Twice the Life
Title: Twice the Life
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Genre: General/Angst
Summary: “In life we have to compromise the chaos of our choices”. Petunia realises what she missed. Petunia, Lily. Beta-ed by Velvet Mouse of Perfect Imagination. Posted at The Unknowable Room.
Words: 824
Disclaimer: I’d love to be able to claim Lily Evans and Petunia Dursley as my own, but I really can’t. Everything you recognise belongs to JK Rowling. Lyrics from Delta Goodrem’s “If I Forget”
Twice the Life
You’re a million miles away,
Your voice, it speaks so painfully
The day that Lily left for school, you locked yourself in your room and cried for hours. It was like your worst nightmare come true. Your passionate, stunning, vivacious sister was gone, bound for some strange new world that you didn’t understand and probably never would.
She promised she would write to you every week, and at first she did. But over the term, the letters became less and less frequent. When she came home for Christmas, she never drew breath to explain why that was. She told of her classes - how she could make feathers fly and change needles into toothpicks or some rubbish like that. Why would somebody want to change a needle into a toothpick anyway?
On one unremarkable April afternoon, while flipping through a family photo album, you realised that your whole attitude towards her had changed. Everything you used to envy - the beauty, the vitality, the passion - became what annoyed you most.
This sudden awareness changed you. You used to be playful and light-hearted. You had known exactly who you were and who you were going to become. You had known that Lily would be beside you the whole way.
After that, though, you were different. Eventually you convinced yourself that money and success and social stature were all a girl could hope for, but the meaningless luxuries you looked to for comfort would never truly satisfy you. From this misconception sprouted what you told yourself was love for Vernon Dursley. You conveniently forgot that he was just a greedy, self-righteous piggish kind of a man that you swore never to be associated with when he asked you to marry him, and you agreed straight away. You quietly noticed that you were wed before Lily was, and, that more than anything else, truly satisfied you on your wedding night.
In life we have to compromise
The chaos of our choices
Sometimes, you wonder what your life would have been like if you hadn’t pushed her away so brutally. If you had smiled rather than sneered, or said you loved her once in a while.
For most of your teenaged years, you thought that you hated her. You thought you must, because she annoyed you, and because you didn’t think that you needed her.
How wrong you were.
You needed her, because you needed to know what was happening in her world. Though you’d never admit that, you knew it, and she knew it, too. She knew that it would be easier for the Muggles who knew nothing of the wizarding community not to notice the weather gradually growing colder, or the number of mysterious deaths and disappearances. But your undeniable awareness of the situation would never allow you to be that blissfully ignorant.
It was easy to blame her when your mother died. She had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course. Amanda Evans died a slow, painful but satisfyingly normal death. That comforted you. You didn’t cry at the funeral. Nobody had expected you to anyway - you hadn’t cried in public since you were 10 years old.
Lily was bawling. It infuriated you to see her like that. She was supposed to be strong and optimistic - she wasn’t supposed to break down. It was an absolutely ridiculous thought, but it kept you from forgiving her; because forgiving her would be to surrender, and surrendering to her was something you would never do.
If I forget to say I love you,
It doesn’t mean that I don’t
Then she died, and you were angry.
You were angry because she died for a cause she was passionate about. You didn’t have a cause. Instead, you had housework and gossip.
She had a purpose. She had a husband she was mad about, who was mad about her. She would die for her baby, and she did. She had a cause larger than herself: everyday, she was saving lives.
You had no purpose like hers. You had a husband who worked to make you comfortable. There was no passion in that; none of the infatuation that newlyweds are supposed to experience. It was just security.
You had a baby. You wouldn’t die for him, because you would never be in the situation to need to do so. You would work as a housewife your whole life.
You weren’t a lifesaver.
When you were young, you had wanted to be. You had wanted to save the world. Lily was supposed to be soaring next to you.
But she left you behind. She had flown off to conquer all her fears and save the lives of strangers, and you had been left to press bedclothes and eavesdrop on the neighbours’ conversations.
There really was no comparison.
She had gotten your life as well as her own. You should have shined, you and Lily, side by side. But fate had overlooked you and left you in the dark, while Lily lived twice the life. She was twice as smart, twice as lovely. She had twice the adventure, twice the fervour, twice the flame.
She had lived twice the life.
Edit: Just thought I'd mention I was Spotlighted on UR. *woot woot* I'm excited. =D