Homemade Ghosts | s. snape

1.2

| 1.2 |

It was generally understood that the Sorting Hat never made mistakes. But, during my first few Hogwarts years, I was convinced it had made a bit of a mistake with me.

Potters had long been Gryffindors, and family tradition seemed to mean a lot to the Hat in a way that never quite made sense to me. Yes, frightened children often want familiarity, but frightened children can come in all personalities.

Something else I thought was problematic was that eleven-year-olds are often entirely different people than who they end up being ten or twenty years later.

I sure did.

I had arrived at Hogwarts having only turned eleven less than three weeks before. I was shy then, and timid. Afraid to stand out from the crowd. The only time eleven-year-old me was reflected in current twenty-six-year-old me was when I was completely comfortable with my very closest friends.

Both my parents and all four of my grandparents were Gryffindors, but it was mostly because my older brother had been in Gryffindor at the time that I jumped on the idea as soon as the Sorting Hat suggested my ancestral House.

But I immediately regretted it. I was soon sure I should have been in Ravenclaw. Despite my disdain for the structure of it all—the lessons and the homework and the exams—I liked the learning. The accumulation of knowledge. I enjoyed experimenting with the information, contemplating ideas. I thought Ravenclaw would have been more accurate for those traits.

Although, I started to wonder a few years in if I was thinking about it all wrong. Perhaps it wasn't really what you valued or what you were good at that mattered. Perhaps it was what you most needed to learn.

To be fair to the Hat, I needed the fire that Gryffindor gave me. That shy eleven-year-old had turned into a popular, brash Gryffindor by my fourth year. (Although, who's to say how much my older brother's graduation the previous year had helped with that?)

If not for that fervor and ferocity, it wasn't clear whether I could have survived what happened during my fifth and sixth years.

James and Lily's wedding had been the summer before fifth year. It was a mild summer afternoon, a beautiful venue in the expansive lawns behind Potter Manor—the beginning of the only few peaceful months of my brother and sister-in-law's life together.

Sirius Black was James's best man; I'd been Lily's maid of honor because her sister had refused to attend. As an adult, I would look back on it as one of the best days of my life.

Back then, I didn't know it would be my last happy memory of my brother. As a kid, I didn't like the pomp and circumstance, and found it boring. I'd gotten tired of my stuffy dress robes soon after putting them on. (Although, I had enjoyed writing a maid of honor speech; embarrassing the newlyweds—primarily my brother, of course—while getting the crowd to laugh was the best part of the wedding.)

The prophecy that tore my life apart was given to Dumbledore sometime the following October. One of Voldemort's servants (I'd never known who) overheard part of a prophecy foretelling a child to be born at the end of July as the only one who could defeat the Dark Lord.

James and Lily announced that they were pregnant around Christmas that year. The baby's due date was at the end of July.

It was still a mystery to me how, but Dumbledore eventually came to find that Voldemort had marked my brother's unborn child as his equal. Dumbledore then told James and Lily to prepare to go into hiding before my nephew's birth.