Tom stopped for a moment, then smiled and nodded. "Good idea. I'll go find him now."
Dumbledore, Newt, and Nicolas Flamel in a single group. Grindelwald had never faced a combination like that. And here was one of Voldemort's minor traps assembling it entirely by accident, with Tom added on top for good measure.
Any Dark wizard with a functioning sense of self-preservation would have taken one look at that lineup and reconsidered his life.
Newt, when Tom explained the situation, agreed without hesitation and immediately led Tom into his suitcase to select whichever of his creatures might be useful for the night ahead.
At midnight, everyone arrived at Grimmauld Place.
Dumbledore was visibly pleased to see Newt. Having two people of that particular weight alongside him stirred something that felt familiar, the memory of other nights, other confrontations, years spent moving against Grindelwald with exactly this kind of company.
Sirius had brought Lupin. Lupin's expression was heavy throughout the introductions. His memory of Regulus was thin, just a younger student who had argued with Sirius constantly, and the year they graduated, the news had come that Regulus was dead. Everyone had assumed he had died in some Death Eater operation. Nobody had thought to ask whether he had gone looking for a way out.
The sound reached them before the cliff did. Waves breaking against black rock, the cold salt smell carried on the wind off the water.
Tom and Dumbledore stood at the edge of the cliff. The wind came off the sea in steady gusts. Dumbledore's beard went sideways and he had to clap a hand over it. Tom stood entirely undisturbed. Every gust that reached him seemed to divide and pass around him on its own.
Watching Dumbledore fight his own hair, Tom asked, "Professor, why not just use a spell?"
Dumbledore produced a length of cord from somewhere in his robes and set about tying his hair and beard back with the focused attention of a man who had made a decision. "Magic is convenient. But if you resolve everything through magic, you stop being quite human, your instinct for ordinary problem-solving slows down, and you build a dependency on power that will eventually work against you."
Tom looked at him sideways. "Is that directed at me?"
"Not at all." Dumbledore shook his head. "Everyone has their own way of living. I'm offering an observation, nothing more. I wouldn't presume to interfere with your choices."
"Then I'll keep solving things with magic," Tom said. "That's what being a wizard means. Do you resent magic for being useful?"
Their philosophies sat at opposite ends of the same question. Dumbledore spent his energy in restraint, keeping the expansion of power from distorting how he saw the world. Tom spent his in the opposite direction, taking everything that power could offer and treating it as something that should be used.
For now, the contradiction between them had not yet produced anything irreconcilable. There were bigger problems demanding Dumbledore's full attention. Grindelwald and Voldemort each represented a threat that required everything he had. Against those two, Tom's particular brand of ambition registered as adolescent contrariness by comparison.
They waited. Eventually a winged horse drew a carriage down from the dark sky and landed behind them. Newt helped Nicolas down from the step. Sirius and Lupin followed.
"Is this the place?" Sirius walked to the highest point of the cliff and looked out in all directions. "I don't see any cave. Kreacher said there was a cave."
"Kreacher!"
A crack. The old elf appeared, shaking, and pointed along the cliff to the right toward the shoreline below. "Here, it is here, there is a crack in the rock, you go through the crack, but Kreacher cannot remember the rest, Kreacher is useless, Kreacher should"
"Stop. That's enough. You've done well."
Sirius cut off the self-punishment before it could begin. Since learning that Kreacher had been made to drink an entire basin of Voldemort's potion, something in Sirius's attitude toward him had shifted, not warmth exactly, but something that at least resembled tolerance.
Dumbledore examined the cliff face for a moment. "The entrance is covered by the tide. Another half hour and it should be low enough to see."
"Albus." Nicolas fixed him with a look of profound displeasure. "Do you have any consideration whatsoever for the sleeping schedules of elderly people? You want me to stand on a freezing cliff in the middle of the night for thirty more minutes? My bones are already-"
"Tom," Dumbledore said, with the faintest smile and no move to intervene, "let's see what you can do."
"Absolute bunch of layabouts."
Tom looked at the assembled group. Dumbledore, Newt, Nicolas Flamel. The combined age in front of him was somewhere past eight hundred years and not one of them was reaching for a wand.
"Professor, if anyone reports me for casting magic outside of school, I'm going to Grindelwald tomorrow morning."
He raised his wand toward the churning water below and sent the spell out, ice-blue and absolute. The cold moved across the surface in a wave, and the sea simply stopped. The waves locked mid-break, frozen into sculpture, and as the water compressed downward under the ice, the rock face below the cliff was exposed, and with it, a long narrow crack running through the stone.
Sirius stared at the frozen waves.
His jaw had not entirely closed.
Lupin went very quiet beside him.
He was supposed to be teaching Tom Defence Against the Dark Arts.
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