Snape and the Prophecy: Snape pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and then looked up at Neville and Harry. He sighed in resignation and then began to speak.

"The first thing you must understand is that when I was young and foolish ... I was very young and foolish. The second thing you must understand that the early days of the last Wizarding War were a time of great confusion. While it was generally understood that the Dark Lord and his followers were motivated by a hatred of Muggleborns, a sizeable portion of the wizarding populace failed to appreciate just how violent and destructive they were. Likewise, at least in the early days, a great many people, including myself, failed to appreciate that the Dark Lord was genuinely a Dark Lord and not just some jumped up agitator the government wished to discredit. The Wizarding Wireless was still somewhat new and, in any case, owned and controlled by the Ministry, just like the Daily Prophet, our only major newspaper. And during that era, the Ministry strongly supported new rights and protections for Muggleborns and Muggles to a degree that even moderate witches and wizards found troubling. To make a long story short, a great many of my friends and peers from my school days believed that the worst accusations against the Dark Lord and his movement were propaganda meant to discredit him, that the atrocities the Death Eaters supposedly performed were fabrications or, worse, actual atrocities performed by Muggleborns for which Voldemort and his followers were framed. That is not an uncommon tactic during times of civil insurrection. I believe the Muggles refer to it as 'false flag' operations. In fact, even the term 'Death Eaters' was first used in a Daily Prophet editorial as an insult against the organization formally known as "The Knights of Walpurgis," an insult the Dark Lord eventually coopted and turned to his own political uses."](/spoiler)

"After graduating Hogwarts in 1978, I remained in contact with former Slytherin friends who joined the Dark Lord's inner circle. I returned to England in January of 1980 after obtaining my Potions Mastery in Italy. The skills I had obtained were some that would be extremely useful to the Death Eater movement, and they wished to recruit me. And while I had little use for their larger political agenda, a family matter that arose around that time made their offer attractive. You see, I am a Halfblood." Both Harry and Neville were startled by his blunt admission. "My father was a Muggle, but my mother was a witch from the now extinct Noble House of Prince. She was expelled from the family for marrying my father, a foolish and shortsighted decision by my grandfather as he had no other surviving heirs. Thus, when he died in 1979, the House of Prince was extinguished. However, my friends assured me that if I could prove my worth to the Dark Lord, he would reward me when he took power by legislatively reversing my mother's expulsion, thereby allowing me to claim the Prince seat and assets."

"It was against this backdrop that on a cold, January day in 1980, I found myself in the Hogs Head Inn in Hogsmeade. I had learned that Albus Dumbledore was meeting with an applicant for the recently vacated Divination Instructor's position, and I had hoped to meet with him myself and present my credentials for the position of Potions Instructor, as I had heard rumors that Horace Slughorn was considering retirement. While waiting for Dumbledore to come out of the meeting room, I suddenly heard the woman inside cry out the beginnings of a prophecy, the same prophecy which the Dark Lord related to both of you. The owner of the bar caught me eavesdropping and, assuming I was deliberately spying on the Headmaster, threw me out. Although I knew there was more to the prophecy than what I'd heard, I believed, correctly, that relating what I did know to the Dark Lord would win me a place in his Inner Circle and, eventually I hoped, the Prince inheritance." He hesitated. "It goes without saying that when I met with the Dark Lord, I had no idea that either of your mothers was with child."

"But you did know you were sending You-Know-Who after a child though, right?" asked Neville in a tight voice. "Even if it hadn't been either of us, you were telling You-Know-Who to kill a child."

Severus chuckled bitterly. "As I said Mr. Longbottom, when I was young and foolish, I was very young and very foolish. In all honesty, when I revealed the partial prophecy to the Dark Lord, I had not considered for one second the possibility that it referred to an infant."

The two looked up at him in surprise. "What?!" asked Harry incredulously.

He shrugged. "I never took Divination, and in my hubris, I applied a layman's analysis to what I'd heard. Consider the words of the prophecy that you already know, Mr. Potter. 'The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches..." The word 'approaches' in my mind clearly referred to someone who was some distance away but drawing nearer. It is not a word that I would have ever used to describe a child in utero whose birth was still over seven months away. The phrase 'born as the seventh month dies' obviously indicated a late July birth date but did not, in and of itself, imply that said birth was yet to come. As for the middle line – 'born to those who have thrice defied him' – well, 'defy" is a rather vague term. Certainly, Lily Potter's 'defiance' consisted mainly of publicly condemning the violence of the Death Eaters and. of course, marrying the Pureblood James Potter despite her Muggleborn status. In any case, the Dark Lord was known to have spent decades traveling the world in his studies of the Dark Arts. I assumed that in his travels, he had crossed wands with a wizarding couple three times - foreign aurors perhaps - and that he killed one or both of them during their third encounter. The subject of the prophecy, then, was most likely their son or daughter who, having reached adulthood, now pursued the Dark Lord to seek vengeance. So no, the possibility of the prophecy referring to an unborn child simply did not occur to me ... until after I was initiated into the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord announced his plans to completely destroy St. Mungos on the morning of August 1st."

Harry's eyes rose. "You were the one who talked him out of it."

Snape nodded. "I along with two others. We persuaded the Dark Lord that murdering dozens of children and infants and possibly hundreds of other wizards and witches at the nation's only hospital would turn the opinion of a still-divided wizarding Britain against us. Indeed, without knowing the full prophecy, it was possible that the mysterious 'power to vanquish the Dark Lord' might refer to the symbolic power that the memory of a murdered child might have in shaping public opinion irrevocably against him. It was a highly improbable interpretation, but it was just plausible enough to deter the Dark Lord from attacking St. Mungo's. Shortly thereafter, he focused his attention exclusively on you two and on Jim Potter, as all three of your were to be born at the end of July and, as far as the Dark Lord was concerned, all four of your parents had defied him three times. It was at that point that I contacted Dumbledore, urged him to send the Potters and Longbottoms into hiding, and agreed to spy on the Dark Lord on Dumbledore's behalf."

I can provide more (that are also not super spoiler-y) if you're still on the fence.

I can see that both are written better (slightly?) than most gary stu, angsty godlike Harry fanfiction.

Harry does have legitimate flaws, and other characters are actually well characterized. Ron and Jim are actually well developed, and so are Lockhart, Snape, Pettigrew, James, and Lily.

If you don't think the 20-30 chapter investment is worth it, then yeah, it's a lot. I do think the 2nd year is really good though.