"My technique really isn't the problem."
Inside the learning space, Ravenclaw spoke to Tom with complete sincerity, clearly doing her best to prove that her academic standards remained intact and to salvage what remained of the Wise Witch's reputation.
The moment she finished, though, her expression shifted slightly. She had the odd, unsettling feeling she had said those exact words not long ago.
"Helena was simply protected too well by me. She never encountered real malice, so she couldn't imagine just how vile people could be. Her intelligence is perfectly normal."
Tom listened with a pleasant smile, nodding occasionally.
He had spent enough time with Ravenclaw by now to understand what actually got under her skin. Two things, and only two. One was age. Every time Ariana addressed her incorrectly, the punishment was a flood of homework that lasted several days. The other was Helena.
Ravenclaw genuinely loved this artificial daughter of hers. After tonight's meeting alone, her approval rating had jumped from seventeen to twenty-four. One more point, and Tom would receive his first talent from her.
Several of his darker suspicions about her had quietly faded because of it.
This Founder was not as extreme as he had once thought. She still had her humanity.
"Stop smiling. Other than being considerably better-looking than him, the way you smile while scheming is exactly like that monkey's."
Ravenclaw was reclining sideways across the sofa, watching Tom's expression with growing irritation.
"Monkey?" Tom paused, then caught up. "You mean Slytherin?"
She curled her lip. "Who else? A doddering old monkey. Doesn't he look exactly like one?"
Tom thought back to the statue in the Chamber of Secrets and found he had no real objection. "He really does. Compare me to him again, and I'll lock you in solitary confinement with the time flow turned all the way up."
The teasing faded from Ravenclaw's face. She gave a small, dignified sniff. "Who told you to fool Helena first? Am I not allowed, as her mother, to avenge my child?"
Ravenclaw was not wrong in her reading of things.
All the Tom Riddles had a gift for playing with people. Voldemort had broken Helena until she lost her bearings entirely. But tonight's Tom had been more efficient. In a single evening, he had dismantled her defenses completely. First the harshest possible words, stripping away every layer she had wrapped around herself. Then, when she was at her most unguarded, he moved closer and made himself the only warm thing in the room. Then came the diadem, casually introduced to stir up her guilt. And finally, the magnanimous absolution, paired with shared condemnation of the Bloody Baron's violence.
By the time they parted, the way Helena watched Tom's retreating back had been practically reverent.
"Don't make it sound so ugly."
Tom did not see anything wrong with any of it. He summoned a chilled bottle of fizzy cola and drank more than half of it in a single go.
"Rowena, Helena's personality is far too open. If I don't do it, someone else will. At least this way, she only has one person to be deceived by. Most people are like that anyway. They don't need trust or freedom. They need someone to follow."
He looked at Ravenclaw, who had gone quiet, and his smile widened.
"You understand this too. You just can't bring yourself to be ruthless about it."
"Forget it. I can't argue with you."
She ended it there.
"Just don't sell Helena off somewhere. We've wasted enough time already. Continue today's study."
Tom nodded, stood, and followed her into the study to carry on learning how to construct convincing false memories.
Ravenclaw's approach to memory was unlike anything he had encountered. She did not believe in forcing memories in whole, cramming them linearly into a mind like furniture into a room. The method was subtler: compress everything into a seed, something small and dense and internally consistent, and let it grow inside the target on its own terms. Their own thoughts would fill in any gaps automatically, and even lend it the worn, uneven texture of lived experience.
No wonder she had once said she lived in both the past and the present. In a sense, she had.
Tom was currently stuck on the compression step. The seeds he produced were too artificial, too rigid. They had no capacity to expand. With Ravenclaw's guidance, though, he had begun to feel the shape of it.
...
Friday arrived.
Care of Magical Creatures and Potions had been swapped the day before, so after lunch the third-years who had chosen the class pulled on their thickest cloaks and made their way down to Hagrid's hut. November had settled into Hogwarts properly now. The wind had an edge to it, cutting at any exposed skin, and Hagrid had not arrived yet, so the students milled around outside trying to keep their hands from going numb.
The upcoming Quidditch match had already begun to crowd out most of the lingering excitement about Grindelwald. Tomorrow's fixture between Hufflepuff and Gryffindor was the main topic. Originally it had been Gryffindor versus Slytherin, but Snape had found an excuse to rearrange the schedule rather than put his students on the pitch in this weather, and Wood had spent several days cursing him for it.
Wood had done an impressive job keeping secrets. Almost no one outside the Gryffindor team knew Harry had a Firebolt now. Ron didn't know either, which was a deliberate choice. Harry understood that telling Ron was functionally the same as posting a notice on every common room board in the castle. No amount of secrecy would survive Ron knowing.
Harry had also asked Tom to stay quiet about it. Tom had agreed, after accepting two hundred Galleons.
For Slytherin, the Quidditch Cup barely registered as a concern this year. Half the school year gone, and they were already more than a hundred points ahead in the House standings. They were not Gryffindor, where points disappeared nearly as fast as they arrived.
Eventually, just as fingers were beginning to go properly numb, Hagrid came tramping out of the Forbidden Forest with two large wooden crates under his arms.
The students crowded forward at once.
"These weren't easy to get," Hagrid said, with the particular air of someone very pleased with themselves. "Started contacting... er, friends last month just to prepare this lesson. So make sure yeh actually learn something in a bit."
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