Written for the History of Magic class at Hogwarts. Prompt: Write about someone leading a rebellion (Note: You cannot write about any of the Golden Trio).

Word Count: 1,011


endless uphill climb


Nymphadora Tonks hadn't been raised in the rebellion, even if both of her parents were a part of it.

They wanted her to make her own choices and choose her own future, even if it meant she supported the government.

Which she didn't. Not anymore.

Back when she was younger, she had trusted the propaganda of the government and consequently the lies they told.

Then, her best friend, Charlie Weasley, had disappeared. There had been no sign beforehand or anything, he just hadn't arrived in school one day.

At first she had assumed that he had to be ill, but when she went to bring him the homework he missed, there was no sign of him or his family anywhere. Some other family had moved in their flat and had claimed that it had been abandoned for years.

That event had sparked something inside her. From that onwards, she began to listen, to think.

With that new mindset, it didn't take long until she noticed a few things.

Danae, the major's daughter, always had more than the other students did, no matter what the context was. No one else seemed to notice and Nymphadora was smart enough to keep quiet.

She had finally started to see what happened to those who complained.

They disappeared and were forgotten.

She didn't want that to happen to her.

Nymphadora figured out what her parents were involved in shortly before she turned thirteen.

And boy, it was almost like the rebellion was made for her.

After a three hour conversation to convince her parents, she joined. For the first few weeks, they would only give her simple missions, the kind that even a clumsy almost-teen couldn't mess up.

But she was incredibly good at getting intel. People tended to underestimate children and females, which Nymphadora—she went by another name while undercover, Adrienne—used that to her advantage. She gave the officers a nice, innocent smile, and was mostly left alone.

Mostly was about as much as anyone could hope to dream for in that matter.

Soon, the people in charge began to trust her with more and more. Getting messages of increasing importance from one person to another, figuring out a new safe haven—or five—for their group, trying to figure out routines, and who the most humane government agents were—if she had to guess, Dawlish would win, but she wouldn't even bet a rusty nail on it—and similar tasks were soon added to her repertoire.

Sometimes, she had problems, but more often than not, she figured it out on her own. If not, well, one question from Adrienne, the girl who dreamed to be the best female government agent, had never hurt anyone.

At least not directly, she was a lot smarter than that. She made sure to convince people that Adrienne Roch was a real person. Nymphadora spent a lot of time on it, and by the time she was sixteen, it was foolproof.

She had—against all advice and common sense—tested it. If you asked her, then calculated risks were an important part of life and more importantly the rebellion.

Her ability to put such an amount of work in numerous tasks while keeping her grades up and generally appearing unchanged did not go unnoticed.

She began to climb the ranks faster than anyone remembered before—it was still too slow for her.

By the time she was fourteen, she had surpassed her mother.

By the time she was seventeen, she had surpassed her father.

By the time she turned twenty, there were maybe ten people more powerful than her in their section.

That, however, didn't make her stop.

After a lot of careful consideration, she faked her death as Nymphadora and started to attend one of the few universities as Adrienne. She majored in law and government studies.

Shameless propaganda and brainwashing, but she was well past caring, not that her Professors or anyone else noticed.

She was a very good actress and method acting was her forte.

A few times she had to make choices between classes or helping the rebellion—this usually ended with her inventing some sort of mild sickness or similar and asking someone to take notes for her. They did it more often than not.

Nymphadora knew that she caused both inspiration and jealousy in the ranks of the rebellion. She tried to weaken the latter by helping everyone that asked whenever she was able to, and it worked. It might not have ended the issue, but every avoided infighting could be the difference between winning and losing in the long run.

Her personal favorite missions where those where she gathered intel. It was a lot of fun to play around with the people she wanted to get information out of and figure out what would make them tell. Sweet, innocent, obedient Adrienne or the more aggressive and cold hearted, slightly sadistic Tonks? Or yet again bribes or seduction from a randomly generated alias?

It was different every time and she loved the challenge of it. She was not one of those people that gave up if they reached a dead end.

She reconsidered her actions, figured out her mistakes, and tired again. She wasn't afraid of hard work.

And it payed off.

While she would not claim all of the spotlight, she knew that she had made a major impact on the rebellion in the exact way she wanted to.

Then—she was somewhere around twenty five at that point, quite honestly, she had sort of forgotten—their leader, who went by Wulfric, died.

No one was sure how it had happened, whether it was natural or not, but in the end, it didn't truly matter.

He left a power vacuum and Nymphadora filled it.

It was hard, there was no denying it, but she felt like she was up to it.

She was ready to at least try.

And, considering the fact that her position hadn't changed in the last five years or so—she had literally passed caring before she had assumed the identity of Adrienne Roch—she must've done something right.


FireRuby: Thank you! I hope you still are!

Lw117149: Thank you!


Tonks' secret identity is named after Adrienne de Lafayette, a historical French person. Roch was one of the first names of her husband.

Please tell me what you think!

~Marvelgeek42