Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all related characters belong to J.K. Rowling. I am merely borrowing them.

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MUGGLE

Chapter Four: Augur

Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.

Niels Bohr

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Petunia woke up with a funny taste in her mouth like dry cotton, and gagged softly. A cool hand brushed across her forehead, and she heard the soft sound of her mother's voice. The words took their time about falling into place—she finally understood after three repetitions, and gratefully accepted a drink of water.

Her room—for it did seem to be her own room—was dark, and so it was a surprise when another voice spoke to her mother. "Yes, case of pneumonia, I should say," said the crotchety old whisper of Dr. Hattersfield, their ancient family physician who had delivered not only both Petunia and Lily but their mother as well. "It can come on quite suddenly, especially if people insist on taking their daily constitutionals out in the pouring rain!"

Petunia closed her eyes, confused. Pouring rain?

"She's really usually a very sensible girl," said her mother gently, stroking her daughter's hair. "I can't think what got into her."

Neither could Petunia. Why had she been out in the pouring rain? She remembered the library—why had she been at the library?—and the old librarian—and running, running, running out into the rain, coming down much harder than when she had snuck out of the house with the crystal ball clutched to her chest...

With a panicked cry that turned into a racking cough she sat up in bed. "Lily, where's Lily?" she gasped out, trying to slide out of bed past her mother. Her arms wouldn't work, though; they were shaky and weak. This was not pneumonia, Petunia thought, this was what happened when Muggles messed around with wizard magic.

She remembered all she had seen, and the thought sent a shudder up her spine.

"Darling, I will go get Lily," said her mother, sounding slightly alarmed. "You lie back down and rest."

Dr. Hattersfield came and took her temperature as her mother walked out. Petunia did not complain at the metallic taste of the thermometer. "Do you remember what happened, young lady?" he asked, clucking at her temperature.

"I was walking in the rain," Petunia said, struggling to remember what had happened after she fled the library. "I don't remember how I got home. I think I was lost."

"You found your own way home," said the ancient doctor, raising one eyebrow. "You are there now."

"I know that," said Petunia snappishly. She vaguely wondered what had become of the crystal ball.

The door opened again and Lily sidled in. Her face, lit by the light from the hallway, looked none too pleased. "I need to talk to her alone," said Petunia to the doctor. "Please," she added as an afterthought.

Now two people in the room looked annoyed, but Petunia didn't care. "Please," she said again, and he nodded, shutting the door behind him.

Lily turned on the light and sat in Petunia's desk chair. "Where is it?" she said in a low voice.

"I can't remember," Petunia said.

Her little sister rolled her eyes. "Of course not."

"I'm not trying to make your life miserable, Lil," Petunia said, the words coming out rather more curtly than she had intended. Her head ached; she did not want to have this conversation, but Lily must be warned about what she had seen. "Really I'm not. I can See things in the crystal ball. I saw you and you were dead. And your son was about to be killed."

Lily sighed. "Petunia, you're very ill right now. I think you were ill yesterday when you took it and thought your joke was real. Dr. Hattersfield told us that you might be delirious and that's why you ran away. Fine, you don't remember where you left the crystal ball. I realize you're quite sick. But please, don't think you are sick enough to actually See something in that piece of rubbish. Most magic folk can't even See anything. It's almost impossible. And you're not even a witch!"

Petunia struggled up from her pillows, feeling as if the entire weight of the world had landed on her chest. "Please, Lily, you have to believe me," she whispered. "Please. For Harry's sake. For your sake." She felt a tear drip down her cheek.

"Who's Harry?" whispered Lily, paling slightly.

"Your son," said Petunia softly. Lily shook her head and stood up, pacing around the room. Petunia's head was spinning; she turned on her side and closed her eyes, hoping to make the dizziness go away. A warm drowsiness overtook her mind, and she felt herself slipping off, back to the oblivion of sleep. There was more she needed to tell Lily, much more—but she could not make the words come from her lips.

She felt a weight on her shoulder—Lily, gently hugging her, and then it was gone.

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Lily left the day after, bound safely on the train back to school, and did not speak again to Petunia. Petunia herself did not seek out her sister; for one, she was firmly watched by her mother, who would not let her out of bed, and for two, she was hurt by Lily's disbelief.

She would not be allowed back in school for another month because of illness, and rapidly found herself bored stiff with nothing to gossip about. Her friends called, of course, and sent letters, but it wasn't the same. Petunia desperately wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, that didn't have traces of Lily all over the place to remind her of all that she had seen. At night she woke gasping and shaking with the terrifying images from the crystal ball once more fresh in her mind.

Where had she put that crystal ball, she wondered. She did not remember anything after running from the library and out into the rain. She did not doubt that she would have tried to put it somewhere safe, even in such an agitated state of mind, but where could that safe place be?

After she was allowed out of bed she looked all around the house, but she doubted very much that the crystal ball was anywhere inside it. No doubt Lily would have reclaimed it at once if she had walked in with it still in her arms. When her parents went to work she slipped out and looked around the outside of the house, but since her mother had developed the irritating habit of calling on the phone at random times to check up on her daughter, she could not go very far.

At the end of her month away from school she was obliged to admit defeat, and left without finding the crystal ball. Petunia rather wondered if Lily had gotten in trouble for taking it, but since her sister didn't write any longer, she didn't think of it.

At school she was no longer bored to tears, having four weeks of gossip (and schoolwork) to catch up with, but the nightmares did not stop. Her roommates never said anything but Petunia more than once caught them giving her strange looks the next morning—and she had to admit, if one of them had been doing the same thing, she would have given out a strange look or two herself.

The nightmares were nothing compared to the strangeness of one particular spring day, though.

Petunia lay sprawled on a bench in the gardens, chattering to her friends with nothing more serious in mind, for once, then the curious case of Angela Huffminster's newest boyfriend, Dirk Montmorency from Snellings Boys' Academy across town, whom no one had met and about whom a large amount of rather startling rumors had sprung up. Busy dissecting the fallacy in the latest one, about how Dirk had supposedly spent six years living on an agricultural commune with Congolese Pygmies in the middle of Africa, Petunia failed to notice when the rest of the world went absolutely silent and still around her.

"...there, Mags, you see why it's simply impossible?" she finished up.

No reply—and Petunia had been expecting to get a rather emphatic rebuttal.

Petunia sat up. "Mags?"

Maggie sat with her hands in the air, mouth open, clearly about to deliver a scathing reply, but nothing came. Gently Petunia touched her outstretched hand, and found it stiff and heavy, like a stuffed hunting trophy, and felt a quiver of fear rising within her.

Lucy and Maude both sat leaning against the bench, in the same strange manner. Petunia stared at them, her hands trembling. "What's happening?" she whispered.

"I assure you, it's quite all right," said a quiet voice behind her. Petunia whirled around with a start, nearly tipping over the bench. A pair of winking black eyes stared down at her from a wrinkled old face surrounded by short, curly salt-and-pepper hair beneath a tall, pointed blue velvet hat. The stranger, looking very much like ancient pictures of Merlin from storybooks, was dressed in sweeping blue robes dotted with tiny stars. Beneath it he wore a silver waistcoat and a ruffled cravat that poked up oddly from beneath his short, snow-white beard. "I merely need to speak with you in private, Miss Evans. This is the easiest way."

Petunia goggled at him, very much aware of Maggie's frozen form next to her. "Did you hurt them?" she whispered, a tremor of fear in her voice.

The stranger smiled. "They will not remember anything except your conversation on the bench, my dear. You suddenly remembered a very important appointment and had to rush off." He held out his hand, still smiling gently.

Petunia did not move. "You're a wizard," she said flatly. "Who are you, exactly?"

"Ah, of course. Introductions must be made," said the man. Giving her a sweeping bow, he grinned and said, "I, dear girl, am Barnabas Augur, professor of Divination at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."

A weight suddenly dropped into the pit of Petunia's stomach—they had found out about the crystal ball. Lily must have gotten in trouble for losing it... Professor Augur suddenly laughed, and said, as if he had heard her thoughts, "Yes, my dear, it is about the crystal ball, but you are in no trouble. If you would walk with me for a bit I will explain."

Feeling that she could do nothing less, if only for Lily's sake (even though Petunia vaguely wondered why she bothered), she nodded and walked next to the professor. Behind her, she heard the girls start chattering again, not even noticing her as they headed down the path.

"Now," said Professor Augur, "I heard a very strange tale from Lily after the Christmas holiday about the fate of a crystal ball lent out to her for practice. It seems her older sister stole it, and then pretended to have visions in order to taunt her about being unable to See anything."

Petunia felt her cheeks redden. Though she would not have admitted it to the professor, Lily's words hurt quite a bit. "I think," continued the professor, "that there is a different explanation." He stopped, and put a hand on Petunia's shoulder. "Have you ever heard the legend of Cassandra, Miss Evans?"

"I think so," said Petunia. "Wasn't she some sort of Greek myth?"

"Indeed," said Professor Augur with a smile. "I suppose the Muggle world would call her mythical, although she is quite real. She made prophecies but no one believed her—do you know why, Miss Evans?"

"They thought she was mad, I think," said Petunia.

"That, of course, but there were wizards around back then, too. There was the blind prophet Tiresias, who warned Oedipus of the dangers of asking too many questions about his parents, and the soothsayer Calchas, who was himself at the great siege of Troy with the Greeks, among many others. Yet the wizards of that time did not believe Cassandra, either. Do you know why?"

"Because they thought Muggles couldn't do anything like see the future," said Petunia, unable to hide the bitterness in her voice.

The professor nodded slowly, the smile still on his face. "Precisely, Miss Evans. I see cleverness runs in the family, my dear girl," he said.

Petunia thought this professor was rather condescending, but she merely nodded.

"You are a rare breed of Muggle, Petunia, that has some little bit of power—not enough to do magic as a proper witch or wizard would, but enough to open your mind to channels that other Muggles would not see, and indeed, that even other magic folk cannot see. It is perhaps because your talent is focused, or perhaps because you are so inquisitive of yourself, that you can use the crystal ball as you do," said Augur.

"Then what I saw is going to come true?" asked Petunia.

Augur cocked one eyebrow at her. "It may," he said, the smile gone from his face quick as lightning. "It may indeed. But it is still the future—it is still changeable. To change it, though, that is a tricky business. For who is to say whether it is not your actions in trying to change the future that cause it to happen?"

Petunia's shoulders slumped. She had half been expecting this strange professor to tell her that this was all some kind of elaborate joke, thought up by Lily to torture her. Her heart thumped in her chest, so loudly that she thought the professor would hear it, and her fingers trembled. If it was a joke, than maybe it would mean that nothing would happen. Nothing would come of her visions—but if they were really real (deep down she had known they were, but she wanted not to believe it) then they would happen. They could happen, Petunia amended herself, not yet willing to cement her sister's fate.

"Now," said Professor Augur, "I would like to know exactly what you saw when you looked into the crystal ball."

To speak of the figure that still haunted her nightmares was quite difficult, but Petunia did her best. It was hard to remember what had actually occurred in the vision and what had been an invention of her mind, for she had dreamed of the scene many times since then.

The professor's face grew more and more troubled as she spoke. When she finished he was silent for a long moment, and then looked at her with a grave expression on his wrinkled face.

"I have seen this man too," said Augur softly. "Tell me, does Lily speak to you of any of the events of the wizarding world?" Petunia shook her head, and he went on. "There is a powerful wizard who has been stirring up trouble among the magical community. He hates Muggles, and even more he hates those wizards who sympathize with them, who marry them, live with them, work with them—he believes that wizarding folk should remain pure and separated, untainted by the dirty blood of the rest of the world." Augur's eyes blazed with fury. "Above the places he has done his dirty work, he leaves his Mark—a giant, glowing green skull with a snake protruding from its mouth."

For a moment the professor seemed consumed by anger, sending a shiver of fear down Petunia's spine.

"Yes, Petunia," he said, "I know whom you saw. His name—his name is Lord Voldemort."

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