Evidence of Absence

Finding truth

“Tom, my dear boy, I wonder if you would mind giving me your observations of a student.”

Tom blinked slowly, pulling his attention away from Nagini, who was coiled up around his feet at the professors’ table and telling him all about the hunt she’d had last night. “Pardon, Albus?” he asked, stirring a spoon through the remains of the omelet on his plate. He was no longer hungry.

“A student.” Albus gave him a slightly condescending smile. “The reason all of us are here?”

Tom lifted a shoulder in a shrug. He and Albus had achieved a truce over the years, one created more by the worn grooves of habit and working together than any cordiality. “Yes, all right, Headmaster. Which one?”

“Harry Potter.”

Tom blinked a little. Harry Potter was in his NEWT Defense class, but nothing remarkable. He had got an Acceptable on his OWL, that was all. He kept his head down in the class, turned in average essays, won perhaps forty percent of the duels that Tom set him to with other members of the class, and was headed for nothing more important than some kind of Ministry desk job, or perhaps one at the prank shop that his father ran with Sirius Black. “What about him?”

“His parents are worried about him.” Albus gazed across the Great Hall at the noisy, chattering Gryffindor table. Tom looked with him, but honestly couldn’t even pick out Potter’s head at this distance, so little impression had the boy made on him. “Apparently he’s been sneaking out at night, and he’s also had problems at home.”

Tom made a slightly irritated noise. “I’m not his Head of House. Why not ask Minerva?”

“Because she tried to follow him, and he gave her the slip. And she’s had him into her office for tea and biscuits, and he still refuses to confess.”

Tom’s interest grew a little. He had a prickly sort of friendship with Minerva, like two hedgehogs who had decided to travel together for a time, and he knew she was good at using that tea-and-biscuits routine to get her Gryffindors to talk. It was also more than a little odd that a boy whose greatest skill was, as Tom had heard, on the Quidditch field would manage to evade an experienced professor. “In her Animagus form?”

Albus nodded.

Tom tilted his head, interest sharpened. That no doubt was why Albus had given him this task, because he knew Tom would stop at nothing once his interest was engaged, and he was more than good enough to follow a sneaking student.

“Yes, all right, Albus,” Tom said, eyes scanning the Gryffindor table again. There, he thought he saw a shock of wild black hair that might be Potter. “I’ll follow him tonight, assuming he goes out, and report his destination to you.”

Albus smiled at him. “Thank you, my dear boy. I knew I could count on you.”

“You smell of irritation,” Nagini said from under the table. “I don’t like it.”

Tom ran a hand down her neck. “No matter, my dear one. Albus has asked me to investigate a mystery, but has done it in a patronizing way.” He felt her tongue dart against his palm in acknowledgement.

No one at the table with him flinched. The general population in magical Britain might think of Parseltongue as a Dark Art, but to his colleagues, it was simply another Thursday morning.

*

When he thought about it, Tom supposed there was one thing that had stood out to him about Potter before Albus’s request. His first two years at Hogwarts, he’d been one of the bright-eyed, endlessly-rushing Gryffindors who had assumed they would automatically be good at everything they wanted to be good at. Tom had taught them better in his Defense classes, but Potter had adapted and even seemed to enjoy the challenge. Tom remembered marking him, near the end of a second year, as one of the rare students who might display real prowess at Defense in the future and would need careful guidance.