A/N: So here it is, the last chapter. I hope you all enjoy it!
About six months after he defeated Voldemort, Harry received a letter from his aunt, asking him to visit at his earliest convenience. When a muggle brown letter envelope arrived at The Burrow where he was staying at the insistence of Mrs Weasley, he knew that there wasn't really anyone else it could have come from. It was short and the writing was incredibly familiar to him. Looking at it, he didn't feel particularly great, so he tried in vain to put it off. Another one arrived a week later using the same method. He was sitting at the table at The Burrow staring at the message within, which was very much the same as before, except for one notable difference. She had used the magic word.
"Everything alright Harry?" Mrs Weasley asked looking at him with concern.
He battled with himself about whether he should tell the truth or not before answering.
"Just a letter from my aunt."
"Oh," Mrs Weasley said fairly neutrally. "What does she want?"
"Well, apparently they're back in Surrey, in the same house and everything. She wants to talk to me."
"Don't feel as though you have to do anything you don't want to, dear. Was the last letter the same?"
"I didn't know you had noticed that."
"Oh, I have been trying especially hard recently to try and be there for all of my children. I've missed things in the past."
"But..."
"ALL of my children. Now, is it something that you feel you need to do?"
"Why would I want to do it?"
"Not want, Harry. Need. Sometimes what is best for us isn't what we want to do. Would it bring you closure?"
"Maybe."
"Think about it dear."
He had thought about it at length previously, but that was nothing to his thoughts now. He made lists and spent sleepless nights tossing and turning. Eventually, he came to the answer he was looking for, and while he knew that this wasn't something that was going to hurt him physically (at least not that he thought), psychologically it was going to destroy him.
Number 4 Privet Drive looked very much as it had more than a year ago when he left it for what he had thought had been the last time. He briefly wondered who had tidied up the garden in his absence. With some effort to keep his hand steady, he rang the doorbell, and it made the same sound that it always had. Feet pounded up the stairs behind the door, giving Harry the idea that someone had just scurried up the stairs to avoid him. He wondered if it had been Dudley or Uncle Vernon.
Aunt Petunia opened the door and gestured for him to get inside, and when he entered he was hit with a wave of memories. He was directed into the living room, and not even told not to touch anything. They sat down and he was presented with a cup of tea and a chocolate bourbon.
"It's over, then?" she asked, fiddling anxiously with her own biscuit, a custard cream.
Harry nodded before nibbling at his biscuit just like when he had been little and a chocolate biscuit had fallen on the floor and he had got it instead of one of Aunt Marge's dogs. It was not good enough for Dudley, too dangerous for Ripper, but allowable for Harry.
"When I was younger, he kept on telling me that it would happen eventually. He had books that explained how not everyone who can't do magic is a squib, and I went along with it. After a while, though, he started to tell me that I wasn't trying hard enough and made me keep on trying. He couldn't comprehend that his daughter wasn't able to do magic. I was fifteen when I wrote a letter to Professor Dumbledore about it. From what Lily's friend…"
"Snape?" Harry offered, recalling the pensive.
"…Snape, yes, told us about magic, I could probably do potions. I was always good at cooking and thought about studying chemistry as I did quite well at it at school. Dumbledore said that I didn't qualify though, and that I probably wouldn't ever qualify as it depended on someone having not quite enough magical ability. I had no magical ability to speak of, so nothing could grow from it."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"How could I? He was so hopeful that I would be like him and Lily that I just kept on playing along with it."
"Why did he…"
"Try to live a normal life? I don't know. I don't think you can put yourself in his shoes no matter how hard you try. Did anyone tell you about your grandmother?"
"My godfather has mentioned my dad's mum, but not yours."
"Effie was nice," Petunia reminisced. "I was jealous of Lily when I went to the wedding as Vernon's mother was never that nice to me. Anyway, our mother was a muggle. She was a lecturer in social work at one of the local colleges. She had so much to give, and I don't think I could have asked for a better mother."
"What happened to her? I know she died."
"I reached my seventeenth birthday, and they killed her. Presumably at that point he lost all hope in me ever expressing any magic, and decided to take it out on the person he blamed."
"And he blamed your mother," Harry said, all of this only confirming what he had ascertained.
"He always said that magic saved him from the orphanage and that he wanted to save people from being squibs. Then I came along, and he blamed muggles for having children with wizards, even though he had been responsible as well. To him, muggle-borns are thieves who stole from me."
"But that's not how it works!" Harry yelled.
Petunia laid a calming hand on his shoulder. She looked up at the ceiling, clearly trying to determine whether Vernon was about to crash down the stairs and kill Harry.
"I know that's not how it works, and most people who try and get these things put into law don't believe it either." At Harry's disbelieving look, she scowled at him. "I was raised by parents who assumed that I would be able to live in the magical world eventually. Of course I used to read the papers."
"Aunt Petunia. Why do you hate magic so much?"
"Well," she said, pondering for a moment, "It started when Lily went to Hogwarts. I hated magic because it had taken her from me. I hid it well from her I think though, so she never knew. I treated her the same way as always. Later? I hated it because it took away my father and killed my mother."
"And now?"
"I don't know if I hate magic anymore," Petunia admitted softly. "It kept on being fed by the fact that I feared that you would end up like him."
"How?" Harry asked, wondering how on earth she had got that impression from a baby.
"When you were little, you could speak to snakes," Petunia started.
"I still can."
"Yes I know. There was also that letter that Dumbledore sent. It talked about how the killing curse could have had an impact on you. I worried that you would repeat his actions. That you would one day kill us all. I wasn't going to let any of us get attached to you. None of us spotted it in him when we were younger, so I wasn't going to let you have the chance to ruin us."
"Treating me like I was nothing wasn't really the way to go about it though. Was it? I felt like magic had saved me from here. Even now, I can't stand it here."
He looked around at the walls of his former prison, emblazoned as ever with pictures of Dudley throughout his life. He very much doubted that there was a single one of him in this house, even in storage.
"I am so sorry," she finally said. "I am so sorry for all we did to you. We should have done better. I should have pushed down my fear and taken care of you like I should have and Lily would have if it had been Dudley. You deserved so much better."
Harry didn't know what to say to that. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough coming from her. She and her husband and son had made his life a living nightmare. There was no going back on that.
"Where is she buried?" he choked out eventually, electing to not continue the same conversation.
Petunia picked up the keys from the kitchen counter. "I'll take you."
Together they walked down the drive, and when Harry looked back at the house, Uncle Vernon and Dudley were glaring at him from the door. He reluctantly got in, and then they drove for what felt like hours in Aunt Petunia's mint green mini. Eventually they came to a stop in front of a very old church surrounded by a fairly substantial graveyard.
"Where are we?" Harry asked, with no small amount of suspicion.
"This is near where Lily and I grew up. Our mum would take us to this church and this is where we put her to rest."
Together, they walked through the rows and rows of graves going back hundreds of years. There were dozens and dozens of Evanses and Aunt Petunia answered his unanswered question.
"He took her name. He always said that his family had been awful."
Harry suddenly felt a familiar feeling that was not unlike the one that he had experienced when he had seen his entire family in the Mirror of Erised. Of course, it was strange to think that the man who had been to the other side of his mother had been Voldemort, but he had been among family. Now, despite the presence of Aunt Petunia, he felt the same.
They came to a stop in front of the grave.
Violet Judith Evans
1 November 1928-15 July 1975
Age 46
Beloved wife and mother
There was extra space underneath like couples quite often left when one died before the other, so they could be buried together. Harry thought that was a mean joke. He would not be buried in this lovely place. His ashes had been thrown through the veil just as they deserved.
"Did he choose the stone?"
"Yes, he wanted it just like that. Could you..."
Harry held out his wand and the words "and wife" rose to meet the surrounding stone, effectively obscuring what had come before.
"Do you want a quote or anything?"
"No, she didn't like anything 'wishy-washy'. How about a flower or something?"
Harry added those as well, filling the space Tom Evans had left for himself in the world. He had no power over any of them anymore.
"Was there anything left of him?"
"Not much. He just. . .fell apart."
"Good."
Harry felt the overwhelming urge to clear something up.
"It's not your fault though, Aunt Petunia. You know that, right? What you did to me is, but what he did to you and everyone else isn't."
Aunt Petunia nodded, her mouth in a straight line.
Harry hadn't got his apparating license yet as there had been too much going on, but Ron had, so he sent him a message. Aunt Petunia waited for him back at the car, and when Ron arrived, she turned to face away from them.
"Is that her?" Ron asked. "I've only ever seen her briefly before."
Harry recalled the various disastrous situations during which the Dursleys had been dragged kicking and screaming into the magical world.
"Yeah," Harry said.
"Do you want me to do anything to her? Ginny taught me the bat bogey curse, and for you, I would serve the time for casting it on a muggle."
"I appreciate it, Ron, but I think I'll just leave her alone."
"Do you think you'll ever see her again?"
"I don't know," Harry said, looking back at the remains of his mother's family. For most of his life, she had been his oppressor. While they had never been close, Harry knew her quite well, and from the set of her shoulders, he could tell that she was crying. Once upon a time, there had been a family and they had been happy. At least three of them had been. Petunia clearly still lived with the shadows of Voldemort and the difficulty of trying to reconcile him with Tom Evans.
"Maybe," he said firmly.
"Where to?"
"I don't know," Harry answered truthfully.
"They want to see you, you know. For you to go home."
"They've just had so much on their plate. Sirius was a mess when he thought he was dead. I don't want to get in the way."
"I very much doubt that you would be. Apparently, Remus spent ages painting your room."
"You wouldn't mind?"
"You might have become a part of our family the moment that we met on that platform, but we all know that you've always been part of another one."
"Yeah."
"Have you talked to Ginny yet?"
"No, but I will," Harry said, looking around at the graveyard with its ancient stones and well-mown grass. "We'll get around to it."
Then Ron took him firmly by the arm, and they apparated away together, leaving Petunia sobbing in the grass.
