Christmas, just as every year, was a red, green, and golden celebration that covered every inch of Hogwarts with yuletide joy. Even as the castle emptied and students went home for the holidays, those who were not trapped beneath this new barrage of bombings in muggle London that Dippet as always had chosen to conveniently disregard, the place retained its over the top cheer.

Tom loathed the holidays.

He wasn't quite sure he could say why, as far back as he could remember the holidays, his birthday, the whole damn season had irked him. Perhaps, simply, it was always so cold and so dark and that forced Christmas cheer and goodwill towards mankind had always seemed something of a sham to pretend the season wasn't what it was.

A bleak and barren harbinger of death.

Many orphans, Tom remembered, if they didn't die with summer fevers would die in the depths of winter.

But he supposed wizards did not concern themselves with such things, and he had contented himself not to be concerned about it either, but…

Something in his mind, as exams finished up and his uncertain future hung overhead like the blade of a guillotine, insisted on remembering exactly where Tom Marvolo Riddle had come from. Where he had wished, for so many years, he had never come from.

Soon, he thought as he stared blankly at the rather dry text he'd borrowed from the restricted section via his free pass as head boy, Tom Marvolo Riddle would effectively cease to exist. Nothing more than a memory of a particularly talented mudblood, truly close with no one, a boy with such wasted potential in a world he could never hope to conquer…

A page turned, he glanced across the table to where none other than Minato Namikaze, seventh year transfer student allegedly from Kyoto, read through a rather thick text on the summoning runes reputedly used by the druids before the Roman conquest.

Next to him, sleeping once again with her and arms resting on the table and looking as if she didn't have a bloody care in the world, was Lee Eru.

Tom allowed his attention from his book to finally wander, to wander past even himself, and instead on his favorite foreign pair. He didn't know why he expected them to leave, perhaps because everyone in Slytherin always left, it seemed the whole damn castle would leave every bloody time leaving him to the mercy of a rather pitying Slughorn.

But they'd declined and stayed and continued to do what they had done since that little agreement they'd reached in October.

Use Tom Riddle as a pack mule to carry out any and every relevant book from the restricted section. And how they used him, they used him more blatantly than he had ever used Malfoy or any of the Blacks for their own dark texts and grimoires. Every day, at a rate that should have been impossible, they were sending him back for this book or that book referenced in this text with Minato flying through them desperately searching for their ticket home.

Looking through them with a single-minded intensity that neither seemed to spare for homework or classes.

Tom…

Did not understand them, not truly. Despite his own resolve to befriend them, to befriend them to such an extent that even if they could leave they would not, he couldn't say he was any closer to his goal.

Certainly, he was more amiable to them, but the pair treated it as something amusing or at times baffling rather than endearing. As if they genuinely preferred his more genuine irritation and confusion.

And he…

He knew now that Kyoto was not Kyoto, that wherever Kyoto truly was for them it was much further than a portkey away. He knew that they had been trained in a very different manner than Tom and for very different goals, that to them Hogwarts and its crawling curriculum and focus on anything but the military was an anathema.

He knew that Minato Namikaze, at least with Runes, Arithmancy, and Transfiguration truly was a genius who if not rivaling Tom then surpassed him entirely. He knew that Minato considered Lee to be his superior in anything that wasn't a niche field, that he expected her without any effort expended at all to the best and brightest at everything she did. He knew the pair were unnervingly close in a way that hinted that they'd been close for almost as long as they could remember.

But all the same, even months later, he did not understand them.

And that simply would not do.

He sighed, closed his textbook softly, and caught Minato's pale eyes as they glanced up at him curiously. Tom considered him in turn, again taking in how… soft he seemed sometimes, no that was not the right word for it, but next to Lee he seemed if not harmless then kind enough to be effectively harmless.

If Tom was dark then Minato Namikaze was a type of golden prince, charming and polite in all the ways Tom himself was, but kind in a way that Tom could never hope to emulate. That, Tom thought, was the source of his charisma. That strange golden light that seemed to emanate from his very soul.

To the point where Tom, when he put aside his rising hackles at being challenged and confronted, could admit that he…

Liked him, liked them, despite her brashness and lack of tact and Minato's smiling goodwill and codependency he liked them. For reasons he could hardly begin to explain to himself except that they'd grown on him like a cancer.

That perhaps seeing someone, anyone, take Dumbledore to task or else suffer through the Slug Club with such blatant discontent and dislike, was more than enough to unwillingly earn some of Tom's good will. That kinship, with the pair of foreigners who were forever strangers in this strange land of Hogwarts, was perhaps inevitable.

Even though he suspected that he had not grown on the pair at all.

"Yes?" Minato asked, blonde eyebrows raising, keeping a tan finger on the line of text where he'd left off.

What to ask?

Why had they come to Hogwarts? He'd ruminated over that often enough but had simply been left with their own answer, that they needed the books and nothing else. They didn't care about the classes, they didn't care about their NEWTS, they probably could have passed the NEWTS right along with their OWLS in the ministry when they entered Hogwarts in the first place. As inconceivable as it was, he truly did believe that the only reason they had entered Hogwarts at all was for its library.

What had they been, in their home country? He'd asked that already and the answer was always a single unhelpful word, shinobi. They were jonin shinobi of Konohagakure, the Village Hidden in the Leaves, they had confessed to him in the library one night. They were among the highest-ranking officers their country had to offer and had been since the age of fifteen. Although, what a pair of fifteen-year-olds were doing as, what roughly translated to as elite assassins, in a magical community's military was something they had not explained.

They had not even seemed to question it themselves. To have magic at all, to have chakra, they said, was to be trained as a shinobi.

After all, what use did a baker have for magic?

Tom studied him, the fine youthful features that marked him as Tom's age if not younger, and Tom finally asked, "What will you do if you can't find a way back?"

Minato gave him a rather wry and unappreciative look before pale eyes turned back to the text, "It's only December, there's no need to be so pessimistic."

"We're speaking hypothetically," Tom reminded him with the smile that he knew Minato found obnoxious. The irony, of course being, that Minato had a rather similar smile himself.

"Then hypothetically I'll remind you that Lee has told you our plans often enough," Minato said, fingers now drumming on the wooden table as his eyes traced a particularly complex rune system to summon Balor, the Celtic god of drought, blight, and death.

"Assassinating Gellert Grindelwald is not a plan," Tom scoffed for what had to be the umpteenth time, "It is suicide."

"You do not have to come," Minato noted, which, Tom stopped and blinked. He… Didn't think he'd made it obvious that he'd intended to come, had not even truly decided it for himself yet.

The truth was that Tom had few plans after graduation. Whatever Slughorn's delusions the political path was not an option. Not only for Voldemort's rise but also simply because of who Tom was, whatever his talents, whatever his networking, his blood would block him from any true position of power and find him the head of some department nobody cared about.

He'd halfheartedly put his application in at Slughorn's eager behest but thought little of it.

He'd thought of applying to Hogwarts, to become a professor, given rumor that Merrythought sought to retire at the end of the year but…

But Albus Dumbledore was deputy headmaster, Tom Riddle was a mudblood with no work experience, and when had Armando Dippet not taken the opportunity to spit in Tom's face when it was most important? He'd made him head boy with Slughorn's endorsement but when the bombs rained down on muggle London, when all the orphans had been shipped to the countryside and Tom left alone on the step of an abandoned Wools, Dippet had simply said, "I'm sorry, my boy, but no exceptions are to be made."

And if he did not travel with Minato Namikaze and Lee Eru to France then something told him he would never see them again.

So, if they did not leave before then, if they found nothing of use inside of Hogwarts, then Tom was going with them through the very fires of hell and back.

Unless, somehow, he could convince them not to.

He didn't think that he could convince them not to.

Swallowing, Tom said, "Nonetheless, that's a rather short-term goal if you think about it. Say assassinating Grindelwald gets you nothing but laurels and maybe a few medals, what will you do then?"

Minato sighed and closed his book, apparently realizing that Tom wanted a real conversation instead of a half-hearted one. At once he looked tired, older than he should, and said simply, "I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"Not everyone, Ren, takes pride in planning out every detail of their hypothetical futures," Minato said with some irritation, but then with another sigh raked a hand through his hair, "I don't know, I… Lee would probably go to the aurors, she'd certainly be good enough at it but that…"

"Will not end well," Tom finished for him and Minato grinned as if they were sharing a little joke between them. The idea of Lee respecting a chain of command who had grown up in anything but an army or the idea of Lee wreaking havoc upon the enemy being tolerated in anything but a state of emergency.

"I might apply to Gringotts as one of their seal masters."

"Not the department of mysteries?" Tom asked, as if any place other than Hogwarts held their answers it would be there, but Minato shook his head.

Minato rubbed another exhausted hand over his eyes as he answered, "No, they're sealed for secrecy, I can't… I can't take an oath swearing fealty to another nation state or willingly place seals that strong on my chakra."

Finally, with a sigh, Minato asked, "What about you?"

"Me?" Tom asked, but Minato's lips just curved into the slightest of smiles.

"What if your grand ambitions fail to come to fruition?"

Tom felt something cold run through him. He had not said Voldemort, had not even implied it, and yet all the same Tom thought Minato knew. That Minato Namikaze, Lee Eru, had known even before they'd laid eyes on Tom Riddle exactly what he was and what he hungered for. Known him down to the very soul in a manner that even a legillimens couldn't hope to.

"My ambitions," Tom said slowly, his voice soft yet cold and dangerous, "Will not fail."

If Voldemort could not exist, if Voldemort faltered and fumbled and died before he could live then…

Then Tom Riddle was ruined, worse than meaningless, he would crumble into ash and fade away into oblivion.

Tom could not afford to fail.

Minato said nothing, did not seem to need to, as he stared at Tom with his eerily penetrating gaze. It was… Tom hated it when the boy looked at him, he'd always hated it, but he hated it because no one but this pair ever looked at him quite like that. Not even Dumbledore who presumed to have seen what Tom was made of and all he could ever be.

Minato then turned, glanced down at Lee with that odd smile of his, fingers winding through her hair, "I can't speak for you but for me… Even in the most impossible of circumstances, even when a miracle's required, she's never failed at least. We'll get home, I don't know how, I don't know when, but we'll manage it."

I can't speak for you.

What a bitter and truthful statement that was, Tom thought.

And what a pair they were he thought as Lee slowly blinked into awareness, eyes lingering on Minato's fingers in her hair without a trace of alarm or hesitation, always circling about one another in a seemingly frictionless dance that held space for no one else.

Not even Tom.

And Tom…

He wanted them. In simple, unadulterated terms, he found that he wanted them in a way he'd never quite wanted anything else. If only because nothing else, not the orphan's toys, not the idea of his father and lineage, not even Hogwarts was quite like them.

"Jesus Christ," Lee said as she sat up, rubbing the back of her head and casually stretching in her seat, "Ren, you're staring at us like Uzumaki."

"My apologies," Tom said with his own pleasant grin which just had her blinking and grimacing in confused irritation in response.

"Kushina Uzumaki," Minato informed him with a pair of raised eyebrows, "Has absolutely no tact and has been dying to get into Lee's pants for years."

Tom felt his expression fall, and, to his utter shame, heat travel to his cheeks.

"No, Minato, I'm pretty sure she's been trying to get in your pants," Lee said after a moment's pause, "Or maybe both of our pants at the same time."

Minato rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, as if even bringing up whatever it was Kushina Uzumaki wanted was a trying process, "I suppose that's one thing to be thankful for, we can put off dealing with that for as long as we're stuck here."

The pair would likely go on like this for some time, they always did when they got in these reminiscing bickering moods, which Tom supposed he was grateful for in this instance as he forced his emotions to settle back down. For all that he liked them too much, he thought darkly, he just might hate them even more.

Still, he thought as they laughed over shared memories, there was something neither had admitted to themselves yet. A small flicker of hope for Tom's ambitions regarding the pair. Whatever world and wars they came from, they did not exist here, and with enough time and enough years it might be easier to simply fade into peace. Not to become civilians, as they called it, but to slink into the role of an auror or else a Gringotts curse breaker and think with dim nostalgia over their homeland.

To allow the violence, the wars, the death to fade into the past and the new world take hold.

And when they did, whether it was in France or England, Tom would be there. He would be right there and have himself a very good day.

And as it was, by the end of the year with Tom decorated with honors for his scores in his NEWT exams, standing alongside his fellow graduates there was no position at Hogwarts on the horizon, nothing in the ministry, not even a humble position as a store clerk.

Instead there was him standing next to Minato Namikaze and Lee Eru, looking out across the channel towards the war-torn shores of France where Gellert Grindelwald and his army of dark wizards waited.

Author's Note: Written for the 400th review of "The Tale of Ren" by Elileth who asked for a continuation to "A Round of Butterbeers", so no assassination of Grindelwald, but some more Tom musing.

Thanks for reading and reviewing, reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Naruto