Clara Potter has always been much more serious than her mischievous younger brother and his unruly band of friends. For much of their youth, the Marauders would do anything in their power to get under the Potter girl's skin, but none more so than Si...
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"LILY, WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS six times, we both know you already have it memorized." Clara groaned from the opposite side of the table.
The two witches had been studying for Lily's upcoming O.W.L.s the entire day. They'd opted (though not by Clara's choice) to ignore the warm summer weather on a beautiful Saturday afternoon and chose to spend the entire day preparing Lily for her exams in the library instead.
Clara, though she really did love Lily like a younger sister, was quite bored of sitting in the near empty library all day. Save for the handful of stressed out fifth years joining Lily in their last ditch effort to prepare for their exams, the library was almost startlingly quiet on that early June afternoon.
But Clara couldn't help but grow weary, especially when she could have been spending time in the courtyard with Marlene instead. Though she'd never say it out loud, Clara thought the other fifth years who were outside enjoying the sun may have been a bit more self-aware than the Evans girl – knowing that stress would inevitably lead to poor performance in the exam.
But she couldn't blame the girl, Clara had also spent a majority of her fifth year with her nose stuck in a book, dreading the O.W.L.s as well.
"Just quiz me once more, I want to be sure." Lily insisted.
With a sigh, Clara looked back down at the aged brown pages of the potions textbook before her, "What is the exact order of ingredients in Polyjuice Potion?"
"Fluxweed, knotgrass, leeches, lacewing flies, boomslang skin, bicorn horn, and the hair of whomever you wish to impersonate." Lily recited with ease.
Clara closed the book and looked up at the redhead, "Can we be done for the day? You clearly know everything, I'm not sure why you asked me to help you study."
"You're the best potions student at Hogwarts, that's why. You got an 'O' on your potions O.W.L. last year, and after Severus–" she cut herself off before breaking open the wound that was still fresh, "I sort of lost my potions study partner after that."
"I'm only good at potions because I have to be if I want to be a healer, not because I'm naturally gifted in it. Plus you should stop worrying about that git. If he ever really cared about you, he would have never called you that."
Lily nervously tucked her red hair behind her ear at Clara's remark. Although Clara would never understand their bond, Severus had been Lily's best friend since childhood. That kind of love doesn't just disappear, even when one of them does something cruel and unforgivable. The love lingers in a painful way that makes you long for simpler times and better days.
His hurtful remarks toward the girl hadn't been the first time Severus had done something to upset Lily over the years, though. He'd begun associating with people who disliked Lily just as much as she detested them and he had ignored her countless warnings about the crowd he was slowly sinking into. It was an unfortunate culmination of little things that had finally boiled over when Lily tried to defend him from James's incessant bullying.
