Sole Author's Note: I really hate these things, but there are a few things I need to say before we begin. (Feel free to skip ahead.)

First of all, this story has been a long time coming. When I first posted it, the sixth book had just been published, and fandom was reeling about the Tonks/Lupin pairing. A long time shipper of them, I was pleased, but also, at the same time, a bit sick to my stomach. While I understood Rowling's intentions, her portrayal of Tonks as a lovesick fool in the sixth book made me a bit upset. I wanted her to be a strong, bad ass Auror. I didn't want her to spend a year moping over a boy.

So I started this story, wanting to depict how Tonks and Remus spent the year of OoTP. But it wasn't very good, so I decided to re-write it, and, as I got older, I began to see relationships differently, and Tonks's sixth book characterization started to make more sense to me, and, well, (seven fucking years later,) here we are. There will be 30 chapters over all, and I do hope you enjoy them.

There were several lovely stories I was inspired by, but frankly, most of them are long gone from the internet and I can't remember the authors' names. Mostly, I alluded to fanfic I liked by copying characters' names. There is a scene with Snape in chapter 17 that is a direct reference to another Lupin/Tonks fic I was always very fond of, but I've lost it through the passage of time. If anyone out there knows the fic to which I'm referring, please, point me in the right direction. Also, all dictionary definitions are courtesy of dictionary DOT com.

Thanks for your time, and thanks to all the wonderful people who've read this through the years, especially the loyal bunch who pushed me through the first draft. I love all of you.

The Girl with the Pink Hair was no stranger to strange looks; she did, after all, elicit them almost everywhere she went. It was a price she was willing to pay, and this day was shaping up to be no different.

This day, her particular look included ripped fishnets, a plaid skirt, and a clip-on eyebrow ring. She felt several people stare at her as she ambled along the busy street, as she stopped every once in a while to check out the displays in the shop windows, pressing her face up against the glass like an excited child at Christmas.

"I suppose yeh think yeh look tough," the man at the newsagents said when she stopped to buy a few magazines and a paper. The Girl with the Pink Hair stopped by every morning, and he had been the one to christen her. It wasn't exactly a misnomer, but her hair wasn't always pink; the day before, she had been a strawberry blonde. This particular day, her hair was short and spiky and electric blue. Her outfits seemed to change as often as her hair, and if it were not for the fact that her heart-shaped face was always the same, she'd be unrecognizable.

"Not particularly, no," she replied with a cheeky grin. "Why, Alfie, do you?"

Her eyes twinkled playfully, and Alfie could have sworn they were a different color than they had been just yesterday. But her hairstyle must have been playing tricks on him.

"Frankly, miss," he said, "no matter how yeh dress, yer always gonna look like yeh wouldn't harm a fly."

"I wouldn't harm a fly," The Girl with the Pink Hair said, smirking over the top of the paper she had opened in front of her, "but a beetle? I hate those things."

"Yer spunky, miss."

The Girl with the Pink Hair laughed. "You make me sound like a bad case of fungus. Spunk, isn't that what that is?"

"Yer growing on me, if that's what yeh mean. Yeh don't mind I call yeh 'Pink Hair,' do yeh?"

"Oh, no. I've certainly been called much worse." She wasn't looking at him anymore, and instead was frowning at the paper. With a grunt, she crumpled it up and tossed it into the bin next to the stand, even though she couldn't have had time to read it all.

Alfie paused, and then, before he could talk himself out of it, he asked the question he'd been wondering since the first day he'd met her. "Where do yeh go, dressed like that, every day, miss?" He had learned not to ask about the papers she threw away; the only time the Girl had responded, she had said that she just really hated trees. It had taken Alfie until long after she was gone to realize that she had been joking. Probably.

The Girl with the Pink Hair shrugged and gave a small, girlish kind of smile. "I go where everyone goes every day," she said. "I go to work."