Gilderoy lay on his dorm bed, staring at the ceiling as his thoughts turned toward Severus Snape, the idea of deepening his friendship with him settling more firmly in his mind, not just for convenience but also to slowly pull him away and make Voldemort lose a valuable servant.
He had already confirmed things to a certain extent with the vow Snape had made about what had happened so far, but that wasn't enough, because what Gilderoy wanted now was to understand Snape properly—his real backstory, not just the surface-level version.
From what he remembered, Snape had been a meek boy, shaped heavily by his home life, with a muggle father and a household that had clearly left its marks on him, which in turn fed his hatred toward muggles. At the same time, he had found Lily, and for a while, she had been his only connection, the one person he could speak to openly.
But even there, something never sat right with Gilderoy.
Lily had initially been attached to Snape because he could introduce her to the wizarding world, something she had no access to before, and while that connection might have been real, Gilderoy didn't think she had ever truly considered him an equal friend.
Things only became worse once Snape boarded the Hogwarts Express for the first time, where he was ganged up on by the Marauders simply for choosing Slytherin, something that set the tone for what was to come.
After sorting, Lily was separated from him, and from that point onward, their lives diverged sharply.
Slytherin already carried a bad reputation due to Voldemort's rising influence, but not every Slytherin was the same, and Snape, being a half-blood, had to adapt if he wanted to survive there. He acted cordially, built connections with pureblood students, and played along where needed, not because he believed in all of it, but because he understood that isolation in Slytherin would destroy him.
They were never his real friends. And he knew that.
Meanwhile, Lily lived an entirely different life in Gryffindor, where things were easier, where she was liked, where she didn't have to struggle in the same way, which made her completely oblivious to what Snape was going through.
When she complained about his Slytherin housemates using dark curses or targeting muggle-borns, she saw it in simple terms—right and wrong—without understanding that Snape was stuck between his own deep-rooted hatred from childhood and the need to maintain those connections just to survive.
So he defended them.
Not because he agreed with everything, but because he didn't have the luxury to openly oppose them.
And yet, despite all of that, Snape's loyalty toward Lily remained unwavering, even when she defended the Marauders, brushing off their actions as harmless pranks when they were anything but.
Gilderoy's expression hardened slightly as he thought about it.
The Marauders didn't just "prank."
They bullied.
Not just Snape, but others as well, using dangerous spells, humiliating people in public, doing things like swelling heads and worse, things that were casually dismissed because of who they were.
And still, Lily called their pranks harmless.
Instead of trying to understand Snape's situation in Slytherin, instead of helping him deal with his hatred or even just standing by him properly, that was the point where she began distancing herself, influenced by her Gryffindor friends and her own black-and-white view of the world.
Snape, already weak-willed due to his upbringing, didn't make the right choices either, and instead of resisting, he leaned into the dark arts, something Gilderoy didn't excuse, because Snape was still responsible for his own decisions, but Lily wasn't blameless either, not when she had been his only real connection, the one person who should have understood him better than anyone else, and yet when it mattered, she didn't act-not responsibility, but duty, the kind that comes from actually caring about someone.
Gilderoy exhaled slowly, his thoughts sharpening as he compared it to himself, because if his own friend had been treated like that, he wouldn't have just stood there and told someone to stop—he would have acted first, cursed the ones responsible, and then helped his friend up, and that was the difference.
His thoughts shifted to that particular memory. Snape's worst memory-James humiliating Snape in front of everyone, and Lily stepping in, not by stopping it properly, but by telling James to stop while standing there instead of actually doing anything meaningful, and then there was that one line, the one most people ignored.
Lily, whose furious expression had twitched for an instant as though she was going to smile.
That wasn't nothing, that was someone trying not to react, trying not to show amusement at Snape being humiliated, at his underpants being exposed in front of the entire school, and that wasn't how a real friend reacted.
That was the truth he wanted to confirm-was Lily actually a bad friend to Snape in this world too?
Gilderoy shifted slightly on the bed, one arm resting behind his head as his thoughts moved forward, because he needed confirmation, not assumptions, not second-hand memory, but something concrete.
"I want to learn Occlumency and Legilimency," he muttered under his breath, already settling on the obvious choice, because Snape was skilled enough and, more importantly, accessible.
A faint smirk formed on Gilderoy's face as the thought settled in properly.
"Maybe I can request him to teach me…" he murmured, his tone thoughtful, though there was a clear edge beneath it, because if, during that process, he happened to cast Legilimency on Snape, then he would see everything for himself.
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