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They say the death of
the Tonks family was the first great tragedy of the wizarding war.

Several muggle news
stations reported the terrible accident, a house fire that claimed
the lives of a young couple and their newborn daughter. None of them
ever recounted the glowing emerald skull that was seen in the sky
above, a serpent coiling and twisting from its mouth.

The pavement outside
was flooded with flowers for weeks afterwards. But years passed, and
old tragedies were replaced by newer ones, more innocent lives and
families wiped out in the space of a single night. In the end, the
three Tonks were just names carved into stone, the beginning of a
long list of innocents.

When the war ended
eight years later and Death Eaters began trading names in exchange
for leniency, the rumours began. Rumours of a child – a little girl
– born to Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange and raised among the
shadows of war. But no two descriptions of the child were ever the
same. Some spoke of dark eyes and ebony hair that fell in tight
curls, some believed her hair was the colour of honey and hung in
plaits either side of her face.

One swore it was
bubblegum pink.

But the rumoured girl
was never named nor found, despite the best efforts of the Auror
task-force. The war had lasted long enough and the Wizengamot had no
time to chase after rumours, not when there was justice to be
sanctioned upon the guilty. The accused were rarely granted trials.

The girl who was not a
rumour was eight when fireworks coloured the sky red and green and
her mother had screamed until blood coated her tongue. Two days later
she ran away into the night, the screams of a young man and woman
following her as she fled. They had looked so frightened, so
desperate, even though they were evil and deserved the pain that her
mother inflicted upon them. The coldness the girl felt in her bones
was the same as when the Dark One had called her name in his high,
clear voice. If the screaming man and woman bore the faces of evil,
what was it she saw every time her mother gazed upon her with those
black eyes?

The girl waited for her
father’s friends to find her again and drag her back to the quiet,
dark house she lived in. But they never came. The girl slept in
alleyways and alcoves until one day, she rescued a page of a
newspaper out of the fire she had just lit with her fingertips, and saw
her parents faces. She saw the faces of the young couple, too – two
Aurors by the name of Longbottom. The girl knew enough to know that even if they
were not dead, there would be nothing left of them alive, either.

The girl was small and
quick and quickly grew accustomed to life on the streets. She stole
food, wallets, things to sell and re-sell to the same person, only
she would change her face in between. Sometimes she met other
children without homes, whose eyes were wide and scared and reflected
horrors similar to her own. They watched with wonder as she created
little green snakes in the palm of her hand and morphed her nose into a wrinkled pig snout. They would gasp and laugh and for a moment their horrors disappeared, and the girl questioned whether muggles really
were evil, after all.

When the girl turned
eleven, the first letter came. Addressed simply to: Geminia
Lestrange, The Doorway to the Abandoned Apothecary, London. It was
signed by a name she recognised, whispered angrily in the hallways
back where she once lived. She knew Albus Dumbledore was a terrible
person, and therefore this Hogwarts place must be full of terrible people, too. She
burnt the letter, and every letter that followed – once a week,
every week – the flames keeping her warm throughout the nights.

It wasn’t long before men in robes began to follow her down the streets, and she feared the people she knew as The Order had finally come to kill her or else throw her in Azkaban, as they had done her parents. She vanished down alleyway after alleyway, changed her face again and again, and they never caught her. But she was always running.

When the girl was fifteen, she went to steal the wallet of a man with a wooden leg and a clawed foot, but he grabbed hold of the arm she had halfway inside his tattered coat without so much as a glance in her direction. When she met his gaze one of his eyes was dancing in its socket, blue and piercing. 

He asked for her name.

The girl glared at him so ferociously that her eyes turned golden. The man’s face was twisted and scarred but she had seen far worse and simply called him a “mad-eyed freak.” He huffed an odd sort of laugh and let go of her arm, handing her a galleon out of the wallet. “Constant vigilance,” were his parting words.

He appeared every day for the next three weeks, wherever she happened to be. It didn’t matter which face she wore – he always knew it was her. Each time they saw each other, he would ask her name, and she would snarl various insults in response. He would laugh gruffly at her in the way that she hated, and remind her again to be constantly vigilant.

One night, the men in robes used their magic to corner her like a lowly animal, and the girl was sure she would be thrown in a cage with her mother and her black eyes. But the mad-eyed man appeared once more, ordered the men in robes to leave, and they nodded their heads to him and did as he asked. When he asked the girl if she was alright, she had no answer, as no one had ever asked her that before. When he asked her to follow him, she did, as she had nowhere else to run.

Later, she sat opposite him in a deserted London café and ate the first hot food she’d had in weeks. Children couldn’t be sent to Azkaban, he said – not for stealing wallets, anyway. They watched each other silently for a while, and then the mad-eyed man asked for her name again. Perhaps it was the hot food in her stomach, or the way his blue eye seemed to read the secrets inside her head, but she told him. This time, he didn’t laugh.

“Your real name, kid,” he said, “is Nymphadora Tonks.”

Something fluttered in the girls chest as the ends of her hair began to turn purple, and she listened to the mad-eyed man’s story.

Finding a home for a girl raised by Death Eaters proved difficult.

At first she was placed
with a young childless couple, who were kind and good-natured but
flinched every time she moved too quickly and whispered in hushed
voices behind her back. A month passed and she was guiltily handed
back, and Mad-Eye’s furious voice was heard lecturing them about
“damaged goods.”

The next home had two
children, both boys younger than herself and fascinated by the
strange girl who could change her nose each time she sneezed. But at
least they weren’t afraid of her, so she entertained them with pig
snouts and showed them how to pick locks and steal watches from
people’s wrists. But she failed to teach them how not to be caught,
and after a tense run-in with the muggle police she was returned once
again.

She was at her third
home for two weeks before waking one morning to find her face
plastered across every wizarding newspaper in England. This was the
angriest she had seen Mad-Eye yet, but her supposed guardians simply
shrugged and left for their holiday in France.

Her last chance at a life off the streets was a
community home for parent-less children, who all looked just as miserable and hurt as she felt inside. Their harsh fates were accompanied by harsher words, and in sixteen days she had been in four fist-fights and ran away three times. Each time it
was only Mad-Eye who could find her. On the third occasion he shouted at her for being so reckless, and she asked him why he
cared what happened to someone who was damaged goods, anyway.

Mad-Eye’s strange blue eye glared piercingly at her. He took her firmly by
the wrist and apparated them to a small but clean house where all of
the furniture looked at least several decades old. He immediately
moved to an empty room off of the main hallway and began shaping something ornate and wooden using his wand. When she asked him what he
was doing, he simply replied: “Making you a bed. Unless you want to
live here sleeping on the floor?”

And so the girl raised
by Death Eaters found her home with the man famed for capturing them.

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