Sky's the limit - Em

It wasn’t like she had gone looking for this. She hadn’t gone looking for them at all. But here they were. They were a part of her life now. And Emmaline didn’t know how you explained to your mother that the woman that you had said was your best friend, was now going to be more than that. That you had entered into a relationship, not only with her, but with the man that she loved. The man that was the father of her unborn child… It was a complicated relationship for someone like her mother. But from the inside of it, Emmaline didn’t really think that it was going to be.

Untraditional, clearly, but looking at the three of them, she didn’t think that there was much traditional about them at all. Andromeda had never been traditional. Traditions had nearly swallowed her for the couple of months that she had tried to abide by them. Emmaline herself had never done anything traditional. She had walked away from a traditional marriage. She had fallen in love with a halfblood. Nothing about their lives was traditional. Even Rabastan… Though she knew that Andromeda’s choices had changed the course of his life, he had never made that traditional match either.

Still, she was happy here. She was happy in this place. In this moment. That was all that she really wanted. She just wanted to be happy. And Ian had made her happy. She wasn’t going to deny that. That she had let herself be happy with him. But there were differences there that would have been hard to overcome. He wasn’t English. He was a magizoologist. And while she wasn’t holding that against him, there hadn’t been all that much that they had had in common. Her outdoor knowledge extended about as far as the horses. And after that she was lost.

Horses were not a magical animal either. She didn’t know a thing about what he was talking about a good majority of the time. She could stitch a wound. And she could perform emergency trauma surgeries to keep human beings alive. But when it came to the difference in billywigs and bowtruckles, she had no idea. One was green, and one was blue? That was about all she had on that front. She had never claimed to be the outdoorsy type, and she had tried. She had let him take her camping. But she had not been the biggest fan.

There was something just… Odd, about sleeping on the ground when there was a perfectly good bed at home. Maybe she was just spoiled, but Emmaline much preferred the comforts of her home. Or even of Andromeda and Rabastan’s new home. She much preferred to be indoors, and away from the elements when she was sleeping. They lived in the United Kingdom, after all, there was no telling just how often it was going to decide to rain. Nearly half of the year, in fact.

“I can think of a number of reasons…” There was a lit to her voice that was not the one she would have used with anyone else in her laboratory. There was something far more flirtatious about the way that he was cooing at her, and the sass that escaped her own lips back at him. “But you know me, I’m a regular Girl Scout. Camping is my favorite outdoor activity.” Emmaline didn’t think that it would have even taken the sarcasm dripping off of her every word for him to know that that was about as far from the truth as she could get. Emmaline didn’t like to think that she was that much of a girly girl. But she certainly wasn’t a camper.

“Did you just shrug at me, Lestrange?” Her perfectly arched eyebrows raised in a little bit of a challenge at the fact that he had so blatantly just shrugged at her. “If you convince Andromeda to eat a s’more, I’ll have to figure out some way to reward you.” If there was one thing that she thought that they would always agree on, it was that Andromeda needed to eat more. And getting her to eat something sweet was probably so far out of the realm of possibility, that she would have liked to see him try.

Pushing her stool out from where she had been working, she stood up and took a step towards him around the end of her workstation. “Zoë probably would too. She loves the stars.” Emmaline knew that he didn’t know her daughter well, but she hoped to change that. She wanted them to have a relationship. A good one. Zoë had lost Travis so traumatically; she knew that they had issues there that were still unresolved. Things that they were headed into their fourth summer of counseling about. But she wanted her to have someone that she could count on to be there. She wanted him to know her, and her to know him too.