Written for the Cluedo/Clue challenge for the prompts 'Petunia Dursley' and 'River' and 'Suspicious'.
Petunia has always been a little jealous of Lily.
She's prettier, something that's clear even when she is a baby. And Lily gets their mother's glorious red hair while Petunia is stuck with their father's mousy blonde.
Lily is vivacious and clever and popular. Petunia has her group of friends, but they don't laugh and play like Lily and her friends do, they aren't free and easy in their manners, only sneering and aloof. She tells herself she's being mature, but Lily always smiles more and Petunia knows she's missing out.
But despite the occasional bouts of envy Petunia loves her sister quite fiercely. She's always there to protect Lily from anyone who sees her cheerful optimism as a reason to torment and upset her.
The two of them are very different, but they're sisters and it's a strong bond.
If only it could last what is to come.
The problems begin when Lily starts acting strangely.
Petunia isn't like her sister, who is accepting of oddities and enamoured of make-believe games. Petunia is sensible and she's never liked fantasy. She likes normal and she's eagle-eyed at spotting when things are different (mostly so she can go quickly in the opposite direction).
When Lily is seven and Petunia eleven she notices that her sister is doing strange things and she's immediately suspicious.
Things move without anyone touching them, Petunia's scarf suddenly turns from blue to red (Lily's current favourite colours) and other small things happen that should be explainable by logic but aren't.
Petunia tries to put the incidents out of her mind. Lily is a little less restrained than Petunia but she's her sister and normal, not a freak of some sort who can make things move with her mind and do scary, strange things. That's the sort of thing found in one of Lily's storybooks, not in real life.
She happily deludes herself until one day when they go and play by the river near their home.
Lily loves the river. Petunia enjoys it too, though he complains about getting wet and muddy and insists to her sister that she's far too mature for splashing about.
She keeps a close eye on Lily though. The younger girl is liable to get over excited and careless – the section of the river they visit is fairly shallow, more like a stream, but it can be dangerous and Petunia doesn't want her sister getting hurt.
She reads a few pages of her book while Lily happily plays around on the bank making mud castles with great enthusiasm.
She looks up after a few minutes when Lily shrieks with delight. She expects to see a near-perfect mud castle, decorated perhaps with grass and stones.
Instead she sees Lily, hands waving around a few centimetres from the river, seemingly making the water dance around her hands.
Petunia blinks twice and then Lily is back patting her mud castle like she hasn't just been doing something impossible.
She's obviously too tired and seeing things. She decides she'll go to bed early and dismisses the incident as the result of a lack of sleep.
But her suspicions are raised now and she can't quite get rid of them.
It's not a fluke like she hopes.
There's a run of good weather and Petunia ends up back at the river with Lily after only a few days.
She paints her nails while Lily plays – pearly pink to look smart and grown-up but not tacky like lots of the other girls at school.
She's mostly done when she feels flowers hitting the side of her face and screeches at her sister when the distraction causes her to smudge the varnish.
She lifts her head to tell Lily not to throw flowers at her but her sister is still in the river, too far to have thrown the flowers herself.
But she is waving her hands and giggling, and the flowers are dancing around in a neat circle – far too orderly to be caused by the wind.
Then suddenly they fly in all directions as Lily turns to look with excitement at some frogs.
Petunia shakes her head. A weird wind and a coincidence, that was all – there's no way Lily could do that.
Is there?
Petunia is suspicious, but she's also worried. From what she sees on the news nothing good ever happens to people who can do unusual things. They end up as freak shows or in prison or vanished by the government … sometimes even dead. She doesn't ever want that for her vibrant little sister.
There are more days at the river, more little hints that make Petunia increasingly suspicious of her sister.
She doesn't want Lily to be some kind of freak, someone that news stories report on and crowds whisper about and people laugh at.
But Petunia can't ignore what she sees.
She tries to find explanations for it all – tricks of the light, tiredness, a freak act of nature. But the oddities keep piling up until she can't ignore them anymore.
Petunia likes sensible and normal. She can't help who she is and she's never been fantastical and imaginative like Lily. She doesn't want her little sister to change but she also doesn't want her to be peculiar.
Petunia has a love for gossip but never about her, never about her family. She doesn't think she can handle the humiliation it would cause if the strange things that happen around Lily become public knowledge.
She keeps trying to ignore it but her resentment grows. Why can't Lily be like everyone else?
They're due for a cold snap soon so Petunia and Lily spend one more day at the river before autumn and winter send them indoors.
Petunia has her diary and she's absorbed in writing all the minute details of the latest school gossip while Lily splashes around like always.
She's just in the middle of documenting a particularly scandalous episode involving Jamie Peters, the school heartthrob, and his dalliances with no less than three girls, all of whom are supposed to be best friends, when she notices how quiet it is.
She looks up sharply to check on Lily and lets out a little scream.
Lily is standing on the water. Not in, but on. It's no illusion, no trick – she is balancing on running water and looking like Petunia imagines Jesus did when he walked on water in the Bible (if he was a girl with fiery red hair rather than a bearded man wearing sandals).
At her sister's shriek Lily's concentration breaks and she drops into the water ungracefully. It's quite a sharp fall but she is unhurt and it doesn't seem to affect her cheerful demeanour.
Petunia can't speak.
She hurries her sister out of the water and wishes desperately that the last few minutes will turn out to be a dream she'll soon wake up from.
They don't.
And Petunia never looks at Lily the same way again.
Petunia's mind wars with itself.
Lily is her adored little sister, a mischievous and bright child who is always smiling and making everyone happy.
But she isn't normal. She's unusual and strange and different – and she's everything Petunia has always been suspicious of.
She's not sure she can get past what she's seen at the river. What Lily can do breaks down Petunia's whole normal world view and she hates it.
Her suspicions grow each day as Lily shows more and more 'abilities' (talents, her parents call them. Her hopelessly liberal and understanding parents who don't seem to care that Petunia is having her world shaken because they're too busy cooing over special little Lily).
The letter arrives when Lily turns eleven and Petunia's suspicions are confirmed.
It's never the same with Lily after that, instead it's harsh words and suspicions and so much bitterness.
The letter is where it changed for good between them.
But Petunia will always remember the river. Because the river is where her suspicions started.
She never goes to visit that river again.
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed it.