Tom's gaze shifted, and something distinctly curious crept into it.
Snape, caught under that look, flushed with irritation. "Riddle, since when do merchants interrogate their customers about what they intend to do with a purchase?"
"Not at all. Just curious."
Tom's smile turned distinctly playful. He began rummaging through one of his Undetectable Extension Charm pockets, the kind that could swallow a small shop whole, and produced a vial of Strengthening Solution with minimal effort. Snape's eyes locked onto it with a hunger he couldn't quite disguise.
Anyone who managed to rob this boy, Snape thought privately, would become one of the wealthiest people in the wizarding world overnight. And the truly maddening part was that most of what he carried around was worth far more than its price tag suggested.
"What do you want for it?" Snape reined in his covetous gaze and asked with deliberate caution.
He was the one inviting Tom to name a price, but if the number was absurd, he wasn't going to play the fool.
Tom rolled his shoulders in an indifferent shrug. "This one... eight thousand Galleons. I'm already giving you a discount. Want a few more while you're at it? Buy ten, get one free."
"Card." Snape produced his Gringotts card with a face carved entirely from stone. Ten bottles? That was eighty thousand Galleons. He wasn't one of those old pure-blood families sitting atop generational fortunes. Where in the world was he supposed to conjure eighty thousand Galleons from?
Tom produced a card reader with visible delight and processed the transaction with brisk efficiency.
"Come find me again if you need anything, Professor."
Snape pocketed the potion and gave a distracted nod. Tom turned to leave, then stopped, and without looking back, asked with an almost innocent air, "Has Harry got the accompanying stance down yet?"
"He's mast..." Snape caught himself halfway through the word and realised, with a lurch of fury, that he'd walked straight into it. The colour that rose to his sallow face was something genuinely spectacular.
"Ten points from Slytherin!"
...
Tom had achieved something that could fairly be called historically unprecedented. He had actually caused Snape to willingly deduct points from his own house. The sheer depth of that particular wound spoke for itself.
What he couldn't work out, though, was why Snape had suddenly taken an interest in Harry's combat ability. Was it because of what had happened two days ago? But the Dementors were already back in Azkaban, weren't they?
Unable to make sense of it, Tom let the question go almost immediately. He had far too many things demanding his attention each day for Snape and Harry's tangled history to occupy any meaningful space among them.
...
After Arithmancy that afternoon, Tom and Hermione made their way to the library. He had already materialised every book in the collection inside his mental learning space, but there was something about sitting with a physical book in hand that still served its own quiet purpose.
A kind of rest, in its own way.
And of course, it didn't hurt to earn a few house points on the side.
"Riddle. Turn this to page one hundred and sixty-eight for me."
A cool, clear voice broke the library's silence. Madam Pince glanced up with immediate displeasure, but the moment she identified who had spoken, her expression went through several extraordinary changes in rapid succession.
The offender wasn't a student. It was a ghost. The Grey Lady.
Heads turned across the room. The Ravenclaw students in particular looked genuinely baffled. Why was the Grey Lady appearing before people like this, and why on earth was she voluntarily speaking to a Slytherin student of all people?
Wasn't she supposed to despise Slytherin?
Students from other houses were largely in the dark about who she even was. She appeared in public so rarely that most of them had never had a real encounter with her.
"Happy to help." Tom followed the direction she indicated and pulled down a thick volume titled "A Complete Compendium of Medieval Tanzanian Ritual Ceremonies," opening it for her inspection.
Every so often the Grey Lady would ask him to turn the page, and Tom obliged each time without complaint. Hermione watched the whole exchange with a growing sense of peculiarity.
In her effort to read more closely, the Grey Lady's translucent form drifted so near that she and Tom were practically overlapping. It was fine, of course, since she was a ghost. But Hermione found herself thinking that if this had been a living girl pressing that close against him, she would not have been nearly so composed about it.
Fortunately the strange scene didn't last long. Once the Grey Lady had read what she came for, she floated back up to her usual height and gave Tom a composed nod.
"Thank you, Riddle. I shall be awarding one hundred points to Slytherin."
And with that, she drifted away.
One hundred points.
Plenty of young witches and wizards had heard her say it. Most smiled to themselves, shook their heads, and went back to their books. Nobody took it seriously for a moment.
The ghosts of Hogwarts were, each in their own way, a little unhinged.
Nearly Headless Nick had spent centuries desperately hoping his head would finally come all the way off, and had developed an enthusiastic habit of performing his almost-decapitation as a kind of spinning party trick for students. The Bloody Baron wore an expression so permanently murderous that even the Slytherin students gave him a wide berth, and Peeves himself was reportedly frightened of him. Moaning Myrtle had turned the second-floor girls' bathroom into something resembling a haunted monument, effectively barricading the entire room through sheer volume of grief.
And then there was the Fat Friar, who appeared on the surface to be the most normal of the lot and was therefore the strangest by far. Wizards and the Church had been sworn enemies for centuries, with textbooks still full of passages mocking and condemning the clergy. And yet the Fat Friar had not only infiltrated the Church but had risen to the rank of Cardinal, only to be poisoned by a rival Cardinal in the middle of a dispute over who would become Pope. Some people suspected he had been a deep-cover operative sent by the wizarding world to reform the Church's attitude toward magic from the inside. In reality, he had simply been a genuinely devout Catholic who, even in death, continued to attend Mass every week without fail.
Even Sir Cadogan's portrait up on the seventh floor was a lunatic of the first order, challenging every passing dog to single combat and hurling words like "coward" and "craven" at anyone who failed to stop and fight him.
So the students in the library simply filed the Grey Lady under "eccentric ghost" and assumed she was a sheltered, imperious noblewoman who had never quite adjusted to the world outside her own head.
Only the Ravenclaw students exchanged uncertain glances. Their impression of the Grey Lady was rather different. She was learned, precise, and most definitely not the sort of person who said things she didn't mean.
Their suspicion was confirmed that evening.
Walking past the entrance hall on the way to the Great Hall for dinner, they stopped dead in their tracks.
The Slytherin points total had shot upward by an enormous margin.
She had actually done it.
They had taken her for a braggart. She had simply been stating a fact.
The news tore through the dinner tables like wildfire, and the reaction from the students was nothing short of an explosion.
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