Her name is Petunia, and she does not believe in fairy tales. She can no longer grasp the concept of unreal worlds filled with perfection. There is no room in her heart for more fantasies.
If it hadn't been for Lily being a witch, this might have been different. Petunia may have opened up more to these ideas, allowing her mind to wander into a realm where unicorns did exist and rainbows filled the skies all the time. But she knows the dark side of magic, and, to her, it's not beautiful.
She, as a young child, had possessed quite an imagination, living in a happy tale alongside her slightly-off-kilter sister. But as she grew older, the light and playfulness in her soul just disappeared. Her fantasies, which were once so vivid and creative, became much more realistic, dreaming not of being a princess, but of the average, working-class mother. The fairytale life was not her idea any longer. She wanted real.
The memories she had of this "fake" childhood (as she liked to refer to it as) were dark to her, as there was no real reason for her to actually want them prominent in her mind, where she could possibly revert back to those ways. As far as she was concerned, Lily was never her sister, and they never did anything with each other, because all of those things weren't real. They were just jokes, creations of sinister magic that she had conjured. Life was so much better than that.
So when her nephew was thrust into her life, a child born to two magic parents, her and her husband Vernon wanted him to live life without the knowledge of magic. They decided that, because he was in their "perfect," non-magical, non-fairy tale life, he would have to play by their rules. After ten years of this, he was gone, following the same path his mother did.
By then, Petunia was tired of living this lie. She was tired of pretending she didn't like the idea of magic, didn't like the thought of fairy tales. So when her nephew Harry would return to her house each summer, she would get the feeling that she wanted to be like him, be like her late sister, be free to use mystical powers whenever she wanted. That was what he was going to school for, to learn how to control it, right?
But people out there hadn't learned, because as the years went by, she heard of bad people out there using magic for evil. Why were they given the power, when there were people like her, who wanted it and wouldn't mess around? She was told already, in a letter, that her sister had been the lucky one, the one blessed with this ability. It just wasn't in the cards for Petunia to be a witch like Lily was.
To have Harry send them away before what should have been his seventh year of school was a dream come true for her in some ways. It was saving from a fairy tale gone wrong in her mind. After all, she was normal. Why in the world would she want to even deal with such an absurd thing as magic in the first place?
A/N: Entry for The Domain's fairy tale challenge. I don't know if I'm actually going to submit it, though. I don't own anything involved, by the way~
Siggy