Draco Malfoy: "Well, no one really knows until they get there, do they, but I know I'll be in Slytherin, all our family have been — imagine being in Hufflepuff, I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?"
Ivy Potter: "No, I think Hufflepuff would be rather nice. I mean, just imagine what you could get away with? No one would suspect a Hufflepuff."
That Universe Over There
is a Harry Potter fanfic written by mytimeconsumingsidehobby, which takes the idea of a Peggy Sue fic and twists it a little sideways. When Harry, who really should know better after the events of the past, touches a peculiar artifact which calls to him, he winds up on the rooftop of a house in Little Whinging — a decade or two back. Still his adult self, he's immediately confronted with a young girl who escaped her cousin Dudley through the simple expedient of making the distance between herself and the nearest roof moot. He immediately decides to take the young Ivy Potter in and give her all the love and attention she deserved from an actual parent, starting with all the vacations she's missed.
So far, so good. Things don't start really going wrong until it turns out that Ivy is a Friend to All Living Things, particularly those living things which have a tendency to kill you if you so much as glance in the wrong direction. The goblins, who have always treated him as a nuisance at best, have a tendency to grin at them both all the time, as though they know something he doesn't — and immediately popularize his name as Peverell, which draws attention from all the wrong people.
Everyone who knows anything is smiling like the cat who ate the canary, which is kind of easy to do when the potentially most powerful person ever has absolutely no clue.
And everyone else is quite convinced that Henry Peverell, nee Harry Potter, is either about to take over the world, or has already done so — and that Ivy Potter is likely to do so through some manner of weaponized campaign of niceness. The Slytherins are particularly biting their nails... save for Ivy, who's happily skipping through minefield after social minefield, either the worst Slytherin ever, or the very best.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: As is standard for such fics. It was truncated halfway through, which allowed Ivy Potter to actually get better, but it's clear that this abuse still impacts her hard.
- Achievements in Ignorance: Ivy makes use of telekinesis just by waving her wand, without even bothering with a spell. Free casting, in other words, something Harry taught her to do simply because it seemed a useful skill to have. Everyone else assumes she's silently casting a spell, though, because they've been taught that you need to use a spell to do that sort of thing.
- Anti-Villain: Barty Crouch, Jr. was just looking for a star to hitch his wagon to, and he was really looking forward to teaching folks instead of being... well, a murderous thug subjugated by an equally murderous supervillain. Once Sirius decides to explain that Harry is his master instead of Voldemort (and the Goblins agree, declaring him Lord Slytherin), Barty just turns face. And then turns to Baseline!Luna's side once he realizes that she's the one who's really in charge, as is only proper. He's still not a good person, but starts doing his best to try and be one.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Percy and Thomas quickly realize that the best way to deal with Ivy is to simply check out all the library books in which she expresses interest — well, the dangerous ones, anyway. Of course, it's Ivy, so all the interesting books are also the dangerous ones. The two being who they are, they then start reading them. Percy at one point turns that into an escape mechanism from a warded tomb which Bill, his curse-breaker brother, does a Spit Take at.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Ivy will smile at you, happily point you to the right person to help you with your revision, and generally even offer her last muffin. And if you hurt one of her friends, she will make you cry.
- Black Widow: Sabrina Zabini, whose clear attraction to Sirius is tempered mostly by the fact that if she keeps killing wealthy, amoral socialites, she's not only doing the world a favour, she's getting rich in so doing.
- Blow You Away: Ivy is mistakenly given a book about microclimate manipulation spells. Tiny things, of course, like creating rainbows or prisms out of ice to make things prettier, or at least more interesting. She immediately hits upon a hurricane spell.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Flint and Wood, the two opposing Quidditch captains, decide that it's more important to impart an understanding of how awesome Quidditch is to Ivy, rather than see the world go without her genius. They then get into a spat about what flat they're going to move into. Also, Percy Weasley and Thomas Harrington quickly realize that the best way to preclude Ivy from creating a hurricane which actually takes down Hogwarts is to work together.
- Friend to All Living Things: Harry is quite certain that Ivy could befriend a dragon and bring it home with her. He's probably right, it's just a matter of her actually finding one...
- Got Me Doing It: As she's an 'honorary Hufflepuff', Ivy jokes around about 'ten points to Hufflepuff' whenever she and her friends do something clever outside a school context. Sirius winds up joining in just because Ivy's enthusiasm is infectious — after Sirius becomes a teacher. By the end of the year, Hufflepuff leads by an incredibly wide margin.
- If You Ever Hurt Her: Harry, Sirius and Remus have a brief pause to hash things out amongst which one of them will deliver the statement.
- Irony, Situational: After Ivy demonstrates that she's a parselmouth in 2nd year, a bunch of students decide to get pet snakes, especially since she'll happily translate for them. Everyone expects that Slytherin will have the most snakes of the non-metaphorical sort, but nope, the majority are with Ravenclaw students, and Tiger remains the only pet serpent in the House.
- Kill It with Fire: Sirius' desire to murder 12 Grimmauld Place winds up like this. Harry keeps telling him no, and it never sticks.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Whatever the whole 'Master of Death' thing is, let alone what's going on with the Peverell name, nobody seems interested in letting Harry know, and considering that one group who's aware are the goblins, while the other is the seemingly all-knowing Garrick Ollivander, Harry would probably have better luck eating his own elbow than forcing an answer out of either.
- Manipulative Bastard: Albus Dumbledore's introduction expresses his disappointment with how he can't mold Ivy Potter into the self-effacing, self-destructive heroine archetype ... and his appreciation of how he gets to mold the children of the wizarding world properly, even though it never works out. In this he's more of a Smug Snake, never quite realizing that everyone around him knows exactly what he's doing, and that their goals are often contrary to his.
- Noodle Incident: Whatever happened in Montréal stays in Montréal, on threat of no more ice cream.
- Not Enough to Bury: It turns out that Lockhart being eaten by a basilisk intent on protecting the sole remaining Speaker doesn't leave a whole lot.
- Papa Wolf: If anyone threatens Ivy, then Harry will be right there to severely dissuade them from doing so again, and Remus, Sirius and Barty will be right behind him to make sure it sticks.
- Parental Abandonment: Doesn't happen - Harry makes it very clear that he will never abandon Ivy, and would probably burn Britain to the ground to keep her safe - but her fear of this informs the Boggart during that one DADA class.
- Person of Mass Destruction: Weirdly, Ivy doesn't count. She caused a hurricane in the Slytherin common room, but it was tiny and readily counteracted with a hairdryer or the like. The basilisk she made friends with has been quite responsible. It's just that everyone is so convinced that she counts as this that they're willing to overturn social norms, blast through walls, and break the natural order of things to stop her from doing... exactly that.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil — and especially Lockhart's. When he is eaten by Hilda, nobody cares. Nobody investigates. And nobody can be blamed.
- Running Gag: Harry refuses to set fire to Sirius' homestead. And of course, the Twitchy Eye.
- Servile Snarker: Barty really shouldn't have been subjected to Sirius and Remus. Within a few chapters, he's being just as snarky as any freed House Elf — and it's entirely possible that he's working with and learning from Kreacher. (He's still genuinely on Harry's side, just takes the piss constantly for everyone's own good.)
- Stations of the Canon: Averted — somewhat. The Horcruxen are immediately destroyed as soon as they come to light, Ivy's in particular, courtesy of the Goblins and one cursebreaker they had at ready hand. However, things like Lockhart, Bellatrix' escape from Azkaban, somehow!, and the Goblet of Fire seem to violate Harry's ability to stop them. This leads to Harry composing a mad scheme to steal the latter and, presumably, remove it from existence.
- Telekinesis: Ivy demonstrates the ability to do this, wordlessly, and seems surprised when everyone is telling her that should have been impossible.
- Theseus' Ship Paradox: Turns out that the Goblet of Fire burns up pretty fast when it's subjected to oath-fire. It's been replaced time and again. The Gringotts staff claim that goblin-forged materials are exempt from this, but how honest about that they are is hard to say, especially as goblin-forged stuff hasn't been observed to break. (The Sword of Gryffindor implies their honesty, however.)
- Twitchy Eye: Everyone who has ever dealt with Ivy develops one. She, in turn, seems to get a second sense as to when someone's gotten one.
