PROLOGUE: Old friends

"-re you listening to me, Mrs Dursley?" Dour and dismal: a tone that bespoke a deep hatred for having his time wasted. Petunia twisted in her seat, guarding her brief moment of disorientation closely. Her husband should be home soon, should have been home a while ago. But once he arrived, she knew he would make everything better. Once he was home, she'd need to get Dudley from that newly arrived batty woman across the road, Mrs Figg.

Then they captured her again. Those damn green eyes.

Much like the first time she had seen them – as a young girl, barely four years to her name – peering curiously from a bundle of cloth; a baby, swaddled in simple white linen.

It occurred to her that she'd likely never see a person so poorly suited for such a simple job again.

Severus Snape had never been a boy comfortable in his own skin – always at odds with himself. That much, at least, had not changed as he entered manhood. But now he wore it like a sharp mask just beneath cold grey eyes; daring the world to question his right to be present at any given moment. Without asking she knew he had learned that the only answer he could give was pure, unadulterated vitriol.

It scared her: he terrified her. His mouth was moving: thin bloodless lips forming words but she could only dully hear them, as through a long tunnel. With a great effort, she remastered herself and focused on him – tearing her eyes away from the vivid eyes of her sister.

"Don't we know each other well enough to skip this Mr and Mrs tosh?" If the question caught him off guard, nothing in his face betrayed it.

"Our childhoods are far behind us." Dark eyes swept over her face, lingering on her prematurely ageing features. "Now, were you listening to me, Mrs Dursley?

She ignored the jab at her appearance. Normally, she would have bristled and bitten back. But it felt like she was swimming into the riptide; no leverage or purchase on the ground beneath her.

In a wash of disappointment and even grief, she finally clenched her heart around the fact that her sister was gone. Petunia had never missed her until it was too late. But a single glance at the awkwardly cradled infant reminded her with a sting of bitter irony why she hadn't.

"Did you know that she was always the favoured daughter?" Petunia asked, reminiscing. "Always Lily this, Lily that."

Ugly laughter bubbled in the hollow of her throat. "Who had time for frumpy, weak, ugly Petunia?"

The tallow skinned man flicked his unreadable gaze to the wall behind Petunia, his eyes tracking the gilded frames of photographs. Searching perhaps, for when she changed so markedly from the healthy girl he no doubt remembered.

Stilled within an oak frame, nowhere else was there a more mismatched set of a family. Elizabeth and John Evans were every inch normalcy and regular happiness. There was one hitch in an otherwise idyllic marriage: their lack of children.

They said it was the war that had taken away John's ability to sire the next of the line. But neither of the parents wished to raise a son, and adopted two daughters. Lily Evans stood out – even in black and white. Conversely, Petunia could not have been more different to her sister – and neither girl looked anything like their mousy, round faced adoptive parents. Both girls were healthy and happy. This was not to last.

Illness would hollow out her sister's cheeks; a gaunt waif of a girl. Petunia continued to grow – until there was a jarring shift in the status quo. In a simple aluminium frame, Lily looked healthier, larger. The dynamic shifted gradually, and it seemed that by adolescence Lily had outstripped Petunia well and truly.

The absence of that fiery head of hair was conspicuous, and even to Petunia's eyes the story was less bright without her sister. High School, University. A handful of functions and fancy dresses, and finally her husband.

Severus Snape's eyes had come to rest on Vernon's face. "I am sure your husband has more prominent shortcomings than his vision."

Petunia barely heard him. Vernon Dursley was the best thing that ever happened to her. Her career as a journalist had been defined by her coverage of the sports star. Quiet British suburbia had been gripped by a craze for the brutal boxing ring. And the Queen's champion -as far as Surrey had been concerned- was Vernon Dursley. Shadowed, intense little eyes like diamonds gleaned from under a prominent brow. He wore a pin-striped suit, pushed to straining by his boxer's physique, and a black bowler hat half covering a series of bruises from his cheek to his hairline.

Snape was looking at her again. She could feel his eyes like dark weights on her conscience.

"Will you answer my question, Petunia?" Whatever caution he had intended her to take heed to fell on deaf ears.

"Did you know she wrote to me?" Petunia said, ploughing through his resistance to the conversation. Even though her childhood friend was almost unrecognisable, he stilled for a moment - sensing that it would be best to let her run out of steam.

"Even when she went away to her… to your school. Even when she stayed there during the summer, she wrote." Her voice was barely a whisper as she continued.

"She said she missed me, how much she wished that I could come and spend time with her there." Petunia's voice cracked, but she'd started and now couldn't be stopped. Not even by herself.

"You know, she told me all about you. How I was right, that you did like her as more than a friend. Later how I was right again, that you were a creep. How she abandoned you for that Potter maniac. I said to her, I told her 'the Potter one is no good either!'…. I told her!"

Her voice peaked to a shrill height, and Petunia slowly mastered herself: she felt drained, wrung out by her bitter resent. She brushed angry tears from her eyes. They burned on the back of her hands, equal parts shame and fury with her grief. She hadn't wanted to care.

"I was right about that as well."

She looked at Severus, and though his bearing hadn't changed his lips had tightened until his sharp mouth was a mere slit. It was a small pleasure, but it was still a vindictive joy to see someone else suffer because of her sister and her selfish choices. Why did she alone have to bear the pain?

"Did you ever really get over her?" This time, Petunia could see a muscle in his jaw flex and relax. And yet, his response was as cool as ever; as though a great body of water smoothed over her ripples until everything was still.

"I owe her everything. Conversely, I owe you very little, Petunia. I will ask once more."

He paused for a moment and adjusted the child in his arms - looking as uncomfortable as Petunia felt. She didn't want to hear the question.

"Will you take in Lily's son, Petunia?"

Finally, the boy in question made himself heard. Harry Potter burbled, and a chubby arm stuck out of his swaddle and thumped against Snape's dark vest. He spared the bundle a single, unaffected glance, before returning the arm into the folds. The baby gurgled happily at the small attention.

"I heard you the first time!" Petunia snapped, suddenly. She cringed inwardly at the childish outburst and suddenly wished she'd held her tongue. Before Snape could return with his silky rebuke that Petunia could sense coming, she continued.

"Isn't there someone, somewhere, else…?" She trailed off, hopefully. If Snape was disappointed to be robbed of a chance to insult her, he did not show it.

"You are his aunt and his only blood relative." She found herself unable to refute this, and sat in mute consternation until she alighted a gem: the simple unfairness of the situation.

"And why me?' As much as she wished to blithely condemn the child to an orphanage after he passed into her arms, she knew she wouldn't be able to do that. 'Why not someone like her? Like you."

"A wizard?" The word touched her like the presence of something unclean and taboo.

"Yes, a freak like his parents."

The revulsion sparked something in her, rubbing on a forgotten memory — a genie in a lamp.

In a poorly considered evening of reconciliation, Lily had strong-armed herself back into Petunia's life. She had hoped that her snubbing of the wedding invitation and the birthday parties would be enough: a clear line in the sand. She should have known better.

But when she had come stumbling through the fireplace, arm in arm with her husband and flanked by two men. Lily was heavy with pregnancy, and said that she had wanted to see her sister one last time before she went into hiding.

She knew one of them by name. He had a laugh like a bark and favoured the rogue's rough ponytail. Above all: he was to be her nephew's Godfather.

"Black!" She seized onto the name with all the desperation of a drowning woman to a life vest. It was almost enough to smother the surprise that she was only just remembering this now. Why was it just coming back to her now?

"What?" Snape whispered his own word like a curse, but Petunia disregarded it; she had him.

"His Godfather!" And just like that, she invoked the tempest. Petunia knew she had made a mistake.

The light-bulb above them flickered and plunged the room into near darkness, the curtains by the window were thrown open as a foul wind swept in and the hem of Snape's cloak swept around him like a storm-cloud. His face was suddenly meticulously animated, and emotions of rage and despair battled across his features.

Then it was over: control creeping from one corner of his mouth to the sweeping tip of his eyebrows. In a moment, the sea of frothing anger slid into an apathetic black ocean.

"You won't say that name again.' Snape stated, and his face had returned to a mask fashioned into a rictus of human skin. His lapels, which had writhed like angry snakes, lay flaccidly to his side. 'A war criminal has no rights to Lily Evan's son."

The baby cooed, and the atmosphere was broken.

Snape spoke again and his voice was backed by the vice-like grip of a surgeon on his knife.

"There are no others. You are the last of his family." Rising from his seat, Snape approached her, looking very tired as he offered her the bundle. Curiosity, if nothing else, prompted her to accept.

It was surprisingly heavy. A large child for his age, as Petunia herself, had been. The babe yawned, and turned to look at her with Lily's eyes: those damn green eyes seemed ill-fitted for a young child. They latched onto her face with an unsettling eagerness.

Harry's weight turned into a damning mass of obligation and responsibility. She handed him back with every intention of letting the child slip from her grasp if Snape didn't accept him immediately.

"No. No, I won't take him.' She glared at Snape, wreathing herself in righteous anger. 'Vernon and I have our own life. Our own son. You said you owe Lily?"

"Well I,' Petunia clenched her fists, but she did not stop, '...I owe her nothing."

Severus Snape was very quiet for a time, and a distracted pall settled over his features.

"I understand."

Placing the bundle back into the crook of his left arm, he fluttered his fingers in the air: a flourish which was rewarded by the appearance of a thin length of wood.

"We shall try once more."

Now she could see it clearly in the light, Petunia frowned. This hadn't been the first time she had seen these. Lily had one, she had turned it on her that last time, Lily's well-worn, wet apologies welling up in her green eyes. Wasn't tha -

"-re you listening to me, Mrs Dursley?" His tone was snappish and bespoke of an eternal hatred of having his time wasted. She twisted in her seat slightly, glancing towards the clock. Her husband should be home soon, and then everything would be better, she was sure.

"Yes, I heard you Severus."

She sighed, and glanced at the photographs upon the wall. She'd worked so hard to separate herself from Lily and her kind, and yet it seemed she was cursed to put up with them.

Her eyes settled on her husband. He looked dashing, as ever, in his pin striped suit and bowler hat. The cut on his lip and the bruising over his face only added to his attractiveness.

How would he take it, she wondered.

"Give him here."

Snape complied, and Petunia took the bundled baby in her arms. He was heavy, she thought. A large baby, like she had been. Though he looked most strongly of his father, his eyes were exactly like Lily's had been.

She looked at Snape and, although it was brief, she saw the smallest light of relief in his bearing.

"You thought I wouldn't take him?" Petunia asked, not really asking.

"Yes, though for the life of me I cannot imagine why." Severus replied, with the drawl of a long-suffering man.

Petunia tsked, as she batted at the baby's nose with a finger.

"I am his last family, and that means something. Lily and I are-" Her throat tightened around the sentence and she hesitated before continuing. "...were sisters. I owe her this much."

Petunia glared up at the tall man, "Though I'm sure that you wouldn't understand."

"I understand."

In that moment, Severus Snape did not at all look as terrible as he had since unceremoniously arriving at her door; something of the softness she associated with the boy that he had been shone through. Petunia blinked and it was gone, replaced by a man that couldn't care less about her and would be happy to leave.

"Go on then." Petunia said, gesturing to the door. It was darker than she'd have thought- it was surprising that Vernon wasn't home yet.

"I have enough to explain to my husband without you lurking in the living room."

Snape turned on his heel and beelined for the door, he opened it, but hesitated on the threshold.

"We'll be in contact more discreetly to arrange support for your family. Be sure to remember our last, Petunia."

Severus didn't wait for her to reply; the door closed behind him with a dismissive snap. She distantly registered the familiar sound of Vernon's car pulling into the driveway. Equal parts relief and wonder washed over her and she finally let the tension fade from her shoulders.

It did nothing from the pounding headache, however. Grimacing, Petunia unwrapped the bundle, much to the delight of the child within, and looked at her nephew.

Harry Potter.

She sniffed haughtily. His hair was a mess.