Fanfic / In the Bleak Midwinter (TheLoud)

I am trying to set things right. Merope was a witch who had a terrible childhood, and she grew up to do terrible things. Her son will be a wizard with great power. If he were to grow up unloved, in that orphanage… It would be bad. He would commit crimes much worse than Merope's. But if raised properly, I think he could accomplish great things.

It is the winter of 1927, and Tom Riddle has escaped from his abusive marriage to Merope Gaunt, wanting to put it behind him and forget about the horrible supernatural things that happened to him. His parents are dubious about his story, but happy to have their son home and away from that unsuitable girl. Their maid, Fiona, is not sure what to make of the goings-on, but loyal to her employers and glad to have the work.

Then a young woman, a Miss Hermione Granger, turns up on their doorstep, bringing a death certificate for Merope, a baby boy with Tom's eyes, and a tale of magic that will turn their world upside-down...but even she doesn't realise the scope of the events she has set in motion. (Little Tommy didn't get his ambition and drive from the Gaunt side of the family, after all.)

In the Bleak Midwinter is an ongoing Harry Potter fanfiction by TheLoud, posted on FanFiction.Net (here), and Archive of Our Own (here). The fic also has an Audio Adaptation read by voice actor Sam Gabriel, which can be heard on one's preferred podcast platform or downloaded from her personal website.

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This story contains examples of:

A-F

• Adaptation Species Change: Viktor Krum is stated to have been part Veela. Where Fleur inherited Veela beauty, Viktor inherited the Veela's Bird People nature and affinity for the air, and apparently looked like a monstrous bird-man.
• Adaptational Jerkass: That Merope canonically roofied and sexually assaulted Tom Sr. is bad enough to position her as an antagonist, but canon doesn't have anything more than that to say about what their relationship was actually like. This fic makes it explicit that she was abusive and controlling towards her husband and was frequently displeased with him, apparently whenever he did anything other than fawn over her. She used to hex him if she thought he so much as glanced at another woman, she had a literally explosive temper that included childish outbursts of accidental magic, setting things on fire or breaking glass (and careless enough to injure Tom in the process), and it's implied with her use of mind-altering substances and spells that he was prevented from making contact with his friends or family outside of her.
• Affectionate Nickname: Mary Riddle has an endless supply of cutesy nicknames for her infant grandson and doesn't ever seem to use the same name more than once onscreen, and her pool of names only grows the more she learns about the Wizarding world and its body of creatures. Tommy is called everything from a bludger to a puffskein.
• Alien Gender Confusion: Dobby admits that he has trouble telling humans apart by appearance alone and is reliant on Tertiary Sexual Characteristics to tell the sexes apart. He didn't realize Cecilia is a woman until Tom referred to her with feminine pronouns because she doesn't have long hair or apparent "teats", as her hair is bobbed and her clothing gives her a flat-chested figure in 1920s fashion.
• Ancestral Name:
  • At least three consecutive generations of Riddle men are named some variation on the name Thomas. There's Squire Thomas Riddle, current head of the family, Heir Tom Riddle, the story's narrator, and his young son Tom "Tommy" Marvolo Riddle. 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.
  • 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, an ardent blood purist, who won't stop getting into rows with Lucius over his muggle-loving ways.
  • A background character is Sirius Black II, canonical 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.
• Apology Gift: At the advice of a florist, Tom chooses deep purple hyacinths to apologise to his former girlfriend, Cecilia, whom he dropped when he fell into Merope's power. She is extremely unimpressed and compares the gift to a cat bringing her a dead mouse.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • 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. Tom notes, when Ignis stays for dinner at Riddle Manor, that he uses a spell to cut up his food, as he can't hold a piece of food in place while cutting it due to only having one hand.
  • He later loses limbs and organs repeatedly during his Apparition lessons, which turns Tom's stomach. However, since splinching isn't inflicted by Dark magic, Hermione is able to easily fix it.
  • Tessie also mentions offhand that her brother Axel once "forgot his elbow" when he Apparated. Axel is clearly no worse for wear thanks to the wonders of healing magic, but the thought of it brings Tom's mind back to witnessing Ignis's splinchings, threatening to turn his stomach all over again.
• Atrocious Alias: While gathering suitably "pathetic" life stories from werewolves about the tragedies of life with lycanthropy, all of the contributions are written under pseudonyms of each author's choice. The silliest one is "Unicorn Pants", bearing in mind that "pants" in UK English refers to underwear rather than trousers. When UP is offered a traveling sales job with Tom and Hermione's fledgling Wolfsbane company, he abandons the name after a couple minutes of his bosses and coworkers attempting to say it with a straight face and tells everyone to just call him Eric, his actual name.
• Baby Trap: When Fiona sees Hermione breastfeed little Tommy, she jumps to the conclusion that he must be Hermione's, not Merope's, and that Hermione is just trying to extort something from the Riddles. Hermione's explanation that she's taken a wet nurse potion is not necessarily convincing, but it certainly changes the subject.
• Bad Future: Hermione's original timeline appears to have involved Voldemort winning and everyone she knows dying. There are specific references to Ron and Neville no longer needing their robes, which Hermione had in her expanded bag; how her parents were killed in order to hurt her; and how Harry resisted the Killing Curse once, implicitly not the follow-up. She went back in time because she had nothing left to lose.
• Becoming the Mask: 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.
  [Tom] set off to return his father’s suit and change into his muggle costume. Clothes. His muggle clothes. His normal clothes. Whatever.
• Bedlam House: 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, which you can tell because he automatically responds to each one with a quip.
• Blackmail: Tom used to collect incriminating information about scions of the aristocracy as a hobby, but since encountering the magical world, he's tired of it — besides which, his collection is already large enough, and it's too easy.
  They put themselves in embarrassing situations so willingly, it seemed unsporting.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: When Tom meets up with Lerina Kettleburn at La Truffe Emeraude to discuss having her write Loup Garou, she at first thinks Tom has figured out that she's the one behind a particular pen name best known for its lurid werewolf novels and that he has a problem with that and is blackmailing her. He makes it clear that he's not blackmailing her because he has a problem with her werewolf novels, but speaking of blackmail, it would be unwise to antagonize the werewolves who so generously contributed their sad stories to the project, whether by misrepresenting them or threatening their safety by trying to find their actual identities, and that doing so would also antagonize him. She looks a bit faint at this, so he smiles at her and tells her about the money she'd get if she agrees.
• Blue Blood: The Riddles are a Squire family, essentially making them a kind of fancy landlord that owns a village, but in the hierarchy of British aristocracy, 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.
• 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 and that she is pleased to hear. 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.
• Breast Expansion: Hermione takes a wet-nurse potion so that she can feed the infant Tommy, and one of the effects is that it enlarges her breasts because they're literally engorged with milk, to the point of looking disproportionate on the bony, half-starved frame she sports for the first year or so of her time with the Riddles. Flat chests happen to be in style, though, and Tom's narration frequently points out her "unfashionable" figure. When Mrs. Riddle takes the potion so she can feed Tommy while Hermione's out, Squire Riddle makes it quite clear that he enjoys this particular effect on his wife, much to Tom's discomfort.
• Cathartic Crying: After Cecilia refuses to believe in magic and that he's not mad, Tom breaks down in tears and tries to hide it because he thinks his crying looks hideous. Hermione pulls him into a hug anyways so that he can cry on her shoulder, which he does until he's completely cried out, releasing all of his sorrow and the stubborn hope that he might get Cecilia back. Several years later, Tom repays the favor to Hermione when they narrowly survive their meeting with Lord Woolsey and she cries from fear and rage, and he lets her sob into his chest until she feels better.
• Consummate Liar: Tom is such a good liar that he can tell even obvious lies with enough conviction to lull listeners into thinking he's telling the truth, even when they should know what he's saying is false. While working out a plausible cover story to swindle Caractacus Burke out of Slytherin's Locket, which Merope pawned some months prior, Tom acts out the story and says to Hermione that 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?" This also makes him a hell of an actor, and proves adept at posing as a haughty pureblood wizard. 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.
• Creepy Child: It's filtered through the perspective of his father, but even as a barely day-old newborn, Tommy is far too aware of the world around him for his age, likely thanks to his natural Legilimency abilities allowing him to see people's thoughts, and he also started using accidental magic when he was only days old, and violent magic, at that, which is much earlier than normal. Once he's mobile, he doesn't crawl normally for the first few months and instead tries to slither like a snake, and his babbling sounds distinctly more like Parseltongue than English, which Hermione is slightly bemused by, but Tom finds genuinely adorable. The Riddles, especially his father, love the hell out of him and are immensely proud of him and all that he is, though, because that's their boy and all of that means that he's very powerful and from a great bloodline. It's no wonder that the matrons at Wool's in Hermione's timeline thought he was a devil child, though.
• The Dandy: 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 they gifted her 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.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Tom, for all of his outward arrogance and bluster, is still deeply scarred by his time with Merope. He's sensitive to mind-altering substances and is vigilant around witches, and the smells of his once-favorite things are enough to make him dissociate and run for his life, because he instinctively associates them with Amortentia, even after he learns that Amortentia smells different to everyone. Some of his associates still think he's gone mad and Cecilia in particular tries to convince his parents to have him involuntarily committed. Hermione is also similarly scarred by her time on the run from Voldemort and his forces- she reacts harshly and immediately whenever someone unexpectedly pulls a wand on her, stuns Tom and breaks his nose (she fixes it) when he makes the mistake of waking her, hates hearing her name shouted (because it reminds her of Harry and Ron desperately calling for her from the Malfoys' dungeons as she was tortured by Bellatrix), and can't even set foot in Malfoy Manor or hear peacocks without going into a full-blown panic attack.
• Deal with the Devil: When Tom brings information about antibiotics to a chemist, to test it and begin developing them, the man looks through what he has and jokingly asks if Tom is going to require his soul in exchange for such revolutionary information. Tom replies that he has no use for the man's soul, and isn't even using his own.
• Defrosting Ice King: 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 blackmail material, 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.
• Didn't Think This Through: Miss Kettleburn's book-signing is attacked by some fanatical members of Woolsey's pack, who don't approve of what she's doing. The result is not only a lot of free publicity for her book, but also an upswing of popular sympathy for her as the victim of the attack.
  Tom: Being skilled at esoteric magic doesn’t mean they're smart.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • While touring his old grammar school, Tom notices that the art studio has replaced the old medieval revivalist painting that used to be there with a much more modern print of a cubist nude from Tamara de Lempicka, which he would've found rather distracting had it hung there in his youth.
  • 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.
    She had the gall to direct his attention to that particular region of her anatomy, and simultaneously demand a sophisticated action like speech?
• Domestic Abuse: Tom's memories of Merope are quite traumatic. She was not well educated, but she could use a wand well enough to hurt him if he had misbehaved in any way, or if she imagined he had.
  Tom: She mostly just made things explode, when she thought I had slighted her. Once when she thought I had looked at a waitress in an inappropriate way…
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: When Hermione refers to Merope's actions as rape, Tom struggles to reconcile that in his head, since the idea of a woman being able to rape a man is foreign to his thinking (especially living in the 1920s). After considering it, however, he realises that Hermione is correct, that's exactly what it was.
• Dramatic Irony: When Hermione offers Ron's robes to Tom, he questions whether such old robes will be out of fashion by now. Since they actually come from nearly a century in the future, Hermione is amused.
  Hermione: Wizarding fashion changes extremely slowly, or perhaps not at all. It’s a very tradition-bound culture.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Tom initially finds Hermione quite plain, but good nutrition and good clothes do wonders for her, and when she claims that "your cook is making me fat," he considers it a clear invitation to ogle a little.
  Müller might nitpick about a lack of athleticism, but Tom, when he wasn't searching for things to tease her about, could find no fault with Hermione's physical form. "Hester does excellent work. Perhaps she deserves a raise."
• Erotic Eating: Tessie Prewett's first introduction to profiteroles (in the company of a young man she wants to impress) apparently goes this way.
  Some mothers might have urged their daughters to lick cream in a less suggestive way, but considering that Mrs. Prewett was too busy eating to notice, Tessie's tongue was free to do what it wanted.
• Exact Words: Tom prefers to make use of careful wording, rather than outright lies, to cover the fact that he's not a wizard.
  Tom: Don't put words in my mouth, Miss Granger. I did not lie. I never claimed to be a pureblood wizard.
  Hermione: Yes but… You stole Malfoy's wand and threatened him with it! That does strongly imply that you are at least a wizard.
  Tom: No it doesn't. I could have been threatening to shove it up his nose. Would have served him right, too.
• Fake Relationship:
  • 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, a result of Merope's abuse, as lingering grief from how much he misses her; this 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 says "Merope was the most beautiful girl in the world" to prove to himself that the Veritaserum he's been dosed with has worn off.
  • For a straight example, when Tessie realizes she really loves Algie, whom 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.
• Fake Wizardry: The Riddles make their entrance into the wizarding world, and manage to persuade everyone that they're a previously reclusive magical family, through a mixture of Hermione's bemused help, playing on people's assumptions, making excuses for keeping magic covert in their home, and later, Dobby synchronising his own magic with Tom's pretense of using a wand. After all, if a family has a Floo connection, gets the Daily Prophet, is served by a house elf, routinely travels by Portkey, and dresses in robes, surely they're witches and wizards, right?
• Faking the Dead: When Marius Black is confirmed as a squib and seeks sanctuary with the Riddles, Hermione creates a temporary corpse and drops it from a height just outside his bedroom window, for his sister to arrange an apparent suicide and cover up his disappearance so his family doesn't come after him. (She's a bit disturbed when the sister instead leads their parents to believe she deliberately pushed him out his window — and is praised for it.)
• Fish out of Water: 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 due to the witch burnings from centuries earlier 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.
• Fitness Nut: 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. 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.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: 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.

G-P

• Generation Xerox: The personalities of the Riddles are back-formed from Voldemort's canonical personality traits. Tom Sr. is just as arrogant, self-centered, manipulative, ambitious, dramatic, and funny as his son is in canon, on top of the two looking exactly alike at their respective ages, and the elder Riddles' personalities are in turn back-formed from Tom Sr. to make him one half of each of his parents. By that extension, it's implied in this fic that Voldemort got his temper and misanthropic disregard for others from Merope.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: 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. 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.
• Glamour
  • Cassiopeia Black's outward appearance has been hit hard by the Black family's history of inbreeding. Even at age twelve, she's considered so unsightly to look at that she's had multiple glamours applied at a wizarding beauty salon to conceal her visage, so many that she trips the disguise-detecting wards at Riddle Manor.
  • Briar and Bramble, two of Tom's werewolf employees, keep themselves safe in Wizarding Britain by constantly disguising themselves with glamours whenever they go out in public, and never use the same faces or names more than once.
• Gold Digger: When Tom gets to know the Prewetts a little, he suspects that they have invested a great deal of their modest resources (being only a branch family) in their daughter's appearance.
  Tom respected that investment plan. The payoff was potentially large, for a relatively small initial outlay.
• Goo-Goo-Godlike: Tommy commits his first act of accidental magic when he's about three days 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.
• Good Is Not Soft: 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.
  "I killed three of them," said Harrier, her voice so faint Tom barely recognized it.
  "Good job!" said Hermione. "You're quite a duelist."
• Good Old Fisticuffs: The first time Tom meets Serpens Malfoy, he winds up punching the man in the face, causing him to drop his wand, which Tom then picks up, unintentionally winning the wand's allegiance and claiming it for himself, despite being a muggle.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Tom is too polite to let it show or affect their working relationship (much), but he secretly hates Ignis, whom he thinks looks like a tramp even disregarding his werewolf injuries, for drawing Hermione's attention away from himself, and unknowingly sees Ignis as romantic competition. When Hermione agrees to try brewing Wolfsbane for Ignis, Tom secretly hopes that Ignis 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. Tom becomes fonder of Ignis over time, even if he himself doesn't realize that and continues to internally judge him.
• Heroic Willpower: 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 when his drink has been spiked with Veritaserum, and with no knowledge of the potion's existence 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 his interrogator 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.
• Horrible Housing: Tom offers Ignis the use of the Gaunts' shack, which the Riddle family has inherited. Ignis is overwhelmed by the generosity of letting him have the former home of such an ancient and pure family — until they go together to inspect it. Upon seeing the dirt, rot, fungus, discarded bones, structural weakness, and general squalor of the place, Tom apologises to Ignis for ever offering it, and brings it down with a well-placed shove to a supporting beam, stating his intention to raze it and build a replacement.
  Ignis: I don't mean to insult your in-laws, but you're saying this was your wife's childhood home?
  Tom: Yes. And I assure you that she was a pureblood, of an older and purer family than yours. Just think, if the McKinnons stay focused on blood purity for long enough, one day they'll achieve greatness like this.
• Hypocritical Humor: After chaperoning Hermione at Ignis's home, Tom's mother mentions that Mrs Mckinnon went on and on about her granddaughter and that "it seemed excessive."
• I Need A Drink: The story opens with Tom attempting to forget about Merope and the fear that she'll come back for him — with chemical assistance.
  The wind did not sound like an enraged woman screaming. It really didn't. It was just wind. Everything was fine. Tom was home again. He could relax. It might take more brandy. He poured another dram.
• I Owe You My Life: Tom gets Serpens Malfoy to end his Veritaserum interrogation by telling him that his wife Giselle is plotting to kill the Malfoy heir, Corvus, so that her own son Abraxas can become the Malfoy heir instead. 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, Serpens also feels indebted to Tom for saving his son, and he repays it by 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.
• Insult to Rocks: When Tom tells Cecilia that Merope was a witch, Cecilia replies that he should "just call her a bitch and be done with it," but he refuses to insult canines.
• Literary Allusion Title: This story opens with an excerpt from the 1872 poem of the same name by Christina Rossetti, 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.
• Love Potion: Despite his bad history with having been controlled by Amortentia, Tom is willing to use it, if necessary, to win back the girl whom he lost when Merope enslaved him. It doesn't quite go as he planned; it can induce obsession, but that doesn't change everything else about the person. Cecilia still doesn't believe his claim that magic is real, but under the influence of the potion, she changes from being dismissive, to becoming obsessed with getting him treatment for his "madness" because she's so concerned about his wellbeing.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: The Prewetts are very displeased that their daughter Tessie is marrying Algie, a Muggle, even though that Muggle is heir to an Earlship and a very large 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.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: 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 looks almost exactly like his father did at that age.
• Manipulative Bastard: 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, guiding people's opinions with subtle applications of peer pressure, 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.
• Marriage of Convenience: Cecilia, while under the influence of Amortentia keyed to Tom, decides that she wants to help Tom more than anything else and suddenly asks him to marry her... and tells him that doing so would make her his family member, giving her the legal right to have him involuntarily committed to a mental institution for his clearly mad belief in witches and magic, since his parents are apparently unwilling or perhaps too mad themselves to get their son the help he so clearly needs. They thankfully are not wed and no part of this plan occurs, but the revelation, artificial as it was, since she completely forgets about all of her actions while under the potion's influence after the antidote is administered, is enough to drive him to tears.
• Meaningful Echo: 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 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.
• Metaphorically True: Tom is very careful to not outright lie to any wizards in any ways that could be found out, and frequently lies by omission or says things in a way that subtly guides people towards reaching conclusions that are advantageous to him. For instance, he tells Serpens Malfoy, who already suspects that Tom isn't a Pureblood, that he isn't a muggleborn wizard, and lets Serpens decide that means he's a halfblood, not that he's (gasp) a completely magicless muggle playing at being a Wizard.
• Muggle Born of Mages: A major character is 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 Alternate Universe, 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 a prominent pureblood 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.
• Muggle–Mage Romance: Tom facilitates his friend Algernon Clamdowne-Clamdowne, heir to the Earl of Lichford, meeting with Tessie Prewett, a pureblooded witch, against the wishes of Tessie's family. Algie has no idea that magic exists, and Tessie doesn't realise that their go-between, Tom, is actually a Muggle. But they make each other happy. Hermione is taken aback when she hears that Algie and Tessie are engaged, since she knows the Prewetts never did anything of the kind in the original timeline — but she's pleased by it.
• Noblewoman's Laugh: Tom laughs as he shows off how he's going to use Dobby's magic to convince people he's actually a wizard, which Hermione describes as an Evil Laugh. He insists that it's his triumphant laugh.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Most of Tom and Hermione's werewolf employees go by the pseudonyms they submitted their stories under for the Loup Garou project. Not even their bosses know their actual names. Only Ignis and Eric use any part of their actual names, and Eric never gives his surname.
• O.C. Stand-in
  • 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, that Tom Sr. rejected his son on sight, and that they were so disliked by their community that nobody attended their funerals, 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. Squire Riddle is arrogant and ambitious, but also brash and not always the most tactful, while Mary balances him out by being more subtly cunning, aesthetically minded, and gently mannered.
  • 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. She's cheerful and flighty and comes to love dancing and adventures like any other spirited young lady.
• Original Character: Canon is relatively thin on characters alive in Wizarding Britain in the late 1920s, particularly people who were adults as opposed to peers and agemates of Voldemort, who would be infants, toddlers, or not yet born, so this fic fills out the cast by necessity with quite a few of its own.
  • 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 Hestia has yet to appear in the flesh, 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. In Hermione's timeline, Ignis dies young, as many werewolves do.
  • When Tom and Hermione start a business selling Wolfsbane after proving that the potion works on Ignis, they hire seven other closeted werewolves as traveling salespeople of sorts from the crowd that contributed their stories to the Loup Garou novel project, most of whom go by the code names they used when submitting the stories. Some of the more prominent characters are Eric, a freelance cursebreaker who looks a little bit like the protagonist of the novel, and Briar and Bramble, a paranoid gay couple skilled in magical glamours who never go out in public with the same names or faces twice.
  • 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 late first wife was Njinga Shacklebolt (presumably a relation of Kingsley), 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, 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.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Tom commonly looks uncomfortable whenever he happens to catch his parents, who are very clearly still in love, getting mushy and romantic. 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.
• Parental Substitute: Hermione makes herself Tommy's nursemaid practically from his birth, despite not being his actual mother, and the two predictably become very close, with Tommy eventually calling her "Mama" once he starts babbling in English with as much earnestness as he refers to his blood father as "Papa".
• Phony Psychic: Hermione and the Riddles pass off Hermione's knowledge of the future as her being a Seer, which she is somewhat amused by considering her dislike of divination and the fact that she is not, in fact, a Seer. It does work as a convenient excuse to get out of situations and social engagements, as she can just claim that she had an urgent vision that needed to be addressed immediately.
• Power Perversion Potential: When Ignis comes to lunch at the Riddle House while Polyjuiced into Tom, Tom's father muses that it might be entertaining for sexual partners to use in the bedroom, for the sheer novelty of exploring a different body from what you're used to without resorting to adultery, much to Tom's discomfort. To Tom's even greater discomfort, his mother seems intrigued by this when she cheerfully tells her husband that she'd like to discuss that further with him later.
• Pragmatic Hero: The Riddles have ethics, but they treat them more as guidelines than actual rules. They well understand the concept of Enlightened Self-Interest, admire power even amongst those who misuse it, and would happily rule the world for its own benefit. They would probably qualify as Unscrupulous Heroes if they weren't also rather cheerful and friendly.
• Priceless Paperweight: Hermione and Tom are able to recover Salazar Slytherin's locket, a priceless historical artefact that opens only in response to Parseltongue. It makes a good toy for little Tommy, who has great fun repeatedly making it open and then smacking it closed.
• The Proud Elite: 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.

R-Z

• Repetitive Name: Tom's friend Algie's surname is "Clamdowne-Clamdowne". In the UK, double-barrelled surnames are strongly associated with nobility and are/were intended to show off one's maternal pedigree as well as their father's. That Algie's is repetitive makes this a parody of this practice, as it implies that his parents are related and backs up his claim that he's "so inbred [he] could be a sandwich".
• Reverse Psychology: Before telling his parents about Merope being a genuine witch and little Tommy being magical, Tom talks up the possibility that they'll turn Hermione out of the house after hearing her story — which, naturally, gets his mother indignant at the very idea of mistreating a guest in that way, and guarantees that she'll hear Hermione out.
  "We shall see how calmly you take the news," said Tom.
  "Perfectly calmly, I assure you," his mother insisted.
  Tom did not smile, although he was proud of himself for nipping his mother’s anti-witch fury in the bud.
• Rich Language, Poor Language: In this fic, Little Hangleton is located in Yorkshire, 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 he apparently sounds stuffier now than Algie's elocution tutor.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The Riddles and Hermione pass off Hermione's knowledge of the future as her being a Seer. Serpens Malfoy also recognizes signs of Cruciatus damage in her when she gets tremors, and he concludes that she's been mistreated in the past for her gifts, perhaps even tortured for not producing a vision on command. He's correct that she's been tortured by the Cruciatus, but not because she's a Seer, because she isn't a Seer.
• Rock–Paper–Scissors: 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.
• Royal Inbreeding: 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 mother of his heir, Corvus, was Njinga Shacklebolt, who is from the Empire of Axum (Ethiopia).
• Running Gag: 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 dressing 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.
• Saving the World With Art: Tom pragmatically decides that it would be expedient to fight for werewolf rights because their downtrodden status and prejudice preventing them from holding down steady employment makes them an economically unproductive demographic. He proposes paying a writer to compile a werewolf version of Uncle Tom's Cabin to bring their plight into the public eye in the hopes that their lot will be bettered, like how that book led to the end of slavery in America, so that he can better extract profit from them. The result is a sweeping romance called Loup Garou, serialized in Witch Weekly, about a brave, gallant werewolf who falls in love with a beautiful girl.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In May before Tommy was born, Merope tried Imperiusing Tom to drink more Amortentia, but he was able to shake off the spell and escape — he simply got up, left their London flat without a word or second glance or even packing any of his belongings, and returned to Riddle Manor. That was the last time he ever saw her.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: The Riddles discover evidence that Hermione is a time-traveller, but choose not to immediately tell her that they know. (It explains a lot about her, but since they're pretty happy with how she's changing things, they see no need to confront her or interfere.)
• Selective Obliviousness: 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 although she at first wonders why an owl would be flapping at her window in broad daylight, her main conclusion is "Tom is delusional and 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.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Hermione decides that the critical point in the development of Lord Voldemort was when, as an infant, he was sent to an orphanage instead of his living parent. So, she goes back in time to retrieve little Tommy and bring him to his father.
• Shout-Out:
  • 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 H.G. Wells's scientific romances!"
  • Tom's mother reads The Tale of Tom Kitten to Tommy, a story that Tom always found disturbing. The author clarified in chapter comments that they were actually thinking of The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, 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 The Dandy 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 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, The Sorcerer, which to his surprise is about a betrothed couple secretly dosing everyone in their village with a love potion. Tom, who lost most a year of his life and was sexually assaulted under the influence of a love potion, does not find this funny at all unlike the rest of the audience, and has Dobby Apparate him home partway through the first act when he starts to panic and dissociate, after the characters in the play decide to go through with the potion. He misses 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, and he's almost sad that he missed that part.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Squire Thomas and Mary Riddle are very much in love with each other and active in the bedroom even after multiple decades of marriage and they still gross out their adult son with their kisses and flirty banter.
• Sour Grapes: To an extent. Very early on, the Riddles initially try to act like and imply that they're a pureblood family. Unable to get away with this lie, they quickly pivot to acting like they're a wealthy halfblood family, which they successfully get away with. On multiple occasions, they then talk about how stupid blood purity really is to multiple other wizards. One can't help but think that to an extent, it's because they were unable to get away with pretending to be purebloods. Albeit, at least some of their thoughts must be genuine, for Tom often does think about inbreeding in a negative way both in the magical and muggle worlds.
• Stepford Snarker: Tom snarks about aesthetics and appearances as a defense mechanism when he's afraid, whether for his life or just of his own emotions.
  • When he meets Lord Woolsey, he can't help but notice that the werewolf's throne is decorated with real human skulls and mentally declares it tacky, perhaps to distract himself from the notion that they probably once belonged to people that Woolsey has killed. Then, Woolsey flexes his muscles in a clear intimidation display and Tom narrates that the man's physique would make Müller envious. He goes on to muse to himself that Woolsey would probably kill and eat Müller and mount his skull on his throne, "which would be a terrible end for the Danish gymnast."
  • And of course, when he hugs Hermione, he reminds himself that it's so that he doesn't have to look at her "ugly" visage or so that she can't see how ugly he looks when he cries, and when he crouches to hug her while she's seated, he tells himself that it's good exercise for his legs.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Just as his son was in canon as a young man, Tom is at least One Head Taller 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 one day in the Wizarding World, 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 if he'd been ugly, Merope wouldn't have ruined his life.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Serpens Malfoy spikes Tom's drink with Veritaserum, causing him to reveal more than he intended. Fortunately he's able to steer the conversation away from topics that might have been fatal.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Having only just met Hermione, Tom doesn't want to admit just how pleased and especially relieved he is to hear of Merope's death. When he later tells his maid, though, her reaction is, "Oh sir! What wonderful news."
  He was free. He was crying. Did tears of joy resemble tears of mourning closely enough that it was safe to uncover his face?
• Tragic Keepsake: While Hermione was on the run with her classmates and friends, she wound up carrying just about everyone's personal effects in her moleskine bag for them, likely because it allowed the group to easily and quickly keep moving with less chance of leaving things behind that could be used to track them. After everyone was killed and she was removed from her timeline, she still has several people's clothes and presumably other belongings that bring back sad memories, such as Ron's robe, permanently stained with blood from a Dark magic injury; one of Harry's muggle t-shirts, which she uses to free Dobby; Neville's fine cloak, stained with Ginny's blood; and Cho Chang's mostly intact sky-blue robe.
• Unmanly Secret: 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.
• Unreliable Narrator: 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, and he's none the wiser.
• Villain Respect: 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, even at sixteen. 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.
• Visual Pun: The Pickled Salamander restaurant serves food with relatively ordinary quality, but an impressive experience, such as bubble and squeak that periodically releases floating bubbles containing animated 'mice' made of beef and cabbage, or blackcurrant flummery that needs to be earthed ("Ah! Current.") before it can be safely eaten.
  Tom poked at the crust of his boring toad in the hole with his sharp-tined fork. The crust tasted like reasonably good toad in the hole crust. He dug through it in search of the meat.
  A toad jumped out of the crust, making a break for freedom over the railing.
• Wake Up Fighting: Hermione's years of combat and escaping have left her very sensitive to any kind of threat. At one point, when she falls asleep in her chair, Tom moves to transfer her to a bed, and wakes up on the floor with a headache and a previously broken nose (Hermione fixed it).
  Hermione: You startled me. Don't do that. Never do that.
• Weak, but Skilled: 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, portkeys, and other wizarding artifacts that don't require one to possess magic of their own.
• Webcomic Time: The fic has been updating steadily chapter by chapter over the course of five years, sitting at 38 chapters and over 270,000 words as of June 2023, but only around two and a half years have passed in-story. The first eight chapters went nearly day-by-day and covered Tommy's first few weeks of life. The author has stated that they have plans for the story extending several decades into Tommy's adulthood.

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