Dumbledore raised a hand, and the unconscious Graves drifted through the air to land gently beside Fudge. "Take him with you. Explain everything once he has calmed down. And in future, please do not bring him to Hogwarts. There is no need to create further friction."
He had done what he reasonably could. Whether Fudge would listen was Fudge's business. Dumbledore was simply too tired of dealing with all of it, and yet here he was, tidying up behind Tom so the situation would not spiral into something worse.
He sighed internally. Being exhausted was one thing. Being unable to stop was another entirely.
...
The Slytherin common room.
Tom was quietly working through the logistics of how to ensure Robert Graves slept permanently. He had little patience for flies that kept returning after being swatted away.
This had technically only been the first encounter, but Tom knew with absolute confidence that if Graves walked away from it intact, there would be a second. He had promised someone called Ross that he would let him deal with Graves, and that had been on the understanding that Graves would not personally come after Tom first.
He couldn't act on British soil regardless. And he had a trip to North America during the holiday to collect a debt from Cassandra. A few more days of breathing would not make much difference.
"Tom, what are you thinking about?"
Daphne, who had been working her way through a late-night snack and had noticed his prolonged silence, looked up with mild curiosity.
"Nothing in particular. Just thinking about where to bury someone."
"Bury someone?" She blinked. "Who are you burying?"
"A nasty piece of work who thought it would be a good idea to threaten me."
"Bury him for what?" Daphne's expression shifted immediately into something considerably more indignant. "Skip the burial and send him straight to Azkaban. Let the Dementors give him a kiss."
"That's actually a very good idea." Tom nodded with genuine appreciation. "I might try that when the time comes."
He was not being dismissive. He actually meant it.
It was well established that Dementors could drain a soul. Barty Crouch Jr. had met exactly that fate in the original timeline. What he found genuinely interesting was the question of what happened to the soul stone during that process. Was it absorbed by the Dementor? Was the consciousness inside simply erased?
Either scenario was worth investigating. His current methods for extracting souls were still crude, relying on some rather unpleasant Dark Arts as an intermediary. He found the process distasteful, honestly. Refining it was overdue.
...
The following morning, the departing students boarded the Hogwarts Express bound for London. With more than half the school staying behind for Christmas, the compartments were unusually spacious. Tom's, however, was not. The Greengrass sisters, Cho, Marietta, and Penelope had packed themselves in with the cheerful disregard for personal space that came naturally to people who had not seen each other outside a classroom for months.
Ginny, Hermione, and Luna had all stayed at school.
"My mother told me you hit someone important from the Ministry last night?" Marietta asked, leaning forward with the conspiratorial energy of someone who had been waiting since breakfast to bring this up. She really was Hogwarts' reigning authority on gossip. The speed at which she had acquired this particular piece of information was genuinely impressive.
Then again, her source was her mother. Some talents were clearly hereditary.
Daphne was the only one who knew anything, and she said nothing. The other girls all turned to Tom with expressions that had gone from surprised to worried in the space of a moment. Tom had an established record of taking issue with various authority figures, but Ministry officials were a different category entirely. That kind of thing had consequences that could reach Azkaban.
"Nothing of the sort," Tom said, with the confidence of someone stating an uncontested fact. "What happened was that Fudge brought someone to see me and it did not go well. But the man in question was not a Ministry official. He was a foreign national."
He paused, then added helpfully: "Professor Wilkinson's old enemy, actually. Robert Graves."
"Oh, good..."
Cho relaxed visibly. Penelope, who had a better memory than most, recalled hearing something about Graves before and ventured carefully: "That Graves, isn't he the Head of Security for the International Confederation?"
Tom nodded.
The colour left Penelope's face entirely.
"There's nothing to worry about," Tom said, completely relaxed. "Don't overestimate the International Confederation. It's a loose alliance, nothing more. They have no independent enforcement authority. Any armed action on British soil requires prior permission from a cooperating local Ministry."
He leaned back against the seat.
"And besides, I acted in front of Dumbledore. If he had wanted to stop me, Graves would never have been touched. He didn't move once."
"Anyway, Cho, really, stop worrying." Marietta, looking like she had been holding another piece of news in reserve for exactly this moment, leaned in again. "My mother also told me that this morning Fudge had a screaming argument with someone, and then that whole group walked out of the Ministry looking absolutely furious. Probably Graves."
Marietta's guess was perfectly accurate.
Graves had woken up furious and had come to Fudge's office with the full intention of bringing people to Hogwarts to make arrests. This crossed a line that Fudge found intolerable. Whatever he might have thought of Tom personally, Graves had now bypassed him entirely, treating the British Ministry as a corridor he could walk through whenever he liked. Fudge ordered his Aurors to detain the International Auror contingent Graves had brought with him on the spot.
This had nothing to do with protecting Tom. Fudge was simply furious at being made irrelevant in his own Ministry.
Dumbledore would never have been this brazen about it, and he had far more actual standing to be brazen. Who did this provincial outsider think he was?
Riddle had honestly let the man off too lightly.
Fudge found himself thinking this with considerable feeling.
...
The sky darkened as the train rolled south, and by the time King's Cross came into view, night had properly settled over London. On Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, the particular warmth of long-awaited reunions filled the air, families pressing through the barrier and converging on the students spilling off the train.
Mrs. Greengrass had come to collect her daughters, having nothing pressing on her schedule that evening. The moment Tom stepped off the train, she saw him, and she noticed immediately that something about him had shifted again.