Fanfic / How Friendship Accidentally Saved Magical Britain

How Friendship Accidentally Saved Magical Britain is a comedic What If? Harry Potter fanfiction written by map_of_mysteries and hosted on Archive of Our Own. The story ran from November 2021 to August of the following year, concluding with the 22-chapter main installment, How Fred and George Accidentally Befriended a Wannabe Dark Lord, and The Hunt for Bellatrix’s Last Horcrux, a "missing scene" short story.

While sorting their family's collective school supply purchases for the 1992-93 school year at Hogwarts, Fred and George Weasley discover a leatherbound diary that they're pretty sure they didn't have the money to buy, so they tuck it away and resolve to use it to record ideas for pranks. That is, until their words vanish and are replaced with the elegant handwriting of an entity that introduces himself as Tom Marvolo Riddle. How will the echo of the boy who would eventually become Lord Voldemort stack up against the Weasley twins? Naturally, Hilarity Ensues.

Being led by resident pranksters Fred and George, this fic has a much more lighthearted and comedic tone than canon, and offers a different perspective of life at Hogwarts outside of the sorts of trouble that tend to follow the Boy Who Lived and his associates. After decades of complete isolation with only his thoughts and some of his creator's memories for company, the Tom Riddle who emerges from the Diary is very much distinct from Voldemort, especially with the likes of Fred and George serving as his first and only outside contact.

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This fanfic includes examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming: Umbridge accosts Tom at dinner, and he (genuinely) accidentally calls her "Professor Umbitch" with perfect sincerity, much to his classmates' horror and delighted awe. He decides to roll with it and insist that, yes, he was in fact referring to her, Professor Umbitch, which she responds to by attempting to curse him, prompting Moody to descend upon her and transform her into a toad. He doesn't even get detention or any kind of discipline for disrespecting a faculty member, and she stays the hell away from Tom for the rest of the school year. So it all works out in the end.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Because he rebuilds himself with bits of the Weasley twins' souls and via magical accident, the body that Tom winds up with upon exiting the Diary has reddish copper-colored hair instead of his canonical dark hair, and skin that freckles easily, making him look very much like a Prewett, Molly Weasley's family. Even his features are slightly altered, such that he legitimately passes for a relative of Molly's, which has the secondary effect of keeping anyone who knew him back in the 1940s, Dumbledore included, from ever figuring out who he actually is. Tom is aghast that he is not only ginger now, but has freckles.
• Adaptational Heroism: Tom despises Voldemort and wants to kill him, and his nearly fifty years spent fully conscious and imprisoned within the Diary have left him wary of committing crimes like he used to and risking going into any kind of real prison. When he finds out about the other horcruxes, he hunts them down and destroys them himself, sometimes at great risk to his safety and wellbeing — removing Harry's horcrux knocks him unconscious for days on end. He also becomes actual friends with Harry, leading the charge when Harry is kidnapped, and is ultimately the one to kill Voldemort for good in the end.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Canon describes Fred and George as mostly Book Dumb and uninterested in school once they decide to open a joke shop, but this fic makes them downright geniuses adept at research and spellcraft with Fred having a head for numbers (both arithmancy and muggle mathematics) and magical theory and George being skilled at transfiguration and potions — enough that George is one of the very few fourth-year students hand-picked by Snape to brew the Mandrake Restorative Draught for the petrifications. They also both resolve to get good grades on their OWLs and NEWTs so that they're taken seriously after school as proper, qualified businessmen and inventors. The first time the Diary writes back to them, they immediately stop and run a battery of diagnostic spells against it, and even remove a compulsion built into it that would've made them obsessed with writing in it before they touch it again. There's several scenes of them spending hours in the library reading up on cool spells and applications of magic that can be used or altered for pranks, and even repurposing them on occasion for legitimate non-prank products that they patent and sell while they're still in school. Fred even figures out, with the help of a muggle quantum physics textbook, how to get a spell to go through physical matter... and tests it by stunning Percy through an armchair.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Tom is for the most part harmless and just a regular run-of-the-mill arrogant Slytherin whose idea of revenge is mostly restricted to childish hexes and hiding somebody's shoes, even if he does also know a lot of obscure Dark magic and regularly (jokingly?) threatens people who annoy him with death, which the twins are pretty sure he'd be able to get away with. It's hard to be afraid of Tom when he spends most of his time fussing over his pet snakes or cocooned in blankets doing his best impression of a caterpillar in a pupa. With no access to (or likely even regard for) the Original's memories of the prophecy or the Boy Who Lived, Tom holds no quarrel, hatred, or obsession for Harry. They even become casual friends, with Tom sneaking Harry groceries during the summer holidays so he doesn't starve when he's with the Dursleys and even taking Harry on a few excursions to get him out of the house.
• Adaptational Protagonist: Fred and George Weasley, and Tom Riddle are the primary protagonists of this fanfic and the only narrators, while Harry Potter himself, although still important to this story's plot, only shows up a handful of times. Focusing on characters outside of Harry's year gives a slightly more normal look at life at Hogwarts without the "Boy Who Lived" stuff being as prominent. It also gives insight into the sheer amount of work, research, and ingenuity that goes into the twins' famous pranks, as well as a closer look into the founding and development of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes and the owl-order service that preceded it.
• Ambiguously Gay: During Moody's Imperius-breaking exercise, he compels Cedric to serenade the prettiest person in the room, which in Cedric's mind is apparently... Tom. Tom puffs up a bit, enjoying the ego-boost.
• Animal Motifs: Taking a page from the Marauders, the Powers of Friendship give themselves pseudonyms inspired by their Patronuses. Elestren is Carrion (vulture), Tom is Gold-Digger (Niffler), Fred is Vulpine (fox), George is Vandal (magpie), and Lee is Snoop (dolphin).
• Announcer Chatter: When Lee accidentally swallows one of the twins' experimental candies and loses his voice just before a Quidditch game, Elestren fills in for him as announcer and turns out to be shockingly good at it, her commentating style being a mirror of Lee's only biased in favor of Slytherin. (She also calls Fred and George Tweedledee and Tweedledum.) Once Lee recovers, the two do the announcing together for the rest of their time at Hogwarts, with their respective biases balancing each other out and their banter enhancing the entertainment value of the matches.
• An Arm and a Leg: George accidentally burns most of Lupin's right hand/paw off trying to defend himself from Lupin's werewolf form. Since that was his wand hand, Lupin has to relearn all of the wand movements all over again using his left, which he turns into a highly effective learning opportunity for the remaining month of school- any student able to pull off the spell being taught before Lupin manages it gets ten House points, and the first one to pull it off gets fifty.
• Artificial Human: The fragment of soul bound to the Diary doesn't directly have most of the original Tom Riddle's memories and only develops his personality by reading the drivel the original un-split Riddle had written in the Diary, such that he considers himself totally separate from Voldemort, who he calls "the Original". Fred and George (accidentally incorrectly) conduct a Dark ritual at midnight on Beltane (May 1st) in an attempt at conjuring an effigy that will be compelled to finally give them true answers as to the Diary's nature, but it turns out that Tom was trying his own ritual at the exact same time to exit the Diary, causing both rituals to go... not quite right, instead conjuring up a fancy new body for one Tom Marvolo Riddle. And thanks to the soul bits Tom had been absorbing from the twins on the sly, his conjured body strongly resembles that of a Prewett, with coppery hair in contrast to his canonical dark hair, and freckles, much to his horror.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • George learns a ridiculously powerful and obscure spell that wreaths himself in incredibly hot fire strong enough to destroy most things on contact and burn through bone, but it's so energy-intensive that George can only sustain it for brief periods before passing out. Additionally, the spell only protects against physical contact and not spellfire; as wizarding fights are nearly always ranged, this makes it a liability in combat.
  • Fred figures out how to cast spells through physical matter. While it's very useful for hexing prank targets through walls and other obstacles, doing so takes a lot of concentration and drains his magical reserves much faster than normal, making it an unreliable technique in a real fight.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Due to having soul bits in common with the Weasley twins, Tom is unable to lie specifically to them, as their shared souls act like a compulsion that keeps him from doing anything more than misdirecting them, which will only slow the likes of Fred and George down for a little bit. Lying to literally anyone else is fair game, though.
• Chekhov's Gun: When Tom moves in with Frances Cooper, a former cop, he gains an interest in handling and firing muggle firearms and spends his summers practicing his marksmanship at the local firing range, even getting a full gun license. Wizards are always caught off-guard when faced with muggle weaponry, after all, especially firearms, and bullets can be enchanted with runes to pierce common shield charms easily. Hence why Tom is able to simply blow his alter-ego's brains out.
• Cool Car: Tom liberates the Weasleys' now-feral Ford Anglia from the Forbidden Forest and spends the summer of 1993 fixing it up and giving it a new, shiny coat of bright red paint. The car still has expansion charms on it from when it was with the Weasleys so it can comfortably seat several people plus luggage, and it's also fully sentient now and very happy to fly itself.
• Cool Old Lady: Frances Cooper, Tom's (semi-fake) relative and guardian, is a retired police officer who teaches criminology at Oxford and gets Tom into shooting muggle guns, a hobby that proves very useful in the climax. She also apparently has "connections" that allow her to easily secure an identity and papers for Tom's newfound existence in the muggle world, and is widow to a squib from the Prewett family, so she's familiar with magic and doesn't bat an eye at her new ward setting up a potions lab in her basement.
• Dead Pet Sketch: The "pet" in question is actually Scabbers the rat, AKA Peter Pettigrew, canonical backstabbing Death Eater extraordinaire, so this turns out to be a good thing. Fred and George dig up a Dark ritual intended to give them real answers as to the true nature of the Diary. One of the requirements of the ritual is the sacrifice of a beloved family pet, and the twins obviously commandeer Scabbers for this, but not before transfiguring an identical replacement so that Ron is none the wiser. That Scabbers was never really a rat to begin with has unexpected... consequences for the ritual, and the replacement rat causes a minor misunderstanding when Sirius breaks out of Azkaban bent on seeking revenge against Pettigrew.
• Dies Differently In The Adaptation:
  • At the end of Harry's second year, the Weasley twins dig up an obscure and Dark ritual to gather information about how the Diary works and what, exactly, it is. One of the requirements of the ritual is the sacrifice of a longtime family pet, and for that, the twins use Scabbers, unknowingly killing Peter Pettigrew in the process roughly five years earlier than canon. In their defense, they had no idea Scabbers was anything other than an oddly long-lived rat, and this predictably causes a few issues once Sirius breaks out of prison.
  • Barty Crouch Jr. dies when George desperately casts a (perhaps overpowered) household cooking spell at him and pulverizes him into a fine red paste, instead of getting Dementor-Kissed maybe a year or so later.
  • Voldemort himself dies for good on the wrong end of Tom's muggle rifle, loaded with bullets engraved with runes that allow them to pierce most shield spells, in the graveyard maybe two hours after he was resurrected with Barty Crouch Jr. as his only ally instead of three years later at the end of a highly destructive war, brief coup, and a Final Battle with thousands of Death Eaters at Hogwarts.
• Does Not Like Spam: Tom despises pickled foods, a trait he shares with the Original Tom Riddle, who would go on page-long rants about them writing in the Diary. When the twins confront Tom about being Voldemort, Tom muses to himself about the idiom of "being in a pickle" and decides that pickles, being culinary abominations, are a perfect way to describe difficult situations.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Elestren Parkinson is described by Fred as looking like a creepy porcelain doll, with milk-white skin, jet black hair, and oddly petite proportions.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Tom's new surname Gaunt-Prewett is initially abbreviated to "GP", which gets immediately rendered by the other Slytherins (and eventually Hermione) into "Yippee". Tom, naturally, hates it, but he comes to own it anyway.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Sirius Black is convinced his cousin Bellatrix Lestrange made a trio of Horcruxes after two are discovered in places significant to her, being the Black family's home and her personal bank vault. As per canon, Bellatrix didn't make any Horcruxes and they both belong to Voldemort; the fact that more than one Horcrux ended up in a location connected to the Black family was unintended on their owner's part.
• Everyone Has Standards: Fred and George admit to being a little amoral and consider the law to be "a bendable guideline that could be disregarded at one's own discretion", but even they consider Lockhart Obliviating people and taking credit for their achievements to be just wrong. So they successfully oust Lockhart by framing him for the petrifications.
• Evil Twin: Tom treats his creator, the current Voldemort, a bit like this, in that he considers himself (and is for all intents and purposes) a completely separate individual from Voldemort, and also hates him. Tom and the twins claim that the original Voldemort is Tom's evil grandfather, and their friends accept that as Tom's "dark secret".
• Final Exam Finale: For the story's climax, the main student characters pull out all the stops and throw literally everything they've learned and created over the course of the story at Voldemort, from invented hexes and prototype joke products, to Fred's newly discovered "casting through walls" technique and Tom's love of muggle firearms.
• Flight:
  • For a prank at the end of their third year, the twins give Mrs. Norris wings, unintentionally making the cat faster and more mobile and virtually silent, allowing her to catch 60% more students than before, much to Filch's delight. The wings remain for at least the full three year duration of the story, forcing the twins (and their prank-loving friends) to dodge her.
  • The summer after his OWL year, Tom becomes obsessed with learning how to fly wandlessly and without any external implements such as brooms, flying carpets, or wings, because if Voldemort could do that even with magic that Tom says should've been severely damaged after making his Horcruxes, it should be child's play for Tom and his relatively undamaged magic. This leads to him repeatedly throwing himself off of roofs and balconies (with cushioning charms under him, don't worry), and hurling himself at trees and into mud puddles as Fred and George look on in bemusement. By the time of the Quidditch World Cup, Tom is able to consistently hover off of the ground by two inches.
• Geek Physiques: Tom is skinny and has "noodle arms", as the twins put it. He's so out of shape that lifting his own uncharmed trunk with his noodle arms is a great burden to him, and climbing the rope ladder into the divination classroom presents a genuine challenge to his nonexistent core strength. Being a proud wizarding scholar, he considers any and all forms of physical labor and activity to be beneath him. Fred and George, who routinely undergo strength and endurance training as part of their roles as Beaters on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, are highly amused by this.
• Gilligan Cut: Tom figures out from what the twins write to him that the only thing that could be behind all of the school's petrifications is Salazar Slytherin's basilisk, and he resolves to absolutely not tell them anything about it, nor how to access the Chamber of Secrets. In the very next section, he caves after the twins tell him that the Ministry has sent the Aurors to investigate because he worries that the Aurors may decide to close the school down, and as much as he cares for the Chamber, he cares for Hogwarts as a whole even more.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Tom has spent the last fifty years imprisoned within his Diary, fully conscious, with no contact with the outside world from the moment of the horcrux's creation, and nothing better to do with his time than pore over every single word of drivel that the Original wrote in the Diary, and also take advantage of the Original's Photographic Memory and reread books he'd memorized. When "Forge" does finally write in the Diary, the trope is ultimately subverted as Tom becomes desperate and almost needy for them to keep writing and talking to him now that he's tasted human contact again, and if there was any lingering Voldemort-esque insanity, his conversations with the Weasley twins rebuild his soul enough to give him things like empathy and human emotions and also a taste for pranks. Lampshaded when Tom emerges from the Diary and George nervously asks him if he's feeling sane, which Fred responds to by stating that if Tom wasn't sane, he by definition wouldn't be self-aware enough to accurately answer that question.
• Groin Attack: Fred desperately tries out a hair waxing charm on the newly revived Voldemort as a diversion, not expecting it to do anything since he's very clearly bald, only for the Dark Lord to double over for a moment, clutching his crotch and ass. What a way to discover that even Lord Voldemort has hair down there, as though anyone was asking or wanted to know. Fred and Emily are so shocked by this discovery that they nearly lose their advantage.
• Guile Hero: Fred and George are crafty enough to make any Slytherin proud, not just with wandwork and combining and altering spells for their own purposes, but also socially when bribing and convincing people to do what they want.
• Horse of a Different Color: For Fred and George's prank at the end of their sixth year (Harry's fourth), they paint the thestrals pulling the carriages with glowing paint, making them semi-visible even to people who can't see the creatures. They even take advantage of the thestrals' invisibility to create patterns on both sides of them that line up at certain angles. For the record, the twins can both see thestrals because they happened to watch their great aunt pass away from old age.
• Humanity Is Infectious: When Tom starts surreptitiously absorbing soul bits from "Forge", he winds up absorbing some of the twins' personalities, leading to him gaining a newfound desire to play pranks, something resembling a conscience, and even empathy that sees him becoming almost fond of "Forge", as annoying as "he" is.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: George accidentally gains one when Lupin attacks him in werewolf form. They're just slight scratches and not bites, and George thinks they look more like he got attacked by a cat than a near-death encounter with a Dark creature, but since they're from a magical being, the scars can't be removed with magic, and he and Fred are dismayed at not being able to easily pass as the other anymore. Whenever George and Lupin see each other afterward, Lupin can't help but look sadly at George's scars, and George looks sadly at Lupin's mangled hand in turn.
• Improvised Weapon: Fred and George do very well in mock duels repurposing various household, personal grooming, and prank spells as diversions — it's hard to focus when the hair has been magically waxed from your body (complete with pain), or if your cloak or shoes or underwear have just teleported over to your opponent. Even Moody is impressed at the twins' ability to distract opponents. George accidentally kills Barty Crouch, Jr. using a (perhaps slightly overpowered) common household cooking spell designed to blend up ingredients — it completely pulverizes him into a fine paste of blood, viscera, and bone chunks.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: One of the twins' many product ideas for their joke shop is a "Miniature You" candy inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Fred accidentally knocks an experimental shrinking solution into George's cauldron during potions class and discovers a decently stable formula that would work for the candies, as the potion explodes and shrinks the two down to a height of eight inches. Fred notes that Snape is much, much scarier when you're not even a foot tall and he's yelling at you. Later, the twins utilize their shrinking candies to slip into Umbridge's personal quarters in the castle through a slightly opened window.
• I Hate Past Me: Diary-Tom has had fifty years spent in complete isolation with nothing better to do than poring over and analyzing every single word of drivel the Original Tom Riddle wrote in the Diary and has come to several unfavorable conclusions about his other self. For the most part, he considers Voldemort a tosser and an idiot, especially for seriously insisting on using a moniker that they came up with when they were twelve, and also for being a blood supremacist, considering that the Original is a half-blood.
• Kidnapped from Behind: After the end of the 1994-95 Hogwarts term, Harry is at the very back of his group of friends when he's kidnapped in broad daylight on the Muggle side of King's Cross Station by an Apparating Barty Crouch, Jr.
• Large Ham: Tom often goes on pages-long rants in the Diary about how stupid "Forge" is, complete with foul language and novel insults that the twins can't help but record for later use. This lecturing/ranting tendency continues once Tom exits the Diary and becomes a fully human student, where he gets on his metaphorical soapbox in the Slytherin common room and rants about things like the student body's disdain for divination.
  Diary!Tom: Fuckwitted, imbecilic bastards – both of you! I cannot believe you two boneheads deluded yourself into thinking that this was a good idea. I swear to Morgana, if you pull anything like this again, I will show you the true meaning of…
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Unlike in canon, Tom Riddle succeeds in fully exiting the Diary at the end of the canonical Chamber debacle, complete with his own functional body, and he goes on to become a major character. This occurs only a third of the way through the story, and basically everything he does from there would be impossible for him to do from within the Diary, leaving it difficult to talk about the story without revealing that particular canon divergence.
• Lighter and Softer: This fic is led by famed pranksters Fred and George Weasley, plus their adopted cousin the newly revived Tom Riddle. Tom's long years of isolation in the Diary have left him bitter towards Voldemort, and absorbing bits of soul from the Weasley twins has mellowed him out and given him a bit of a taste for pranks himself. The canon plot and associated events that follow Harry are mostly in the background, giving this fic space to be something more along the lines of a Slice of Life story for (essentially) regular students at Hogwarts. There's lots of petty student rivalries, Quidditch, schoolwork, research sessions for pranks, silly antics, and also some accidental assault and murder of bad people. It's all in good fun.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Tom accidentally tilted one of the runes engraved in the bullet that killed Voldemort, causing blood and brain matter to violently gush out of the wound at random like a horrible geyser.
• Machine Monotone: It's magic and thus not actually a machine, but it's mentioned that existing audiobook spells used by visually impaired and disabled wizards to read books aloud sound flat and toneless and perhaps not unlike a muggle text-to-speech program, an aspect that the twins manage to overcome with their own audiobook spell, which can read any text aloud in any voice that the caster is familiar with.
• Magic Map: After giving up the Marauder's Map to Harry, Fred and George decide that they need to make their own. It takes them over a year, but they manage it, and also add some enhancements over the original, including a search function for quickly locating a specific person, zoom capabilities, automatic layout updates (in case a passageway becomes inaccessible or the walls change, as the castle is wont to do), the ability to track ghosts and some pets, and two passwords, because the twins were able to figure out the original Map's password as first-years, which they consider to be poor security. The new map is called The Power of Friendship, after the rest of the group imagines how silly it would be for Tom to ask them for something by that name, and the two passwords are "All for one, one for all" and a (anachronistic) verse from the My Little Pony theme, the latter of which must be sung.
• Meaningful Rename: Tom's new name becomes Thomas Mervyn Gaunt-Prewett, on account of how his stolen bits of Weasley souls have given his new body some of the coloring and features of a Prewett, Molly Weasley's family. Molly, being the de-facto matriarch of the House of Prewett, all but adopts him, giving him a family, and he even gets dragged along on the family's Egypt trip.
• Must Have Caffeine: Tom is not a morning person, doubly so when he's living in a drafty castle in Scotland and needs piles and piles of blankets to function. Most people learn quickly not to talk to him until he's on his third cup of strong black tea, and Elestren is able to successfully ply Tom out of his bed on a lazy Saturday with a steaming mug of extra-strong coffee.
• Naked First Impression: Tom emerges from the Diary buck naked, shivering in the Scottish nighttime chill and just as shocked to suddenly have a body again as the twins are to see their kind-of buddy in the flesh. Eventually, after gaping at the Weasley-esque freckles all over Tom's body and having a debate with Fred as to whether Tom is sane and if it would even be practical to ask him at all, George chucks his outer robe at Tom's head. Tom manages to find a whole wardrobe of decently fitting discarded clothes in the Room of Hidden Things.
• Named by the Adaptation: The Fat Lady is given an actual name, Margery Farley. She likes to meet with Atria Black for tea on Tuesdays and is an expert in pyromancy, i.e. explosions.
• Omniglot: Tom speaks several languages other than his native English and can read even more than that, which he learned so that he could read tomes of Dark magic from other cultures. One of these languages is Mandarin Chinese, and he's apparently fluent enough in speaking that to cringe at Fred's pronunciation of Chinese-language spells. German, the language of the country that Tom claims to have been living in for the first decade-plus of his life, is apparently not one of his languages, although he does make attempts to rectify that. He also winds up learning to understand "car", the particular Starfish Language used by the flying Ford Anglia that once belonged to the Weasleys, and he puts his language skills to work redeveloping the twins' audiobook spell to read books in ten other languages.
• Original Character: This fic introduces Elestren Parkinson, a Slytherin girl a year older than the twins and three years older than Harry, who becomes Vitriolic Best Buds with the twins. Her relation to the canonical Pansy Parkinson (whether older sister or cousin) is not stated. The twins also find a mysterious painting in an out-of-the-way corridor of a woman named Atria Black, who has many interesting stories and may have been a follower of a Dark Lady. Again, her relation to any canonical members of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black is not stated, and the only clue as to when she lived is that she is at least a couple centuries old, which would place her squarely in an era of the Black family with no named canonical members.
• Poor Communication Kills: During that incident in Lockhart's dueling club where Harry accidentally reveals his Parseltongue, it turns out that he actually told the snake to flee and get help because he assumed Snape was going to hurt the snake, expecting the snake to just go to a fellow regular snake. But since the request came from a Parselmouth, the snake instead went to the basilisk, who is considered the king of all Hogwarts snakes, and the basilisk responded to this by petrifying random students regardless of blood status with reckless abandon, finishing out the year with two dozen petrified students who now had to take summer school and Snape needing assistance from his top potions students to brew enough Mandrake Restorative Draught. Luckily, as soon as Harry asks the basilisk to stop petrifying people, it happily complies and retreats to its burrow.
• The Prankster: Fred and George prefer to put their magical talents towards pranking, as in canon, but Tom Riddle, of all people, winds up gaining a taste for pranks as well, thanks to (somewhat unwilling) influence from the twins. His first prank is when he's still in the Diary — the twins had been relying on his magical knowledge, so he gives them a spell to try out that he claims enhances their hearing, only for it to make the twins' ears grow to the size of melons for two days on top of enhancing their hearing. It comes precisely during a time when Fred and Elestren won't stop getting into rows with each other, forcing George to hear every inane word at maximum volume.
• Refuge in Audacity: Harry accidentally outs himself as a Parselmouth and gets accused and bullied by the entire student body of being the next Dark Lord in the making? Heartbreaking, especially for an abused kid who never had a choice in the event that gave him said Parseltongue. Fred and George donning black hooded cloaks lined with portable smokescreens so they look like they're gliding like Dementors, proclaiming Dark Lord Harry's presence through the corridors, and pretending to be Harry's new Dark followers? Pretty funny. Summoning storm clouds to follow Harry around and crackle scarily? Even better. Convincing Lee Jordan, Ron, and the three Gryffindor Chasers to get in on the prank, adding a pair of glowing red lights to the shadowed face area of Angelina's hood, and Angelina demonstrating a talent for a truly sinister Evil Laugh? Priceless, and so worth the detentions.
• Shout-Out: George takes Muggle Studies, and part of that class entails watching muggle films, including Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Star Wars, inspiring the twins to recreate things from those movies, such as a flying carpet (which is much harder to operate than a broomstick), dancing cutlery, and (thankfully nonfunctional) lightsabers. Some of them, particularly recreating the entire "Be Our Guest" sequence with the school's cutlery, singing candelabra versions of the school faculty, and writing new Hogwarts-specific lyrics, prove extremely complicated. The entire school was delighted by it, and all of the faculty members pocketed their respective candelabra statuettes bearing their likenesses, even Snape. For the practical portion of the Charms OWL, Fred and George are asked to summon lightning, so they use an altered lightning spell to emit lightsaber blades from the ends of their wands and enact a lightsaber duel in the middle of the test, much to Flitwick's amusement, and they still get a top grade!
• Significant Name Overlap: On Harry's suggestion, Tom names the African bush snake he liberates from the zoo "Draco", specifically because the thought of Tom's new snake friend and the self-important Malfoy heir having the same name makes Harry snicker. This comes to a head when Draco (Malfoy) storms into the Slytherin common room demanding that Tom stop pretending that the two of them are an item or his father will hear about this, after Tom's yearmates have spent all term listening to Tom go on about Draco (the snake) needing to be hand-fed, bathed, petted to sleep, and kissed. Draco (Malfoy) gets laughed out of the room, of course.
• Single-Minded Twins: Subverted with Fred and George's portrayal in this fic; they have different talents and skills that complement each other, take different electives, and have slightly different social circles and friends. They note in narration that their claim that they were telepathic with each other is actually a lie and have come to simultaneously regret convincing people of that and at times wish they actually had it.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Per the premise, the piece of Tom Riddle in the Diary survives the events of Chamber of Secrets on account of not being a murderous git, as does the basilisk, simply by Harry asking it to stop petrifying people, at which point it returns to its nest without complaint and stops petrifying people, leaving further action unnecessary. Additionally, Cedric survives the events of Goblet of Fire on account of the lack of Triwizard Tournament, Fred survives the defeat of Voldemort, and since Voldemort was killed for good mere hours after his revival at the end of Harry's fourth year, he was unable to break into the Department of Mysteries or take over the Ministry and Hogwarts, meaning Sirius and everyone else who dies after Goblet of Fire due to Voldemort's actions is spared, too.
• Starfish Language: Tom meets the Weasleys' Ford Anglia on the Hogwarts grounds by pure chance, which has become fully sentient during its months spent living in the Forbidden Forest with the other creatures, and he winds up becoming fluent in "car", a language that consists of headlight blinks and horn honks, as it regales him about its life in the forest and assures Tom that he need not learn how to drive, because it knows how to drive and fly itself, thank you very much.
• String Theory: Ginny, Neville, and Luna drag Fred into an empty classroom to show them their theory, with help from their "crazy wall" of photos, scrawled notes, documents clearly stolen from the Ministry, and string, of how Sirius Black escaped Azkaban, his movements, and possible plans. Of course, they're still working off of the assumption that Sirius is an evil Death Eater bent on murdering Harry, so none of it is correct, but they do uncover the suspicious circumstances surrounding Sirius's arrest and imprisonment without a trial and in so doing unwittingly get the ball rolling on his pardon.
• Strongly Worded Letter: Tom is so fed up with Lockhart after months of reading the twins' complaints about him in the Diary that he convinces them to transcribe a six foot long scroll of hate mail on Tom's behalf and anonymously send it to Lockhart. Lockhart tries to destroy it, but Fred and George knew this would happen and charmed it to always return to Lockhart in perfect condition no matter how he tries to destroy or dispose of it, and to also float behind him around the school reading aloud choice quotes from the letter in Lockhart's own voice.
• Unseen Pen Pal: Fred and George's interactions with Tom via the Diary have a similar effect to chatting via letters or email or what have you, in that the only things each side knows about the other come solely from what they write to each other. Fred and George write collectively in the journal under the name "Forge", not wanting to give a possibly Dark artifact their real names, and Tom, guessing correctly that the name is fake but unable to tell just who and how many are behind the name, is none the wiser and thinks for most of the school year that "Forge" is one person. Tom also finds it suspicious just how often the Diary is written in, since the twins take turns with it during their respective free periods, and asks them how they're managing to keep up with their studies. On the other hand, Tom sometimes goes on long monologues about one twin's particular area of expertise while the other twin has the Diary, such as going on about arithmancy to George, forcing him to hurriedly transcribe the monologue for Fred's later perusal before the words vanish.
• Vampiric Draining: In the Diary, Tom is able to steal little fragments of Fred and George's souls to build himself back up as they write in the journal, and the amount he can take from them is proportional to how emotionally close the words are to them. They mostly just ask Tom academic questions and complain about school to him, nothing very heavy, so he's only able to steal little bits of them, not enough for either one to even notice thanks to the fact that there's two of them, compared to him stealing soul bits from eleven-year-old Ginny only. It's his soul's unusually quick growth that leads to Tom realizing before he even leaves the journal, to his surprise and displeasure, that "Forge" is two people, not one.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • Fred meets Elestren Parkinson through her stalking him in revenge for an accident involving her friend, even long after Fred and that friend had reconciled. Fred and Elestren wind up partnered for a project in their arithmancy class and spend the whole time loudly sniping and arguing with each other over the theory and how to present it best, leading to them getting into shouting matches even outside of class and eventually gaining an odd sort of friendship and familiarity by the end. The twins choose to make her their bookkeeper for their fledgling business, and she has a lot of genuinely good advice and product ideas and even gets them a solicitor, all while still insulting Fred on the regular, and George calling her "Harpy".
  • Tom, despite his frustration and tirades, finds himself growing somewhat fond of the Weasley twins, at least in part because they were his only point of contact with the outside world when he was in the Diary and also because he absorbed some bits of their souls and accidentally became a bit "Weasley-like". Outside of the Diary, the friendship becomes a bit nicer, but no less strong, with Tom becoming especially close with Fred over his scholarly leanings, and later George over their mutual hatred of Voldemort. By the end of the story, Fred and George are still the only people who know Tom's true origins.
• What If?: After surviving the ordeal with Remus's werewolf form at the Shrieking Shack, Ron asks Tom for self-defense lessons, which see Ron learning new (moderately Dark) defensive spells and building up his reflexes. Ron's reflexes wind up catching one Barty Crouch, Jr. after the Death Eater attack at the Quidditch World Cup, revealing to the Ministry that he was not in Azkaban where he belonged, which leads to a large inquiry into corruption within the Ministry, and putting the kibosh on the Triwizard Tournament. This new inquiry also leads to Dolores Umbridge getting placed at Hogwarts as the teacher of a mandatory class on how to obey the Ministry alongside Alastor Moody (apparently the real one) as DADA professor, combining aspects of the plots of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix into the same year and allowing readers to witness Moody fighting against Umbridge and blocking her from using blood quills on students. All because Ron got twitchy and shot a hex in the direction of a noise.
• Wreathed in Flames: While trying to figure out a spell to make himself fireproof for personal protection while developing and assembling fireworks and flame-based prank gadgets, George massively overshoots his goal and finds a spell dating back to the witch burnings to "become one with the fire" that wreaths himself in actual, very, very hot fire that burns everything except himself and anything on his person, and is powerful enough to burn flesh not just down to, but THROUGH bone. However, the spell costs so much energy that George usually passes out after using it and it's only effective on physical contact, in a setting where real wizarding fights are almost always ranged.

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