Disclaimer: *sigh* This disclaiming thing gets old. Okay, you know the drill. Not mine. I'm not J.K. Rowling and I'm not Warner Brothers.

He didn't remember the first time she'd babysat him but he'd been told about it when he got old enough to understand more of the story. It crossed his mind when he went to see his parents in the hospital and when people talked about the Lestranges; whenever the unforgivable curse that had tortured his parents was brought up, whether in conversation, a lesson, or a battle. But of course he didn't remember. He'd only been a year old.

The war was considered well over by late November of 1981. There were still Death Eaters but they were all in hiding; they wouldn't dare blow their cover by attacking anyone. That night, there was a memorial service for Ministry personnel who had died in the war, and Neville's parents were going. His babysitter was only ten years old but she took her first babysitting job with utmost pride. It wasn't really much of a job, or wasn't supposed to be. It was only going to be a couple of hours, from eight till ten at the most. His parents had put him to bed and gotten him to sleep before she even got there. She was only there so someone would be there. And the little girl of ten had been told that if anything happened with Neville, all she would have to do was firecall the Ministry. Someone would be in the atrium and could send an owl to where the memorial service was happening.

"If you don't see anyone there," his mother told her as a precaution before she and his father left the house, "don't try and climb through. There are wards that prevent underage wizards and witches from entering the Ministry unaccompanied so you won't be able to get through the fire. Just firecall your dad at work, okay?" They also told her that the muggle couple next-door was home if anything was really urgently wrong with Neville but to be careful because they weren't accustom to magic and would be perplexed by many of the things in the house. And the girl of ten had agreed, still feeling very proud of herself that Frank and Alice Longbottom, friends of her mother, trusted her to watch their little boy.

For an hour and a half, she adopted a pattern of reading her book for five minutes and then rushing into Neville's nursery to check on him. But, returning to the living room with her book after one of these trips, she heard a noise. She heard voices and the sound of spells. The house shivered with a big burst of light and she knew one of the wards had been taken down. The voices became excited by the shiver in the house as Neville began to cry, and the little girl's stomach tossed uncomfortably as she assumed they were trying to break the next ward. It couldn't be Frank and Alice if they were taking down the wards. She admitted later, that her first thought was that she was scared and that she wanted to be home; her second thought was of Neville. So she had ran back to his nursery, picked him up, and, struggling with the weight of a crying one-year-old boy, had gotten to the fireplace, clumsily knocked the jar of Floo powder on the hearth over so that the powder flew into the flames, and fearfully called out the name of her own house.

From her own house, she flooed the Ministry, feeling a bit less afraid with her father's owl hooting in the den and her cat rubbing against the little boy she had set on the floor when she arrived home. She told the man in the atrium what had happened, and he quickly rushed an owl to go find Frank and Alice on the upper floor where the memorial was supposed to be. It was a few minutes later when her mother had come through the Floo and hugged her daughter in her arms. She told her Frank and Alice had already left when she'd firecalled. Alastor Moody said he would go and check that everything was alright. It wasn't until much later that they got the news. The Longbottom house had been broken in to by four Death Eaters. The Death Eaters had been captured but Frank and Alice were not alright. They had been tortured for information; they had been tortured into complete insanity by the time Moody and another couple Aurors had managed to get passed the new wards set by the younger Lestrange and Crouch. Perhaps the Death Eaters had wondered where the baby had been when they got into the house and waited, only briefly, for Alice and Frank to get back. However, as far as Neville knew, Bellatrix Lestrange had never known just how close she was to hurting not only the young couple and their son, but her own niece. When Neville had asked Tonks about the incident years later, she told him the thing she remembered most had been how when her mother had heard who had attacked Frank and Alice, she had grabbed her daughter in a tight hug and refused to let her go for at least five minutes.

Perhaps because they knew Frank and Alice had trusted her, perhaps because they had known Andromeda since before she had even been a Tonks, or perhaps because they was grateful that Nymphadora had unknowingly saved Neville's life, his grandparents had continued to let her babysit him. When she was younger and Neville's Gran was having a sort of meeting with other grown-ups, or was making a potion that needed all of her attention or something like that while her husband was at work, she would firecall little Nymphadora Tonks and ask if she would be willing to keep an eye on Neville for her. They were always in the same house as his Gran but Gran didn't have to worry about him or entertain him. And he had grown to love the little girl who came to play with him. He would run to the fire when she came tumbling in, yelling about his Dora. She could make such funny faces for him, and play with him. His favorite thing was when she told him stories. She could make her face and hair change to be the characters in his books. When he was younger he would just stare at her face, not even really paying attention to her words. As he got older, he stared to listen more and more. But he still paid more attention to her face.

She started Hogwarts just after he turned three. After that she only watched him during the summers or breaks but sometimes his grandmother would leave them alone in the house. And he still loved her. She made him feel like it was alright to be clumsy; she definitely was. She could still make him laugh with her funny faces. And he found out he could make her laugh. Not laugh at him as sometimes his relatives or kids he was tutored with did, but laugh with him when he told her stories of things that had happened. She taught him to laugh when he fell down because she did when she fell. And even as he grew older and remembered more and more of his babysitters clearly (most of them relatives) he still liked Tonks the best.

Which was why after the final battle, fighting not to make either of them cry, he had gone to Andromeda Tonks and told her that whenever she needed a babysitter for Teddy, she could definitely call Neville. She had reached out to hug him and neither of them had managed to keep their eyes dry.

I know this is really random but I was wondering about why Neville wasn't at all hurt when the Death Eaters attacked his parents. I was also laughing at the idea of Tonks babysitting Draco (would have been the right age just a BIT too much family conflict for it to be likely) when I realized that Draco and Neville were the same age (I know duh) and that I'd set up a relationship between the Longbottoms and Andromeda in my head. So would Tonks at some point probably have babysat Neville? And think about it. Despite being together in the endings of the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, no one ever bothers to introduce them (okay so Tonks in unconscious in the fifth book, Neville in the sixth, and the seventh there were a lot of strange people but bear with me here!) Anyway, hope you enjoyed my really strange take. There will be a second chapter but likely not a third.