Whatever reservations one might have had about the arrangement, Nicolas moving closer was unambiguously good news. Beyond simply having company, the more practical advantage was that Nicolas was a Potions Master of the highest order, capable of brewing any number of the more troublesome concoctions that Tom could never quite find the patience for himself.
...
The clock ticked past midnight. Astoria had long since lost the battle against her own eyelids, and Tom carried her back to her room with the careful precision of someone defusing something precious. The moment Daphne saw this, she promptly shut her eyes and feigned sleep. Tom noticed the dark strands of hair that she had arranged artfully over her face, and the single eye peeking through the gap, watching him. He said nothing, pretended he hadn't seen a thing, and carried her back just the same.
Both girls retired with private little smiles they would never admit to.
Lucky girls, the both of them.
...
The night passed without incident.
Tom opened his eyes the next morning to a wall of parcels. They had stacked themselves into a genuine barricade between the bed and the door, which was exactly what he had been hoping for when he lifted the concealment charms last night. There was something deeply, unreasonably satisfying about it.
The individual gifts weren't all valuable. That wasn't the point. Unwrapping them was its own reward, a kind of uncomplicated pleasure, and the fact that someone else would deal with the packaging afterward made it even better.
He worked through the pile from half past seven in the morning. By nine, Astoria had appeared to help, and together they had the whole lot catalogued and sorted before eleven. Daphne had originally intended to help as well, but Astoria had ejected her from the room on grounds of being clumsy, noisy, and a general disruption. Daphne had accepted her exile with improbable good grace.
Astoria was beginning to understand what people meant when they said the simple-hearted were blessed. Tom had a weakness for that sort, much like he did for Lucy the Seventh. Some things just worked the way they worked.
...
By afternoon, they had set up a grill in the courtyard and were deep into the serious business of roasting meat. Christmas Day itself was typically spent indoors. Most shops stayed closed. The real commerce resumed the following day, Boxing Day being the unofficial start of post-holiday spending.
Tom had been mildly puzzled by the lack of response from North America. Several days had elapsed since the incident, and no one had come knocking. The only move on that front had been Dumbledore filing a formal complaint with someone, somewhere.
The answer, as it turned out, was embarrassingly mundane.
The Ministry was on holiday.
Expecting most wizards, creatures of comfort that they were, to come in during the break was an exercise in pure optimism. A small number of conscientious officials held the fort on rotation. But the relationship between British and American magical authorities was, to put it diplomatically, not one built on mutual admiration. They weren't like their Muggle counterparts, where raw geopolitical weight forced cooperation. Instead, they operated in a state of perpetual mutual condescension, bound together by necessity and little else.
MACUSA had indeed sent an official letter. The duty officer on shift had taken one look at the letterhead, confirmed it bore the MACUSA seal, and dropped it directly into the non-urgent correspondence pile without reading a single word. Someone from the appropriate department would deal with it once the holidays were over.
...
At the same time, Dumbledore's lobbying had quietly begun to take effect.
He had locked onto a single argument and refused to let go of it: Tom had acted purely in self-defence. The initial casualties had been the result of friendly fire within Graves's own ranks, and therefore could not be attributed to Tom at all. Without the use of the Killing Curse, he argued, the situation would never have reached that scale.
It was a somewhat ironic position for Dumbledore to find himself in. In another life, Fudge would have called him a senile old fool and stripped him of every title he held, and he would have done nothing to defend himself. Here, he was actively pulling strings on behalf of a teenage boy who had dismantled an entire family.
But that was the weight of the Dumbledore name. When he applied himself in earnest, when he set out to argue black was white, a considerable number of people would pause and genuinely wonder whether they had somehow fallen under a Confundus Charm and whether Dumbledore wasn't simply correct after all.
MACUSA President Korhog was furious and rattled in equal measure. He had not anticipated that Dumbledore would dispense with all pretence of fairness and simply lean on his reputation like a battering ram.
If the lid wasn't going to stay on, Korhog decided, then he would take the lid off himself. He released the scandal openly. The following morning, the New York Ghost ran a full account of what had become of the Graves family: unable to return home, unable to seek help, the whole humiliating picture laid out in print.
The news spread across continents within hours.
For the first time, the name Tom Riddle entered public consciousness attached to titles like "Dark Lord" and "malevolent practitioner of the Dark Arts." It was not a flattering introduction. But infamy, as any student of history knows, carries its own kind of weight. People learned his name. People learned what he had done. A reputation for danger, once established, has a way of preceding a person into every room they enter.
Even the Daily Prophet picked up the story. Tom's correspondence address was flooded almost immediately, his inbox buried under messages from fellow students, all asking variations of the same two questions: was it real, and what did it feel like to take on an entire family alone?
Tina, when she saw the news, came directly to find him.
She sat and listened to the full account without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment.
"Everything's changed," she said at last, her voice low and hollow. "Everything's changed."
She rose and went home without another word.
Greed and provocation demanded a price. Tina understood that principle perfectly well. Most people simply never believed the price would be demanded of them specifically, or if they did, they badly miscalculated what they could endure.
...
The closing days of the year were a media storm. The piece of kindling that truly set the whole thing ablaze came from an unexpected direction: Grindelwald, operating through the German Minister for Magic, released a public statement.
"Tom Riddle? He was the one who held back my fire and saved Hogwarts Castle. You're making a spectacle over him dealing with a few provincial Americans? If anything, the real shame is that someone of his calibre is still sitting in a classroom. Perhaps he'd consider becoming my student instead."
Dumbledore read it and his beard practically bristled of its own accord.
You want to poach my student?
I am a Headmaster. What exactly are you?
Grindelwald's invitation drove the coverage to heights it hadn't previously reached. European Ministries that had treated the whole affair as someone else's problem began to form opinions. The general consensus tilted toward urging MACUSA to let the matter go quietly, rather than drive the boy any closer to Grindelwald's orbit.
One Dark Lord was already more than enough. The world had no appetite for another one in development.
...
On New Year's Day, 1894, Bones arrived at Tom's villa as an intermediary.