When she started to wake, Hermione Granger could only think, in a muddled way, that she was rather cold.
Also thirsty. Fortunately, she noticed a bottle next to her cheek. It was part of why she was so cold. That, and her lack of clothing. Out of the corner of her eye, as she gulped down water thankfully, she caught Harry's similarly unclad figure. Poor Harry! was her first thought. Her second was I wonder what sort of trouble we've gotten into this time? And then she spit out some of the water when she realised Harry had become the same age as he was when he entered Hogwarts. The ritual must have worked! she thought, then, hazily. Hermione was not at her best when waking up. Neither Ron nor Harry had managed to understand that. Hermione Grange - not a morning person.
Gradually she moved her head slightly. She widened her eyes on seeing a naked, sleeping Mr Lovegood. And a child version of Luna next to him. Next to her was a woman that could be Luna's mother, though something about that thought struck her as dubious. Then she raised her head a little and saw ... her. Okay, that put the kibosh on the ritual working. Had they travelled back in time physically? Should be impossible. But she was too sleepy to ponder anything.
She moved her elbow and bumped another body. It turned out she was lying next to a young man she'd never seen before in her life. Spurred on by that fact, she conjured simple robes for everyone in the room and looked for somewhere to answer Nature's call. She saw a smallish rectangular hole in the floor on the side opposite the door. It had no obvious means of disposal, either. Well, she thought, there's always Evanesco.
The headmaster was not so crude as he'd himself been, Tom snarled in his thoughts. He didn't use a tattooed Slave brand with a Protean charm to summon his minions. Instead, a serpent ring bit his finger. Twice.
"Headmaster, I come," Tom said, twisting the ring twice. The number of bites was the number of turns. Once he had been bitten seven times. If anyone cut the ring from his finger, wore it, recited the phrase, and twisted the number of times they'd seen him use, they'd be stunned so hard an Enervate wouldn't wake them. Moreover, the phrase itself changed every time he was summoned, the new one would be given to him when he left the headmaster on whatever new mission he had prepared for Tom. In truth, the Unbreakable vow had not been intrusive. Other than killing unauthorised persons, making a Horcrux, or deliberately thwarting the headmaster, he was free to do as he pleased while the headmaster pondered how best to make use of him. Apparently, the pondering was over.
The headmaster summoned the house elves, who served them both tea. After taking a few relaxed sips, he said, "as you have guessed, I have my orders for you for the foreseeable future. They are written on this parchment." With that, he handed it over to Tom.
It was blank.
"I don't understand how to read this, headmaster," Tom said, respectful and restrained. "I see nothing."
"And nothing is what I am ordering you to do, Tom. You are, for the most part, a free man."
Tom was stunned. What was the point of enslaving him, then? At least the headmaster's rumoured eccentricity was demonstrated to be all too real.
"To be clear, keep on with the standing orders. Make no Horcruxes, don't kill unauthorised persons, don't deliberately thwart me. But otherwise, do as you did. And I am authorising you in advance to kill everyone, including Order members, that you did last time. For the most part, you were unknowingly doing me a favour by ridding me of untrusting, untrustworthy or rebellious members. Not a single one had not been manoeuvred - by me - into your grasp."
Well, that squared with whom he now realised the headmaster to be, quite well. Virtually the rest of his reputation was a fraud. Right now, he had his fake-concern face on.
"Unfortunately, Tom, that includes your already de-souled body 'dying' in Godric's Hollow ... and I will substitute my Necromantic knowledge for yours. But don't worry, while you will still have to leave your body and be a wraith in Albania long enough for Quirinus to find you, in the meantime, you can be my agent — well compensated, at that - on the Continent. And in a body where no one would ever guess it was you, to boot."
"The rumours of the 'Minister's Specials'?"
"Are true, but this is not one of those." He waved his hand at a section of wall, which vanished to reveal a very dusty set of stairs. After he followed the headmaster down, Tom saw the body, preserved in perfect stasis. It was living proof — or rather, freshly deceased proof, that the headmaster had been on to him from the beginning. There were other rituals powered by slaying besides the Horcrux one, and he'd found her every bit as annoying this time around as the last time.
Shimmering with pleasure after a visit to the prefect's bathroom, "Moaning" Myrtle Warren suddenly felt something she'd only experienced while alive. It immediately killed her good mood, because Myrtle felt like someone was walking on her grave.
"Why all this, Headmaster?" Tom couldn't help but blurt out. "Why repeat the future, why the charade?"
"A charade, it is not, young Tom. Rather, it's more a masquerade. And as for the reason, let me answer your question with another. It seemed to me that your rather impressive passage through time was not entirely using your own power?"
"What? No, it was," Tom snapped. But the headmaster merely twinkled at him. "I will admit," he continued reluctantly, "that the way had been opened by another."
"Yes, another. Another more powerful than either of us, who can do what we seemingly cannot. Another who can pore over the historical record and pinpoint the time when one of us, too, started tampering with time."
"So you do nothing? You cower in fear?"
"Not quite nothing, dear Tom, and do I appear to be cowering?"
"Then you have changed the time-stream?"
"Negligibly. And, alas, it only reinforced the motives of the tamperer. Since my changes resulted, so far, merely in strictures on mudbloods and half-bloods, we can assume our antagonists include those, though other aspects smack of pureblood family magic."
Tom would have been confused had the headmaster not informed him he was keeping a Seer captive atop an unused tower near Gryffindor and Ravenclaw. No doubt, he calibrated the effects of his actions with whichever descendant of Cassandra he'd managed to stow away.
"So, to what end will you tamper?"
"To subtly shift the balance without ever tipping them off until I catch up with their time of course. Then," he said in an off-hand tone, "I will obliterate them before they know I am coming."