History Fanfic / InTheBleakMidwinterTheLoud

* IOweYouMyLife: Tom gets [[spoiler:Serpens Malfoy]] to end his Veritaserum interrogation by telling him that [[spoiler:his wife Giselle is plotting to [[WouldHurtAChild kill the Malfoy heir, Corvus]], so that her own son Abraxas can become the Malfoy heir instead]]. [[spoiler:Serpens]] is horrified and leaves at once, and it turns out that Tom (or Hermione's 1997 copy of ''Nature's Nobility'') was right, giving the boy a life debt to Tom and Hermione. Of course, he's only eleven and he imagines an improbable situation where he bravely swoops in to protect Tom from a monster or some evil muggles who are about to burn him at the stake. By extension, [[spoiler:Serpens]] also feels indebted to Tom for saving his son, and he repays it by [[spoiler:poisoning Tom's brother-in-law Morfin Gaunt, leaving Tommy the last surviving member of the Gaunt/Slytherin line, and thus its only remaining heir rather than just the spare]]. Tom and Serpens even wind up becoming friends of a sort, or at least associates.

** Ignis lost his left hand during his first transformation into a werewolf. Apparently he tried attaching a steel shackle to his hand so that he wouldn't be able to run loose and hurt anyone -- but once the wolf overtook his mind, he bit it off to get free.

* DistractedByTheSexy

* FakingTheDead: When [[spoiler:Marius Black]] is confirmed as a squib and seeks sanctuary with the Riddles, Hermione creates a temporary corpse, for his sister to arrange an apparent suicide and cover up his disappearance. (She's a bit disturbed when the sister instead leads their parents to believe she deliberately pushed him out a window -- and is praised for it.)

* HeroicWillpower: Tom was able to break through Merope's Imperius long enough for him to get away from her -- this is a difficult feat even for wizards, much less a muggle with no experience with magic, and Hermione is genuinely impressed by it. He realizes after mere moments that [[spoiler:Serpens Malfoy]] has spiked his drink with Veritaserum, and with no knowledge of the potion or how it works, he's able to successfully resist babbling (almost) everything truly incriminating with careful use of truths until he takes advantage of his state and turns the tables to get him to go away. He also, despite being a muggle, begins to learn Occlumency and has his first success when he misdirects Hermione and thinks of a different playing card instead of trying to brute force block her from figuring out which card he drew.

* ManipulativeBastard: The Riddles, being an upper-class family, know how to navigate high society and all the brown-nosing and manipulation that entails, and they fit in scarily well with purebloods and have them all fooled into thinking they're wizards just like them, mere days after discovering for the first time that magic is real. They're skilled at directing conversations, subtly gathering information about situations without letting on that they know nothing about them, and convincing people of just about anything. It's no wonder that the high-end wizarding tailor assumes Tom to have Sorted Slytherin, and sends him off with clothes with snake patterns.

** Ignatius "Ignis" [=McKinnon=] is a young self-employed werewolf who sells Dark creature extermination services. The story also fills out his family, giving him parents, an older brother, and a sister-in-law and niece. He is presumably a great-uncle to the canonical Marlene [=McKinnon=], a close friend of Lily Evans Potter and founding Order of the Phoenix member who, along with the entire rest of her family, was wiped out by Death Eaters shortly before the Potters were murdered. In Hermione's timeline, he dies young, as many werewolves do.

** The story also fills out the Malfoys and Prewetts during this time period. Abraxas Malfoy, Draco's grandfather, is Tommy's age and only an infant at this point, so his entire immediate family is developed -- his father and the current Malfoy patriarch is Serpens Malfoy, Serpens's first wife was Njinga Shacklebolt, with whom he had his heir Corvus and Abraxas's older half-brother, and Serpens's second wife and Abraxas's mother is a halfblood named Giselle, [[spoiler:who plotted to murder Corvus so as to position her own son as the Malfoy heir]]. This fic also has Ron's Great-Aunt Tessie as one of Tom's peers and acquaintances, and makes her a Prewett, complete with her mother, Edith Prewett, and her high-strung, blood supremacist older brother Axel.

* DistractedByTheSexy: Tom struggles to continue the conversation when Hermione mentions that she has taken an antidote to the wet nurse potion she originally used, resulting in changes to her figure of which he's ''well'' aware. Especially when she looks down at herself and asks for his feedback.

** An odd example, as the faking doesn't consciously begin until one of the parties is already dead. In order to quell rumors that he went mad, Tom chooses to pretend that he really was madly in love with Merope all along and claims that he's still mourning Merope when he's actually mourning the relationship he could've had with Cecilia (and also poorly recovering from the trauma of losing most of a year of his life and being sexually assaulted under Amortentia, not like he'd ever admit to that). When people expect him to talk about his relationship with Merope, he substitutes his feelings for Cecilia instead. He also passes off his trauma reactions as a result of Merope's abuse as lingering grief from how much he misses her, which sometimes pains him, as in the case when he dissociates and panics at an opera that treats a love potion as a gag, and he chooses to pass off his reaction as grief that he would never get to see one of his late wife's favorite plays with her ever again. His hatred for Merope is so strong that he tries to say "Merope is the most beautiful girl in the world" to prove to himself that the Veritaserum he's been dosed with has worn off.

** An odd example, as the faking doesn't consciously begin until one of the parties is already dead. In order to quell rumors that he went mad, Tom chooses to pretend that he really was madly in love with Merope all along and claims that he's still mourning Merope when he's actually mourning the relationship he could've had with Cecilia. When people expect him to talk about his relationship with Merope, he substitutes his feelings for Cecilia instead. He also passes off his trauma reactions as a result of Merope's abuse as lingering grief from how much he misses her, which sometimes pains him, as in the case when he dissociates and panics at an opera that treats a love potion as a gag, and he chooses to pass off his reaction as grief that he would never get to see one of his late wife's favorite plays with her ever again. His hatred for Merope is so strong that he tries to say "Merope is the most beautiful girl in the world" to prove to himself that the Veritaserum he's been dosed with has worn off.

** Lucius Malfoy I, canonical 16th century ancestor of Lucius II the (future) son of Abraxas and father of Draco, makes a brief appearance during Tom's Ides of March tour of Malfoy Manor as a portrait, and it's also stated in this fic that he remodeled Malfoy Manor in an attempt at wooing Queen Elizabeth I. His portrait is right next to Brutus Malfoy, who won't stop getting into rows with Lucius over his disgusting muggle-loving ways.

** A background character is Sirius Black II, great-grandfather of Sirius Black III, Harry's godfather. Since he's the only Sirius Black alive right now, he's referred to as just Sirius, making it a little odd to read about a Sirius being a frothing blood supremacist, something Harry's beloved godfather would never be.

* BedlamHouse: Cecilia lists off a bunch of modern (by 1927 standards) psychiatric treatments that Tom could try for his madness, such as electronarcosis, running electricity through his brain; drugging him with barbiturates so he sleeps for days on end; and "malarial therapy", deliberately infecting him with malaria, which "only" has a 15% death rate. All of them justifiably sound terrible to Tom.

* TheDandy: Tom pays a lot of attention to fashion trends and goes so far as to discard and replace his wardrobe every single year whenever the styles change. He also constantly needles Hermione to dress and style her hair in "modern" late 1920s fashion, and even refers to her curvy figure and natural long bushy hair as "unfashionable". When he invites her to Algie and Tessie's wedding as his date, he tells her that they'll have to go dress shopping because the formal dress she bought two years prior, shortly after she brought them Tommy, is two years out of fashion, and he can't possibly let her be seen in public wearing such rags, let alone on his arm at a wedding.

** An odd example, as the faking doesn't consciously begin until one of the parties is already dead. In order to quell rumors that he went mad, Tom has to pretend that he really was in love with Merope all along and claims that he's still mourning Merope when he's actually mourning the relationship he could've had with Cecilia. When people expect him to talk about his relationship with Merope, he substitutes his feelings for Cecilia instead. His hatred for Merope is so strong that he tries to say "Merope is the most beautiful girl in the world" to prove to himself that the Veritaserum he's been dosed with has worn off.

* GooGooGodlike: Tommy commits his first act of accidental magic when he's about a day and a half old -- he picks up on his father's anger at Hermione using his natural Legilimency and sets her hair on fire. Accidental magic this early is highly unusual and it's an indication of his sheer power.

* {{Bookworm}}: Tom is a lover of books and knowledge and admits to wishing he could read the entire British Wizarding Library at Oxford, a trait that he shares with Hermione. The difference is that Hermione is more likely to approach knowledge in a Ravenclaw manner, learning for its own sake, whereas Tom approaches it in a Slytherin manner, because knowledge is power. He's baffled that Hermione doesn't feel the same.

* {{Bookworm}}: Tom is a lover of books and knowledge and admits to wishing he could read the entire Oxford Wizarding Library, a trait that he shares with Hermione. The difference is that Hermione is more likely to approach knowledge in a Ravenclaw manner, learning for its own sake, whereas Tom approaches it in a Slytherin manner, because knowledge is power. He's baffled that Hermione doesn't feel the same.

* FishOutOfWater: In contrast to the 1990s when the canon books take place, where muggles are often regarded as inferior, harmless simpletons, British wizards in the 1920s tend to be genuinely afraid of muggles and treat "muggletouring", or visiting muggle areas in disguise, to be something akin to going on a safari surrounded by dangerous beasts that could leap out and kill you at any moment. Serpens Malfoy, for all of his cunning and subtle menace, is hilariously uncomfortable when Tom invites him to the Drones Club, a muggle men's society club, and always looks completely bewildered whenever Tom mentions anything muggle to him, such as fountain pens or telephones. When another table at the Drones Club gets rowdy and chucks a bread roll at Tom and Serpens's table, Serpens acts like he nearly got mauled to death, even though Tom deftly caught the roll and then casually got up and scolded the table, all without dying.

* BecomingTheMask: When Wizarding Britain assumes that Tom is a wizard himself, the Riddles roll with it and pass themselves off as wizards who are simply rather entrenched in muggle society. After a few months of this, Tom even starts to genuinely consider himself a member of Wizarding society and see Wizarding things as the norm, and even thinks of himself as an actual Wizard and an honorary Slytherin.

* BlueBlood: The Riddles are a Squire family, essentially making them a kind of fancy landlord that owns a village, but in the hierarchy of British nobility, they rank below even baronets (who aren't permitted in the House of Lords) and are technically not nobility as they aren't conferred titles, despite all of their wealth and upper-crust associates and pretensions. Tom feels a little insecure about how low his family is compared to people like Cecilia's family, who are Baronets, and his friend Algie, who is inbred and lacking in talents, yet is heir to an Earldom.
* ConsummateLiar: Tom is such a good liar that he can tell even obvious lies with enough conviction to make listeners think he's telling the truth. While working out a plausible cover story to [[spoiler:swindle Borgin and Burke out of Slytherin's Locket, which Merope pawned some months prior]], Tom acts out the story and says to Hermione that [[spoiler:the store's piece is a replica and that he actually owns the real one]], which she knows is false, but he says it so convincingly that she genuinely asks him "Really?" As a muggle who has unintentionally made people think the Riddles are a wealthy but as-yet-unknown Wizarding family, this is an important and useful skill to have.

* TheDandy: Tom pays a lot of attention to fashion trends and goes so far as to discard and replace his wardrobe every single year whenever the styles change. He also constantly needles Hermione to dress and style her hair in "modern" late 1920s fashion, and even refers to her curvy figure and natural long bushy hair as "unfashionable". When he invites her to Algie and Tessie's wedding as his date, he tells her that they'll have to go dress shopping because the formal dress she bought two years prior, shortly after she brought them Tommy, is two years out of fashion, and he can't possibly let her be seen in public wearing such rags, let alone on his arm, at a wedding.

* DefrostingIceKing: Tom is clearly still scarred from his time with Merope, doubly so after Cecilia refuses to believe him and rejects him, and it has resulted in him not wanting to risk his heart getting too close to anyone new, hiding under arrogance and vanity and dry wit. He won't even let his guard down around his own family or dare shatter the illusion that he's the cool, untouchable Heir Thomas Riddle, and he struggles to imagine anyone genuinely caring for him without expecting something in return -- he even thinks his crying over Cecilia is hideous and assumes Hermione must find the sight amusing, until she pulls him into a hug. Hermione is just as bad, except she's grieving all of her loved ones and is likely reminded constantly that she went back in time and put herself in this situation for them. She also hints that she may not be around at the time of her original birthdate due to time travel shenanigans, adding to the guilt she'd feel if she ever became close to anyone and tried to build a life and family for herself, perhaps with Tom.

* FishOutOfWater: In contrast to the 1990s when the canon books take place, where muggles are often regarded as inferior simpletons, British Wizards in the 1920s tend to be genuinely afraid of muggles and treat "muggletouring", or visiting muggle areas in disguise, to be something akin to going on a safari surrounded by dangerous monsters that could leap out and kill you at any moment. Serpens Malfoy, for all of his cunning and subtle menace, is hilariously uncomfortable when Tom invites him to the Drones Club, a muggle men's society club, and always looks completely bewildered whenever Tom mentions anything muggle to him, such as fountain pens or telephones. When another table at the Drones Club gets rowdy and chucks a bread roll at Tom and Serpens's table, Serpens acts like he nearly got mauled to death, even though Tom deftly caught the roll and then casually got up and scolded the table, all without dying.

* ForHalloweenIAmGoingAsMyself: It's revealed that wizards are known to go out on Halloween into muggle areas and guise, or sing for treats in costume, just dressed as themselves where they won't stick out at all amongst the muggle guisers also in costume. Tom, who very nearly considers himself a Wizard by the time of his first post-Tommy Halloween, always wears his most Victorian-looking Wizarding clothes on Halloween and the muggles all assume he's dressed up as a vampire. And to the Riddles' tenants, he may as well be a vampire for how much rent he charges.
* GenerationXerox: The personalities of the Riddles are back-formed from Voldemort's canonical personality traits. Tom Sr. is just as arrogant, self-centered, manipulative, ambitious, and dramatic as his son is in canon, on top of the two looking exactly alike at their respective ages.
* GivingRadioToTheRomans: Hermione isn't interested in just uplifting the world by a century, but she's willing to share a few improvements in order to help people, such as the Wolfsbane Potion, and knowledge about antibiotics. The reactions of the werewolves are...mixed. [[spoiler:Those who were already trying to remain civilised are generally grateful, albeit usually too poor to make a proper business out of selling the potion. On the other hand, those who embrace the wolf, living in feral packs and viewing regular humans as mere prey, are violently displeased by this new development, because it threatens their source of recruitment.]]

* GooGooGodlike: Tommy commits his first act of accidental magic when he's about three days old -- he sets Hermione's hair on fire. Accidental magic this early is highly unusual and it's an indication of his sheer power.
* GoodIsNotSoft: Hermione still has a very firm code of ethics, passionate about protecting the innocent and quick to hug those who are suffering, but her years of warfare have also left her quite willing to fight and kill in self defence.

* GreenEyedMonster: Tom is too polite to let it show or affect their working relationship (much), but he secretly hates Ignis, who he thinks looks like a tramp even disregarding his werewolf injuries, for drawing Hermione's attention away from himself and sees him as romantic competition. When Hermione agrees to try brewing Wolfsbane for Ignis, he secretly hopes that he gets poisoned by the potion and dies. Complicating this is that his experiences with Merope have made him refuse to acknowledge that he is, in fact, in love with Hermione.
* HeroicWillpower: Tom was able to break through Merope's Imperius long enough for him to get away from her — this is a difficult feat even for Wizards, much less a muggle with no experience with magic, and Hermione is genuinely impressed by it. He realizes after mere moments that Serpens Malfoy has spiked his drink with Veritaserum, and with no knowledge of the potion or how it works, he's able to successfully resist babbling (almost) everything truly incriminating with careful use of truths until he takes advantage of being forced to tell the truth and turns the tables on him. He also, despite being a muggle, begins to learn Occlumency and has his first success when he misdirects Hermione and thinks of a different playing card instead of trying to brute force block her from figuring out which card he drew.

* LiteraryAllusionTitle: This story opens with an excerpt from the 1872 poem of the same name by Christina Rosetti, which is about the birth of Christ and the warmth of the love and devotion he inspires amidst the cold of winter. The excerpt cuts off after the first mention of a figure who has arrived in the terrible snowy winter to reign over Heaven and Earth, before the back half of the second verse that explicitly names the figure as Jesus, implying that the infant Tom Marvolo Riddle is the one who will come to reign, shaking up the world as he was always destined to.

* MalignedMixedMarriage: Tessie Prewett's family is very displeased that their daughter is marrying Algie, a Muggle, even though that Muggle is heir to an Earlship and a family fortune. Axel went so far as to blame Tom for introducing her to Algie and ruining her honor, and challenged him to a duel, which Axel lost. Tom manages to convince Hermione to be his date by reminding her that merely being seen at the wedding will piss off blood purists, as it will be taken as a political statement in favor of mixed marriages.
* MamasBabyPapasMaybe: The wealthy Riddles are naturally a bit suspicious of a girl turning up with a baby who she claims is Tom's -- Fiona in particular is protective of her employers. However, as Hermione makes it clear that she's not trying to extort anything from them, just giving them the entirely voluntary option of raising Tommy, they warm to her. It also helps that Tommy has his father's unusual blue-black eyes.
* ManipulativeBastard: The Riddles, being an upper-class family, know how to navigate high society and all the brownnosing and manipulation that entails, and they fit in scarily well with Purebloods and have them all fooled into thinking they're wizards just like them, mere days after discovering for the first time that magic is real. They're skilled with directing conversations, subtly gathering information about situations without letting on that they know nothing about them, and convincing people of just about anything. It's no wonder that the high-end Wizarding tailor assumes Tom to have Sorted Slytherin, and sends him off with clothes with snake patterns.
* MeaningfulEcho: The first time Tom is vulnerable with Hermione is after Cecilia ends things with him for good, leaving him in tears. Hermione tells him, "You shouldn’t cry alone. It’s much better for one’s mental health to cry on someone’s shoulder," before pulling him into a hug and letting him sob his heart out on her shoulder until he's cried out. A couple years later, after [[spoiler:their meeting with Woolsey goes horribly wrong and Ignis is nearly killed]], Hermione cries from rage and fear, and Tom repeats her line back to her before offering her a hug, which she gratefully accepts as she cries into his chest.
* MuggleBornOfMages: A major character is [[spoiler:young Marius Black]]. Like in canon, he's a squib, but here, he has an ally in his older sister, who has been covering for him for his whole childhood and making it look like he's been doing accidental magic right up until the day his Hogwarts letter would've come had he been a wizard. In this fic's AlternateUniverse, he would've been honor-killed by his own family on his eleventh birthday for not showing magic, but Tom decides to save him, definitely because the kid would owe a life debt to him and serve as an insider source on the Black family and not because he doesn't want a child to die, and raise him in the muggle world. His death is faked and his sister tells her family that she pushed him out the window, knowing that her parents would commend her for putting their useless squib son out of his misery. Despite being a squib, he still holds strong blood purity prejudices that need to be trained out of him before he can truly restart his life in the muggle world. At first, he especially hates Hermione for being muggleborn and accuses people like her of "stealing" her magic from another wizard, perhaps allegedly making squibs out of good purebloods like himself.

** We know almost nothing about what the Riddle family was actually like as people in canon, other than that they were Voldemort's paternal family and weren't liked by their community, and this fic expands on their characters based on their known backgrounds as landed gentry. The story extrapolates out Tom's personality based on some canon aspects of Tommy, such as his arrogance, manipulation skills, ambition, and obsession with appearances, and then extrapolates personalities for Squire Riddle and Mary Riddle to make them each one half of their son.
** The story also elaborates on several canonical Wizarding characters from the era. Tom befriends Quintessa "Tessie" Prewett, for instance, who would become a Great Aunt to Ronald Weasley some fifty years later and whose dress robes Ron would wear to the Yule Ball.

** The Riddles' maid Fiona appears in the first chapter trying to defend Tom from witches, and makes frequent appearances thereafter getting surprised by her bosses' strange behavior as they entrench themselves further in Wizarding Britain. Their cook [[SupremeChef Hestia]] has yet to appear herself, but she's frequently mentioned being asked to accommodate surprise Wizarding guests and gamely responds with aplomb every time.
** Ignatius "Ignis" [=McKinnon=] is a young self-employed werewolf who sells Dark creature extermination services. The story also fills out his family, giving him parents, an older brother, and a sister-in-law and niece. He is presumably a great-uncle to the canonical Marlene [=McKinnon=], a close friend of Lily Evans Potter and founding Order of the Phoenix member who, along with the entire rest of her family, was wiped out by Death Eaters shortly before the Potters were murdered.

** The story also fills out the Malfoys and Prewetts during this time period. Abraxas Malfoy, Draco's grandfather, is Tommy's age and only an infant at this point, so his entire immediate family is developed -- his father and current Malfoy patriarch is Serpens Malfoy, Serpens's first wife was Njinga Shacklebolt, with whom he had his heir and Abraxas's older half-brother Corvus, and Serpens's second wife and Abraxas's mother is named Giselle. This fic also has Ron's Great-Aunt Tessie as one of Tom's peers and acquaintances, and makes her a Prewett, complete with her mother, Edith Prewett, and her uptight, blood supremacist older brother Axel.
* ParentalSexualitySquick: After Mrs Riddle takes a wet-nurse potion so as to share in feeding little Tommy, Tom considers the effect on her figure to be unfashionable -- but his father is instead eyeing her in a way that has Tom quickly finishing his breakfast and excusing himself from the table.

* PragmaticHero: The Riddles have ethics, but they treat them more as guidelines than actual rules. They well understand the concept of EnlightenedSelfInterest, admire power even amongst those who misuse it, and would happily rule the world for its own benefit. They would probably qualify as {{Unscrupulous Hero}}es, if they weren't also rather cheerful and friendly.

* TheProudElite: The Riddles are landed gentry, albeit only Squires who essentially own the village of Little Hangleton, a fact that they greatly pride themselves on. They have impeccably classy manners and are obsessed with appearances and proper comportment befitting their station, and are very pleased to discover that young Tommy, despite his late mother's disreputable station, is actually a scion and heir to a highly important Wizarding line of descent that includes the Slytherins and Peverells, the closest thing Wizarding Britain has to royalty.

* RichLanguagePoorLanguage: In this fic, Little Hangleton is located in Yorkshire, [[OopNorth in the north of England]]. Tom once had the accent to match, and he hated it so much that he trained himself to speak a perfect Queen's English befitting a man of status, to the point that his friend Algie, heir to an Earldom, says Tom sounds stuffier than his elocution tutor.

* RockPaperScissors: When Tom accidentally disarms a witch and wins her wand from her, the wand changes allegiance to him, causing it to not work as well for her, so he proposes that he lose to her at a game of rock-paper-scissors so she can get her wand back on her side again. The witch also reveals that the Wizarding version of rock-paper-scissors is called Wand-Cloak-Stone, based on ''The Tale of the Three Brothers'' -- Wand summons Cloak (removes it from its wearer), Cloak hides Stone (so it can't be found), and Stone resurrects the Wand's victims. He narrates that he considers rock-paper-scissors to be a game of strategy rather than a game of chance because he can read people's tells to see what sign they'll throw. Tom got so good at that when he was a schoolboy that the other kids stopped playing rock-paper-scissors with him, and he has to consciously make himself play Stone/Rock instead of Wand/Scissors when he catches that the witch is about to play Cloak/Paper.
* RoyalInbreeding: Tom narrates that a lot of his higher-ranked noble cohorts are noticeably inbred, particularly his old friend Algie, who has "bulging blue eyes and a weak chin", a common feature on many English noble heirs that can make it hard for the uninitiated to tell them apart. Inbreeding is also a significant problem among Wizarding Pureblood families, which the Malfoys actively work against by selecting consorts from other countries -- Serpens Malfoy's late first wife and Abraxas's stepmother was Njinga Shacklebolt, who is from the Empire of Axum (Ethiopia).
* RunningGag: Fiona, the Riddles' maid, keeps walking in on weird Wizarding things happening in her boss's study when she calls Tom for meals. Tom bringing home an owl, the obsessively fashionable Riddle family dressed in weird outdated Victorian-looking Wizarding garb, the Riddles hosting a clearly lowborn amputee tradesman for dinner, Tom carrying what appears to be the corpse of a little boy, two Toms having lunch, the list goes on.

* SelectiveObliviousness: It's implied that Cecilia is so logical and practical that her mind refuses to believe that magic and Wizards and Witches are real, and simply assumes it's all either just a trick, or the ramblings of her clearly mentally disturbed ex. Malfoy's owl tries to get into Cecilia's study to deliver its message directly to Tom while he's visiting her, and her conclusion isn't "gee it's odd that an owl would be out during the day and flapping at my window," it's "Tom is delusional and [[HearingVoices he thinks owls are speaking to him]]." She thinks nothing of him sticking his arm into his new bottomless wallet past his elbow and asks him if his parents know he's out, like he's feeble-minded and needs to be supervised, and when Hermione accidentally Apparates right in front of her with the signature crack and even insists that there's no way she could've missed that, Cecilia instead replies that she definitely heard Hermione say "shit" and begs Hermione to get Tom the help he clearly needs. Hermione doesn't even have to Obliviate Cecilia in the end.

** When the Riddles find Hermione's 1997 copy of ''Nature's Nobility'' and correctly conclude that she must be a time traveler, Tom says, wonderingly, that it's "like [[Literature/TheTimeMachine H.G. Wells’s scientific romances]]!"
** Tom's mother reads ''Literature/TheTaleOfTomKitten'' to Tommy, a story that Tom always found disturbing. The author clarified in chapter comments that they were actually thinking of ''Literature/TheTaleOfSamuelWhiskers'', the sequel, which features the protagonist almost getting turned into pudding and eaten, but this story is about playful kittens who are dressed up in fine clothes only for the titular Tom Kitten to mess them up and lose them. The implication is that Tom was TheDandy even as a young child and found the notion of not taking care of fine clothes horrifying. Another connection that can be made is that Tom Kitten's family seems to be trying to be humans, given that they wear clothing and walk on their hind paws, which contrasts with cats in other ''Tom Kitten'' stories that don't wear clothes and work as ratters, mirroring the Riddles' scheme of passing themselves off as Wizards.
** Tom pretends to go see a movie as an alibi for him [[spoiler:dosing Cecilia with Amortentia]] -- the plan is to sit down somewhere near the back of the theater with a Disillusioned Dobby, have Dobby Apparate them outside while Disillusioned, go do the deed, and then Apparate back into the theater before the movie ends. The movie is ''The Triumph of the Rat'', a 1926 silent film about a former criminal pretending to be high class until he tries courting an actual aristocrat, only to be exposed for the fraud he is and sent back to his old criminal haunts in disgrace, where even they no longer respect him, forcing him to live out the rest of his days scavenging with the rats. The premise mirrors Tom's extremely precarious position in Wizarding Britain, where people seem to think he's actually a Wizard and one wrong move could blow the entire con and send his family and subsequently Tommy into disgrace.
** Tom goes out with his friends to see a comedic opera, ''Theatre/TheSorcerer'', which to his surprise is about a betrothed couple secretly dosing everyone in their village with a love potion. Tom, who lost months of his life and was sexually assaulted under the influence of a love potion, [[DudeNotFunny does not find this funny at all]] unlike the rest of the audience, has Dobby Apparate him home partway through the first act after the characters in the play decide to go through with the potion, and winds up missing the ending, where the titular sorcerer who supplied the love potion in the first place is denounced and killed by the rest of the characters. He's almost sad that he missed that part.

* TallDarkAndHandsome: Just as his son was in canon as a young man, Tom is at least OneHeadTaller than Hermione with perfectly coiffed jet-black hair and very dark eyes, and even Hermione describes him as classically handsome. Wizarding Britain agrees, and after only a day, he winds up in Witch Weekly as the most eligible bachelor and a contender for the Most Charming Smile award. He believes he got his looks from his mother, and at one point briefly (''very'' briefly) bemoans that [[SoBeautifulItsACurse if he'd been ugly, Merope wouldn't have ruined his life]].

* UnmanlySecret: Tom unironically reads Witch Weekly, a women's magazine, to stay up to date on fashion trends and Wizarding culture, finding it a better driver of and a more insightful look into Wizarding society than the drivel in the Daily Prophet. Everyone looks at him weirdly whenever he has to admit that (although he's not going to give away the advantage he gets from it). He also anonymously tips off WW's photographers and journalists as to where he'll be specifically so that Wizarding Britain sees him hanging out with high-status Wizarding families such as the Malfoys and Prewetts, building his and his family's reputations as powerful socialites.
* UnreliableNarrator: The one and only narrator is Tom Sr., who is incredibly arrogant and assured of his rightness. His narration showcases his unthinking bullshitting abilities, and that where possible, he'll choose to interpret situations the way he wants to see them, which is not always correct. In particular, he seems convinced that he has Hermione wrapped around his finger and his narration even outlines just how his remarks and actions are intended to steer people his way, but it's clear that Hermione is using the same tactics on him as well.
* VillainRespect: When Tom finds out that in Hermione's time, his very own Tommy murders his entire family at the age of sixteen and successfully frames it on Morfin, then goes on to amass a following, take over the world, and kill a lot of people, he's briefly dismayed, but is taken over by complete awe at that other Tommy's sheer ambition and vision. He thinks that Tommy could do great things if only that ambition is shaped and aimed in the proper direction... by his own equally ambitious and power-hungry standards, of course.

* WeakButSkilled: Tom is a completely magicless muggle, but he's sharp and creative in ways that are uncommon in old-fashioned, stagnating Wizarding Britain and easily works out novel ways to make use of potions, his House Elf, and other Wizarding artifacts that don't require one to possess magic of their own.

** At least three consecutive generations of Riddle men are named Tom. There's Squire Thomas Riddle I, current head of the family, Heir Thomas Riddle II, the story's narrator, and his young son Thomas "Tommy" Marvolo Riddle III. As the story is written solely from Heir Tom's perspective, Squire Riddle is referred to in narration as "Tom's father", while his son is Tommy. Tom's mother calls her husband Thomas, her son Tom, and her grandson Tommy.

* FitnessNut: Tom is an ardent practitioner of Swedish gymnast Jørgen Peter Müller's system of calisthenics, and cites his beautiful physique and physical prowess to his daily Müller system exercises, which he performs in the nude, per Müller's instructions. He judges other men who are out of shape and even tries to get Hermione to start doing them. Some of Müller's exercises are still recommended to this day by modern physical therapists, so Tom's obsession is likely well-founded.

** Tom goes out with his friends to see a comedic opera, ''Theatre/TheSorcerer'', which is about a betrothed couple secretly dosing everyone in their village with a love potion. Tom, who lost months of his life and was sexually assaulted under the influence of a love potion, [[DudeNotFunny does not find this funny at all]] unlike the rest of the audience, has Dobby Apparate him home partway through the first act after the characters in the play decide to go through with the potion, and winds up missing the ending, where the titular sorcerer who supplied the love potion in the first place is denounced and killed by the rest of the characters. He's almost sad that he missed that part.

* DefrostingIceKing: Tom is clearly still scarred from his time with Merope, doubly so after Cecilia refuses to believe him and rejects him, and it has resulted in him not wanting to risk his heart getting too close to anyone new, hiding under arrogance and vanity and dry wit. He won't even let his guard down around his own family or dare shatter the illusion that he's the cool, untouchable Heir Thomas Riddle, and he struggles to imagine anyone genuinely caring for him without expecting something in return- he even thinks his crying over Cecilia is hideous and assumes Hermione must find the sight amusing, until she pulls him into a hug. Hermione is just as bad, except she's grieving all of her loved ones and is likely reminded constantly that she went back in time and put herself in this situation for them. She also hints that she may not be around at the time of her original birthdate due to time travel shenanigans, adding to the guilt she'd feel if she ever became close to anyone and tried to build a life and family for herself, perhaps with Tom.

** The story also fills out the Malfoys and Prewetts during this time period. Abraxas Malfoy, Draco's grandfather, is Tommy's age and only an infant at this point, so his entire immediate family is developed- his father and current Malfoy patriarch is Serpens Malfoy, Serpens's first wife was Njinga Shacklebolt, with whom he had his heir and Abraxas's older half-brother Corvus, and Serpens's second wife and Abraxas's mother is named Giselle. This fic also has Ron's Great-Aunt Tessie as one of Tom's peers and acquaintances, and makes her a Prewett, complete with her mother, Edith Prewett, and her uptight, blood supremacist older brother Axel.

* RockPaperScissors: When Tom accidentally disarms a witch and wins her wand from her, the wand changes allegiance to him, causing it to not work as well for her, so he proposes that he lose to her at a game of rock-paper-scissors so she can get her wand back on her side again. The witch also reveals that the Wizarding version of rock-paper-scissors is called Wand-Cloak-Stone, based on ''The Tale of the Three Brothers''- Wand summons Cloak (removes it from its wearer), Cloak hides Stone (so it can't be found), and Stone resurrects the Wand's victims. He narrates that he considers rock-paper-scissors to be a game of strategy rather than a game of chance because he can read people's tells to see what sign they'll throw. Tom got so good at that when he was a schoolboy that the other kids stopped playing rock-paper-scissors with him, and he has to consciously make himself play Stone/Rock instead of Wand/Scissors when he catches that the witch is about to play Cloak/Paper.
* RoyalInbreeding: Tom narrates that a lot of his higher-ranked noble cohorts are noticeably inbred, particularly his old friend Algie, who has "bulging blue eyes and a weak chin", a common feature on many English noble heirs that can make it hard for the uninitiated to tell them apart. Inbreeding is also a significant problem among Wizarding Pureblood families, which the Malfoys actively work against by selecting consorts from other countries- Serpens Malfoy's late first wife and Abraxas's stepmother was Njinga Shacklebolt, who is from the Empire of Axum (Ethiopia).

** Tom pretends to go see a movie as an alibi for him [[spoiler:dosing Cecilia with Amortentia]]- the plan is to sit down somewhere near the back of the theater with a Disillusioned Dobby, have Dobby Apparate them outside while Disillusioned [[spoiler:and walk to Threepworple Manor to dose Cecilia's tea, make sure she drinks her tea]], and then Apparate back into the theater before the movie ends. The movie is ''The Triumph of the Rat'', a 1926 silent film about a former criminal pretending to be high class until he tries courting an actual aristocrat, only to be exposed for the fraud he is and sent back to his old criminal haunts in disgrace, where even they no longer respect him, forcing him to live out the rest of his days scavenging with the rats. The premise mirrors Tom's extremely precarious position in Wizarding Britain, where people seem to think he's actually a Wizard and one wrong move could blow the entire con and send his family and subsequently Tommy into disgrace.

* AncestralName
** At least three consecutive generations of Riddle men are named Tom. There's Squire Thomas Riddle I, current head of the family, Heir Thomas Riddle II, the story's narrator, and his young son Thomas "Tommy" Marvolo Riddle III. As the story is written solely from Heir Tom's perspective, Squire Riddle is referred to in narration as "Tom's father", while his son is Tommy. Tom's mother calls her husband Thomas, her son Tom, and her grandson Tommy.
** A background character is Sirius Black II, great-grandfather of Sirius Black III, Harry's godfather. Since he's the only Sirius Black alive right now, he's referred to as just Sirius, making it a little odd to read about a Sirius being a frothing blood supremacist, something Harry's beloved godfather would never be.

* ShoutOut

* SelectiveObliviousness: It's implied that Cecilia is so logical and practical that her mind refuses to believe that magic and Wizards and Witches are real, and simply assumes it's all either just a trick, or the ramblings of her clearly mentally disturbed ex. Malfoy's owl tries to get into Cecilia's study to deliver its message directly to Tom while he's visiting her, and her conclusion isn't "gee it's odd that an owl would be out during the day and flapping at my window," it's "Tom is delusional and [[HearingVoices he thinks owls are speaking to him]]." She thinks nothing of him sticking his arm into his new bottomless wallet past his elbow and asks him if his parents know he's out, like he's feeble-minded and needs to be supervised, and when Hermione accidentally Apparates right in front of her with the signature crack and even insists that there's no way she could've missed that, Cecilia instead focuses on the fact that Hermione said "shit" and begs Hermione to get Tom the help he clearly needs. Hermione doesn't even have to Obliviate Cecilia in the end.

* RockPaperScissors: When Tom accidentally disarms a witch and wins her wand from her, the wand changes allegiance to him, causing it to not work as well for her, so he proposes that he lose to her at a game of rock-paper-scissors so she can get her wand back on her side again. The witch also reveals that the Wizarding version of rock-paper-scissors is called Wand-Cloak-Stone, based on ''The Tale of the Three Brothers''- Wand summons Cloak, Cloak hides Stone, and Stone resurrects the Wand's victims. He narrates that he considers rock-paper-scissors to be a game of strategy rather than a game of chance because he can read people's tells to see what sign they'll throw. Tom got so good at that when he was a schoolboy that the other kids stopped playing rock-paper-scissors with him, and he has to consciously make himself play Stone/Rock instead of Wand/Scissors when he catches that the witch is about to play Cloak/Paper.

* FakeRelationship

** For a straight example, when Tessie realizes she really loves Algie, who her family would disapprove of her marrying for being a Muggle, Earldom and associated wealth or no, Tom hatches a plan to pretend to be the man she's courting, and it just so happens that he really enjoys Muggle-Touring and his Muggle friend Algie happens to be with them a lot. Tessie thinks Tom is handsome and charming, of course, and her family would be happy to see them together, but Tom thinks she's annoying and only dances with her exactly enough to maintain the ruse.

* GooGooGodlike: Tommy commits his first act of accidental magic when he's about three days old- he sets Hermione's hair on fire. Accidental magic this early is highly unusual and it's an indication of his sheer power.

** An odd example, as the faking doesn't consciously begin until one of the parties is already dead. In order to quell rumors that he went mad, Tom has to pretend that he really was in love with Merope all along and claims that he's still mourning Merope when he's actually mourning the relationship he could've had with Cecilia instead. When people expect him to talk about his relationship with Merope, he substitutes his feelings for Cecilia instead. His hatred for Merope is so strong that he tries to say "Merope is the most beautiful girl in the world" to prove to himself that the Veritaserum he's been dosed with has worn off.