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“You should smile more,” her mother says. “Like Lily.”
If there are any two words that define Petunia Evans better, she doesn’t know of them. Not her, not even with her big, bookish vocabulary. Snobbish, people tell her. Petunia is snobbish, with too big a brain, too bony a body, too strict and too judgemental and too… too everything. Too many frowns. Too many sharp comments. Too much blonde in her hair colour, without being blonde in her spirit, her hair too curly and too frizzy, her eyes too sharp and too narrow, her cheekbones too prominent.
Too many worries. It’s Petunia who worries too much about the small things; about how dirty their dresses get when Lily goes running down into the ravine, about Lily breaking her neck rocketing up trees, about being late for school or missing dinner or worrying their parents, about failing school and about what people would say about them if they were too much of anything and too little of anything else. Petunia worries, and they worry at her with sharp little fangs and sharp little claws, rubbing perpetually against her skin like the polyester dresses that Mum is fond of buying for them.
She worries about Severus Snape. Her list of worries about Severus Snape is long, too long, and too difficult for her to put in words. Petunia is bad with words, as bad at words as Lily is good at them, and every time she says anything about him at all, she feels like the worst sort of person.
“Look at what he wears,” she hisses at Lily. “And the Snapes… you know what they say about the Snapes! His father is a drunk, we never see his mother, and they don’t go to church—”
“None of that is his fault,” Lily always says, indignant. “So what if he’s poor? So what about his parents? So what that they don’t go to church? He can’t control any of that! Even Mum says we should take pity on him, he hasn’t much of a home to go to—and anyway, I like him, Tuney!”
“No, but—” Petunia always replies, frustrated more than her words can say because it’s not the poverty. It’s not his parents. It’s not the church. It’s Severus Snape himself that makes her uncomfortable.
It’s the fact that Severus Snape disdains her—Petunia with her prim dresses and her blonde frizzy hair and her too sharp eyes and too big brain, and him with his floppy, bat-like clothing and his too long, too greasy hair. And it’s not that Petunia necessarily thinks he should respect her just because she’s from a good and stable family with marginally more money than his, but maybe it’s only that Petunia doesn’t think that she should be disrespected for nothing she has ever done.
Severus is always trying to draw Lily away from her. Lily is pretty, and Lily is trusting, and too often Lily goes. And Petunia is Lily’s older sister, and she’s supposed to take care of her, and how can she do that when Severus is always trying to separate them?
“You weren’t invited,” he always tells her, his nostrils flaring as he leads Lily away. “Go away.”
“I can’t,” she retorts, determinedly following them into the depths of the ravine, picking her way through the mud and leaves. “She’s my sister, and I can’t leave her alone.”
“You’re not one of us,” he replies, his voice thick with scorn. “Don’t come where you’re not wanted, Muggle.”
She doesn’t know the meaning of that yet, but she will.
She’s twelve when she learns about magic.
Lily is magic. Lily is magical, and Petunia is there when Professor Minerva McGonagall arrives at their door to invite Lily, special Lily, to study magic at a boarding school in Scotland. It’s called Hogwarts, and the descriptions of it—
The descriptions of it are magical in and of themselves. The school is a castle, situated on a hill overseeing a lake, bordering a forest. Everyone at the school is magical, Lily and of course Severus are going, and Petunia can’t go because Petunia isn’t magical. Petunia isn’t anything.
She tries anyway. She sits down at her prim, whitewashed desk, and she handwrites a letter to Hogwarts in her best cursive, asking if she might be able to come too. She doesn’t have high hopes when she does it, not really, but doing something is better than doing nothing, so she does something. Her letter whisks off into the void, and she tries to forget about it—tries to forget when Severus casts her smugly superior looks as he leads Lily away to talk about magic, tries to forget when Lily herself chatters endlessly about the excitement of going away to a magical boarding school, tries to forget when Lily comes home from a trip to Diagon Alley with a new wand and new robes and a new cauldron that their parents must have stretched themselves to buy.
She doesn’t succeed. She squirrels away pieces of magic like candy, left to be savoured when she is alone, but it isn’t good for her. It isn’t healthy for her. This is a world that she can never join, a fact that is only reinforced when Headmaster Dumbledore himself writes to her and says so.
Petunia Evans is a Muggle. She has no place in their world, the magical world, and it’s best that she come to terms with that now. She couldn’t do magic if she tried, any more than she could ever be as beautiful as Lily, as fun as Lily, as likeable as Lily.
There’s another world where Petunia Evans lets this disappointment seep deep into her bones—a world where Petunia Evans grows old, and bitter, and angry at all the things she cannot have. In that world, Petunia Evans lets her jealousy steep, like tea that’s been left too long, and lets it turn into a thick, steaming beverage of resentment and hate and disgust. In that world, Petunia Evans is always second-best to her beautiful, her magical, her shining and smiling sister, in her own head if nowhere else, and this remains so even after Lily is gone.
That’s a different world.
It’s wrong to say that Petunia isn’t angry at the injustice of it all. She is—she is very angry. It’s unbecoming of a woman, Mum says, but that doesn’t magically make Petunia less angry. Petunia is an angry person, and Mum’s lectures only make her simmer with anger instead of burning with it. Petunia lives with her anger, lets it boil long and slow, and then she puts her anger to work.
Lily is always going to be the special one, the magical one. Lily is always going to be the beautiful one, the fun one, the shining and smiling and well-liked one against whom Petunia can never compare. And if Petunia always measures herself on Lily’s scale, she’ll never win. So, she doesn’t.
Petunia Evans is angry, and she doesn't need to be beautiful. She doesn't need to be beautiful, she doesn't need to be magical, she doesn't need to smile or shine or to be liked. She just needs to work at the things that she can do—the things that Lily cannot and will never do—and she’ll …
Well, she doesn’t know. She’ll be something. By her own light and on her own terms, she will be something other than second-best.
And so, when Lily comes home with her pockets full of teeming frogspawn, turning toadstools into teacups with a wave of her wand, Petunia is studying. Petunia has thick textbooks full of numbers, full of rigid analysis and explanations and reason, and she gobbles them up as fast as Lily’s new pet owl gulps down mice. Over Christmas break and Easter, Petunia is studying. Exams are always just around the corner, and if Petunia can’t do magic, she can do calculus.
The summers are harder—Britain doesn’t have summer coursework, and this is rural England in the 1970s. There’s no summer school, no internships for Petunia to win. Instead, starting from when she is fifteen, Petunia works. She finds a job at a diner washing dishes one year, and then she goes back as a waitress her second and third years, even if she hates the smell and the dress and the insincere smiles she’s required to plaster onto her face. But she hates being at home more—she hates listening to her parents fawn over Lily, their prized witch and baby, she hates Lily’s stories about a place that Petunia will never be able to go, she hates being faced with her inadequacy at every turn.
The money from the diner is decent. She tucks most of it away, finding nothing that she really wants to spend it on, and anyway it’s her ticket away from home. No one is going to come around offering her a scholarship to a magical boarding school, so she has to build these opportunities for herself.
Her parents don’t ask. She goes to school, and her marks are good, and she thinks Dad gives her report cards a once over without ever really seeing them. And then she does her O-Levels, and they come back with a neat line of As and Bs, and then she goes onto her A-levels where she drops all the arts and humanities she’s allowed to drop in favour of more maths. More sciences. More chemistry, and physics, and biology. The hard sciences are the safest, a place where magic doesn’t threaten so much, and Petunia takes refuge in it.
She’s the only girl—a young woman, now—in half of her classes. There are other women in biology and chemistry thinking about going to nursing school, but Petunia doesn’t think that’s her path. Petunia isn’t nice. Petunia isn’t patient. Petunia doesn’t want to work coddling patients, and if she were going into medicine, she’d go in for surgery instead.
But that doesn’t appeal to her either. Surgery—there’s so much blood, and guts, and Petunia is fussy and hates getting dirty. Petunia likes hard numbers, not tissue and flesh, so medicine is right out. Engineering, though, engineering has numbers aplenty, and she likes chemistry, likes physics, and so she applies for an engineering slot instead.
Not at a local school, and not Cambridge or Oxford either. Her marks are good, but not that good. Instead, it’s Imperial College London, University of Manchester, and University of Sheffield that get her applications, and it’s not much of a surprise when, after the A-level exam results come out, Petunia gets into all of them.
As a point of clarity, it isn’t a surprise to her. It’s very much a surprise to her parents.
“Petunia, darling,” Mum calls her from her room, where she’s reading. It’s non-fiction—George Gamow’s One, Two, Three… Infinity that Petunia finds a bit speculative for her tastes, but it is supposedly a classic and she isn’t working at the diner until the evening shift. She looks up from her book, frowning.
“Yes?” she says.
“Er,” Mum replies, sounding a little lost. “You received some mail—from a university in London. We’d—your father and I—would like to talk about it.”
That piques Petunia’s interest, and she primly folds a spare hair ribbon into her book and unfurls herself from her bed. “University College London?”
It’s the most highly ranked school she has applied to. In applying, she thought it was possible, but an outside chance, and had more or less settled herself to Manchester or Sheffield—though, she reminds herself sharply, she doesn’t know now if she got in. Still, if it’s a rejection, she’s not sure why her parents would want to talk about it with her. She isn’t Lily, and she’s the eldest child; in her experience, her parents don’t rush to console her for disappointments. She’s expected to handle them herself.
Them wanting to speak with her about this mail is different, and her mind, always quick, is already racing towards the possibility and the reality. If she got in, then that would be good, but she’d have to find money to pay for it. Her bank account has enough for probably a year—but she’ll need summer work, or she’ll need to tutor, or something.
She’ll figure it out, if she gets in. She hopes she does.
“Yes,” Mum says, a smile weakly flittering across her face. “It’s… a bit of a surprise for you, Petunia.”
“Is it?” Petunia asks, but she means it rhetorically as she swings her long legs off her bed.
Petunia is tall for a woman—too tall, since women are supposed to be small, supposed to be delicate, and she simply isn’t. She’s tall, and she’s broad-shouldered, and her neck is too long and her face too narrow. She’s been compared to a horse, and not favourably so, not that Petunia gives a damn. The person who said it had been angry that Petunia had the top score in a maths exam, and for some reason, as men so often did, he had chosen to attack her non-existent beauty in response.
She’s used to it, and she doesn’t care. Beauty is Lily’s, and it’s something that Petunia gave up on long ago.
Downstairs, her father is sitting at the dining room table. He’s a tall man, lanky, with pale hair that is caught somewhere between sandy brown and grey. One of his legs is crossed over his knee, and he’s squinting at a thin letter that Petunia can see in his hand.
The insignia of University College London is on it. Petunia wants to see it, but she desists.
Her heart thudding, she sits down at the table. And she waits.
“University,” her father says finally, setting the letter down on the table. “In London.”
Petunia glances at the letter. Even upside down, it’s clear that the letter is an acceptance.
“Yes,” she says, even if she hasn’t made the decision quite yet. She has acceptances from Manchester and Sheffield in hand, but she was waiting on this one, and maybe this is the moment that she decides. Maybe this, when her parents are looking at her and only at her, is when she decides the course of her future.
“For engineering.”
“Yes,” Petunia repeats. And she waits.
It is a long time before her father speaks again.
“I hadn’t realized you were…” he says, and the words trail off. “So interested in the sciences.”
“It hasn’t been a secret.” And it hasn’t been. Her subjects have always been listed, neat in bold ink, on every one of her report cards. It isn’t on her that her father has only been skimming them long enough to put together that Petunia’s doing well, instead of putting the pieces together about who Petunia is.
“No,” he agrees. “I suppose not. I thought you were studying—I don’t know. Typing. Secretarial work. You’d be an excellent secretary.”
Petunia is sure she would be. She has the mindset to be—her work is always carefully filed, kept neatly organized, easy for her to find. But she doesn’t want to be a secretary. She doesn’t want to play second fiddle to anyone.
“I don’t want to be a secretary,” she says, reaching across the table for her letter.
Her father hesitates. He isn’t good with words either, not really. He’s a man come of age in the 1950s—he’s always worked, and he’s provided for their family, and Mum has always been at home. Like the men in his generation, he isn’t exactly communicative.
“Are you sure?” he says finally, even if Petunia knows perfectly well that’s not what he’s trying to say.
“Yes.”
“It’ll be hard,” he says, frowning at her. “It’ll be hard to meet someone, marry someone. Men don’t want someone who is smarter than them, Tuney—men don’t want to marry women who become engineers. And we can’t afford this—we can’t afford to pay for you to school in London, with the tuition and the living costs… you should consider a typist’s course instead. Lots of work, for typists.”
Her parents had never complained about how much Lily’s schooling cost them. Lily had always gotten things new—new robes, new books, new supplies every year. Her own owl to correspond with her school friends every summer, and to write to them at home. Petunia has seen the money being exchanged, and it’s not a small amount. Petunia has never cost her parents so much.
“No,” Petunia says simply, standing up from the table. And that no—it’s not just a no. It’s not just about the typing course, or about the money, or about not being attractive enough to marry. It’s a no to everything, a complete rejection of society and the values they impose on her, and Petunia has long since decided that she will never be able to compete by their standards and so she won’t compete at all.
Petunia Evans writes her own rules, and she’s going to be an engineer.
“And I hate being called Tuney,” she says, and she folds up her letter and slides it into her pocket.
She mails her acceptance to University College London on her way to work that evening.
She moves out that summer. She thinks her parents want to argue with her, to argue with her choices, but it is very hard to argue when Petunia is simply implacable.
Petunia doesn’t care about getting married. She never thought anyone would want to marry her before—she’s not beautiful, she’s not fun, she’s not attractive—and she’s long since given up on pleasing people. She doesn’t care that men don’t want to marry women who are smarter than them, and she doesn’t want to be a secretary.
As for the money, Petunia’s worked every summer since she was fifteen and she’s spent very little of it. That, along with a bursary, are enough to pay for her first year at University College London, and she’ll qualify for work study once she’s there. Her parents have no leverage, and instead the summer becomes an icy impasse.
She doesn’t talk about her plans much. Lily asks, and Petunia rattles it off quickly and with no seeming emotion, because she doesn’t expect Lily to care. Lily blinks, uncomprehending, and then she grins and congratulates her. Petunia doesn’t quite know what to make of that, so she nods stiffly and asks something about that sport that witches and wizards play, something involving broomsticks, and lets Lily carry the conversation off again.
She doesn’t talk to her parents much once she’s moved out from home. She calls, once a week or so, and her conversations with her mother are flat, stilted. Mum asks how things are in London, about her classes, about whether she is seeing anyone, and Petunia says things are fine, her classes are good, and no, she’s never seeing anyone. She says so even if she is seeing someone, which she does on occasion, because she simply doesn’t care to bring anyone home with her. She talks to her father but rarely—she is, she thinks, confusing to him.
Instead, she studies, and she works, and sometimes she even goes out with friends. She has friends—London is a very different place than Cokeworth, much more modern by some sensibilities, and while she isn’t quite at the stage of burning her bras neither does she disagree with many feminist points. How could she? She’s studying engineering, one of only a handful of women in a roomful of men, and she thinks she does well at it.
She goes home three times a year: at Christmas, at Easter, and once over the summer. Otherwise, it’s London, and it’s school, and Petunia Evans has moved on.
It’s an irony, isn’t it, that for all that Lily is a witch, for all that Lily was the rambunctious child turned to a confident and assertive young woman, that Lily ultimately does what is expected of any woman of their generation. She goes to school—magic school, yes—and then barely a year after she’s graduated, she’s getting married.
There are rules to transgression, Petunia thinks. There are rules that are acceptable to break—rules around what women wear, how women look, how women act. Lily breaks a lot of those rules. But Lily doesn’t break the rules that matter.
The year is 1979, and Lily is getting married. She’s having a family soon, she tells her family in excitement—she and James are trying to have a family, hoping to replace the one that James has lost. His parents were elderly, he explains during the rehearsal dinner, and it’s just not the same.
Her parents are delighted, of course, and even Petunia can begrudge a small, awkward smile at her little sister and her beau. They’re all right, for all that they’re a literal world apart from her, and to her own surprise, she doesn’t dislike them. They’re just different, different to the point of being unknowable, and Petunia can’t imagine that they have anything in common.
It is 1979, and Petunia is an engineer. She’s only twenty-one, but she has a brand-new job with the British Ministry of Defence. She has a shiny piece of paper on her wall, and she makes things that go boom. She isn’t seeing anyone—her last relationship ended with a small, tired fizzle, and she can’t say she cares—and the idea of settling down, having a family, is nearly as foreign as magic.
Right now, Petunia mostly cares about being less poor than she is, about trading in her flea-ridden shoebox of a bedsit for something that’s clean and has actual bedrooms, and about maybe taking a holiday outside of Britain for the first time.
It’s at the wedding that Petunia learns about the war.
No one tells her about it, of course. Petunia is sitting with her parents and with some of, it seems, James’ more distant and elderly wizarding relations. She and her parents are the only Muggles there—something about the Statute of Secrecy—and while the conversation at the table is polite, it’s clear that they don’t have much in common. Mum and Dad are still in awe at magic, still turning around and staring at every pulled wand and spray of sparks.
Petunia sticks out like a weed in the middle of the posh, well-landscaped rose garden that is the wedding reception—too tall, too ungainly. Her navy-blue sheath dress is one that she purchased for work, not for a wedding, and it’s like nothing that anyone wears there. Even Mum fits in better, her paisley floral sundress almost matching some of the patterns on wizarding robes, and it certainly flows more like a set of robes than Petunia’s straight-cut dress. No one is talking to her, Petunia’s stiff and short answers driving them off, and she’s trying very hard not to care about the beauty and the luxury and the magic.
And so, she hears the whispers.
“Yes, Shane McDougall—”
“Dead?”
“Worse—arrested.”
“On what charges?”
“Remember the attack on Colin McDougall and his family?”
“Yes, you can’t mean—that’s Shane’s own brother!”
Someone scoffs, and Petunia looks in that direction. The speaker is a brunette woman, almost a redhead, with a Scottish accent. “Well, a would-be Death Eater can’t have a brother shacking up with a Muggle, can he?”
It’s much later that night before Petunia can ask Lily about it. After the ceremony and dinner is the dancing, and things devolve into a raucous mess. Free-flowing alcohol makes tongues loose, so Petunia—Petunia who does not dare take any of the suspicious drinks for herself and sticks to water—hears more than she should.
There is a war on. There is a megalomaniac—she’s heard him called The Dark Lord, she’s heard him called He Who Must Not Be Named, but she’s mostly heard him called You-Know-Who—who is leading an insurrection against the Ministry of Magic. His followers call themselves Death Eaters, and they are little better than a gang. There have been attacks, torture, murder, and not all of it in the wizarding world.
“Lily,” Petunia hisses towards the end of the night, when most of the other guests have gone home. Her fingers are like pincers as she grabs her sister and pulls her towards a wall. “What’s this about a war?”
“Oh, you know, Petunia…” Lily giggles. She’s flushed from drink, from a joyous day, but Petunia can see that she’s pulling herself together in front of her. “Look, don’t tell Mum and Dad, alright?”
“I barely talk to them,” Petunia says coolly, and that’s true. “A war?”
“Yes.” Lily sighs, looking around, becoming sombre. “I suppose we can’t get away from it, not even for one night. James and I hoped… yes, there’s a war.”
“Are you involved?” Petunia can’t help asking. She’d never get involved in a war herself, not directly and her job notwithstanding, but Lily is and has always been a different sort of woman. Lily has strong principles and a sense of justice, so Petunia can’t imagine that she isn’t involved somehow.
“Everyone is.” Lily raises her chin. “When you have a threat like You-Know-Who—you can’t ignore it. In his mind, you’re either with him or against him, and if he’s going to try to kill you anyway, you might as well fight.”
“That serious?”
Lily hesitates, then her mouth thins. “Yes. But you shouldn’t worry about it, Petunia. It won’t affect the Muggle world.”
Petunia gestures to the dwindling reception. “Won’t it? It’s already affected the non-magical world, Lily—people have been murdered, the papers are all talking about a crime wave, and you invited us here—”
“It won’t affect you,” Lily repeats, and her voice is firm with conviction. “I can’t say I’m not fighting, Petunia, because I am and I have to, but it won’t affect you. No one who was on his side was here today, and none of them know where you live or anything. I’ll keep you and Mum and Dad safe, all right? I will.”
Petunia has grave misgivings. She and their parents were here, in the middle of a large, wizarding reception—how many people saw them? How well does Lily really know each of her guests? What about the things that Lily had said about them before she knew better, before the war started in earnest, before she knew they were important?
She doesn’t know what to say to that, so she just purses her lips and shakes her head. “You better,” she says. “Because we don’t have magic to protect ourselves.”
A year passes.
Petunia has her own life. She has her job—and even if Petunia has long since given up on being liked, she is shocked to find that she is liked, if being liked means being respected. She’s good at her job, precise, exacting, and detail-oriented, which are traits valued when one works in the lab where things explode. She finds herself going out for drinks on Fridays with other women from the lab, and time passes.
She was never good at keeping in contact with her family. Mum calls, every week or two, and their conversations are short and stilted. She hears that Lily is pregnant, and that it’ll be a little boy, and when Mum inevitably (anxiously) asks whether Petunia has met anyone, Petunia says no. The conversation dries up after that, and Petunia hangs up.
It’s a surprise when the bobbies come knocking, shortly before Petunia leaves for work on a cool, crisp autumn day soon after the start of the school year.
“Yes?” Petunia asks, eyeing the two men suspiciously.
“Detectives Holman and Rickert, ma’am,” the older of the two detectives tells her. He has a droopy face, with deep grooves under his eyes, and jowls that remind Petunia of a bulldog. “You’re Miss Petunia Evans?”
“Ms.,” Petunia corrects automatically. “Ms. Petunia Evans, yes.”
“Ms. Evans.” The man sighs. Petunia doesn’t know if he’s Holman or Rickert. “I’m the bearer of bad news, I’m afraid. Your parents…”
“What of them?” Petunia asks, and her voice is sharp even if she feels a rushing begin in her head. She hasn’t talked to her parents for a while—has it been one week? Two? Maybe even three?
“Would you like to sit down?” The younger detective asks, his face wrinkling in concern. “Maybe you should be sitting down.”
“No,” Petunia snaps. “Just tell me.”
“They’ve passed away, ma’am,” the older detective says, reaching out a hand in a motion to steady her. Petunia backs away from his hand, grips the doorframe instead. “Gas leak in the house—best we can guess, within the last couple days. Nothing anyone could have done. I’m very sorry.”
Petunia feels herself nodding, and her face is dry. The detectives are staring at her, waiting for her to—what, break down? She doesn’t know. Instead, she keeps nodding, and she takes a deep breath. “Right,” she says, and her voice sounds very far away. “I suppose I better take the day off, then. Make arrangements. Right.”
It isn’t an accident. Petunia isn’t stupid. Gas leaks—there’s been a spate of them too, enough that the government is blitzing the media with the harms of carbon monoxide. It’s all murder, magical murder, but at least Petunia thinks her parents did not suffer. The ones who suffered, even Muggles can make out the marks, and it gets put down as a crime instead of a tragic accident.
Lily is there, at the funeral that Petunia planned and paid for. It’s a small, simple memorial service held at the church that Petunia and Lily grew up in, where her parents had been faithful parishioners for decades. Lily is pale, and her son Harry, only a few months old, sleeps in her arms.
“You know this wasn’t an accident,” Petunia says quietly, after the service. “It came from your world. Your magical world.”
“I know,” Lily says, keeping her voice down. “I know, Tuney.”
“It’s Petunia,” Petunia snaps. She hasn’t been Tuney in a very long time. “You said—you said they’d be safe. That you’d protect them.”
“I know.” There are bags under Lily’s eyes. “I slipped—we slipped, Petunia. It won’t happen again.”
Petunia takes one look at her tired face, and at the sleeping baby in her arms, and she doesn’t believe her.
No one is looking out for Petunia.
She doesn’t know that. But she doesn’t have it in her to trust that anyone is looking out for her, and while she thinks she might be distant enough to Lily to go ignored, she can’t trust in that. So instead, she takes the time run the numbers, to figure out her own protections.
Her flat is small, but it seals off well—her windows are tight, and her doors are heavy fire doors. Her stove runs on propane, and it’s about two weeks of experimentation and calculation before Petunia works out her plans.
First, every night before she sleeps, she puts a table in front of the door. The table has a vase on it. Wizards might be able to unlock her doors with magic, but they still have to walk through them, and all it’s meant to do it make noise and wake her up. Her stove at full blast pumps out enough gas to fill the apartment in approximately six minutes, which is about how long it takes for a plugged-in food processor to melt on a lit stove and, hopefully, spark. And then it explodes, and hopefully takes some wizards with it.
It's crude, but it helps Petunia sleep at night, so there it is.
Shockingly, it works.
She wakes up in the dead of winter to the crash of the vase exploding on the ground. There’s a grunt and swearing—Merlin—and that’s all Petunia needs to hear. She’s out of her bed in a flash, a thick sweater over her head and her go bag over her shoulder. She pauses by her stove, lighting it, before she takes off out the window onto the fire escape and to a co-worker’s flat.
The worst part about the whole attack is that Petunia has no idea if it worked. She knows her flat exploded before it was supposed to, because the blast was simply too small. Her guess is that one of the wizards set it off with his wand when her flat was only at the lower explosivity limit. In any case, she doubted she’d seriously harmed the wizard, whoever it was.
For work, she carefully weaves a story implying that she is the target of international espionage because of her research. That is enough for the British Ministry of Defence to extend certain protections to her—a gun licence, a legal name change to Dursley, a few invented items for her new, more secure flat. It’s not much, but she hopes it’s enough.
No one else is looking out for her. No one ever has. No one has ever really cared about Petunia Evans Dursley, and that’s fine, because she doesn’t need them to.
It’s November 1, 1981. It isn’t so for much longer, but so it is.
Petunia is sitting in her housecoat, her hands wrapped around a mug of chamomile. She saw the signs all day: the showers of sparks, the owls flying every which way, the men and women wearing robes in open daylight. Something is happening—has happened—in the wizarding world, and she’s waiting.
For what, she’s not entirely sure. For Lily to contact her, maybe—their relationship isn’t good, but neither is it terrible. They’ve exchanged cards since their parents died. A Christmas card, then Petunia had sent one for Lily’s birthday, and Harry’s. She got one back, with a basket, for her own birthday. Petunia would like to think that Lily would contact her if something had happened, but at the same time she doesn’t really expect Lily to, either.
But something feels wrong. There’s been no word from Lily all day, and something is just wrong.
There isn’t a knock at the door. There’s only a rustle of movement, a whisper of someone stopping and putting something down at her door. Petunia lives in a flat, and she knows the sounds of her neighbours—this isn’t one of them.
She opens the door just as an elderly man, one with a white beard so long that he could have tucked it in his belt, is putting a letter into Harry’s hands. And in that moment, Petunia knows.
“You can’t have been thinking of leaving him here all night,” she says, leaning against the doorframe and frowning. “It’s cold, and he’s not even eighteen months old.”
The man coughs, straightening, and he offers her the letter with a shaking hand. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Miss Evans—”
“It’s Dursley, now.” Petunia pauses. “Ms. Dursley. I’m not married.”
“Miss Dursley,” the old man corrects himself. “Albus Dumbledore.”
Petunia nods. She knows the name—how can she not when she wrote to him so long ago? How can she not when his reply made her change her life?
The silence that stretches between them is long and awkward, but Petunia is used to that. She waits, and eventually, Dumbledore coughs. “The letter will explain it all,” he says. “He is safe if he’s with you, as a blood relative. There’s a spell—I rooted it in your blood, to Lily’s sacrifice, and no one can harm him while he is with you. No one can harm either of you before he becomes of age.”
Petunia nods again, looking down at the baby. Baby Harry. She doesn’t know him well, has never even held him, but she is the only family he has left in the world. There’s something in that, she thinks—they’re two people, all alone in the world.
“I’m not Lily,” she replies. “I’m nothing like Lily.”
“You’re more like Lily than you think you are,” Dumbledore says, his eyes crinkling very slightly.
“I’m not magical.” Petunia looks down at the baby again. “And he will be.”
“Magic isn’t everything.” Dumbledore is smiling now. “You know that better than most.”
“So it isn’t,” Petunia replies with a sigh, picking up the basket to bring Harry inside. A basket, really? Didn’t they have proper carriers in the wizarding world? “So, it isn’t.”