FicWad

The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.


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Chapter 7: Not Quite As Planned


Monday, June 18, 1990.

It had been a very productive morning. Her parents both worked, so she was free to come and go as she pleased during the day without anyone noticing. Ah, the joys of being a teenager.

The goblins had wanted a staggering 20,000 galleons to uncurse the ring and destroy the soul fragment within it, assuming they were able to, and wouldn't even look at it until she could make a down-payment. Some of that was undoubtedly mark-up they knew they could get away with, but she couldn't begrudge them that. From the point of view of wizarding Britain as a whole, 20,000 galleons was cheap, assuming their curse breakers could handle it, but Tonks had no idea where she was going to get it from now that she had made this her problem.

So the case had never been opened, and Tonks left it in a vault which the goblins were happy to rent to her until she could come up with the money. Goblins don't take unnecessary risks.

"You know that if any Death Eaters knew this was here and that I planned to have it destroyed as soon as I could afford to, they'd consider breaking it to steal it, right?" she had asked, as she was getting back into the cart. She was sure that the goblin would have raised an eyebrow if it had possessed one. "And if Voldemort returned, he would probably make a try for Nicolas Flamel's vault, too? I'm not saying Gringott's is insecure of course! It's just that if you had some particularly nasty traps you wanted to experiment with anyway, well, those would be good places to start."

The goblin just smiled in what Tonks assumed passed for politeness, and started the cart. "Thank you, Miss Tonks." it yelled, over the rushing air. "We'll take that under advisement."

Tonks screwed up her face and changed her features again before they got back to the surface. She had some shopping to do before going to check on Harry.


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When Tonks got to #4 Privet Drive, she found the car gone and no one home. Okay, maybe her strategy yesterday hadn't been as successful as she had hoped. At this point, she could hunt them down with tracking charms, maybe, if Dumbledore hadn't found a way to interfere with them even when Harry was away from home. She could also just wait—Vernon would eventually need to go to work, and they would want to home in time for Dudley to get back to school in the fall. Idiots.

Unfortunately, that last option, she thought, relied on the Dursleys behaving like sane, sensible people, which, for all their obsession with normality, they weren't. She had also promised Harry that she would check up on him, and couldn't stand the thought of him going for so long without knowing what was going on. At least, she would hate being kept in suspense for that long if it were her in that situation. She walked back out of the neighborhood, until she was sure she was out of range of Dumbledore's monitoring charms, and started casting tracking spells.

She was scared to try to track Harry directly. The Dursleys, too, seemed to be covered by whatever Dumbledore had put in place. Not so with Vernon's car. This was easier than most cases she had been given as an auror, but it would be annoying to hunt down nevertheless.

In the academy she had learned a variety of tracking techniques. The most fun of them—simply getting on a broomstick and following a pointing spell—wasn't viable during the day in muggle areas. The next best involved triangulation from some well-placed floo and apparation points available only to aurors; again, not an option here. Nevertheless, she had been drilled on ad hoc tracking by triangulation.


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An hour and a half later, she was on a country road in Scotland, a few hundred feet away from the gate to a private campground which must have taken the Dursleys at least ten hours to drive to. The distance hadn't delayed her very much, but the Dursleys were now in a fairly public place. It was the small, dense kind of private campground, too, with a pool and other amenities. Tonks wasn't sure how camping worked for muggles, exactly, but she could tell that no one here was really "roughing it".

She considered how to tackle the situation. On the one hand, it was packed with muggles, including lots of children running around. On the other, Dumbledore's charms were far away, and she could use magic as much as she liked so long as it remained discreet. Tonks cast several muggle-repelling charms on herself, followed by a muggle-specific notice-me-not, and then walked in the front gate.

She saw, or rather heard, Dudley right away. He was running around the pool, trying to hit a smaller boy with an inflatable toy duck. There didn't seem to be any adults around who were responsible for intervening.

Unable to do anything about it without revealing herself, Tonks proceeded further into the campground to search for Harry. She was confronted with a maze of tents and a bewildering variety of muggle vehicles, some of which were practically small houses on wheels. Tonks wondered what the point of going camping in one of those was.

Eventually she came to the back of the campground where there was a grassy strip containing only tents. She found Vernon's car in the middle of it, parked in front of a large, blue, new-looking tent, from which she heard the sound of snoring. It had several windows which were just barely zipped open at their tops, but in her 12-year-old-Dora disguise she wasn't tall enough to see in any of them. Then she noticed her shadow falling against the wall of the tent, and had an idea to get Harry's attention if he was awake.

She made her shadow wave. Nothing happened from the tent, and the snoring continued, which at least meant Vernon and Petunia were asleep. Well, Vernon was asleep, and Petunia was asleep or terrified. Tonks waved both hands above her head and jumped up and down. Nothing.

She had a memory of her father tucking her into bed at night, and making shadow animals against the wall. She had never been very good at it, but it was worth a try. She stepped back so her shadow was only against the grass, and managed to put together what she thought was a passable rabbit. She held it over her head to make it appear at the base of the tent, where she made it hop along and wiggle its ears. She tried to make it open and close its mouth, too, which made it briefly look like a horrible monster. There was a giggle from inside the tent, and her heart leaped.

She tried another shape, this time deliberately going for a monster. Monsters turned out to be easier than rabbits. More giggling. She walked closer to the tent, so her whole profile was visible, and made a beckoning gesture. There was again only snoring. She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head. This was met by some rustling noises. She put her thumbs to her ears and wiggled her fingers, then put her hands back on her hips. Very, very slowly at first, the zipper on the tent door started opening, and eventually Harry stuck his head out. He looked scared.

Tonks put her finger to her lips. Harry nodded, and finished getting out of the tent, zipping it up behind him. There was a two-rail fence at the back of the campsite, with a copse of trees surrounded by pastureland on the other side. Forest was visible a quarter mile in the distance, where foothills rose up in front of mountains. Tonks clambered over the fence, and waited while Harry followed. Once they had most of the little copse between them and the campground, she found a bush that hid them from view, and sat down crosslegged. She looked up at Harry with a smile that she hoped wasn't scary.

Harry sat down facing her, looking expectant and nervous. She had hoped to have come up with something suitably epic to say to him, but nothing she had thought of seemed appropriate when she was mostly worried about not being terrifying.

"Well, I said I'd check up on you, didn't I?"

"How did you get here?"

"Magic." There, that was actually pretty good, right?

"Did your parents follow us?"

"My parents are at work. They don't know I'm here."

"Then, how . . .?"

"Magic." She allowed herself an enigmatic smile.

Harry didn't say anything for a long time. Tonks decided to forge ahead.

"So, what did your relatives say to you after I left?"

"I got sent to my room, and Uncle Vernon went to pick up Dudley, and I guess to a camping store to get that tent. Then we packed up really quickly and drove all night to get here. They didn't really say anything at all to me, just whispered to each other."

"I guess I should have expected that. Um, I don't actually have any idea where to start. I guess I should start by coming clean myself—I'm actually a few years older than I look, but I thought if I looked this way I'd be less scary." Harry looked confused. "It seemed like a good idea at the time! Now I wish I hadn't done that, because I don't want you to start out feeling lied to."

"That's okay." said Harry. Tonks thought she probably looked more nervous than he did at this point, but decided that was probably a good thing.

"Also, you should call me Tonks. That's my last name—everybody calls me that. Dora is short for something embarrassing that my mum likes but I hate. Uh, I think everything else I've said to you is true, though."

"Were you joking, about how you found me?"

"No."

Silence.

"How do you know who I am?"

"That's a long story. The short answer is that you're famous, so everyone knows who you are, but for various reasons nobody figured out where you lived until now. Ugh, I guess I better start this way—I'm sorry. Your relatives told you that your parents died in a car crash, right?"

"Yeah."

Tonks took a deep breath and let it out. "They were killed by a man who had come to kill you. They died protecting you. That's when you got that scar. Everyone will know you by that scar, by the way. So, the man who put you with your aunt and uncle is named Albus Dumbledore, and I think he was trying to protect you from having to grow up as a celebrity. He's a very good man, but he makes mistakes from time to time, and one of those was not checking up on you to see how you were doing."

Harry apparently had no idea what to think of that. "Did you use magic to disguise yourself?"

"Yeah. Um, unless you want me to, I don't really need to look twelve. It might be kind of startling if the first magic you see is me changing back to my normal body, though."

"Is there something scary about how you really look?"

"No! I mean, I guess that's a reasonable question given how I phrased that. All I meant is that I'm a little older than this. I was born in 1977, so physically I just turned seventeen, but this really is how I looked when I was twelve." Tonks wasn't entirely comfortable with that phrasing, but it was literally true, if misleading.

"Did you have pink hair when you were twelve?"

"Sometimes. I can change it to be whatever I want. That's how I looked younger, too. But most people can't do it that way -- it's a magic ability I was born with."

"It's okay if you look seventeen."

"You sure?"

Harry nodded. Tonks stood up, screwed up her face, and then stopped. "Actually I have to transfigure my clothes first—I wouldn't be able to fit in this. Sorry, hang on." She pulled her wand out of her pocket, and Harry watched intently as a series of flicks left her in a robe that was far too big for her, hanging off her shoulders. "Okay, that's always kind of ridiculous looking." She grinned, and Harry laughed. Then she screwed up her face again, and grew.

"Well, this is me. See, not a monster! Aah, don't look at me like that, now I feel guilty! Well, I guess it is that impressive if you haven't seen it before. Sorry, I didn't really have this all planned out ahead of time."

"That's okay." said Harry, as she sat back down.

"Oh, damnit, Harry. I don't know where to start. This all seemed like a good plan but I don't actually know what I'm doing. If anybody else had done it they would have found some impressive way to do it and not bolloxed it up like this, but you were there for all these years alone with those awful people and I couldn't just leave you once, I mean, once I knew where you were, but I rushed in all confident that I could fix things and Dumbledore would never know but now we're off in the middle of nowhere Scotland instead. Hiding behind a bush." Tonks was visibly on the verge of tears, but managed a laugh at her last joke. "Uh, Harry, we should probably get further away in case your relatives wake up. I'm not actually very good at being quiet, even if you are."

Harry looked across the field. "We could go for a walk, but they're going to be really mad if they realize I'm gone. Are you sure it's safe in this field with those cows over there?"

There were some beautiful highland cattle grazing a few hundred feet from them.

"I guess not. I don't actually know anything about cows. We're not going to walk. Do you mind traveling magically?"

"No!"

"Okay, well, it's not really a pleasant sensation, but it is fast. What we're going to do is called apparation. It's basically going from one place to another directly, but it can feel like you are being squeezed through a small space, and it makes some people throw up the first time. I'm not legally allowed to do it, because I haven't taken the test and gotten my license, but I'm really good at it. So, don't tell anybody I did it, okay? It's how I got here to find you, and I'm still in one piece. Do you trust me?"

"I guess so. Where are we going?"

"How about some place up in the mountains that I stopped at while trying to find you?"

"Okay."

"I'm going to need to hold onto you tightly for this to work. Once you're a little more experienced, you can hold on to me, but I don't want to take any chances, okay?"

When Tonks touched Harry's arm, he winced away from her.

She went still as a statue, expressionless, looking at him.

He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and long pants, both slightly too big for him. "Harry, is there a place I can touch you without it hurting?" He took her hand and put it on his wrist. "Okay. Change of plans, though, about where we're going." She took a deep breath, and then Harry felt like he was being sucked though a hose.

They arrived on the Tonkses' front lawn with a "pop!", whereupon Harry threw up, and Tonks nearly collapsed as she sat down on the grass, tears streaming down her face.


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Tonks composed herself after a minute. "Sorry Harry—lots of people don't like apparating. This is my place, come on in and I'll get you a glass of water."

Fortunately the Tonkses' house wasn't particularly different looking from a muggle one, so there wasn't much to distract Harry and require explaining.

"Okay, Harry. You were too sore to have me touch your arm earlier, and I brought you to my place without asking first because I'm worried about you and want to see if you have any injuries that needed treatment, and because I wanted to get you as far away from your relatives as I could, at least for now. I apologize for not explaining first."

"That's okay, I don't mind. I don't have any injuries, though, just some bruises."

"Bruises count as injuries as far as I'm concerned. Do you mind showing them to me? Could you take of your shirt so I can see how bad it is?"

Harry thought for a moment. "Uh, I guess so."

Harry only had his shirt halfway off before Tonks could see a patchwork of bruises on his back, some of them apparently recent, and in shapes that couldn't plausibly be attributed to accidents. She gestured for him to stop, tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat. "That's good enough." She had to be sure, though. "Those are from your relatives, right?" Harry nodded, slowly, clearly unsure what was happening.

Tonks would have just stood there, crying, if it weren't obviously making Harry worried. "Oh, Harry, I'm so sorry. I didn't know it was that bad. I would have taken you with me yesterday if I had known.

Sorry for crying so much—you don't need that right now and it's not helping." She paused and took a breath, rubbing the tears off her face with her hands to avoid startling Harry by conjuring a handkerchief. "Okay. After seeing that, I don't want you going back to live those people, ever, and I want to do some things very quickly to make sure that happens. I know you never had any choice in being put there—Albus Dumbledore just decided that was where you were going—and I'm trying to get you away from there regardless of what you think you want. But I can't let you go back after seeing those bruises. Do you understand?"

"Not really. I don't like living there. I've thought of running away, but I don't have anywhere else to go."

"Well, I'm going to try to get you someplace safer. I'm not sure where, yet, but I'm going to do my best. Okay?"

Harry nodded, still looking nervous.

"You're scared this won't work out, right?"

"Yeah."

"I guess that's fair. Let's see what we can do before Dumbledore realizes you're gone, shall we?" She attempted a smile, although it came out looking forced, then stared off in space, thinking. "Would that . . . huh. That might . . . no. DAMNIT. Sorry, Harry. Uh, the person I would most like to have take care of you is the closest living friend of your father's, but he's a werewolf and wouldn't be able to get legal custody." Harry seemed to have a permanent wide-eyed look at this point, which Tonks was having trouble reading. "He's a really nice man, it's just, you know, when the moon is full. Damn it, that would be so convenient. I'll try to make sure you get to meet him eventually, though, okay?" Harry nodded.

"I can't think of anyone who's an obvious candidate for just coming in and saving the day. We want someone who will stand up to Dumbledore and the Ministry—the Ministry of Magic is the wizard government in Britain—and who has the clout to keep you. I think I could make sure you never go back to the Dursleys, but I need to make sure you wouldn't wind up someplace worse, and I can think of a few families that would very much like to get their hands on you and who you do not want to live with. Huh. I have some ideas.

You know what? I'm going to go see if I can convince my mum to take the afternoon off. Do you mind if I leave you here for a few minutes? Okay, good. You're safe here—worst case scenario, you get bored. Here, come to the living room. Here's today's Daily Prophet—that's a wizarding newspaper—by the time I get back I expect you to have lots of questions no one will have time to answer. Um. I'd feel better if you just sat on the couch and didn't go anywhere. Can you do that? Okay, and remember not to tell anyone how I found you or got you here, if you can manage it. It was really complicated and I could get in trouble. I think that's it. Oh, I'm going through the floo this time—that's the fireplace. Wizards use it to travel."

Harry watched as Tonks called out her mother's workplace and stepped into the flames. The room suddenly felt much quieter with Tonks gone. Harry's stomach was in a knot, and as interesting as the paper would have seemed just an hour ago, he was too distracted to read it.

It seemed like Tonks had been gone for a long time when Harry realised he was feeling queasy. He was terrified of upsetting Tonks, lest she decide to send him back to the Dursleys, but he didn't think she'd want him throwing up on the rug, either. Eventually his stomach made the decision for him—he quickly got up and went down the hall, and found the bathroom door open. And so it was that when Tonks returned through the floo with her mother, she nearly panicked to find the couch empty.

"Hang on mum, he was here, he can't have gone far..."

"I'm in here!" he yelled, not wanting to get Tonks in trouble, but had to turn back to the toilet and throw up again.

"Okay, Mum, please don't be mad at me, at least not yet. Mum, this is Harry Potter. Harry, this is my mum." Harry turned around and looked up at them. Andromeda gasped.

"She saw your scar, Harry, that's all. Mum, don't ask how I found him yet because it was really complicated, but the family he was with was abusing him and we can't let him go back." Andromeda was just staring at him. "Mum, please help—he's covered in bruises," Tonks said, sounding genuinely panicked.

"I want to get him to a healer but I want someone to photograph those bruises so we can stop Dumbledore from putting him back there but I don't want him to end up with somebody like Malfoy or whoever Fudge wants."

Andromeda sighed. "Harry, one of the things you should know about my daughter is that she is incapable of staying out of trouble."

After getting Harry cleaned up, they returned to the living room to discuss what to do next. Andromeda eventually suggested asking their cousin Augusta Longbottom to help. "I know you don't like her, Dora, but people at the ministry respect her, and she won't let anything happen to Harry."

"Mum! I don't dislike her. She's just scary. But I think Harry needs somebody scary on his side right now. And she'll talk his ear off making sure he learns about what happened to his parents."

"Right, then. I'll give her a call. Longbottom Manor!" she called, tossing a pinch of powder into the flames. After a minute the imposing face of Mrs. Longbottom appeared in the flames.

"Andy! It's Tonks, now, right? Yes, I remember. From your expression I deduce that this is not a social call to your long-neglected relations." She gave a stern look to Andromeda. "So either someone is dead, or you want to ask for a favor. Hm, no, clearly no one is dead. What is it, then?"

"Nymphadora has uncovered a sort of delicate situation which I was hoping you could help with. It would be better not to discuss it over the floo. Could..."

"Of course. I'll be there shortly." She vanished for a moment, giving Tonks the chance to interrupt.

"Harry, if you ever use that name... oh, I hate to threaten you right now. Just don't use it!"

Her mother didn't have time to protest before Mrs. Longbottom reappeared in her enormous hat. "I'm coming through."

She came through in a burst of soot, noticing Harry immediately. "Harry, is that you?"

Harry was too terrified to respond, but Andromeda didn't give him a chance anyway. "Harry, this is Augusta Longbottom. Augusta, this is Harry Potter. Evidently Nymphadora not only somehow discovered where he lived, but took it upon herself to remove him from his muggle relatives, who she feels were abusing him."

"Harry, is this true?" Harry just stared at her, uncomfortably.

Tonks stepped in. "Harry, she's asking if your relatives hit you. I'm sorry Harry, but would you show Mrs. Longbottom your bruises?"

"No, Harry, that won't be necessary. I'll take you to St. Mungo's right away."

Tonks held up her hand before Mrs. Longbottom could simply scoop Harry up and carry him off. "Harry, you should go with her. Everyone else is terrified of her too, so you'll be safe. She's on your side. Okay? I'll try to check up on you once this has all settled down." Harry stood up, and winced as Augusta did, in fact, pick him up and carry him off through the floo.

Once they were gone, the two Tonkses sat in silence for a while. "Thanks, mum."

"So, are there any other celebrities you have been stalking, that I ought to know about? . . . The fact that you are blushing is not reassuring." She sighed. "Oh, you're not in trouble, at least not with me. Just keep me out of it next time. Don't give me that look. I'm heading back to work. I love you!" She kissed her daughter on the forehead, and went off through the floo.


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"Stalking celebrities. Hrmph." muttered Tonks as she sat on her bed. Aside from getting the ring to safety, her main attempt to change the timeline so far had gone wildly off the rails. Each individual step had seemed reasonable at the time, of course, and she couldn't just leave Harry where he was. But no one had told her how bad things had been for Harry living with the Dursleys. Maybe they had behaved better once he was getting visitors regularly? But her threat had just seemed to make things worse. She obviously knew a lot more about hunting down Death Eaters than about child welfare.

She'd have to rethink her plan to help Sirius before doing anything more about it, and wait a while before writing any of the letters she was contemplating. Visiting the library was looking like a better and better idea, however much it resembled homework.