All Those Empty Spaces by jackiejlh
Title: All Those Empty Spaces
Author: jackiejlh
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,083
Warnings: None
Character(s): Petunia Dursley
Summary: She never noticed all of the empty spaces in her life until they started filling up with memories.
Petunia Dursley will be forty years old tomorrow, but age doesn't matter anymore, and everything she’s ever wanted and worked for has been taken away from her.
There are empty spaces in her life now, and maybe they’ve always been there. Maybe it’s just that the empty spaces were easy to ignore until they started filling up with memories, clamouring for her attention when she had nothing else to distract her from her thoughts. Or maybe the spaces were never empty to begin with.... She’s not sure how to tell at this point, and not sure it matters much either way.
~
The house is small, smaller than the one they left behind, and Petunia never realised how much she enjoyed her days alone until Vernon had to stop working and Dudley couldn’t go back to school. Now the days seem to drag by and the years play through her mind, the sounds oddly muffled or muted but the pictures clear: Lily pushes her on the swing sometimes, and other days Petunia stands beside Vernon at her parents’ funeral and wonders if it had really been a car crash or if Lily’s war hadn’t somehow spilled over into the normal world.
Occasionally she thinks about Harry, but then hurries her musings on to other things. He’s no longer the boy, though. There have been too many who have held the title of the boy over the years, she’s decided, and the silence gives way to remembering them all, and it’s hard for her to keep them straight if she doesn’t call them by their names.
~
Lily and her husband fought in a war; neither of them survived. Their son is fighting, has been fighting, and Petunia wonders if she’ll ever learn of his fate. She supposes he’s still alive, or someone from his Order would have come by already. Or maybe they’re all dead, she thinks with a fleeting sense of panic, and no one will ever come.
~
Vernon misses the telly-the wizards never thought about what they’d actually do, trapped in this tiny, empty house-and Dudley misses his friends. Petunia misses everything, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes, right down to the stray cat she shooed off her doorstep with increasing irritation morning after morning and the spiders that would occasionally creep out of the hall cupboard.
She misses her clothes, for they only have what they brought with them that first night. The wizards gave them robes to wear, but they haven’t even looked at them. They’re still in a bag, tucked into a new hall cupboard-one that probably has just as many spiders lurking in its shadows as the old one did, but this one doesn’t hold the memory of a little boy with a scar on his forehead, and Petunia uses this new cupboard for storage even though the old one remained empty for years after Harry had his own bedroom.
~
If the days are long, the nights are endless, but perhaps lying awake is better than sleeping.
Petunia used to have nightmares about the murderer from the news breaking into her home and hurting her family. She thinks back to a time when that man was just a boy, when he sat at her parents’ kitchen table and laughed too loud, talked too much, and teased her in a mean-spirited sort of way that she’d never really forgiven him for. Years later, the fact that the news of his escape had reached her world was all she needed to know about just how dangerous that boy-Sirius, she amends now because she has to use his name or his face will get lost among the others-had grown up to be, and she was terrified.
She still remembers the last time she saw him-when he stood in her garden, just beside the runner beans, and despite his obvious dislike for her, he tried to convince her to attend Lily’s wedding the following morning. Your sister wants you to be there, Sirius had said, his voice a harsh whisper. She’s been crying ever since your letter arrived. She’s your sister, how can you just not go? She loves you....
He got mad when Petunia said that she didn’t care, that she didn’t love Lily no matter Lily felt about her, and his eyes had burned with anger, almost glowing in the darkness. But it was three a.m., and Petunia’s primary concern at that moment was that her new neighbours would see her talking to a strange man in her garden in the middle of the night.
Sometimes Petunia wishes she’d cared a bit less about her new neighbours. Sometimes she wishes she’d swallowed her pride and gone to Lily’s wedding, watched her marry the man she’d die with only a few years later. Other days Petunia is certain that the distance between her and her sister is the only thing that kept her guilt from overtaking her every time she looked into Harry’s eyes.
Lately, Petunia’s nightmares are far more sinister. The dark men multiple with every second and lurk in every shadow, and they no longer bother with Harry because they can’t touch him, not in her dreams. In her dreams it’s her they’re after, and they all look like Sirius Black-long, torn robes and dirty hair and crazed laughs to match the maniacal expressions in their eyes-even though Sirius turned out to be innocent in the end.
~
She wonders if she’ll ever get to leave this house, if they’ll ever go back to Privet Drive even if Harry and his friends do win the war. She wonders if anyone misses her, has even noticed she’s gone, or if the wizards have made it so that no one remembers the Dursleys ever existed; she knows they can do such things....
She muses, Maybe it’s for the best if they’ve done exactly that. Petunia can’t see herself ever going back to that house, picking up her life as if nothing had ever happened. There would be too many questions, too much gossip, too many rumors, and there has been enough talk about her nephew over the last few years to cast a bad light on her family anyway. Our reputation, she thinks, will probably never recover from this.
~
I shouldn’t think about Harry, she tells herself again, but she does-everything seems to lead back to him in her mind-and for the first time she understands why the witches and wizards treat him as if he were some sort of god. It’s not because they think he can save them, but that he’s their only chance and it’s either support him or admit defeat.
The very idea of admitting defeat makes Petunia sick. It aches somewhere inside her chest, throbbing in time with her heart. She’ll be strong, she has to be, if only for Vernon and Dudley. They need her; she knows more about this world than either of them ever will. She was the one who knew how to extinguish the ever-burning candles because Lily told her about them once, and she is the one who reads the letters from Hestia Jones that come every week with the food, translates them from wizard to Muggle, into words her family can understand, explaining all the bits that don’t make sense to them. She never realised how much she knew of that world until it became their only link to any world outside the tiny safehouse.
~
The first boy, she remembers with a shudder, was Severus. Sev, Lily had called him, but Petunia had always felt that Severus fit him better somehow. He was an awful, wretched little thing, not at all the sort that Lily usually spent time with and nothing like the boys she befriended in her final years at school. At first Petunia had teased her sister and made kissing noises at her every time she even mentioned Severus’s name, but it wasn’t long before she learned to hate Severus because he shared something with Lily that Petunia never could, and that wasn’t fair. They were sisters, they’d always done everything together, and it wasn’t fair.
Life isn’t fair, something in her mind hisses, mocking her, and she turns her gaze back to the window and thinks about how no one can see the house from the outside. She wonders if anyone out there would even know if they were attacked. Would the spells and charms the wizards cast protect them, or simply drown out the screams before they ever reached the street?
~
Severus had spoken of Dementors once, and Petunia isn’t sure she ever really believed him, not until Dudley was attacked. Now his words echo through her mind, and for once the sound is crystal clear. They look like death and smell even worse, he said with the sort of excitement that only a nine-year-old boy can feel over something so dreadful. I’ve heard they can suck your soul right out of your body, he continued, and then, softer, added, D’you think it hurts, Lil?
Once upon a time, Lily told her sister, Severus has... joined the other side, her eyes hardening with the words, and only a few months later she’d brought new friends home with her at Christmas.
Sometimes Petunia wonders if Severus will ever learn exactly what it feels like to have his soul taken by Dementors. A part of her, a part she doesn’t like to admit even exists, hopes that he will.
~
Dementors are just one of the things to be concerned with now, Hestia Jones wrote, and lately Petunia has learned to believe in so many things she’s never believed in before-vampires and werewolves, giants and dragons, un-death and graveyard resurrections.
Snape has been made the headmaster at Hogwarts, the witch wrote in another long and rambling letter, and Petunia wonders if Hestia is waiting somewhere too, lonely and bored.
He killed Dumbledore. He’s nearly as evil as You-Know-Who.
Petunia finds it hard to reconcile this information with the memory of the little boy whose face lit up every time Lily smiled.
In her nightmares, Petunia’s Death Eaters never look like Severus, but this is only one of the things that no longer make sense to her, and she tries not to dwell on this particular thing any more than she does the rest of them.
~
“Happy Birthday,” she whispers to herself as the clock’s hand ticks past twelve, and Vernon mutters something in his sleep and then settles against the pillow once more, his deep snores echoing through the tiny room. He won’t remember-he never does, and neither does Dudley, and even though they probably have better reasons to forget this year than they’ve ever had before, it hurts just a bit more than usual.
Lily never forgot her birthday, not once, not even after Petunia stopped speaking to her. The last few gifts had been returned unopened, but with each year came another owl tapping at her window, a package dangling from its leg for all the world to see.
The year after Lily died, Petunia would have given anything to hear an owl outside her window, even if she’ll never admit it to Vernon or even to herself.
~
In the morning, Petunia showers and dresses and makes a breakfast identical to the one the day before. She crosses out the date on the calendar, a morning ritual so that she won’t lose track of the passing time. It’s otherwise unmarked, nothing to signify that this day is any different than the last.
After breakfast, perhaps I’ll write another letter, she thinks, and maybe she’ll mention to Hestia that it’s her birthday because Hestia reminds her of Lily in some ways, and Petunia has never been as lonely as she is right now.
Petunia Dursley is forty years old today, and in one moment she feels eleven but then later she’s ancient, aged beyond her years by the weight of everything she’s lived. Everything she’s ever wanted and worked for has been taken from her, but she’ll keep wanting and keep working because it’s the only thing left for her to do. She’ll keep remembering because somebody has to, and maybe one day she’ll stop pretending that the memories don’t exist. One day, she reminds herself with a pang of worry, the memories may be all I have left, and she stares absently out the window, lost in her thoughts.
Author: jackiejlh
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,083
Warnings: None
Character(s): Petunia Dursley
Summary: She never noticed all of the empty spaces in her life until they started filling up with memories.
Petunia Dursley will be forty years old tomorrow, but age doesn't matter anymore, and everything she’s ever wanted and worked for has been taken away from her.
There are empty spaces in her life now, and maybe they’ve always been there. Maybe it’s just that the empty spaces were easy to ignore until they started filling up with memories, clamouring for her attention when she had nothing else to distract her from her thoughts. Or maybe the spaces were never empty to begin with.... She’s not sure how to tell at this point, and not sure it matters much either way.
~
The house is small, smaller than the one they left behind, and Petunia never realised how much she enjoyed her days alone until Vernon had to stop working and Dudley couldn’t go back to school. Now the days seem to drag by and the years play through her mind, the sounds oddly muffled or muted but the pictures clear: Lily pushes her on the swing sometimes, and other days Petunia stands beside Vernon at her parents’ funeral and wonders if it had really been a car crash or if Lily’s war hadn’t somehow spilled over into the normal world.
Occasionally she thinks about Harry, but then hurries her musings on to other things. He’s no longer the boy, though. There have been too many who have held the title of the boy over the years, she’s decided, and the silence gives way to remembering them all, and it’s hard for her to keep them straight if she doesn’t call them by their names.
~
Lily and her husband fought in a war; neither of them survived. Their son is fighting, has been fighting, and Petunia wonders if she’ll ever learn of his fate. She supposes he’s still alive, or someone from his Order would have come by already. Or maybe they’re all dead, she thinks with a fleeting sense of panic, and no one will ever come.
~
Vernon misses the telly-the wizards never thought about what they’d actually do, trapped in this tiny, empty house-and Dudley misses his friends. Petunia misses everything, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes, right down to the stray cat she shooed off her doorstep with increasing irritation morning after morning and the spiders that would occasionally creep out of the hall cupboard.
She misses her clothes, for they only have what they brought with them that first night. The wizards gave them robes to wear, but they haven’t even looked at them. They’re still in a bag, tucked into a new hall cupboard-one that probably has just as many spiders lurking in its shadows as the old one did, but this one doesn’t hold the memory of a little boy with a scar on his forehead, and Petunia uses this new cupboard for storage even though the old one remained empty for years after Harry had his own bedroom.
~
If the days are long, the nights are endless, but perhaps lying awake is better than sleeping.
Petunia used to have nightmares about the murderer from the news breaking into her home and hurting her family. She thinks back to a time when that man was just a boy, when he sat at her parents’ kitchen table and laughed too loud, talked too much, and teased her in a mean-spirited sort of way that she’d never really forgiven him for. Years later, the fact that the news of his escape had reached her world was all she needed to know about just how dangerous that boy-Sirius, she amends now because she has to use his name or his face will get lost among the others-had grown up to be, and she was terrified.
She still remembers the last time she saw him-when he stood in her garden, just beside the runner beans, and despite his obvious dislike for her, he tried to convince her to attend Lily’s wedding the following morning. Your sister wants you to be there, Sirius had said, his voice a harsh whisper. She’s been crying ever since your letter arrived. She’s your sister, how can you just not go? She loves you....
He got mad when Petunia said that she didn’t care, that she didn’t love Lily no matter Lily felt about her, and his eyes had burned with anger, almost glowing in the darkness. But it was three a.m., and Petunia’s primary concern at that moment was that her new neighbours would see her talking to a strange man in her garden in the middle of the night.
Sometimes Petunia wishes she’d cared a bit less about her new neighbours. Sometimes she wishes she’d swallowed her pride and gone to Lily’s wedding, watched her marry the man she’d die with only a few years later. Other days Petunia is certain that the distance between her and her sister is the only thing that kept her guilt from overtaking her every time she looked into Harry’s eyes.
Lately, Petunia’s nightmares are far more sinister. The dark men multiple with every second and lurk in every shadow, and they no longer bother with Harry because they can’t touch him, not in her dreams. In her dreams it’s her they’re after, and they all look like Sirius Black-long, torn robes and dirty hair and crazed laughs to match the maniacal expressions in their eyes-even though Sirius turned out to be innocent in the end.
~
She wonders if she’ll ever get to leave this house, if they’ll ever go back to Privet Drive even if Harry and his friends do win the war. She wonders if anyone misses her, has even noticed she’s gone, or if the wizards have made it so that no one remembers the Dursleys ever existed; she knows they can do such things....
She muses, Maybe it’s for the best if they’ve done exactly that. Petunia can’t see herself ever going back to that house, picking up her life as if nothing had ever happened. There would be too many questions, too much gossip, too many rumors, and there has been enough talk about her nephew over the last few years to cast a bad light on her family anyway. Our reputation, she thinks, will probably never recover from this.
~
I shouldn’t think about Harry, she tells herself again, but she does-everything seems to lead back to him in her mind-and for the first time she understands why the witches and wizards treat him as if he were some sort of god. It’s not because they think he can save them, but that he’s their only chance and it’s either support him or admit defeat.
The very idea of admitting defeat makes Petunia sick. It aches somewhere inside her chest, throbbing in time with her heart. She’ll be strong, she has to be, if only for Vernon and Dudley. They need her; she knows more about this world than either of them ever will. She was the one who knew how to extinguish the ever-burning candles because Lily told her about them once, and she is the one who reads the letters from Hestia Jones that come every week with the food, translates them from wizard to Muggle, into words her family can understand, explaining all the bits that don’t make sense to them. She never realised how much she knew of that world until it became their only link to any world outside the tiny safehouse.
~
The first boy, she remembers with a shudder, was Severus. Sev, Lily had called him, but Petunia had always felt that Severus fit him better somehow. He was an awful, wretched little thing, not at all the sort that Lily usually spent time with and nothing like the boys she befriended in her final years at school. At first Petunia had teased her sister and made kissing noises at her every time she even mentioned Severus’s name, but it wasn’t long before she learned to hate Severus because he shared something with Lily that Petunia never could, and that wasn’t fair. They were sisters, they’d always done everything together, and it wasn’t fair.
Life isn’t fair, something in her mind hisses, mocking her, and she turns her gaze back to the window and thinks about how no one can see the house from the outside. She wonders if anyone out there would even know if they were attacked. Would the spells and charms the wizards cast protect them, or simply drown out the screams before they ever reached the street?
~
Severus had spoken of Dementors once, and Petunia isn’t sure she ever really believed him, not until Dudley was attacked. Now his words echo through her mind, and for once the sound is crystal clear. They look like death and smell even worse, he said with the sort of excitement that only a nine-year-old boy can feel over something so dreadful. I’ve heard they can suck your soul right out of your body, he continued, and then, softer, added, D’you think it hurts, Lil?
Once upon a time, Lily told her sister, Severus has... joined the other side, her eyes hardening with the words, and only a few months later she’d brought new friends home with her at Christmas.
Sometimes Petunia wonders if Severus will ever learn exactly what it feels like to have his soul taken by Dementors. A part of her, a part she doesn’t like to admit even exists, hopes that he will.
~
Dementors are just one of the things to be concerned with now, Hestia Jones wrote, and lately Petunia has learned to believe in so many things she’s never believed in before-vampires and werewolves, giants and dragons, un-death and graveyard resurrections.
Snape has been made the headmaster at Hogwarts, the witch wrote in another long and rambling letter, and Petunia wonders if Hestia is waiting somewhere too, lonely and bored.
He killed Dumbledore. He’s nearly as evil as You-Know-Who.
Petunia finds it hard to reconcile this information with the memory of the little boy whose face lit up every time Lily smiled.
In her nightmares, Petunia’s Death Eaters never look like Severus, but this is only one of the things that no longer make sense to her, and she tries not to dwell on this particular thing any more than she does the rest of them.
~
“Happy Birthday,” she whispers to herself as the clock’s hand ticks past twelve, and Vernon mutters something in his sleep and then settles against the pillow once more, his deep snores echoing through the tiny room. He won’t remember-he never does, and neither does Dudley, and even though they probably have better reasons to forget this year than they’ve ever had before, it hurts just a bit more than usual.
Lily never forgot her birthday, not once, not even after Petunia stopped speaking to her. The last few gifts had been returned unopened, but with each year came another owl tapping at her window, a package dangling from its leg for all the world to see.
The year after Lily died, Petunia would have given anything to hear an owl outside her window, even if she’ll never admit it to Vernon or even to herself.
~
In the morning, Petunia showers and dresses and makes a breakfast identical to the one the day before. She crosses out the date on the calendar, a morning ritual so that she won’t lose track of the passing time. It’s otherwise unmarked, nothing to signify that this day is any different than the last.
After breakfast, perhaps I’ll write another letter, she thinks, and maybe she’ll mention to Hestia that it’s her birthday because Hestia reminds her of Lily in some ways, and Petunia has never been as lonely as she is right now.
Petunia Dursley is forty years old today, and in one moment she feels eleven but then later she’s ancient, aged beyond her years by the weight of everything she’s lived. Everything she’s ever wanted and worked for has been taken from her, but she’ll keep wanting and keep working because it’s the only thing left for her to do. She’ll keep remembering because somebody has to, and maybe one day she’ll stop pretending that the memories don’t exist. One day, she reminds herself with a pang of worry, the memories may be all I have left, and she stares absently out the window, lost in her thoughts.