New chapter: The Reconstruction of Harry Potter, Harry/Tonks, R
Title:The Reconstruction of Harry Potter, Chapter Two
Rating: Adult (will be)
Warnings: AU in that Tonks survives. Non-epilogue compliant. A good chunk of it takes place in America
Summary: Life has not gone according to plan since the war ended, especially not for Harry Potter. However, a new case, an old friend and a terrifyingly familiar enemy might be just the thing to set it all to right.
Featured Characters/Pairings: Harry/Tonks. Harry/Ginny and Remus/Tonks mentioned
Word Count: 2248
Author's Notes: This was written for the fantastic queenb23more , who generously bid for a fic at help_haiti . It will be updated regularly and I expect it to be less than ten chapters.
I'd spent four days in New Orleans, and I still didn't even know if I liked the place. It seemed to balance on a knife point of jubilation and despair. Some parts of it were stunningly beautiful, and other parts were completely depressing. Unfortunately, the nature of my task required me to spend more time in the sordid parts of town. I got nowhere asking about Meloni or Leidolf or any of the other names I'd heard them use. People here, while initially warm and hospitable, seemed to shutter themselves off when I started asking too many questions. I felt completely out of my element. I was usually pretty good at getting people to open up and talk to me, but here, even when we were speaking the same language, the art of conversation was entirely different, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. And then there was the French, which I knew enough of to translate on the signs I saw all over town, but which sounded completely different when spoken. I tried to take notes, and stayed up late at night attempting to translate them with my trusty Auror handbook. And it was by doing that that I came up with my one and only decent clue.
Loup-garou. Hermione would have picked it up right away, remembering it from our third year Defense class. The witch who'd uttered the word (under her breath) had been particularly nervous, fiddling with the bright yellow scarf around her neck. Something had bothered me about that scarf, and I found myself wishing for a pensieve in order to examine my memory of our conversation more closely. At the time, I'd chalked her mannerisms up to a Pepper-up addiction, which was growing more common than you'd think. People started out using it to party just 'that much more' after the war. In fact, that had been one of George's more worrisome coping mechanisms. He got tired of people hovering early on, and discovered that the best way to discourage that sort of behaviour was to put on a happy face. George being George, he had the resources to accomplish this chemically, and there was a period of about six months where I don't think I had a conversation with him where he wasn't stoned out of his mind. It finally took Lee's threatening to leave to knock some sense into him.
But, that was a different story altogether and one that would take too long to tell here. About the girl in the apothecary. She could have been a Pepperhead. She was painfully thin (lots of people, girls in particular, took it initially to lose weight) and her eyes were glazed with something unnatural. And the scarf could have been her way of disguising love bites, or bruises from an abusive lover, or even a tattoo she hadn't wanted her boss to see. But the yellow scarf had seemed so out of place in the dingy, dusty shop. It made me think of something Lavender might have worn, though she'd have worn it to draw the eye to her battle scars, rather than cover them up. Which had me thinking about werewolf scars. And the fact that she'd whispered 'Loup-garou' and crossed herself when I showed her the potions I confiscated from my suspect the week before, back in London. "We don't sell those here," she'd insisted. "We are a respectable establishment."
I found the place again easily enough the next day (located between a strip club and a massage parlour, very respectable indeed) but the girl was not in. When I showed the same items to her boss (I think it was her boss, only an Apothecary could smell quite that...musty) his blasé demeanor changed rapidly. He practically threw me out the door. "I do not deal with monsters," he roared, and when I tried to explain that I was trying to help, he hit me with a flash of purple that had me heading nearly to the opposite side of town before I realized what he'd done.
I tried three times to go back, but the old bastard was far stronger than I'd have thought, and his Revulsion Jinx was one of the most powerful I'd ever encountered. Clearly, I was going to need help. Preferably someone who knew the area better than I did.
Of course, that meant that I needed to do a little shopping, because I hadn't seen my godson in three years at least, and it wouldn't do to show up empty handed. Not that I hadn't sent some pretty cool gifts for his birthdays and Christmas, but it always made me feel good to shop for him-maybe it was overcompensating for my own gift-deprived childhood and trying to make up for it by spoiling another orphan?
Clearly, I was bollocks at interpreting maps. I mean, I'd known it would be big, but there really was nothing that could have prepared me for how spread out America would be. After two Portkeys, several unexpected detours (Florida is really, really humid and I wouldn't recommend picking what looks to be a nice spot on a map unless you actively want to come face to face with a hungry alligator. Or a large, talking mouse wearing white gloves), and the unexpected splinching loss of half my chest hair, I found myself walking up a country lane to a cottage that looked as though it had been designed by Lewis Carroll. I heard a noise to my left and spotted a head of mad turquoise hair that could have only belonged to my godson. He was buzzing around on a toy broom-one, in fact, that I think I had sent him-chasing a terrified dragonfly.
His gap-toothed grin practically took up his whole face. It was a smile I had only seen on his father once, and in a memory at that. For a long moment, I stood there, transfixed. This was a fair bit different from the way that I felt when I caught sight of Bill and Fleur's little girl. I liked Bill and Fleur well enough, (Fleur in small doses) but this boy felt more like family, in fact-I'd come uncomfortably close to having to raise the poor thing when I was just a kid myself. I saw him and I thought about everything that had happened before he was born, how a war had brought two people that probably wouldn't have looked twice at each other together, how an irresistible force had met an immovable object-what with her unshakable determination to give him happiness and his unwavering determination to sacrifice his happiness to his condition. It almost seemed fitting that he'd died a martyr and she'd cheated death by refusing to let it take her. And here was the living, breathing result of all that anguish, cheerfully unaware of all the impossible things that needed to happen in order to bring him into existence, and he was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in my life.
"Well, if it isn't Harry Sodding Potter, as I live and breathe, standing in my garden."
I spun around at the sound of Tonks' voice. She was kneeling in a bed of snapdragons, brandishing a miniature hoe in a similar manner to the way I'd seen her wield a wand. Not that she seemed to be threatening me with it, exactly, but I wouldn't have wanted to be in the position of the dandelion I spotted near her knees. She had her hair sort of a silvery white, and it suited her, especially as the sun seemed to be glinting off the top of her head. But most of all, I noticed her smile, which had always managed to brighten up even the gloom of Grimmauld Place and now had me grinning in response.
"Wotcher, Tonks," I found myself saying, and her smile widened as she rose to her feet.
"Everything all right, then? Or did you need to get away from the hero groupies?"
I laughed, but I wasn't sure how to respond. I mean, there had been a girl or two (or twenty) who'd paid far more attention to me after the war than they had before, but I'd been too focused on Ginny at the time to even consider it. And now that Ginny was out of the picture, I found the best way to judge if a girl and I were going to get on is how little she did react when I told her my name. Or maybe I was just worried about reading about my most embarrassing sexual proclivities on the front page of the Prophet. I decided to ignore it. "No, I'm here on a case. And to see Teddy, of course. And you."
She raised her eyebrow at the last bit. "So, I take it the Aurors haven't managed to ruin your faith in humanity yet? Good for you, Harry."
"Is that what happened to you?" I asked.
"Ah, no, not really. Or not just them, anyway. Forget I said anything and come over here and give me a proper hug. You may be the big damn hero to everybody else, but to me, you're still the skinny, spotty teenager with the messy room who tried to pretend he wasn't checking out my arse."
"I didn-" I could feel my face heating up as I walked toward her outstretched arms. "I suppose I did, at that." The back of her shirt was covered with sweat, but she still smelled unbelievably good, like sunshine bottled up as perfume. She always had.
"So then, has the Ministry found out about the prostitution ring I'm running here? Are you coming to take me away in chains?"
"As if I could," I said. "You'd probably knock me flat on my arse if I tried."
"I could, and don't you forget it," she said, holding out her hoe threateningly. I felt the tension in my gut loosening up a bit. It occurred to me that Tonks had always been able to do that to people. No matter how bad things got, she always had something funny to say to lighten up the situation. Sort of like Ron, who I was missing more than I realised.
"It's a really cool place you have here," I said, looking around.
"Isn't it lovely? You can thank the Ministry for it. Sort of a pension to make up for Remus losing his life ‘in the service of the people of Magical Britain.’ He was worth more to them dead than alive. Not that they'd ever actually employ a lycanthrope, even now."
I felt sick to my stomach at the thought. I had been rather disgusted at some of the gestures of that sort that went into effect after the war. As if the Ministry itself was responsible for the Order when they'd been so eager to distance themselves from the organization long before Voldemort took over.
And as much as I admired Kingsley Shacklebolt, even as Minister he still hadn't managed to improve the lives of people like Remus. Officially, discrimination in employment was prohibited. Which meant that it was easier for Muggleborns and people with battle-related disabilities to get decent jobs after the war, but for former House-Elves and Goblins and in particular, Werewolves, people somehow always managed to find a 'more qualified' person to fill the job. The House Elves had people like Hermione on their side and Molly Weasley had done miracles with her campaign to make sure that all of the Lycan children whose parents had been killed by Greyback got good homes, but the adults were sort of screwed.
Part of the blame went to Greyback himself, for terrifying the entire country. It gave people an excuse to hold on to their fears and prejudices. 'See, look what they do! They want to take over the country and fill it with monsters. They won't be happy until we're all monsters.' Not that it mattered that people like Remus and some of those he'd brought back with him from his time with the pack had actually protected them from real monsters like the Lestranges.
I couldn't help but look over at Teddy. As a child of a well-known werewolf, he was in sort of a precarious position. I didn't blame Tonks for an instant for taking him somewhere where nobody knew about his father. But at the same time, it made me angry. He should have grown up as the child of a war hero. He should have been able to wear his heritage proudly. "He's grown up a lot," I observed.
"Hasn't he?" she said, looking over at him with tears in her eyes. Maybe they were tears of pride, but I suspected that my showing up here brought back a lot of memories of home and friends and her life with Remus. I hadn't meant to dredge it all up for her.
"He's brilliant," I said. "And I've missed you both."
Tonks smiled and put her arm around me. "Well then, I suppose it's about time you come in and we have ourselves a catch up. I've got a jug of chilled tea made. That's how they drink it here. On ice, no milk, and ridiculously sweet, y'all. And god help you if you don't have any on hand to welcome the neighbors."
"Oi, Teddy!" she called out. "Time to come in for lunch. And it's high time you got to know your godfather."
Chapter One
Rating: Adult (will be)
Warnings: AU in that Tonks survives. Non-epilogue compliant. A good chunk of it takes place in America
Summary: Life has not gone according to plan since the war ended, especially not for Harry Potter. However, a new case, an old friend and a terrifyingly familiar enemy might be just the thing to set it all to right.
Featured Characters/Pairings: Harry/Tonks. Harry/Ginny and Remus/Tonks mentioned
Word Count: 2248
Author's Notes: This was written for the fantastic queenb23more , who generously bid for a fic at help_haiti . It will be updated regularly and I expect it to be less than ten chapters.
I'd spent four days in New Orleans, and I still didn't even know if I liked the place. It seemed to balance on a knife point of jubilation and despair. Some parts of it were stunningly beautiful, and other parts were completely depressing. Unfortunately, the nature of my task required me to spend more time in the sordid parts of town. I got nowhere asking about Meloni or Leidolf or any of the other names I'd heard them use. People here, while initially warm and hospitable, seemed to shutter themselves off when I started asking too many questions. I felt completely out of my element. I was usually pretty good at getting people to open up and talk to me, but here, even when we were speaking the same language, the art of conversation was entirely different, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. And then there was the French, which I knew enough of to translate on the signs I saw all over town, but which sounded completely different when spoken. I tried to take notes, and stayed up late at night attempting to translate them with my trusty Auror handbook. And it was by doing that that I came up with my one and only decent clue.
Loup-garou. Hermione would have picked it up right away, remembering it from our third year Defense class. The witch who'd uttered the word (under her breath) had been particularly nervous, fiddling with the bright yellow scarf around her neck. Something had bothered me about that scarf, and I found myself wishing for a pensieve in order to examine my memory of our conversation more closely. At the time, I'd chalked her mannerisms up to a Pepper-up addiction, which was growing more common than you'd think. People started out using it to party just 'that much more' after the war. In fact, that had been one of George's more worrisome coping mechanisms. He got tired of people hovering early on, and discovered that the best way to discourage that sort of behaviour was to put on a happy face. George being George, he had the resources to accomplish this chemically, and there was a period of about six months where I don't think I had a conversation with him where he wasn't stoned out of his mind. It finally took Lee's threatening to leave to knock some sense into him.
But, that was a different story altogether and one that would take too long to tell here. About the girl in the apothecary. She could have been a Pepperhead. She was painfully thin (lots of people, girls in particular, took it initially to lose weight) and her eyes were glazed with something unnatural. And the scarf could have been her way of disguising love bites, or bruises from an abusive lover, or even a tattoo she hadn't wanted her boss to see. But the yellow scarf had seemed so out of place in the dingy, dusty shop. It made me think of something Lavender might have worn, though she'd have worn it to draw the eye to her battle scars, rather than cover them up. Which had me thinking about werewolf scars. And the fact that she'd whispered 'Loup-garou' and crossed herself when I showed her the potions I confiscated from my suspect the week before, back in London. "We don't sell those here," she'd insisted. "We are a respectable establishment."
I found the place again easily enough the next day (located between a strip club and a massage parlour, very respectable indeed) but the girl was not in. When I showed the same items to her boss (I think it was her boss, only an Apothecary could smell quite that...musty) his blasé demeanor changed rapidly. He practically threw me out the door. "I do not deal with monsters," he roared, and when I tried to explain that I was trying to help, he hit me with a flash of purple that had me heading nearly to the opposite side of town before I realized what he'd done.
I tried three times to go back, but the old bastard was far stronger than I'd have thought, and his Revulsion Jinx was one of the most powerful I'd ever encountered. Clearly, I was going to need help. Preferably someone who knew the area better than I did.
Of course, that meant that I needed to do a little shopping, because I hadn't seen my godson in three years at least, and it wouldn't do to show up empty handed. Not that I hadn't sent some pretty cool gifts for his birthdays and Christmas, but it always made me feel good to shop for him-maybe it was overcompensating for my own gift-deprived childhood and trying to make up for it by spoiling another orphan?
Clearly, I was bollocks at interpreting maps. I mean, I'd known it would be big, but there really was nothing that could have prepared me for how spread out America would be. After two Portkeys, several unexpected detours (Florida is really, really humid and I wouldn't recommend picking what looks to be a nice spot on a map unless you actively want to come face to face with a hungry alligator. Or a large, talking mouse wearing white gloves), and the unexpected splinching loss of half my chest hair, I found myself walking up a country lane to a cottage that looked as though it had been designed by Lewis Carroll. I heard a noise to my left and spotted a head of mad turquoise hair that could have only belonged to my godson. He was buzzing around on a toy broom-one, in fact, that I think I had sent him-chasing a terrified dragonfly.
His gap-toothed grin practically took up his whole face. It was a smile I had only seen on his father once, and in a memory at that. For a long moment, I stood there, transfixed. This was a fair bit different from the way that I felt when I caught sight of Bill and Fleur's little girl. I liked Bill and Fleur well enough, (Fleur in small doses) but this boy felt more like family, in fact-I'd come uncomfortably close to having to raise the poor thing when I was just a kid myself. I saw him and I thought about everything that had happened before he was born, how a war had brought two people that probably wouldn't have looked twice at each other together, how an irresistible force had met an immovable object-what with her unshakable determination to give him happiness and his unwavering determination to sacrifice his happiness to his condition. It almost seemed fitting that he'd died a martyr and she'd cheated death by refusing to let it take her. And here was the living, breathing result of all that anguish, cheerfully unaware of all the impossible things that needed to happen in order to bring him into existence, and he was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in my life.
"Well, if it isn't Harry Sodding Potter, as I live and breathe, standing in my garden."
I spun around at the sound of Tonks' voice. She was kneeling in a bed of snapdragons, brandishing a miniature hoe in a similar manner to the way I'd seen her wield a wand. Not that she seemed to be threatening me with it, exactly, but I wouldn't have wanted to be in the position of the dandelion I spotted near her knees. She had her hair sort of a silvery white, and it suited her, especially as the sun seemed to be glinting off the top of her head. But most of all, I noticed her smile, which had always managed to brighten up even the gloom of Grimmauld Place and now had me grinning in response.
"Wotcher, Tonks," I found myself saying, and her smile widened as she rose to her feet.
"Everything all right, then? Or did you need to get away from the hero groupies?"
I laughed, but I wasn't sure how to respond. I mean, there had been a girl or two (or twenty) who'd paid far more attention to me after the war than they had before, but I'd been too focused on Ginny at the time to even consider it. And now that Ginny was out of the picture, I found the best way to judge if a girl and I were going to get on is how little she did react when I told her my name. Or maybe I was just worried about reading about my most embarrassing sexual proclivities on the front page of the Prophet. I decided to ignore it. "No, I'm here on a case. And to see Teddy, of course. And you."
She raised her eyebrow at the last bit. "So, I take it the Aurors haven't managed to ruin your faith in humanity yet? Good for you, Harry."
"Is that what happened to you?" I asked.
"Ah, no, not really. Or not just them, anyway. Forget I said anything and come over here and give me a proper hug. You may be the big damn hero to everybody else, but to me, you're still the skinny, spotty teenager with the messy room who tried to pretend he wasn't checking out my arse."
"I didn-" I could feel my face heating up as I walked toward her outstretched arms. "I suppose I did, at that." The back of her shirt was covered with sweat, but she still smelled unbelievably good, like sunshine bottled up as perfume. She always had.
"So then, has the Ministry found out about the prostitution ring I'm running here? Are you coming to take me away in chains?"
"As if I could," I said. "You'd probably knock me flat on my arse if I tried."
"I could, and don't you forget it," she said, holding out her hoe threateningly. I felt the tension in my gut loosening up a bit. It occurred to me that Tonks had always been able to do that to people. No matter how bad things got, she always had something funny to say to lighten up the situation. Sort of like Ron, who I was missing more than I realised.
"It's a really cool place you have here," I said, looking around.
"Isn't it lovely? You can thank the Ministry for it. Sort of a pension to make up for Remus losing his life ‘in the service of the people of Magical Britain.’ He was worth more to them dead than alive. Not that they'd ever actually employ a lycanthrope, even now."
I felt sick to my stomach at the thought. I had been rather disgusted at some of the gestures of that sort that went into effect after the war. As if the Ministry itself was responsible for the Order when they'd been so eager to distance themselves from the organization long before Voldemort took over.
And as much as I admired Kingsley Shacklebolt, even as Minister he still hadn't managed to improve the lives of people like Remus. Officially, discrimination in employment was prohibited. Which meant that it was easier for Muggleborns and people with battle-related disabilities to get decent jobs after the war, but for former House-Elves and Goblins and in particular, Werewolves, people somehow always managed to find a 'more qualified' person to fill the job. The House Elves had people like Hermione on their side and Molly Weasley had done miracles with her campaign to make sure that all of the Lycan children whose parents had been killed by Greyback got good homes, but the adults were sort of screwed.
Part of the blame went to Greyback himself, for terrifying the entire country. It gave people an excuse to hold on to their fears and prejudices. 'See, look what they do! They want to take over the country and fill it with monsters. They won't be happy until we're all monsters.' Not that it mattered that people like Remus and some of those he'd brought back with him from his time with the pack had actually protected them from real monsters like the Lestranges.
I couldn't help but look over at Teddy. As a child of a well-known werewolf, he was in sort of a precarious position. I didn't blame Tonks for an instant for taking him somewhere where nobody knew about his father. But at the same time, it made me angry. He should have grown up as the child of a war hero. He should have been able to wear his heritage proudly. "He's grown up a lot," I observed.
"Hasn't he?" she said, looking over at him with tears in her eyes. Maybe they were tears of pride, but I suspected that my showing up here brought back a lot of memories of home and friends and her life with Remus. I hadn't meant to dredge it all up for her.
"He's brilliant," I said. "And I've missed you both."
Tonks smiled and put her arm around me. "Well then, I suppose it's about time you come in and we have ourselves a catch up. I've got a jug of chilled tea made. That's how they drink it here. On ice, no milk, and ridiculously sweet, y'all. And god help you if you don't have any on hand to welcome the neighbors."
"Oi, Teddy!" she called out. "Time to come in for lunch. And it's high time you got to know your godfather."
Chapter One