Author's note: Enjoy!

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights

Hogwarts: Assignment 9, Etymology Task #1: Write about a good listener.

Content Warnings: Discussing trauma, abuse, abuses of power, and corruption

Advising Selfishness

She sunk into the sofa once Remus had taken a freshly fed and burped Teddy from her arms and whisked him away to bed.

"We don't have evenings anymore, we have feeding schedules and diaper changes," she informed Harry who was also curled up on the couch. They weren't the most exciting hosts at the moment.

"I think it's brilliant," Harry said—and based off of what she knew about how he'd been raised, by the bits Remus had told her with furrowed eyebrows and from visiting that dreadfully boring Muggle house, Tonks believed it. She believed that the chaos of keeping up with a needy newborn was brilliant for Harry.

Since the war had ended, they'd all been collaborating to keep an eye on him—she and Remus, Molly, and Sirius. He'd explained everything that had happened to him in the forest very straightforwardly to Ron and Hermione when he'd come out of it, which was something. But still. Learning that you'd been raised for slaughter, that you'd been lugging around a sliver of your nemesis's soul, the trauma of a year on the run, and the complete and utter chaos and guilt that came with that final battle… it was a lot for one boy to carry. Thankfully, Harry was heads over heels for his godson so he wasn't very difficult to entertain for Tonks, at least, and it wasn't hard to convince him to come over.

"Well, other than discovering just how far your godson can pee if you're not quick enough when you change him, what's new with you?" Tonks asked.

"Not much," Harry said—even if this was a lie and Tonks knew it was a lie because she'd been tasked with a very specific mission. "You?"

"My nipples are itchy 23 hours a day and my body still hasn't forgiven me for waltzing into a warzone promptly after giving birth," Tonks said. "Which probably aren't things you needed to know, but there you go."

Harry cracked a smile. She usually knew how to get him to smile; she'd practised on all the kids for years during their various stays at Grimmauld Place. Harry had always smiled at bold, brutally honest, and flippant lines.

"Also I know you don't have 'nothing' going on," she said—because she also knew enough about Harry to know that he didn't need any more interrogations or mind games in his life, so it was best to be honest. "I heard you were thinking of joining the Auror Office at the end of summer."

"I… who told you that?" Harry asked. "Was it Ginny? No, this sounds like Hermione..."

"Nevermind who it is," Tonks said. Molly, it was Molly. "I have my ways. Is it true?"

Harry paused for a second.

"Yes," Harry admitted. "But you get it, right? I mean, you're an Auror."

"I sure am," she said. And she'd been proud of it, once. "But why are you asking me? You sound defensive."

Harry pondered this, too.

"Some people…"

"Ginny?"

"A few people don't think it's a good idea," Harry said. "They think I need to take a break. They think I'm rushing into this, instead of taking time to process what's happened and rest. They think I don't need to join the Auror Office, that I've done enough."

"I can see their point," Tonks said, propping her feet up on the coffee table. "I mean, you just brought down Voldemort."

"So many people were involved in that—"

"Of course, but you were the lynchpin of all that," Tonks said. "If it'd been an Auror mission—which it decisively wasn't—you would have been called our Point. The person who took the lead and gave directions and was designated to cast the clenching spell that caught the target."

She saw him file that tidbit of information away. Tonks went on.

"You've had one hell of a year," she said.

"Everyone has."

"Sure," Tonks said. "But you've had one of the worst ones. Hermione and I get on, you know. I've heard some things."

"Right," Harry said. "I mean, I understand that, I do. I just… I feel jittery. When I'm sitting around doing nothing."

"Is it doing nothing if you're resting?" Tonks said. "Recovering? When I get sent on the deep-dive undercover missions the department likes to use me for, I get a full week off after."

"I guess," Harry said, though he didn't sound sure.

"Do you want a Quidditch metaphor instead?" she offered.

Harry grinned. "Hit me."

"You were a Seeker, yeah? Seekers spend a lot of the game sitting on their brooms, watching and waiting for the right time to do their job," she said. "What's wrong with the waiting? Why is this any different?"

Harry considered this.

"Well, why did you want to be an Auror?" he asked.

"Because Mad-Eye believed in me," Tonks said simply. "I always wanted a job where I could help people, but Mad-Eye saw a very specific set of skills in me. If those skills could be most useful, most helpful, in the Auror Office, then I was there. And my family… well, even before my father was killed, my mother had suffered enough at the hands of blood supremacists. If you scratch a blood supremacist, you'll find a dark wizard more often than not. I like chopping problems at the root and that, to me, was the best way to do it."

Harry nodded along.

"I always wanted to help people too," Harry said. "I mean, even in Muggle primary school when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up… obviously, I didn't have high hopes for myself and I doubted the Durselys would ever send me to school, but I wanted to help people. I always said things like 'rubbish collector' or 'nurse' that I thought would be helpful. That's what Aurors are meant to do, at the end of the day, when they're good."

"True. And you'd be a good Auror, to be fair," Tonks said. She knew Remus thought so too, even if he also worried about this. Hell, they should just formalize their Harry Potter Awareness and Preservation Society. They could meet Wednesdays, and maybe Molly would bring snacks.

"Thanks," Harry said. "I suppose I… well, Mad-Eye said he believed in you and I guess I thought… for a long time it was like Dumbledore believed in me. He very specifically believed I'd be the one to stop Voldemort and he was right."

"Yeah," Tonks reckoned.

"So I guess I just thought, well, from there… from there I thought I'd make a good Auror," Harry said. "But Dumbledore was wrong about a lot of things—he admitted to it himself. So now I'm… I guess I'm confused about what I want to do and what I'm meant to want to do."

Tonks nodded and she felt sorry for him. This poor boy didn't need an identity crisis on top of the general crisis he'd just solved, that was just cruel.

"Can I offer you advice?" Tonks asked. "I'm not qualified to give any, especially on this little sleep, but can I?"

"Please," Harry said eagerly.

"Make sure that you want to do this for the right reasons," Tonks said. "Not because it's something you know you can do, not because it's something maybe you should do or that's expected of you. Because that kind of thinking got really dangerous during the Second Wizarding War, first off. But more importantly, you don't deserve to do a single thing you don't want to do for the rest of your life. You've done enough. And between you and me, it's not going to be very pleasant in the Auror Office for a little bit—and that's not your mess to fix."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

"When you killed Voldemort, you neutralized our biggest threat—let's get that right," Tonks said. "But it's like you broke a dam, too. People were hiding all sorts of problems behind Voldemort, using him as a figurehead for issues that were bigger and older than him."

"Like the werewolf legislation," Harry said. "How they're refusing to pull it back, even if Remus and the others have argued that it should be repealed since it was an Umbridge policy."

"Exactly like that," Tonks said. "And the Auror Department is one of those problems. How much do you want to know?"

"All of it."

"Wow. Well, buckle up."

"I'm ready."

"During Mad-Eye's years, the Ministry essentially gave him the reins because he was brilliant—but they never took them back. Before he retired, Mad-Eye put in place restrictions that made it extremely hard to become an Auror, but once you were in? You were like a god in the ministry—you were nearly untouchable, you answered to nobody but your Head Auror. And it got sloppy, then. There's no other reason why Voldemort so easily infiltrated and paralyzed the Auror Office after he killed Scrimgeour. And there's going to have to be a reckoning in the Auror Office about what we did so wrong. First, there's the whole issue of Sirius going to prison—that's about the justice system overall, but Aurors are the ones who brought him in and who followed briefs about a supposedly 'dark wizard' unquestioningly. Then there's the whole question of where we all were during the Second Wizarding War. Sure; Hestia, Kingsley, Mad-Eye and I were in the Order. A few others were killed or exiled. But where were the others? What were they up to? Who were they hunting down when Voldemort was puppeting the Ministry—Death Eaters or Muggleborns on the run?"

Her stomach churned as she brought it up and her throat dried. She'd been lucky, in a way, to be relegated to desk duty because of her pregnancy—no matter what other ugly things her coworkers, and the Death Eaters slipped among their ranks especially, were saying about it. It meant that she'd been able to continue gathering information for the Order without committing any atrocities, although she'd felt blood on her hands every time she'd processed the paperwork about Muggleborn outlaws or compiled statistics about successful Snatchers. If she had had shown any sign of recognition or sadness or shock when they'd brought her the papers about her own father being killed and his murderers getting their reward, she would have been killed—pregnant or not.

"As an Office, it's broken," Tonks said. "The reason that they're recruiting new Aurors right now Harry is that many of the old ones are straight up in Azkaban. Meanwhile, we've got Death Eaters running loose and trying to escape—the very people we're supposed to track down and bring to justice, except a lot of Aurors went bad during the war. Or worse, they were complacent and now we have to figure out what to do with them."

"That's why you're working half-days," Harry said. "Even if you're supposed to be on maternity leave."

"Yup," she said. "Like I said, it's a mess. So ask yourself if it's a mess you want to fix, or if it's a mess you want to circle back to when those of us who were there when it fell apart have put it back together in a smarter, stronger way. And if you think you do want to fix it, ask yourself why? And make sure that it's a totally selfish reason Harry, because you've been selfless enough to be selfish now."

Harry considered this.

"It's important to me, for there to be an Auror Department works," Harry said. "So that dark wizards don't get as powerful as Voldemort did and so people don't get hurt like Sirius did."

"Alright," Tonks said.

"And I like being in teams, like in Quidditch," Harry said quietly. "I know it's harder, but I'm done working alone."

"It is nice to be part of a team," Tonks nodded.

"I've never had my own desk before."

"Well, you'd get one as an Auror," she said—even if that seemed like a small ask from the Boy Who Lived. Hell, she could send Remus to IKEA right this minute.

"And Dolores Umbridge once said I'd never be an Auror and I want to piss her the fuck off before she's sent to rot in Azkaban," Harry said.

She burst out laughing.

"Well, go file your application, then," she said. "And welcome to the mess."