Alt. Chapter One - "My Mother's Eyes"
Author: hedwigs_bane
Rating: G
Word Count: 4,940
Song Lyrics: "My Mother's Eyes" - Bette Midler
A.N.: This was an alternative first chapter to a seven chapter story entitled "My Mother's Eyes". It was an attempt on my part to explain the unforgivable behaviour of Petunia Dursley towards her sister's son Harry during his time on Privet Drive. Though I ended up not using it for the story, it turned out to be a solid piece on its own. star54kar 's new site is the perfect place for it, I think! (This piece was written before the release of Deathly Hallows, and so is not canon compliant.)
The final form of the whole story (a Harry/Ron centric fic) can be found on my site.
ALTERNATIVE CHAPTER ONE
Got my mother's eyes and my father's hair.
Does anybody really care?
It's gettin' cold out here.
“5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Happy Birthday, Harry.” Harry Potter smiled grimly to no one, in as much as he was alone in his room, counting down to midnight on what had just become July 31, 1997. Physically, he felt no different. He knew, however, that in the transition from one second to the next everything had changed. He, the Boy-Who-Lived, The Chosen One, was no longer an underage wizard.
“Well, Hedwig,” he said to the snowy owl sitting on top of its cage, “time to go.” He walked over to the owl, carrying the piece of parchment he had been clutching for the last forty-five minutes. Hedwig held out her leg as if she had been waiting for the charge since she had watched him writing it.
“Stay at the Burrow until I come for you, all right?” Harry always wondered if Hedwig really understood English, or if she could interpret his thoughts. All he knew was that she never failed to know what was required of her. “Don’t bother coming back here, because I won’t be here.” Ever again, he thought to himself. He offered his arm, and Hedwig jumped onto it, allowing him to carry her to the opened window. He winced as she began to flap her wings for lift, tightening her talons on his bare skin until she felt it safe to let go and soar off into the black sky.
Rubbing his arm, Harry looked down into Privet Drive. He felt no sense of nostalgia, no longing for a time when he was younger. This view meant less than nothing to him. There was never a time when he looked out of this window and he felt like he was home. His aunt, his late mother’s sister, had never wanted him there. His uncle even less so. His cousin hardly mattered at all. As far as Harry was concerned, if Number Four collapsed into rubble after he stepped out the front door, he couldn’t care less.
Harry turned and scanned his bedroom, or his prison as he liked to think of it. Nothing about the room gave any indication that a wizard had occupied it for better part of seven summers. It was so muggle that it made him want to heave. The Dursley’s would never allow any moving pictures to be hung on the walls. He couldn’t display his pennant of the Irish National Quidditch team that he had bought at the Quidditch World Cup three years before. Anything that might have declared “Harry Potter was here” had been hidden beneath the loose floorboard under the bed. Until now, that was.
Across the room, Harry saw his trunk standing open. He could have closed it hours ago, knowing full well that the few personal items he had even bothered to remove from it had been repacked not long after dinner. Still, he recalled times at school when he thought he had packed everything, only to find a pair of unwashed socks under the bed clothes. He glanced at Hedwig’s cage, empty now except for about a week’s worth of owl droppings. He decided to leave it. He could buy a new cage in Diagon Alley. Also, it pleased him to picture the horrified look on his aunt’s face. Something for her to remember me by, he thought.
Performing one last check of the drawers and closet, he confirmed what he had already known: everything that was his was in the trunk. Just to antagonize his cousin, Dudley, he left the birthday cake that Hagrid had sent him on the small writing desk. He knew his Aunt Petunia would not allow the great hulk to eat it, both because of Dudley’s ongoing and dismally ineffective diet, and because she would fear it was poisoned, or otherwise enchanted. Harry smiled to himself as he pictured the look on Dudley’s face as he watched his mother bung it into the bin. Something for him to remember me by.
Harry latched his trunk and took a deep breath. It wasn’t hard to leave, certainly. It was, however, hard to begin the rest of his life. If nothing else, Number Four Privet Drive had provided continuity. No one here had ever thought him as special or destined for anything important. Now he prepared himself to enter a world of unknowns. And it made no difference whether he stayed here or left. The protection afforded him by living where his mother’s blood dwelled had expired when he turned seventeen. For Harry, there was only one thing he still knew for sure. He would kill Voldemort, or be killed by him.
Before that, however, there were still some moments to look forward to. In less than a month’s time, he would be joining the Weasley family for Bill and Fleur’s wedding. He felt a warmth spread through him as he thought of what a happy day it would be at the Burrow. All the more so because he would be reunited with the two most important people in his life, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.
A sudden but familiar sense of exhilaration passed through him. There was a time when Harry would have written it off as simply his excitement at being with his friends again. But no longer. For close to three years now he knew exactly why his heartbeat quickened and his breath shortened like this. He had first noticed it in his 4th year at Hogwarts, when he learned that Ron had been taken as the thing he would miss the most in the Triwizard Tournament. It happened again when he learned Ron would recover after being attacked by a brain at in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic. Without taxing his memory, Harry could think of at least a dozen times that he felt the same way.
Taking his wand from the back pocket of his jeans, Harry pointed it at the trunk and muttered a spell, performing his first bit of magic as an adult wizard. He watched as the trunk transfigured into a soft leather briefcase. He bent over to pick it up and nearly wrenched his arm from its socket.
“Nice play, Potter, you idiot,” Harry growled at himself, then cast another spell to make the weight of the valise match its appearance. Picking it up easily now, he walked to the bedroom door. How many times in the past had he longed to blast this door open, sending the various deadbolts that his uncle had installed crashing into the opposite wall. Of course, he never could, not if he wanted to remain a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. More than once he had been reprimanded for the use of underage magic by the Ministry, even when he was totally innocent.
Feeling a rush of power now that he had come of age, Harry considered how best to leave Privet Drive. He could blast the door open, shaking the Dursley’s from sleep. It might be fun to terrorize them all a bit as a partial repayment for the misery they had heaped upon him. The pig’s tail had suited Dudley all those years ago. Maybe it was time to make the transfiguration complete. Considering what his cousin looked like now, it wouldn’t be a difficult charm. He would just need to finish what his aunt and uncle had started.
No, he had wasted too much time already. He just wanted to be gone from here with as few diversions as possible. He spoke a soft “Alohamora,” and listened as the numerous locks clicked open. He opened the door and listened to Dudley’s rasping snores. He wondered how he had ever managed to sleep in the same house with such a racket. Leaving the bedroom door open, he walked down the hall to the stairs.
He stopped short. In the dim light of a small lamp that always burned in the front hallway, Harry could see someone sitting on the bottom stair. It was a tall, slim someone, who sat hunched over and hugging herself, as if she felt very cold.
“Aunt Petunia?” Harry said quietly. His aunt stood and turned to face him.
“You’re leaving then?” Her voice lacked that disapproving, clipped quality that Harry was so used to hearing whenever she forced herself to speak to him. He couldn’t identify this new tone, having never heard it from her before.
“Yeah,” Harry said, as if he was trading small talk with a stranger. “I reckon its time.”
She nodded curtly, “And where will you go?” Harry was taken aback at this. He couldn’t begin to guess why this information would hold any interest for her. Still, he felt no need to be evasive. He was beyond the Dursley’s control. There was nothing they could do or say to stop him from going where he pleased.
“I’m going to take a room at the Leaky Cauldron,” he said, walking down the stairs and standing in the front hall. “Then I’ll be going to stay with my friend Ron and his family. After that, I’m not really sure. I thought I would visit my mum and dad’s graves.” At this, he saw her eyes lock onto him as she drew a quick breath.
“Are you in a rush, or could we have a cup of tea?” A cup of tea? What we she playing at? In all his years at the Dursley’s she had never once offered him anything. She told him where things were, and after he had served the family, she allowed him to scrape together something for himself. She had surely never stopped him from making tea for himself, but she had never offered it to him, either.
“No,” Harry said, feeling tremendously uncomfortable. “I really don’t have the time to make tea.” He hoped she had properly interpreted his inflection.
“Just a sit-down, then?” she persisted. “I promise not to keep you long.”
Harry’s discomfort was now at war with his curiosity. Was this to be some sort of “let-bygones-be-bygones” scene? Did she honestly believe that anything she had to say would be of any interest to him? No, no, no. For sixteen years she had had her chance to be civil, to treat Harry like a member of the family, and not some indentured servant. He owed her nothing, not even the clothes on his back, which he had bought for himself in the muggle high street.
“Please.”
It hit Harry like a Stunner. He had heard his aunt simper the word before. It was usually when she was begging Uncle Vernon for a new gas cooker, or pleading with Dudley to be satisfied with the dinner of steamed vegetables she placed before him. Never had she spoken it directly to Harry. Temporarily robbed of the power of speech, Harry merely nodded.
Aunt Petunia walked into the lounge, Harry following. She sat at the end of the sofa, and waved at Uncle Vernon’s favorite chair. Harry sat, but did not allow himself to lean back into the cushions, perching instead on the end on the seat, his feet firmly on the floor. He waited, presuming that his aunt would explain this curious behavior, but for a long moment she only stared at him.
“I really don’t have a lot of time,” Harry said, trying to draw her out.
“If you leave,” she finally began, “won’t you be in danger?”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Harry replied. “I’m in danger if I stay. I just turned seventeen. Dumbledore’s charm won’t protect me anymore.” He felt his throat close as he spoke Dumbledore’s name.
In a swift change of subject, Aunt Petunia asked, “Do you know where your parents’ graves are?” Harry almost blurted out “Godric’s Hollow,” but stopped himself. He wasn’t at all certain that the graves were there. He only knew that he had lived with them there for the first year of his life.
“I have an idea, but I’m not positive.”
“If you find them, find where my sister is buried,” Harry could see a tear roll down his aunt’s left cheek, “would you write me and let me know?”
Harry felt a fire in his chest that soon blazed throughout his entire being, “What? Are you out of your mind?” He jumped to his feet and stood over the frail looking woman. “Why would you possibly care where they’re buried? Plan to go dance on their graves, do you?”
Without looking up, Aunt Petunia whimpered, “Lily was my sister.”
“And now that matters to you?” Harry’s rage seemed consume him. This shrinking figure before him had no right to speak his mother’s name. She had no right to pretend that she held anything but contempt in her heart for Lily Potter. “You lied to me about who she was. You never let me mention her in this house. You let me believe that she and my father were no good! How dare you call yourself her sister!”
“I know,” Aunt Petunia now had her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking, and Harry could hear her gasping sobs. “I know what I did. But I did love her…”
“LOVED--!” Harry’s anger was now so intense he could barely speak. He could feel his wand pressing against his right hip, and considered whipping it out, never more certain that he could perform an Unforgivable Curse. “You liar. You didn’t love her. You hated her! You thought she was a freak!”
Aunt Petunia leapt to her feet, meeting Harry’s incensed gaze with her own. “Yes, blame me. Blame me for the way I treated you. Blame me for the things I said about your parents. Blame for whatever you like, but don’t you dare to say I didn’t love my sister!”
If she had been a man, Harry would have forgotten his wand and simply smashed her face with his fist. Yes, he was angry, but more than that she had left him with nothing to say. How could she claim to have loved his mother when she had spent years proving otherwise? But here she stood, vehement in her claim and forcing Harry to question what had been one of the central realities of his life on Privet Drive.
It was this instant that Uncle Vernon chose to bumble down the stairs to stand in the doorway, “What’s the bloody hell is going on down here!” he blustered, tying the belt of his dressing gown. “Have you any idea what time it is, boy?”
This time Harry did draw his wand. Pointing it at his uncle’s chest, he growled, “Don’t call me boy.”
“Ha,” Uncle Vernon spat out. “A false threat! You can’t use your magic here, boy. You’ll get kicked out of that freak school of yours. Or maybe they’ll finally throw you into prison, like they should have done years ago.”
With three long strides, Harry had closed the distance between them and stuck his wand into the folds of skin that might have once been Vernon Dursley’s neck.
“I told you, don’t call me boy,” he said darkly. “It might interest you to know that I’m of age now, and I can hex you into oblivion if…”
“Stop it, both of you!” Both Uncle Vernon and Harry turned to stare at Aunt Petunia. Her face was deeply flushed. “Vernon, I want you to shut up and go back to bed.”
“Wha-wha-wha-- ?” Uncle Vernon huffed, his bushy moustache flipping with each incomplete syllable.
“Go- back- to- bed,” Aunt Petunia said, as if she were scolding her son. “I will explain it to you tomorrow.”
Through his wand, Harry could feel his uncle shaking with what he guessed to be a mixture of rage and fear. However, the massive man didn’t utter another word. He backed away from Harry, turned and stomped back up the stairs.
And you,” Aunt Petunia said to Harry, her tone much as it had been with her husband. She stopped, took a breath and then said in a softer voice. “Please, sit down and I will try to explain.”
Harry had spent a good deal of his pent up rage on his uncle, and now noticed that his wand arm was shaking slightly. Feeling disoriented, he made his way back to the armchair and fell into it. “All right,” he sighed. “Explain.” Even as he said it, Harry was convinced that there was nothing his aunt could say that would convince him of her claim.
Aunt Petunia took a moment to compose herself. She sat ramrod straight, crossed her ankles and folded her hands in her lap. Harry thought she looked like a witness giving evidence in court.
“Like you, my sister got her letter from that school when she was eleven years old.”
“Your sister, Lily, got her letter from Hogwarts…” Harry corrected her.
“Yes, yes,” Aunt Petunia agreed, and not with the hesitant resignation that Harry would have expected. To him it sounded more like someone trying to learn a language, and had just had her pronunciation corrected. “Lily got her letter from Hogwarts. Until then, she and I had been like any other sisters. She was a year younger than me, and so from the time I was about five years old, I tried to look out for her. And I will tell you again, I loved her.
“We were as close as any sisters I knew, and closer than most. She even looked up to me, I think. We did all those silly things young girls do. We made a pact, saying that we would always be more than sisters, we would be friends. I would help cover it up when strange things happened around her. I had to. We didn’t know what was happening, and since we spent all our time together, it could have been either one of us.”
Harry remembered all the strange things that had happened around him when he was younger. His hair growing back when Aunt Petunia had cut it; The ugly jumper that continued to shrink as she tried to stretch it over his body; finding himself on top of a school building when he was being hunted by Dudley and his gang; the glass of the snake enclosure disappearing. He seethed when he thought of the times he’d been punished for things over which he had no control. Especially now, when he was certain that Aunt Petunia knew better.
“Then,” Aunt Petunia continued, “Lily got her letter. She was a witch. You probably wonder why I wasn’t happy for her. I wonder if you can understand what is was like for me. I was 12 years old, and I was losing my best friend. Oh yes, it was only school, and she would be home for the holidays, but nothing could ever be the same. And yes, Harry, I was jealous. It couldn’t have been more than a year since we had been playing, talking about what it would be like to be magical, with magic wands and fairy dust. And it turned out that she was, and I wasn’t.
“And because you were mad you weren’t a witch, you’ve hated my mother ever since?” Harry asked, unable to believe it.
“Of course not,” his aunt countered. “I was twelve. I was jealous. I might even have said I hated her at the time, but in the way a child says it when she can’t find the right words. In the way Dudley used to say he hated me if he didn’t get a second ice cream after dinner. But I didn’t hate her. I was just hurt.
“It’s true that we were never as close after she went to that… to Hogwarts. She had new friends, magical friends. She was living the life we used to fantasize about. Even then, I loved her. Even then I couldn’t wait for her to come home from school, hoping that we could somehow be as close as we had been, but it wasn’t possible. Little by little your world took her away from me.
“It was magic that I was learning to hate, not Lily. It had taken my best friend, and I wouldn’t let it take anything else.
“I grew older and I met Vernon Dursley. I’m not a stupid woman, Harry. I could look in a mirror and see that the men would never be lining up at my door, or even trying to chat me up at the bus stop. Vernon was no Prince Charming, but he used to cut a dashing figure. I fell in love, and I was overjoyed when he proposed marriage. He was better than I could have hoped for.”
Harry’s mind waged war with it self. It seemed split between wondering what the young, in love Petunia and Vernon might have been like, and not even wanting to think about it. He chose the latter, reckoning that he had enough nightmares to be getting on with.
“Then, Lily came home for the summer. Of course, I had to introduce her to Vernon. They met only once, because that was the same night he discovered that she was a witch. My parents never made secret of the fact, at least at home. They understood that they couldn’t spread the news around, but at home they felt that Lily should be able to be who she was.
“Later that night, Vernon told me that he was calling off our engagement. He told me that he couldn’t marry into a family of freaks. He was afraid of what our children might be like.” Aunt Petunia leaned forward, resting her elbows on her lap and her chin on her fingers. “I begged him not to leave me. I told him I would do anything. I couldn’t lose him, Harry. He was my only chance.”
For the first time since she had begun speaking, Harry actually felt a twinge of emotion for his mother’s sister. More curious than that was that the emotion was not anger or hatred. It was pity.
“He agreed to ‘take the chance,’ as he put it, on the condition that I have nothing to do with Lily after he and I married. He was forcing me to choose, and I had no choice. Not really. Not if I was going to find some happiness in life. And so my hatred for your world grew stronger. It had forced me to disown my own sister, my best friend, just so I could have a chance at a normal life.”
Harry watched the tears begin to stream down his aunt’s face. He still didn’t have it in him to try and comfort her, either with words or actions. He could, however, do her the courtesy of listening to the entire story.
“So, Vernon and I married. Less than a year later, my parents told me that Lily was getting married as well. I never told them about the promise I had made to Vernon. Instead, I lied. I told them I thought Lily was a freak, and that I had always hated her. I would not witness my freak sister’s wedding to her freak husband. I didn’t have a choice. It was as likely that Vernon would leave me still, even after we were married.
“After that, I no longer had parents, either. I couldn’t be around them because all they did was try to reconcile me to my sister. Then Vernon got a job with Grunnings, and we moved here to Privet Drive. Not very long after, Dudley was born, and our lives began to settle down. Then I received a letter from my parents telling me of your birth. I still have it if you’d ever like to see it. It broke my heart to think I would never meet my sister’s child. But I knew Vernon would never relent. And I grew to hate magic even more.”
Had this conversation been taking place anywhere else, Harry might have been crying. But he could still look around at this house that he hated so much, and it fortified him against giving full vent to these new emotions.
In a much quieter voice, as if she was afraid to of being overheard, she continued, “I no longer loved Vernon Dursley, but I couldn’t give up my life, or risk losing my child by trying to reunite with Lily. But then, it became a moot point.” Aunt Petunia dropped her face into her hands again. Her next sentence was punctuated by heavy sobs that wracked her entire frame. “I got… another… letter saying that… your mother.., my sister had been… killed.”
Harry couldn’t stop the tear that rolled down his cheek now, but he hurriedly wiped it away. He swallowed hard and blinked several times to clear his eyes. Aunt Petunia had convinced him that she did, indeed, love her sister. There might have even been a universe wherein she could have loved him. She was a victim of so many things, of being a muggle while her sister was a witch, of circumstances that made her believe that Vernon Dursley was her only chance for happiness, and of Vernon Dursley himself. Harry might never approve of her choices, but he knew that he would never be able to simply hate her again.
“Magic had taken away my best friend.” She raised her head and continued, “Magic had separated me from my sister and my parents. And magic killed her before I could ever say I was sorry. I hated magic. I hate it now! And so, when you were left on our door step, I hated you. But I still fought Vernon to allow you to stay with us. The letter from Dumbledore made it clear that this was the only place you would be safe. I suppose a part of me felt that I owed it to Lily.
“But I couldn’t let what you were affect my son. I had to make him more special than you, to indulge his every whim so he always knew he was my son, and no matter what you would become, you would never be better than him. I never encouraged him to treat you like a brother. I just couldn’t bear to watch him lose a brother like I had lost my sister. I never dared to hope that you wouldn’t be a wizard. I knew you had to be.”
Harry understood almost everything, but there was still a missing piece. “But, why did you..?
“Treat you like dirt?” Harry nodded to show that his aunt had correctly interpreted his thoughts. “Don’t you see? If you had not been here, I might have been able to get beyond all that I had lost, all that I had given up. But now you were here. You were a constant reminder of the pain that I couldn’t even share with my own husband. I had no one to tell, no one who could sympathize. I had alienated my parents, married a man with no compassion, and raised a son to be a spoiled, pampered bully. And every day there you were, looking at me with those eyes.”
“My mother’s eyes,” Harry had heard it so often that he said it automatically, before he could stop himself.
“Exactly,” sobbed Aunt Petunia, dropping her face to her hands again. “Every time you looked at me, it was like a knife through my heart. You were my constant penance for all the wrong choices I had made in my life.” She raised her head again and took a deep, shaky breath. “I am sorry, Harry. You didn’t deserve my hatred. You didn’t deserve to be treated so horribly. You didn’t deserve having to live in a house without love, or a house with Vernon Dursley.”
“Neither did you,” again, Harry spoke before he knew he had. As Aunt Petunia fixed him with a look of disbelief, Harry had no choice but to continue. “Nobody deserves a life like that. You were afraid, and maybe you didn’t make the best choices. But nobody deserves that much pain.”
Then, something happened that Harry would never have believed was possible. Aunt Petunia stood and walked over to him. He automatically stood as well. Then his aunt wrapped her thin arms around him and squeezed him hard, crying into his shoulder. Having nothing else to do with his arms, her put them around her as well.
“I’m so sorry, Harry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right, Aunt Petunia,” Harry said in reply. “I survived, and I’m O.K.”
Aunt Petunia released her grip and leaned back to look Harry in the eye. “Yes. Yes, Harry, you’re O.K. And now you have to get out of here. Get out of here before you start to think that this is how life has to be. Don’t make my mistakes. Make friends, find love, live life. And please, Harry, stay safe. You are my only living connection to my sister.”
She led Harry back out into the front hallway, and watched him pick up his valise. They embraced once more. Harry opened the front door, and stepped out onto the stoop, where his life with the Dursley’s had begun.
“I’ll write to you if I find my parents’ graves,” he had to offer her something.
“Thank you, Harry,” she replied. “And, Harry?”
“Yes?”
“Send it by owl. It’ll really piss Vernon off.” With a wry smile, she closed the door.
Rating: G
Word Count: 4,940
Song Lyrics: "My Mother's Eyes" - Bette Midler
A.N.: This was an alternative first chapter to a seven chapter story entitled "My Mother's Eyes". It was an attempt on my part to explain the unforgivable behaviour of Petunia Dursley towards her sister's son Harry during his time on Privet Drive. Though I ended up not using it for the story, it turned out to be a solid piece on its own. star54kar 's new site is the perfect place for it, I think! (This piece was written before the release of Deathly Hallows, and so is not canon compliant.)
The final form of the whole story (a Harry/Ron centric fic) can be found on my site.
ALTERNATIVE CHAPTER ONE
Got my mother's eyes and my father's hair.
Does anybody really care?
It's gettin' cold out here.
“5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Happy Birthday, Harry.” Harry Potter smiled grimly to no one, in as much as he was alone in his room, counting down to midnight on what had just become July 31, 1997. Physically, he felt no different. He knew, however, that in the transition from one second to the next everything had changed. He, the Boy-Who-Lived, The Chosen One, was no longer an underage wizard.
“Well, Hedwig,” he said to the snowy owl sitting on top of its cage, “time to go.” He walked over to the owl, carrying the piece of parchment he had been clutching for the last forty-five minutes. Hedwig held out her leg as if she had been waiting for the charge since she had watched him writing it.
“Stay at the Burrow until I come for you, all right?” Harry always wondered if Hedwig really understood English, or if she could interpret his thoughts. All he knew was that she never failed to know what was required of her. “Don’t bother coming back here, because I won’t be here.” Ever again, he thought to himself. He offered his arm, and Hedwig jumped onto it, allowing him to carry her to the opened window. He winced as she began to flap her wings for lift, tightening her talons on his bare skin until she felt it safe to let go and soar off into the black sky.
Rubbing his arm, Harry looked down into Privet Drive. He felt no sense of nostalgia, no longing for a time when he was younger. This view meant less than nothing to him. There was never a time when he looked out of this window and he felt like he was home. His aunt, his late mother’s sister, had never wanted him there. His uncle even less so. His cousin hardly mattered at all. As far as Harry was concerned, if Number Four collapsed into rubble after he stepped out the front door, he couldn’t care less.
Harry turned and scanned his bedroom, or his prison as he liked to think of it. Nothing about the room gave any indication that a wizard had occupied it for better part of seven summers. It was so muggle that it made him want to heave. The Dursley’s would never allow any moving pictures to be hung on the walls. He couldn’t display his pennant of the Irish National Quidditch team that he had bought at the Quidditch World Cup three years before. Anything that might have declared “Harry Potter was here” had been hidden beneath the loose floorboard under the bed. Until now, that was.
Across the room, Harry saw his trunk standing open. He could have closed it hours ago, knowing full well that the few personal items he had even bothered to remove from it had been repacked not long after dinner. Still, he recalled times at school when he thought he had packed everything, only to find a pair of unwashed socks under the bed clothes. He glanced at Hedwig’s cage, empty now except for about a week’s worth of owl droppings. He decided to leave it. He could buy a new cage in Diagon Alley. Also, it pleased him to picture the horrified look on his aunt’s face. Something for her to remember me by, he thought.
Performing one last check of the drawers and closet, he confirmed what he had already known: everything that was his was in the trunk. Just to antagonize his cousin, Dudley, he left the birthday cake that Hagrid had sent him on the small writing desk. He knew his Aunt Petunia would not allow the great hulk to eat it, both because of Dudley’s ongoing and dismally ineffective diet, and because she would fear it was poisoned, or otherwise enchanted. Harry smiled to himself as he pictured the look on Dudley’s face as he watched his mother bung it into the bin. Something for him to remember me by.
Harry latched his trunk and took a deep breath. It wasn’t hard to leave, certainly. It was, however, hard to begin the rest of his life. If nothing else, Number Four Privet Drive had provided continuity. No one here had ever thought him as special or destined for anything important. Now he prepared himself to enter a world of unknowns. And it made no difference whether he stayed here or left. The protection afforded him by living where his mother’s blood dwelled had expired when he turned seventeen. For Harry, there was only one thing he still knew for sure. He would kill Voldemort, or be killed by him.
Before that, however, there were still some moments to look forward to. In less than a month’s time, he would be joining the Weasley family for Bill and Fleur’s wedding. He felt a warmth spread through him as he thought of what a happy day it would be at the Burrow. All the more so because he would be reunited with the two most important people in his life, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.
A sudden but familiar sense of exhilaration passed through him. There was a time when Harry would have written it off as simply his excitement at being with his friends again. But no longer. For close to three years now he knew exactly why his heartbeat quickened and his breath shortened like this. He had first noticed it in his 4th year at Hogwarts, when he learned that Ron had been taken as the thing he would miss the most in the Triwizard Tournament. It happened again when he learned Ron would recover after being attacked by a brain at in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic. Without taxing his memory, Harry could think of at least a dozen times that he felt the same way.
Taking his wand from the back pocket of his jeans, Harry pointed it at the trunk and muttered a spell, performing his first bit of magic as an adult wizard. He watched as the trunk transfigured into a soft leather briefcase. He bent over to pick it up and nearly wrenched his arm from its socket.
“Nice play, Potter, you idiot,” Harry growled at himself, then cast another spell to make the weight of the valise match its appearance. Picking it up easily now, he walked to the bedroom door. How many times in the past had he longed to blast this door open, sending the various deadbolts that his uncle had installed crashing into the opposite wall. Of course, he never could, not if he wanted to remain a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. More than once he had been reprimanded for the use of underage magic by the Ministry, even when he was totally innocent.
Feeling a rush of power now that he had come of age, Harry considered how best to leave Privet Drive. He could blast the door open, shaking the Dursley’s from sleep. It might be fun to terrorize them all a bit as a partial repayment for the misery they had heaped upon him. The pig’s tail had suited Dudley all those years ago. Maybe it was time to make the transfiguration complete. Considering what his cousin looked like now, it wouldn’t be a difficult charm. He would just need to finish what his aunt and uncle had started.
No, he had wasted too much time already. He just wanted to be gone from here with as few diversions as possible. He spoke a soft “Alohamora,” and listened as the numerous locks clicked open. He opened the door and listened to Dudley’s rasping snores. He wondered how he had ever managed to sleep in the same house with such a racket. Leaving the bedroom door open, he walked down the hall to the stairs.
He stopped short. In the dim light of a small lamp that always burned in the front hallway, Harry could see someone sitting on the bottom stair. It was a tall, slim someone, who sat hunched over and hugging herself, as if she felt very cold.
“Aunt Petunia?” Harry said quietly. His aunt stood and turned to face him.
“You’re leaving then?” Her voice lacked that disapproving, clipped quality that Harry was so used to hearing whenever she forced herself to speak to him. He couldn’t identify this new tone, having never heard it from her before.
“Yeah,” Harry said, as if he was trading small talk with a stranger. “I reckon its time.”
She nodded curtly, “And where will you go?” Harry was taken aback at this. He couldn’t begin to guess why this information would hold any interest for her. Still, he felt no need to be evasive. He was beyond the Dursley’s control. There was nothing they could do or say to stop him from going where he pleased.
“I’m going to take a room at the Leaky Cauldron,” he said, walking down the stairs and standing in the front hall. “Then I’ll be going to stay with my friend Ron and his family. After that, I’m not really sure. I thought I would visit my mum and dad’s graves.” At this, he saw her eyes lock onto him as she drew a quick breath.
“Are you in a rush, or could we have a cup of tea?” A cup of tea? What we she playing at? In all his years at the Dursley’s she had never once offered him anything. She told him where things were, and after he had served the family, she allowed him to scrape together something for himself. She had surely never stopped him from making tea for himself, but she had never offered it to him, either.
“No,” Harry said, feeling tremendously uncomfortable. “I really don’t have the time to make tea.” He hoped she had properly interpreted his inflection.
“Just a sit-down, then?” she persisted. “I promise not to keep you long.”
Harry’s discomfort was now at war with his curiosity. Was this to be some sort of “let-bygones-be-bygones” scene? Did she honestly believe that anything she had to say would be of any interest to him? No, no, no. For sixteen years she had had her chance to be civil, to treat Harry like a member of the family, and not some indentured servant. He owed her nothing, not even the clothes on his back, which he had bought for himself in the muggle high street.
“Please.”
It hit Harry like a Stunner. He had heard his aunt simper the word before. It was usually when she was begging Uncle Vernon for a new gas cooker, or pleading with Dudley to be satisfied with the dinner of steamed vegetables she placed before him. Never had she spoken it directly to Harry. Temporarily robbed of the power of speech, Harry merely nodded.
Aunt Petunia walked into the lounge, Harry following. She sat at the end of the sofa, and waved at Uncle Vernon’s favorite chair. Harry sat, but did not allow himself to lean back into the cushions, perching instead on the end on the seat, his feet firmly on the floor. He waited, presuming that his aunt would explain this curious behavior, but for a long moment she only stared at him.
“I really don’t have a lot of time,” Harry said, trying to draw her out.
“If you leave,” she finally began, “won’t you be in danger?”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Harry replied. “I’m in danger if I stay. I just turned seventeen. Dumbledore’s charm won’t protect me anymore.” He felt his throat close as he spoke Dumbledore’s name.
In a swift change of subject, Aunt Petunia asked, “Do you know where your parents’ graves are?” Harry almost blurted out “Godric’s Hollow,” but stopped himself. He wasn’t at all certain that the graves were there. He only knew that he had lived with them there for the first year of his life.
“I have an idea, but I’m not positive.”
“If you find them, find where my sister is buried,” Harry could see a tear roll down his aunt’s left cheek, “would you write me and let me know?”
Harry felt a fire in his chest that soon blazed throughout his entire being, “What? Are you out of your mind?” He jumped to his feet and stood over the frail looking woman. “Why would you possibly care where they’re buried? Plan to go dance on their graves, do you?”
Without looking up, Aunt Petunia whimpered, “Lily was my sister.”
“And now that matters to you?” Harry’s rage seemed consume him. This shrinking figure before him had no right to speak his mother’s name. She had no right to pretend that she held anything but contempt in her heart for Lily Potter. “You lied to me about who she was. You never let me mention her in this house. You let me believe that she and my father were no good! How dare you call yourself her sister!”
“I know,” Aunt Petunia now had her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking, and Harry could hear her gasping sobs. “I know what I did. But I did love her…”
“LOVED--!” Harry’s anger was now so intense he could barely speak. He could feel his wand pressing against his right hip, and considered whipping it out, never more certain that he could perform an Unforgivable Curse. “You liar. You didn’t love her. You hated her! You thought she was a freak!”
Aunt Petunia leapt to her feet, meeting Harry’s incensed gaze with her own. “Yes, blame me. Blame me for the way I treated you. Blame me for the things I said about your parents. Blame for whatever you like, but don’t you dare to say I didn’t love my sister!”
If she had been a man, Harry would have forgotten his wand and simply smashed her face with his fist. Yes, he was angry, but more than that she had left him with nothing to say. How could she claim to have loved his mother when she had spent years proving otherwise? But here she stood, vehement in her claim and forcing Harry to question what had been one of the central realities of his life on Privet Drive.
It was this instant that Uncle Vernon chose to bumble down the stairs to stand in the doorway, “What’s the bloody hell is going on down here!” he blustered, tying the belt of his dressing gown. “Have you any idea what time it is, boy?”
This time Harry did draw his wand. Pointing it at his uncle’s chest, he growled, “Don’t call me boy.”
“Ha,” Uncle Vernon spat out. “A false threat! You can’t use your magic here, boy. You’ll get kicked out of that freak school of yours. Or maybe they’ll finally throw you into prison, like they should have done years ago.”
With three long strides, Harry had closed the distance between them and stuck his wand into the folds of skin that might have once been Vernon Dursley’s neck.
“I told you, don’t call me boy,” he said darkly. “It might interest you to know that I’m of age now, and I can hex you into oblivion if…”
“Stop it, both of you!” Both Uncle Vernon and Harry turned to stare at Aunt Petunia. Her face was deeply flushed. “Vernon, I want you to shut up and go back to bed.”
“Wha-wha-wha-- ?” Uncle Vernon huffed, his bushy moustache flipping with each incomplete syllable.
“Go- back- to- bed,” Aunt Petunia said, as if she were scolding her son. “I will explain it to you tomorrow.”
Through his wand, Harry could feel his uncle shaking with what he guessed to be a mixture of rage and fear. However, the massive man didn’t utter another word. He backed away from Harry, turned and stomped back up the stairs.
And you,” Aunt Petunia said to Harry, her tone much as it had been with her husband. She stopped, took a breath and then said in a softer voice. “Please, sit down and I will try to explain.”
Harry had spent a good deal of his pent up rage on his uncle, and now noticed that his wand arm was shaking slightly. Feeling disoriented, he made his way back to the armchair and fell into it. “All right,” he sighed. “Explain.” Even as he said it, Harry was convinced that there was nothing his aunt could say that would convince him of her claim.
Aunt Petunia took a moment to compose herself. She sat ramrod straight, crossed her ankles and folded her hands in her lap. Harry thought she looked like a witness giving evidence in court.
“Like you, my sister got her letter from that school when she was eleven years old.”
“Your sister, Lily, got her letter from Hogwarts…” Harry corrected her.
“Yes, yes,” Aunt Petunia agreed, and not with the hesitant resignation that Harry would have expected. To him it sounded more like someone trying to learn a language, and had just had her pronunciation corrected. “Lily got her letter from Hogwarts. Until then, she and I had been like any other sisters. She was a year younger than me, and so from the time I was about five years old, I tried to look out for her. And I will tell you again, I loved her.
“We were as close as any sisters I knew, and closer than most. She even looked up to me, I think. We did all those silly things young girls do. We made a pact, saying that we would always be more than sisters, we would be friends. I would help cover it up when strange things happened around her. I had to. We didn’t know what was happening, and since we spent all our time together, it could have been either one of us.”
Harry remembered all the strange things that had happened around him when he was younger. His hair growing back when Aunt Petunia had cut it; The ugly jumper that continued to shrink as she tried to stretch it over his body; finding himself on top of a school building when he was being hunted by Dudley and his gang; the glass of the snake enclosure disappearing. He seethed when he thought of the times he’d been punished for things over which he had no control. Especially now, when he was certain that Aunt Petunia knew better.
“Then,” Aunt Petunia continued, “Lily got her letter. She was a witch. You probably wonder why I wasn’t happy for her. I wonder if you can understand what is was like for me. I was 12 years old, and I was losing my best friend. Oh yes, it was only school, and she would be home for the holidays, but nothing could ever be the same. And yes, Harry, I was jealous. It couldn’t have been more than a year since we had been playing, talking about what it would be like to be magical, with magic wands and fairy dust. And it turned out that she was, and I wasn’t.
“And because you were mad you weren’t a witch, you’ve hated my mother ever since?” Harry asked, unable to believe it.
“Of course not,” his aunt countered. “I was twelve. I was jealous. I might even have said I hated her at the time, but in the way a child says it when she can’t find the right words. In the way Dudley used to say he hated me if he didn’t get a second ice cream after dinner. But I didn’t hate her. I was just hurt.
“It’s true that we were never as close after she went to that… to Hogwarts. She had new friends, magical friends. She was living the life we used to fantasize about. Even then, I loved her. Even then I couldn’t wait for her to come home from school, hoping that we could somehow be as close as we had been, but it wasn’t possible. Little by little your world took her away from me.
“It was magic that I was learning to hate, not Lily. It had taken my best friend, and I wouldn’t let it take anything else.
“I grew older and I met Vernon Dursley. I’m not a stupid woman, Harry. I could look in a mirror and see that the men would never be lining up at my door, or even trying to chat me up at the bus stop. Vernon was no Prince Charming, but he used to cut a dashing figure. I fell in love, and I was overjoyed when he proposed marriage. He was better than I could have hoped for.”
Harry’s mind waged war with it self. It seemed split between wondering what the young, in love Petunia and Vernon might have been like, and not even wanting to think about it. He chose the latter, reckoning that he had enough nightmares to be getting on with.
“Then, Lily came home for the summer. Of course, I had to introduce her to Vernon. They met only once, because that was the same night he discovered that she was a witch. My parents never made secret of the fact, at least at home. They understood that they couldn’t spread the news around, but at home they felt that Lily should be able to be who she was.
“Later that night, Vernon told me that he was calling off our engagement. He told me that he couldn’t marry into a family of freaks. He was afraid of what our children might be like.” Aunt Petunia leaned forward, resting her elbows on her lap and her chin on her fingers. “I begged him not to leave me. I told him I would do anything. I couldn’t lose him, Harry. He was my only chance.”
For the first time since she had begun speaking, Harry actually felt a twinge of emotion for his mother’s sister. More curious than that was that the emotion was not anger or hatred. It was pity.
“He agreed to ‘take the chance,’ as he put it, on the condition that I have nothing to do with Lily after he and I married. He was forcing me to choose, and I had no choice. Not really. Not if I was going to find some happiness in life. And so my hatred for your world grew stronger. It had forced me to disown my own sister, my best friend, just so I could have a chance at a normal life.”
Harry watched the tears begin to stream down his aunt’s face. He still didn’t have it in him to try and comfort her, either with words or actions. He could, however, do her the courtesy of listening to the entire story.
“So, Vernon and I married. Less than a year later, my parents told me that Lily was getting married as well. I never told them about the promise I had made to Vernon. Instead, I lied. I told them I thought Lily was a freak, and that I had always hated her. I would not witness my freak sister’s wedding to her freak husband. I didn’t have a choice. It was as likely that Vernon would leave me still, even after we were married.
“After that, I no longer had parents, either. I couldn’t be around them because all they did was try to reconcile me to my sister. Then Vernon got a job with Grunnings, and we moved here to Privet Drive. Not very long after, Dudley was born, and our lives began to settle down. Then I received a letter from my parents telling me of your birth. I still have it if you’d ever like to see it. It broke my heart to think I would never meet my sister’s child. But I knew Vernon would never relent. And I grew to hate magic even more.”
Had this conversation been taking place anywhere else, Harry might have been crying. But he could still look around at this house that he hated so much, and it fortified him against giving full vent to these new emotions.
In a much quieter voice, as if she was afraid to of being overheard, she continued, “I no longer loved Vernon Dursley, but I couldn’t give up my life, or risk losing my child by trying to reunite with Lily. But then, it became a moot point.” Aunt Petunia dropped her face into her hands again. Her next sentence was punctuated by heavy sobs that wracked her entire frame. “I got… another… letter saying that… your mother.., my sister had been… killed.”
Harry couldn’t stop the tear that rolled down his cheek now, but he hurriedly wiped it away. He swallowed hard and blinked several times to clear his eyes. Aunt Petunia had convinced him that she did, indeed, love her sister. There might have even been a universe wherein she could have loved him. She was a victim of so many things, of being a muggle while her sister was a witch, of circumstances that made her believe that Vernon Dursley was her only chance for happiness, and of Vernon Dursley himself. Harry might never approve of her choices, but he knew that he would never be able to simply hate her again.
“Magic had taken away my best friend.” She raised her head and continued, “Magic had separated me from my sister and my parents. And magic killed her before I could ever say I was sorry. I hated magic. I hate it now! And so, when you were left on our door step, I hated you. But I still fought Vernon to allow you to stay with us. The letter from Dumbledore made it clear that this was the only place you would be safe. I suppose a part of me felt that I owed it to Lily.
“But I couldn’t let what you were affect my son. I had to make him more special than you, to indulge his every whim so he always knew he was my son, and no matter what you would become, you would never be better than him. I never encouraged him to treat you like a brother. I just couldn’t bear to watch him lose a brother like I had lost my sister. I never dared to hope that you wouldn’t be a wizard. I knew you had to be.”
Harry understood almost everything, but there was still a missing piece. “But, why did you..?
“Treat you like dirt?” Harry nodded to show that his aunt had correctly interpreted his thoughts. “Don’t you see? If you had not been here, I might have been able to get beyond all that I had lost, all that I had given up. But now you were here. You were a constant reminder of the pain that I couldn’t even share with my own husband. I had no one to tell, no one who could sympathize. I had alienated my parents, married a man with no compassion, and raised a son to be a spoiled, pampered bully. And every day there you were, looking at me with those eyes.”
“My mother’s eyes,” Harry had heard it so often that he said it automatically, before he could stop himself.
“Exactly,” sobbed Aunt Petunia, dropping her face to her hands again. “Every time you looked at me, it was like a knife through my heart. You were my constant penance for all the wrong choices I had made in my life.” She raised her head again and took a deep, shaky breath. “I am sorry, Harry. You didn’t deserve my hatred. You didn’t deserve to be treated so horribly. You didn’t deserve having to live in a house without love, or a house with Vernon Dursley.”
“Neither did you,” again, Harry spoke before he knew he had. As Aunt Petunia fixed him with a look of disbelief, Harry had no choice but to continue. “Nobody deserves a life like that. You were afraid, and maybe you didn’t make the best choices. But nobody deserves that much pain.”
Then, something happened that Harry would never have believed was possible. Aunt Petunia stood and walked over to him. He automatically stood as well. Then his aunt wrapped her thin arms around him and squeezed him hard, crying into his shoulder. Having nothing else to do with his arms, her put them around her as well.
“I’m so sorry, Harry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right, Aunt Petunia,” Harry said in reply. “I survived, and I’m O.K.”
Aunt Petunia released her grip and leaned back to look Harry in the eye. “Yes. Yes, Harry, you’re O.K. And now you have to get out of here. Get out of here before you start to think that this is how life has to be. Don’t make my mistakes. Make friends, find love, live life. And please, Harry, stay safe. You are my only living connection to my sister.”
She led Harry back out into the front hallway, and watched him pick up his valise. They embraced once more. Harry opened the front door, and stepped out onto the stoop, where his life with the Dursley’s had begun.
“I’ll write to you if I find my parents’ graves,” he had to offer her something.
“Thank you, Harry,” she replied. “And, Harry?”
“Yes?”
“Send it by owl. It’ll really piss Vernon off.” With a wry smile, she closed the door.