"Of course not." Tom snapped back to attention and quickly moved to placate the young lady, catching her hand in his. "I get to see you every single day, which means I'm happy every single day. That goes without saying."
The young witch broke into a bright smile at once. Talent or no talent, Daphne would have believed him regardless.
She only let go of his hand, reluctantly, once Professor McGonagall appeared in the classroom, settling in dutifully to listen to the lecture. Any other professor, and she might have kept clinging a little longer.
While Tom sat through his lessons outside, back in the learning space, Ariana was busy giving Joan a lesson of her own.
Ariana's expression had started to look distinctly strained.
"Joan, these are just letters of the alphabet... what's so difficult about them?"
Modern English had grown out of French and Germanic roots, with a fair number of its more advanced words borrowed straight from Latin, the shared ancestor behind nearly every language on the continent.
And compared to French, English had simplified considerably over the centuries, easier to learn by most measures.
Inside the learning space, everyone could communicate freely, unhindered by any language barrier, thanks to the space's own properties. But once revived and returned to the outside world, real linguistic ability would matter, which was exactly why Ariana had taken on teaching Joan English.
Half a day in, though, and Joan still hadn't managed to reliably recognize even ten of the twenty-six letters.
Joan's eyes had gone glassy and unfocused by that point. The strange markings looked, to her, a hundred times harder to parse than any battlefield map she'd ever studied. "Miss Ariana, I... I manage to memorize a few letters, but then when you teach me the ones after, I mix them all up again."
Ariana's expression froze.
Had she really taken on this responsibility, teaching Joan to read, a little too lightly?
Determined not to give up easily, Ariana pushed through until midday, before finally cracking and going to find Ravenclaw for help.
Listening to Ariana's account, Ravenclaw, who'd been enjoying a quiet moment to herself, offered a gentle smile. "It's only letter recognition. It shouldn't be nearly this complicated. You must not have found the right approach."
"Sister Rowena, I really can't figure it out." Ariana tugged at Ravenclaw's arm, pleading. "Joan's clearly trying so hard, but nothing seems to stick. Please, help me out here."
"Alright, alright, I understand." Ravenclaw stretched languidly, her silk robes doing little to hide the elegant lines beneath them, if anything only accentuating them further.
She rose to her feet, and a more practical set of everyday robes swept in from the wardrobe by the door, settling onto her at once.
"Come on then. Let's go see for ourselves."
Ariana lit up with delight and hurried to lead the way, bringing Ravenclaw along to have a proper "reckoning" with Joan.
By the time Tom arrived that evening, none of the three women were anywhere to be found.
He found that mildly odd, but didn't dwell on it. Ariana, since climbing out of the shadow of her childhood, had steadily returned to her clever, quick-witted self, and picked up anything new remarkably fast. Ravenclaw, of course, needed no introduction, the sharpest witch history had ever produced.
Surely the two of them together couldn't be stumped by one country girl.
Impossible. Absolutely impossible.
Tom called Andros over to serve as his test partner instead.
When Andros learned that Joan's Approval Rating had already reached its maximum, he sat stunned for a long moment, staring at Tom in something like disbelief.
Tom offered a warning. "Andros, whatever happens in a moment, don't look too shocked."
Divine Grace Incarnate: Scarlet Lotus Saint.
Setting aside what the talent actually did, the name alone, Scarlet Lotus Saint, left something uneasy stirring in Tom's chest.
Surely this wasn't about to turn him into some kind of magical girl.
Unfortunately, his time-manipulation ability couldn't preview the outcome of claiming a talent in advance. After a full day of hesitation, he finally decided to claim it here in the learning space. If it really did trigger some kind of transformation, he could always use his authority over the space to seal the talent away entirely, as though it had never surfaced at all.
Andros looked a little lost at the explanation, but nodded along dutifully anyway, dependable as ever.
Only then did Tom feel settled enough to claim the talent.
The next instant, an eerie flame wrapped itself around the boy's entire body, flame that seemed to pour straight up from some infernal depth, carrying with it countless sharp, keening cries and roars, and yet, strangely, threaded through with something unmistakably sacred as well.
For a moment, even Andros couldn't tell what to make of the power's true nature.
Wrapped inside it, Tom remained entirely unharmed. The flame burrowed into his body slowly, deliberately, and at the same time his magic began undergoing a quiet transformation of its own.
Tom recognized the sensation immediately, remarkably close to what he'd felt eating the golden apple. The key difference was that the apple's sacred power had functioned as an active talent, one he'd needed to consciously trigger in order to fuse it with his magic and produce something greater.
This transformation, by contrast, reshaped the fundamental nature of his magic directly, though on a noticeably smaller scale.
The fusion moved quickly. In under five minutes, the flame had vanished entirely, leaving behind a small mark shaped like a flame etched between the boy's brows.
Andros felt a flicker of something like delight, though he still didn't dare trust it fully.
Once Tom opened his eyes again, he immediately conjured up a small flame to test it.