Tendrils
Written for A Drabble a day keeps the doctor away challenge by Bamberrr.x
Many thanks to Viren96 for the reviews!
Characters: Petunia Evans Dursley
She watches the other girl as a hunter watches a tiger; carefully, deliberately, and with no insignificant amount of fear.
She does not understand it the first time it happens. She sits on the floor, playing with her dolls, when the rattle falls off the toddler's cot and lands beside her. She turns to pick it up, but watches instead as it zooms upwards through the railings of the bed, back into her sister's hand. She gazes open-mouthed at the red-haired child now sucking the rattle, then shrugs and turns back to her dolls.
Petunia is seven the second time it happens. Five year old Lily has turned her old black hair slides purple, to match the new dress their mother has bought her for Evensong this New Year. Petunia tries hard, alone in her room after the service, staring at her own red hair slide hard enough to hurt her eyes. The plastic slide does not change; seeming to mock her in its crimson lustre. The first seed is thus planted.
The seed grows slowly throughout the years, sprouting tendrils with each new incident; the empty pen that refills itself, the flower petals that change colour, the window mobile that tinkles when the breeze is absent. The culmination occurs when the greasy-haired boy drops the tree branch on her shoulder. Sniffling as her mother gently tends her bruised collarbone, she vows to have nothing more to do with the freak.
The letter from the old man is gentle, regretful. She knows not if she is ashamed, or enraged, or both. Her pale eyes take in the cloaked men and women on the platform, the owls, the cats and the broomsticks; a world in which she has no part. Abnormal, she thinks, and the first blossom sprouts on the tree.
She watches as the boy with the thick spectacles and laughing hazel eyes carries her sister away in burst of purple fairy dust. She screams when the infant is found on her doorstep and later watches with jaundiced and not unfearful eyes as the boy grows, thin and starved and unloved. Her heart beats faster each time she locks him in his cupboard, unacknowledging of his protests, wholly aware of his innocence. And thus the tree bore its first fruit.
It is when Dudley shakes the boy's hand that the first autumn occurs. Years later, when she sees her son grown, with children of his own; when a Christmas card arrives from the boy; when the boy himself arrives one day; when she sees the small red-haired girl clutch at her father's arm, reminiscent of another like her so many years ago, does she realise that the tree has finally withered, and died.
The first seed and its sprouts of envy were born,
It bore me a harvest of thistle and thorn.