Growth Spurt (Public Teaser)

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Chapter 1

A Nosy Auror

Nymphadora Tonks had plenty of time to think while she was on guard duty.

It wasn’t like there was much to the job. She just sat there in a bush for six hours straight, every other night. It was cold enough that she needed a warming charm every fifteen minutes, despite it being the middle of summer. The entire street was extremely muggle. Tonks didn’t mean that in a bad way exactly, but it did mean that this job was mind numbingly boring.

Of course it was important. You Know Who was back and acting in the open again, after even the Ministry was forced to acknowledge his return. The boy who first brought news of it was the one Tonks was protecting. He was also at the root of most of those thoughts spiraling through her cranium.

Tonks wasn’t a fool. She saw the way his relatives treated him, and she imagined that had only been worse before, when he was a child instead of a tall and well-built eighteen year old boy. It was downright criminal, in her opinion, and the fact that he put up with it at all made her respect for him skyrocket.

It wasn’t like that was his only trouble either. From the bits Tonks caught off other Order members, every single year of school saw his life threatened in at least three different ways. He’d fought off Dementors, slain basilisks, and outed two different dark wizard professors. It sounded like a storybook. But it was Harry Potter’s real life, and despite everything, he had come out the other side in one piece.

So what was his reward?
 His Godfather, the closest thing he had to family in the whole entire world, catching a spell to the chest and ending up stone dead.

Tonks had liked her uncle a whole lot, which made him the only extended family she could say that about. He’d always been a good laugh, even after he got a touch crazy after Azkaban. She was mourning Sirius herself. But she as doing it with her mother and father, like an ordinary family could. What was Harry doing?

Bottling it all up and trudging on with his life, as near as Tonks could tell. He worked out daily, and perhaps that helped some, but Tonks thought that was no substitute for a bit of warm affection from another human being.

She was willing to do it herself, and if it hadn’t been for Dumbledore telling them explicitly not to approach the boy, that’s exactly what she would have done. She couldn’t understand why such a rule existed. But at some point, in all that sitting around and thinking she was doing, she did come up with a clever little way around it.

If Nymphadora Tonks couldn’t approach Harry Potter, then she wouldn’t be Nymphadora Tonks. Nobody would even know anything happened, including Harry himself.

But hopefully, she’d be able to ease his worries just a little bit.

~