"The Sensible Sister," Petunia, PG Title: The Sensible Sister Author:green_amber Characters/Pairing: Petunia gen, with Petunia/Sirius, Petunia/Vernon, James/Lily Summary: Petunia's initial reaction to her sister's death, finding out her sister was killed. Rating: PG Warning(s): character death, bizarre pairing Originally Written: 5/06 Notes: for hp_angstfest! I so need to flesh this out someday.
"Won't," Dudley insists when I try to put him to bed. I finally have to ply him with milk and cookies, and three different bedtime stories. Thank God, he finally dozes off somewhere around "Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, and Nod is a little head."
There's a strange foreboding in the air. You know those nights you can almost feel something important hanging in the balance, but darned if you have any inkling what it is?
I snuggle up with my sleeping son and feel his warmth. The whole scene reminds me of when I was a little girl and Lily and I used to curl up together for our nightly tale. Mum knew all the old standards by heart--Grimm, Perrault, Andersen. My favorite was always "Snow White and Rose Red."
I think it was because of the sisters. Usually when there are sisters in a fairy tale, they don't get on together; they're rivals. Snow White and Rose Red acted like sisters, real sisters, not the way Lily and I have been the last few years. I bet Snow White and Rose Red never let their relationship dwindle down to polite Christmas cards with pictures of babies slipped inside. Still, it's not as if we've got much to talk about anymore, is it?
(I was Snow White, of course; I was the blonde one, the quiet one, the neat one. Lily was Rose Red, crowned as she was with that crop of red hair. Outgoing, outspoken, switching at the drop of a hat from passionate exuberance to volcanic wrath. Never a dull moment with our Lily.)
Then there were our grandmother's tales. Hers were different. She didn't tell them lightly; she'd always say she didn't want to give us false hope and she would refuse to tell them, except when it was Christmas and she'd had too much eggnog. That was when she'd tell us about the wonderful school with the talking portraits and moving staircases, and the letter they'd sent her when she was eleven, inviting her to step into this magic world. Then she'd nod off, leaning her head back against the upholstery, leaving Lily and me to embroider the rest of the story with an improbable Babel of details that grew more elaborate every year.
She was gone by the time I turned eleven. No letter came; I shrugged my shoulders with the jaded certainty only an eleven-year-old can have. Batty old Grandma, she was just spinning a yarn all along. Having us on.
A year later, Lily's birthday was greeted with a flourish of owl feathers and tears of joy from Mum. That was the end of Snow White and Rose Red. I felt a lot more like Cinderella, and Lily was going to the ball.
I sigh; why am I thinking so much of Lily tonight? I see a cohort of teenagers parading up Privet Drive and remember: it was Halloween last night, and the local hoodlums seem to think it still is. I forget these things, being too old to celebrate it myself, and Dudley still being too young to do so. I suppose I won't forget Halloween in a few years, when he wants to dress up in something outlandish and gallivant about the neighborhood scaring the daylights out of the old ladies.
Halloween has something to do with witches, doesn't it? Maybe that's why I've got Lily on my mind.
Vernon is already snoring when I tiptoe into our bedroom--if only Dudley were so easy to lull to sleep! His mustaches flutter with each labored breath, and I remember that he's older than I am.
Funny how things turn out, isn't it? He annoyed me when I first met him, when he was one of Dad's business associates and I was the seventeen-year-old girl who had to be polite to him at dinner or else. He was in his late twenties at the time, and had just got divorced. I still remember him raving on about how his wife had let him down--put on weight and let the house go to seed--and bit my lip until it bled to keep from telling him about the rather sizable gut he himself sported and the mustard stain on his ugly tie.
Now, we're as happy as anyone else is, I suppose. I'm as slim as I was in school, and the house is impeccable; the second part, at least, is easy. I do like things neat. It's a life, and not a bad one as they go.
I slip under the covers, and let sleep come.
The sensuous purr of a motorcycle; I look down the lane both ways, but don't see it. It's Lily who points up at the sky; I follow her finger and see the bike descending from the clouds.
"Show-off," mutters Lily's new boyfriend. It's summer hols (owl droppings and bits of leaves on the bedroom floor again), and Lily's brought this James bloke home to meet us. "Can't just use a broom like normal people."
The show-off lands gracefully on the pavement, black hair streaming behind him in the wind. I smell leather and rain. Was it raining where he came from? He looks like something out of a story: Hades, Phaethon.
"James! Lily! You've got to try this. And who’s this vision of loveliness?"
He takes my hand and kisses it, with enough mockery in the gesture to keep it from seeming old-fashioned, and enough sincerity that I don't slap him.
"Petunia Evans," I say, and feel my cheeks burn.
I wake, shaking the dream from me like raindrops. It's not the first time.
I read somewhere that déjà vu isn't anything magical at all. It's a neurological mistake; you see something, and your brain accidentally files it into long-term memory, so even though you only just saw it, you feel like you saw it a long time ago. It works in reverse too. Case in point: Sirius Black. I should have forgotten him a long time ago. That was a fluke, a blip. It's just a mistake that I still sometimes think about him.
A motorcycle growls to a start, then fades into the distance. I didn't dream the sound. That must have been where the dream came from. It's nice to have a logical explanation.
It occurs to me that motorcycles shouldn't be zooming up and down Privet Drive in the middle of the night. And that it's much too dark in here. I glance at the window; no streetlights. My blood runs cold with a vague but almost tangible fear.
I should wake Vernon and send him out there with the fireplace poker. Instead, I do what a hundred horror movies should have taught me not to do--I go alone. Because it's all in my head and I don't want to worry him with my silly notions. Because that sounded far too much like Sirius' bike and if he's here Vernon will call him a long-haired hoodlum and run him off before I can see him. Because I can't shake the feeling this has something to do with Lily.
She and I were almost friends again, that year. It wasn't because I was using her to insinuate myself into Sirius' life, which was what she accused me of once, in one of those angry fugue states where you yell everything that comes to mind and then have to pick up the pieces later.
It had more to do with the fact that we finally had something to talk about. A common language, as it were. She never knew what to say when I talked about movies and rock music and bellbottoms; I was lost when she talked about transfiguration and Quidditch and robes. Boys, we could agree on. (Infuriating, yet utterly irresistible.)
Did the thing with Sirius last? Remember: I was always the sensible sister.
Did the bond with Lily last? A little longer. Then I was married and pregnant and busy, and she was married and pregnant and busy, and then there was some kind of war in wizard-land and she had to go into hiding. We were speaking different languages again.
I open the front door. No one's there. I'm about to chalk it all up to an overactive imagination, when I happen to look down and see a basket on the doorstep. Inside, a child sleeps, its forehead slashed with a horrible scar. There is a note pinned to his blankets.
The baby opens its eyes, and I know who it--he--is, even before I read the note. The green is unmistakable even in the dim glow of the streetlights (which are inexplicably on again). The note only confirms what the trembling in my hands, the salt taste in my throat, and the churn of my gut already know: Lily is dead.
Lily's son crinkles up his little face and squalls his anguish to the heavens. I pick him up, cradle him to my chest. I should be crying, too, but I've never been able to cry when I'm supposed to. I know, two weeks from now, I'll break a wineglass and bawl like an infant.
I can't cry now; Harry needs me. If it's the last thing I do, I'll keep him from my sister's world. There's nothing in it for him but death.