Fanfic / To Shape And Change

To Shape and Change is a Harry Potter Peggy Sue fanfiction written by Blueowl and posted on Fanfiction.net.

After the war with Voldemort ends in disaster, Severus Snape goes back in time, intent on preventing the tragedy to come. His goal: teach Harry to become the greatest wizard of all time, starting with their very first meeting in Diagon Alley. However, he soon realizes that his interference has far-reaching consequences, and he will need to tread carefully if he doesn't want greater tragedy to result from his actions.

Features a redeemed Severus Snape and a Harry whose life at Hogwarts goes in a very different direction thanks to the aversion of Adults Are Useless. It is complete at 34 chapters.

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To Shape and Change provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • The Dursleys, naturally. This time, however, Severus intervenes and makes it clear there will be severe consequences unless they step up to at least the bare minimum of feeding Harry properly, leaving his personal belongings alone, and not overworking him with endless household chores. As a result, their biggest issue in this timeline is being emotionally neglectful and distant, which suits Harry just fine since it gives him more time to study.
  • To a lesser extent, Neville's Gran is very controlling and has little to say by way of praise for her grandson, which is implied to be the main source of Neville's insecurity.
• Adaptational Backstory Change:
  • Harry genuinely inherited his Parseltongue from his parents here, rather than unwittingly being gifted them by Voldemort. Dumbledore still assumes the latter, however, and Severus lets him think that because he and the other professors are clearly more comfortable with that explanation. Also, Harry got his scar from an ancient ritual his mother performed in her last moments, sacrificing her magic to create a protection that deflected the Killing Curse.
  • Voldemort never made any Horcruxes, instead surviving as a spirit due to undergoing unspecified dark rituals to increase his power.
• Adaptational Explanation:
  • This story establishes why Harry sleeps in the cupboard at the beginning of the series: the Dursleys tried to put him in their spare bedroom, but he threw a fit whenever he went inside because he'd seen his mother killed in a similar bedroom. Instead, he took to hiding in a small, dark space — the cupboard. The Dursleys eventually gave up on getting Harry to sleep in the normal bedroom and just declared the cupboard his room, leaving him there even after he overcame his fear of the upstairs bedroom.
  • The nature of house-elves and their magic is also elaborated on. House-elves enjoy helping others and derive their powers from magically binding themselves to someone whom they serve. Unfortunately, many wizarding families, like the Malfoys, see house-elves as property and treat them horribly, skewing what's supposed to be a mutually beneficial partnership into a form of slavery. Snape's relationship with Mittens and Harry's relationship with Dobby are both shown as positive examples of a wizard and house-elf partnership.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: In canon, there was only the slightest hint that Snape had grudgingly accepted that Harry was more like his mother than father during Snape's last moments. Here, he's managed to completely overcome his Irrational Hatred of the boy without even needing to be put on death's door, to say nothing of him independently realizing before the story even started just how hostile of an individual he had been to everyone around him. It seems the Bad Future he comes from has humbled him greatly.
• Adaptation Distillation: The Horcruxes and the Deathly Hallows are completely removed from the plot, putting the focus on the need for Harry to prepare to confront Voldemort directly. The Chamber of Secrets and basilisk are also never brought up, though Riddle's diary makes a brief appearance.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Due to Snape's emphasis on the need to study hard and introducing him to Parselmagic, Harry becomes far more studious and develops an interest in becoming a healer rather than an Auror. In addition, Snape's efforts to ensure that the teachers and Headmaster are more visibly present and supportive leads to Harry becoming far happier and better-adjusted, especially once he's removed from the Dursleys' custody and Happily Adopted by the Flamels.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Severus gets along better with just about everybody in the new timeline.
  • Severus takes advantage of his first meeting with young Harry to set himslf up as a mentor figure, teaching him about his Parseltongue abilities, helping him get a head start on his studies, and standing up to the Dursleys on Harry's behalf. It isn't long before Harry looks up to him and is genuinely touched that a Stern Teacher like Severus cares about him enough to push him to excel.
  • There's also less friction between Severus and other members of the staff because he isn't constantly antagonizing them for petty reasons anymore...though that eventually raises suspicion for other reasons.
  • Harry ends up befriending Neville and forming an acquaintance with Draco Malfoy and his friends on the train, getting to know them much better while remaining virtual strangers with Hermione and the Weasleys.
  • Thanks to adults generally being more open and honest with him at Severus's insistence, Harry doesn't have nearly as many issues with mistrust of authority or thinking that Adults Are Useless and is more likely to approach authority figures for help rather than trying to do things himself — which in turn gets him into far less trouble.
  • Thanks to his Parselmagic abilities, Harry picks up on Lupin's lycanthropy without realizing what it is and is much more wary of him as a result, having identified him as somehow dangerous. It's only after he learns what being a werewolf means that he overcomes his reservations and forms a stronger relationship with Lupin. He likewise struggles to build a relationship with Sirius due to having developed different interests and not having as much common ground, which isn't helped by a few insensitive decisions on Sirius's part.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • Petunia tries to justify Harry's living situation by telling Severus that they tried to put him in the spare bedroom when they first took him in, but he refused to sleep anywhere but the cupboard. Severus immediately demands to know if she ever considered that it might have been a coping mechanism for the trauma of witnessing his mother's murder in his own bedroom, which stuns all three Dursleys silent.
  • After seeing Neville's shocked reaction to his casual use of Voldemort's name, Harry points out that it's...well, his name. Why shouldn't he use it, if that's what Voldemort wanted to call himself?
  • Severus subjects Zacharias Smith to the same grilling he gave Harry in the original timeline, then repeats the questions to Harry, who answers correctly due to having studied the first chapter of the textbook, as a pointed demonstration that he respects preparation and academic effort more than people who tattle on their classmates.
• Adults Are Useless:
  • Severus makes a point of defying this, going out of his way to help Harry and avert some of the dangerous scrapes he got into in the original timeline. Unfortunately, this sometimes causes new problems to emerge...
  • Dumbledore's decision to leave Harry with the Dursleys is justified here; he had no idea the Dursleys were mistreating him, and by the time he realized Harry and the Dursleys had problems in the original timeline, the war had started and Harry needed the protection of the blood wards. It's also implied that even then, he never realized how bad things really were. When Severus reveals the truth in the new timeline, Dumbledore has a major My God, What Have I Done? moment and accepts responsibility for his role in the mistreatment Harry endured. He also begins making plans to remove Harry from the Dursleys' custody and eventually places him with the Flamels, who happily adopt him.
  • Played straight by the Dursleys. If the Dursleys had cared about Harry at all, their affection for him would have activated blood wards set up by Dumbledore and made their home a near-impregnable fortress against dark magic. Because they don't, the blood wards are useless and Harry would be just as safe — or even safer — elsewhere.
  • Generally averted; thanks to Severus's influence, the teachers and Dumbledore are far more open and approachable than they were in the previous timeline. This results in students becoming more comfortable coming to them with problems, which enables them to actually solve those problems properly. This is particularly prominent with Harry, who firmly believed this trope in the previous timeline due to adults keeping secrets from him and generally proving themselves untrustworthy over small issues.
• Bad Future: This Snape comes from a future where the war against Voldemort ended disastrously.
• Berserk Button:
  • For Dumbledore, harming his students. He accidentally blows up a bookshelf when he hears about the Dursleys' abuse of Harry, and later, after learning that Quirrel has been attacking Harry with Legillimency, he amost goes after Quirrel himself before Severus convinces him to wait for Auror backup.
  • Trying to harm Harry, for Coral. Fenrir Greyback and Bellatrix Lestrange learn the hard way that coral snake venom is swift and very lethal.
• Brutal Honesty: Severus tends to veer into this, particularly when he's asked to explain something he feels should be obvious. This is usually followed by him pausing and reminding himself to ease off a bit, particularly where Harry is concerned.
• Butterfly of Doom: Severus's efforts to make things turn out better than the previous timeline sometimes lead to nasty unforeseen consequences.
  • Quirrel is caught early, killed, and Voldemort forced out of Hogwarts, but he simply ends up finding a new host in Peter Pettigrew. In addition, the early reveal of his continued survival causes him to drastically accelerate his plans, making overt attacks as early as the end of Harry's first year and properly resurrecting himself midway through the second year.
  • Telling Harry up front about his Parseltongue averts a lot of suspicion and bullying, but also gets Harry targeted with some nasty curses sent by people who resent his growing healing abilities and prompts Fenrir Greyback and his clan to ally with Voldemort much sooner after Harry creates a cure and vaccination for lycanthropy.
  • Giving Harry special permission to have Coral leads to other students realizing there's no rule against having their pets in class, so long as they're not disruptive. Ron starts bringing Scabbers to classes as a result, which causes Pettigrew to run away and reunite with Voldemort much earlier than before, becoming his new vessel after Quirrel dies and enabling his return much sooner.
  • Sabotaging Voldemort's recovery after he's shot by a Muggle he attacked causes Voldemort to plunge deeper into depravity by murdering children and using their magic to restore his health and power.
• Character Development:
  • Severus realizes he's been through some of this himself when he arrives in the past. Not only has he overcome his resentment toward Harry (to the point where Harry himself trusted Severus to change the past for the better and helped him perform the time-travelling ritual), he gets along much more smoothly with other professors during staff meetings and outright wonders why he used to start pointless arguments over things like Quidditch rivalries. He's still a strict teacher who doesn't tolerate foolishness or slacking off, but being through a losing war and watching many people die — including some of the students he's now teaching again — has softened his harsher edges and helped him adjust his priorities in favor of more constructive goals.
  • The wizarding world as a whole gains some respect for Muggles after Muggle medical technology proves crucial to a groundbreaking advancment in wizarding medicine (a cure and vaccine against lycanthropy) and successfully treats a few patients St. Mungo's had essentially written off as hopeless cases.
• Cosmetic Horror: Downplayed and used positively when Molly Weasley is horribly disfigured by Fiendfyre. The method Harry comes up with for treating the scars isn't exactly pleasant (it involves slicing scar tissue off and healing the wound left behind, repeatedly), but it's still better than what any other healer could do, which is essentially nothing. By the end of the treatment, the patient is recognizable as themseves again, which provokes both her and her husband to tears of joy.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: On the Hogwarts Express, Coral confirms that for all his shyness and forgetfulnesss, Neville has naturally powerful magic. While his own insecurity still holds him back, he starts to grow a spine and develop real ability much sooner than in canon thanks to Harry's encourgement.
• Deadpan Snarker: McGonagall proves herself adept at this when a flabbergasted Bill Weasley stops dead in his tracks upon hearing that Severus Snape personally requested his curse-breaking expertise.
  McGonagall: Mr. Weasley, I do hope you intend to follow me into the Great Hall. I would hate to inform the Headmaster and the other professors you were somehow indisposed out here.
• Establishing Character Moment: Severus's first scene makes it clear that he's had a great deal of Character Development off-screen, bonding with Harry closely enough that Harry performed a Heroic Sacrifice to send Severus back in time and try to create a better future where they could actually win the war against Voldemort. Even though Harry is still alive and well in the past, Severus still spends a moment choking up over his sacrifice before putting his feelings aside and getting to work making good on Harry's faith in him.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even the Death Eaters draw a line at sacrificing their own children to boost Voldemort's power.
• Faux Horrific: Harry is thrilled to learn that he has Potions class first, much to the horror of older students who are familiar with pre-time-travel Snape and his callous behavior.
• Fighting from the Inside: Voldemort uses the Imperius Curse to force Harry to murder his adoptive father. Harry manages to fight the curse off and turn the attack on Voldemort himself.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • In the previous timeline, Harry's magical and physical growth were stunted by the Dursleys' mistreatment, leaving him too weak to defeat Voldemort even when he was fully grown. After "noticing" Harry's malnourished state in Diagon Alley, Severus prescribes him a weekly regimen of supplement potions and confronts the Dursleys, demanding that they take better care of him going forward. This gets Harry's development back on track and drastically improves his living situation. It also convinces Dumbledore to remove Harry from the Dursleys' custody altogether during second year and results in Harry being Happily Adopted by the Flamels.
  • Severus tells Harry about his Parseltongue abilities right away and encourages him to learn Parselmagic, which greatly reduces the amount of suspicion Harry has to endure when others find out.
  • Severus immediately tries to head off Harry's confrontation with Voldemort in first year by suggesting that the series of traps on the third floor be used as a Red Herring — with an age line to keep any students from wandering in — while really hiding the Stone in Dumbledore's tower, which is one of the few places even Voldemort would hesitate to enter. This leads to the idea of using the Fidelius Charm as an extra measure of protection, ensuring only Dumbledore and one other person know the Stone's exact location. Voldemort never even gets close to it — though not for lack of trying. Severus is the one who confronts Voldemort in front of the Mirror of Erised and is badly injured as a result, rather than Harry, and uses the opportunity to cement himself as a trusted spy by passing privileged but worthless information on to Voldemort.
  • After taking Severus's advice to get to King's Cross early (and knowing in advance how to get onto the Platform 9 3/4) Harry ends up befriending Neville on the train and establishing a rapport with Draco Malfoy over his Parseltongue abilities without meeting Ron or Hermione at all. Their conversation about hard work and helping others also results in Harry and Neville being sorted into Hufflepuff instead of Gryffindor.
  • Voldemort's continued existence is made public much sooner, causing him to discard most of his subtle planning and make more direct attacks against Hogwarts and the Ministry to consolidate his power as swiftly as possible.
  • Voldemort ends up using blood from a different "enemy" (Albus Dumbledore's blood, stolen from a newly created blood bank) to resurrect himself, which changes the appearance of his new body.
• Healing Hands: Harry develops these thanks to his practice with Parselmagic.
• Heel–Face Turn: Lucius Malfoy and a few other Death Eaters have one after Voldemort asks them to give him their children as sacrifices to fuel his power. They respond by turning on him and wiping out most of his remaining loyal forces before going into hiding to escape retribution.
• Heroic Sacrifice: It's strongly implied that the Harry of the previous timeline expended enough magical energy to kill himself in order to fuel the spell that would send Severus back in time and create a better chance of defeating Voldemort.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Severus works to avert this by introucing Harry to the benevolent White Magic associated with Parseltongue, as well as engineering the reveal of his Parseltongue ability under much more controlled circumstances to promote open-minded acceptance rather than suspicion. It works.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • The Sorting Hat still has to think very hard about where to sort Harry, though this time it struggles to decide between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, with Slytherin relegated to a close third.
  • When another student tries to get Harry in trouble for having a snake on the first day of Potions, Severus grills that student with the same questions he asked Harry in the original timeline.
  • Voldemort's vessel unleashes a dangerous creature in the castle as a distraction to investigate the third floor in search of the Sorcerer's Stone and confronts one of the protagonists in the final chamber containing the Mirror of Erised.
  • Harry still comes face-to-face with Voldemort (who is using another character as a vessel for his spirit) and barely escapes with his life at the end of his first year.
  • Voldemort still completes the ritual to make a new body for himself thanks to vital assistance from Peter Pettigrew.
• Irony: During his first meeting with Severus in the new timeline, Dumbledore admits that he hadn't expected Severus to be so kind to Harry and praises his self-control in handling the situation, unaware that in the original timeline, his fears about Severus taking his resentment out on Harry were well-founded.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Two people make the mistake of attacking Harry with lethal intent; both suffer swift deaths when Coral bites them in self-defense.
  • The Hogwarts Board of Governors forces students to use outdated equipment despite the teachers' repeated requests for replacements in order to cut costs. This comes back to bite them when a near-fatal accident with a faulty broom gets them chewed out by angry parents and forces them to spend a small fortune fixing other issues they'd been ignoring.
  • Zacharias Smith provokes Harry by calling his mother a mudblood and is slapped with a week of detention for using a slur and bullying his housemate. He later tries to hex Draco when he steps up to defend Harry during another round of bullying and gets another week of detention, as well as having his parents called in and being confined to his dormitory except when a prefect or teacher escorts him to classes and meals for two weeks.
  • Dolores Umbridge decides to push her xenophobic worldviews at a ceremony honoring a breakthrough in wizarding medicine. This gets all of her bigoted remarks picked apart by other guests who point out that the new medical procedure is directly derived from Muggle technology, humiliating her. Then she has to sit there and listen to a discussion of other impressive things Muggles have accomplished.
  • The Death Eaters who make Heel Face Turns and wipe out a huge chunk of Voldemort's remaining forces are rewarded with pardons for their previous crimes.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Giving a house-elf clothes releases them from service, which most consider a Fate Worse than Death. Harry quickly realizes that there's no clause against letting the house-elf buy their own clothes and exploits this to improve Dobby's wardrobe, much to Dobby's delight and gratitude.
  • Harry's Parselmagic is completely ineffective on curse scars, but there's nothing stopping him from cutting the scar out and healing the wound it leaves behind normally.
• Mind Rape: After Harry confesses to having odd headaches in his Defense Against the Dark Arts class, Snape uses Legillimency (with Harry's permission) as a diagnostic tool and makes the alarming discovery that someone else has been trying to penetrate Harry's mind.
• Mood Whiplash: In the middle of a tense scene as Death Eaters gather following Voldemort's return, Severus has to suppress a flicker of amusement when he realizes that using different ingredients for the ritual has altered the appearance of Voldemort's new body.
  Voldemort had hair.
• Moral Dilemma:
  • Severus faces one when thinking about how to handle Sirius Black. He certainly doesn't plan to leave an innocent man rotting in Azkaban, but he can't get him freed without tipping his hand and potentially compromising his goal of nurturing Harry to his fullest potential. Freeing Black would give Harry another source of adult support and deal with Pettigrew, but Severus notes that Sirius didn't contribute very much to the fight against Voldemort in the previous timeline, and he does have more immediate threats to worry about. He ultimately decides that he needs to leave the issue be for the moment and put more thought into it once he has the time. Then Pettigrew goes missing, taking the situation out of his hands.
  • Another dilemma arises when Voldemort demands Severus's help with sacrificing children to boost his own power. Severus notes that he participated in similar atrocities in the previous timeline, believing that maintaining his cover would do more good in the long run, but facing the same type of situation again, he wonders if it was really the right choice. He decides that saving the children is more important and uses the general shock over his betrayal as an opportunity to take out some of Voldemort's more dangerous followers.
• Morality Chain: The life debt the Malfoy family owes Harry after he heals Draco. Lucius Malfoy is a supporter of Voldemort, but the magically binding nature of a life debt means he can't try to harm Harry in any way without bringing down severe consequences on his family — and the debt will only lift if one of the Malfoys saves Harry's life in turn. Thanks to a combination of this and Voldemort wanting to murder his followers' children for power, Lucius eventually performs a Heel–Face Turn.
• Muggles Do It Better:
  • Muggle doctors have a far better undrstanding of human anatomy and physiology due to the wizarding taboo on certain things like giving one's blood to someone else. As a result, their technology can treat wounds and chronic conditions most wizards can't begin to make sense of.
  • While spells outclass them for raw firepower, a trained Muggle with a gun can still be a nasty surprise to a group of hostile wizards. Wizards also don't know how to deal with physical projectiles or debris embedded in the body and don't know much about infections due to how quickly they can treat injuries. Severus weaponizes this after Voldemort is shot during an attack on a Muggle neighborhood, sealing his wound without bothering to clean or disinfect it and letting the resulting infection run its course. It can't kill Voldemort, but it does weaken him significantly. By contrast, Dumbledore receives treatment for a similar wound in a Muggle hospital and is almost back to his old self in a few weeks.
• My God, What Have I Done?: This is Dumbledore's reaction to learning that Harry was visibly underweight and badly dressed when Severus met him. He sadly notes that he should have listened to McGonagall even before learning the additional details that push his Berserk Button.
• Not So Omniscient After All: Even Dumbledore doesn't know everything, as Severus is forcibly reminded when his description of Harry's life with the Dursleys pushes Dumbledore's Berserk Button. He also surprises Dumbledore with the fact that Harry is a Parselmouth, which Dumbledore wasn't particularly shocked by in the original timeline.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Severus is careful to defy this, especially around anyone allied with Voldemort. Even so, people pick up on the difference every so often.
  • Played for laughs the first time Severus meets with Dumbledore.
    Dumbledore: Lemon drop?
    Severus was very tempted to take one, but it would be so out of character that it might cause Albus to have a stroke. He politely declined.
  • When Severus responds to McGonagall's boast about the Gryffindor quidditch team by diplomatically pointing out that every House has a chance to win rather than starting a petty argument, Professor Flitwick almost falls out of his chair. When he later admits to taking a personal interest in Harry Potter's education, to the point of giving him a rare book he jealously guarded previously, McGonagall outright asks what he's done with Severus Snape, and he can't tell if she's joking.
  • Severus resigns himself to alerting everyone that something is off on the first day of classes, as his shift to a more fair teaching style is made very evident by the fact that none of his students end up crying after a merciless and unwarranted belittlement.
  • Likewise, Severus knows he's pushing it when he suggests adding wards against Dementors to the school's defenses, but is able to play it off by pointing out that the recent incident with Quirrel has given them good reason to prepare for any eventuality.
• Peggy Sue: The premise of the fic. Severus Snape goes back in time, with Harry's help, in an effort to use his position as a teacher to nurture young Harry Potter's magical abilities and help him become strong enough to defeat Voldemort.
• Pet the Dog: Severus is looking forward to giving the Dursleys a piece of his mind and his wand over their treatment of Harry, but at Harry's request he agrees not to harm them in any way and even does them a favor by removing the pig tail Hagrid gave Dudley.
• Poison Is Evil: Averted, tying in with Snakes Are Sinister below. Harry's pet coral snake is venemous, but promises not to bite unless she intends to kill, and Severus casts a few protective spells that further reduce the risk of her venom harming anyone. The few times Coral does poison someone, it's clearly done in self-defense because the victim is actively trying to kill Harry.
• Portmanteau: After learning that Quirrel was possessed by Voldemort, some people dub him "Quirrelmort". Later, when Voldemort takes Peter Pettigrew as his new host, Snape quietly considers referring to him as "Petermort."
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Severus gives a cutting one to the Dursleys, condemming their abuse of Harry and picking apart their excuses for behaving that way. He later gives a more understated one to Zacharias Smith for coming to class unprepared and trying to get someone else in trouble for no good reason.
• Refuge in Audacity: When he's called to treat Voldmort for a gunshot wound, Severus simply seals the wound with the bullet and other debris still inside, knowing full well this will cause a massive infection. He gets away with it because he's dealing with pureblood supremacists who don't know anything about Muggle concepts like firearms or germ theory. This gets him praised for his skill while the person who administered clumsy first aid before Severus arrived is blamed when the victim is still weakened and in pain weeks later.
• Running Gag: Harry doesn't share the wizarding world's chronic fear of Voldemort's name, leading to frequent and sometimes comical reactions when he uses it in casual conversation. It doesn't take long for him to get tired of it and start using the name on purpose to help people break the habit.
• Russian Reversal: In canon, Severus was killed by Nagini in an unexpected betrayal. In this story, Nagini is killed by Severus in an unexpected betryal.
• Shaped Like Itself: Harry's pet coral snake is named Coral.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Harry is horrified when he realizes after accepting ownership of Dobby that Lucius has effectively given him a slave. Severus calms his fears by explaining that house-elves attach themselves to wizards willingly (see Adaptational Explanation above) and genuinely like being asked to help the wizards they're bound to. This doesn't stop some wizards from treating them like slaves, but most of the house-elves shown have mutually beneficial and respectful relationships with their wizard partners.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Discussed and zig-zagged. Severus admits that Harry's Parseltongue abilities will be viewed negativly due to their association with Voldemort, but stresses that the ability is not inherently evil, and neither are snakes themselves. The pet snake he buys for Harry is gentle and good-natured despite being venemous and readily promises not to bite without good reason. However, Nagini is also around in this continuity, and she fits the trope perfectly.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • In the previous timeline, Severus was not killed by Voldemort during the battle for Hogwarts, instead surviving to travel back in time and work for a better outcome.
  • Dumbledore survives in the new timeline, though not without a close call involving a veteran soldier wielding a gun. The epilogue confirms he eventually retired and lived to a ripe old age.
• Stern Teacher: Severus has mellowed from the Sadist Teacher of canon into this. He makes it clear from the beginning that he has high expectations and won't tolerate laziness or substandard work, but makes a clear effort to be more fair than he was the first time around and to check himself when he gets too harsh.
• Stunned Silence:
  • The Dursleys fall into a brief one after Severus spells out to them that Harry started sleeping in the cupboard because he was traumatized by his mother's murder.
  • Neville has one when Harry uses Voldemort's name for the first time, then asks why he wouldn't use it.
• Take That!:
  • Severus expresses disgust with Hogwarts's Board of Governors, noting that their penny-pinching sets students up for failure by sending them off to school with inadequate supplies and inferior equipment. It would only cost a little more to do it right and the improvement in performance would more than make up for the extra expense. To drive the point home, the Board doesn't respond to any requests or complaints about outdated or poorly-maintained facilities until someone is seriously injured by a faulty broom they'd refused to replace for six years running, prompting massive backlash from concerned parents.
  • After learning that his Sorting and a few other facts about him made it into the Daily Prophet, Harry wonders what gave the newspaper editors the idea that they had a right to pry into his life and give private information about him to the entire wizarding world without asking or even telling him about it beforehand.
• Tap on the Head: Averted. When a faulty broom slams Draco into the side of the school, it does enough damage to have killed him within minutes without Harry's intervention. Later, Dumbledore is grazed by a bullet from a Muggle gun and suffers a nasty concussion and some minor brain damage (though with the help of Muggle technology and surgical expertise, he makes a full recovery).
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The final chapter is one. Among other things, it clarifies that Severus eventually married and had a daughter, Dumbledore retired and went down in history as the greatest wizard of the age, Harry and Neville became pioneers of wizarding medicine and married Luna Lovegood and Hermione Granger, respectively, and Harry eventually improved his relationship with Sirius and picked up an interest in Quidditch.
• White Magic: Parselmagic focuses on healing and protection, but is very rare due to only being usable by Parseltongue speakers, many of whom are dark wizards and don't care about its unique applications. After introducing Harry to it, Severus makes a point of telling Dumbledore and his fellow professors that Harry took an immediate liking to the idea, which eases most of their concerns about Harry's Parseltongue ability being a sign of dark tendencies.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Curse scars, like those caused by Fiendfyre, are one of the only things Harry can't treat with Parselmagic. He eventually finds a loophole that at least reduces the scarring.

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