What would Snape have done if Lily had lived? (Was: Mothers)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187544

Potioncat:
>  Even if Lily had survived, she would have been "hurt" and that would be enough to turn Severus. Actually, I think the potential for her being hurt turned him in canon. It's the same dynamic as Regulus and his house elf. (drat, I know his name, but I can't spell it.) Besides, as you say, Snape provided service to DD before LV killed Lily.
> > 
> > Carol, who thinks that the Prophecy is "real" and that without Harry, all other efforts to defeat LV would have been futile
> 
> 
> Potioncat:
> Me too. That's the way a prophecy story works. That's why in a long-a-go thread, I said that Snape's not going to LV wouldn't have changed much. Once a prophecy is spoken and heard---it's in play.
>
Carol ragian:

Well, yes and no. It would have worked out in some other way, true, but it wasn't active until LV brought it into play by trying to thwart it. And Snape's going to LV *did* make a difference, IMO. It set up everything that followed, including Lily's chance to live, which made possible her *choice* to die (not *for* but *instead of* Harry). So Snape is a key figure, without whom we'd have a completely different story with no Chosen One. (I think that the Prophecy wouldn't have been fulfilled if a different DE had been the eavesdropper--no one to ask LV to save Lily--but then there would have been no story.)

I'm not so sure that Lily would have gone to Severus for comfort, but it does seem that she didn't know he'd been a DE (Sirius didn't), so maybe she would have. But if she'd found out later, would she have reacted like Tom Riddle Sr. finding out that his wife was a witch who tricked him into marrying her?

Carol, who likes to think that Severus and Lily finally understood each other in the afterlife and became best friends again (on the same level of friendship as Sirius and James)