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

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Chapter 18: Following a Few Threads


Saturday, October 6, 1990


Nothing Tonks had heard suggested anyone had acted to help Sirius. Some Gryffindors had said McGonagall, Dumbledore, and Flitwick had gone into the dorm and searched the Weasleys' things, but that was all she knew. She had to assume Pettigrew was in captivity.

If he had been turned over to the Ministry, she was pretty sure Fudge would use the opportunity to give a speech and get his photo in the paper, and that hadn't happened. She wondered if maybe Pettigrew had gotten injured somehow. That could be bad. She didn't think Dumbledore would let him escape—not after the warning she gave. He had gone straight to McGonagall like she had asked him to, which was a good sign. All in all, her top two theories were that either Dumbledore had some incomprehensibly complicated plot he was working on, or else had simply not made up his mind what to do with the rat now that he had him.

That kind of caution was all well and good, but she was increasingly unhappy about how long it was taking to free Sirius. He should have been a high priority for her, but he was still stuck in Azkaban. She was certain that Dumbledore knew by now that Sirius was innocent, so further pressure on the headmaster was probably futile.

Dumbledore consistently tried to do right, and Tonks had great respect for the man, but she was feeling more and more justified in stepping in when she thought he was wrong. In this case, she felt he needed a check on his tendency to lose track of the individual people on his 'team'. Tonks tried not to be like him, thinking of people as pieces on a chessboard, but she had to admit that getting Sirius out would be extremely helpful to her. She needed someone trustworthy who would go along with her schemes. Tonks decided it was time to send a letter or two. Unfortunately, after sending them, it would take a while to find out whether they worked.

More frustrating still than her inability to free Sirius was her inability to come up with excuses to contact Remus. Mrs. Longbottom had smply smiled and nodded, and then gone her own way, when hiring a tutor, and Tonks was reluctant to risk messing with the timeline so much as to ask Dumbledore to hire him for the Dark Arts job a little early.

So far as she knew, Quirrel was currently off in Albania or wherever, infecting the back of his head with Voldemort's spirit. She had never had it explained to her how that worked. In any case it seemed silly not to do everything possible to get Quirrel back in Hogwarts where everyone could keep an eye on him. It wasn't like he had shown any propensity to blow his cover until the last possible moment. Maybe the promise of the stone kept him in line, and acted as bait?

Tonks wasn't sure how much of the 91-92 school year had been scripted by Dumbledore, or, if it had, what on earth he had been thinking. It certainly had the halmarks of a Dumbledore plot. Unfortunately whatever it was had been so convoluted as to make her nervous about changing too many elements of it.

One of her best guesses was that Dumbledore had wanted to let Harry go up against a weakened version of Voldemort. Once, after an order meeting during the original timeline, Charlie had told her about his reserve trying to take a dragon that had been raised in captivity for too long, and having to give it weakened prey so that it could learn to hunt and eat for itself. Probably Dumbledore didn't want Harry to kill and eat the dark lord, but basically it was the same idea.

In any case there was only so much she could do to help, since, assuming she didn't utterly screw up her N.E.W.T.s or something, she would be off at the auror academy next year. She wasn't sure how she would be able to help out Harry while he wasn't at school. "Of course, I'm sitting here in a pile of his mail, secretly reading it all before he does." She would really like to just stuff it all in trunks and hand them off to Harry once she was back from school; she wondered if she could find some cheap muggle trunks over Christmas break and shrink them. "Ugh. I'd need, like, twenty of them. Maybe if I sorted out all the junk mail . . ."

She had been doing a pretty enthusiastic job of sorting out the really interesting letters, and now knew about the childhood fantasies of quite a few of her classmates. She worried about invading their, and Harry's, privacy, but not enough to actually stop reading the mail. She wondered what on earth Dumbledore had shielded the poor kid from as he got older, and the mail undoubtedly got racier. If she had been younger, and had a few more years at Hogwarts ahead of her, she would have been tempted to make a deal with Harry where she would steal his mail for him, and neither would tell Dumbledore, just so she could catch the good stuff before it got to him.

"It's not like I'm one of those Slytherin girls who get off on the idea of molesting Harry themselves, right? I'm just reading his mail. Huh." She made a mental note to ask Mrs. Longbottom to send the boys off to school with a case of love potion antidotes. Maybe she could be there for that conversation.

Tonks had taken to spending a lot of her free time here in what she now thought of as "Harry's Mail Room". She had a much easier time with her homework than her classmates, having already done it once, so it wasn't really affecting her grades. She had already read everything in the Hogwarts library about time travel, which wasn't very much; going to the British Library had felt like walking into a trap to her, so she had never followed up on that. Maybe it was just as well that she was too scared to check anything out that might make Madam Pince suspicious, since she would probably just take it up here to the Mail Room to read, instead of spending time with her friends.


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Later that day, at dinner (Tonks had gotten better about not missing meals), she watched Nancy turn a little green at the sight of a roast chicken. "So how is the pigeon project going?"

"Well, I mean, I haven't had to ask you to knock me out again, so that's progress."

"Okay, so you're not on the verge of a panic attack or of puking. Awesome!"

"Hmph. Yesterday was the last day of the extispicy lesson, so unless she comes up with something to top that, it should all be downhill from here. I don't think I'm going to be able to eat chicken again for a long time, though."

"Yeah, I don't think I'd be able to either." Tonks wasn't so sure this was true; she had become fairly inured to blood and gore during her original timeline. But maybe she wouldn't have to be, this time around.

"Giving somebody potions to help them do something like that? If I ever became a dark lord, I would use that technique. It's, like, Death-Eater-level thinking, and I bet Trelawney has no idea. She says her grandmother taught her to read the entrails of all the birds of Britain, and everyone seems to believe her."

"Yeah, it sounds like it was a normal classroom activity not so long ago. Well, long ago for us. Dumbledore probably had to do it when he was our age. He probably never batted an eye when he heard about it, either—that is, I guess, assuming he found out."

"I bet Snape knew exactly what he was doing, though, brewing those potions."

"I bet he wishes he thought of it first. The way you described the effects, it sounded way more disturbing than any of the stuff he's made us cut up. He's probably bitter!"

"Yeah, you're right! I wish I could have been there for that conversation between them. I mean, it was a lot of work he went to brewing all that, and he had to have had a lot of lead time."

Tonks stopped, looking like she was trying not to laugh. "I just had a horrifying thought."

"What?"

"If we were Slytherins, imagining the conversation . . ."

Nancy looked confused.

"Okay, remember during that food fight the other day?"

"Yeah . . . oh! You told me about that. I wish I had been there for that."

"Are you sure? It was pretty unsettling."

"You watched."

"True. Anyway, they would totally have decided Snape only did it in exchange for sexual favors."

"He's their head of house, though, don't they respect him enough not to be that crass?"

"Oh, I don't think they would think of it as being crass. They'd just go right ahead and do it without worrying about whether it was a good idea."

"You make them sound like Gryffindors."

Laughter broke out behind them, and a familiar voice said "Hey, you're that metamorphmagus, aren't you?"

Tonks turned around to see Sandra eyeing her curiously. "Yeah . . ." She screwed up her face, turning the pink streaks in her hair into blue.

Sandra was in awe. "Wow. So we're here using glamors, but when you've got the boys in the broom closet, you can be whoever you want. I mean, whoever they want, or, or, you could pretend to be their girlfriends, and they'd never know." Tonks was blushing; controlling that took even more will than changing her hair, so there wasn't much she could do. "Can you . . . can you do guys, too?" Tonks nodded. "And does it, you know, work?" Tonks just started blushing more. Before she could say anything, Sandra cut in. "It does. Oh, that is so unfair. And you probably never misuse it either."

Rissa had turned around. "Okay, she's really blushing now, Sandra, I think she does. It's Tonks, right? Hi, I'm Rissa."

Sandra kept going. "I bet you're so good you never get caught. Every time anybody in this school is getting it on with anyone else, it might be you."

"And," added Rissa, "you can change one part at a time, right?"

Tonks nodded, blushing. She wanted to pretend to be horrified, and to tell the Slytherins to bugger off, but it was rare for them to be this nice, or almost nice, and she was enjoying the attention. "I actually haven't misused it that way—I mean, I've disguised myself to stay out of trouble sometimes, but not the kind of misuse you have in mind, aside from minor tweaks, like adjusting my breasts to fit whatever I'm wearing."

The two Slytherins were now staring at her breasts. "Ohhh," said Sandra, "could you show us?"

Tonks wasn't expecting that. Quietly, she replied "maybe, if you're nice, but unlike you I wouldn't do it in the Great Hall."

Both of them snorted. "Fair enough," said Rissa.

Sandra gave a sidelong glance down the table. "You know, that would be like, Angie's wet dream, being able to turn into anyone she wanted. That was the girl who was pretending to be Rita—I saw you watching that." Tonks nodded. "She wouldn't talk to any of us about it afterwards—"

"That's because you teased her!"

"Okay, maybe. But I think she'd do that kind of thing again in a heartbeat, and if she had your powers, she'd never go to class ever, she'd be off in the broom closet pretending to be Dumbledore or something."

"Ew, Sandra!" Rissa made a face.

"That is, assuming she could talk anyone into doing it with her."

Becky, sitting on the far side of the table, interrupted. "Sandra, you really shouldn't be talking about her behind her back."

"Oh, come on, it's not doing her any harm. And if she heard about what Tonks could do, she'd just cry and cry and cry out of frustration."

"Oh come on," protested Rissa, "I think she can get herself off without pretending to be Skeeter or something."

"I'm not so sure. And that's something you're born with, right, you can't just take a potion and do it, like becoming an animagus. Right?"

"Er, you can't become a metamorphmagus like that, no, you're born with that. I'm not sure it's that big a deal, though, if you have time and aren't working as an auror or something—unless you want to change all the parts separately, you can just use polyjuice."

Sandra and Rissa gave each other a look Tonks had only previously seen on the Weasley twins, and immediately rethought the wisdom of mentioning polyjuice. Tonks cringed, then realized that the girls probably only wanted to use it for sex (or, she mentally corrected herself, simulated sex) not breaking into Gringotts or something, and that she should probably relax.

Sandra raised her eyebrows. "Please tell?"

"Well, you'll just go look it up yourselves as soon as you can get to the library, so I might as well tell you . . . just try to use it responsibly. Okay. So, polyjuice. In a nutshell, it takes like a month to brew, and then you add a bit of the person you're changing into—like a hair—into the dose you're taking, and you will turn into them—detail for detail—for an hour. You can keep taking it to extend the effect . . . uh, what else, the ingredients are expensive and you won't have them lying around. I don't know why I'm saying this to you, but please don't go breaking into Snape's storeroom to get them."

"Okay," said Sandra, "I'm going to finish eating really, really fast now, and then run to the library. But don't think we've forgotten about your breasts."

After Sandra had turned around, Rissa tried to reassued Tonks. "You look like you just did something awful—don't worry so much. This will probably help keep Sandra out of trouble. Relatively speaking of course."