Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books, Raincoast Books, and Warner Brothers Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
As soon as Harry walked out the back doors he dove to the ground to avoid several incoming curses.
"A little slow their Harry!" Tonks teased.
Harry didn't bother to get up. He Apparated directly behind Tonks put his arms around her from behind and kissed her cheek when she turned in surprise. He then Apparated away and let loose as many spells as he could directly at her.
Tonks was caught off guard by the kiss and barely managed to throw up a shield in time to avoid Harry's attack. He had improved greatly the last few days, she could still hear his curses and he was a bit slower than she was, but it was a great improvement from his yelling one spell at a time. She used one of his own tricks on him, cast the Lumos Solaris spell, side stepped to the left a few paces and let loose a barrage of curses all around him, making sure that even if he moved or dove, he'd hopefully still be hit by some of them.
As soon as Tonks blinded him Harry cast a strong shielding spell and dove away to the right, unfortunately he dove directly into one of the spells Tonks had cast. He didn't hurt and didn't have time to figure out what spell it was that he had been hit with. He got up, started running and blindly let loose as many spells as he could in the direction he thought Tonks was. Unfortunately they didn't slow Tonks down very much and she had hit him with several more spells before he could successfully get away. Harry tried to disparate away only to find he couldn't, she must have hit him with an Anti-Apparation jinx. Harry had of course heard of it, but did not know the jinx himself, or what it looked and felt like. He knew she he couldn't last much longer at the rate things were going and decided instead of running and shielding himself, he'd launch a full offensive on her and go out like a Gryffindor. He stepped out of the spot he was hiding from and found her quickly, he could tell she was already casting a spell at him, but instead of dodging he unleashed as many disarming, stunning, and binding spells he could. He saw her spells coming towards him but stood his ground and tried to get one last stunner off before he was hit. Harry saw the light hit and fell to the ground, unconscious.
Some time later Harry woke up, he shook his head to clear the haziness and got up. He looked around the field and saw, to his amazement that Tonks was laying on the ground where she had been during the fight. He walked over to her only to find that she was unconscious, he smiled as he realized his last stunner must have hit her. He enervated her and gave her a hand up.
"Blimey Harry, I was actually trying to win that time, and you still managed to get me!" Tonks said as she gave Harry a hug and kiss.
Harry blushed and said "You got me too; I just woke up from that stunner you sent at me a moment ago."
"You do know that was bloody stupid of you. You should have kept dodging or used a shield charm to avoid it, not stand there and attack me!"
"Well, it worked didn't it? I knew my shield charms wouldn't last to long with how fast and powerful your spells were coming in. It didn't seem like I was going to get a spare moment to put up a stronger shielding spell and I couldn't Apparate away to give myself the extra time. So I thought if I was going to go out I'd do my best to take you out with me, and attacked to the last moment I could."
Tonks just shook her head, and threw up her hands as she said "Gryffindor's and their bloody courage!"
Harry saw a smile on her face though, and knew she didn't actually mean it.
"You should have used a stronger shield charm, like the full body shield you learned the other day. It would have given you more time to decide what to do. Your plan worked on me, but what if I had woken up before you, or another death eater came by. You need to learn that protection is the most important thing." She smiled fondly at him as she said "You are incredible brave Harry, but you need to learn that retreating is sometimes best. There's nothing wrong with a strategic retreat and living to fight another day. That's why I started to attack you like that; your instinct reflexes and dueling abilities are great, but sometimes you're outmatched and need to live."
"Besides that you are improving greatly, I really didn't hold back this last fight, only with the choices of spells I used. I could still hear what you were casting, but it was much better than at first and had there been other people around fighting, I wouldn't have been able to hear them at all. You still have to work on the power of them, but it was defiantly an improvement. That last stunner you had was really powerful though, it actually broke through the body shield I had up, and to knock me out longer than the one I hit you with, must have had a lot more power put into than normal."
"Huh? How could I have made it more powerful than normal?"
"Well, they don't actually teach how in Hogwarts, some people learn to afterwards though, I learned it as part of my training. But anyone can also do it subconsciously when your emotions are running high and in life and death situations. I guess you probably did it subconsciously when you knew that you were going to get hit? Once you get good at it you can increase your spell power at will, but that takes a long time to do. To start you can use your emotions though, that's what I still have to do. When you put strong emotions behind a spell it can increase the power, the stronger the emotion the more powerful the spell is. The only problem is it does wear you out a lot more quickly than using the spell normally. The way I was explained it was that what you're really doing is instantly after the spell is cast from the wand you combine its power with your own raw magic, using a form of windless casting. So you can't use it all the time, but it's saved a lot of lives. When an Auror's life is at risk we're taught to overpower every spell, because it doesn't matter if we burn out or are to week to fight more afterwards if we're dead."
"You also have to be careful about how much and what type of emotions you use. Using anger, though the easiest emotion to over power spells, can actually affect your spells and give them an unintended side effect. Sometimes it works out, other times it doesn't. As long as you use it in moderation its fine, you just have to be careful not to loose control. Occlumency can actually help you a little with that. Well actually, it doesn't help you over power the spells, but it can help with not giving in to your emotions and loosing control."
Seeing Harry's face she could tell he still didn't understand it well. "Um... I'm not sure I'm explaining it that well. It's kinda like accidental magic when you're angry, you do something that you don't intend to, but with this you do it to your spell. Do you understand?"
"Er... I think so, but how do you actually over charge your spells? You said you do it accidentally or by putting your emotions into it, but how do you do it?"
"Oh, you just put your emotions behind the spell. I'm sure you've done it before, just didn't know that's what it was. Let's have you try on that chair over there." She said as she pointed to the far chair at the outside table about 20 meters away. "Now think of Bellatrix and all your anger for her, and then take all the anger you feel and mentally try to push it all into the stunning charm."
Harry pointed his wand at the chair and tried to think about Bellatrix, all the hatred he had came back to him. He wanted to hurt her, wanted to kill her, she had taken his godfather away, had helped tortured Neville's parents to insanity. Like him Neville did not have parents to help him grow up. He felt the anger rise up in him, it was like a huge storm rolling over him, the images of Sirius falling through the veil, of Bellatrix insulting Sirius, of her casting the Cruciatus curse on him replayed in his mind and he felt even more hatred than when he had cast the Cruciatus curse at Bellatrix. It was as if lightning made of anger was filling his insides, the emptiness that had been there since Sirius' death was gone now, and he only felt his anger for her. He then took it all, all of the hatred, the anger, the pain, and tried to physically push it into the spell. "STUPEFY!" He could feel the difference even before the spell was launched out of his wand. This wasn't a normal spell with a little more power, no this was something he had never done before, and his wand practically recoiled when the spell left.
He saw the light hit the chair, instead of having no effect or flying backwards, the chair physically blew apart. He was stunned as he watched the chair turn into nothing but splinters that were blown apart, covering everywhere over a few meters distance.
Tonks was stunned for a moment from the sheer force of his spell, but then cried out enthusiastically "Merlin Harry! I've never done anything like that! I could feel the power when you cast the spell, it... Bloody Hell! Did you see what it did to that chair?"
Harry, however, was not nearly as enthusiastic about what had just happened and was silently shaking from the anger he had just used. It had been worse than after Sirius died, than after Dumbledore sent him to his office. The power of the spell had been incredible, but the anger offset it, in a way it scared him with just how angry he could be. The anger had now been replaced by guilt. The guilt of what happened to Sirius, of being so stupid to fall for Voldemort's plans.
Tonks finally looked over at Harry and the sight of Harry shaking and the look of fear and guilt on his face instantly killed her enthusiasm. She realized just how stupid she had been, she just had Harry think about his Godfather's murderer only a few weeks after he died, and had him use that thought to fuel his spell. That's great Tonks, why don't you just go ahead and insult him and call him a murderer while you're at it!
Tonks grabbed Harry into a hug and gave him a soft kiss on the lips. She was further upset when he didn't even respond to the hug or kiss. "Harry that was stupid of me wasn't it?" Not waiting for a reply she continued, "Come on let's go for a run and then we'll head back in to do some more reading, I want to tell you about the book I started." She took Harry's hand and pulled him with her as she started to jog.
It took Harry a few moments before he realized what was happening and started to jog with her. They didn't talk at all and Harry didn't cast any spells during the run like he normally would. For the first part of the lap he was lost in his thoughts and didn't pay attention to the running. After about halfway through he started to speed up and loose himself in the running, pouring his feelings of guilt and anger into it.
After the run they went back inside and Harry grabbed a couple bottles of Butterbeer while Tonks got her book and sat down on the couch. Harry sat next to her and asked her what it was about.
She told him it was A Shaman's guide to living the hunt by Shimballa Coldhandsand that the hunt it talked about was a sacred ritual to becoming a Shaman. It seemed to be about how to survive a fight with incredible dangerous creatures such as Dragons, Hydras, Manticores, Chimaeras, Griffins, Occamys, Quintapeds, and of course Basilisks. The interesting part about the book is it doesn't use normal spells like you and I are used to. The spells are all cast wandlessly and seem to be almost prayer like.
Harry was extremely interested in the book after she told him about it. Anything that would help people survive those creatures would surely help me survive the death eaters, he thought. For the several hours Harry helped Tonks read through the book and try to figure out how they used their magic and spells. The book was well written and in parts seemed more like a fiction story than a textbook. By late afternoon they had figured a few ideas out the basics of the magic. The book kept referring to the magical power of the self, your center, where the true divine self reigns within you. The spells seemed to be actual prayers. You meditated or concentrated till you reached your center and then used the magical power of the self and basically asked your god (the shamans had several gods) to help you with whatever the effect of the spell was, you had to make sure to concentrate hard on the effect throughout the whole thing. The effects were mostly self-improvement spells, such as increasing your speed, reflexes, stamina, or strength. Harry wasn't sure if it would work at first but then Tonks pointed out that Dumbledore wouldn't have selected the book if it didn't, they just needed to figure it out. After a bit of discussing, Tonks suggested that it meant you had to access your magic, like you would to Apparate. Tonks wasn't sure how the words fit into it exactly, but Harry thought they might not be needed at all. He said that it might be a form of wandless will magic, just like Apparating. That opened a whole new field to them, if it was possible to use wandless magic to increase your speed, strength, stamina, reflexes and other attributes, they could have a significant advantage in a fight.
Unfortunately before they could figure it all Tonks noticed it was late evening and she had an Order meeting tonight. She said she should leave a bit early and get a few things done, but that she would be back after the meeting, probably around midnight. What started out as a quick goodbye kiss soon escalated into a full out snogging session. Harry had defiantly become more interested in snogging than he had been before Tonks. He loved the feeling of her lips, and her tongue, the feel of her hands in his hair or his back. About fifteen minutes later Tonks disentangled herself and said she really had to get going. She gave him one last kiss and told him to read up on it a bit and that they would work on it more tomorrow.
Harry made a quick dinner for himself before he went back to reading. After the dinner he petted Hedwig for a while, and showed her the backyard, telling her to be careful because the sky wasn't really there and it only had limited space. It seemed like Hedwig was happy though; she had her own backyard that never rained to fly in now. While she went out flying, Harry spent a bit of time transfiguring her cage. He didn't do to much to it really, just cleaned it up, increased its size a bit and added a few branches for her to sleep in. Since this tent was now his house he didn't really see a need to have her cage closed, so he opened up the top and made part of it into a flat landing pad with a tree branch for her to use.
After a couple more hours of reading Harry's eyes were hurting and he was becoming a bit tired. He decided to take a bath and then head to bed early; he could start studying again with Tonks in the morning.
The Order meeting had lasted a bit longer than she thought. Most of the meeting had been disagreements and what she thought as pointless speculation. By the time the meeting finally ended, Tonks wasn't in the best of moods. She Apparated back to Harry's and saw that he was already asleep. She sighed and decided to take a bath; she had been looking forward to talking with him, after the meeting she needed something to unwind.
When she got out of the bath she went to check on Harry and noticed he was moving around and moaning in his sleep, a moment later when she heard him whisper Sirius, she realized he was having a nightmare.
Tonks got into bed with him and softly shook him to wake him up. It took a minute before he was coherent and thanked her. She could tell just from looking at him that it had been a really bad nightmare. So she hugged him closely and whispered that they would go away eventually. After a while of comforting him, she kissed him softly on the lips and told him that they should try and get some sleep. She then laid down on her side next to him and tried to get some sleep.
Harry wasn't tired at all though and didn't want to go back to sleep and risk having another nightmare. He turned onto his side and slid one of his arms around her. He began to slowly stroke her body, his hand running down the sides to her stomach to just below her breasts and then back down. His hand ran back up the side of her body again, but this time when he reached the bottom of her breast, she moved so that it covered her breast. Harry froze when she did this, he hadn't been expecting it and wasn't sure what to do exactly. She felt him freeze and realized what his problem must be; she put her hands on his and slowly started moving it around, letting him feel her. He got the idea and he began massaging her breasts and then slowly exploring the other breast. He played with exploring her chest and stomach for a long time and then began slowly moving his hands lightly up and down her legs.
Tonks had been fairly still the whole time, just letting him explore her body as much as he wanted. Her mind had gone blank and she was lightly panting from all the teasing. She wanted to let him go at his own pace but her ache had become so strong that she started to softly whimper from his touch.
She gripped his hand with hers and moved it from her lower thigh to in between her legs. Her hips began to move and her heartbeat and panting increased. His hands began to explore her but between Harry's nervousness and inexperience, was just frustrating her even more. She moved her body till he was in the right spot and moaned with pleasure at his touch, he unfortunately moved his hand away shortly afterwards to continue exploring. Frustrated, she reached down, grabbed his hand and started to show him exactly what she wanted.
After an amazing climax, it had been a long time since she had anyone's touch beside herself; she sighed and smiled, thinking that that was exactly what she had needed after her annoying meeting. She had to stop him from continuing his exploration and turned around to face him on her side. She whispered a thank you and showed him her gratitude by embracing and snogging him senseless.
She slowly lowered her hand down his body, teasing his chest and stomach as she made her way further down. She kissed him again and broke it off shortly afterwards, kissing his lips, then his chin and his neck. She slowly worked her way down his chest, licking his nipples and breathing softly on him.
The feel of her lips and tongue on his chest mesmerized Harry and the feel of her breath where she had just licked made him groan softly. When her hand encompassed him and slowly started to stroke him he moaned loudly and his mind went completely blank. When he felt her lips on him he thought he was going to feint from the most wonderful feeling he had ever experience in his life. The warmth of her mouth and the wetness of her tongue felt absolutely incredible. Her hand continued to stroke him as her mouth and tongue continued their work on him. He had lost himself in the sensation and soon found that he approaching his release. He looked down at Tonks just before he exploded into her mouth and he felt more satisfied than he ever realized was even possible.
When she asked him how it felt he could only gaze at her and smile, after a moment he finally managed to say "amazing!"
Tonks smiled and hugged him, "I bet you're happy that you decided yes now." She then kissed him once more and put her head on the pillow next to him, her arm still draped on his chest. "Let's go to sleep, we'll get up early tomorrow and train more." She smiled to herself and said, "I don't think you'll have any problem sleeping after that."
Within a few minutes both Harry and Tonks were asleep, each had a smile on their face.
Tonks woke up the next morning feeling great. She felt Harry next to her and had to smile. Though she had many boyfriends, she had never really had a chance to sleep in a bed with one and wake up with him the next morning. At Hogwarts or during the summers she always had to be back in her own bed the next morning, and then she had gone directly from Hogwarts to Auror training.
He looked so cute lying there next to her, so at peace and relaxed. She noticed that he looked so different like that and not for the first time, cursed the world for putting him through everything it had. She lay there and watched him sleep and promised herself he would look like that more often.
She saw him move a little and realized he was waking up. She moved closer to him and kissed him softly on the lips. "Rise and Shine lover boy."
Harry never remembered waking up so peaceful and content before. He smiled when he felt Tonks lips and heard her voice. He laughed softly at the lover boy comment and grinned as he replied "Lover boy huh? Not yet, but if you want..."
Tonks grinned at the thought of that and whisper back "Not yet Stud, but maybe sometime soon." She then laughed as she ran her hand through Harry's hair and messed it up even worse.
Harry pushed her hand away, "Stop that."
"I can't help it, your hair is so messy and cute, and I just had to run my hands through it. I've been wanting to do it for years really, since I first ran into you in my last year."
"What? We met at Hogwarts?" Harry asked incredulously, he couldn't remember ever seeing her before last summer.
"Well, not really. I was heading to the stairs by the charm's corridor, and sort of tripped. You thought it was your fault because you weren't paying much attention, it was when everyone though you were the Heir of Slytherin. You landed right on top of me, your head was on my stomach and I got a good look at your hair. When you looked up I noticed your eyes and remember thinking that they were just so beautiful and that it was such a contrast, your emerald eyes with that messy black hair. You were of course just a second year, so it wasn't in a sexual way or anything then, just that you happened to fall on me. You apologized several times for it, you were so embarrassed and looked like you just wanted to get out of there, that I didn't have the heart to tell you that it was my fault that I was a klutz and it happened all the time. Besides, I wouldn't be surprised if most the girls and even some of the boys at Hogwarts thought about running their hands through your hair at some point in time."
Harry looked at her a moment, "I remember that! But you don't look that girl did."
"I'm a Metamorphmagus Harry; I used to look like that for classes. Sprout and McGonagall didn't like me changing my appearance to often and wouldn't let me have any good hair colors. The prudes."
"So you thought about running your hand through my hair all these years?"
She laughed, "a little conceded huh? It's not like I thought about it all the time, but I did think about it a few times when I was at Hogwarts and then when I met you again last summer and a few times during Christmas. But I never actually thought I'd be doing it like this."
"I actually thought you would have changed styles over the years when you got it cut. I didn't expect it to still be the same as it was then."
"Well it's just stays like this no matter what I do to it, so I've given up trying. My aunt used to give me more haircuts than the rest of my class put together, but it would make no difference, it just comes back to this no matter what. She even tried to cut it herself once when I was ten, she took a pair of shears and destroyed it. She was so pleased with herself because it looked really horrible. I really made her mad the next morning when it was back to normal; I guess I did accidental magic when I sleep, though I didn't know it then."
Tonks was silently gawking at Harry, her mind whirling with the possibility. "Harry, did it stay after you changed it back? I mean it didn't revert back to how she cut it?"
"What? Oh, no. It stayed like this no matter what she did to it."
"Harry, you can't change your hair like that with a spell. Well, not permanently anyway, you can use a few spells or self-transfiguration but that only last for a few hours, a day tops."
She rolled towards him, threw her arms around him and gave him a deep kiss, "Do you know what this means Harry! You could be a Metamorphmagus!"