It wasn't until after her first week of Hogwarts that Luna waited by the Black Lake for the Doctor to pick her up. She was barefoot, trailing her toes in the water and feeling serene. She didn't even shift her position when she heard the TARDIS noise behind her.

"Come along then, Lovegood," the Doctor said.

Luna stood. "Have you ever seen a thestral?" she asked distantly.

"No, but I do a lot of reading," the Doctor said with a cryptic smile. "Sorry I'm late; I was dealing with an infestation of sorts."

"What sort of infestation?" Luna asked, passing him to enter the TARDIS.

"Statues," the Doctor replied darkly.

"Angel statues?"

"Yes."

"I wondered where those went. Nobody else seemed to notice."

"Yes, well, you're different than everybody else."

"I know," Luna said calmly, although something must have seemed odd in her voice, because suddenly Mr. the Doctor was noticing her bare feet.

His face grew serious. "Your shoes. Were they stolen?"

"That's a possibility," Luna answered, more curious about the Doctor's concern than the state of her shoes. "I do think I left them on the night stand, so as to be safe from anything that might crawl under the bed...They seem to have wandered off, though."

"'Under the bed'?" the Doctor repeated.

"Mr. the Doctor, you're stalling," Luna said. "I want to see Tom."

The Doctor sighed and rolled his eyes. "Alright, Lovegood. Let's be off, then." He strode about the controls, flicked dramatically at some switches, and sent the TARDIS swirling through non-matter.

When they slammed to a stop, Luna skipped merrily to the door.

"Wait!" the Doctor called, jogging after her.

She did, serenely upturning her face to look at him.

"A few ground rules," the Doctor said. "First: If I think he's going to turn dangerous, we leave."

"Of course," Luna said, smiling distantly.

"Second: Do not leave your wand unattended around him. In fact, avoid showing him your wand at all."

"All right." Luna nodded.

"Now, I'm not exactly sure where we are in his timeline, so give him no spoilers. Nothing about Hogwarts, nothing about Death Eaters."

"Even if telling him could save him?" Luna said gravely.

The Doctor stared down into Lovegood's face. "You truly do plan to save Voldemort's soul, do you? You care that much?"

Luna frowned a bit. "It must hurt him, to be so dark, mustn't it? I think about it a lot. More, now, since I've met him. It must hurt him an awful lot. And saving him could save other people, too: the Longbottoms, the Prewetts, the Potters..."

"Your mother?" the Doctor guessed.

Luna shook her head. "My mother died after the fall of Voldemort. She was experimenting..."

"Right," the Doctor said hastily. "I forgot."

Luna knew that she hadn't told him this story before, but she was also aware that he was a time traveler and could have heard it from a future version of herself. But then...if she was telling him now, she wouldn't likely tell him in the future, would she?

Before she could think more on it, the Doctor's countenance brightened, and he threw open the TARDIS door. "Hello, Tom!" he exclaimed, entering the room beyond and beginning to bounce up and down on Tom Riddle's bed.

Riddle himself was sitting at his window, staring at the TARDIS. When Luna stepped out, the boy's expression turned greedy. "You're back," he observed with a grin.

Luna was pleased, if a bit uneasy, to have been missed by Young Voldemort. "How long has it been for you?"

"Since yesterday," Tom answered. "Why? Is time different where you're from?"

"It's been a week for us," Luna answered.

Tom peered at her, calculating. "Can you send him away?" he asked, nodding at the Doctor. "So we can talk alone?"

"Absolutely not," the Doctor said before Luna could even open her mouth all the way.

"She can speak for herself," Tom retorted sharply, not taking his dark eyes off of Luna. "She's clever."

Luna was aware that this had to be flattery, seeing as she had barely spoken to Tom, let alone said anything clever to him. Unless...Unless this wasn't only his second time seeing her. With time travel, who could tell?

"Careful, Tom," the Doctor said quietly, "or I'll set your wardrobe on fire. Then what'll happen to all the things you've stolen?"

"How do you know that?" Tom demanded, his face contorting with rage. Some glass ornament on his desk shattered.

Luna, sensing danger, did the first thing that came to mind: she hugged him. It was a way to repel various breeds of heart-parasites, though not a very safe one. Riddle tensed in her hold, but seemed pleased with the attention.

"Can you make him go away?" Tom asked again, and Luna detected a particularly manipulative softness to his tone, now.

Luna backed away from Tom but glanced at the Doctor.

"No!" the time lord shouted preemptively. "No! And you know why not, as well, Lovegood!"

"Mr. the Doctor, with all you know about Tom, do you think that he would hurt me?" Luna asked calmly, hoping that the man would pick up on her psychological maneuvering.

The Doctor stared into Luna's eyes for a few seconds, as though he knew what she was doing but didn't like it in the slightest. At last, though, he said, "I suppose not. But I will be back. Soon." He shut himself in the TARDIS, but the box did not vanish.

"He cares quite a lot," Luna said, by way of explanation.

"I don't like doctors," Tom said, his eyes narrowed very slightly but his voice steady. Luna noted that he was a bit taller than her, even though he obviously wasn't quite Hogwarts age yet. This wasn't remarkable, for Luna was rather small, but it did make him seem a bit more intimidating. Perhaps it would help, she decided, if he didn't see her as much of a threat. "You haven't told me how you do the things that you do," Tom added.

"You mean you don't know? You do it as well," Luna said, setting herself down on the edge of his bed.

"I thought I was the only one," Tom answered, averting his eyes. Even so, Luna could feel the resentment radiating from him, and she almost shivered.

Luna rose from Tom's bed to sit, instead, on his windowsill. She noted that the windowsill wasn't dusty, which must have meant that he opened and closed his window quite a bit. "It's magic," she told him simply. "And that's all I can tell you."

"Why?" Tom demanded, drawing rather close, although from this seat she looked down at him.

To rectify this unforeseen error, Luna dropped to the floor again and remained standing. "Because you find out soon enough anyway. Quite soon, in fact."

Tom looked dissatisfied but said nothing. He only stared.

A thought occurred to Luna. "Dear me!" she cried suddenly. "You've got a soulwig!"

"A what?" Tom asked, slightly alarmed.

Luna placed her hands gently on his shoulders. "A soulwig. It's a parasite that can latch onto your soul and chop it up into pieces. It can't be removed because it stops you from telling anyone that you're hurting until you're too hurt to want it gone."

Tom gazed at Luna, uncertain. "That doesn't sound real."

"It's one of the more abstract of magical creatures," Luna said breathily. "Most deny that it exists. But I believe. I think you have one." Tears started to form in her eyes, and she hugged the boy again.

This time, he shoved her off, displeased. "Stop that! There's nothing wrong with me!"

He had been a bit rough, and Luna's hip hit the corner of his desk. That would bruise. "It's fine if you don't believe me, though," she said quietly, almost to herself. "Most people don't." Somehow, she seemed to have forgotten that she was in the room with Voldemort, and was instead entranced by the less relevant aspects of the situation: How fascinating it was that she was doomed to never be believed and Riddle was doomed to never be fixed. This whole concept of saving him was doomed from the start, and here she stood, barefoot in an orphan's bedroom about forty years before her birth... "That's a pretty rock," she mused, picking up a stone from the top of Riddle's desk and turning it over in her fingers.

She did not notice that Riddle was staring at her again, with the same greedy look as before. His gaze took in the way her head angled and how she stood with her legs crossed, her toes fluttering listlessly against the floor, and how the lazy light of the late sun had her faintly outlined before him, and it didn't occur to him that her first appearance in his room could have been an accident of any sort. Because she was his new secret friend. His very own.

Then she set the rock down, gently, as though trying to avoid waking it, and her eyes met his. "Have you ever hurt anybody, Tom?" she asked curiously.

He grinned a bit at the question, which was not encouraging. "I can make bad things happen," he said confidentially, "to people who were mean to me. I can make people hurt, if I want."

Luna took this response in stride, but then he continued:

"Can you do that?"

"I've never tried," she said calmly. "I think it hurts people more to know that they'd deserve it if they were hurt than it does to hurt them." Perhaps this wasn't the most ethical concept to circulate, but it was how she felt. "I think that people who should be hurt are already hurting more than they hurt others."

Tom neither followed her logic, nor agreed with it, but he decided against calling her mad. "You will visit me more, won't you?"

"Yes," Luna answered. "If you'd like."

"I would," Tom said. "But don't leave yet." For a very brief moment, he eyed the blue box that now occupied the corner of his room as though he'd like to set it on fire, for threatening to end Luna's visit.

"I won't," Luna replied.

"I want to see your magic," Tom said with relish.

"You've already seen it."

"I want to see it again. Does it come out of your hands, or do you do it with your mind?"

At that moment, the Doctor popped out of the TARDIS door. "Time to be off, Lovegood!"

"I'll be back soon! I promise!" Luna said to Tom before he could protest. The glare he was levelling on the Doctor was nothing short of dark.