"You came."
"Should I not have?" Tom looked at Helena with mild confusion.
"Don't be silly."
She gave him a sideways glance. A cold wind moved through the Astronomy Tower, though it passed through Helena without affecting her in the slightest. Above, clouds shifted and snuffed out what little moonlight had been reaching the stones.
Women, it turned out, were much the same whether living or dead. Show them a stranger's face and they wore one version of themselves. Show them a familiar face and something else came through entirely.
Helena was no exception. To the Ravenclaw students she presided over, she was noble, severe, faintly untouchable. But Tom occupied a different category. Because of Lady Ravenclaw, Helena had quietly reclassified him as something like a junior apprentice, a little brother in the craft, and the walls she maintained for everyone else had simply never gone up around him. The result was a Helena who had gradually, visibly relaxed in his presence.
Which mostly meant she now seemed a little dim. No wonder she'd been fooled back then.
Though it wasn't really her fault. She was a constructed person, after all. The blame, if anything, belonged to Ravenclaw for the imprecision of the craftsmanship.
"Tom..."
Helena's voice was soft, but her peach-blossom eyes had narrowed to something distinctly dangerous.
Tom had brought Ravenclaw's presence along for this meeting, splitting off a thread of consciousness to keep her company. The old woman, apparently, had been reading along like someone watching over his shoulder and had correctly identified exactly what Tom had just been thinking about Helena.
He smiled quickly and looked away, focusing on the wind and the sky and anything else available.
"It's freezing out here," he said. "So what's the matter?"
"Have you forgotten something?" Helena's eyes narrowed further. She really did resemble her mother in that moment, though without the weight of authority that made Ravenclaw's gaze feel like a physical pressure.
Tom understood immediately. "The diadem? I haven't forgotten. I already have a plan."
"Really?" Helena pressed at once. "Where is it?"
"I'll tell you when I've retrieved it." Tom wasn't about to mention that it was sitting in the Room of Requirement. There were preparations to make before he went in after it, and it was cleaner to say nothing until the thing was actually handled.
"Then be quick about it." Helena's voice carried the edge of someone who had been waiting longer than was comfortable. "With the diadem, your progress will accelerate considerably. Mother's magic sustains perfect concentration without fatigue, as long as you keep it on. You won't feel tired at all."
Tom nodded. Ravenclaw had explained the diadem's effects to him long ago.
In practice, it was essentially the most basic function of the learning space, and in some ways inferior to it. The catch was that the moment you removed the diadem, every hour of suppressed mental exhaustion hit you at once. Most people couldn't handle it. Prolonged use carried real risks: sudden collapse, loss of consciousness, worse.
What Ravenclaw had actually made it for was to quiet the noise in her own mind, to keep her thoughts from scattering in every direction at once. Somewhere across the centuries, the story had mutated into something grander, and even Helena had swallowed the exaggerated version whole.
Voldemort's reaction to the thing told you everything you needed to know. He'd turned it into a Horcrux and then discarded it in the Room of Requirement like a broken umbrella. A man willing to tear his own soul apart to gain power would hardly pass up a legitimate tool for accelerating that power if the thing had actually worked as advertised.
"Don't worry," Tom said. "I'll bring it back. I won't let a Dark wizard's filth cling to the Teacher's legacy any longer than necessary."
In the shared space of his mind, Ravenclaw's mouth twitched.
You're currently the most dangerous Dark wizard alive, she did not say, but the thought came through clearly enough.
Tom settled Helena's nerves and then moved on, because the evening had more stops on it. Ginny had been waiting in the Forbidden Forest for a while already, and by the time Tom appeared she had worked up a proper sulk.
He dealt with that in the usual fashion.
After a thorough sorting-out that left her thoroughly mollified, Ginny changed into the maid outfit Tom had given her and picked up the other thing he'd brought: a small potion bottle, the liquid inside perfectly clear.
"What's this?" she asked.
"Freckle remover. Apply it to the freckles every night before bed. Within two weeks, they'll be gone."
Ginny did not look pleased. She actually frowned. "Do I need to get rid of them? I think they're rather nice. Cute, even."
She tossed her hair in a gesture of mild self-satisfaction. She wasn't wrong that she could afford the confidence. The baby roundness she'd had in her first year had given way to something else entirely, and there were now third-year boys in the corridors who turned to look when she walked past.
In a few more years, the word for it would simply be beautiful.
"You think they're nice," Tom said. "I don't."
Ginny looked mildly mutinous, but she unscrewed the bottle, held up a small mirror, and started applying the potion.
In Britain, freckles carried a certain cultural warmth. Healthy. Real. In older religious traditions they'd been read as marks of divine favor, proof of virtue carried over from a past life. The general feeling was that freckles were something to be appreciated.
Aesthetic preferences could be shaped by almost anything.
Tom simply didn't share the preference. A beauty mark on a beautiful face was a beauty mark. A spot on an unremarkable face was just a spot. A beautiful girl without freckles was still a beautiful girl, and a cleaner canvas at that.