"Tom, give me just a minute, it's almost ready."
Sirius hustled Tom inside and immediately disappeared back into the kitchen, from which a colourful sequence of curses began filtering out moments later. Apparently he was starting the steak over from the beginning.
Harry had come downstairs in time to hear it. He offered Tom an apologetic smile.
"Don't mind him. Sirius is just... direct. Forthright."
Tom shook his head. Wizarding slang when used as profanity had always sounded to him like someone narrating an essay. The entire English language, honestly, was fairly toothless in that department. He had grown up in an orphanage where the insults routinely traced a person's family tree back several generations and hit every branch on the way down. This was nothing.
They settled in the sitting room, and once Tom had found a comfortable position he asked, "You've been staying here with Sirius?"
"Not exactly." Harry shook his head. "I'm still at my aunt's. I come here during the day, but I have to be back before they lock up for the night."
He paused, then leaned in slightly, voice dropping. "Tom, I heard Grindelwald sent someone to recruit you yesterday."
Tom raised an eyebrow. "Word travels fast."
"I overheard Sirius and Lupin talking." Harry looked down, which was essentially a confession that he had been listening at a door. "They said you didn't actually refuse..."
"That's right."
"But why?" Harry sat forward. "He's a Dark Lord. He's just like Voldemort."
"Sure, but Slytherin's basically famous for producing Dark wizards, isn't it?" Tom looked at him with genuine curiosity. "I'm a Slytherin. If there are advantages to be had, why wouldn't I consider it?"
"Even if he asked you to kill people?"
"Obviously not that far."
Tom had come to find conversations with Harry exhausting in a specific way. Harry wasn't exactly naive, and he certainly wasn't soft, but he had a way of collapsing every moral question into a binary that made nuance feel like dishonesty.
"Forget it, that's not the point. The Headmaster treats me well enough for now, so I'm not going anywhere."
What he did not bother explaining was that Dumbledore, apparently determined to prove that anything Grindelwald could offer Tom he could provide himself, had produced a set of his own handwritten notes from his younger years and presented them as a New Year's gift. By his own account, it was only the second time he had given away such notes, the first being to Aberforth.
You see how these things escalate.
The notes were exceptional. The magical theory on Transfiguration alone cut deeper than anything Tom had encountered in print, and Rowena, who had seen more than her share of remarkable scholarship, had read through the relevant sections and nodded approvingly. Dumbledore was a legend, but he was also a product of genuine study, and his command of Transfiguration had reached a level that could reasonably be compared to Godric Gryffindor at his peak. In terms of pure spellwork, not raw magical power, not the deeper intuitions, but technique alone, the comparison held.
To spare himself further exposure to Harry's moral philosophy, Tom steered the conversation toward a subject Harry could never resist.
Draco Malfoy.
After that it was simple. Tom leaned back and listened while Harry worked through his grievances with impressive thoroughness.
Nearly an hour later, Sirius emerged from the kitchen carrying three plates. Harry gave Tom the look of someone who had made his peace with his situation and reached for his fork first.
Tom looked at the table.
"Sirius." He turned to him. "Have I done something to offend you? Because inviting someone over and feeding them this requires a level of deliberate intent."
The meat was approximately half-cooked. The rest of the table told a similar story.
He might have accepted it from Daphne. From anyone else, this was asking too much.
"It looks..." Sirius picked up a piece of steak with a strained smile and put it in his mouth. The colour left his face in stages, going from red to a greenish grey that suggested genuine internal conflict.
He set the fork down quietly, reached into his pocket, and produced a fold of Muggle banknotes. "Harry, just order in."
Harry took the money and was out the door before anyone could say anything else.
Sirius dropped into a chair and rubbed the back of his neck. "I do have a house-elf. Kreacher. But we don't exactly get along. My mother had him for too long, taught him all the old pure-blood ideas, and he never unlearned them. The only master he ever acknowledged was my brother."
"Surely he'd still cook for you."
"He cooks, yes." Sirius's face took on a colour that had not improved since the steak. "He uses rotted leaves, meat that's turned, seasonings that expired sometime during the last Ministry. That part's almost forgivable. The hands, though." He stopped. "Kreacher hasn't washed his hands in decades. And he does everything with them. Everything. You understand what I mean. No distinction between left and right."
Tom understood what he meant.
"How am I supposed to let him near food?"
Tom's own face had shifted into something that was not quite green but was making its way there. When Harry returned with the takeaway, Tom managed a few bites out of obligation and then declared himself done.
Sirius was ready to leave anyway. Before they went, Harry caught Tom by the arm and dropped his voice.
"That elf, Kreacher, he's not quite right in the head. He's unpleasant about anyone who isn't pure-blood, and there's a portrait in there." A brief, meaningful pause. "Prepare yourself."
"Noted."
Tom made a small gesture of acknowledgment. Sirius grabbed his arm and they Disapparated, arriving at Grimmauld Place in the next moment.
"The address is number twelve," Sirius said.
As the words left his mouth, a building forced itself into existence between numbers eleven and thirteen, shouldering its neighbours aside with the quiet indifference of something that had always been there and was simply choosing to be visible. The houses on either side looked faintly compressed, as though they had absorbed the inconvenience without complaint.
As concealment went, it was considerably more sophisticated than anything the Graves family had managed.