Chapter Twenty-Seven: Teatime with Alice

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Harry had been waiting by the Floo since eleven o'clock if he was being honest even though he wasn't supposed to go over to Longbottom Manor and speak to Alice Longbottom until four. He wasn't feeling particularly honest, though, and didn't want to admit how excited and nervous he was about the entire thing but fortunately Remus understood and had kept him busy for the last few hours playing Wizarding Chess with a short break for lunch.

Finally, at 3:55, Remus casually glanced up at the clock. "Harry, weren't you planning on heading over to speak with Alice Longbottom soon? Maybe you should get going."

Harry, who had had his eye on the clock almost nonstop for the last twenty minutes, intentionally started. "Oh, would you look at that? You're right, Remus. Thanks for reminding me."

He stood up and headed to the Floor.

"Have fun," Remus told him as he began to clean up the last of their games. Remus had been winning anyway so Harry didn't mind that it still lay unfinished.

Harry nodded absently and threw a handful of Floo powder in. "Longbottom Manor," he said as clearly as he could which was really not all that clear when it came right down to it. He couldn't wait until he turned seventeen if for no other reason than he would be able to learn to Apparate. That wasn't a pleasant sensation either and there was a bigger chance of leaving parts of himself behind but he'd get the hang of it and would have much better odds of actually ending up where he wanted to end up.

Harry came out in what appeared to be a parlor. When he was younger, he always ended up sprawled on the floor when he came out of the Floo but Gilderoy had thought that that made him look undignified and so they'd spent many long hours practicing it until Harry could at least manage to keep his balance.

Alice Longbottom was sitting alone in the room reading a book and looked up at his arrival. "Harry!" she exclaimed as she put a bookmark in to remember her spot and then set the book aside. "You're early."

Harry smiled. "I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't late. You're doing me a favor and it would be rude to be late."

"Don't be silly," Alice said, gesturing for him to sit down in the chair on the other side of the sofa she was occupying. "Your mother was a dear friend and I'm honored that you would come to me to learn more about her. I don't know as much about your father, sadly, but I imagine you've heard a great deal from Remus and Sirius."

Harry smiled wryly. "Oh yes."

"James was always one of Sirius' favorite topics," Alice said knowingly. "He used to say it was because James was the first person he met with the good taste to really appreciate him."

A house elf popped into the room then carrying a tray of tea and some delicious-looking scones.

"Put it down on the table, Silky," Alice instructed.

Silky did so and then gave a deep bow and popped back out.

"Would you care for some tea?" Alice asked him.

Harry nodded. "Yes, thank you."

Alice poured him a cup and handed it to him. "Was there anything specific you wanted to know about your mother?"

"I was curious how she went from deeply despising my father and being the best friend of someone that he bullied to dating him in their seventh year," Harry replied.

Alice laughed. "It still makes me smile sometimes to think of what a change those Hogwarts years wrought. You have to understand that, as the only child of a wealthy and powerful Pureblood couple who had spent many years wondering if they would ever have children, James was rather arrogant when he first arrived at Hogwarts. I'm afraid that trait never did fade away completely although he got more bearable as he grew older. Had he lived…"

That was what it always got back to for these friends and acquaintances of his parents. Had they lived. He couldn't even imagine. He supposed that, since they were his parents, he would have liked for them to have lived and raised him but he surely would have turned out very differently and he liked the way he was now. And he didn't really like the idea of no Gilderoy in his life but, without his fame, he wouldn't have held any interest for Gilderoy. Harry wondered if this knowledge should have upset him but it didn't because, no matter why Gilderoy had initially taken an interest in him, he loved him now and that was really all that mattered.

Alice's smile wavered for a second. "Lily was the exact wrong person to try that on. She was too stubborn to admit it but she was a little terrified to be going off to Hogwarts. Severus told her all about Hogwarts, of course, but she confessed that despite that and the magic that she could do she had never quite believed him until she was standing on Platform 9 and 3/4. So when she was trying to make sense of everything and James kept following her around acting like he knew everything and was completely in control…It did not go very well."

"And the fact that he didn't like Professor Snape couldn't have helped matters," Harry added.

"Lily and I never could agree on just why James and Severus hated each other so much at first," Alice mused. "Lily thought it was because Severus was interested in the Dark Arts and James had a pathological thing about them. That was certainly why Sirius didn't like him but his family was steeped in so much dark magic that Sirius couldn't even make it through six summers with those people and moved in with James. And she thought that Severus didn't like James for the same reason she didn't: his arrogance. It was even worse for him, of course, since he had a magical heritage and yet his upbringing was about as far away from James' as you could get."

Harry nodded. That did make sense. "And what did you think?"

"I thought that it was about Lily," Alice admitted. "They were both in love with her, I think, for a very long time. She didn't want James' affections and I don't think she ever noticed Severus' but there you go. James was jealous of Severus because Lily actually liked him and Severus was jealous of James because he was always the type more likely to succeed in wooing a girl. The truth was probably somewhere in the middle."

"And Professor Snape and my mother stopped being friends after he called her the m-word during their OWLS?" Harry asked rhetorically.

Alice blinked at him. "You're well-informed. Yes, that was…what is that Muggle expression? I've always liked it and it seems to describe this situation perfectly. Ah, yes. It was the straw that broke the camel's back."

"I don't understand," Harry admitted. It was a terrible thing to admit to but since it was a Muggle expression then that was probably okay.

"It means that a camel can carry a great deal of weight and you wouldn't think that adding just one more piece of straw would cause a problem and any little problem that comes up is not going to lead to a relationship ending or a mental breakdown," Alice told him. "But if those straw-problems keep piling up then one day it will be too much and the camel's back will break and it will all be too much for someone."

"And Professor Snape calling my mother the m-word was this straw?" Harry asked.

Alice nodded. "Yes, it was. It all started when he was sorted into Slytherin. I know that you were sorted into Slytherin and I want you to know that my mother-in-law was as well so I don't have any problem with that house. Maybe you can understand some of it but most of it you won't be able to because the world is different now than it was then."

Harry understood immediately. "Because of You-Know-Who?"

Alice nodded. "I don't know as much about it as I would have if I were in Slytherin but from what I understand and what became of most of the graduating classes of Slytherins, it was a very difficult place to be if you did not want to be a Death Eater. I never believed that Severus wanted to be a Death Eater but he did not want to be a target of the true believers either so he…fell in with them."

Harry frowned. "What exactly does that mean?"

Alice tilted her head back. "Your mother tried to be understanding but I knew that it bothered her. It bothered her for years. The people he was spending his time with when he wasn't around your mother were just not very nice people and most of them ended up dead or in Azkaban. The ones that didn't probably should have but they claimed Imperious. Severus never actually did anything but being around them all the time irritated him. At last, your mother decided that it wasn't enough for her to be the sole exception to someone's Pureblood-fanatic views and so she walked away after he called her the m-word in front of everybody."

"That's so sad," Harry said quietly.

Alice nodded. "It really is and that's just one of the reasons that I'm so grateful that by the time you and Neville got to school, things changed so much and you can be friends without having to worry about any of that. I don't think that Severus, who was a half-blood himself, was ever really a Pureblood fanatic but I understand why Lily did. She felt that if he could say that about her, his best friend, then it wasn't a good sign for what he thought of anyone else like her."

"But he was being humiliated in front of the whole school!" Harry protested. "He probably didn't mean it."

"I agree," Alice told him. "Your mother couldn't believe that he would say it if he didn't mean it, though, even just a little. And ultimately it didn't matter. It was just getting too hard for her to have to keep making excuses for him and to watch him slip further into darkness. Maybe she could have 'saved' him, I don't know, but she was sixteen and it wasn't her job to force him to make good choices. He might have just pulled her down with him and a clean break was healthier for her than continuing to cling to what was once their friendship. If it was easier to think that he had made his choice…well, that was her prerogative."

Prerogative? Did that mean choice?

Harry nodded. "I understand. I don't know that I could make myself responsible for someone not being a Death Eater either."

"Things with James were almost independent of that," Alice told him. "I say 'almost' because the fact that she was no longer friends with someone who hated James and James had the sense to stop letting Lily see whenever he and Severus fought certainly helped smooth the way, I think. But James just grew up and was a strong supporter of Dumbledore and the fight against You-Know-Who. In many ways he was the anti-Severus and Lily really needed that. James did have his good qualities and among those were his deep almost irrational loyalty and he could be very charming. Lily just finally got a chance to see those qualities in him during sixth and seventh year."

That was certainly more informative than Sirius' claim that Lily just finally, after seven years of stalking, said yes so that James would maybe leave her alone and he hadn't.

"What was she like?" Harry asked her. "Just in general?"

"It's always so hard to figure out how to sum up a person, sum up a friendship that lasted for ten years, with just a few words," Alice said softly. "Your mother was the best friend that I ever had. We did everything together. We even got pregnant at around the same time and went into St. Mungo's together though I delivered a few hours before she did. She was probably more stubborn than was good for her and she didn't let anyone walk all over her or make her feel like she didn't belong. She never did know how to let go of a grudge, though, so even if Severus had turned his life around I don't think she ever would have made up with him."

It was, strangely, refreshing to hear about some negative traits as well. Because his parents were dead and he had never known them, most people considered it their duty to fill his head with only good things about them so that Harry would like them. While he appreciated this, the idealized versions never quite seemed real. Of course, he still wanted to hear about all the good things, too.

"Your mother was very funny although sometimes people had trouble telling if she was being sarcastic or not. I remember this one time someone asked her to do some sort of volunteer work – I don't remember what it was – and she was busy so she told them that she didn't believe in helping people and they actually believed that," Alice said fondly.

Harry looked at her incredulously. "Wouldn't they have been able to tell by just the fact that she outright said she did not believe in helping people?" True he had no real way of knowing if he would have known it was sarcasm if Alice had not straight-up told him that it was but he would like to think that he was a little more observant than that. And he could only imagine the kinds of problems it could cause if his mother went around regularly saying things like that and was believed.

Alice shrugged. "You would think. I got it. I usually got it but even I didn't have the perfect track record. It might have helped if she had had a different sarcasm voice but she said everything in her normal tone. James used to brag that he could always tell and either he could or Lily humored him."

Harry was smiling."That sounds nice."

"It was," Alice agreed. "Let's see…your mother was very smart but she had no idea how to go about studying. In all our years at Hogwarts, she either had to rely on someone else to guide a study session or she would have to decide if it was worth it to read everything that was going to be on the test or simply do nothing."

Harry's eyes widened. "That sounds really inefficient."

"It was," Alice agreed. "But she always got top marks anyway. At a certain point, all of her friends made an agreement that they would never leave Lily to study alone because it was just ridiculous. What else…Oh! Your name was actually all her idea."

"It was?" Harry asked, surprised. "But my middle name is 'James.'"

Alice grinned. "That's what's so interesting about it. Your father's name was James Henry – though he insisted on being called James Harry for some reason – and you were named Harry James but it's a complete coincidence. Or maybe, as your father claimed, yet more proof that they belonged together."

Harry was fascinated. "Where did my name come from then?"

"Your mother and aunt used to talk about what names they wanted for their children," Alice replied. "It's probably for the best that you were born a boy because her girl name was 'Aurelia Devonney.' I don't know where she came up with either of those names but she was quite set on them."

Harry laughed. "You're making that up."

Alice raised an eyebrow. "Am I? Well."

"I can just imagine how hard it would be to convince everyone that I wasn't actually named after my father," Harry mused. "If they even cared to convince anybody."

"Your parents," Alice informed him, "absolutely denied that you were named after your father but they gave every person who asked them a different story so nobody knew the truth."

"But you think that you do," Harry pointed out.

"Yes," Alice agreed, "but Lily told me about her name plan way back in second year. If Lily was really planning on tricking people that far in advance then I believe that she deserves to have pulled one over on me."

Harry laughed. "Yeah, probably. My mother sounds pretty great and even my father does…once he grew up some."

"It's never a good idea to judge people by what they were like as teenagers," Alice advised. "But yes, they were wonderful people and I'm glad that you're finally getting a chance to discover that."

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