"So, you're a Gryffindor now?"

Despite Luna heeding Tom's warning and sitting apart from the other students at the Gryffindor table (sitting alone wasn't exactly something she was unused to, anyway), she soon found herself surrounded by James Potter and his three friends. From the looks on all of their faces, it was clear that the two who hadn't been behind the tapestry with her had been brought up to speed on everything.

"I was never a Slytherin," Luna replied. "Tom gave me the robes a few decades ago. Also a few hours ago. Time stuff."

"Do you understand that you are able to phrase things in less confusing ways?" Sirius said.

"What happened with Riddle?" Remus asked. "Is he really disguised as McGonagall?"

They all glanced up at the staff table, where TomGonagall (an apt name which Luna resolved to start using, internally at least) was already looking directly at them, not even bothering to hide it.

"That's a yes," James said.

"He doesn't want people sitting next to me," Luna told them. "You should move..."

"Oh, yeah," Sirius said sarcastically. "We'll just bugger off to the end of the table and chat about broomsticks."

"You say that like it isn't what we do every day," James said.

"McGonagall isn't Tom Riddle every day."

"If it's true, then why haven't we already told Dumbledore?" Remus demanded.

"Oh, I suggest you do," Luna said. "I don't know that I'll be able to; he could stop me fairly easily. But you three can certainly try. To be honest, though, the fact that he doesn't seem at all concerned over the possibility makes me think he's got some sort of Fidelius Charm or something in place to prevent it. I don't actually know enough magic to be sure, though. Oh! That's another thing: I'll actually be studying here for a while. I'll finally get to take classes again."

The four exchanged incredulous looks.

Peter took it upon himself to politely say, "It's not that we aren't happy for you; it's just...Well, you can't possibly believe that that is the most pressing thing you've told us so far."

"No, I suppose not," Luna conceded. "I am excited to properly learn magic, though. And I can make sure he doesn't harm James or Lily...Say, which one is Lily?"

"Over there," Sirius said curtly, nodding his head in the direction of a red-haired girl who was joking with a friend. "So, you maintain that Tom Riddle is after James and Lily?"

"And him personally?" Remus added. "He couldn't have just..." He paused, looked apologetically at James, then went on, "I mean, if he wanted something done to them, he could just Rabbit Hunt them."

"He could what?" Luna said, frowning. Remus had dropped the term as though it was a well-known one.

"You know, give his followers a scavenger hunt where I die," James said laconically.

"I've never heard of that. Why is it called 'rabbit hunting'?" Luna asked. "If it has to be named after a non-magical animal, doesn't a snake seem more thematically appropriate?"

"He named it Rabbit Hunting," James shrugged.

"He named it? He gave it a name himself? Did he make an announcement that that was what it was called? Issue a bulletin?" Luna giggled a bit hysterically; she was beginning to sound uncharacteristically agitated. She didn't normally respond this way to confusion; normally she loved to be confused. But Tom's near-constant stream of mysteries and tricks and puzzles, perhaps in addition to today's relentless pace and lack of rest, had put her on edge. Yes, she needed to sleep, so she could approach her time here with calmer spirits and a more open mind. And when she really thought about it, it wasn't hard to discover what really bothered her about this new revelation. "I think that might be another change to the timeline," she said, more slowly. "Which means it's probably my fault."

The four boys looked as though they were silently deciding who should be given the arduous task of comforting her, but before they could, Luna processed Remus's initial question and suddenly found herself exclaiming:

"Oh! I must not have told you: It turns out that he doesn't actually want you dead. Or he said that he doesn't, anyway."

"How comforting," James said. "What does he want?"

"He hasn't told me that much. I'll try to keep wearing him down, though."

"Why hasn't he killed you, again?" Sirius asked. "If you're this much of an obstacle to him?"

"You remember what he said That Day, Sirius," James murmured.

"Hm?" Luna asked. "What did he say?" She tried to remember what she and Tom had been talking about, when James and Sirius and Remus had been lurking under an Invisibility Cloak in the Hospital Wing.

"You don't remember?" Remus said. "He must say it a lot, then."

"He says many peculiar things," Luna confirmed. "Did he say I was his?"

"Yeah," the boys chorused, uncomfortably.

"He does that." She glanced again at TomGonagall. Still looking. "Really, you'll probably be better off not sitting with me where he can see."

"We're Gryffindors, Lovegood," Sirius said proudly. It took a moment for Luna to recall where he might have heard her name, to be using it now; she had introduced herself, using her full name, to James and Remus last time she was here, and TomGonagall had called her by her surname when calling her to his stolen office. Right. In hindsight, maybe she oughtn't be so casual about giving out her name, seeing as she was a time traveller. Ah well. Maybe her parents would name her after herself. How funny that would be.

Luna suddenly gasped, quite loudly, and leaned toward the Ravenclaw table as far as she could without leaving her seat, peering down the line, looking for familiar eyes, for a familiar set of features...

"What?" Sirius asked.

"I just realized my parents might be attending now," Luna said. Her voice came out smaller than normal, as her throat felt more closed. She might see her mother and father as children. Her age. She might see her mother.

"Is now the time?" Remus asked.

He didn't understand, couldn't understand why she needed it...But still, Luna processed his question and shortly discovered, with a sinking feeling, that the answer was no. Now was not the time to see her parents as children. As exhausted as she was, that would unmake her. She had been kidnapped by Tom, watched him torture a unicorn, been kissed by him, delivered him, witnessed the death of his mother, cried it out with the most famous magizoologist in the history of the field, and now fired herself headfirst into a rescue mission whose details she didn't yet understand.

And she wasn't even hungry. She had just had dinner with Tom not two hours ago. And also decades ago.

Yes, she needed to limit the amount of revelations she inflicted on herself before bed.

To give herself peace, and to hopefully bring peace to the boys as well, she relayed to them everything that had transpired with Tom since the angel statue had first sent her to him.

...

When Tom returned to his quarters and found his prisoner, Martha Jones, gone, he didn't feel anger right away. His first impulse was to check to be sure that she hadn't taken anything important with her. She couldn't very well amble out with the TARDIS's soul, but there were still things here that he valued enough that it would constitute an emergency of the highest priority if she had made away with them. She had not. That was a relief, after which came the anger.

A Muggle. Had escaped him. Had escaped..."Lord Voldemort". He wouldn't deny that he liked the name; apparently, it had been his, in another timeline, when Luna hadn't been there to make him enjoy hearing his birth name spoken. A timeline in which she wasn't his, and never had been...the thought was extremely repellant. No, she was his even there, even though that version of him, the deleted version, wouldn't have known it.

Doctor Jones had been his bridge to the deleted timelines, and to the false ones (the made-up ones, which she had insisted "didn't count"). A seemingly-bottomless well of knowledge, and somehow she had just ambled out the door.

That was fine, wasn't it? He had about wrung her out for information, anyway.

Tom went to his notes and found the list of names that he had jotted down; everyone who Luna might come to love romantically, based on Martha's recollection of the books, the extended canon provided by the author of the books, the films of the books, and the fan-made reworkings of the films and the books. He couldn't do much about them yet; when he increased his following, he could have them hunted openly, and anyway the TARDIS warned him that some were fixed points in time. Luna had already seen a vision of Neville Longbottom, for instance, via some complicated adventure with the Great Intelligence. For the Longbottom line to be ended now, before the boy was even born, would cause a paradox that it would be outside of Tom's current power to handle; the detested boy would have to be allowed to live at least to the point at which the vision took place, unless Tom grew his power enough before then.

Several of the others, though...Rolf Scamander, for instance. Luna did not know him, yet. It wouldn't be easy to harm famed magizoologist Newt Scamander, nor was it known what other families were involved to make Rolf Scamander; that boy couldn't be preemptively eliminated. But Tom could feel the full stream of time, if he focused hard enough on what he'd stolen from the TARDIS and followed the string of Newt Scamander and his progeny, focused his magic and his rage...

It wasn't hard. As many things as Dumbledore was wrong about, it was at least true that emotion was a strong source of magic, and Tom's hatred of the idea of Luna marrying some faceless other person, and having twins, and being happy without Tom...It pierced through time like a needle through fabric, pierced the future from the past. He could feel Rolf Scamander. He didn't know when; he had been aiming for the boy's birth but might have missed (the sort of imprecision that could be disastrous, for Longbottom). But he could feel him, living, breathing, undeserving, and he could feel his own hatred pouring through the connection he had made...

If there was ever a version of reality where Rolf Scamander took Luna from him, then Rolf Scamander was the most loathsome creature Tom could think of, and he deserved to die.

Could he hate a person to death, through time?

He could. But not without losing consciousness.

Tom awoke in St. Mungo's two weeks later, his head throbbing. He blinked until his eyes could focus on his surroundings properly.

"What have you done?" a familiar airy voice asked from his bedside, in a weary tone that suggested that she actually didn't know the answer (which was good, because having her both here and unaware of his actions was a favorite combination of his).

He broke into a smile and angled his head to better see her. (Even the slight movement ached terribly; he made a mental note that hating someone through time and space was not the best way to kill them. The power of the TARDIS and his own magic were great, but his body could only support so much, until he strengthened it.) She was roughly his age; as she grew older, she also grew better at aiming for times in which she matched his age. The bedside lamp was close enough to her face that her colors were washed out and flattened; she did not normally appear pale, not remotely. Her skin tended to be a shade of tan a bit darker than her hair- a somewhat uncommon complexion with blond hair, in fact. He wondered how long she had been here, watching over him. He hoped she had been worrying about him.

"I wasn't careful," he said, as pitifully as he could. Conversations with Luna had better results when he was hurting.

"That's not what I asked," she sighed, but there was a slight note of indulgence softening her tone, now. She was too compassionate to be properly stern.

Tom raised his hand (it trembled a litte) and traced the soft skin of her lips with his forefinger and middle finger. She did not move away, probably because she did not interpret the gesture in the same way that he did. Or perhaps because he could only maintain the touch for three seconds before the weight of his own arm became too much for him and he had to lower it. "Luna," he wheedled. "I'm thirsty."

She helped him to drink from a glass of water left for him presumably by one of the Healers. "Ordinary magic doesn't make you this weak, Tom; you're very powerful. What have you done?"

He absorbed the compliment greedily. He so enjoyed flattery. And from her, it was more observation than flattery anyway- even better. "It was just a small experiment with time energy that didn't turn out in my favor." Technically true; a trip to St. Mungo's wasn't exactly favorable, even though he felt reasonably certain that the spell itself had worked just as it was meant to.

Decades later, a five year old Rolf Scamander was discovered in his family's own yard, wasted away.

...

The Gryffindor common room was...nice. Luna preferred a riddle to a password, usually, but as she hadn't had to use either to enter the portrait hole (She'd merely joined the flow of older students who apparently had a free period after lunch.), she didn't notice the difference much. Anyway, she wasn't sure that a riddle was best for her just now.

She asked a nice-seeming older girl to point her to the first year girls' dormitory, trudged inside, and showered in the adjacent facilities. It felt wonderful to shower, as much as her inability to remove the time turner reminded her of why she was here. She should have combed her hair out afterword, to keep it from knotting horribly, but as she was exhausted, she merely spelled her robes clean, put them back on, and climbed into a four-poster bed that must have appeared just for her, because there was no trunk beside it.

Luna fell asleep almost immediately, and was awoken all too soon by a Gryffindor girl poking her repeatedly.

Due to her unpopularity in Ravenclaw in her own time, Luna reflexively held her pillow between herself and the offending finger before she was fully awake. Then she remembered where she was and sat up. It was evening outside the window; the girl poking her awake had dark hair and dark eyes. "Yes?" Luna said groggily.

"James Potter and his friends are asking for you," the girl informed her. "Are you a new student?"

Luna rubbed at her eyes, her normal stamina returning to her. "Yes," she answered. "I'm Luna Lovegood."

"Any relation to Xenophilius?"

She swallowed. "Distantly." She managed not to ask if he still attended, and what year if so. Rising from the bed, she offered the girl a smile. "Thank you for waking me."

On the journey down the dormitory stairs, into the ever-growing noise of the common room, Luna raked idly at her hair with her fingers. Still damp, and thickly tangled. Oh well.

It was not hard to spot the Marauders; they were hovering by the bottom of the stairs, a bit like vultures, with tense, earnest expressions. The four boys practically ambushed her as soon as she descended the last step. "You were right," James said. "There's some sort of spell to keep us from telling; every time we decide to, we just sort of...can't."

"I don't understand," Remus said irately. "If it's a Fidelius charm, then we should have been made Secret Keepers when you told us, shouldn't we?"

"Oh," Luna sighed, realizing the problem. "Tom didn't tell me; I guessed. So I was never the Secret Keeper and can't have made you Secret Keepers."

"It is so weird that you just call him Tom, like you're mates," Sirius commented.

"More than mates; they kissed, when he was a child, earlier today." James's tone was slightly manic. Apparently Luna was not the only one who was dealing with a lot, mentally, today. With that in mind, she decided to forgive him for his unnecessary reference to that particular aspect of her impossibly layered relationship with Tom Riddle.

"It wasn't really something I chose to do," she said swiftly.

To her surprise, James ran his hand over his face and replied, "Sorry. I know it wasn't."

She blinked. People did not normally apologize to her. "It's alright," she offered, and she could feel herself brightening a little. "Anyway, I've told you all that's happened to me; now I need you to tell me what Tom's gotten up to, as far as you know; Rabbit Hunting is new to me, and in my time he didn't go by Tom, before, so there may be other new things."

"But you said that if you know what happens, you can't change it," Remus pointed out.

"Right," Sirius agreed. "If anything, we should make sure you find out as little as possible, so that maybe fewer people will die."

"But things have changed," Luna said, though she was frowning and lacking in conviction. In truth, she wasn't sure what constituted an unchangeable future and what constituted a changeable one. She had changed Tom, in observable ways; he had kept his birth name, most obviously. And yet other things, like his path to darkness, seemed so...set in stone. She had wanted to find a different home for Baby Tom, it occurred to her. She had wanted to. And yet a part of her had instinctively known that such a big change would cause damage, in the same way that a body came to instinctively know the edge of the bed even while asleep. Was it the size and significance of the change, then? How much time energy would be exhausted filling in the new gaps? "And I'll be staying here, remember," she added, as that was more relevant. "It will be a bit difficult to avoid knowing the worst of this future...past..." She blinked again, then smiled. "But I'm sure we'll manage; we're all clever, aren't we?"

"Maybe you four," Peter said. "I'm barely keeping up as it is."

"Don't diminish yourself," Luna instructed. "I think you're keeping up just fine."

"Let's try to tell more people," Sirius suggested. "Even if we can't tell Dumbledore, Riddle will still have to leave if loads of students know he's here."

"Weaponizing Hogwarts's inherent rumor-prone nature," Luna agreed, beaming. "I love it."

The plan quickly fell through, though; as each of them attempted to inform others in the common room about TomGonagall's disguise, they found themselves turning away, tongue-tied, before they could manage it.

"Why?!" Sirius exclaimed, once they had returned to their huddle. "Why could you tell us, but none of us can tell anyone else?"

"Probably because when she told you and James, and when you told me and Peter, it was a guess," Remus sighed. "Now she knows for sure, and we believe her, so the Fidelius charm prevents it."

Sirius swore.

"That proves there's some wiggle room, though," Luna pointed out. Her nap had resuscitated her enjoyment of gray areas. "Maybe we can try writing it down?"

They went through idea after idea for the better part of the night. Attempting to write the truth with the intention of giving it to someone failed before quill could meet parchment. They managed to get the truth written if they told themselves it was just a personal journal entry, just for them, but regardless they couldn't then decide to give the note to someone; immediately, their hands would toss the page into the fire, or smear the ink until it was unreadable. Neither could they just leave the note where someone might find it. Neither could they pose the truth as a hypothetical or a question (That was Sirius's idea: to go up to someone and ask, "Did McGonagall seem a bit like Tom Riddle in disguise, today?"). Whatever they tried, as soon as they had the intention, actively or passively, to inform someone else that Tom Riddle was disguising himself as McGonagall, they ended up sabotaging themselves, as if bewitched.

At first, Luna grew more and more intrigued and engaged by each failed trial, more interested in this intricate bit of magic. It helped that she was unused to working in groups, and with people who were equally engaged and interested. But as the night drew on and the five of them became tired, eventually there was little left to do but excuse themselves to the dormitories and hope the morning presented more opportunities or more information.

It did.

For when Luna and the Marauders walked into the Great Hall for breakfast (together; she had never had friends her own age to eat with before, let alone under threat of harm), Luna's eyes immediately landed on McGonagall, at the head table.

And it was McGonagall, she immediately knew. Not TomGonagall, and not an angry cat in a cage. Minerva McGonagall, in her human form, was chatting calmly with Professor Sprout, as though it were a normal morning. It wasn't impossible that Tom might have erased McGonagall's memories of being imprisoned, but that didn't explain...

And then Luna made eye contact with Professor Flitwick, who was already looking her way.

"Oh," she gasped. "That's a bit ridiculous; he can't just be anybody, can he?"

"What?" James asked.

Luna didn't answer; telling him straightaway would just put them in the same situation they'd been in yesterday. At the moment, she was technically only guessing that Tom was disguised as Flitwick; maybe that meant that she would be able to inform everyone. She resolved to shout at the top of her lungs, Tom Riddle is disguised as Professor Flitwick! She even drew in a deep breath, but she found that she couldn't say it. She sighed. "Well, that didn't work."

"Were you trying to yell?" James asked.

"I think shouting it would be the same thing as telling one other person, if not worse," Remus said, raising an unimpressed eyebrow.

"I saw that something's changed," she replied ambiguously. "I thought it might be different now."

"What's changed?" Peter asked, but James was already putting it together, having scanned the staff table:

"He's changed to Flitwick," he whispered. "But...Flitwick's half goblin, and Polyjuice only works on human transformations; how has he done that?"

"And you can tell us that he's switched to Flitwick, as well," Luna observed, "but I couldn't tell anyone else. Can you?"

"No," James replied. "I meant to say it louder straightaway."

"It's because we're already in on it," Sirius said.

"We were already in on him being McGonagall," Remus said. His eyes were trained on Flitwick, now, and he would not look away. "Not Flitwick. It's not the same thing, is it?"

"Maybe the spell prevents us from revealing that Riddle was disguised as any teacher," James said, without confidence.

"I'll be visiting the library at some point today," Remus resolved. "In the meantime, we'll keep trying to invent new ways to expose him."

...

As it turned out, one didn't need to actually be able to do magic in order to get along in the Wizarding World. Being sufficiently knowledgeable and sufficiently confident sufficed, which was good because knowledge and confidence were about all Martha had. She didn't know where or when the Doctor was- hers or the other one. She didn't know specifically where to find Luna, although in all honestly that had become a slightly lower priority than it had been at the beginning of this mission.

Fortunately, she was correct in guessing that she could find Diagon Alley if she just wandered along Knockturn Alley long enough. She managed to purchase herself a new and respectable-looking set of witch robes by pawning off her wristwatch, and had money left over to buy herself dinner and a room at the Leaky Cauldron, albeit for only one night.

The next day, she started asking around as to where she might find Dumbledore.

...

Months passed, and Tom cycled through teachers multiple times a week, scarcely remaining the same person as much as three days in a row. Luna and the Marauders didn't come up with a way to tell anyone, as much as they tried. At a point, their time together lost the pretense of productivity; sometimes, they were just studying together, or she sat with Remus and Peter and watched James and Sirius fly, or she taught Sirius how to imitate the mating cry of a humdinger (for which Remus swore he would never forgive her), or James posed dramatically while she sketched him, or she played wizard's chess with Remus while he was in the Hospital Wing, or she traded chocolate frog cards with Peter.

They explored the Forbidden Forest together, some days. She befriended a few wild animals: the thestrals, as usual, and a spider the size of her foot, and a particularly inquisitive rabbit that turned up so frequently that she began to call it her rabbit. They also explored the castle together; they showed her a myriad of secret passageways that she had never known about, and she showed them the Come and Go Room, which they made their base to experiment with potential chinks in the Fidelius Charm.

Tom's eyes burned into her skull at meals, and she felt as though she was constantly being watched. She knew that it annoyed him that she had friends.

But still, things were nice. She attended classes, and no one seemed to notice that she had come from nowhere. They did notice that she was an odd fit for the Marauders; a few of the girls interrogated her about it, in the privacy of the dormitory. The general tone seemed to be concern mixed with curiosity, as a few seemed to think that the Marauders might be making fun of her by indulging her oddness, and the rest mostly wondered what she could possibly be contributing to their group dynamic. Lily Evans was the source of most of the worry, though she had no shortage of curiosity, too. She reminded Luna of Ginny, a bit, in that she was nice and also full of strong opinions.

"If they're rude to you," Lily said once, "you tell me straightaway."

"Oh, in my experience, they're very nice, but...I will. Thank you." It was very kind of Lily to worry about her, even though it wasn't needed.

Her association with the Marauders seemed to put her on the bad side of not-yet-a-professor Snape and his Slytherin friend group, who tended to flash hostile looks at her when she was nearby. She always smiled in return, which added to his distrust. He seemed to take it as some sort of a taunt whenever she accidentally called him "Professor", no matter how polite she always made her tone.

After nearly every class he taught, Tom called her aside to chat in "his" office. Occasionally they went back and forth debating the morality of his impersonation of the professors, or she kept trying to find out his plans for the Potters, but mostly, they went over her coursework; it seemed he had been serious when he'd said that he wanted her to learn magic, and apparently he wanted her to learn it very well and effectively. Her marks were already high, but he enjoyed giving her extra material to study and looking over her essays for every class.

"I appreciate your concern, Tom, but I believe most would consider this controlling behavior."

"Good." His eyes did not leave the roll of parchment.

The trouble was, she did appreciate his concern a bit. It wasn't quite the same as her appreciation of Lily's concern, but it was there, and she couldn't well deny it.

It was a dangerous precedent, she supposed, that at this vulnerable time in her life, when her mother had died only a little over two years ago, and her father's emotional presence had been reduced to his ironically self-preservative need for her to be happy and okay, and Mr. the Doctor was supportive and protective but not always present, and she had few strong social connections to speak of (for her friendship with the Marauders was new and, while pleasant, not one that she trusted to stand the test of her own most off-putting ways), here was Tom, consistent and concerned. Always near. Always watching. And he was dangerous, and he needed to be stopped, and she needed to escape him, but he did care. There was that. It wasn't enough to change anything, but it was there, and she felt it.

She wished the Hogwarts library had books on emotions, and not just as they pertained to or affected magic, because she suspected that her lack of emotional development, at this age, was part of the problem. It was hard to contend with all of this conflicting information. Tom tortured unicorns, but he looked over her essays so carefully.

Most of all, she wished that he could have been saved from the path of evil. That naive goal seemed so distant now, even though it had only been a few months. He was like a poorly-constructed essay; all of the right ideas were there, but distorted and imprecise and arranged just wrong enough. Sometimes, she would be idly conjuring bubbles or butterflies (from the wand of whichever professor he was impersonating), just for her own entertainment, and then she would catch him watching her, raptly. And she would feel sad for him, that he didn't have serenity or whimsy of his own, and so he leeched so hungrily off of hers. Fed on the levity he couldn't seem to make for himself.

"Do you like teaching?" she asked him once. "Is that why you're doing all of this?"

"Teaching is useful for my purposes," he answered.

"But the students, though. Do you like teaching them?"

"I don't feel any particular way about the students themselves. Why do you ask?"

She conjured butterflies, but they came out green where she had meant them to be orange, and too misshapen to fly properly. She watched them sink lower and lower in the air, and then vanished them sadly. "You should try to enjoy things, Tom. That's all."

"To my recollection, you haven't been much fond of the things I enjoy."

"If you're saying that putting professors in cages and killing your classmates and torturing things are all you can enjoy, I think you might be selling yourself short."

He chortled quietly.

She conjured better butterflies.

Eventually, the year drew to a close, Luna returned her last stolen wand to the last captive professor, the House Cup was awarded, and the Marauders and Luna exchanged awkward, slightly nervous hugs and pretended not to notice TomGonagall watching them from afar.

"Where will you stay?" James asked, his brow slightly furrowed as though he worried that she would have noplace to go.

"I'll probably go back in time for a bit, since I'm meant to have met Tom in the orphanage a few more times and I should probably do it when our ages match. And I'll have to be careful about it, since he doesn't learn that I can visit him without Mr. the Doctor until he's twelve, unless he was lying about what year it was. That'll be good practice, anyway; I'll be teaching myself how to use the time turner with better precision. Then I'll skip ahead to next school year." She petted one of the thestrals pulling the carriage. She was not used to goodbyes with friends. It was odd how somber it felt, given that she wouldn't even have to wait a whole summer to see them again.

"See you then," Peter said, and the carriage left for the village, where they would board the Hogwarts Express.

Luna slipped inside a broom cupboard and turned the time turner.