I like it. Very...angsty. :)

Excuse me, have you her really asking why Snape was angry at a group of people who were covering up a murder attempt at his life? I hope that is not truly your opinion. You can say what you want, but if a group of people knowingly hold information back about an murder attempt they are guilty as well.

It may have been Sirius alone who had tried to lead him into a trap, but all of them, even Lupin, lied about the incident later or at least didnt say the truth so that the wannabe murderer could get away. All that based on the fact that he was their friend and their housemate.

And now you have Lily finding out about it and actually approve?

Your story itself is very well written, but I think it makes her actually looking worse than in canon.

Your story is good but the moral message is more than questionable in my opinion.

Hmmm well we know why he joined the DE's. Its because (according to JK) he wanted to impress Lily and because he thought she would be impressed by power. And I can see why he thought that.

Although it is Lily's right to be friends with whomever she chooses, and was in the right to stop being friends with Severus, that still doesn't make it ok for her to do things like this.

Like, did she need to rub salt in an already gaping wound? Did she need to remind Severus (who's abused and bullied and friendless) that he's got no one and why he's alone and how awesome the Marauders are. To me, it looked like she was going for the kill and was aiming to wound. And for that, I can't really feel sorry for her.

It was a very interesting story.

this was really good! but to the people saying Lily is a bitch and that the Marauders and Dumbledore pushed Snape into being a Death Eater, that's not true. everyone always has a choice. that's is shown through the many actions in the book where if one thing hadn't happened, everything would change. If Sirius hadn't changed keepers, J&L might still be alive, but they did. that doesn't mean Pettigrew had to tell Voldemort or that Snape was forced into telling Voldemort. They all chose to do that. Snape was a brave character, after Lily died. that's the difference between him and James. James changed for Lily, while she was still living, so that he could be good enough for Lily. Lily was definetly not a bitch either, she held on to their friendship until it bordered on abuse. she specifically asked him if blood status mattered and he told her no. from the start, he was hiding from her. not a very good friend.

anyway, I liked the perspective of this story!

Interesting...

Great story! It's really good (even though it's not JPLE ;))

I still don't like Snape though '

I love this story

Some people who reviewed this before are just so... Ugh! Everyone always talks about how Severus changed for Lily, and how he became a better man but so did James. James obviously changed his bullying attitude, and deflated his head or Lily would have never gone out with him. I thought this was brilliant and I absolutely loved it.

This was wonderful. I feel like lots of fans really don't get WHY Lily stopped being friends with Snape, they think "One bad word ends a whole friendship? What a bitch!" But this is ridiculous. It not just an insult, or a bad word, it's a entire prejudice laid into one word. If the same were going on in the Muggle world, and a black girl was friends with a white boy who associated with the KKK and then called her the n-word, no one would even have the nerve to call her a bitch for distancing herself from him. And yet plenty of Snape fans thinks she overreacted and that she was cruel.

I'm actually rather disturbed by a couple of the reviews you got that are still laying the blame on Lily. As you pointed out in her letter, she did a heck of a lot to keep their dying friendship from ending, trying to make it easier for Snape, while he just went on his merry way calling people Mudbloods and sinking into the Dark Arts. He was the one soaking up purist ideology that was prejudiced against her-and she defended him! He did not deserve her friendship for five years, and the fact that it lasted that long is a testament to how nice a person Lily is. The complete opposite of a bitch.

Is she still playing the victim? My god that woman is self-centered. Not that severus was in the right either, but he was clearly at a disadvantage in many aspects of his life.

Not only that, but she's making excuse for scum like potter and black, who are just as evil as other wannabe death eaters. Severus is right, she DOESN'T get it. She still sees life in two dimensions. Black and white. Good and evil. She doesn't realize that potter and black are closer to black than white, especially black. People like those two make it hard for vulnerable and impressionable individuals like severus to clearly discern who is on the side of good, and who is on the side of evil.

Anyways, just a little rant about the stupidity that is lily evans. Your fic itself is good. In the end, it's probably a more realistic take on lily evans' character, if not the most desirable one.

This is very good, how did you get into their heads like that?

Well, Lily has one point: Sirius is the one to blame for the Shrieking Shack incident. But she obviously accepts all of her housemates as good people - including Sirius - although the Shrieking Shack incident was attempted murder. Yes, of course Gryffindors is acceptable for good Gryffindors, if they try to kill evil Slytherins. She says, she abhors bigots, but the Marauders are at least as big bigots as Lord Voldemort himself, because they harass and bully Severus, because he exists - just like the Death Eaters harass muggleborns. But maybe she doesn't see the similarities, when her own house is involved.

It is nice of her to accept an insane wannabe-murderer like Sirius Black, who only didn't become a murderer, because James Potter saved Severus thus preventing Sirius Black from becoming a murderer.

I'm not even certain , if saving Severus was about Severus at all, if Sirius 'prank' had succeded both Sirius Black and Remus Lupin had been prosecuted for murder - although Lily says that Remus told her the truth about that incident, she doesn't seem to notice this implication. Maybe James Potter only wanted to save his best friends from a life-time sentence in Azkaban and a Dementors Kiss, what would have been their punishment.

Lily is as biased as all the other Gryffindors - Dumbledore included. The Marauders have never been punished for their dangerous pranks and the harassment of Severus four to one. The Marauders have never fought fairly.

Severus apologised for calling her a mudblood - which after all is only a word just like Snivellus, which she called him in the worst memory, too. She is just as bigoted as she believes him to be. He apologised and she didn't accept, but what makes it worse, she uses this letter to make him feel worse after he was nearly killed by Sirius Black's prank.

Excuse my language, but Lily is an insensitive bitch. Severus is a psychological/emotional wreck at the moment after being nearly slaughtered by a werewolf and sworn to secrecy by a headmaster who always not only ignored but applauded the Marauders' bullying of Severus.

Honestly the Marauders and Dumbledore pushed him torwards the Death Eaters, because they've treated him cruelly and have never given him the choice to make any other decision - Lily's harassment in this letter wouldn't help either. He had been a victim for years - first his father's than the Marauders' - he joined the Death Eaters, because he didn't want to be a victim any more. It's logical, he was mistreated by the world and the Dark Lord promised him power.

Why does Lily believe Severus should fight on Dumbledore's side in that stupid war? Why does she think he would join a group of people who have only mistreated and bullied him? Is she really too blind to see what being bullied by the Marauders did to him? She really expects him to fight alongside men who tried to kill him? That's as stupid as Voldemort asking Harry to join him in the Philosopher's Stone. Honestly even if Severus wanted to join the Order of Phoenix directly after finishing school, he would have to watch his back for 'friendly fire' from fellow Order Members like Sirius Black, who has already proven himself capable of murder. Why should he fight for people who mistreat him because he exists? Lily didn't give him any logical or acceptable reason why.

Is what Sirius Black did to Severus really less evil than anything Severus has done while still in school? She is biased. Not everything Gryffindors do is good and not everything Slytherins do is evil. Honestly. Dumbledore and the rest of the school, especially the Gryffindors, believe any Slytherin student to be evil and a Death Eater as soon as they are sorted into the house, thus isolating the Slytherins who then turn to their own house-mates or later the Death Eaters, because they were never accepted by the members of the other houses. If you tell a person long enough that they are evil, some day they might believe it.

But the Gryffindors where asking Lily to end her friendship with the evil Slytherin Severus Snape from the beginning - the worst memory was the perfect oppotunity for her to do exactly that. Finally she could be friend with the Gryffindor bullies aka the Marauders and become James Potter's girlfriend. Her friendship with Severus would only have hindered her. Well, who wouldn't want a boyfriend whose best friend tried to murder one's own former best friend? But sensitivity is a Hufflepuff trait not a Gryffindor on, isn't it? And common sense a Ravenclaw one. So Severus and Lily's friendship really was doomed from the time they were sorted into Slytherin and Gryffindor.

I found the description of Snape's reactions much more convincing than the letter.

Yes, it's very likely that he didn't understand her point of view since in canon she didn't articulate it very clearly. She told him that she didn't like his "creepy ... evil" friends and she didn't approve of the Dark magic one of them allegedly "tried to do" when Snape wasn't around ("D'you know what he tried to do...?" isn't the sort of question you'd expect to make an impression on an enabler or collaborator), but she didn't mention Death Eaters, mudblood or ultimatums. Also, the situation wasn't at all this clear-cut. It seems unlikely they even knew while at school that Death Eaters wanted to kill Muggle-borns (Regulus still didn't know a few years *after* SWM, and he was cousin to one of Voldemort's most loyal), or to subjugate *all* Muggle-borns regardless of talent.

(In fact, given that Hagrid expressed surprise in the first book that Voldemort hadn't "tried to recruit them before" - and that JK said in interviews that, in fact, Voldemort *had* tried and her refusal was one of the three defiances of the prophecy - it seems that subjugating the talented ones *wasn't* part of the plan. Not yet, at any rate, and hence not suspected by young!Snape.)

OTOH, he couldn't help seeing that *Lily's* housemates routinely tried to "force (him) into subservience" (That's what bullying is, and even James's best buds admit to Harry that it was ongoing harassment, ie bullying); that one (or more) have even tried to kill him; and that Lily wasn't particularly bothered about *his* troubles. *Days* passed between her learning that he'd almost died down near the Whomping Willow and her speaking to him ("I heard what happened the other night"), and she neither asked him about it when they met nor allowed him to tell her. She'd already pre-judged him the villain, presumably on the word of the "gang" that regularly bullied him.

(If she hates bigots, BTW, she should hate James and Sirius. They're bigoted enough to hate Snape "because he exists", as James put it - but perhaps it was really because they were both rich purebloods and he was dead common.)

Unlike in your fic, in canon he never told her that he was afraid to associate with her in public. "Walking across the castle courtyard, evidently arguing" doesn't look especially discreet either; he's certainly not showing any signs of jumpiness about being seen together, and as soon as she (falsely) reassures him that she isn't falling for James, he completely relaxes.

I'm sorry to say that I believe her friendship had long died by the time of the Shack incident, let alone by SWM, and she only hadn't admitted it because she wanted to be able to blame *him* for the break. I've always thought her intervention in SWM was not about rescuing Snape but about flirting with James: the kind of flirting you do when you're not admitting you fancy someone, which is getting their attention and keeping it by scolding them.(I called it using him "as a prop in their weird flirting rituals" in my 2004 fic "Levels".) It's classic 1950s rom-com stuff - and apparently that was JK's intention. When she was asked immediately post-OotP about Lily hating James, she replied, "Did she? You're a woman; you know what I mean."

So I liked that you showed him angry, and that you call her subsequent action "the ultimate betrayal", even though you presumably only meant that from his point of view, not yours.

That was really good and totally believable with canon. A little sad but still really good.

This is really, really good! You're a talented writer and I enjoyed this immensely.