Tom was not a person who concealed his edge.
He had more hidden cards than most people could imagine, but concealment and submission were never tools he had reached for. In the wizarding world, where conviction and will shaped reality at a fundamental level, a person who played weak for too long would simply become what they were pretending to be. You could not afford to spend your life bending.
So from his very first day at Hogwarts, Tom had been exactly what he was, never dimming himself for any room. He was the centre of attention wherever he stood, and as his life force and the nature of his soul deepened and refined themselves, the weight of presence he carried had grown into something most people found difficult to face directly. Meeting his eyes was something many chose to avoid. Speaking loudly in front of him was something fewer still attempted.
Robert Graves had managed his confrontational display the previous evening largely on the strength of years spent at the top of a hierarchy where almost no one outranked him. An ordinary Ministry official would have swallowed whatever they had been planning to say the moment they walked through the door.
But what Mrs. Greengrass noticed this evening, as Tom stepped off the train, was something different. A quality had settled over him that had not been there before, something deep and still and unknowable, like standing at the edge of a lake on a clear night and seeing starlight reflected in water too dark to see the bottom of. Beautiful, and somehow unsettling in a way that reached past rational thought.
This was the influence of Rowena's teaching. She had spent very little time on conventional magic and a great deal of time on disciplines of the mind, and that particular training left marks on a person's bearing that were impossible to miss.
Rowena appeared gentle. She looked like the sort of person you would confide in. But Ariana went strange in her presence. The other two members of the learning space fared no better. Only Tom, operating with the particular advantage of being constitutionally immune to other people's auras, treated her with the same ease he brought to everything, simply ignoring whatever strange psychic gravity she projected.
"Mama!"
Daphne spotted her mother and launched herself forward like a bird freed from a cage, tucking herself into Mrs. Greengrass's arms with complete abandon.
"You're practically grown and still this much of a handful," Mrs. Greengrass said, sounding entirely unperturbed, the smile on her face refusing to stay contained. She reached out to ruffle Astoria's head when the younger girl crowded in beside her, and then she looked at Tom over their heads. "Come home with us tonight. Rest there a few days before you go back to your own place."
Tom nodded and accepted without argument.
The four of them paired off, one adult, one child each, and Apparated to Greengrass Manor.
The house-elves had already laid out an evening meal of considerable ambition. The table conversation moved inevitably between Grindelwald's recent upheavals and Tom's own encounter the evening before. Mrs. Greengrass was not particularly anxious about the former. The family records from the first war were detailed, and the Greengrasses had navigated it without taking sides. They were a family with no particular appetite for power or influence, which meant no one ever found reason to target them. As long as they kept clear of wherever the fighting was thickest, they would weather this one the same way.
What genuinely irritated her was Graves.
"Tom, you have nothing to worry about on that front. I can't do much to him while he's in North America, but the moment he tries to do business in Britain again, I will find a reason, and I will have him sitting in Azkaban long enough to feel it properly."
There was a particular strain of quiet superiority in British wizarding culture, a reflexive sense that continental wizards were one tier below and that North Americans were something else entirely. However numerous and energetically ambitious the Americans had become, the attitude persisted that wealth accumulated quickly was still just wealth accumulated quickly.
Tom smiled and said nothing about his own plans. Things managed best in silence.
After dinner, the two sisters pulled him into the garden to transplant everything they had brought back from school, and when that was done they retreated to the bedroom and arranged themselves one on each side of him under the blankets. Nothing could come of it beyond the fact of it. Tom ended up telling them a story to get them to sleep.
...
The next morning, it was Cassandra who woke him, if waking was the right word for what she did.
[Cassandra: Hogwarts is on holiday, yes? You have rather a lot of money sitting with me. Are you no longer interested in it?]
[Tom: Being on holiday implies a small amount of actual rest. Even house-elves get days off.]
[Cassandra: I'm asking you to come collect money, not report for work. Is a holiday in North America such an unpleasant idea? I recommend Cancun. Yes, it's full of Muggles, but the scenery genuinely compensates.]
[Tom: Winter should feel like winter. I have no interest in spending Christmas wearing beach shorts on the wrong side of the planet. Pass.]
[Tom: Five days. I'll come to North America in five days and be back before Christmas Eve.]
In Massachusetts, Cassandra stared at the message with a slight frown. Today was the fifteenth. He was talking about three or four days at most before heading back.
She had no real standing to demand he spend Christmas in North America, so she settled for insisting he come sooner, otherwise she warned him she would spend the waiting time buying clothes and accessories on his behalf.
Tom did not take the threat seriously. He gave her something non-committal, folded the device away, and tried to get Daphne out of bed. They had plans to meet Cho at a shopping centre that day, and Daphne's relationship with mornings was complicated.
An unannounced visit from Bones, however, rearranged the schedule entirely. Tom sent the sisters ahead and told them he would catch up when he could.
"Sorry for interrupting your plans." Bones smiled. She did not look sorry in the slightest.
Tom made a sound of unimpressed acknowledgement. "As long as you know. Say what you came to say quickly. This is a holiday I did not come by easily."
"I came to bring you money." Bones shrugged. "The bad news is it's probably going to take a significant bite out of that holiday."