Hello, all!

I apologize for the delay - as it turns out, May is going to be a bi-weekly posting schedule for me as I am graduating and there are a lot of events keeping me from editing. For those of you who read the old version, a good amount of this chapter will be familiar. A lot of the conversations have changed, but the main plot points are the same. I hope you enjoy the changes!

This chapter is dedicated to all of the moms. I hope you all had a lovely Mother's day!

CHAPTER 5 – Dudders and Tuney

October 31st, 1985

"I'm sorry, what did you say, Harry?"

The little family of four always celebrated Halloween together. This year, it fell on a Thursday. As the noises of trick-or-treaters danced outside their home, Harry, Lily, Sirius, and Remus cuddled together on the floor of Lily and Sirius' home. Harry had wanted to make a fort – a blue fort, to be precise. He and the three Potter house elves had searched the house for blankets and, without magic, enlisted the help of the adults to build the biggest fort they could. They even managed to get the TV inside. Lily, Remus, and Sirius had then proceeded to charm everything within the fort the color blue. They all laid down together and stared up at the blankets. Lily had then proceeded to charm the top blanket to look like the night sky. Remus regaled them with the myths of the stars. He knew today was the day his dad died when he was really little. And he could tell. Sirius hadn't said anything all night.

"I said Mummy says it's okay to miss Dad."

Remus and Lily smiled. "I see you are quite perceptive, young man." Remus said with a chuckle.

"Oh, Harry." Sirius said. "I miss your dad every day."

Harry paused for a moment, thinking. "I think I would miss Ron too." He stood up – the fort was just a little taller than him – so he could properly sit pretzel-style. "Can you tell me another story?"

Sirius smiled. "Another prank story, Prongslet?"

Harry's eyes lit up, but Lily shook her head. "No, I want to tell him about that night four years ago. I think it's time."

"What do you mean, Mummy?"

Lily sat up and crossed her legs, mirroring her son. "Harry, why don't you come sit down in my lap." Harry did as he was told. It wasn't much of a hardship for him – sitting on his mother's lap was the most comfortable place in the world. She played with his hair and held him close as she began to speak. "Four years ago today, an evil man came to our house. This man's name was Voldemort, and we had been at war with him for a long time. He wanted to kill you, so your daddy and I did everything we could to keep you safe. Daddy fought him and lost, but he managed to save us before he died. The only thing you walked away with was that scar. And because of how your daddy protected you, he is the bravest man I will ever know, and you should be so proud of him, Harry. Because of that night, you're famous. Someday, I'll tell you much more about that night. But for now, just know that when people ask you about Halloween, to tell them just how brave your father was."

Harry nodded his head. "I promise."

February 8th, 1986

"Mum, do we have to go? I hate going there!" Harry whined. She had woken him up early for the long car trip they were about to depart for.

"Yes, you have to go. You don't have a choice when it comes to who your family is. Now get up before I have to bring Snuffles in here to lick you awake."

Harry's eyes widened. "I'm up, I'm up!" It was 5 o'clock in the morning, and still quite dark outside. Harry winced as he sprung up out of the bed with vivid memories of being awoken by a mangy dog that seemed to enjoy licking him to death far too much.

"You have thirty minutes to eat and get dressed before we leave." Lily briskly walked out of Harry's room and down the stairs to start breakfast.

Twice a year, Lily Potter brought her son to her sister's house while her sister's walrus of a husband was away on business. She always made it a car trip because aparating always scared Petunia and her sister's house wasn't connected to the floo network. Besides, she loved taking her car out of the garage to go further than the flower shop she worked at those two times a year. It reminded her of the car trips she used to take as a child with her family to go to their Aunt's house for Christmas, and she loved sharing the experience with her son. He was being raised as a wizard, but she was making bloody sure he knew where he came from. What made him better than Voldemort.

Of course, there was a time when she and her sister were not all that close. In fact, they still weren't that close. But Lily felt that something had changed when Petunia showed up to James' funeral, and a few months after James had died, Petunia reached out to her to see if she was doing alright. She made a point on the phone to inform her it was because their parents would have wanted her to, but she couldn't help but feel touched by the fact that her sister cared enough to call. It was then that they planned to meet for the first time in two years, and it went shockingly well – she presumed, because the walrus was finally out of their way when they did so.

Lily broke the eggs against the pan and emptied their shells into it, listening to the searing proteins. She was completely aware that she could cook breakfast magically, or even ask the elves to do it for her, but then it lost all of its appeal. She enjoyed her time to think.

"Mummy. Mum I'm hungry." A bleary-eyed Harry said as he entered the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. He was wearing the Chudley Cannons jersey and sweatpants she had laid out for him.

"I know love. I'm making you your eggs now. Scrambled, right?" The half-asleep Harry nodded. "Cheese as well?" He nodded again. She smiled at how much her son still acted like James sometimes even though he wasn't there. "Grab a plate and fork then and go sit down at the table. I still need to put half of the eggs in the refrigerator for Sirius." Harry continued to nod as he grabbed his plastic Quidditch plate with the picture of the Chudley Cannons' seeker waving the snitch at him and left the kitchen for the dining room.

It was 8 o'clock and a usually hyper Harry Potter was pouting in his mum's car. He really didn't like going to his cousin's house. In fact, he'd go as far to say that he hated going there. His aunt was nice, but Dudley never shared his toys. Especially since he has a whole second bedroom dedicated to toys. Just toys! And a bunch of them were broken! His mum also told Harry to always stay calm at their house and not to let them get him upset. And he wasn't allowed to use any of the magic his mom had taught him. And they were stuck there for two whole days. He really didn't get why he had to go somewhere so boring for a whole weekend when he could be playing with Ron and Ginny. Not to mention, Sirius and Remus wouldn't be there. How horrible.

"Are we there yet?" Harry's full bladder was suddenly the only thing he could think about.

"Yes, sweetheart. Can't you tell? We're in their cul-de-sac. All the houses look the same." Lily said.

"I have to use the loo, Mum." Harry said, now starting to squirm in his car seat.

"There's not much I can do about that until we get there, Harry. Now be quiet. Two minutes, I promise."

Harry sat patiently waiting and watched the houses go by. The car turned into a driveway and Harry just about ripped the belt off of his car seat.

His mum shut the car off and seemed to take as long as she possibly could to open the door for him. As soon as she finally did, he escaped. "Harry, wait for me," his mum said. Harry ignored her, of course and ran straight to the door and rang the bell.

His Aunt Petunia was one of the nicest people he knew. She didn't like it when his mum used magic but that only happened when either he or Dudley was in trouble or hurt. Besides that, she gave him the biggest hugs. She was always happy to see him.

"There's my little Harry-berry!" His Aunt said as she opened the door. She picked him up and gave him a hug.

"Aunt Petunia!" Harry giggled. "Put me down put me down! I need the loooo!" he tried to say as Petunia squeezed him tightly.

"Okay okay! Go quick! Dudley is in the living room watching T.V. and waiting for you. Sesame Street is on." She said pointedly, knowing it was Harry's favorite show.

"Thanks!" Harry beamed up at her and ran to go find the loo.

"They're growing up so fast." Lily said to her sister as she put down the tray of tea. Lily picked up a cup, recognizing it as her parents' old china.

"I know." Her sister replied as she poured milk into her tea. It was now 9 o'clock. Sesame Street had just ended, and the kids were heading upstairs to play with Dudley's new train set. "It seems like just yesterday we were trying to figure out how to see each other's baby without Vernon figuring it out." She laughed to herself as she remembered the first time she and Lily had seen each other again after all those years.

March 28th, 1982

It was a bright spring morning. A little warmer than usual for an English spring morning, but she was taking it as a pleasant sign for how the day would go. She woke up earlier than normal, fed Dudley, and then took her time making her own breakfast while she thought. Making breakfast was the best time for thinking, as her mother had always said.

Vernon was gone for the weekend, so Petunia felt it was the perfect opportunity to invite her sister to stay for a day or two. Every time they had fought in the three years before they stopped talking, the boys had been there. Particularly, her boy. It didn't go unnoticed. But when she found out her sister's husband had died, she couldn't help but reach out to her. Imagining being alone with a baby terrified her. And Lily was a full two years younger than her, to top it off.

Sighing, she ate. She took a break to calm down a screaming Dudley, and then returned to a cold meal. With her nerves starting to get to her, she decided she wasn't hungry enough to finish it and cleaned up. Just as she was done, there was a knock at the door.

She walked up to it tentatively and was surprised by how overwhelmed she felt when she opened the door. There was her grown-up sister. She seemed to have grown into herself – her figure was fuller, she had the start of smile lines, and she had even more freckles. But her eyes and her hair were exactly what she remembered them to be. She was the same Lily as she always had been. But there was a sadness and fear in her eyes.

When she looked down, her heart swelled. Holding Lily's hand was a small boy that looked exactly like his father. Except he had her eyes. But his eyes weren't sad or fearful, but joyful.

"Hug?"

The toddler let go of his mother's hand and held his arms out to his aunt, expectedly.

"Hug?"

Petunia had been caught off-guard. She realized she was taking too long to respond to the boy. She bent down and picked him up, giving his small body an even smaller squeeze.

"Hello, Harry. I'm your Aunt Petunia."

He giggled in her arms. "Hugs!"

She looked back at her sister, her eyebrows raised. "What can I say, he may look just like James, but he's inherited a little bit more of me than I thought he would. Hi, Petunia. It's been a while."

Petunia's eyes welled with tears as she wrapped her free arm tightly around her younger sister. They were quiet for a while, standing there together in Petunia's doorway thinking of times past.

"I'm so sorry it took me so long to call, Lily. But thank you for giving me this chance."

Petunia could feel the smile of her sister against her neck. "Everyone deserves a second chance, Petunia. Let's see how this goes, shall we?"

A small voice from between them echoed in their ears. "Down, please?" They separated, realizing they were squishing Harry between them tighter than they had realized.

Laughter filled the air as Petunia put her nephew down and led them to the living room, where Dudley was impatiently waiting for his mother to return.

"You know, Lily, I don't know what I would do if you hadn't given me a second chance. Being able to call you when I need someone to talk to, and seeing our sons play together is a treat I never knew I needed. Vernon is just so negative all the time. He has this pent-up anger he never seems to be able to fully get out. It just sleeps until something is close to poking it, and then it rages." She looked Lily in the eyes. "I've never really told you this Lils, but I don't know what I would have done if you'd died the night that he came for you and James. I would have been beside myself." She began to tear up and look down at her tea. "I really hate to say it, but I don't think I'd be the same person today. I know for a fact that I wouldn't feel the same way that I do about my husband that I do today. Lily, I need some advice."

The abrupt change in conversation caught Lily off-guard. Although they had become closer, her sister tended to stick to everyday conversation. They would discuss Sirius or her husband when they were joking about men, but that had been the extent to which they had talked about Vernon. She was never one to share her feelings – she never had been, ever since Severus had come around the first time when they were children. Lily gathered that this was a more important conversation than anything they had had before. "Anything, Petunia. You know I'm here for you." She said even though inside she was slightly wary of what her sister was about to say.

"Lily, I think I need to divorce Vernon. He's just not what I thought he was. I thought I loved him, I thought I wanted normal. But he's not normal, Lily. He's venomous. He's negative. I know I tend towards the mundane in conversation, but he tells me I'm boring now, almost every day. In front of my son. And he finds the negative in everything, Lily. A news story on TV he'll drone on and on about forever. Don't get me wrong, I still don't like magic, but I've come to accept that it can be helpful in your life. But when I mentioned something you and I did as children the other day, he simply looked at me and said, 'You don't have a sister'. Vernon is so disruptive in his pursuit for normalcy that I just don't think I can handle it anymore. I don't love him as much as I thought I did, and I don't want to be his wife. At the same time, I don't want to hurt Dudley. He looks up to that bastard." Petunia looked up at her sister for the first time since she'd begun her speech. "Lily, I don't know what to do. I've started to have nightmares about Dudley turning into his father."

To say that Lily was upset for her sister was an understatement. She'd never liked Vernon and she was glad that her sister finally saw him for what he and their relationship together was, but she was sad that it meant her sister was in so much pain. And she was angry that he was always such an arse. "Well, Tuney, it's up to you. My house is always open, you know that. We've got two extra rooms and we can always make more – that's the beauty of magic. We will always be your family, and I never want you to forget that, Petunia. We even live in a Muggle village, so you would fit in perfectly. Obviously, this is something you have to think about, but I will be proud to be your sister no matter what happens." Lily smiled at her sister, knowing she would make the right decision. Sirius would just have to suck it up.

In the smallest room upstairs, Harry watched as Dudley smashed a toy train against the carpet, fraying it while doing so.

"Dudley, why can't I play with the train too?" Harry asked his cousin. He was tired of his cousin's selfish behavior when it came to his toys. But this is how he always was, so he wasn't too surprised. Dudley was showing Harry his new train set that he'd gotten for his birthday. The rough nature that he was using made Harry completely aware of the fact that the train would soon end up in the pile of broken toys that was sitting in the corner of Dudley's "toy room", another pile added to the toys he never played with.

"Because it's mine and my daddy says I should always keep what's mine to myself because other people aren't smart enough." Dudley told Harry what his dad said in the same way that his dad said it.

"But Dudley, if we both play with the train then we can have fun together." Harry tried to explain to his cousin. "My friend Draco wasn't allowed to play with others before we started playing. And now I can't wait to see him again because we had so much fun!"

"But it's mine."

"If you let me play with the train with you then you can play with my toy broom with me." Harry said doing his best to compromise with his dunce of a cousin.

"What do you mean toy broom? Aren't brooms used for sweeping? Why would I want to play with something you clean with? Cleaning is boring." Dudley asked, train forgotten.

"Not where I live. I can use my toy broom to fly." Harry explained with a smile.

"You can't do that."

"But I've done it. And Uncle Sirius gets to go high on his." Dudley's head looked like it was about to explode with wonder. He didn't understand how a broom could possibly ever fly. Magic was for freaks. That's what his dad always said. "My uncle Padfoot takes me on his broom sometimes when he isn't being an Auror."

"What's an Aurer?" Dudley asked.

"It's Auror. They fight the bad people left over from the war. The war took my daddy away. And it also gave me this scar." Harry lifted up his bangs to show his cousin the scar that Voldemort had left him. "That's what Mum says. She won't tell me why I got it."

Dudley stared at the scar in complete awe. The sharp lines and definition of the scar scared him a little. He'd never seen anything like it. It was almost cool.

"Wow. Aurers must be really cool if they can get rid of what gave you that."

"I know. Uncle Padfoot is awesome. He fights all the bad people." Harry stood and grabbed a piece of train track. He used it as a wand and pretended to be an Auror, in their full glory.

"Pew pew pew!" Dudley tried to give the sound effect of a gun.

"No, Dudley! It goes 'woosh woosh'. They don't make sounds! And you have to say a spell!" Harry said and grinned.

Dudley Dursley then picked up another piece of train track and pointed it at his cousin. They pretended to duel while making up spells for their wands. They were having so much fun for once that their day flew by. Before they knew it, it was time to go to bed. The next day, they continued to play. Dudley, being rough with his toys as always, broke one of the train tracks they were using as wands and began to cry. Harry quickly fixed it, and Dudley clapped. Maybe this magic thing wasn't as bad as his dad says it is after all.

Lily and Petunia couldn't have been happier – the boys were finally, truly, getting along, by the sound of it. They had even raced up from their meals to keep playing together. Dudley's toy room was a disaster when Lily and Petunia came in Sunday afternoon to find that Dudley and Harry had built their own forts to act as their "shields" from the other person's spells.

"What in heaven's name are you doing, Dudley?" Petunia said as she gasped at the mess.

"Harry told me about his Aurer Uncle so Harry and I were playing Aurer."

Lily could not help it when she began to laugh hysterically. Her sister's son was pretending to be a wizard. Not only that but he was getting along with her own son and accepting magic. Petunia pretended to be upset, but honestly, she didn't even mind that they were playing a game about magic. If she couldn't have it at least her son could enjoy it.

"Mum, I don't want to leave!" Harry said. Unlike Dudley, he recognized the arrival of their mothers and the setting of the sun meant that he and Dudley had to stop playing and he and his mother had to leave.

Lily wiped her eyes from the tears that had formed from her laughter. "I'm sorry, sweetheart, but we have to be home to feed your Uncle Padfoot and the Weasleys. I don't think he'll be able to last without us."

"Auntie Lily, do you mean the Aurer Uncle?" Dudley asked, trying to be polite as he tried to hide his excitement as well.

"Yes, I do mean the Auror Uncle," Lily responded as she began to laugh once again. She just had to remember to tell Sirius all about this later. "In order for him to be a good Auror though, we need to feed him. Let's get going, Harry."

Harry sighed. For the first time in his life, he'd been having fun with his cousin. Given he didn't spend much time with Dudley, but before this trip he hadn't liked him much. This time, he found he could have fun with him, too.

Lily packed Harry up and loaded the car. The two sisters watched as their children said goodbye, and Lily and Harry waved their goodbyes through the car window as they backed into the street.

"Bye!" Dudley said as he ran down the driveway, waving at his cousin's car which was now on the street and driving off where he couldn't go.

"Come inside now, Dudley, it's starting to get cold." Petunia called her son in, happy that he finally seemed to have fun with Harry.

"Alright, mum." Dudley ran back up the driveway as fast as his fat little legs could carry him. He got inside the door and remembered something he'd promised himself to ask his mum as soon as he could. "Mum? Can I ask a question?"

"Sure my little Dudders. Anything." Dudley winced at the name his mother had created but continued on with his question anyway.

"Can I get a cool scar like Harry's?"

I hope you all enjoyed this chapter! I know some of you may turn away from this story now that I've changed Petunia's personality a bit, but it wasn't without reason. I believe that based off of the seventh book cannon, a lot of her struggles with Harry are rooted in her loss of her sister and him reminding her of her inability to reconnect with her. Vernon was also an influence that strengthened her hatred of the wizarding world. He was always striving to be normal, and she was attracted to that when they got together. Additionally, without Harry there as a way for him to get out his anger and frustrations, I see Petunia being on the receiving end. Let me know what you think in the comments, I'd love your opinions on this change that I've made!

Thanks for reading,

Writingblondie