AN: All due and proper 'Thanks' to two wonderful betas, Fox Murphy and LysPotter. All mistakes are mine since I tweaked it a bit after they reviewed.
Disclaimer: In totality, I own an itchy brown sofa, matching over-sized chair and a friendly cat. I do not own Harry Potter. If J.K. Rowling would like to trade I am willing to part with the itchy furniture. I am attached to the cat.
The point is, don't sue me.
It was an ever-present fact of Harry's life that his parents had lived through a war that had ended sometime after his first birthday. Until he'd gone to Hogwarts, he'd been aware that his mother had played some vital role in it, enough so that she was dreadfully famous, without knowing what she'd really done.
Once, when Harry had been very young, his parents had taken him to Hogsmeade with one of their old school friends for lunch. Their friend, a man named Sirius Black, had bought Harry anything for which he had asked. Honeyduke's after lunch was then a must. Bursting from the shop, Harry's face was sticky and grinning with all the candy he'd managed to clutch in his tiny hands and his mother's eyes were laughing even as she scolded him to stop running ahead. The dark man's proven generosity had only convinced a greedy-eyed Harry to toddle straight to the wonderfully hovering, gleaming broomsticks clearly visible in a shop window. Seeing his intent, Sirius Black had laughed out loud and clapped Harry's father on the back.
"Well, James Potter, it seems the boy has inherited more than your sloppy hair-style!"
At the word 'Potter', passers-by had looked up and scanned their faces before settling on Harry's mother. With a few startled gasps, a small mob quickly surrounded her.
Harry turned back to his parents to point them and the dark man to the right broomstick only to find that he couldn't see his mum or dad at all.
"That's her!"
"Oh my God!"
"Get her autograph!"
"It's Lily Potter!"
"I can see her scar!"
Harry was frightened. He could hear his mother trying to move past them, her voice strained as she called for him.
"Harry! Where's Harry? James, I can't see Harry!"
"Sirius, get Harry and meet us back at the house." James called from somewhere near the edge of the growing crowd. Sirius's face filled Harry's tear-blurred view as he was tugged up into the man's arms.
"I've got him!" Sirius called out, and Harry could hear the two loud cracks of his parents as they apparated before his own world spun away.
His parents laughed about it later that evening, so had Harry, once his sobs had calmed down to a few hiccups. They had all quietly sipped tea and told each other how much they'd overreacted. Sirius had pulled a chocolate frog from behind Harry's ear and earned giggles from Harry and groans from his parents. They had a lovely dinner and pretended to forget about the whole thing.
Harry learned to never say his last name near his mother in wizarding public.
It seemed to Harry that something else had happened besides their role in the war that haunted his parents. The only time his father had ever spanked him and the first time his mother had not come to explain why he'd been punished was an incident that had confused Harry for some time. Nine year old Harry had been playing with his pudgy cousin Dudley in his cousin's garden while their parents talked stiffly to one another on the patio. Dudley was constantly calling for Harry to wait so as he could catch his breath. This only made Harry run faster away. Harry really couldn't help thinking how funny it would be to just float the wheezing Dudley up off the ground and watch his round, little legs peddle the air. No sooner had he thought it than Dudley was panicking as the ground moved beyond his uselessly stretched limbs. Harry laughed.
"Look at Pudley! See, pigs can fly!" Harry shouted gleefully at the freely spinning child.
Harry's mum dropped her glass and the sound it made caused Harry to lose enough of his focus on Dudley that the boy dropped to ground. Dudley screamed and Petunia rushed to him, with a purple-faced Vernon close behind. Harry knew Dudley wasn't hurt, he's only been a few feet from the the ground. The pillock was just overreacting for a bit of attention, which only made it funnier.
Harry turned to grin at his parents when the look of disbelieving horror on his mum's face stopped his laughter. She had not moved from where she'd dropped her glass and was looking between Harry and the still shrieking Dudley. Harry's dad had taken one look at his wife's face before turning to Harry with dark eyes and a set jaw. He'd firmly taken Harry by the shoulder, marched him inside and smacked him in three sharp bursts on the bum.
"We don't make fun of others, Harry. Never!"
Harry had been too surprised to cry, and even though it hurt to sit, he did so on the Dursley's frilly couch while his dad left to give their apologies and fetch Harry's mother to leave. When they'd got home, he'd been sent straight to his room. No dinner. Harry spent the night listening to his stomach growl and his mother sob, and he knew he didn't understand the full meaning of what he'd done wrong.
So many of his parents actions seem inexplicable to Harry. Harry could remember a few times when Remus Lupin, another old school friend with shabby clothes but the best stories, would solemnly arrive early in the morning and leave with Harry's father. It was one of the few times that his dad did not return home until well after the sun set. Harry sneaked out of bed each time to listen to them as they shared a few sober pints in the kitchen, curious beyond containment to know what they'd been up to. All Harry had ever been able to glean was that they visited someone bad. The someone was in the wizard prison, Azkaban. His parents, Remus Lupin and Sirius had all known the bad someone in school. He also knew that Sirius still hated whoever it was. Harry really didn't understand why anyone would want to visit an evil wizard, and thought that Sirius Black was right to not ever go.
It was not until his Sorting Feast at Hogwarts that Harry found out what his mother had done that had been so special in the war. Harry had become used to the murmurs that his last name could cause. It was no different when the Sorting Hat placed him in Gryffindor and his new house-mates crowded around with curious faces. Stupidly, Harry had hoped that at school he would find some respite from his mother's fame.
"Do you know how she did it?" It was a question from the bossy, disapproving girl he had met on the train. The other students tried not to look overly excited that they might hear this answer as Harry turned towards the girl.
"Did what?"
"What do you mean? How did she survive the killing curse? How did she beat You-Know-Who?" This last bit was whispered with an excited urgency that it made him wary.
"I don't know what you mean. And I don't Know-Who."
"You don't know that your mother survived a killing curse from the Darkest wizard ever known AND that she managed to destroy him too! How do you not know that! I know that and I'm muggleborn!" The girl's outrage seemed to infect those around them and Harry found himself surrounded by open-mouthed, identical looks of shock. Harry felt his ears burn.
"My parents don't talk about the war much. And I suppose you mean Voldemort." He shrugged and hoped that this would suffice. It was true, his parents simply refused to talk to him about what had happened to them. Only once, when Harry had asked his father who the bravest person in the war had been, hoping it had been his dad, Harry's father had simply said, "Severus Snape." Harry still didn't know who that was.
Harry's total lack of knowledge was not acceptable to the bossy girl, who he later found was named Hermione, and she spent the rest of dinner informing anyone who would listen, or wouldn't listen, about Harry's mother. Apparently, Voldemort had targeted his family when Harry was just a baby. His parents had gone into hiding, but Voldemort and one of his loyal followers had found them out. Hermione said what had happened next was still debated, but somehow his mother survived a killing curse that rebounded to kill the dark wizard. Since Harry's mother was the only person to have ever survived such a curse, everyone wanted to know how she did it. Ron, a red-haired boy that Harry had met on the train, told Harry through mouthfuls of food that Harry's mum was a hero and even had her own chocolate frog card. Ron later asked if Harry could get his mum to sign his card.
Harry could not help asking why hadn't his parents told him any of this. Strangers knew more about his family history than he did. Despite his promise to mail every week, Harry waited a whole month before replying to his parents' ever increasingly frantic letters. He was sure his letter was still angry even after the wait and he forgot to even tell them that he had made the Gryffindor Quidditch team as the youngest seeker in a century. His parents apologized and would only repeat essentially what Hermione had already told him.
One idle summer after Ron had left from his couple of weeks visit, Harry found an album in the dusty attic while looking for the Quidditch ball set that his dad had been convinced was up there. The photographs in the album were full of smiling people that Harry had never seen before, although he could spot a few recognizable faces. There were even some pictures from his parents wedding. He had tossed the album aside while he tried again to find the Quidditch case, but brought the album back down with him to look at after he gave up looking for the case. His father was reading on the sofa and Harry joined him.
"Who's the greasy-looking weed?" Harry said while pointing to one of the photographs in the back.
"Stop that, Harry!" His dad snapped, surprising Harry with his sharp tone. "You were raised better than to call people names."
"Sorry. Didn't mean anything by it. So, who is he?"
Harry watched as his dad seem to deflate, suddenly looking older than Harry could ever remember.
"He was someone who, I deeply regret to say, I mistreated in school."
"Is that why he looks so surly? You couldn't have been that bad. Not as bad as Malfoy."
"No, Harry. I was worse than Malfoy." His father looked at him and Harry had trouble holding his father's intense gaze.
"I was unforgivable towards Severus Snape."
Harry's father left before he could ask anymore.
A fourth year Harry stared blankly at the Headmaster. The Headmaster's eyes twinkled back. Harry's parents sat on either side of him, staring at the floor.
"You mean Voldemort was trying to kill just me?"
"Yes."
"But I was a baby."
"Voldemort saw you as a threat, regardless. Harry, I'm afraid that Voldemort saw you as a danger to him because it was prophesied that someone would be born that would have the power to destroy him. Voldemort thought that was you. He tried to kill you in order to prevent you from being able to kill him in the future. Your parents have kept this from you so that you might grow up normally, insofar as this is possible."
"Me? Kill someone? Kill Voldemort? But he's just a spectre, or whatever you'd call it. No one has even seen anything from him since my first year when he tried to steal the philosopher's stone." There was a shuffling silence from the adults in the room as Lily glared openly at Dumbledore for not keeping Harry out of that mess. James eventually cleared his throat.
"Harry, do you know who I visited in Azkaban?"
"No."
"When your mother and I went into hiding, we used a Secret-Keeper. The man we choose was a childhood friend, Peter Pettigrew, who betrayed us to Voldemort. He is still a Death-Eater, and he has escaped."
"We believe he will try to find Voldemort and bring him back." Dumbledore's eyes didn't sparkle as much anymore.
"We're going to do everything we can to stop them, just as we always have, but you should be warned of what is going on."
Harry quietly sat and tried to figure out what had caused everyone here to lose their minds. One of their friends was going to bring back Voldemort, a dark wizard who only his mother had defeated, and who had tried to kill him as a baby because Harry was supposed to kill him and save the wizarding world or some such.
"Seriously? I'm just a kid. How am I supposed to defeat someone that even my mum, the "Woman-Who-Lived" couldn't completely destroy?"
"It's not that simple Harry," interjected Dumbledore before Harry's mum could reply, "you've actually already started destroying him without even realizing it. That diary you killed was a piece of Voldemort's soul."
Harry's parents shared a look over Harry's head. They'd looked everywhere for Voldemort's Horcruxes with Albus, even actually managed to find some of them. No one had expected Harry to fight a basilisk and find a Horcrux while at school. Lily had scolded Harry all summer about putting himself at such risk.
"Regardless, no one expects you to go running off to fight any dark wizards right now." Lily said with another pointed look at Albus.
"We only thought you should know what is going on. You're becoming a young man, Harry." James fixed his son with a patronizing grin, hoping to tease some of the seriousness of the situation away. He was rewarded with a exasperated eye-roll.
In all of the subsequent explanations about the Horcruxes and how they planned to defeat Voldemort, Harry noticed that the one thing they didn't talk about was how his mother had beat Voldemort over a decade ago.
"How did you do it, Mum?"
Harry had wanted to ask since his first year and the look she gave him told him why he hadn't until now. But he would need to face Voldemort soon, and he needed to know in case there was anything more he could do.
"I didn't do anything. Severus Snape did."
Harry jolted. The only people he'd ever heard talk of Severus Snape were his parents and Dumbledore. He'd even begged Hermione's help looking in the library, but other than a few record-setting NEWTS scores and a birth record, he'd not been able to find anything.
" Who is Severus Snape?"
"Was. Severus Snape was my best friend growing up. He's the reason we're all still alive. He died to save us, Harry."
" Then how come no one knows who he is?"
"Albus said it would be better that way. That Severus would never want anyone to know about it. And if no one knew what happened, it might provide us some protection if everyone thought I had some special power."
" Then what did this guy do?"
Lily closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Harry waited while his mother slowly collected her thoughts.
" We grew up together. Severus was the first one to tell me what my magic was since I was Muggleborn and didn't know anything about it. However, he changed in school, became a Death-Eater or as good as one, and I told him off for it in our fifth year. He was the one who told Voldemort about your prophesy, but he also told Dumbledore to put us in hiding."
"That doesn't make any sense -"
"Don't interrupt, Harry. Severus risked his life to have us put into hiding, but Peter betrayed us. When Severus found out that Voldemort was to come here, he followed him and hid. Voldemort tried to kill you, Harry, and he would have killed me to get to you, except that Severus jumped in front of the curse. Because of Severus' sacrifice, Voldemort's next attempt to kill me backfired and he was killed by his own curse."
"But hadn't other people ever sacrificed themselves to save someone else? Why did that save you?"
"I don't know." Harry watched as a few silent tears slipped down his mum's cheeks. "Perhaps it was because it was completely selfless. I had been his only friend, and I had abandoned him to marry someone who'd spent years tormenting him. I refused to even speak to him and he died for me."
"Mum?" Harry hesitated, not knowing if he should ask anymore. His mother looked up into the green eyes that matched her own.
"Did he love you?"
"Yes. I think so, and I think I knew it even when I told him off."
It was quiet. And Harry held his mum's hand while she cried.
"It's okay, mum." Harry whispered to her. "He forgave you."
AN: It always bothered me that Harry got all the attention for something his mum did. It also bothered me that Lily and James never had to come to terms with what they did to Snape. On another note, I do not think that Snape would have altruistically saved Harry or James. I do think, given the chance, he would have died to save Lily. Finally, for those who think my Harry is OOC, you're probably right. I assumed that a Harry with parents wouldn't have to grow up quite so quickly and would perhaps be a bit more immature like James had been when he was young.