she scolds. “If you want to see me sooner, you need only ask.”
I think I will.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-25 05:19 am (UTC)Fifty-year-old Rolanda is fucking hot. Also just saying. :)
I am in love with Andromeda's relationships with her family. Remus is nothing. ("In my eyes it is also three, but the third is my sister, not my son-in-law." God, yes.) How could he be? What even was he to Dora? Andromeda doesn't know, won't ever know. Her grief for Ted is so deep and raw and I am in awe of what you accomplish in a few sentences.
I love how you balanced memories of Ted with her new interest in Rolanda - she is certainly not just a replacement! She makes Andromeda feel alive! And she doesn't gaf about the portraits of Harry (such a nice touch).
Gorgeous.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-25 05:39 pm (UTC)The Blacks’ notion of family is probably the most interesting in the fandom. They clearly feel a very strong bond to each other, and I think any treatment of them that tries to write around that is going to have trouble. I find it more affecting to go through the mess of it and let Andromeda have her feelings about her sisters. But their family is also so famously insular, and I think it takes a huge amount of work to break into it as a newcomer—Ted did, Andromeda chose him, and he proved himself by being there until his death. Rolanda easily communicates that she understands the complexities of family. Remus made about the worst first-impression that he could have for this family and died before he could correct it. Andromeda can acknowledge that without actually liking him. Harry is coming to the family through Remus, that son-in-law she detests, and I don’t think she will ever really like him as a result. She’s counting the days until he marries and has his own kids.