All the Times Things Changed Forever
Story:
I. The First Sister
Grown-ups always told Petunia she couldn't possibly remember when Lily was born, that she'd been too small then and must have imagined her memories later. But Petunia remembered.
Lily had been red and scrunchy when her mum had let Petunia peer inside the blanket where the baby was swaddled. Lily had her eyes squeezed shut and an almost angry expression on her newborn face, as if the world she'd been promised were a better one than this appeared to be.
"Would you like to hold your sister?" her mum asked. Petunia shrugged. She didn't know if she wanted to.
Petunia's dad sat down next to her mum on the bed and pulled Petunia into his lap. Very carefully, Mum settled the baby in Petunia's chubby arms, Dad keeping his own strong ones around her. As Petunia cradled the baby, Lily seemed to relax against her sister's chest, letting out a little baby snuffle.
Petunia, at two years old, felt a fierce stab of possession and one of her current favourite words suddenly took on a new dimension. Mine, she thought. Nobody was going to take this sister away from her.
II. The First Loss
They were seven and five when their grandmother died. Their mum was inconsolable for days and kept bursting into tears, while their dad wandered around the house after her, looking sad and helpless.
Petunia and Lily sat on the couch side by side.
"But what about when Gran comes back?" Lily asked.
"She's not coming back."
"Yeah, but what about when she does?"
"I told you, Lily. She can't."
Lily started to cry. And that was worse than a whole bunch of grandmothers dying.
"Come on," Petunia said quickly. "Come on, Lily, let's do something nice for Mum. Let's try to make her happy. What do you think she would like?"
"Um," Lily sniffled through her tears, "flowers?"
"Okay," Petunia nodded decisively. "How much money have you got?"
She led Lily to their shared bedroom, where both sisters emptied their piggy banks and pooled their coins, arranging them into neat stacks of pence and shillings.
Petunia found it soothing how things could fall into place even when everything was falling apart. Lost in her concentration, she took the stacks of coins apart again and rearranged them differently, by size now instead of how much they were worth. They had £5.65. That was enough for a lot of flowers.
"Tuney?" Lily asked. "Are you coming?"
III. The First Sign of Things to Come
They weren't really supposed to go on reading after their Mum and Dad had come in to tuck them in and turn off the light. But Petunia had a torch and Lily had a favourite book of ghost stories, and sometimes they would huddle under the blanket together on Lily's bed, Lily holding the torch steady so Petunia could read aloud.
One night, Lily pulled a different book out from under her pillow, a library book. "These ones are supposed to be re-e-eally scary," she grinned.
Petunia, who didn't even like ghost stories, took the slim volume from Lily's hands gingerly, as if it might bite. But she opened to the first page and started to read aloud.
Lily was right - the story was scary. Petunia felt goose flesh crawling up and down her arms. Lily huddled closer against her, eyes closed, not looking at the page, just listening.
Which meant that while Petunia had half her attention eye on the words she was reading at the moment but half an eye cocked to what was coming next, Lily wasn't expecting the ghost to burst from the main character's travelling trunk as he struggled alone through a darkened wood on All Hallows' Eve.
Lily shrieked with fright and every light in the room - the overhead fixture, the lamps on each of the girls' desks, even the torch - blazed brightly for one hallucinatory moment, before all the bulbs blew in the same instant and plunged the bedroom back into darkness.
"What…what was that?" Petunia whispered after several seconds of petrified silence.
"I don't know," Lily whispered back. "Maybe a, what do you call it, a fuse? Blew?"
Petunia didn't know much about fuses, but she knew that wasn't what it was.
"Please don't ever do that again," she begged her sister.
IV. The First Time on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Petunia wasn't surprised when some kid named Severus Snape showed up on the playground and accused her sister of practising witchcraft. She wasn't surprised when Snape started turning up like a bad penny all over their lives.
She wasn't surprised about the letter that came by owl or the severe woman in a tartan cap who showed up the next day to explain it.
She wasn't even surprised when the Headmaster with the weird name of the weird school Lily was supposed to go to rejected Petunia's childish plea to come along too, because Petunia already knew she wasn't special. She didn't make fuses blow and flowers grow three times as fast and things fly through the air just by thinking about them. In fact, she didn't even really want to be able to do those things. But she didn't want to lose Lily.
What did surprise Petunia was how willing Lily was to go. If Petunia had been told she could have some great scholarship to a fabulous something-or-other, but she had to leave her little sister behind - well, she wouldn't have taken it. She thought that had always been clear.
And so to keep from being left, she left first.
"You think I want to go to some stupid castle?" she hissed at Lily, aware the entire time of the stupid Snape boy watching them. Probably gloating that he'd finally won. "You think I want to be a freak?"
In that moment, she truly meant it, and she was savagely glad to see Lily's tears.
Petunia didn't wave as the train pulled out of the station and she didn't respond to her parents' concerned smiles and inane assurances in the car on the way back home that "You'll see, when Lily comes home for Christmas, everything will be just like it always was."
When they got back, Petunia went straight to her room - her and Lily's room until that morning - and tidied everything she owned, down to the hair clips in the small box on her dresser. She had a sudden need to know that everything was where it was supposed to be.
When she was finally finished, her throat was parched and it was dinnertime and she told herself the feeling she was feeling was peace.
V. The First Time Lily Came Home
"And then Calliope told Meridian she had to put Bowtruckle seeds into her Hair-Raising Potion, which is ridiculous, obviously, because the Bowtruckle isn't even a plant…"
It was like Lily was trying to show off just what useless nonsense she was learning at that Hog-whatsit place, Petunia thought, gritting her teeth. Lily had only been home a day, but already Petunia's head was swimming with people named things like Sirius and Narcissa and Fabian and Gideon and Remus, whom she couldn't possibly be expected to keep straight. Their parents, of course, found every word out of Lily's mouth fascinating.
"Then James Potter had to go and -"
It was the first reassuringly normal name Petunia had heard Lily utter in her day-long monologue, but for some reason those three short syllables sent an odd shiver down Petunia's spine.
"Who?" she interrupted, forgetting that, theoretically, she wasn't speaking to Lily. Not that Lily had noticed the silent treatment yet.
"This little twerp in my House." Lily sighed dramatically. "Honestly, I don't think he'll ever grow up."
Somehow, Petunia was not reassured.
VI. The First Time Lily Didn't Come Home
"I'm sorry, darling, didn't I mention this?" Petunia's mum paused fractionally in affixing yet another bauble to the Christmas tree. "Lily isn't coming. Well, she'll be here for Christmas, of course, I made her promise that. But she's spending the rest of the holiday with a girl called Mary. Lovely girl, also comes from a Muggle family - you know, people like us. We met her this September when we took Lily to the station." There was mild accusation in her mother's tone, aimed at the fact that Petunia hadn't come along this time when they drove down to London to drop Lily off for the train ride to her third year at school.
Petunia didn't deign to answer her mother's words, the spoken ones or the unspoken, and now Mrs Evans did pause in her decorating to study her older daughter. "To be honest, sweetheart," she said, "you two have been getting along so poorly, I thought it might do you both good to have some distance this year. I'm sorry I forgot to tell you the plan had changed. But Lily will still be here for Christmas."
Petunia spent most of that long, empty school holiday sorting through and discarding the childhood items that still infested her bedroom - the toy animals and insipid posters of kittens and heart-festooned diaries that locked with miniature keys - telling herself all the while that she was simply doing some long-overdue cleaning. After all, she was fifteen and didn't need those things anymore.
VII. The First Kiss
Petunia was also fifteen when she got her first kiss. It wasn't anything spectacular, over almost before she had time to register properly what was happening, in the middle of a crowded and decidedly unromantic school dance, with a boy who liked her more than she liked him anyway. But it was hers. Her first.
As she lost herself back into the crowd of dancing students, Petunia was discomfited to realise the first person she wanted to tell was Lily. Not Patty and Jen, her supposed best friends, but Lily, who'd always been there, wide-eyed and eager to hear a full report on all the "firsts" Petunia got to before her. First day of school. First loose tooth.
It bothered her that she should think of Lily now, in this moment that should have been her very own, when Lily was barely even a part of her life anymore. And probably didn't care about anything as mundane as a first kiss for a plain girl at a normal school.
Petunia bit her lip, harder than she'd meant to, then touched her fingers to the sore flesh. She would find Patty and Jen and tell them about Dominic's kiss, all the details like how he'd held her hand after they danced and how he'd been stuttering and shy when he asked if he could. Patty and Jen would be happy for her.
And so it went, through other boyfriends and other milestones. Lily wasn't there to tell, so she didn't tell Lily.
She didn't tell Lily either when she met the man she knew she'd marry. She was eighteen and at university; Vernon was two years ahead of her and studying business. Vernon knew exactly what he wanted - a wife, a house, a child; a job and, above all, to be successful at it. And since Petunia had no idea what she wanted, finding someone else who did seemed like the next best thing.
Her first Christmas with Vernon's family as his fiancée was something of a shocking experience. But Petunia, who'd always had fortitude on her side, figured she'd made her bed and she would lie in it.
While Vernon had a tender side beneath his bluster, his father and mother and sister seemed to be all bluster - when they weren't being outright rude.
His sister Marge, especially, sniffed at everything Petunia said and called her scrawny within her earshot.
His mother widened her eyes in a way that was clearly meant to look unintentional when Petunia meekly mentioned her wish to work outside the home after they married.
His father didn't even talk to her at all.
"I don't think your family like me much," Petunia murmured to Vernon when they finally got a brief moment to themselves, in front of his parents' TV.
"Don't be ridiculous!" Vernon insisted. "They think you're lovely!"
As far as Petunia could tell, actually, Vernon was the only person anywhere who thought she was lovely. And she was grateful to him for that.
He was the one who'd backed her up when she said she wouldn't go when her parents threw a party to celebrate Lily finishing that school and invited all Lily's strange friends from the place into their own house.
Vernon agreed with her when she said Lily ought to go to university or get a real job, instead of mooning about with her weirdo friends, practising…that stuff they did. Petunia tried not to think about it too precisely, what they did, because it gave her the shivers every time. She knew it was silly, but when she thought about Lily's…abnormality, Petunia heard a faint echo of a roomful of light bulbs blowing out at once.
VIII. The First Big News
Petunia almost managed to exclude Lily from her wedding party, until their mother intervened, insisting Lily would be a bridesmaid. It marred what should have been a perfect day, because Lily was mad at her and she was mad at Lily and they were both trying to avoid each other despite being corralled together for all the speeches and posed photos.
As if that weren't enough, Lily was also allowed to bring her strange boyfriend as her date - again, their mother's insistence - and Petunia had to keep half an eye on him the entire evening, because he kept letting strange comments slip in front of Petunia's friends and relatives. He also displayed an entirely abnormal fascination with anything technological - including the sound system, the overhead lights, and the industrial dishwasher in the kitchen of the hired hall.
"They have a machine for doing the washing-up," Petunia heard him whisper excitedly to Lily as he slid back into his seat, just feet away from the table where Petunia's friends from university sat. The bride groaned and turned yet a shade paler, and her new husband hurried to fetch her another glass of sparkling wine.
Two months later, Lily was married to the idiot who'd never seen a dishwasher.
Petunia, meanwhile, had thought she would chafe at being a housewife the way Vernon and all his family expected, but to her surprise, she quickly came to enjoy the routines. She woke up before Vernon and made his breakfast and packed a lunch. When he left, she started on her tasks for the day, tidying the house, washing the clothes, doing the shopping.
She found she was developing a strange fascination with cleaning her kitchen - it gave her a swell of pride to see everything gleaming in this, her very own house. Only 21, and already she had a dream home and a successful husband.
Or maybe it was more about the fraction of a moment of true calm she gleaned when she completed a task to perfection, in a world where so many things were beyond her control. The more things she had to do on any given day, the more Petunia experienced an almost unconquerable desire to make sure the kitchen was tidy first.
She preferred to think it was pride in her dream home and successful husband.
Anyway, the question of whether to work or stay home was a moot one now - Petunia had very special news to share with her family that year at Christmas.
Just a month later, of course, Lily had to overshadow Petunia's joy with her own special news.
IX. The First Cousins
Lily's baby looked a lot like Lily's husband. That was Petunia's first conscious thought when she saw Lily across a sea of flowers at the funeral home, carrying her infant son in her arms. Lily's eyes were red-rimmed, but her face was stoic. No one expected a car crash. No one expected to lose their parents at 20 years old.
Petunia fought down an involuntary panic as she saw Lily catch sight of her and start to make her way through the crowd. They hadn't spoken to each other since…she wasn't sure when they'd last spoken to each other. Not since Dudley had been born, certainly. Petunia had simply been too busy to go out of her way to track Lily down. She clutched Dudley a little tighter against her chest, until he began to squirm in protest.
"Petunia," Lily said. She found a chair and settled Harry on her lap, indicating her sister should do the same. Reluctantly, Petunia did.
Lily's eyes were bright with concern. "Are you doing okay?"
Petunia stifled an impulse to roll her eyes. No, of course I'm not okay, Lily. "Fine, I suppose," she said.
Lily was gazing down at the boy on her lap with fierce tenderness. "I'm just glad they got to meet Harry. And Dudley. If we'd had any idea, of course, we would have spent so much more time with them…but I'm glad they -" She stifled a slight, hiccupping sniffle. "I'm glad they lived to see their grandchildren at least."
Petunia felt the queasy sensation again of the world sliding out from under her feet. The last two and a half days had been a perpetual state of thinking she'd found her footing and then losing it again. No parents. Ever again.
Lily turned and looked at the baby on her sister's lap. "They're cousins, you know. Maybe we should try to have them see each other more often. They're all each other has, now. We're all each other has." She lifted her gaze to Petunia's face.
Petunia met her sister's eyes and said clearly, but without rancour, "No, Vernon and Dudley are all I have. You left a long time ago."
They gazed at each other for a long moment. Tears began to leak silently from Lily's eyes. "I'm sorry, Petunia," she whispered. "I wish it could have been different."
Finding a sudden burst of strength, Petunia collected Dudley in her arms and stood, looking down at Lily. For the first time in years, she felt like the big sister again, the one who could comfort and protect, not just tag along behind. Strange to think there was a time when she'd been pleased to see Lily's tears. Or a time when she'd have done anything to prevent them. Now she just felt blank.
"I wish that too," Petunia said.
After a moment's hesitation, she leant down to place a kiss at her sister's temple. Then she turned back to the crowd to find her husband and go.
X. The First Day of All the Rest
Barely a year later, Petunia knew of Lily's death the moment Vernon asked, "Their son - what's his name again?"
Well, perhaps she didn't know it. How could she know something she hadn't been told? But she had that same premonitory chill she'd felt the very first time she heard James Potter's name.
Lying in bed that night next to Vernon, pretending to sleep, Petunia turned the idea over and over in her mind, prodding at it like a sore tooth. What would it be like if Lily died? How would that feel?
She found her response was mostly resignation. It would be sad, certainly. Knowing Lily, she'd get herself blown up over something pointless, some nitpicky insiders' disagreement nobody in their right mind even knew or cared about. It would be bitter, too, considering everything they'd missed out on as sisters, though Petunia hurriedly pushed that thought away.
But as she lay there in the dark with an ever stronger certainty that Lily is dead, mainly what Petunia felt was a sort of cheerless relief. At least now maybe she could truly leave all of that behind, all the worry and bitterness and disappointment that was having Lily for a sister. From this day on, Petunia could live her life on her own terms.
The next morning, she opened the front door and screamed.
I. The First Sister
Grown-ups always told Petunia she couldn't possibly remember when Lily was born, that she'd been too small then and must have imagined her memories later. But Petunia remembered.
Lily had been red and scrunchy when her mum had let Petunia peer inside the blanket where the baby was swaddled. Lily had her eyes squeezed shut and an almost angry expression on her newborn face, as if the world she'd been promised were a better one than this appeared to be.
"Would you like to hold your sister?" her mum asked. Petunia shrugged. She didn't know if she wanted to.
Petunia's dad sat down next to her mum on the bed and pulled Petunia into his lap. Very carefully, Mum settled the baby in Petunia's chubby arms, Dad keeping his own strong ones around her. As Petunia cradled the baby, Lily seemed to relax against her sister's chest, letting out a little baby snuffle.
Petunia, at two years old, felt a fierce stab of possession and one of her current favourite words suddenly took on a new dimension. Mine, she thought. Nobody was going to take this sister away from her.
II. The First Loss
They were seven and five when their grandmother died. Their mum was inconsolable for days and kept bursting into tears, while their dad wandered around the house after her, looking sad and helpless.
Petunia and Lily sat on the couch side by side.
"But what about when Gran comes back?" Lily asked.
"She's not coming back."
"Yeah, but what about when she does?"
"I told you, Lily. She can't."
Lily started to cry. And that was worse than a whole bunch of grandmothers dying.
"Come on," Petunia said quickly. "Come on, Lily, let's do something nice for Mum. Let's try to make her happy. What do you think she would like?"
"Um," Lily sniffled through her tears, "flowers?"
"Okay," Petunia nodded decisively. "How much money have you got?"
She led Lily to their shared bedroom, where both sisters emptied their piggy banks and pooled their coins, arranging them into neat stacks of pence and shillings.
Petunia found it soothing how things could fall into place even when everything was falling apart. Lost in her concentration, she took the stacks of coins apart again and rearranged them differently, by size now instead of how much they were worth. They had £5.65. That was enough for a lot of flowers.
"Tuney?" Lily asked. "Are you coming?"
III. The First Sign of Things to Come
They weren't really supposed to go on reading after their Mum and Dad had come in to tuck them in and turn off the light. But Petunia had a torch and Lily had a favourite book of ghost stories, and sometimes they would huddle under the blanket together on Lily's bed, Lily holding the torch steady so Petunia could read aloud.
One night, Lily pulled a different book out from under her pillow, a library book. "These ones are supposed to be re-e-eally scary," she grinned.
Petunia, who didn't even like ghost stories, took the slim volume from Lily's hands gingerly, as if it might bite. But she opened to the first page and started to read aloud.
Lily was right - the story was scary. Petunia felt goose flesh crawling up and down her arms. Lily huddled closer against her, eyes closed, not looking at the page, just listening.
Which meant that while Petunia had half her attention eye on the words she was reading at the moment but half an eye cocked to what was coming next, Lily wasn't expecting the ghost to burst from the main character's travelling trunk as he struggled alone through a darkened wood on All Hallows' Eve.
Lily shrieked with fright and every light in the room - the overhead fixture, the lamps on each of the girls' desks, even the torch - blazed brightly for one hallucinatory moment, before all the bulbs blew in the same instant and plunged the bedroom back into darkness.
"What…what was that?" Petunia whispered after several seconds of petrified silence.
"I don't know," Lily whispered back. "Maybe a, what do you call it, a fuse? Blew?"
Petunia didn't know much about fuses, but she knew that wasn't what it was.
"Please don't ever do that again," she begged her sister.
IV. The First Time on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
Petunia wasn't surprised when some kid named Severus Snape showed up on the playground and accused her sister of practising witchcraft. She wasn't surprised when Snape started turning up like a bad penny all over their lives.
She wasn't surprised about the letter that came by owl or the severe woman in a tartan cap who showed up the next day to explain it.
She wasn't even surprised when the Headmaster with the weird name of the weird school Lily was supposed to go to rejected Petunia's childish plea to come along too, because Petunia already knew she wasn't special. She didn't make fuses blow and flowers grow three times as fast and things fly through the air just by thinking about them. In fact, she didn't even really want to be able to do those things. But she didn't want to lose Lily.
What did surprise Petunia was how willing Lily was to go. If Petunia had been told she could have some great scholarship to a fabulous something-or-other, but she had to leave her little sister behind - well, she wouldn't have taken it. She thought that had always been clear.
And so to keep from being left, she left first.
"You think I want to go to some stupid castle?" she hissed at Lily, aware the entire time of the stupid Snape boy watching them. Probably gloating that he'd finally won. "You think I want to be a freak?"
In that moment, she truly meant it, and she was savagely glad to see Lily's tears.
Petunia didn't wave as the train pulled out of the station and she didn't respond to her parents' concerned smiles and inane assurances in the car on the way back home that "You'll see, when Lily comes home for Christmas, everything will be just like it always was."
When they got back, Petunia went straight to her room - her and Lily's room until that morning - and tidied everything she owned, down to the hair clips in the small box on her dresser. She had a sudden need to know that everything was where it was supposed to be.
When she was finally finished, her throat was parched and it was dinnertime and she told herself the feeling she was feeling was peace.
V. The First Time Lily Came Home
"And then Calliope told Meridian she had to put Bowtruckle seeds into her Hair-Raising Potion, which is ridiculous, obviously, because the Bowtruckle isn't even a plant…"
It was like Lily was trying to show off just what useless nonsense she was learning at that Hog-whatsit place, Petunia thought, gritting her teeth. Lily had only been home a day, but already Petunia's head was swimming with people named things like Sirius and Narcissa and Fabian and Gideon and Remus, whom she couldn't possibly be expected to keep straight. Their parents, of course, found every word out of Lily's mouth fascinating.
"Then James Potter had to go and -"
It was the first reassuringly normal name Petunia had heard Lily utter in her day-long monologue, but for some reason those three short syllables sent an odd shiver down Petunia's spine.
"Who?" she interrupted, forgetting that, theoretically, she wasn't speaking to Lily. Not that Lily had noticed the silent treatment yet.
"This little twerp in my House." Lily sighed dramatically. "Honestly, I don't think he'll ever grow up."
Somehow, Petunia was not reassured.
VI. The First Time Lily Didn't Come Home
"I'm sorry, darling, didn't I mention this?" Petunia's mum paused fractionally in affixing yet another bauble to the Christmas tree. "Lily isn't coming. Well, she'll be here for Christmas, of course, I made her promise that. But she's spending the rest of the holiday with a girl called Mary. Lovely girl, also comes from a Muggle family - you know, people like us. We met her this September when we took Lily to the station." There was mild accusation in her mother's tone, aimed at the fact that Petunia hadn't come along this time when they drove down to London to drop Lily off for the train ride to her third year at school.
Petunia didn't deign to answer her mother's words, the spoken ones or the unspoken, and now Mrs Evans did pause in her decorating to study her older daughter. "To be honest, sweetheart," she said, "you two have been getting along so poorly, I thought it might do you both good to have some distance this year. I'm sorry I forgot to tell you the plan had changed. But Lily will still be here for Christmas."
Petunia spent most of that long, empty school holiday sorting through and discarding the childhood items that still infested her bedroom - the toy animals and insipid posters of kittens and heart-festooned diaries that locked with miniature keys - telling herself all the while that she was simply doing some long-overdue cleaning. After all, she was fifteen and didn't need those things anymore.
VII. The First Kiss
Petunia was also fifteen when she got her first kiss. It wasn't anything spectacular, over almost before she had time to register properly what was happening, in the middle of a crowded and decidedly unromantic school dance, with a boy who liked her more than she liked him anyway. But it was hers. Her first.
As she lost herself back into the crowd of dancing students, Petunia was discomfited to realise the first person she wanted to tell was Lily. Not Patty and Jen, her supposed best friends, but Lily, who'd always been there, wide-eyed and eager to hear a full report on all the "firsts" Petunia got to before her. First day of school. First loose tooth.
It bothered her that she should think of Lily now, in this moment that should have been her very own, when Lily was barely even a part of her life anymore. And probably didn't care about anything as mundane as a first kiss for a plain girl at a normal school.
Petunia bit her lip, harder than she'd meant to, then touched her fingers to the sore flesh. She would find Patty and Jen and tell them about Dominic's kiss, all the details like how he'd held her hand after they danced and how he'd been stuttering and shy when he asked if he could. Patty and Jen would be happy for her.
And so it went, through other boyfriends and other milestones. Lily wasn't there to tell, so she didn't tell Lily.
She didn't tell Lily either when she met the man she knew she'd marry. She was eighteen and at university; Vernon was two years ahead of her and studying business. Vernon knew exactly what he wanted - a wife, a house, a child; a job and, above all, to be successful at it. And since Petunia had no idea what she wanted, finding someone else who did seemed like the next best thing.
Her first Christmas with Vernon's family as his fiancée was something of a shocking experience. But Petunia, who'd always had fortitude on her side, figured she'd made her bed and she would lie in it.
While Vernon had a tender side beneath his bluster, his father and mother and sister seemed to be all bluster - when they weren't being outright rude.
His sister Marge, especially, sniffed at everything Petunia said and called her scrawny within her earshot.
His mother widened her eyes in a way that was clearly meant to look unintentional when Petunia meekly mentioned her wish to work outside the home after they married.
His father didn't even talk to her at all.
"I don't think your family like me much," Petunia murmured to Vernon when they finally got a brief moment to themselves, in front of his parents' TV.
"Don't be ridiculous!" Vernon insisted. "They think you're lovely!"
As far as Petunia could tell, actually, Vernon was the only person anywhere who thought she was lovely. And she was grateful to him for that.
He was the one who'd backed her up when she said she wouldn't go when her parents threw a party to celebrate Lily finishing that school and invited all Lily's strange friends from the place into their own house.
Vernon agreed with her when she said Lily ought to go to university or get a real job, instead of mooning about with her weirdo friends, practising…that stuff they did. Petunia tried not to think about it too precisely, what they did, because it gave her the shivers every time. She knew it was silly, but when she thought about Lily's…abnormality, Petunia heard a faint echo of a roomful of light bulbs blowing out at once.
VIII. The First Big News
Petunia almost managed to exclude Lily from her wedding party, until their mother intervened, insisting Lily would be a bridesmaid. It marred what should have been a perfect day, because Lily was mad at her and she was mad at Lily and they were both trying to avoid each other despite being corralled together for all the speeches and posed photos.
As if that weren't enough, Lily was also allowed to bring her strange boyfriend as her date - again, their mother's insistence - and Petunia had to keep half an eye on him the entire evening, because he kept letting strange comments slip in front of Petunia's friends and relatives. He also displayed an entirely abnormal fascination with anything technological - including the sound system, the overhead lights, and the industrial dishwasher in the kitchen of the hired hall.
"They have a machine for doing the washing-up," Petunia heard him whisper excitedly to Lily as he slid back into his seat, just feet away from the table where Petunia's friends from university sat. The bride groaned and turned yet a shade paler, and her new husband hurried to fetch her another glass of sparkling wine.
Two months later, Lily was married to the idiot who'd never seen a dishwasher.
Petunia, meanwhile, had thought she would chafe at being a housewife the way Vernon and all his family expected, but to her surprise, she quickly came to enjoy the routines. She woke up before Vernon and made his breakfast and packed a lunch. When he left, she started on her tasks for the day, tidying the house, washing the clothes, doing the shopping.
She found she was developing a strange fascination with cleaning her kitchen - it gave her a swell of pride to see everything gleaming in this, her very own house. Only 21, and already she had a dream home and a successful husband.
Or maybe it was more about the fraction of a moment of true calm she gleaned when she completed a task to perfection, in a world where so many things were beyond her control. The more things she had to do on any given day, the more Petunia experienced an almost unconquerable desire to make sure the kitchen was tidy first.
She preferred to think it was pride in her dream home and successful husband.
Anyway, the question of whether to work or stay home was a moot one now - Petunia had very special news to share with her family that year at Christmas.
Just a month later, of course, Lily had to overshadow Petunia's joy with her own special news.
IX. The First Cousins
Lily's baby looked a lot like Lily's husband. That was Petunia's first conscious thought when she saw Lily across a sea of flowers at the funeral home, carrying her infant son in her arms. Lily's eyes were red-rimmed, but her face was stoic. No one expected a car crash. No one expected to lose their parents at 20 years old.
Petunia fought down an involuntary panic as she saw Lily catch sight of her and start to make her way through the crowd. They hadn't spoken to each other since…she wasn't sure when they'd last spoken to each other. Not since Dudley had been born, certainly. Petunia had simply been too busy to go out of her way to track Lily down. She clutched Dudley a little tighter against her chest, until he began to squirm in protest.
"Petunia," Lily said. She found a chair and settled Harry on her lap, indicating her sister should do the same. Reluctantly, Petunia did.
Lily's eyes were bright with concern. "Are you doing okay?"
Petunia stifled an impulse to roll her eyes. No, of course I'm not okay, Lily. "Fine, I suppose," she said.
Lily was gazing down at the boy on her lap with fierce tenderness. "I'm just glad they got to meet Harry. And Dudley. If we'd had any idea, of course, we would have spent so much more time with them…but I'm glad they -" She stifled a slight, hiccupping sniffle. "I'm glad they lived to see their grandchildren at least."
Petunia felt the queasy sensation again of the world sliding out from under her feet. The last two and a half days had been a perpetual state of thinking she'd found her footing and then losing it again. No parents. Ever again.
Lily turned and looked at the baby on her sister's lap. "They're cousins, you know. Maybe we should try to have them see each other more often. They're all each other has, now. We're all each other has." She lifted her gaze to Petunia's face.
Petunia met her sister's eyes and said clearly, but without rancour, "No, Vernon and Dudley are all I have. You left a long time ago."
They gazed at each other for a long moment. Tears began to leak silently from Lily's eyes. "I'm sorry, Petunia," she whispered. "I wish it could have been different."
Finding a sudden burst of strength, Petunia collected Dudley in her arms and stood, looking down at Lily. For the first time in years, she felt like the big sister again, the one who could comfort and protect, not just tag along behind. Strange to think there was a time when she'd been pleased to see Lily's tears. Or a time when she'd have done anything to prevent them. Now she just felt blank.
"I wish that too," Petunia said.
After a moment's hesitation, she leant down to place a kiss at her sister's temple. Then she turned back to the crowd to find her husband and go.
X. The First Day of All the Rest
Barely a year later, Petunia knew of Lily's death the moment Vernon asked, "Their son - what's his name again?"
Well, perhaps she didn't know it. How could she know something she hadn't been told? But she had that same premonitory chill she'd felt the very first time she heard James Potter's name.
Lying in bed that night next to Vernon, pretending to sleep, Petunia turned the idea over and over in her mind, prodding at it like a sore tooth. What would it be like if Lily died? How would that feel?
She found her response was mostly resignation. It would be sad, certainly. Knowing Lily, she'd get herself blown up over something pointless, some nitpicky insiders' disagreement nobody in their right mind even knew or cared about. It would be bitter, too, considering everything they'd missed out on as sisters, though Petunia hurriedly pushed that thought away.
But as she lay there in the dark with an ever stronger certainty that Lily is dead, mainly what Petunia felt was a sort of cheerless relief. At least now maybe she could truly leave all of that behind, all the worry and bitterness and disappointment that was having Lily for a sister. From this day on, Petunia could live her life on her own terms.
The next morning, she opened the front door and screamed.