Departure From The Diary
is a Harry Potter fanfic by TendraelUmbra in which the diary horcrux of a genderbent Voldemort, realizing that Harry is another horcrux, attempts to merge with the horcrux on Harry's head and possess him, but winds up stuck on Harry's head instead. Now stuck with a teenage Dark Lady in his head, Harry finds his life more complicated than it was when he entered the Chamber to save Ginny even as he slowly and unwittily grows much closer to the younger version of his greatest nemesis.
The fic can also be read here on Archive of Our Own.
This fanfic contains examples of:
- Artistic License – History: In reality, Tamelyn wouldn't have been in London during the Blitz, since it started after the Hogwarts reconvened and ended before it let out. The author admits that she changed the timeline for the backstory to make sense.
- Asshole Victim: The stalkers from 1939 and 1993, plus Aunt Marge.
- Both Sides Have a Point: When Hermione goes to the professors about Harry receiving a Firebolt for Christmas, Harry takes the middle ground between her and Ron. On the one hand, the broom did arrive under rather suspicious circumstances and is prohibitively expensive*. On the other, Harry also agrees with Ron in that it'd be impossible for Sirius Black to wander into Gringotts and make a withdrawal of that size given the bounty on his head. Worse is that Hermione went behind Harry's back to inform the professors rather than simply talk to him, especially since Harry was going to ask her opinion before she ran off.
- Child Soldiers: Before the Statute of Secrecy, muggle nobility tended to abduct wizard children to serve in their armies, since it was easier to instill loyalty on them. That was the reason why Hogwarts was built as a fortress.
- The Corrupter: Tamelyn to Harry. This becomes epecially pronounced after third year, when he starts becoming increasingly disdainful of muggles without even realizing it.
- Death by Adaptation: Ludo Bagman dies during the Quidditch World Cup riot.
- Everything Except Most Things: Harry tries to argue against Tamelyn's insistence that all Muggles hate anyone who's "different", saying that just because she had bad experiences doesn't mean they're all like that. Yet when he starts thinking it over, Harry realizes that the Dursleys, his teachers, the neighbors, and every other Muggle he's ever met has been exactly the same.
- Explosive Results: Harry and Tam find out the hard way what happens if one tries to power the Patronus charm with a memory of watching someone die.
- Gender Flip: Voldemort is born a girl named Tamelyn Riddle instead of a boy named Tom Riddle.
- Heel Realization: Downplayed. At the end of his third year, Harry realizes that he's never really been a good person so much as a bad person trying to do good things. Notably, Harry admits that his arguing against Tam killing Aunt Marge was because arguing that killing was wrong was easier than admitting he enjoyed it and wished he'd done it himself. But even when he admits that he's a bad person, Harry just shrugs the revelation off and admits he can live with it.
- Kids Are Cruel: The children of Wool's Orphanage lock Tamelyn in her room in the middle of a bombing raid and refuse to let her in the bomb shelter when she gets out. She has to hide in a nearby sewer drain and narrowly escapes being blown up.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Dumbledore's insistence in sending Tamelyn back to the orphanage in the middle of a war leads to Voldemort's Start of Darkness.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Tamelyn hates Grindelwald partially because of this - while she doesn't necessarily disagree with his goals, she considers his plan as being particularly stupid and only having managed to make muggles even more of a threat than they already were.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Tamelyn regularly reminds Harry of his Leeroy Jenkins tendencies, particularly that he tried to fight a Basilisk as a twelve-year-old with literally no plan at all. She makes it quite clear that event alone has convinced her he'd get them both killed if she ever left him alone for a few hours.
- Open Secret: Remus Lupin's lycanthropy is a downplayed example. Harry mentions it offhand and Katie remarks that one'd have to be a complete idiot to not realize, but Angelina had no idea. Katie even points out that not only is Lupin "sick" every full moon, but Snape's substitute lessons are always about werewolves and how to identify them.
- Orphanage of Fear: Wool's Orphanage for Tamelyn, largely thanks to the other children. and when she gets some control over her powers, she makes it one of those for them as well.
- Point of Divergence: Some minor ones happen as a result of the fic's events:
- Since Hagrid is never cleared from involvement in the Chamber of Secrets debacle, he doesn't become the Care of Magical Creatures teacher, which butterflies away the entire Malfoy and Buckbeak subplot in third year.
- Harry convinces Neville to not to keep a password list on his person, which keeps Sirius from entering the castle a second time.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Tamelyn spares Ginny and instead combines with the Horcrux in Harry's scar because it's faster and easier, while leaving behind far less evidence, compared to killing them both.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Tamelyn firmly believes this. But then again, as Harry points out, since she hates feeling weak or powerless most of all, it's not much of a surprise she'd consider rape worse than murder.
- Secret Secret-Keeper: By the end of Harry's third year at Hogwarts, Dumbledore has deduced that the fragment of Voldemort's soul in the diary has somehow possessed Harry and the two are now Sharing a Body. He chooses not to confront Harry over this as he doesn't want to risk tipping Tamelyn off, he has no real evidence to convince anyone else, and he believes this might somehow relate to the prophecy about Harry vanquishing Voldemort.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Bertha Jorkins doesn't go to Albania because she wants to meet Harry at a party being hosted by Fudge. As such, she never runs into Voldemort and even gets her memories restored when Harry tries to read her mind.
- Start of Darkness: The event that sets Tamelyn on the road to becoming Voldemort is nearly getting killed during a bombing raid, which makes her obsessed with attaining immortality.
- This Is Your Brain on Evil: Dark magic is literally addicting, with Tamelyn declaring that said addiction is the only reason why anyone would use the Unforgiveables, stating that casting the killing curse "feels like a corpse passing through your soul" and is utterly revolting.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Binns, of all people, is the one who introduces Tamelyn to horcruxes - although he doesn't know about horcruxes himself, he mentions that Herpo the Foul survived the complete destruction of his body, which is exactly the sort of immortality that she is looking for, and she quickly begins researching that.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Tamelyn wants to kill off muggle-borns in the short term and remove them from their parents immediately after birth in the long term because she's trying to protect wizarding kind from muggles. The reason is that the Statute of Secrecy is basically a super Fidelius Ward that keeps magic hidden and is anchored to muggles' disbelief in magic, with every muggle who knows of magic weakening it. If too many muggles in one area know about magic, it will result in a cascading failure of that Statute that will out magic to the entire world. Between her own childhood and having lived through the London Blitz, Tamelyn is utterly certain that muggles would go to war against wizards and completely wipe them out.
- What Measure Is a Mook?: Inverted. Harry takes cruel satisfaction from Tamelyn murdering Aunt Marge but is horrified when she does the same to a future rapist, even asking her if "Several prevented rapes are worth a murder".
