Harry Potter gets smart and takes control - The Goblet

Chapter 53 Lily & Sev

TRIGGER WARNINGS! This one has some trigger warnings! The details are at the bottom of the page for anyone who wants to check them.If I put them here they'll contain spoilers for everyone.

That night after the dinner shift they sat in front of the fire in Harry's Room. Hermione read one of Harry's books to catch up to where he is on their study schedule, and Harry opened up his mum's diary.

*

By the looks of it, the summer after his mother's fifth year had been intense. She had filled two whole notebooks with journal entries just from the summer alone. First of all, a distant relative had died earlier in the year, leaving Lily and her sister with a sizeable inheritance. This considerably eased the financial strain she'd lived with her whole life. Even though both her parents worked full time, they still struggled to make enough to make ends meet in Cokesworth. The inheritance meant that Lily could pay her own way, easing the burden on her parents. She put it to good use on her education and supporting herself at once.

The other thing that had his mother up in harms that summer was the Ministry. She had found out, purely by coincidence, that the Ministry offered more OWLs than at Hogwarts. There had been a tiny article in the profit mentioning that the first muggleborn to ever be issued a time turner had had a breakdown and flunked all her exams.

Lily had been furious back in her third-year to learn that she was denied the chance to study extra classes as it would require a time turner. And the Ministry didn't give time-turners out to muggleborns. It added insult to injury, when she then learnt that the Ministry offered extra subjects, not on the Hogwarts curriculum and she'd never been told.

She'd gone into the Ministry several times that summer to demand long distance enrolment in some of the courses. They were reluctant to let a muggleborn enrol as surly she should not do as well as her pureblood peers. On her 3rd attempt, she managed to get a witch, that she then managed to persuade to sign her up.

"You know you'll never get all these subjects done by the time you graduate," the witch had said, "and really, you're wasting your time! muggleborns just don't understand enough to make it that far."

Lily had devoted quite a few pages to her rant about how rude the women had been. And how long it took her to persuade her that, no she wasn't stupid, she had 11 owls thank you very much! And yes, she could do it before she graduated because they had a policy of using time turners!

The women had apparently coughed and spluttered, but Harry's mother had managed to persuade the women that she was 'desperate to fit in, and be like all the pureblood and integrate herself properly. She'd spun a pretty tale that appealed to the witche's pureblood ideas.

His mother had not managed the time turner, however. Still, she did manage to sign up for several extra classes including, Etiquette and Culture, Religion, Ancient Studies, Spell Creation and Enchanting. She'd also signed up for the language OWL. With language potions, it was a relatively easy OWL. She'd wanted to sign up for Art and Alchemy as well but knew that without a time turner, five extra subjects would be a tough let alone two on top of that just for fun.

Then she just had to manage them all and get her NEWTs.

The rest of her summer had been filled with a haze of studying and more time turner applications, that were unsuccessful. Lily spent a lot of time ignoring Potter's persistent owls and trying not to dwell on the conflict with Sev. That too took up a good deal of space in her diary entries.

Normally she and Sev spent most of the summer in the park between their houses, in Lily's kitchen brewing or studying, or inventing spells and potions. But this summer it was long hours studying, avoiding the issue, avoiding the hurt, and avoiding Petunia who had gotten colder and crueler towards her sister.