this chapter is really short, i'm so sorry, but i hope you enjoy it all the same.

loose plot and characters copyright JK Rowling.

It was really quite boring, standing around in Hogsmeade all day. Indeed, Tonks had one day off every fortnight, but she always wasted the precious time sleeping. It gave her a sickening, self-pitying pleasure to know that she wasn't doing anything productive. It was heavenly evil.

She woke in the very early hours of a Sunday to an irritating melody coming from outside the door to her flat that of the cause she did not know nor care. She might have thought the sound pleasant if it had not awoken her. Annoyed that she had received only a few hours of sleep, she moaned, swore, and sat up, tucking her chilly feet into the fuzzy Chudley Cannons slippers that were waiting, haphazardly thrown about, by the side of her bed. Picking at the crusty sleep stuck on her eyelashes, she stomped over to the nearest window. Tonks pulled open the curtains and the window itself, letting in a bracing mid-October wind. Only yesterday she had found Harry Potter in Hogsmeade, threatening that complete joke Dung for stealing a sack of delicate trinkets from Grimmauld Place. Grudgingly she had tried to placate Harry, but, she had a hunch, to no avail.

She turned into the dingy little flat's bathroom and stared into the mirror. She looked horrible, she knew; there were heavy gray bags under her eyes, her cheeks were pale and hollow, and grease covered her nose and hairline. Dropping her head so that her sink, slowly, hazily, came into view, her tummy gurgled and forced up last night's 3 bottles of firewhiskey. Ick. She needed a shower.

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Tonks stripped effortlessly as the steam wafted from behind the violently pink shower curtain and made her body uncomfortably sticky. Bip, there went the black tank, embellished with the words "the Weird Sisters". Ploop, bye-bye, baggy jeans. Swish, the black knickers drifted away from her hand. Plop, the sketchy black lacy bra (manufactured in some-3rd-world-country that Tonks had purchased from a street vendor on a dare from poor, restless Sirius… oh god, he was dead… ) landed on the tiled floor.

Tonks stepped into the moldy old shower. To her dismay, she could still hear the melody that she had noticed earlier, even through the pounding water. Shrugging, she began to sing Lady Greensleeves (which she had been forced to memorize back in muggle grade school, before she had attended Hogwarts) in a falsetto opera voice in a disastrous attempt to cheer herself. She washed and sung and slipped and laughed. Wow, I'm happy, she thought, and realized that she liked to be by herself. She could mull things over without fear of interruption or judgment.

"My men were clothed all in greeeeen,

And they did ever wait on theeeeeee;

All this was gallant to be seeeeeen,

And yet thou wouldst not love meeeeeee."

She began her own wild rant of self-pity, making madcap connections between the lyricist of Greensleeves and herself, laughing and sobbing and screaming the song…

"Your vows you've broken, like my heart,

Oh, why did you so enrapture meeeee?

Now I remain in a world apart

But my heart remains in captivityyyyy..."

Just as Tonks reached a particularly sorrowful part of the song, she recognized the sound of paws and the calming melody became louder. There was a burst of light, and Tonks, terrified, peeked out from behind the shower curtain.

"Wotcher." she mumbled to herself, squinting, blinded by the light in front of her. Then she realized what it was…

"Oh, shit."

a/n: sorry, i know that was aweird, short first chapter. i hope it hooked ya, though. x3