Disclaimer: It's all mine, I tell you, all of it! I'm not a random weirdo who happens to have a computer!

Okay, so I am but...oh, fine.

sigh

Everything belongs to JK Rowling except Liz and Alex, I'm not making any money out of this and blah de blah de blah.

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Tonks was woken the next morning by Liz, shaking her urgently.

"Tonks! Wake up – you're going to be late for our first class if you don't!"

Tonks rolled over. "Whassa time?"

Liz was dressing frantically, holding some hair-clips in her mouth. "Aguno, ut ish eelyate!"

Tonks didn't try to work out what Liz had just said, but looked at the magical clock on her bedside table. It read quarter to nine. "Oh, Merlin! Where's my socks?"

Ten minutes later, the girls were running through the corridors and consulting the map of Hogwarts they had been given by the Gryffindor prefect.

"Left here, I think, unless – Oh no!" Tonks felt the staircase move beneath her feet, smoothly depositing her and Liz in a completely different corridor. The two were now utterly lost. Looking around, Tonks felt something akin to awe for all the other students, who seemed to have no problem finding their way about in the vast labyrinth of corridors that made up Hogwarts.

"Tonks!"

"Not now, Liz! I think if we take this passage – "

"Tonks!"

"What?!"

"Tonks, Professor Flitwick's just gone past and we've got Charms with him first lesson! If we follow him, we'll get to the classroom!"

"You're a genius. Haven't I said that all along?"

"Uh huh. Come on."

"No, I'm serious!"

"If you say so. Come on!"

A few minutes later, the two girls slid into their seats, flushed from running after Flitwick. Alex grinned at them then asked,

"Where were you? I've been waiting for ages."

Liz was about to answer, when Professor Flitwick started to take the register.

Stairs, she mouthed. Alex looked bemused, but nodded nonetheless.

As the three friends walked to their next class (Potions), Tonks regaled the other two with stories of her Morphmagus tutor, who had been hired by the Ministry to help Tonks control her transformations.

When they reached the dungeon door, Tonks felt a shiver of excitement run through her. She had always loved the fact that you change somebody's life irrevocably simply by adding an extra ingredient or changing the number of times you stirred a pot. She suddenly thought that potions like people: each one different, even of only by a hairs breadth. And she simply had an extra ingredient – she wasn't a freak, just a little more complicated. Then she pulled herself up sharp.

Where did that come from?

Before Tonks had time to follow that thought up, the dungeon doors creaked open. She was about to have her first meeting with Severus Snape.