Chapter Thirty-One
Tom surveyed his work and nodded in smug satisfaction. Severus's bedroom had been expanded to fit two beds, one the man's original twin bed and the other king-sized but otherwise identical to Tom's bed in Gryffindor. Mostly because he'd relocated his bed and enlarged it.
"It kind of clashes, don't you think?" Hermione pointed out. "And did you even ask him before deciding this?"
Tom considered her words and wrinkled his nose. He'd liked picturing Severus's indignation at the Gryffindor monstrosity occupying his bedroom, but now that he thought about it, he hadn't asked, so it would probably be best not to antagonize the man too much right away. He swished his wand a few times until the bright reds and golds had deepened and shifted into near-black burgundy and saffron. "Better?" he asked.
Hermione looked around and nodded. "I was a bit distracted last time, but Professor Snape's quarters really don't look like I'd have expected."
"And how, pray tell, would you have expected them to look?" asked a silky voice behind them.
Hermione jumped. "Professor!"
The man turned his attention to Tom. "To whom do I owe the….pleasure… of this renovation?"
Tom smiled disarmingly, which didn't ease the severity of Severus's expression one iota. "That would be me. We'll be staying here during break."
"Why?" The word was hissed, which was impressive given how little it lent itself to being hissed.
Tom cocked his head. "Do I really need a reason?" He shrugged, deciding it wasn't a point worth arguing at the moment. "Luna and I want to see if spending more time in close proximity to the people I'm bound to will help stabilize my connection to this body." He shot the potions' master a wounded look. "I even went through the trouble to expand your quarters for the time being so you wouldn't feel too crowded."
No amount of protest could convince Tom to change his mind, and it only became more useless once Luna arrived. So it was that by evening, Severus had four teenagers living in his apartments with plans to remain there for two weeks. In defense of his privacy, the man erected a wall between his bed and Tom's, then covered the open area between the new wall and the original walls with Silencing and other privacy charms. He also reworked the wards on his private lab in hopes of it staying a private lab.
Luckily for him, their other reason for staying with him was to have a place to read some of the more questionable books they'd pilfered from the Black library, so they left him alone for the most part.
One evening, Ginny frowned suddenly. "How many horcruxes have been destroyed so far?" she asked.
Tom tilted his head. "Three. Why?"
A victorious gleam appeared in the girl's eyes. "And how many are there all together?"
"Seven… but that's counting myself. If you exclude me and Voldemort, it's only six."
"What if destroying the horcruxes is the process Luna talked about?" Ginny asked excitedly.
Tom frowned. "I'm not the one who destroyed the diary though."
Luna spoke up then. "The process only needs to be performed by you if it's acting in a symbolic manner. If it's acting in a practical manner, it wouldn't matter who completed the process so long as it was done."
"The timing fits too," Hermione noted. "The diadem was destroyed over Winter Break, and I assume you killed the locket before school started?" At Tom's confirmation, she smiled at Ginny. "I think you're probably right then, although we shouldn't assume that to be true until we can test it. Tom, what and where are your other three horcruxes?"
Even Severus, who'd been eating in the kitchen and pretending his dining table hadn't been taken over, looked up at that.
Tom sighed. "That's going to be a problem. Nagini is one - she's the snake Voldemort keeps at his side. Another is Hufflepuff's cup, which I gave to Bella. I believe she put it in Gringotts, but I'm not positive, and it hardly helps us if she did. The last is a ring." He folded his arms on the table, tapping sharply at the wood. "The protections I placed around it would be difficult for me to bypass or dismantle. It was supposed to serve as a way of ensuring no one could somehow control me to make me take it for them." He caught the disbelieving glances from around the table and rolled his eyes. "I know, it wasn't very logical. I wasn't operating at my best at the time."
Tom looked at Luna. "What did you mean by 'acting in a practical manner?' I've confirmed that neither Voldemort nor I feel anything when the horcruxes are destroyed. I'm not sure their destruction is particularly changing anything."
"Of course it is," she told him bluntly. "Even if that isn't the process we're looking for, it's definitely changing something. I told you before, didn't I? Last year, your soul within Harry Potter was thinner. When you arrived back this year, it was denser."
Tom's brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of that in terms of the horcrux ritual as he knew it. "Everything says that creating a horcrux involves fracturing the soul, then shearing off a portion and placing it within an object. None of that should affect density." He thought through it further, eyes widening as he came to a conclusion. "But if in fact the soul remains intact and is merely spread to be anchored in more places… Then that makes sense. But wait, no." Tom shook his head. "If that were true, why wouldn't each part of the soul share the same memories?"
Luna didn't look like she had any ideas, but Hermione said thoughtfully, "What if we assume that the soul is like light?" She pressed her eyes closed in clear irritation when she received nothing but blank looks. Even Tom had no idea what she was talking about, for all that he'd grown up in the muggle world. "Muggle science says that light has properties of both a particle and a wave. What if we assume the soul is similar? Perhaps it can be both torn apart and merely stretched out at the same time?"
Tom made a soft sound of sudden understanding. "Like the Philosopher's Stone."
Severus's head jerked up. "What?"
Tom gave the man a wry grin. He should have known that Severus would be interested. The so-called pinnacle of potions was said to be alchemy, even though it was really just that the background knowledge required for one tended to be useful for the other.
"The Philosopher's Stone," Tom repeated. "Though they call it a stone, it acts as both a liquid and a solid." He frowned at the number of surprised looks he was receiving. "My primary goal is and always has been to become immortal. Why wouldn't you expect me to know all about the Philosopher's Stone?"
Ginny raised an eyebrow. "Probably because you haven't made one of your own."
"And you resorted to trying to steal Flamel's stone our first year," Hermione added.
Tom sighed. "Plenty of people, myself included of course, know how to make a Philosopher's Stone. The problem lies in actually doing so. At this point in time, it is, practically speaking, impossible."
"What do you mean?" Hermione asked. "How could it be easier to make one seven hundred years ago than it is now?"
Tom rubbed his brow tiredly. "It takes a bit of an understanding of alchemy to explain this," he said, "so bear with me. Alchemy is, at its heart, a condensed form of ritual magic with all external variables removed. The circle contains the instructions, and whatever items are placed within the circle are the ingredients. Should all the instructions and ingredients be correct and present, the transmutation that takes place will be identical, no matter who performs it.
"The problem is that, where a ritual has enough flexibility to adapt to slight inconsistencies, an alchemic circle does not. That means that every circle for a specific reaction has to be the same size as every other circle for that reaction. The size is as much a part of the instructions as the runes used. As it happens, the circle to create a Philosopher's Stone is… large." Tom summoned a map from one of Severus's bookcases and traced a circle on it with his finger. It crossed over Northern Europe, into Asia, and down into Africa. "This is roughly the area Flamel's circle covered. Seven hundred years ago, a wizard could simply travel around, creating the circle at their leisure and without having to explain to anyone what they were doing. Now, however, you won't find many countries willing to have a circle of this size running through them, so the only places you could manage it are in uninhabited areas like the ocean or Antarctica."
Tom stood and returned the map to the bookcase. "Unfortunately, that means omitting the primary ingredient of a Philosopher's Stone. Human life."
Hermione gasped and shook her head. "No! Nicholas Flamel couldn't have… If he had, Dumbledore wouldn't have worked with him!"
"You misunderstand," Tom said calmly. "The circle calls for humans whose lives have been cut short while within it. Murder qualifies, certainly, but so does sickness. I imagine Flamel needed only to place the circle and wait."
Tom shrugged. "I'm unclear on the exact number of lives a Stone needs to consume to become a true Philosopher's Stone, but I believe it to be in the tens of millions. Thus, the only places I could create the circle are places where the circle couldn't be activated."
Luna tilted her head. "Would you mind if I sent that information to Daddy? He's far more interested in the Deathly Hallows than the Philosopher's Stone, but I'm sure he would be interested all the same."
"We've gotten pretty off-topic," Ginny commented.
Tom nodded. "True. Very well, so if we assume that each horcrux acts as a separate anchor for my soul, then given that the ritual we've been doing has elements of soul magic within it, it's possible that as one anchor is released, further destabilizing my soul, the ritual then gives it a more stable attachment, resulting in a net gain in stability."
Luna smiled at him. "That fits my observations, yes."
Hermione picked up from there. "So then the second stage of the ritual makes that connection even more stable by binding us even more tightly together, and we do each stage in sets of three because three is such a magically stable number itself."
"And speaking of three," Ginny finished, "the third stage then ties things off, resulting in a Tom that doesn't need to worry about his body rejecting him anymore. Right?"
Severus sighed from his spot at the counter. "That sounds… probable, at least. However, I'm uncertain how that third stage might proceed. Are you even capable of love, Master?"
Tom pressed his lips together in a thin, hard line and looked away. He doubted it.
"We don't need to worry about that yet," Luna said gently. "And the surest way to eliminate the possibility of love is to try to force it. Let us worry about how to manage that step. I promise you, we won't let you down." If Luna said so, Tom had no choice but to trust her. It wasn't as though he had any better options.
The next several days were spent plotting how they might obtain (or at least destroy) each horcrux, preferably without alerting Voldemort to what they were doing. The snake would, they agreed, have to be played by ear, since any concentrated attempts to kill it would make Voldemort suspicious at the very least. The ring would take some time and effort, because Tom had designed it to be nigh-impossible for him to retrieve, but he would continue to work on the problem. Over the summer, he could perform some reconnaissance to check on the condition of the wards around it. As for the cup…
"Narcissa spoke with her sister and confirmed that yes, the horcrux most likely is being stored within the LeStrange's vault at Gringotts," Severus informed them one evening just before school resumed.
"Narcissa?" Tom asked, startled.
"I merely told her to probe discreetly about whether there was anything of import within Bellatrix's vaults, under the pretext of retrieving it for her since Bellatrix cannot go there herself at present," Severus reassured him.
Tom blinked. "I didn't ask you to do that," he said.
Severus's lips curled into a small, amused smile. "No, you did not, Master."
"You've been inordinately helpful recently," Tom noted, eyes narrowing. "You never took this sort of initiative before."
Severus hummed in thought. "The Dark Lord treats his servants poorly. Even one of his most favored servants can be killed in an instant for a single mistake. Every one of his inner circle is tortured on a regular basis." He waved one graceful hand nonchalantly. "I only actively helped the Dark Lord if I needed to restore favor after a failure."
Tom frowned. That didn't exactly answer his question, but he supposed he could follow the logic to a reasonable conclusion.
But Severus wasn't finished. "Dumbledore, for all that he's meant to be the champion of light and goodness, is not much different. He uses words, rather than curses, for his torture, but he doesn't hesitate to pierce unhealed wounds if it serves to bring his followers into line. Additionally, he shares even fewer of his plans than the Dark Lord, making it difficult to discern what would be useful in the first place."
The Potions Master's eyes softened, just a bit. "You have not once intentionally harmed me, and you removed your curse on my godson for no other reason than that I requested it. You agreed to save Potter and have, from what I hear, been continuing to make progress on that task. I demanded you not bind yourself to another Gryffindor, and you have changed your plans to accommodate that demand. In return, you've asked nothing more of me than to protect your secrets, and as much as I find this habit of invading my private rooms irritating, I suspect that were I angry or distressed by it, you'd leave without another word."
The matter-of-fact manner Severus used was, perhaps, the only reason Tom was able to avoid bolting. He didn't understand, precisely, why this appraisal of himself compared to his peers made him feel so uncomfortable, but he knew it was related to the fact that it was an evaluation of himself as he was, not of one of his cleverly crafted facades. Whatever the cause, he felt a flicker of warmth surrounded by fear and anger and embarrassment. He didn't like it. "Is Narcissa able to access Bella's vaults by any chance?" he asked rather than confront that feeling.
"No," Severus said, accepting the topic change without comment. "Her only suggestion if we needed something from there was to find a way to make Bella retrieve it herself. Apparently, the goblins dislike Rodolphus and Rabastan, so while Gringotts isn't strictly bound to report fugitives walking through their doors, they would possibly do so anyway for those two."
Make Bella. The words didn't fit together in any way, shape, or form. Not before he'd driven her insane, and certainly not after. Tom grimaced. Yet another problem caused by his poor decisions. "Thank you, Severus. You've done well."
The first day after Break ended (and after Severus finally reclaimed his privacy), McGonagall began calling students into her office to discuss their futures. Tom entered her office at his scheduled time and sat. The entire exercise was pointless, but he couldn't very well explain that to McGonagall.
"Mister Potter," his Head of House said warmly. "This meeting is to talk over career ideas you might have, and to help you decide which subjects you should continue into sixth and seventh years. Have you had any thoughts about what you would like to do after you leave Hogwarts?"
Tom shrugged. "Isn't this a bit late to be discussing that? If I wanted to be a Curse Breaker at Gringotts, I'd already be missing classes I'd need NEWTs in."
The woman pursed her lips. "Yes, well, unfortunately very few second-year students know what they wish to do for a living, so such talks would do little good before choosing electives."
"You could at least discuss what types of careers require each elective," Tom countered. "I might not have known what I wanted to do at that point, but I'm sure I would have been able to tell that not a single career requiring Divination interests me."
"Mister Potter," McGonagall frowned at him quite fiercely. "You've already quit Divination, and when I've checked on you, your Arithmancy studies seem to be progressing more than well enough, so I fail to see how this is relevant."
Tom smirked. "To me? It's not. But it's still relevant for every single second and first year here, as well as all Hogwarts' future students."
That took her off guard. At last she sighed and leaned back in her chair. "You've changed, Mister Potter. For the better, I think. Your grades have improved across the board, of course, but moreover… I don't want to say that you didn't care about others before, because you clearly did, and quite strongly at that, but your care was limited to a very narrow range of people. This year, watching you, I've discovered a young man who has the makings of a fine leader."
Now Tom was the one taken aback. Why was she suddenly complimenting him?
"However," she added before he could think of anything to say, "I'm afraid that the Headmaster has forbidden meeting for career counseling before fifth year."
"Of course he has," Tom muttered.
The witch pointedly ignored his comment. "So again, Mister Potter, your plans for the future, if you would?"
"Minister for Magic," Tom said flippantly.
"Mi- Mister Potter, I would thank you to take this seriously!" Her nostrils flared with her indignation, and her animagus form showed in her tensed back and the small facial twitches of trying not to hiss.
Tom leaned forward, resting his elbows on her desk and clasping his hands together. "I am. I will become Minister, and I will fix this world. Of course, I realize I'm unlikely to become Minister straight out of Hogwarts, but that's fine. I will take a year and obtain my Defense Mastery, then come teach here for five years or so before beginning my campaign. Once I become Minister, one of my students will take over the Defense position, ensuring a smooth transition. Hermione will already be working at the Ministry, I believe, and Luna will either be working at the Ministry or working in research. Ginny is interested in joining the Aurors if Voldemort is still at large by then, but otherwise she intends to work on reforming Azkaban." Tom sat back, giving McGonagall a thin smile. "I have thought about the future quite seriously."
It took several moments for the woman to regain her equilibrium. At last she sighed. "I see that, Mister Potter. My apologies. Well, I'm afraid to say that there is no NEWT requirement for becoming Minister. However, a Defense Mastery will, naturally, require a NEWT in Defense, as well as two other, complimentary classes."
That was vaguely new. That hadn't been a requirement when Tom first obtained his mastery. "Complementary classes?" he asked.
Professor McGonagall nodded with a smile. "As you know, Defense incorporates many different disciplines. For example, Remus Lupin took Charms and Care of Magical Creatures. Barty Crouch Jr, on the other hand," she said with a moue of distaste, "obtained his NEWTs in Charms and Potions. I'm sure you can see how the difference affected their classes. Other common courses are Transfiguration, History, and Herbology, but so long as you can justify how it improves your abilities at Defense, any course is potentially acceptable."
Tom hesitated, then bowed his head. "Thank you, Professor. I hadn't heard about that part of the requirements."
She smiled again. "Not at all. Thank you, Mister Potter. Your plans give me hope that the future will be less bleak than it has looked recently."
That night, Aurors arrived at the school. A giant had been discovered in the Forbidden Forest, and it and its keeper, Hagrid, were to be taken into Ministry custody. Though both escaped, it ended in Dumbledore being declared complicit in the matter. Before Aurors could arrest him, Dumbledore disappeared in a burst of flame.
Umbridge was declared Headmistress by morning.
AN: I'm fairly certain that the year will finish out in the next two chapters. I'll be keeping it within this same story, because it's annoying as all heck to do a search for completed stories, start reading one, and realize that the year was completed but not the story. Once the entire thing is finished though, I'll possibly split it up for better readability.
Also, updated several chapters after realizing that I've been misspelling Kreacher and Lucius for a while now. Sorry about that!
