"I hate magic."
Petunia is watching baby Harry make his favourite toy, a bright green, rather squint-eyed hippogriff, float around over his cot.
Lily looks up from the boxes of clothes she is sorting.
"You don't really think so."
"Sometimes I do," Petunia says with a sigh, scowling at the latest Witch Weekly she has been trying to read for the last thirty minutes. So Celestina Warbeck dazzled everybody with her glamorous colour-changing robes at the concert in Liverpool, how exciting. Petunia herself has to use colour-changing spells on her robes multiple times a week, on all three on them. She could swear that upstart McKinnon from Magical Accidents and Catastrophes has caught on already, so it is just a matter of time before the gossiping begins. Besides, the cow is from that crowd, and knows more about her than Petunia is comfortable with. Maybe she should make a pre-emptive strike and leak her affair with Black to the rumour mill. Lily probably wouldn't approve, but what her little sister doesn't know...
The said little sister raises an eyebrow expectantly.
"Even after seven years as a Mudblood of Slytherin, I still believed that ultimately, there was some balance and justice in the world. I had my magic and you had your beauty and charm. It was all going to work out dandy. Right as rain. Swish and flick. And look at us now."
Petunia throws the magazine on the on the coffee table with much more force than it's necessary.
"I put on my best smile, worked hard for those NEWTS, dutifully brought crystallised pineapples to the old walrus... And still ended up in the dead-end job, pushing parchment in a cramped office all day and doing all the work for the dunderhead boss who doesn't know his arse from his elbow. But he is a son of some bigwig from International Cooperation, so he'll be promoted soon, while I'll continue earning less than the Squib janitor." It's not even six in the evening, but Petunia is already in the ranting mode. "And make no mistake, in the current climate, I wouldn't get even that position without Frank."
"How are things with him?" Lily asks, snatching the bottle Harry is trying to summon from the air and taking him into her arms.
Petunia sneers.
"It's over for good. He's not going to ever marry me, he's too much of a mummy's boy for that. Especially after he all but took that bastard's side over yours... I can't believe I wasted so much time on him. Years of careful planning, all for naught. Apparently, all those sweet love confessions and promises of forever mean nothing when your Mother dear wants a well-to-do, preferably pureblood daughter-in-law. What about MY mother? Mum and Da who would still be alive if I didn't join his precious Order? A sorry bunch of hypocrites and freaks, all of them."
"We don't know what happened," Lily says gently. "The coroner said it was a heart attack. Da had one already."
Petunia barks a screeching laugh, an unladylike sound she wouldn't be caught dead making where anybody with a wand could hear her.
"A heart attack that both of them had at the same time? Don't fool yourself. It was the Killing Curse, plain and simple." She looks away. "And I'm as good as cast it myself," she doesn't add.
Still, Lily knows her to well to understand the words unspoken.
"Don't," she says in the same infuriatingly soft voice. "They would do it anyway because you, a Muggleborn, dared to be good at magic. They would do it because I, a Muggle, dared to have a magical child."
Lily has always been a better person, and Petunia wants to throttle her for that sometimes.
"You are too kind for your own good, Lily. You never resented me for having magic. You don't resent me now for..." She can't say the words, pointing at the boxes haphazardly packed with their parents' belongings instead. "If I were you, I would hate me with all my cold shrivelled heart."
Lily laughs, making Harry squirm in her arms.
"No, you wouldn't, Tuney. You are the best auntie and sister Harry and me could ever ask for. As for being in the Order, it was a right thing to do, and I'm very proud of you. You were so very brave and you stood up for justice, just like Da always taught us."
"One thing that bastard got right, the Sorting Hat would have definitely put you into Gryffindor." Petunia smiles wanly. She wishes she could share her sister's confidence in her virtues.
"What will they do without you now?" Lily asks, evidently not up to discussing the arrogant toerag.
"I don't know and frankly, I don't care."
"But you still get information from Severus?"
Petunia shrugs noncommittally. Knowledge is power.
"I just don't understand how you could be friends with him still. I would cut him out of my life back when he called you that slur. And it was all downhill from there!" Lily says hotly.
She had been good friends with Snape before that incident in his fifth – and Petunia's seventh – year, but invariably gave him a cold shoulder after that, even when Petunia herself mended bridges. Nowadays, she usually leaves the room whenever he shows up. Still, Snape brought Potions throughout her more than difficult pregnancy and brings them now for Harry dutifully. Petunia suspects he has been carrying a torch for Lily since the times he tried to impress her with stories about magic in their childhood years, when Petunia was away in her first years at Hogwarts. She was so jealous of him then, afraid he would take her sister from her. It doesn't matter anymore, though. Snape made his bed long ago and now has to lie in it.
Snape made his choice, and Lily is good at holding grudges. She threw the galleons a certain unmentionable toerag brought to her in his face (which Petunia personally considers to be a very unwise decision, but there's no changing Lily's mind after she made it), and she won't ever look at Snape the Death Eater. Even though he swears he only brews potions for them. Probably lies, although Petunia never thought he had a stomach for real violence. His own Sectumsempra left Potter with barely a gash. When she herself tried it on a grabby werewolf in the Knockturn Alley once, she almost gutted him. She wonders sometimes if she should feel more remorse over that.
"He called me a Mudblood, and I spread a few choice stories about his childhood of a street rat in his mother's blouse, a witch mother who allowed herself to be beaten black by a drunken Muggle brute," Petunia says. "That hurt his already low standing in the House much more than Potter and his gang taking his pants off in front of the whole school ever could. This is how our relationship has always worked. Tit for tat."
He brewed her cosmetic potions and she called him out on his pity-parties and made him wash his head at least once in a while. Together, they spent countless hours in a disused classroom in the dungeons with a senile 18th century portrait of a woman in green who Snape claimed was his great-grandaunt learning to pronounce their r's and u's like a Black rather than poor lowlifes from a northern mill town. Snape has always tried to show off to Lily, but it is Petunia who knows him at his most wretched, vindictive, jaundiced and pathetic. She has always been the only one allowed to see him at his lowest. The opposite is true as well, of course. She had to be perfect for Frank all the time, and even with Lily, she keeps some of her more judgemental and petty thoughts to herself. But Snape gets her baser instincts, because he is like that too. Petunia wonders what it says about her if the closest thing she has ever had to a real friendship is with a person she actively despises.
There is a loud pop outside, and Petunia leaps to her feet, wand in hand. She peeks through the curtains, careful not to be seen.
"Speak of the devil," she grumbles.
Snape comes in, opening his ever black robes. There's a T-shirt with a Muggle rock band underneath. He doesn't shed the robes completely, and Petunia suspects there's finally a reason for that. Despite what she said to Lily, she doesn't know how she feels about that.
"So there you are, little Potter," he says, scrutinising Harry as if deciding whether the baby was fit to chop into one of his noxious potions. Whatever he does with his... associates now, has not improved his social graces any.
Lily draws herself up and marches away to put Harry back into the cot.
"His name is Harry EVANS, and you'd better remember that." Narcissa Malfoy herself couldn't sound more proud, standing in this ruin of a house in Cokeworth after the father of her child decided he wanted nothing to do with them both. Lily's fairy-tale of a romance with a dashing wizard ended shortly after her getting pregnant, and Petunia has enough self-possession to bite back "I told you so". It was her who first brought Lily to the Order meetings, after all.
"Narcissa's brat has colic, so I made enough potion to share with you too." Snape watches Lily imploringly. If he thinks he could win her over with that pathetic attempt, Petunia has news for him.
Lily pointedly smoothes the blanket over Harry, face away from Snape.
"Had to watch him for a couple of hours today. Narcissa is sure her precious baby will show his first accidental magic any day now," Snape scoffs.
"Harry made his toy hippogriff float today. And his bottle," Petunia can't help but brag, even if Lily sends her death glares.
"He did?" Snape looks startled. "Well, as an August child, he made it just in time for a dubious honour to go to Hogwarts with Draco Malfoy."
"A July child," Petunia corrects him automatically.
"What?"
"Harry was born just before midnight, on July, 31. He's a July child, if only barely," Petunia explains.
"Are you serious?" Snape whispers after a long pause, his eyes slowly filling with horror.
"Why would I be lying about something like that?" Petunia asks, looking at him in incomprehension, just as Lily simply asks, "Why?"
Snape has his head in his hands, shuddering uncontrollably. Suddenly, he disapparates, but just as Petunia and Lily are exchanging looks, he appears again at the same spot. Petunia distractedly thinks that she needs to remove Snape from the wards, as he has clearly gone round the bend.
And then Snape is telling them some crackpot story about a prophecy, and Petunia's hand itches to try Sectumsempra for the second time in her life. Lily shouts at Snape and then pummels at his chest, which Snape lets her.
"Australia," Petunia says as soon as the door is closed behind Snape, who leaves with suspiciously red eyes and a hand-print on his jaw.
Lily looks at her as if she lost her mind. She is not, though. Her mind has never been clearer.
"Fuck Britain. Fuck You-Know-Who. Fuck the Ministry and Dumbledore with his double-faced Order. That nosy old hag from down the street asked about the house, let's sell it to her. We haven't unpacked our things since moving in anyway." Petunia is on her feet now, pacing in agitation. "We used to have such big dreams about travelling all over the world before I got that blasted letter, remember, Lily? Having great adventures under the hot tropical sun. I bet Harry would love it too, growing up in a place where it doesn't rain all the time."
Lily is silent and wide-eyed, but Petunia sees the decision forming in her eyes already. They look at each other, two sisters, in a perfect understanding Petunia though they lost after she turned eleven.
"Australia." Lily nods.