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Chapter 53: Plotting In Two Houses


Friday, January 18, 1991. Morning.


"They were boring."

"How often did you check?"

"Just twice. They were asleep both times, so it didn't seem worth it," said Fred, yawning. "Also, it was just plain weird."

"Tsk, tsk. Come now, Fred, staying awake to watch Snape sleep isn't creepy at all!"


The twins were huddled together in their room in the dorms, after waiting for everyone else to leave. Dora had passed them a note at the end of dinner yesterday, asking them to keep an eye on Snape and Quirrel, since the twins were "in the best position to do it of anybody," and there were some things she was wondering about. "Let me know as soon as possible if you see either of them unusually close to someone else, or if they leave the castle unexpectedly," it had said, "but for Merlin's sake don't get it into your heads to follow them around in person! Leave that to me or Sirius. Oh, and never make eye contact with Snape, or with Dumbledore if he does the twinkly-eye thing. Can't have them using legilimency on my spies. Oh, I suppose you should avoid eye contact with Quirrel for good measure. I have no idea what to offer in return, so I'll have to owe you one — thanks!!!"

If Dora hadn't been Sirius' cousin, they would have perceived this as blackmail about their possession of the map. After some discussion, though, they had decided Dora's request counted as close enough to doing the Maruaders' own work, and besides, they could be creative about cashing in on that favor later.


So they spied on Snape and Quirrel. Yesterday evening, a prefect escorted three girls to Snape's office hours. That had seemed promising, and the girls were there for nearly an hour, but none of them got 'unusually close'. Quirrel just sat in his room the whole time. After losing a coin toss, Fred had set a silent alarm spell to wake himself up periodically.


"I wonder," said Fred, as they stared at the map one last time before heading down to the common room, "if Sirius—"

"—Padfoot."

"Right. I wonder if Mr. Padfoot knows some way to get it to remember what it shows?"

George thought for a moment. "Probably not. Something that amazingly useful ought to be obvious once you got the map working. You could just spy on everybody, even if you missed something . . ."

Fred nodded, considering the possibilities. "We'll ask him, just in case. I'm sure he'd want to know if Snape got 'unusually close' to anyone, too!"

"Ha!" said George, as he took the map from Fred and peered at it. "Do you think, maybe . . ."

". . . this was his idea?"

"Well, he hates Snape. Why Quirrel, though?"

Fred scratched his head. "That is the puzzle. Everyone would want to know if Snape were having an affair—"

Both of them stopped for a moment, grimacing at the thought.

"Of course," said George, "without following them on foot, we just have the map for evidence."

"Which," Fred observed, "is no evidence at all. Hm. I bet Quirrel's just a distraction."

"Could be Snape is the distraction, just to motivate us," countered George.

"True, true. He can be very distracting in class, at least. I believe if we are going to do this right, we will have to spy on everyone ever now, just to be sure no valuable gossip is missed."

"Clearly!"

"I don't mean go out of our way, of course," said Fred. "Just, you know, if we do spot something . . ."

George nodded.

"So . . ." said Fred, looking thoughtful. "We'd better get this straight: If we catch Snape . . ."

". . . in a broom closet . . ."

". . . with Trelawney . . ."

". . . then it's not our department," said George, "and Dora gets to track that one down without our . . ."

". . . interference?" suggested Fred. "What is our department anyway?"

"Oh, I don't think we should say — although gossip-related mischief is probably not, uh — what is it Percy would say?"

"Not our core . . ."

". . . competence! Right. I think that was it, when he was trying to get Ginny to do his chores."

Fred imitated Percy: "'I think it best if I delegate tasks which lie outside of my core competencies.'"

"What a prat."

"To be fair, he apologized. Eventually."

They paused for a moment, considering this.

"Anyway," said Fred, "I think anything exploding, changing color, or growing feathers is definitely in."

"Good enough," said George, shrugging. "So if it's Madam Hooch . . ."

". . . and Dumbledore . . ."

". . . we pass it to one of the girls. But only if we feel like it."

"Right. That, O brother, sounds like a plan where we might cause a reasonable amount of mayhem while expending very little effort."

"Precisely," said George, tapping his wand to the map. "Mischief managed!"



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Secrets, in the absence of magic, are notoriously difficult to keep.

In the presence of magic, it is another story.

The desire to keep information to oneself, or to control its distribution, is a fundamental human trait, and a really staggering amount of human mental capacity is devoted to it. Wizards are absolutely no exception, and, over the millennia, have devised so many magical means of preserving secrecy that a Charms class could spend a year on it and barely scratch the surface. Like most magic, it is mostly useless, but when applied competently in the appropriate situations, it can be immensely powerful.

Hogwarts was positively steeped in it, in the same way it was steeped in nearly every other type of magic, and most of the time it was all undetectable.

Tonks had often wondered why so few students had known about the Room of Requirement in either of her two timelines. The place was so insanely useful that knowledge of it really ought to have been passed around more, but it seemed like even the professors didn't know about it, and students either discovered it by accident or learned about it from each other in ones or twos. Even then they rarely discovered its full capabilities, and mostly had it re-use the form they originally found it in.

Faced, however, with a situation the room would be really useful for, Tonks declined to share it with anyone. She didn't think this was due to any magic inherent to Hogwarts, although she spent a while seriously considering that possibility. In reality she just preferred to keep a secret resource secret. Alastor, no doubt, would be pleased with her. He would not have been all that pleased with her little massed-shields trick, though, and would have given her a lecture about the perils of revealing knowledge she had no explanation for.

And he would have been right. Not only could Tonks not plant the seeds of a future resistance by training kids herself, but she probably had to make her plans seem like someone else's ideas. For now that was utterly inconsistent with the distraction of teaching anyone about the Room of Requirement.

After the stand-off with Slytherin on Tuesday, Tonks had made an offhand remark to a prefect about teaching the younger Hufflepuffs some basic defensive magic (and then carefully dropped the subject for a day). Professor Eeles was excellent at teaching theory and strategy, and was enthusiastic about driving home his points with hands-on demonstrations, but he made few attempts to put it all together in any practical way.

There was nothing particularly odd about this — Eeles was still one of the best Defense teachers Tonks had had while at Hogwarts — but getting the students to the point of being useful in a serious fight between wizards was far more work than Eeles had signed up for. Heck, it took over a year of training at the Auror Academy before recruits were sent out into the field at all, even for stupid stuff. The average wizard had no interest in fighting, so even a small amount of practice could give an opponent a nearly insurmountable advantage.

Slytherins were, straightforwardly enough, more aggressive than Hufflepuffs. They picked more fights than Hufflepuffs, and through this they trivially wound up getting more practice at fighting than Hufflepuffs. This, as Tonks saw it, was a fairly straightforward problem, and a perfect excuse to set in motion some of the schemes which, in theory, she had been sent back in time to undertake. It was also about the only thing she could easily do with the school in lock-down mode — she was sure Harry would be out in the halls every night chasing Quirrel around, but unlike Harry, Tonks didn't think she'd get rescued by Fawkes if the basilisk showed up.

She had been much warier about sending letters after Luna's trick with retaining the owl — it would be too easy to track her somehow if she didn't find better ways to anonymize herself. Post owl magic didn't rely on appearance, so she couldn't just disguise herself — she was always just Tonks, to an owl (normally that was a reassuring thing). There were a few notes overdue for sending, though, so she would eventually need to just pour the privacy and security charms on, take a deep breath, and get back to contacting people again. She might have to ask Sirius for help when she saw him next weekend in Hogsmeade, assuming Dumbledore didn't decide to cancel that, too.


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On Wednesday evening, in the Hufflepuff common room, she sought out the prefect she had spoken to earlier. Glenn, the prefect, was studying by himself in a chair next to the fire. Tonks sat lightly on the chair's arm and tried to figure out how to make him see things her way.

He turned around, a little awkwardly, to look up at her. "Um, hi there . . . What's up?"

Tonks took a deep breath. "So," she began, "that incident with the Slytherins yesterday . . ."

"What about it? I thought Flitwick and Dumbledore dealt with it well enough."

"What if they hadn't been there?" She hadn't mean to be so direct, but if Glenn was giving her the opening, she might as well use it.

"I really don't know," said Glenn, shrugging. "I suppose it could've gone pretty badly — those shields weren't really enough — but it's not like a major fight would break out in the Great Hall." Tonks looked doubtful. "Okay, fine — what are you getting at?", he asked.

"Nothing specifically. Well, just, teachers and prefects aren't always there every time the Slytherins try to pick a fight, or, um, goad us into one. And, it seems like . . . hm. Do you think maybe with the basilisk out, the Slytherins think they can get away with more? I think that's what I'm really worried about."

Glenn narrowed his eyes and frowned, considering that. "I mean, I assume so . . . they certainly seemed louder than usual, and not like after a Quidditch match, either. From where I was sitting it looked like there were a few — well, maybe half — of them who were actually looking for trouble, and the rest were just making fun of us."

Tonks grinned. "If you put it that way, it sounds just like how they acted without the basilisk!" She noticed a few students look up from a nearby couch when she raised her voice. Was that good or bad? She wasn't sure.

"This was more . . . I don't know." Glenn paused, searching for words. "Everyone feels like something's going on, which I suppose it is? But I don't remember having both tables with wands drawn on each other before. That's a new low."

"Do you think we should expect them to do it again?"

Glenn looked confused. "What difference would that make? I'm not sure what you're asking."

"Argh, sorry," said Tonks, "it's just, if the teachers hadn't been there, and it came down to a fight, I don't think we would have won."

Glenn shook his head, unconvinced. "Sure, by ourselves, but Ravenclaw and Gryffindor would have stepped in."

"Yeah, Glenn," interrupted one of the students from the couch, "but even before the basilisk, they just waited until there weren't so many people around. My year has potions with them, and they're always awful when Snape isn't looking."

"They keep saying 'badgers!' under their breath when they think he can't hear!" added another student. Tonks had been over-hearing 'badgers!' a lot,, too, but had so far listened to the voice of Moody in her head telling her not to let it get to her.

"And," added a third, "he just takes off points if we fight back!"

"Do you fight back?" asked Tonks, turning away from Glenn to face everyone on the couch.

"Not really," said one of them. The poor kid looked pretty downcast about it, and she hoped she hadn't sent the wrong message.

"Sorry," said Tonks, "I didn't mean you always ought to — I think that came off wrong." The other students nodded and shrugged. "But what if, say, you thought you were really in danger? Like, if they got worse?"

"So what are you saying?" Now there were several students hanging around the conversation, leaning on the back of the couch, trying to decide if it was going to be interesting enough to find a seat on the floor and commit to joining in.

"I'm not saying anything in particular," said Tonks, trying not to sound defensive. "I guess I'm wondering out loud how safe we all feel, and whether there's anything we can do . . . I mean, Defense class doesn't really teach anyone how to defend themselves, but the Slytherins mostly only have just a little more experience fighting than we do, and that's just because they pick the fights." She worried that she was being too obvious. Of course, consensus-based decision-making was normal for Hufflepuffs, so everyone else probably just assumed she was trying to be polite (which unfortunately was different from overlooking who originated ideas).

"So you want us to practice fighting?" asked one of the on-lookers.

"No! Not unless everyone wanted to, and thought it was a good idea." Tonks looked around, and decided to clarify. "I mean, practice defending yourselves from bullies, not how to fight like a Slytherin!" She grinned; a few students laughed. "We could spend some time outside of class going over what Eeles doesn't teach, to make sure the younger kids are a little safer if the Slytherins decide the basilisk is an excuse to be much worse than usual. We'd have to keep whatever we did secret, of course, or we'd just encourage them." Tonks looked around, trying to get a feel for the mood of the room.

"That thing with the shields was pretty cool," said a second year boy, "we could practice doing that again!" Tonks just smiled, but didn't step in, trying to indicate she was done. This was followed by everybody talking at once.

She leaned down a little towards Glenn, and lowered her voice. "So much for me being subtle. Sorry about that. I was just trying to offer a suggestion, not end up in the middle of a big project." She got off Glenn's chair and moved to the edge of the circle of students, hoping to avoid looking like she was in charge of anything, stepping back and waiting to see what happened next.


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Tonks had been in the Gryffindor common room a few times, and had heard about the Ravenclaw and Slythering ones. Professor McGonagall usually kept her house's room on the small side, because situations almost never came up where most Gryffindors were trying to use it at the same time. They were either up in their dorms, or out making trouble. A room big enough to hold all 200-250 Gryffindors, or however many there were right now, would be visually overwhelming. No matter how you rearranged the furniture to break the space up, the lack of walls left people feeling exposed. So, counterintuitively, more people tried to use the room when it was smaller, and McGonagall didn't feel like fighting human nature in this case.

The Hufflepuff basement solved this seemingly intractable architectural problem by having more than one room in the common area. You couldn't assemble the whole house in one place this way, but Professor Sprout had ensured that everyone felt comfortable in the space, and everyone who wanted a seat could reliably find one.

Sprout had also ensured that there would be room by the light-wells and magically-lit windows for all of the houseplants she didn't want to keep in the greenhouse, or was showing off, or maybe was just experimenting with. In the dark corner behind where Tonks was standing, a huge specimen labeled Monstera hogwartsii twined around a stake as wide as her wrist, going most of the way to the ceiling. Periodically it rustled its wide, deeply-lobed leaves to beckon students over. If you got close enough it would poke you, or maybe tickle you — Tonks was never sure what it was trying to do, and actually found it rather creepy. Plants had no interest in human concepts of personal space or boundaries. Fortunately Sprout had put most of the more "interactive" ones out of reach of furniture.

As a first year, Tonks had made the mistake once of falling asleep in a chair next to an innocuous-looking cycad. She had woken up an hour later to find it — literally — "rooting" around in her pockets while it placidly chewed the last page of her homework. She had screamed; the plant had gone "whuf!" and continued chewing. Attempts to retrieve the last bits of paper from its mouth, or whatever that was, resulted in Tonks getting snarled at. Sprout had scolded her for feeding it junk. Tonks didn't sit there, or next to any unfamiliar plant, ever again.

She felt ambivalent about being back at Hogwarts. She loved the Hufflepuff basement — during the day, bright natural (and magical) light complemented the plants and cheerful yellow furniture and carpets. At night, gleaming copper fixtures shone in the light of gas lamps and fireplaces. There was always someone around to talk to, and always a quiet corner where you could find privacy when you needed it. She had spent seven years of her life here, minus vacations, and had been unexpectedly, bizarrely, confusingly, given an eighth. It was now halfway over. For all that she lounged around, sat in sunbeams, and tried to drink in the experience, it wasn't the same.

Oh, you could go back. Humans are magnificently adaptable, and whole days went by when she wasn't consciously thinking of her former life. She just never felt fully at ease here anymore, as if its promise of safety and support was a false one because it would come to an end, and she already knew what that end might be like. And out there — in the real world, outside of the self-absorbed microcosm of Hogwarts — there were good things. Wonderful things. Excitement. Opportunities. People she loved.

The camaraderie of the Auror Office was built on shared, intense experiences of a sort Hogwarts could never provide. Or at least, it hadn't when she was a student here. She supposed for Harry things were different. The Auror Corps was small and took very few applicants. She had spent most of her training time with Alastor. Moody was awesome, and fun to work with, and she adored him — cranky paranoia and all — but he wasn't exactly warm and friendly. Tonks had never recaptured the sense of belonging she felt in school.


Outside of Hogwarts, the world didn't provide you with a nice menu of options for extracurricular activities. You had to find your own. Tonks had often wondered what her life would have been like without the war — would she have managed to become nearly so interesting a person if she hadn't found herself working with the Order?

She had been lucky to have gone to an interesting school, and lucky to have had an interesting job (even if she would have preferred not to have lived in such interesting times). "Interesting" was not really enough for a fulfilling life, though. Like Hufflepuff house, the Auror Office had people there at all hours, but on the other hand, she hadn't lived in the office either. She had gone back to her apartment at night, and if she woke up at 2 AM and couldn't sleep, it was simply not an option to floo back to the office in her pajamas to chat. The Aurors were not family. Perversely, it wasn't until the Ministry had fallen, and she was living at 12 Grimmauld Place or with Remus, that she felt like she had a family again. Born in the midst of that, Teddy had occupied her full attention . . . Would caring for him have eventually left her feeling isolated? She hadn't been given a chance to find out.

Tonks had run on adrenaline, more or less, for the first few days after catching the snitch. Mentally, emotionally, philosophically — it was just too weird at first, too much of a shock, for her to treat the new timeline as anything other than a strange dream, no matter how much she threw herself into it. Once the reality had sunk in, she had locked herself in her room and sobbed. Then she told herself how grateful she should be for the opportunity she had been given, which didn't make her any less sorry for herself, but did make her feel horribly guilty about it. Ultimately, it was all too complicated for her, and she repressed most of it. Human emotions did not evolve to deal with time travel.


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Tonks had sat on the floor to watch the discussion play out, but her attention had drifted. She wasn't sure how long she had just been staring into the fire while everyone talked around her. A small crowd had gathered, chattering happily. She had given them an exciting, secret project that required everyone from first to seventh years to work diligently together for the benefit of the House. As worrisome as the release of the basilisk was, she could not have engineered a better opportunity on her own.

Harry's little club in the previous timeline had been amazingly successful, both at preparing its members for the war and at building friendships across houses and years. Well, not just friendships — she was pretty sure Harry had used it to get to know both Cho and Ginny. Or, maybe they had used it to get to know him? Ginny was certainly assertive; Tonks had never really met Cho.

One of the young students near the center of the crowd was Cedric Diggory, now a second-year. She had kept an eye on him all year. This timeline would be different. She would make sure everyone was prepared for the worst, but she would do her darndest to prevent it from happening in the first place. That was the real way to change the future, the only way to do so without risking the lives of everyone she cared about. She laughed to herself — done right, her biggest regret this time around might be having messed with Harry's love life. Should she contrive to have him introduced to Cho earlier, before Cedric asked her out? Give Ginny some competition? Maybe the timeline would work out better if she didn't simplify too many things . . . she could justify a little meddling as "reintroducing complexity for the sake of the timeline" — yeah, that sounded good. If Dumbledore ever found her out and she had to make excuses for acting ridiculous, she was prepared. Nobody other than Dumbledore would buy it, but that was okay. She laughed quietly to herself.

Tonks turned away from the crowd and looked back into the fire. She scooted over a few feet, then leaned back against the side of a chair. She could tell her house had the matter under control — they had moved to the lower-key conversation of drawing up plans. It sounded like they would just be using the dorms and common areas for practice for now (not that they had any other choices under the circumstances). That was good though, she thought — it was usually easier to avoid looking suspicious if you did things in plain sight.

She let her mind drift again, relaxing in the sound of friendly voices around her. The year would end and she'd need to move on; perhaps Voldemort would rise again; perhaps all her plans would fall apart. But for right now she was comfortable, and this was a good thing. She would need to learn to relax if she was to keep her cover and avoid interfering in any sort of Hufflepuff dueling practice. Dimly she was aware that she could probably never go on to the Auror Academy in this timeline, since there was no way she could hide her experience from them. Sirius might start bugging her about "finding a career" or something on the next Hogsmeade weekend, but she could avoid thinking about that for a little while longer.


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Tonks woke up, still leaning against the chair. The fire was burning a little lower than before, adjusting automatically to the time of day. A quick Tempus returned 2:04 AM. She yawned, got up, and found the room empty.

She was halfway to the door to the girls' dorms when she heard whimpering and gasping from a couch off in the shadows. She moved quietly, so she was pretty sure the couple hadn't heard her. Then again, maybe they didn't care. This was another difference between Hufflepuff House and the Auror Corps — the Auror office never had couples making out in the corner.

Listening to them, for Tonks, was like a whispered promise that even if she wasn't having fun of that sort herself, in theory it was an option. Sure, she had kissed a boy or two under the mistletoe at Christmas, and maybe had a few intense conversations in the common room that led to something more, but it was always a one-time thing. She would feel awkward, completely change her appearance the next day and avoid the boy out of shyness, so nothing ever came to anything. She didn't know whether she regretted that or not. There were a lot of boys here, sure, but now that she had six years on the oldest of them in mental age, they were too boring or annoying to be attractive.

She told herself that of course she knew what to do with boys — she had a son, for Merlin's sake — or rather, had in the other timeline. She grimaced. The noises in the corner, now that she was paying attention to them, included wet, semi-rhythmical ones. She kind of wished that she found it arousing, and wondered what it would take for her to actually be turned on by it. Probably knowing who it was, for a start, would help — noises alone were too abstract for her. Noises plus gossip, though . . .

She walked quietly to a spot where she wouldn't cast a shadow in the firelight, and waited. Convinced that she was still being ignored, she inched around. She didn't pretend this was good practice for anything. And it's not like the couple would tell on her, right?

As it turned out, they were far too distracted to notice her. The boy had his hand up the girls robes, and she was kissing him, moaning into his mouth. Tonks vaguely recognized them, and placed them somewhere between third and fifth years, but didn't know their names. So, no gossip, then. She watched for a minute, maybe more, before deciding it was depressing after all.

She went to bed, then lay awake making a mental inventory of boys she knew and contemplating whether she would want to seduce any of them. There weren't any good candidates. She loved Remus, or at least the old Remus, but even the thought of meeting up with him didn't seem appealing. A lot of things no longer seemed appealing lately. Maybe she was too anxious about the future for that? It didn't really matter. Regardless of the source, the effects of stress were the same.



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Author's notes:

I'm not dead. Neither is the story. I just had a section that I needed to work on all at once, and was very difficult to get through. Which is not to say the rest will be easy; I have no idea.

Looking forward, chapters 54-56 are basically continuations of this one. I will post them as I finish cleaning them up. After that the plot will actually move some, but I will probably be doing something like describing the same events over repeatedly from different perspectives. That might take a while before I'm comfortable posting anything.

After that I will take some unknown amount of time (probably way more than I anticipate, given how everything else has gone) to wrap up loose ends. Then I can send everyone off on the Hogwarts Express and call it "End of Year One" or something exciting like that.

Probably at that point I will go back through the whole thing fixing stupid editing errors. I try not to do that too much since, at least on Ficwad, it can wind up sending update alerts to people when all I did was fix a typo.

As to this chapter, I'm sorry it is depressing. Hopefully the following chapters will make up for it. I feel bad for Seventh-Year Hogwarts students — even non-time-traveling muggles often have trouble in their last years at a school.

Please assume that Tonks will behave responsibly if she thinks she's depressed and go see Madam Pomfrey. I have no idea how to get into the topic of mental health in a world with things like cheering charms, so I will probably not tackle it in any further depth than I have so far. I mention all this because I'm uncomfortable writing a character who acts depressed but doesn't seek help.