Tom lay sprawled across his desk, sketching busily on the whiteboard in front of him, mapping out the design of the gift he intended to make for Ariana.
He wasn't sure whether Dumbledore would ultimately allow Ariana to tell others about her condition but given how thoroughly the old beehive doted on his little sister, the odds were good he'd indulge her in this small act of willfulness.
Either way, it didn't matter. Whether Dumbledore said yes or no, it made no difference to Tom. The little trinket he'd promised her had to be finished tonight.
Never mind that without something else to hold onto, even with more people around to provide cover, Ariana would still risk exposure. More importantly—
'This is my promise.'
A man of his word, that was one of Tom's many excellent principles. (Of course, if circumstances were sufficiently exceptional, principles could always be... adjusted~)
He had said he would deliver the thing tomorrow, and so, even if it meant staying up all night, he would deliver it.
'Besides, it's just a small trinket. Once I've settled on the materials and method, it won't take long at all~'
With that thought, Tom sketched the outline of a glove on the whiteboard and noted down Ariana's measurements beside it.
He supposed the item could just as easily have been made into an amulet, or a hairpin, the final effect would be no different but he couldn't help it.
The moment he thought of holding, his mind went straight to gloves. And besides, he had already gone to the trouble of measuring her hand; if the finished product ended up being some other shape entirely, what had been the point of all that measuring?
So: a glove it was.
With the form decided, the question of materials came next. Naturally, his thoughts went to the dragonhide gloves he'd bought for himself.
Dragonhide was tough, durable, and an excellent conductor of magical energy, it made perfect sense for a glove. If his own pair weren't custom-fitted, Tom would have seriously considered altering them and passing them along to Ariana.
But dragonhide presented one very significant problem:
'It's the middle of the night — where on earth am I supposed to find dragonhide?! (╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻'
Not that the cost worried him; Snape could put it through official channels as a "reimbursable expense." But at this hour, even if Dumbledore himself went looking, there was no guarantee he could source dragonhide in time, much less mere Snape.
As for Tom simply producing a sheet of dragonhide on his own?
He couldn't do that. It might look, from the outside, as though he could casually reach into thin air and produce whatever he wanted but there was a logic to it.
Everything that appeared in his hand was something he had owned, or at one point possessed. He didn't always know what was in that invisible store of his, or precisely where things had come from, but he knew that if he reached, he could find what he was looking for.
Dragonhide, however, was another matter. No matter how many times he'd tried, he'd never been able to pull it out. Then again, he'd never actually seen a dragon so perhaps that was hardly surprising.
(Fine. Next plan.)
He erased "dragonhide" from beside the glove sketch and fell into thought.
'Let me think... what else could be used to make a glove? The finished product needs to be comfortable, and ideally serve as a conduit for magical energy... wait—'
His gaze drifted, unbidden, to the blue fur along his own body.
Soft. Comfortable. An excellent conduit for magical energy. He could weave spells directly into the fibers. His own cat fur, it occurred to him, satisfied every condition rather neatly.
But knitting a pair of gloves from one's own fur...
'No, no—absolutely not.'
The image of how much fur that would require made him shudder. He was still young. He had no desire to end up a bald, patchy, Mediterranean cat before his time.
Without a moment's hesitation, this idea died before it was ever written on the board.
After eliminating more plans than he could count, Tom slumped forward onto his desk and stared at the whiteboard which was still blank except for the solitary glove sketch while his tail drooped listlessly behind him.
He'd considered everything he could think of, but none of it was quite right. Either the materials weren't available, or they were simply wrong for the job. He was no closer to a solution.
'Fine. I'll just go with instinct.'
In the end, Tom gave up on thinking and simply reached out a paw, letting his instincts guide his hand through the empty air. Something solid settled into his grip. He opened his eyes.
In his paw was a sheet of... parchment.
Ordinary parchment. The same kind young witches and wizards used for their homework assignments.
'...Parchment? Can you even make a glove out of parchment? It's sheep-skin, technically, but it's still paper. Is this actually going to work?'
Still, reasoning that something he'd grabbed by instinct might have a special quality he wasn't yet seeing, Tom smoothed the parchment out on the desk and pressed his paw-pads against it to test the texture.
It was surprisingly interesting, actually, not quite like leather, but not like ordinary fabric either. There was something particular about it. The only real drawback was that it was stiff; wearing it would likely be uncomfortable.
'Does this mean I'll end up making an origami glove after all? No—there must be a way to fix that. Come on, instinct, help me out one more time.'
He closed his eyes and reached again.
Two things came back into his hands, one hard and round, one soft and elongated.
In one paw: a roll of bandage, origin unknown. In the other: a small glass bottle, transparent, with a label reading Moonstone Powder.
"Meow?"
He studied the two items with a puzzled look. The bandage, he could see, was entirely ordinary, nothing special about it at all which meant the key was the moonstone powder.
Moonstone—if I'm remembering right, it acts as a harmonising agent between potion ingredients. So, its properties include some quality of... blending? In that case, perhaps I can use the moonstone to harmonise the parchment and the bandage and give the parchment the softness and comfort of the bandage?
It had come from instinct, so it was probably correct. And as for whether it would work, well, when had Tom ever encountered something he'd imagined and then failed to do? If he could conceive of it, he could make it happen.
On the whiteboard, beside the glove outline, three words now appeared: parchment, bandage, moonstone powder.
The parchment would give the glove its shape and serve as a vessel for magical energy. The bandage would lend it softness and comfort. The moonstone would be the binding agent, fusing the two together into one.
To any self-respecting alchemist even Nicolas Flamel himself, this plan would have been worthy of outright contempt.
Alchemy was not a vending machine. It was not metallurgy. You couldn't just toss a few potion ingredients together and expect material properties to merge like items in a video game. (And you certainly wouldn't use potion ingredients in an alchemical process, even in a video game.)
But this was Tom. And if Tom believed something was possible, then what looked to any alchemist like sheer impossibility was, for him, a matter of perfectly ordinary effort~
He set the whiteboard aside, cracked his knuckles, well, his little paw-pads and eyed the three materials in front of him. After a moment's consideration, he tore several hand-shaped pieces from the parchment.
Then he poured the moonstone powder over the parchment cut-outs, wrapped them tightly in the bandage and stared at the bundle with great anticipation.
Nothing happened.
"?"
Tilting his head, Tom scratched his cheek, then slapped his paw against his palm with sudden realization. He reached into thin air again.
One hammer. One miniature welding torch. One mostly-used tube of glue, all tumbled onto the desktop in a heap.
'Right, of course. You have to stir things together when you're brewing a potion. If you want two materials to fuse, you can't just leave them sitting there, you have to actually work them.'
With a gleam of excitement in his eye, Tom cracked his knuckles once more and set to work.
What followed was difficult to describe in ordinary language, even Tom himself, as the person doing it, couldn't quite explain what was happening.
All that could be said was that it unfolded like a scene from a cartoon:
The moment Tom's paws made contact with the materials, a cloud of inexplicable smoke rose up and swallowed him and everything in front of him. Through the haze, you could just make out a small figure in frantic motion, swinging the hammer with a clang, pressing the glue tube with a squeal, raising the welding torch in a shower of sparks—
The welding torch, in particular, deserved special mention. The other two tools were baffling enough on their own, but the torch wasn't even plugged in.
Hogwarts, as everyone knew, was a place where all electronic devices failed without exception. How a battery-less, cord-less welding torch was functioning here, in a dormitory, in the middle of the night, was a question for the philosophers.
All one could say was: this was Tom. Some things simply didn't apply to him.
Clang clang clang!
Hissssss!
Thunk thunk!
The cacophony of sound, combined with the welding sparks flickering through the smoke, made the scene look like anything but alchemy because, of course, Tom didn't think of it as alchemy. He was simply following his instincts, driving forward on the quiet, inexhaustible conviction that this ought to work.
After some time, his movements slowed, and as he stopped, the smoke gradually dispersed.
When the last wisp cleared, a glove lay on the desktop: brand new, gleaming with the particular luster of leather.
No one looking at it would ever connect it to the parchment, bandage, and moonstone powder that had sat on this same desk not long before.
Tom pinched it between his claws and felt it. A curious sensation met his paw-pads not as smooth as leather, not as yielding as cloth, but somewhere between the two: springy, supple, warm to the touch.
Actually... it was rather pleasant~
'Done. Now that there's a physical object to work with, the next step is enchanting it, giving it the ability to let a ghost make contact with solid things.'
He had already thought through exactly how to do this. It was a magical world, after all, the solution had to be appropriately magical. On the whiteboard, in the center of the glove diagram, were the words: infuse with magic.
Just as the chess pieces in Wizard's Chess moved on their own, and the balls in Quidditch followed rules that defied ordinary physics, objects could be given special properties by infusing them with specific magical intent.
This world had its spells and incantations, yes but the underlying nature of magic here was fundamentally idealist. Just as Harry, long before he ever learned the Vanishing Spell, had once made the glass of a boa constrictor's enclosure disappear simply because he wanted it to, the intent was the thing.
So, in Tom's conception, all he needed to do was embroider a pattern onto the glove and, in the process, weave into it his magic and his wish. The pattern would carry the enchantment.
'Using magic to make a wish... I have the feeling this has happened to me before. When I was rescuing Pandora to avoid being torn apart by an overflow of magical energy, I think I made some kind of wish back then, didn't I?'
Absent-mindedly, Tom plucked a small tuft of fur from his tail, it was his own, after all, and therefore the most fitting material he owned to serve as an enchanting medium. He placed it in his paw and began working it with both paw-pads: rolling it, pressing it, poking it...
When he came back to his senses, the tuft of fur had become an even skein of fine thread.
'Well then. I'll embroider... whatever comes out~'
He picked up a needle, threaded it with the blue strand, and closed his eyes.
He had no particular design in mind; better to abandon thought entirely and let pure instinct decide what took shape on the glove's surface~
With the needle in his grip, Tom's paw moved with surprising agility across the glove, the blue thread gradually building up into a pattern, his movements were more practiced and precise than many a person twice his age.
As he sewed, Tom let his magic travel down through the needle and into the thread, holding loosely in his mind a quiet, formless intention:
'I want it to help Ariana touch things. Gently. Steadily. So she can hold on properly.'
The thought was like a seed. With each stitch, it was sewn, one careful pass at a time into the glove.
Gradually, as the threads accumulated, the outlines of an image emerged.
When he finally finished and opened his eyes, Tom had expected to find a jumbled, shapeless mess.
Instead, a crisp and complete design looked back at him from the surface of the glove.
On the left: a simplified silhouette of a blue cat. On the right: the profile of a golden-haired, blue-eyed girl. (Quite how blue cat-fur thread had managed to render golden hair was a question for another time.)
Their hands were joined together, the lines were simple, yet somehow uncannily alive.
"Meow?"
Tom froze. He leaned in and looked more closely.
Something about this pattern... wasn't quite right, was it?
His little owner was Luna, wasn't she? And yet the figure on this glove—
He hadn't thought about what he would end up embroidering, but this... this was a little much, wasn't it?
He, Tom, was unfailingly devoted to his dear little Luna!
He thought of his ethereal young mistress, then glanced out the window to gauge the position of the moon, and after a long pause, decided:
(Forget it. It'll do. It's a temporary thing—what matters is that it works. If I can get dragonhide later, I'll redo the pattern then. Besides... Luna won't mind. Probably... Zzz...)
Somewhere between one thought and the next, the Tom sprawled across the desk drifted quietly to sleep, and the dormitory fell into silence.
Beside him, the glove lay still. In the moonlight, the embroidered figures on the palm seemed to shimmer faintly like a small, earnest blessing.