Transcendence

Granger did an awful job of hiding her dismay. She was all wringing hands and worried eyes, and when Tom entered the little cabin she spoke up immediately.

"The book is wrong; I only recorded what it said."

Tom paused for a fraction of a second. It was the first time she had ever addressed him willingly, without him first having to threaten her in some way to gain her cooperation. Then his eyes traveled curiously past his frazzled archivist and to the table behind her. She had reorganized his deliberately haphazard stacks, somewhat surprisingly in more or less the same way he would have done it himself had he not been tricking her into believing he had no idea what they were about. He could tell even from across the room which category of books she'd been working on.

"You ca--" began Granger, then cut herself off abruptly before she said that he couldn't do something. After a moment's hesitation, she continued, "You'll read the books yourself before assuming that I did a poor job, won't you? It isn't my fault if the authors are wrong."

He had pondered how Granger would react to her views--rather, the Hogwarts curriculum--being challenged, but this was more than even he had anticipated. Tom had always been skeptical of what he was told and had never accepted his textbooks and professors at their words. He had always considered it the single positive attribute he'd brought with him from the Muggle orphanage, because he had quickly learned that children who had been raised in the wizarding world tended to accept conventional wisdom and lists of magical rules at face value without question.

Tom had expected Granger to be more like him, since she had been raised by Muggles. He had certainly not expected such blind faith in authority.

The only change in his expression was a flicker that passed through his eyes so quickly that Granger was left wondering if she'd seen it at all. He reached out to smoothly pluck her notes from midair where he'd Summoned them and made a show of scanning the rows of her small, neat handwriting, then he turned to her with a perfectly arched brow.

"What makes you think the author is incorrect?"

She spluttered for a moment, and when she finally spoke her already-annoying voice rose higher with each word. "The first exception to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration clearly states --"

"I asked for your thoughts, not for you to regurgitate Gamp's Law at me," he cut her off, quite enjoying the way she gaped at him in astonishment and not a little anger.

"What else can I do except state the facts?" she asked, and Tom was genuinely disappointed in her unimaginativeness. "If it were possible to conjure food from thin air, then someone would have done it and it wouldn't be one of the exceptions!"

Tom allowed an amused smile to flit across his face. "Are the exceptions laws describing the limits of magic itself, or are they statements describing the limits of wizards' minds?"

Granger gaped at him quite unattractively. "They're laws about the limits of magic, of course! You can't honestly believe that if a wizard were simply more intelligent he could create food from nothing!"

"Most transfigurations are accomplished by pure magic guided by sheer force of will. The average wizard doesn't seriously consider the molecular properties of wood versus metal when he transfigures a match into a needle, as the author suggests," he began with a shrug. "That is why most transfigurations are rarely as good as the real thing and often can't stand up for very long to any real attempt to use the objects. But if one did know the exact molecular properties and concentrated on transfiguring the match on a molecular level instead of just imagining the superficial idea of a needle..."

He trailed off with a challenging look in her direction, while she stared at him in a mixture of astonishment and a clear determination to prove her point.

"No," she insisted rather forcefully. "If it were that simple, then food wouldn't be considered the first principle exception to Gamp's Law. This--this book"--she said the word as if it caused her great pain to grant the text such a label--"would be required reading, if it were true. It would be a revolutionary breakthrough!"

Tom laughed grimly. "There probably isn't even one wizard in a thousand who could define the term 'molecule,' much less who has any idea about the different chemical structures of things. The fact that there hasn't been a wizard with both the scientific knowledge and magical capability to actually accomplish it doesn't mean it can't be done."

"Then you're just arguing hypotheticals! You don't seriously claim to have done it yourself!"

He shrugged one shoulder lazily. "I'll get around to experimenting with food eventually, when I have the time. Taking over the world is a full-time job, you know, and hardly leaves time for studying anything else." He also rather suspected that his few years of scientific education, which had been quite lacking even compared to his more fortunate Muggle contemporaries, was woefully outdated these fifty years later. "But I've no reason to think the exception is actually a limitation of magic itself, since I have already broken the fourth exception."

"You can't have!" she exclaimed. "I tried duplicating money myself and--"

Tom's sharp eyes cut to her at that, and she immediately stopped talking.

"You are calling me a liar because your meager attempts failed?" he demanded, caught somewhere between anger and amusement.

She stared at him with wide brown eyes, clearly having realized only at that moment how much she had been pushing him, how much freedom he had been allowing her to challenge him before she'd crossed that line. Tom shook off the remnants of his anger with a deep breath and a flex of his fingers so that he might more clearly feel the Horcrux's energy mingling with his own. Then he schooled his face back into handsome impassivity and stared at her coolly.

"I suggest, Mudblood, that you attempt to apply your not inconsiderable mind to having a bit more imagination. I've no use for someone who is incapable of thinking for herself."

Indeed, if there were but one good thing Tom could say about Draco, it would be that he was an imaginative little prat. Sometimes too imaginative, truth be told, but Tom was convinced that by the time the boy was old enough to be of any real use he would have managed to mold his little Malfoy mind into something worthwhile. He had left Granger standing there with an impossibly hurt look on her Mudblood face only to be met with Draco's eager face almost as soon as he'd set foot back in the manor.

"My Lord, I think I figured it out!" he exclaimed from the top of the grand staircase as Tom was walking across the entrance hall from the front drawing room. He took the steps down two at a time, triumphantly holding aloft a bundle of parchment almost as thick as his own forearm.

Tom stood half ready to cast a Levitation Charm should the boy fall headlong down the marble steps. As soon as Draco was close enough that Tom could be heard without yelling across the entrance hall, he asked, "Did you have a house-elf waiting to inform you as soon as I returned?"

"What?" replied Draco, clearly startled at having his train of thought interrupted. Then, "Yes, of course, but look!"

There were suddenly several long pieces of parchment floating open in front of his face, and Draco stood beside him pointing at the last line of a series of complicated equations and chattering away. Tom thought that perhaps it was time to redraw the line for the acceptable level of familiarity for Draco to have with him. On the other hand, Malfoy was such a sensitive, spoiled little git that he doubted he'd get anywhere near the level of productivity out of the boy were he to be harsh and cold towards him.

"This is almost correct," Tom finally said, forestalling Draco's longwinded explanation. "You're right that he added additional boomslang skin after we had left the potion to simmer after the first step of the second part of the brewing cycle, but you've miscalculated the amount."

Draco stared at him. "How did you check my work so quic--You already knew the answer!"

Tom flicked his fingers vaguely in Draco's direction to silence him. "Of course I did. Look here where you've assigned a value of nine to the boomslang skin. It should really be somewhere around seven point three, but I suspect that you were unable to find the correct value listed anywhere and tried to derive it yourself using some known value." He mentally reversed the calculation Draco would have used to derive the value, and a few seconds later corrected himself, "From the value of Ashwinder skin. Of course, with your limited knowledge, you could not properly account for all of the differences between the two."

"You aren't mad that it's not correct?" ventured Draco.

"Actually, I did not expect you to get this far. I had anticipated that you would stop after you determined that the culprit was boomslang skin and pinned down the timing."

It occurred to Tom after he'd stopped speaking that perhaps Draco would desire some more explicit praise than that, perhaps something more along the lines of being told that he had done very well and gotten surprisingly close to the correct answer for someone who hadn't even begun the class at Hogwarts yet. But Draco had clearly read that implication into what he'd already said, because he was smiling widely. Tom reached out a tendril of magic to scan Draco's thoughts and quickly learned that his young follower had been teaching himself Ancient Runes and Arithmancy since their discussion in the library all those weeks ago, so eager was he to impress Tom.

"Can I ask you something, My Lord?"

Tom was amused that Draco would think to ask permission now after he'd taken so many liberties earlier, but he waved him on without commenting on it.

Draco carefully rolled up his parchments, eyeing his work much more closely than necessary and avoiding looking at Tom. "Why did you assign me this task if you were going to do it yourself anyway?"

"I wanted to see if you could do it." The answer really was that simple. He added, "But I hardly went through the whole process myself. I simply looked in your grandfather's mind for the answer."

In fact, he had invaded Abraxas's mind for more information than that, and that process had been quite painful for Malfoy. He had cooperated somewhat after Tom had assured him that his mental wellbeing wasn't at all necessary for what Tom had planned for him, of course.

Draco had already bowed his head low and turned to go back up the stairs when Tom called him back.

"As it happens, I did do the calculations for the precise amounts of boomslang skin myself." He wasn't yet a good enough Legilimens to have ferreted out such precise information, even when he'd had direct eye contact and no concerns about breaking Malfoy's mind. "You can find them on my customary table in the library. Top row of parchment, second stack from the right. Do replace my original back where you find it."

It was both a reward and another test. From the way Malfoy's eyes lit up and he smiled brilliantly at Tom before rushing back down the stairs towards the library, Tom knew that the boy really was thrilled at the opportunity. He could appreciate that thirst for knowledge. And the next time he was in the library, he would know whether Malfoy had the gall to look at his other papers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The second meeting after the failed attempt on Gringotts wasn't any less terrifying for Lucius and Mulciber than the first had been. Tom knew that he was significantly less likely now that he'd had another week to calm down to hold Mulciber under the Cruciatus Curse for five minutes straight merely because his information was boring, or to blow up Lucius's glass while he was holding it because he looked too much like his father when he tilted his head a certain way, but neither Mulciber nor Malfoy knew that.

They were still holding meetings in Abraxas's study, except now it was Tom's study. Lucius had been visibly put out at that--no doubt he'd been waiting literally years to move into the room--but Tom had decided quite abruptly that he was no longer a schoolboy to be skulking about in the library. He was Lord Voldemort, more or less, and if he wanted the master's study he would take it.

"Lestrange is extremely lucky at your timing, My Lord," Lucius was saying. "If he'd been caught now instead of last week, he'd almost certainly have been Kissed."

Tom could not but agree. He looked up from the Daily Prophet he'd spread across Abraxas's desk, although he could still see the moving photograph and the headline screaming up at him as he looked at his remaining followers--ESCAPE FROM AZAKABAN!

"Indeed, this Fudge seems like he wouldn't be capable of reacting within reason if he actually tried."

Lucius nodded once in acknowledge. "Yes, My Lord, he is little more than a fool. He is understandably eager for any news that could distract the public from the Ministry's catastrophic failure here, and he is sure that publicly disposing of one recently captured Death Eater would make up in some way for them having lost another one. If the Head of the Department were anyone less formidable and popular than Bones, Fudge would likely have had Lestrange Kissed in the middle of the Ministry atrium today, notwithstanding the fact that he's already been legally sentenced to Azkaban."

"The apprentice Healer I have under the Imperius Curse told me that Molly Weasley had an emergency appointment this morning," added Mulciber. "She is convinced that the information Malfoy's house-elf passed on about you going after her remaining children is directly related to Black's escape. She insists that her children will not be allowed to go back to Hogwarts this year, and she nearly took Arthur's head off when he intervened in the argument that caused between her and one of her sons. Apparently she has one of those magical clocks that shows you were where family members are instead of telling time, and she's taken to carting it around with her everywhere, even out in public."

Lucius snorted. "I wonder if she would feel any more secure if she knew that there will be Dementors stationed at the school. I had no choice but to agree with Fudge or he undoubtedly would have done everything in his power to replace me as head governor with someone more willing, but I admit that I am considering keeping Draco out of Hogwarts."

"Draco will be going to Hogwarts," stated Tom.

His tone was mild, but his eyes were hard, and Lucius could clearly see that arguing would not do any good. He visibly swallowed and lowered his eyes in acceptance.

"Yes, My Lord."

Feeling no need to acknowledge the subject further, Tom began on the various questions he had regarding Black. "From what you two know of him, what is Black likely to do? I would like to intercept him as soon as possible so that I can either bring him into the fold or, if his mind proves unsalvageable, put him down before he becomes even more of a liability."

Malfoy and Mulciber looked at each other uncomfortably. Tom was getting quite impatient with their silent conversation by the time they seemed to reach an agreement and Mulciber turned back towards him to speak.

"My Lord, I beg you will forgive us, but we truly have no information about Black. As far as we know, you... He... is the only person who ever knew who his spy in the Order was."

Tom raised his eyebrows. "Spy?"

Despite having tried to pass the buck to Mulciber, Lucius was unable to keep his mouth shut. He rolled his eyes in exasperation at his fellow's inadequate explanation. "Black was the first of his family sorted into Gryffindor, and before he'd finished Hogwarts he'd alienated his family and managed to get himself disowned. Nobody had anything to do with him for years. He was certainly never openly a Death Eater. We all knew that He had a spy inside the Order, but I was shocked, as was my wife, when Black was arrested."

"I see," said Tom. "That presents a problem, but if Black was that successful at spying, then that on top of his obvious competence in escaping from Azkaban makes him too valuable to pass up. You will pool your resources and come up with any helpful information you can about him by our next meeting."

He dismissed them with a wave of his hand, and Mulciber bowed and all but ran out the door as quickly as possible without making himself look as frightened as he was. Malfoy, on the other hand, lingered in the study. Tom looked up from his various parchments to glare dangerously at him.

"My Lord, forgive me. It's just that I wonder if you might be willing to... reconsider your position on Draco attending Hogwarts. He would be much safer at Durmstrang, and he would receive a much better education there as well. In fact, I had always planned to send him there, but Narcissa--"

"No," interrupted Tom, and Malfoy choked on whatever utterly uninteresting bit of family drama he had been about to share with him. "I need eyes at Hogwarts, and Draco has proven himself capable of meeting my expectations."

Lucius's eyes widened, and Tom imagined that he could almost see his hammering heartbeat in his neck.

"My Lord... with all due respect, isn't Draco too young to take on the responsibilities of a Death Eater? I had been planning on allowing my son to join at sixteen, the customary minimum age, but--"

"Your son?" Tom echoed, a cold smile twisting his lips. "Draco might be your son, but he is my follower. When he joins formally and what responsibilities he has in the meantime is entirely my decision, not yours. You lost that right, if indeed I would ever have considered letting you have it in the first place, when your family betrayed me."

Malfoy held onto the back of his chair as if he might fall over without it. "My Lord, I had nothing to do with my father's plot. I swear, I am your most loyal--!"

Tom took more pleasure than he probably should have in cutting the man off yet again. "You are certainly loyal to someone, but it isn't to me." He held up a hand to forestall Lucius's next protest. "I know that you had nothing to do with your father's betrayal, but I also know that the only reason he didn't want to involve you is that you never would have allowed him to plot against your son. It had nothing to do with your loyalty to me."

"That might have been his reasoning, My Lord, and of course it's true that I never would have gone along with any plan that put Draco in danger, but I would not have betrayed you even if Draco had not been involved."

Tom's smile grew wider. "I have seen your mind. You support me because you see me as the lesser evil and hope to protect your son from Lord Voldemort. If you thought tomorrow that my other self would offer a better deal, you would betray me in an instant."

His growing skills in the art made it easier than ever to pick up the rather loud half-thought that flitted across Lucius's mind before he could push it away. If He offered Draco's freedom...

The smile turned into a laugh. "Draco will never be free. Allow me to be perfectly clear so that we understand one another: He. Is. Mine. In fact, the only reason I am allowing you to live is that Draco is too young to take over the Malfoy estate and your various positions if I were to kill you like I am going to kill your father."

When Lucius Malfoy stumbled out of his father's study, anyone who saw him would have known immediately that something life-altering and horrible had happened to him. Tom knew that only he would ever know the reason, because Malfoy was certainly not stupid enough to mention their conversation to anyone else, especially not his wife. And especially not Draco himself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As was common for him nowadays, Tom's good mood didn't last very long at all. Almost as soon as he was left alone to his own thoughts, the weight of his failure and his to-do list pressed in around him as if he were on the bottom of the ocean. The Horcrux's excited pulses of energy at sensing his general elation brought his mind almost immediately back to the matter that had been at the forefront of his mind over the past week: He couldn't keep putting off his plans and experiments until he had another Horcrux.

His attachment to the ring Horcrux, as ill-advised as it had always been, was now something he absolutely could not afford. The cup was beyond his reach, and as yet he'd had no luck trying to track down further Horcruxes.

Removing the ring from his finger felt almost as if he were removing his arm from his body, but he gritted his teeth and did it anyway. Perhaps he stared at it for too long without acting, but there was no one there to judge him for it except for the portrait of Sirius Black, which was leaning around the ring Tom had placed on top of it in order to continue screaming up at him.

With a sudden movement born of the thought that he had to either give up the idea completely or just do it, Tom pointed his wand at one of his desk drawers and began moving it in a complicated pattern as he hissed the password. From inside the drawer he pulled out a lockbox that had been warded as impenetrably as he knew how to make it, and from there (after several minutes of delicate wand work and chants in Parseltongue) he carefully levitated out a clear vial no bigger than his pinky.

He refused to physically touch it. He was uncomfortable enough just touching it with his magic.

Hell, he was uncomfortable enough just being in the same room with it. He could sense its presence, in the same way he might sense someone looking at him except that it was a much stronger, more tangible feeling of danger.

With a lead heart, he carefully manipulated the vial until a single drop was teetering on the edge of the rim. He watched it grow until finally it dripped off the vial, and although he wanted desperately to stop it even in that split second it was in midair, a single drop of basilisk venom landed next to the ring, just shy of actually touching it.

He could feel the Horcrux going absolutely insane, but otherwise nothing happened.

A series of spells later had the venom removed completely from the desk and the vial resealed in its lockbox inside the desk. Then Tom picked up the riotous Horcrux and placed it back on his finger, allowing himself to be swept into the Horcrux's mindscape.

He had barely had time to reorient himself before he was engulfed by frigid arms and found himself face to face with the wide, terrified eyes of the other Tom.

"What happened?" demanded the Horcrux, either not bothering to or unable to mask the fear in his voice.

Tom had been more than reasonably certain that the Horcrux had no idea what was actually going on in the real world beyond some vague impressions of Tom's strong emotions when they were in close proximity, but if he'd ever had any lingering doubts they were swept away by this. There was no way that the Horcrux could have faked such a reaction, much less that he could have hidden his anger if he'd had any idea that Tom himself had been the one to put him in danger.

"There was an attack," he said, filling his voice with all the stress he'd actually felt, even if the words were a lie. "Basilisk venom..."

He trailed off by design and wrapped his arms around the Horcrux in return, allowing his body to shudder as if at the memory. The Horcrux moaned as if it were in distress and squeezed him tighter, crushing them together in a kind of embrace that Tom had never experienced before. It was odd, being held and holding someone for purposes other than domination or pure sexual gratification. It was stranger still given the fact that the Horcrux had not touched him since their first encounter, but he accepted it with all the grace he could.

After a while, the Horcrux spoke into his ear, voice barely above a whisper. "I didn't know what was happening, but I felt like I was going to die. There was this feeling of foreboding, and then suddenly there was this... terror. All I could do was scream and struggle. And then it was gone, and I was myself again, here in this graveyard. I've never--the feelings--I don't--"

"I know."

And he did. It was the same thing he had felt when Potter had come within inches of plunging a basilisk fang into his diary. He had never felt any emotion that strongly before, and he had never felt anything close since. Overwhelming seemed a bit too underwhelming a word to adequately describe the experience.

He'd needed to know whether his feelings were entirely the result of watching Potter and knowing what would happen, or if it was also at least partially the result of the connection and sensory awareness of a Horcrux that he had known existed since he'd been interacting with the ring. He'd needed to know whether a Horcrux's sensory perception extended in that way to its surroundings.

Now that he had verified all of those things, he could leave the Horcrux's mind and run the test again on the diary, just to be absolutely, one hundred percent sure that it was no longer in any way connected to him. If it was still connected to him, he was sure that he would experience the same thing he had felt in the Chamber before his body had fully formed, the same thing that the other Tom had just experienced. If it was no longer connected to him then he was sure that he would feel no more discomfort than what he'd felt handling basilisk venom in general.

He had devised plenty of other tests, but none of them could provide him with absolute certainty. And he needed absolute certainty on this issue.

At the moment, though, he was more concerned with the way that the other Tom's lips kept brushing against his ear and then his jaw. He had thought it was accidental at first, but at a certain point he had to accept that it was not. That point came sometime between a brush against his jaw and the lightest touch of lips against lips. He wasn't sure exactly what his first reaction was, as all of his possible reactions seemed to come to mind all at once. It was only after he realized that he was more put off by the Horcrux's lack of body heat than by the kissing itself that his mind settled on opportunism.

Tom had known since the first time he'd found himself in the Horcrux's mind, even before the first time it had asked to be invited into his own mind, that it was looking for a way to take over. That it either wanted to force him to reveal the exact details of how he had created his body so that it could replicate it, or, if that avenue failed, to take over his body as its own.

It was exactly what he would have done in the Horcrux's position, and in fact it was little better than what he had done to Ginny Weasley.

If this was how the Horcrux wanted to play the game of trust and manipulation between them, then Tom would play along, as unconventional and unexpected as it was. He would even let himself enjoy it; after all, what was it if not the ultimate form of self-pleasure? If this form of self-pleasure came wrapped in a game that, if he lost, would result in him losing control of his own body and soul, then that just made it more exciting.

When the Horcrux brought their lips together again, he pressed back to deepen the kiss.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author's Notes: Tom has so many balls in the air that it isn't the easiest task for me to juggle them (especially not within the general world limit I've given myself for chapters in this story), but I think I've got it worked out in this chapter. Please review if you have any thoughts, and thank you again to those who reviewed the last chapter!