Harry Potter gets smart and takes control - The Goblet

Chapter 32 Sev & Professor Snape

He was not going to say anything to anyone, Harry thought determinedly, as he put his potions homework back in his bag. If Professor Snape didn't want anyone to know that he was Lily's friend, Harry wouldn't tell. He'd done enough to the man already. His father had done enough to the man already.

But Harry had to know. He had to know what happened. Yes. He felt horribly torn about it. He wanted to know what happened, but if it had been him, he would not have wanted anyone to know. It would be a considerable breach of Professor Snape's privacy. But he had to know what his parents had done. He struggled with it, agonised over it before he slowly opened his mother's journals again.

He buried himself in her diaries, not pausing or looking up from his reading. He read through dinner, desperate to find some clue in a young Sev's world, desperate to find some good in the form of his mother to somehow make up for how bad his father was. He was desperate to have some sort of reassurance that it got better, that there was a happy ending, that at least his mother had been a good person and had been there for Sev.

But what he got from his mum's perspective seemed even worse as she talked about how Sev felt and how she hated it, and Harry's father. She and her friend Sev had clearly been very close growing up and continued to be through their Hogwarts years.

Harry wondered what had happened to them, feeling his heart clench at the continual reminders that her journal gave him, of just how awful his father and his friends were.

His mother's diaries had stopped at the end of OWL year. Shortly after Sev was assaulted in front of the school and Lily had stalked off after he called her a Mudblood. Sev'd waited for hours outside the common room for her all night. And when she finally came out, eyes red from crying, they had a screaming match.

She yelled at him for calling her a Mudblood. She'd been so hurt that he'd turned on her. That he'd used that word on her. He'd been quiet in regards to his friends using it. She didn't like it but she'd understood. She'd understood how hard it was for him in Slytherin surrounded by would-be Death Eaters when he wasn't one himself, when he was only a poor half-blood.

She understood needing to stay quiet and to fit-in to be safe. But then he turned on her, in a moment of embarrassment when she had been trying to help. That had been unforgivable. He'd yelled right back at her for calling him Snivillus and poking fun at his worn clothes, at abandoning him to be assaulted by the Marauders when they'd had him at their mercy.

They had screamed at each other, for hours, both furious and hurt. She hadn't spoken to him after that, despite how much she missed him. She could hold a grudge. Her parting words to him on the Hogwarts Express had cut Harry to the bone, on Sev's behalf.

"I never expected you to stand alone and stand out against them," she had written recalling their parting words, "I never expected you to stand up for me when it would draw their ire and the pain of their wands. We both know that's way too dangerous. They outnumber you too much and know where you sleep. I understand what you have to do, to stay in with the right people in that house; to survive there, such as it is in these dark times. As much as I hate it, I get it. Because there are no happy endings in the real world, we both know this.

There is no-one to save you in the real world. You have to do it yourself. Life sucks, and you have to do things you don't like to survive sometimes. Especially when you grow up as poor latch-key kids in Cokesworth like we did. But I expected you not to turn that bigotry on me. What happened Sev? It was us against the world. We swore houses would not change anything. Where's that Sev? I miss my friend, but he's nowhere to be seen."

Harry couldn't believe she'd left him like that, or that Sev'd said that to her, had called her a Mudblood. Harry ached as he read her entries. The more he read, the more he saw himself in both of them.