Nymphadora Tonks — Dora, to anyone who wanted to remain on speaking terms with her — stared out the window and tried very hard not to think about what was waiting at the other end.
Or rather, who.
Three weeks ago, a letter had arrived at Hogwarts in her mother's handwriting. Dora had opened it expecting the usual antics like how your marks are, are you eating properly, your father says hello. She had not expected what was inside, which was the information that her mother had, without telling her, without asking her, gone and done something enormous and was only now writing to inform Dora of the fact as though this were a perfectly reasonable sequence of events.
Her mother had reinstated her connection to the House of Black.
There had been more to it than that. And that was the part Dora kept coming back to.
Not because she didn't understand it. By the second reading she understood it perfectly well. Her mother had done it for her protection, because a Metamorphmagus with no powerful family standing behind her was, apparently, an open invitation for the Ministry to make decisions about her gift without anyone being able to argue back.
Dora was eleven. She was entirely capable of handling the Ministry herself, when the time came, which it hadn't yet, and her mother was being dramatic.
She had not written back to say this, because she had learned early that some arguments were better saved for in person.
The letter had also said — this was the part currently sitting in her stomach like a stone — that she was to behave herself accordingly, because Arcturus Black, the head of the House of Black, her great grand uncle, had arranged to collect her from the platform personally for the Holidays.
Arcturus Black. On the platform. For her.
Dora had read that sentence four times to make sure she hadn't misunderstood it.
She had not misunderstood it.
The trouble was that nobody at Hogwarts knew this was coming. Nobody knows her connection to the Black family!
They knew her father was Ted Tonks and her mother was Andromeda Tonks, and they knew she was a first year sorted in Hufflepuff, who lives in London, who could turn her hair interesting colors when she was concentrating, and regularly tripped over things that weren't there. She had never told anyone her mother was born Andromeda Black. It had never come up. Nobody had asked. And in the way of things, you don't realize you needed until you have them, four months of just being Dora Tonks at Hogwarts — no history attached, no name to manage — had been something of a relief.
That was apparently over now.
She stared at the gray December sky outside the window and thought that her mother could have at least mentioned it before doing it.
"Dora." Penny Haywood leaned forward from the seat across, her brow furrowed. "You've been staring at that window for an hour."
"I'm fine," Dora said.
Nobody in the compartment appeared to believe this.
They were her first real friends at Hogwarts — Penny Haywood, Rowan Khanna, and Leonora dela Zerna, all her fellow Hufflepuffs— and four months was long enough for them to know her. They knew she was the one who turned her hair green during Charms when she was concentrating too hard and didn't notice until Penny pointed it out. They knew she tripped over things that weren't there and laughed about it before anyone else could. They knew she had opinions about everything and shared them without being asked, that she was the first one to volunteer for something difficult and the last one to admit when something was bothering her.
"Um, Dora." Leonora was staring at her hair. "You're not wearing your spiky pink hair today."
"Oh." Dora touched her hair self-consciously. "No. Not today."
The three of them looked at her with concern on what Dora Tonks looked like and were now looking at someone slightly different. The hair was dark and wavy, falling past her shoulders in a way that her pink spikes never did. Her eyes, which were usually warm brown, had gone a pale, clear gray.
She hadn't done it deliberately. She had woken up this morning and looked in the mirror and found that her magic had settled there overnight. She didn't know what to do with that.
"Is something wrong?" Rowan asked carefully. "I have never seen you with anything but the pink."
"I'm fine," Dora said again.
The train finally stopped with a long, settling sigh of steam. For a moment everything was the ordinary noise of arrival. Doors banging open down the carriages, the rush of cold air, voices calling to each other in the corridor outside.
And then the platform went quiet.
Not silent — there were still sounds, the murmur of the crowd, the creak of trunks being dragged down — but the quality of it changed. Penny noticed first. She had leaned toward the window to look for her parents and gone still instead.
"That's odd," she said.
Dora turned from the window she had been staring out of for the better part of an hour. On the platform, the usual press of waiting parents had arranged itself in a strange shape — a wide, instinctive half-circle of space around a single figure standing at the center of the platform. Not because anyone had been asked to move. They simply had, the way people moved around something that did not invite proximity.
The man was old. Not frail-old. He stood perfectly still in dark robes, a silver-headed cane in his hand that he did not appear to be leaning on. He was looking at the train with the patient attention of someone who was accustomed to waiting and did not find it beneath him.
"Who is that?" Rowan asked.
"He seems—" Leonora searched for the word. "Intense."
From the corridor outside their compartment, voices were filtering through.
Is that—
No, it can't be—
Merlin, I think it is—
"Is that Lord Black?!" someone said, loud enough that the question carried clearly through the door. The response was a burst of hushed, urgent murmuring.
Penny turned from the window. Rowan and Leonora were both staring at the platform now. None of them moved toward the door. Everyone has heard of the Black family but none of them expect to meet one, especially the head of the infamous or famous Black family in the platform of all places!
The tension inside the compartment was thick enough to choke on. The name Black carried its own gravity, and hearing it spoken aloud on the platform seemed to make the air colder.
Penny, Rowan, and Leonora were practically glued to the glass now, their initial curiosity hardening into the distinct, wide-eyed awe of young witches and wizards witnessing a living legend.
"Lord Black?" Rowan whispered, the word sounding heavy and academic, like a chapter from A History of Magic that had suddenly decided to step off the page. "The actual Head of the House? Why would he be here?"
"Look at him," Leonora murmured, her voice tight. "He looks like he owns the station. Everyone is literally backing away from him."
He did. Arcturus Black stood like an ancient monument amidst the swirling steam of the engine. The crowd of parents—ordinary, bustling, cheerful Ministry workers and shopkeepers—had cleared a twenty-foot radius around him, leaving him isolated in his terrifying, aristocratic splendor. His dark robes were of a cut and quality that didn't belong in this decade, and his grey eyes, even from this distance, scanned the windows of the carriages with sharp, predatory precision.
Dora swallowed hard. The stone in her stomach had just turned to lead.
"Dora?" Penny turned around, her hand pausing on the latch of the compartment door. "Are you going? We should probably wait a minute until he leaves. My dad says the Black family is not one we should messed with."
"I can't wait," Dora said.
Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. It wasn't her usual loud, bouncy tone. It was quiet. Steady.
Her friends looked at her. Really looked at her. With her hair dark and wavy, and her eyes that pale, piercing grey, she suddenly didn't look like the clumsy Hufflepuff who knocked over inkwells. She looked like she belonged to the man on the platform.
"What do you mean you can't wait?" Rowan asked, adjusting his glasses, his eyes darting between Dora and the window.
Dora didn't answer. She couldn't. If she stayed in this carriage any longer, she was going to lose her nerve entirely, and if there was one thing Andromeda Tonks had drilled into her daughter, it was that you never, ever let them see you hesitate.
The corridor was a bottleneck of students, all of them pressed against the windows, whispering furiously.
"Move, please," Dora said, shoving her way through.
"Watch it, Tonks," a fifth-year Slytherin snapped, but when he turned and caught sight of her face—and those grey eyes—the words died in his throat. He blinked, confused, and instinctively stepped back to let her pass.
Dora hit the heavy castle-iron handle of the carriage door and stepped out onto the platform.
The cold December air smacked her in the face, carrying the scent of coal smoke, wet wool, and old magic. The moment her boots hit the concrete, she felt the eyes. Not just her friends' eyes from the window behind her, but the eyes of half the platform.
She walked forward. Every step felt like she was lifting iron weights. Her trunk dragged behind her, the small wheels rattling against the uneven stone—the only loud, undignified sound in the sudden hush of King's Cross.
As she cleared the crowd and stepped into the open half-circle of space, Arcturus Black's gaze snapped directly to her.
He didn't blink. He didn't smile. He simply watched her approach, his hand resting casually atop his silver-headed cane. His eyes flicked over her dark, wavy hair, noted the pale grey of her irises, and settled on the square line of her jaw.
Dora stopped exactly five feet away from him. She refused to look down. She refused to trip. For once in her life, her boots found perfect, steady purchase on the ground.
"Grandfather," she said. It felt like biting a coin to see if it was real.
The crowd around them went entirely, breathtakingly silent. From the window of her carriage, she could hear the faint, muffled sound of Penny Haywood letting out a gasp.
Arcturus Black looked down his nose at her for a long, agonizing beat. Then, the corner of his mouth twitched—not in a smile, but in the grim, satisfied smirk of a man who recognized his own blood when it dared to look him in the eye.
"At least you didn't topple over your own two feet," Arcturus said.
Dora felt a sudden, hot flash of heat prickle her cheeks. It was an agonizing reminder that her reputation as the clumsiest person in the world had somehow traveled all the way back to the ears of the family patriarch.
Before she could offer a sharp retort, Arcturus flicked his wand with lazy precision. With a soft pop, her heavy trunk shrank down to the size of a matchbox. He tapped it with the tip of his wand, directing it to slide neatly into her cloak pocket.
"Come along now," he said. "We have much to prepare for Yule."
He turned on his heel, his cloak swirling behind him like dark smoke, and began to walk. Dora lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and followed him out into the cold London air, leaving the astonished whispers of the platform far behind her.
*****
The moment they disappeared through the station archway, the frozen silence on the platform shattered into an absolute roar of voices.
"Hey! Hey, you! Look at me!" Merula Snyde lunged forward, her fingers snapping onto Leonora's robes, her violet eyes wide with a mixture of shock and immediate fury. "Since when does Tonks know Lord Black?"
"Are you sure that was even Tonks?" Barnaby Lee blinked stupidly, scratching the back of his head as he stared at the empty space where the pair had been standing. "It didn't really look like her. Her hair wasn't even pink."
"I don't know, Snyde! Let go of me!" Leonora shoved at Merula's hands, trying to wrench herself free from the Slytherin's grip.
"Don't lie to me! She's your friend. She sits at your stupid table!" Merula hissed, tightening her hold. "Surely you know what kind of game she's playing!"
"We don't know either! She didn't tell us anything!" Penny Haywood stepped aggressively between them, her usual cheerful demeanor completely gone as she slapped Merula's hands away from Leonora. "And Leonora's right. Let go of her, Snyde!"
Lysander Parkinson was still entirely stunned. He had come to the platform for a moment of pure, unadulterated pride. Picking up his eldest son, Julius, who had entered his first year at Hogwarts. A Slytherin, of course. Lysander had been prepared to gloat, to show off his heir to the rest of the Sacred Twenty-Eight.
He had certainly not expected to see Lord Black of all people standing in the middle of King's Cross.
Naturally, everyone knew who the man was. The entire platform had given him a wide berth, treating him less like a wizard and more like a sleeping dragon. No one in their right mind wanted to piss off Lord Black or find themselves on his bad side.
Lysander's mind raced back to his last communication with the formidable patriarch. It had been during the massive purchase for the Black family house-elves. Lysander hadn't just participated. He aggressively negotiated, undercut and outmaneuvered the other houses by buying their house elves, train them and sell them directly to Lord Black.
The other families had been furious when they discovered they'd been cut out of the loop, but they had also been forced to grudgingly respect it. It was cunning, it was ruthless, and it was entirely acceptable within their world. Best of all, Lysander had flipped those house-elves to turn a massive, staggering profit.
But why was Lord Black on the platform? Surely, he wasn't here to pick up a child. He was far too old to have one of his own, and while everyone knew Sirius and Regulus Black were his grandsons, they were adults by now—or rather, they would have been. Besides, playing chauffeur to a student seemed entirely beneath the dignity of the Head of the House of Black.
Yet, when a brave—or perhaps entirely foolish—little Hufflepuff stepped out of the crowd, approached the formidable old man, and called him grandfather, Lysander's mouth fell completely open.
Grandfather?
Rumors had been circulating for years that the House of Black, powerful as it was, was on the brink of extinction. Regulus was missing and presumed dead, and Sirius was missing also presumed dead. The family had no apparent successor. But if this child called him grandfather, could she be a secret, unacknowledged heir? A potential successor hidden away in Hufflepuff, of all places?!
Lysander's mind raced. She was a girl, and the Blacks were a strictly patrilineal family. By all traditional laws, she shouldn't be able to inherit the lordship. However, when a house was desperate enough to survive, traditional laws had a habit of being rewritten. If Arcturus Black was backing her personally, the entire political landscape of the wizarding world was about to shift.
"Julius," Lysander snapped, his fingers tightening on his son's shoulder. "Do you know that girl?"
His son blinked up at him, looking thoroughly confused. "Uh, no, Father. She's a Hufflepuff. I don't associate with them."
Under any other circumstances, Lysander would have beamed with pride at his son's proper, elitist attitude. But now was not the time for schoolboy snobbery.
"Well, forget that for now," Lysander muttered, his eyes still fixed on the space where the two Blacks had just vanished. "Change of plans. I want you to get close to that Hufflepuff after Yule."
Julius stared at him, dumbfounded. "Huh?"