Chapter 21: The Perfect Little Saint
"Funny story, actually – the Sorting Hat had a bunch of trouble with me, too."
"Oh, yes, I noticed you sat under there for a pretty long time."
"We also started out in Ravenclaw, but started discussing all of the Houses, and ended up being even less sure of where I was supposed to go than at the start."
"Now that is ironic," Professor Dumbledore sipped his tea. "But quite amusing. Do go on, Tom. How did you finally decide?"
And here came the magical insert. "Well, finally, the Sorting Hat decided to ask me what I thought defined a great man."
"And how did you answer?" Professor Dumbledore asked.
Tom shrank down shyly and gave Professor Dumbledore his most innocent, cheerful, hopeful, naïve smile. "It took me a while to arrive at the answer, but I finally thought I had the right one. 'A good man is defined by his kindness, but a great man is defined by his dreams.'"
There was a silent pause in the room.
God, there was so much revolting sweetness in that one action Tom could have sworn he was getting diabetes. Either that, or he had just sprouted a set of ovaries.
But the show had to continue, so, following this statement, Tom willed his cheeks to color slightly (being able to cry and blush on command were the two most useful skills in the average poor little orphan's toolbox since forever) and looked down even further, all the while pressing the tips of his index fingers together.
Finally, Professor Dumbledore broke out into a genuine smile and lifted his teacup.
"A very profound statement, for someone so young."
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeecccccccchhhhhhhhhh…
"I guess the Hat just interpreted my statement to mean ambition, so…" here Tom inserted a nervous chuckle, "Slytherin it was!"
SHUT UUUUUUUUUUUUUUPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP...
"Well, I'm glad that you're in Slytherin. That's each of us in each of the Houses!" Minerva put in cheerfully. "I really admire the Four Founders. I hope we can be like them someday."
"Or better!" Tom included, making sure to stay in character.
It was pretty hilarious, how Dumbledore had had the whole "concerned teacher" display amped up to eleven.
Even more so, when Tom had responded so perfectly naively ("I wasn't sure at first, but I seriously think that my world peace idea will catch on greatly with the Slytherins. They're so receptive and there's quite a bit of heirs to influential families who said they'd support me when the time came!") that he had ended up walking away from that meeting with advice on the true nature of the nasty politics that came with the snakes.
"Be careful, Tom. You'll understand soon that not everyone means what they say before you. And you must be careful not to lose sight of your surroundings when chasing said dream."
If only that was our dream. Then his "advice" might have some merit.
I hate him. Why do long-bearded wizards always have to be so perceptive? It makes my job so inconvenient.
"Ending all conflict is a big dream, don't you think, Tom?" Professor Dumbledore asked.
"Oh, not all conflict," Tom said quickly. "People have to argue to maintain healthy relationships. It just means that we can still have diversity in opinion. If there was no conflict, we'd all just be mindless minions, and that's not good. I just want to spread more awareness around the world so that people can be more accepting of others' ideas. That way, people will sit down and talk things over like mature adults instead of picking up wands and guns every time there's a disagreement."
"I hope you will remember that, when you are actually starting this journey," Professor Dumbledore said, suddenly tired.
"If men from a century ago can start bloodless revolutions at podiums and ballot boxes, then so can I," Tom declared.
"I will hold you to that."
"I think that it's a very noble goal," Minerva smiled at him, her cheeks slightly red.
Oh, god, it's already starting. Damn it! That's not fair! You're only eleven!
What's not fair?
But Jerry refused to answer, and retreated to a corner of Tom's mind to sulk.
So Tom just shrugged and continued with the conversation, parroting some of Jerry's complaints from years past.
"Well, someone has got to start raising awareness. And why can't it be me? The world's getting better, but there's lots of problems that still need to be addressed."
"Did you know that in the Muggle world, blacks are still being discriminated against, hundreds of years after slavery was finally made illegal? And even though women legally have a political say, not very many of them hold office or have opportunities for social mobility, either." (Here Minerva became especially starry-eyed.)
"…and I hear that hate crimes are occurring in Germany right now against all sorts of groups, like Jews and Gypsies and Catholics and political dissidents and other sorts just for being different…" (Here Professor Dumbledore suddenly became even more interested, too)
"…and even the Wizarding World has its problems. A very small percentage of the Wizarding World – the old Pureblood families – hold the majority of wealth and power, and they exclude the newcomers, like the Muggleborns, from all of that because of their prejudice…"
You are so full of hot air that the Hindenburg would be jealous.
Oh, shut up, Jerry.
Fawkes did not leave Professor Dumbledore's office again, however, and Tom didn't want to risk breaking into a teacher's private quarters, so he simply had to deal with not knowing what a phoenix song sounded like. It was frustrating, but at least he had time to do other things.
Endearing himself to the general public, for example, was so easy that it wasn't even funny.
It wasn't long before Tom became that one kid who was just completely above reproach, from both his teachers and his peers.
Except for that bullied bully from the train, there wasn't anyone who had anything to say against Tom's character.
He wasn't the type of "popular kid" who climbed to the top by sticking everyone else in the bottom of the caste system. He was just sort of there, and everyone who knew him could say that he was a nice and smart person.
Of course, no one ever noticed that he always had the uncanny knack to be there right when he was needed.
Really, it was like he could appear out of nowhere, sometimes.
Ah, invisibility. How he loved it.
Learning Disillusionment and other invisibility-related charms, courtesy of the Room of Requirement, had been surprisingly not as hard as Tom had initially expected.
Neither were magical disguises, once Tom figured out how to hold the facial transfiguration for an extended period of time.
Both were simple enough skills that Tom had been able to master within about a day once he had found the proper library books. (As innovative as Jerry was, he had very little actual information about the nature of magic itself – leading Tom to believe that he had been a Muggle of some sort with a magical relative.)
It turned out that all that Tom really needed was not extra power or control, but attention to detail, and that had been fixed easily enough.
Tom had always been an observant child, for the sake of survival; he simply hadn't known what he had to look for in the first place.
Most of the books on magic were horribly outdated (there was a reason why textbooks in normal schools are updated at least once every decade – not once every century), but the principles remained the same.
Sure, Tom could throw out the parts about incantations, because they didn't help him at all, but the visualization processes associated with the incantations worked wonders.
So now Tom could sneak around properly without too much trouble.
Tom wasn't sure if it was enough to fool Professor Dumbledore – after all, just because they were camoflagued, and had learned to hide giveaways like footsteps and shadows, didn't meant that they had their presences hidden completely. Fooling the paintings and his fellow students were the important thing – Tom could do that easily. The teachers would be more difficult to trick, but they couldn't be around all the time.
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