Being an older sister is tough. You get a taste of freedom, of what it's like to be an only child, for a short amount of time—a couple of years, usually. And that's not enough time to enjoy it, so you're forced to look back with resentment at time your parents could have spent doting on you, spending long hours playing with you, showing their friends pictures of you.
Being the older sister of Lily Evans crosses the line of tough and makes its way into the territory of unbearable.
Petunia didn't hate her sister. She was never particularly fond of her, of course, but she didn't hate her. Was she jealous? Oh, yes. She didn't even try to mask her jealously after the first few years. She was angry with her parents... Wasn't she enough alone? Why did they feel the need to have another daughter? Were they trying to replace her?
From the beginning, it felt like they loved Lily more. Petunia would later learn that a lot of elder sisters felt the exact same way as she had, but for the time being, she would just sit in her room and cry while her dad talked about his beautiful baby girl, even when she was definitely not a baby anymore, or while her mother chattered away with her friends about how quickly she was growing. Petunia was growing too!
And Lily was special. They couldn't explain it straight away, of course. But weird things always happened around her. Ordinary objects moved, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes blatantly; if she ever dropped anything, it would just float gently to the ground. Petunia tried to see if she could do the same and ended up breaking three plates and bursting into tears while her precious, talented little sister somehow cleaned up the mess in under a minute, smiling brightly.
Oh, how Petunia tired of hearing about how special Lily was.
Then she got her letter from that school.
Their parents were so proud of her. They hadn't been proud of Petunia in ages. What was so great about getting into a school for other abnormal people—people like her sister and that Snape boy who lived at Spinner's End. Maybe, maybe this was a good thing. Yes, she was getting sent away for the majority of the year. She could finally get a little bit of attention...
She was wrong. All her parents talked about was Lily this, Lily that. Reading her letters, writing her letters, anticipating when they'd hear from her next. Reiterating just how proud they were that their daughter was so special!
Lily would come home on breaks, all smiles and glowing happiness. Talked about her friends and professors and spells and trick stairs—whatever that meant!—and ghosts—what a load of rubbish—and classes and the food and how wonderful everything was.
Petunia was in a sour mood the day they picked her sister up from the Kings Cross at the end of her first year, so she snapped, "If it was so bloody fantastic, why didn't you just stay there?"
"Petunia!" her mother chastised. "Didn't you miss your sister?"
"Not really. She should've stayed where she belongs."
She caught sight of Lily's reflection in the window as they drove home, and she could see that her eyes were filling with tears. "Well it's true!" she exploded. "They're all weird like you there. That's where you belong. You don't belong here with us. We're normal. We don't fly around on broomsticks or-"
"Enough!" her father boomed. "Petunia, what's gotten into you?"
She sighed. They wouldn't listen if she tried to tell them how much it bothered her that Lily got to be the perfect one and she was left to live in the shadow of her younger sister's accomplishments already. They'd probably use parent words like petty, or childish.
But over time, it started to wear her down. The never-ceasing talk of how perfect Lily was. She would never dare admit it out loud, but she was secretly glad—no, thrilled—when she and Snape had their little falling out. It brought Petunia a sick sort of pleasure to see Lily looking so downtrodden.
Another year passed, and she'd finally beaten Lily at something. She was engaged! For once, all attention was on her, but she could barely enjoy it for being nauseated by just how sweet and genuine Lily was being. "Oh, I'm so happy for you, Tuney! That's great!"
During her final year at Hogwarts, Lily started dating that Potter boy. Petunia hated him before she even met him. And after she'd met him? Well—the way he acted was proof enough that he and Lily were perfect for each other, with his nonsensical babble about Quidditch.
But that wasn't what left her seething. It was that Lily had still managed to one-up her! Lily'd snagged a charming boy who clearly cared about her—he'd suffered through six years of getting shot down! Even cynical Petunia had to admit that that was romantic—and here she was, engaged to Vernon after about four months of dating. Not that she didn't love him; she did. But what Lily and Potter obviously had... it was the kind of love that everyone can see, the kind they make films about. And Petunia had ordinary, boring, typical, normal, every day love.
But she realized that that wasn't so bad. Who liked extraordinary, anyway?
She cried when she got Lily's wedding invitation. She. was. so. bloody. happy! She got everything she ever wanted, never had to work for a second. "We're not going," she decided.
"What was that?" Vernon called from the couch.
"My sister's wedding, we're not going!" she exclaimed gleefully, scrubbing the kitchen floor until it shined. She was feeling light as a feather with this decision. She was taking a stand: the life of Lily Evans-soon-to-be-Potter was not going to be a chapter in her book anymore.
"To that Porter character?" he asked.
And Petunia smiled to herself, because she was so glad to have found someone who cared about the magic world just as little as she did.
When Dudley was born, Lily and James sent a rather generous gift. Where had that money come from? Somewhere at the back of her mind, Petunia felt the slightest feeling of guilt, but she pushed it away, convincing herself that they were just trying to buy their way into the Dursley family's good graces. Well, she wasn't having that!
A few weeks later, they received a letter from the Potters—they loathed that name; it was practically taboo to say it in the house—announcing that Harry had been born. "Ugly name, Harry," Petunia muttered bitterly. "And looks so much like his father! What a pity."
There wasn't any correspondence from the Potters after that. Vernon said they'd probably taken the hint. Petunia was too bus with polishing every last centimeter of their home to care too much, and Dudley was quite the handful.
Then, just a couple days after Halloween the following year, she screamed.
That boy was on her porch! With a letter addressed far too specifically to her. This was a joke of some sort, she thought, tearing it open.
It hit the ground softly after she'd read it. Her sister had been murdered. So had Potter. Petunia may have despised almost every single thing her sister ever did, hated every second of her time she wasted, envied her for getting so much more attention, and occasionally wished for one of those stupid little spells to backfire, she never wanted her to end up dead.
And for the first time since childhood, she found herself getting truly angry.
If Lily had just been a normal girl like her, she wouldn't have gone to that school and become a threat to the Dark wizards. She wouldn't have married Potter and they wouldn't have had Harry and she wouldn't have been killed. She would have grown up and gone to a regular school and Petunia wouldn't have had as much to be jealous about and Lily could have married one of Vernon's coworkers and maybe they would have gotten along and god damn it, Lily would still be alive.
But she couldn't voice this. No one would understand. Her parents had been gone for a couple years. Vernon was the only one who knew about her sister's affliction, as they liked to call it, but it was a touchy subject. And she'd talked about Lily so horribly for so long that she couldn't just change her tune like that.
So she resolved to stay angry. And she would squelch it out of Harry if it was the last thing she did, because there was no chance in hell he was ending up the same way as his parents.
Years passed. On the outside, the Dursley family was a happy bunch, and they were so kind to have taken in their orphaned nephew. On the inside, there was turmoil brewing. They'd been noticing for several years that despite their best efforts, Harry was exhibiting not-so-standard traits.
He started to get letters. And they couldn't stop it. That—that Hagrid thing came and told him everything anyway, no matter that they hid in that rickety old hut on the rock. And the lie started to crumble.
Harry didn't understand. Not even Vernon and Dudley really understood. Petunia didn't just hate magic because of her aversion to anything out of the norm. She hated it because it's what had set her sister apart, what made her different, what got her killed in the end. Being different doesn't make you special; it makes you an easier target. Why was that so hard for so many people to get through their heads?
Still, she persisted with her horrible treatment of her nephew when he was home for the summer. It was wrong, but part of her hated that he even existed; she'd read that letter, and she knew that it was Harry that Volde-what's-it had been after that night. She couldn't help but feel bitter towards him. She didn't want to be stuck with a wizard. She was supposed to escape that world when she moved out and got away from Lily.
Then the Dementors attacked. She knew it was real; she'd heard that awful Snape boy telling Lily about them while she listened in. She should have been grateful because Harry had saved Dudley from him, but she couldn't; she just felt more resentment. If he hadn't been with them in the first place, Dudley wouldn't have been made a victim. All she could do was harbor even more anger.
The world was becoming a darker place. She could sense it. Partly from her keen intuition, and partly from scraps of that mad paper Harry read that she found in the bin. And Dudley had changed. Ever since the Dementor, he'd become quieter, more reserved, less intense. He moped about sometimes, but he also looked quite pensive at times—it was almost a welcome change.
She was so upset the day they had to relocate. There was a war going on, and these people honestly thought they would be the ones the wizards would come for to ask about Harry? They knew less about him than just about anyone out there. Some point after Dudley said to Harry, "You saved my life," the weight of it hit her: they were expected to be the people closest to Harry, his family, the ones who knew the most about him, and she couldn't even tell you his favorite color or his best friend's name.
She'd done horribly. Keeping him safe, what a joke. If her sister was still alive, she'd probably make her feel ashamed about what a shoddy job she'd done. No sense worrying about it now, though; it was far too late to go back and try to fix anything.
They were kept out of the loop on what was happening out there, and they were content with it.
But one day in early May, an owl scratched at the window. Petunia didn't know what drove her to open it, but she did. The owl left that insane newspaper, the Daily Prophet, and then flew off.
There was Harry on the front page, a large crowd of people behind him, all looking dirty and bruised.
The headline read Boy-Who-Lived Vanquishes You-Know-Who For Good.
A single tear trickled down her cheek as she whispered, "Your mother would be so proud."
(The whole generous gift thing is, of course, running under the assumption that you can exchange Galleons for Muggle money in the same way that Hermione's parents exchanged Muggle money for wizard currency.)
I always felt a bit bad for Petunia, like she could have been a perfectly nice individual in another set of circumstances. Also, I really suck at titles if I can't think of a lyric to go with it off the top of my head. But I don't think Petunia was ever cut out for the wizarding world, so it fits, I suppose.