Chapter 34: Doe Eyes - May 1994

True to his word, Snape manufactured excuses to assign three detentions to each Harry, Ron, and Hermione for sneaking out to the Shrieking Shack. All of them were to be served separately with Snape himself.

Ron and Hermione told Harry that their detentions were the usual sort, but with a casual interrogation thrown in. Snape asked them lots of questions about themselves, their families, Harry, and their friends at school.

Harry asked Ron, "Do you reckon he's trying to figure out our secrets?"

Ron gazed at the ceiling. "Maybe, but it certainly didn't feel like it."

"What did it feel like, then?"

Ron tipped his head to the side. "Like, talking to my friend's parent. Nosy questions trying to determine how trustworthy they are as a friend, if they have a good family, that sort of thing."

Hermione said that Snape asked about being a muggleborn. "He asked me if I get bullied about not being from a magical family. He also asked about my relationship with my parents. I told him that I was adopted. He didn't give any kind of reaction to anything I said."

Harry was perplexed. When it was finally time for his detention, he didn't know what to expect.

Lily-as-Snape brought Harry to his office. Harry's heart picked up. Not a regular detention, then.

As Harry sat in the chair on the other side of the desk, he observed the professor. The expression on Snape's face on someone else would have meant he would cry at any moment. That face was quickly replaced by a blank one.

Snape said, "I have not heard any rumors about the wolf and the mutt's ill-fated visit. That speaks well of you and your friends' discretion."

Harry shook his head. "We haven't said anything. Not even to each other."

Snape grabbed a parchment weight off his desk and tossed it from one hand to the other. "If someone told you that the truth is a great and terrible thing, what would you make of it?"

Harry recognized that as a "Dumbledore-ism". Slowly, Harry said, "It feels like an excuse."

"Are excuses to lie ever acceptable?"

Harry knew that this wasn't a hypothetical inquiry. "Yes. For example, when a truth isn't yours to tell."

"Any other times?"

Harry thought about the myriad of secrets that this person kept from him. He wasn't quite up to the word games, so he said, "I'm sure there are."

"I have many secrets." Snape set the parchment weight down. "I fear that if you heard them all, you'd never speak to me again."

Harry didn't make eye contact but challenged, "You'll never know unless you speak them."

"Recent events have left me feeling rather… exposed. I am still looking for certain answers that pertain to the Dark Lord's snake, for example. However, I can see that jealousy has blinded me. It also put you in danger, indirectly."

Snape's eyes flicked to Harry, and Harry met them with as neutral of an expression as he could manage.

"I see sharing particular facts as a way to avoid repeating my mistakes, because hiding them has created a twisted net requiring increasingly complex maneuvers to evade." He paused. "Yet some things can never be unsaid. Some truths really are dangerous. Do you think you can bear them?"

Harry's knuckles were white as he gripped the unyielding arms of the wooden chair he sat in. He thought he knew where this was going. Staring at the cliff, he felt both purpose and apprehension as he jumped off. "Tell me."

Snape stared a little too long at Harry's green eyes. Then, the professor looked away and began to tell a story: "In 1969, your mother met a young man named Severus Snape. They both grew up in a mill town called Cokeworth. She called him Sev and they became fast friends. Lily and Sev's friendship was founded on normal sorts of things: imagination games, idle gossip, and negative feelings about certain family relations. But they also had another thing in common: they were both magical yet growing up in the muggle world."

Harry nodded. He knew all of that already.

"After a few years, they both went off to magical school. They continued their friendship, but it was hard because they were sorted into different Houses. Their friendship was a poorly kept secret. But they together had a well-kept secret: they both were aspiring politicians. Some might even call them aspiring Dark Lords."

Harry's eyebrows raised but he didn't interrupt.

"Lily Evans fell in love with a fellow Gryffindor. She was torn between her greater aspirations and her true love, between what she wanted to achieve and who she was. She wanted to have it all, as they say. But that wasn't to be. There were many obstacles, large and small. But the largest was the Dark Lord that you're familiar with."

The preteen noted that Lily had just implied that she genuinely loved James Potter. That answered one big question their son had.

"The Dark Lord's rise spawned many threats for her and her young family. But the most important threat took the form of a prophecy, given to her cherished friend Severus Snape while in the service of the Dark Lord. You see, that friend pretended to serve that master when he dreamed of a co-rulership of sorts with his best childhood friend. I hope you can hear how naïve that sounds. I certainly can," she spat.

Harry was surprised. Would Lily Potter have become another dark lord, if things had been different?

The pair sat in silence for a while. Finally, Harry prompted, "What happened next?"

"Sev had seen the Dark Lord's power firsthand, and feared greatly for his friend. The friend did not heed his warnings to his satisfaction, leaving her security at the hands of her husbands' friends. Sev then sold his soul to two old men, begging them to protect his friend and creating a new hell for himself. Where he envisioned ruling as two together, he was sentenced to serve two in opposition."

Harry said, "It sounds like he was trying to be good, though. Doesn't that count for something?"

Lily-as-Snape spoke as if from a distance. "Who can say what side the scales will come out on? Or when the counting's even done?"

Harry didn't know what to say to that. He waited.

"Your mother was very angry with her dear friend Sev. She wanted to be out there, fighting for her other friends and muggleborns like herself, instead of locked away with a newborn and an enthusiastic-but-ineffective young father."

Harry held his breath.

"The two friends were no stranger to the sort of dark magic that would help Lily get her freedom. It would only be temporary, she agreed."

After several beats of silence, Harry said, "It was permanent, wasn't it."

The professor stood up abruptly and moved behind the chair. "Somehow — impossibly — I sensed that you knew."

Harry didn't want to lie about the source of his knowledge, not when Lily-as-Snape finally was telling him the truth. Instead, he said nothing.

"Sev was the one who learned about magical bargains. He then took steps to construct one, and was successful…" Lily gave a shuddering breath, "… was successful at defeating the Dark Lord and saving his friend and her son. However, it was at great personal cost — the greatest personal cost. I didn't deserve it. But you did, you do."

Lily-as-Snape again looked into Harry's green eyes. Harry had a brief flashback to Lily-as-Snape's death in the Shrieking Shack, in the other timeline. While Harry struggled momentarily with that other horrible scene, he was able to ground himself when he saw the pink of Lily's cheeks and vibrancy in her dark eyes.

Lily continued talking, though it sounded more distant. "Even in the depths of my despair after that horrible night, I could never hate my best friend for deceiving me into letting him play the role he painstakingly constructed for himself. Between the two of us, I was the better actor. But he, he cast himself into a bit part, to tremendous effect."

Harry asked, "What was Sev like?"

Lily laughed sarcastically as she sat back down. "Honestly, he was mean. We both were as kids. To some small extent, we grew out of it, particularly once he was away from his drunkard father and I was away from my horrid sister."

Harry tried to sound casual. "She's gotten a little less horrid lately."

Lily-as-Snape made a face. "I'll believe that when I see it."

"Do you want to come visit us this summer?"

"Sirius was right. You are very forgiving." Lily abruptly slammed her fist on the table. "Haven't you heard a damn thing I've been saying? Not just today, but since we met three years ago? I'm. A. Bad. Person. The signs are all there if you've been watching even a little. You don't want to know me better."

High on the success of getting a key piece of information from his mother, Harry matched Lily's delivery, "Bad. People. Have. Families. Too." He added, "A Christmas gathering of Petunia, Acturus Black, and Sirius showed me that not-so-nice people can even have fun."

Lily-as-Snape almost laughed, but it caught.

Harry said, "Think about it. I'll be back for another detention on Friday." He left without waiting for a dismissal. Honestly, he needed to be somewhere else. This was a lot.

"Snape told you the truth?" Ron questioned at their emergency, mid-week secret meeting.

Hermione corrected, "Snape told him one thing that is true based on the evidence we already had. The rest could be varying degrees of true, and certainly not complete."

Harry sighed. "I think she was telling the truth. She loved my dad. She also didn't take her friend's view of the threat seriously, and he suffered for it."

Hermione narrowed her eyes. "What about the dark lord stuff?"

"It fits with the characterizations Sirius and Remus gave me. She had big ambitions but hid them."

Ron asked, "How was the detention after that?"

Harry bit his lip. "Regular detentions, unfortunately. No new information, or even an acknowledgement that the previous conversation happened at all."

"If she's putting her walls back up, it might be related to her spying." Hermione grimaced. "You two may be in a more open place, but you both still have responsibilities. We might get the Voldemort problem wrapped up in the next year or so, but we still have to stay vigilant."

"Yeah. Harry, is there anything you need from your mother for our big-picture plans? Any information? Obviously any intel on Voldemort's plans would be good, but she probably won't respond well if you ask her directly."

"Er, well I could ask her about the ring. Make sure the horcrux is gone."

"If the opportunity presents itself, sure." Ron said, "Speaking of opportunities, tomorrow's weather looks very promising, according to Lavender."

"Animagus transformation, right!" Hermione squealed.

Despite the unlucky feeling that the setting brought about, Hermione, Ron, and Harry snuck out to the Shrieking Shack to complete the animagus transformation ritual. They couldn't ward the place against animagi, obviously, so they brought Crookshanks as a guard-cat.

Hermione argued that they should do the ritual off school grounds since this kind of magic was actually illegal unless they registered their forms with the Ministry, which they couldn't do as minors.

Once they were all sitting cross-legged on the floor, Hermione said, "Ron, you can go first."

"Oh no, witches first," Ron said nervously.

"I'll go," Harry offered. "I feel very ready, like it's inevitable."

Hermione gulped and exchanged a look with Ron. Neither of them felt like that. But, she supposed that Harry was very instinctual.

He drank the painstakingly prepared potion.

Hermione watched him closely while Ron was clearly practicing the animagus-reversal charm.

Twenty minutes later, a white dove with green eyes was sitting in Harry's place.

"Ooooh! Very nice, Harry!" Hermione squealed. He's so beautiful! And a bird, just like he predicted.

Hermione went next. It took her much longer, she could tell by the watch on her no-longer-furry wrist.

"A badger!" Harry told her.

Ron took the longest of them all to turn into a beautiful orangish fox.

Hermione was practically bouncing. "We all got such great forms! And on the first try, too."

Hermione, Ron, and Harry all had big smiles as they snuck back to Gryffindor tower.

Somehow, Luna knew they'd succeeded at becoming animagi. Luna greeted Harry the next day in the library with a "Congratulations!"

Harry preened. "Thank you. Do you think you'll ever do it?"

"What makes you think I haven't already?" She gave him a mischievous smile and refused to say more on the topic.

Harry was fairly certain that she was joking.

Harry eventually switched over to work on Care of Magical Creatures. They were both writing an essay about thestral care. They gave each other practice scores.

As the daughter of a magazine publisher who let her write articles, Luna gave excellent feedback on essays. It was getting to the point where Harry thought he could finally write essays at his true level of ability. Which, granted, wasn't amazing.

After they were done working for the day, Luna asked Harry, "Have you heard from Sirius lately?"

"Yes, he told me that my aunt's first published novel will release this Fall."

"Do you know anything about it?"

"Er, it's a muggle sort of novel. Romance, maybe?"

"Do you think you could get an advance copy for me?"

Harry's mouth twisted. "I'll ask Sirius."

Harry walked Luna back to the Ravenclaw Tower then walked to the Owlry to draft and send a reply.

Letters to and from Sirius couldn't have anything of real substance in them, so Harry told him about the creatures he was learning about, Ron's new favorite charm, and the Gryffindor team's recent quidditch success in addition to Luna's request.

Harry sent Hedwig off with a, "Thanks, girl." His beloved owl responded with a hoot.

He wished that he could fly with her, but he wasn't confident enough in his transformation to attempt it without Ron or Hermione around to help.