I own a lot of things but Harry Potter is not one of them, and for that, I'm grateful.
Of Human Rights
Lily Evans never claimed to be without faults. She desperately wanted the biggest piece of cake for herself, she didn't always stand as firmly on her principles as she would have liked, and she couldn't help laughing at Severus Snape when he looked particularly ridiculous during a run in with the Marauders.
No, Lily Evans fully admitted that she was no saint, and she embraced the fact that she was a human being with all the faults that came with it. But she also believed she had a right to be just that: A human being. She couldn't help the way she was created and she refused to be ashamed of it.
"Duty and right walk hand in hand" her father always told her, and that was how she lived. Her (and everybody else's) duty was to be as good a person as possible, not less, but not more either; in return she fiercely believed she had the right to love herself, be loved and liked and have a good life just like any other person.
That was why she refused to let the Slytherins look down on her because of her heritage, that was why she got absolutely furious when anybody as much as hinted she didn't have the right to be happy or even exist. Some might call it self-respect; Lily herself thought it the epitome of human rights, The Right.
She wore her faults on her sleeves and held her chin high in pride of what she was. That was how she won the respect and devotion of Sirius Black, and a big part of why James Potter loved her. Whenever she felt the Right had been offended, whether it was her own or somebody else's, she would get earth-splittingly angry and her eyes would blaze with a passionate fury that three times made Lord Voldemort himself back down for a few seconds before he struck.
When Lily had her son, she experienced the fragility of a baby. She started to understand that she lived in a time where everything holy, including The Right, would be laughed at and destroyed just because of a madman that despised his own humanity. She came to see that her anger didn't change anything in the end and she found that she was prepared to give it up if it gave her child even the smallest chance of prevailing.
When she realised that even if her belief of The Right was closely connected with love, love still came first in the end and that was why Lily Evans died begging for something that she believed had every right to be a matter of course.
Between inheritance and environment, most believe environment to be the most important factor in a person's life. Perhaps that is true, perhaps it's not, however that may be, Lily managed to pass her belief and her fierceness of defence of it down to her son. Maybe it was in his genes, perhaps he understood and remembered it from the year they had together.
Thanks to that self-respect her son didn't become a wreck from living with the Dursleys as he so easily could have done. Thanks to it, he never really believed himself unworthy. When he came to feel the just fury he inherited, he would name the feeling hatred, but in the end it was very far from it, and he would see that the Cruciatus Curse wouldn't work for it, would not take proper effect with a fuel so closely related to goodness.
This Right, and the belief in it, is what made Lily Evans special and her son able to save the world. It was only justice, after all.
Thousands of thanks go to my beta: From the Silent Planet. She's kindly made sure that this IS in fact proper English and deserves pizzas and ice-cream en masse.
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