My Muses Name is "Procratination"
Apr. 16th, 2005 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherxquillWhen I should be researching for a cultural studies essay, the muse hits with a vengeance. As always.
Title: Invisible Lover
Author: featherxquill
Characters: Petunia Dursley
Rating: NC-17
Summary: She twists and erupts under his grasp, but who is he?
A/N: Warnings, very big red neon flashing lights. Very dark, will very possibly squick. BDSM, in a sense.
A candle in the window of the spare room of number four, Privet Drive, flickering in the breeze. It casts golden ripples over the wall and bedding, the figure standing in front of the mirror.
The firelight is kind to her lean form, capturing with its shadows and highlights curves that aren’t at first apparent, and softening sharp facial features. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again there is a spider web on the mirror, and the room is cold and dark.
A surge of fear wells within her, but she fights it back. Always there is the fear, but despite it she smiles. Magic is touching her, she no longer feels barren and dry. Someone in the magical world wants her, sees her; notices her. The fear is worth it.
His hands are cold as they wrap about her, and she feels icy fingers against her nipples. She arches her head back against what could be his shoulder, and a small moan whispers from her lips.
He is strong, she can feel it, as he steps back, pulling her away from the mirror, and fingers trail over her shoulders as he circles her to stand before her.
She can still see a mottled reflection of herself in the mirror. Her thoughts are beginning to drift, but still she manages to wonder once more at why he must always veil himself so. Why has she never seen this lover?
Her blood pulses through her flesh and her brain, she can feel it racing like fire or tiny icicles, can feel every speck of her being as he nears. Cool wetness against her face, unseen fingers twining in her hair, pulling her head back to expose her throat, then hungry, sucking kisses tracing down it. His body pressed close to her, pushing her backward, toward the bed. Her eyes flutter closed.
She feels the back of her knees hit the duvet, then his hand is cupping her cheek, then turning her face to one side, then pushing her back so her knees buckle and she falls onto the bed. A brief moment where he is gone, then he is everywhere. Cool hands trace the contours of her skin, the curve of shoulder, breast, stomach, thigh. That insatiable mouth suckles at her ear, then trails down to nipple, stomach, bellybutton, and, agonisingly slowly, down…
A bubble of emotion wells in her throat – sadness, longing, pleasure, pain. It tightens her chest, then erupts forth from her mouth in a moan as she feels those lips touch her, fingers spreading her apart and tongue teasing against her, within her. Tears seep from the creases of her eyes as he brings her up, up, up and her head arches back against the bed. Then he pulls away, and she cries out in protest, but he is shifting atop her, and in a moment there is a different sort of solidity at hr entrance – hard and cool and moist, and then he plunges inside her and draws her into his embrace.
The visions start then.
…a girl with red hair and a grin from ear to ear throwing open the bedroom door, jumping on the bed and screaming. “Petunia, Pet, wake up, I’m a witch, I’m a witch!” And then Mummy and Daddy are running in and grabbing Lily up and spinning her in the air and crying and laughing and smiling, and the other girl in the bed is just watching, waiting for someone to grab her and spin her and tell her she is a witch too…
She feels nails scrape at her skin, and wraps her legs tighter around him, pulling him deeper within her and feeling fabric and skin against her naked form. Invading her, sending hot shards of pleasure through her. Magic filling her up and holding her tight as he mind crashes and burns around it.
…A huge, grinning skull hovering over the charred remnants of her parents’ house, green light bathing her features as she just stands, staring. “You and Vernon come over for dinner, Pet, I’ll cook a roast”. A roast. Roasted while Vernon tried to start the car. That could have been us. The woman with her arms wrapped about herself does not cry. Instead, a strange sort of emptiness fills her up…
She spins, spins, rides the waves of heat as they build inside her, as he moves about her and within her, as he spins his web of power and she holds tight to him and cries out as the magic pricks at her skin, spinning her faster, taking her higher, right up to the stars behind the closed lids of her eyes.
…A baby cries, but not next to her. Not in the crib in the corner of the room where Dudley sleeps because he cannot bear to be parted from his mother. No, this child is further away, but its cry has woken her as baby cries wake all new mothers. As if in a dream, she climbs from the bed and pulls a robe about herself, searching for the source of the noise. None of the neighbours have new children. Perhaps this is a dream. It sounds like it is coming from outside. Outside the front door. A baby. A baby and a letter. Your sister is dead. This is her son. Not even a person to tell her, as though she is just some thing. Just a Pet. I’m a witch, Pet. Take my child, Pet. She crumples the letter in her fist…
“I hate you.” She whispers in his ear as the stars bloom before her eyes, as the wild horses of pleasure thunder through her body and she comes, crying out like a banshee, clutching hard to him, feeling him spew something wet and icy inside her. The tears are hot on her cheeks, and the wild magical pleasure is fire and ice on her skin.
Then he is gone, and she hopes she did not wake Vernon with her cries.
****
“It wasn’t me! It was a couple of Dementors!”
“A couple of – what’s this codswallop?”
“De – men – tors. Two of them.”…
Somewhere, in the depths of her memory, a fragment broke free and drifted into Petunia’s consciousness.
It had been many years since she had overheard James telling Lily about the prison guards. They’d been out on a date, and James was bringing her home. Petunia, as always, had watched them through the blinds of her bedroom. Something in her got a thrill out of being witness to midnight hugs and stolen kisses. This time, however, Lily didn’t look happy at all. She looked rather pale, and James grave.
“But what exactly are they, James?”
“The Dementors? I don’t think anyone is really entirely sure. They’re only partly corporeal, I think, and they feed on happiness, suck out your soul if they can. You felt what they do. They make everything go cold, and force you to relive your worst memories. I’ve heard some people say that you become a Dementor when one takes your soul, so then you spend forever trying to find another soul to fill the void. It mightn’t be true, though. I’m not sure whether they’re living or dead, or something in between. All I know is that they sap everything from you, even your will to live. That’s why they have them guard over Azkaban.”
…“And what the ruddy hell are Dementors?”
“They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban.”
Was that her voice? Oh, dear God, why had she spoken?
Petunia’s hand lifted to her mouth as the world seemed to spin around her. She could hear her husband shouting, and knew she was speaking, but would never be able to remember what she had said. Something icy was trickling down her throat, forming a frozen lump in the pit of her stomach.
She thought she might be sick.
Part 2 (ETA for archiving purposes)
“Expecto Patronum!”
Pure, undiluted happiness like a supernova in his eyes. Agony, agony! Then spinning, twisting, falling up, back, away. Away from that light and that love. Hanging for a time, drifting. Weak. He needs something sweet, strong; heady. Some melancholy. He needs her.
Some of his companions enjoy teenagers, haunting schools and orphanages, but he finds them too much. All that angst, like a drink too strong. Too much, and too raw. Too petty. Her sorrow is rather mellow, fermented through her life into something that gently infuses her entire being. Despair coupled with resignation, lust laced with pain. Disappointment, mediocrity. A vintage wine for a connoisseur of unhappiness.
And she seems to want it as much as he does.
There is no candle in the window this night. A boy in the bed they share. A powerful boy with many of those poignant, horrific sorrows that others so love.
They all sleep. This will not do.
She wakes to the feel of icy fingers on her cheek, and her eyes fly open. No one. Everyone. Him. It.
“…living or dead, or something in between…”
She shudders away from the touch, eyes flashing daggers of revulsion and fear. Can it even see her? Or is it just the Incubus of medieval horror, here for its own pleasure, to terrorise and confuse?
It touches her again, this time upon her shoulder, and she flinches. Already she can feel the thoughts being dragged into her consciousness, can feel that thick welling in her throat. But this time she knows what it is. A hand cups her breasts and she grabs what is probably a wrist and pulls it away from her.
If it is possible for the air to fill with malevolence, it does. Something more acute than the usual fear takes hold of her, icy terror as though he has wrapped his fingers around her throat. She feels the cool air flicker over her skin as if he is moving, then Vernon makes a whimpering noise beside her. Her eyes go wide with horror, and she swipes her hand at the air over Vernon’s head, trying hit at it, but striking nothing.
His face has gone pale, and his lip quivers. “Please, don’t. Please, Uncle James. Please don’t…” It sounds nothing like his voice, its very small coming out of him, like there is a little boy in there, but the whispers get louder. He cries out with that not-voice as though he has been struck, and Petunia’s cry echoes his.
“All right!” She takes a shuddering breath, and her voice is next a whisper, badly cracked with something that is probably fear, or shame, or both. “All right. Don’t hurt him.”
Then the thing is on her, all around her and within her, and the memories rise again, memories of a life mostly a failure, and the tears stream down her cheeks. And its hands are upon her, and she shudders and cries out as she climaxes in the bed beside her husband. The sorrow shatters into tiny fragments of shame that embed themselves inside her.
When it is gone, and she is taking great shuddering breaths and drying the cursed tears on the pillow, Vernon stirs, and his eyes open sleepily, but are full of concern. “Are you all right, Pet?”
In a way, she does love him, but it is less wife and husband love than the kind of love that one feels for a classic painting bought in youth, after years of vowing only to look at abstracts. At the time you love it, and compromise your standards of rebellion for long enough to buy it, and over the years it becomes something that is simply there, still stoic and solid, real and beautiful, but a representation of everything you once thought you would never be. She reaches out to touch his cheek. It’s never been his fault.
“Just a nightmare, love. I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Go back to sleep.”
It gets worse after The Boy has returned to The School. It goes on for another year.
****
The house is dark and the hall clock chiming midnight when Harry slides in through the front door, treading carefully to avoid stepping on those floorboards that creak. Things have been different this year; they’ve been treating him like a human. He’s not sure if it’s to do with the fact that the Order threatened them on the day he came home, or something else. Once back within her usual surroundings and without pink hair to offend her, Aunt Petunia seemed almost glad he was there.
He climbs the stairs, skipping the noisy one. He’s not going to push his luck. Their newfound civility might be pushed by being woken at midnight. When he reaches the landing, his eyebrows narrow. He doesn’t remember closing his bedroom door. Perhaps it was the wind. He crosses the landing and opens the door.
…And there is a Dementor, and there is Aunt Petunia, and it’s on her, with its hood pulled back, but it’s not kissing her, it’s… oh god her knees are spread, and she’s crying, and he’s never seen anything more disgusting in his life. His wand is in his hand before he even knows how it got there.
“Expecto Patronum!”
No, no! Not here! Not her! No! But there is something sharp in this happiness, and it jabs at him and roars in his senses and flings him out, away, spinning, tumbling, disappearing into the darkness. The tendrils he’d wrapped around her thoughts are torn free, and if he had eyes he might weep, because he’d almost forgotten that he had no soul. Almost.
Weak. She is gone. Weak.
In a way that was worse, having it ripped away from her. She is shaking when The Boy offers her his hand, and that makes it worse again. But the memories it brings, that it sucks from her, they’re all still there, and she feels like she’s ridden the roller coaster too many times, and her legs have turned to jelly and her stomach is up where her heart is supposed to be. She takes his hand and lets him help her to her feet.
“Come on,” He speaks in a tone she doesn’t think she’s ever heard him use before. He sounds like Lily. “I’ll make you some tea.”
And then she’s sitting at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped about a mug of tea, and he’s sitting across from her, staring at her like he’s never seen her before.
“Why did you remember what Dementors were, last summer?” the question is careful, brittle, as though he knows he doesn’t want to know the answer. He can see them, she realises. To him it is not invisible. She lifts her eyes from the caramel-brown surface of the tea to look at him, and he seems to see it there, what she cannot say, because if she tries to open her mouth everything tastes like bile.
She takes a sip, and eventually the sick feeling passes. “What do they look like?”
He looks at the clock on the wall, the dirty dishes stacked on the sink, anywhere but at her. “I… you don’t want to know.” He pushes the chair out, then, and stands, crosses the room so to stare out the window into the dark backyard. “When… when they come too close to me, I hear my Mum screaming.”
She cannot feel anything, even when he says it like that. His Mum. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t think she ever cried for Lily, and she doesn’t intend to now.
“Yes. Well. I remember staring at the burned remains of my parents’ house.”
He turns again, and his eyes are wide. “Voldemort killed…?”
She snorts. “Hadn’t you ever wondered what happened to your grandparents? Yes. Magic killed them, too. And to think I so badly wanted to be part of it, as a child. Waited for my letter for weeks.”
He is staring again, staring at her like she’s grown a second head. She doesn’t know why she’s saying all this. But he saw the thing on her. What does it matter? What does any of it matter?
“You wanted…?”
A flush of anger warms her, and her eyes pierce him. “Of course I did! It’s every child’s dream, isn’t it? Being unique and special, powerful? Well, she was, wasn’t she, and I wasn’t. That was all there was to it. The apple of their eye.” She takes a sip of the tea, but it tastes bitter on her tongue. “No one ever stops to question whether the ugly stepsisters lived happily ever after.”
An unreadable expression twists his face. “Well, you did, didn’t you?” He gestures around himself. “You got what you wanted.”
Again, she snorts. “Happily ever after, Harry, me? I have a university degree, did you know that?”
He walks back over to the table, but does not sit. She’s not looking at him. “No, I didn’t. You’ve never bothered to speak to me like I was a person before.” Perhaps she should feel guilty for that, too, but she doesn’t. “What in?” he asks.
She swirls the tea. “Public relations.”
“Why didn’t you use it, then?” There is nothing kind in his voice.
It tumbled out, then. “Because my parents died. I got pregnant. I got married. I got lumbered with a spare child and I promised myself that I would never let my child feel like I was made to feel like. Like I was second best, like being magical was a wondrous gift that would solve all the problems in the world. So I stayed at home to give him the best life possible.”
“Because it was easy and you didn’t have to think.”
“What?” The words are jarring, and her eyes flick up to his. She is looking at Lily. She is looking at James. She is looking at herself. Hard and bitter and cold. He slaps his own mug down on the table, and she jerks back, but can’t look away from him.
“You just did what was easy. You didn’t try to make a life. You just took what was given to you. Why don’t you just stop pitying yourself and do something about it, if you’re not happy?”
She blinks, thinking of its hands upon her, of Vernon in the bed beside her, of Dudley growing more and more like his father every day. Harry is so right that it sears a pain in her chest, and makes her angrier than she has ever been at him. Makes her hate him more than she ever hated her god damn saint of a sister.
“It’s too late for that, Harry.”
Fire sparks in his eyes, and he sends the teacup flying across the room to shatter on the floor. “My mother and father are DEAD, Petunia! A week before the end of school I watched my godfather be killed, and found out that I have to kill the wizard that killed my parents, or die by his hand. I have to save the god-damn world, Petunia. If I don’t win, he’ll kill everyone. I’m sixteen years old, all the people I love are dead and I have to prevent the fucking apocalypse. What do you want from me? You want me to save you, as well? From a crap marriage and a boring life?” He turns his back on her, and crosses to the door, then turns back.
“You know what, Aunt Petunia? Do it yourself.”
She sits for a very long time, unmoving, hands frozen around the mug of tea that is rapidly growing cold, staring at the doorframe, where Harry had been standing. It is no Dementor this time that makes her memories swim to the surface. Those last days of high school, feeling the road stretched out before her and wondering where it might take her. The lectures at university, her head filling with knowledge and the burning desire to succeed. Graduation day; elation. Knowing she was going to live out her dreams.
She stands, and at that moment she is every bit as brave as the woman who threw herself in front of a killing curse to save her son. At that moment she is every bit the Gryffindor the young girl so desperately wanted to be. It is a very different kind of magic pulsing through her veins.
He is not there to hear her speak, but it does not matter. “You know what, Harry? I will.”
A/N: I warned you. This comes from a rather twisted part of my head.
Title: Invisible Lover
Author: featherxquill
Characters: Petunia Dursley
Rating: NC-17
Summary: She twists and erupts under his grasp, but who is he?
A/N: Warnings, very big red neon flashing lights. Very dark, will very possibly squick. BDSM, in a sense.
A candle in the window of the spare room of number four, Privet Drive, flickering in the breeze. It casts golden ripples over the wall and bedding, the figure standing in front of the mirror.
The firelight is kind to her lean form, capturing with its shadows and highlights curves that aren’t at first apparent, and softening sharp facial features. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again there is a spider web on the mirror, and the room is cold and dark.
A surge of fear wells within her, but she fights it back. Always there is the fear, but despite it she smiles. Magic is touching her, she no longer feels barren and dry. Someone in the magical world wants her, sees her; notices her. The fear is worth it.
His hands are cold as they wrap about her, and she feels icy fingers against her nipples. She arches her head back against what could be his shoulder, and a small moan whispers from her lips.
He is strong, she can feel it, as he steps back, pulling her away from the mirror, and fingers trail over her shoulders as he circles her to stand before her.
She can still see a mottled reflection of herself in the mirror. Her thoughts are beginning to drift, but still she manages to wonder once more at why he must always veil himself so. Why has she never seen this lover?
Her blood pulses through her flesh and her brain, she can feel it racing like fire or tiny icicles, can feel every speck of her being as he nears. Cool wetness against her face, unseen fingers twining in her hair, pulling her head back to expose her throat, then hungry, sucking kisses tracing down it. His body pressed close to her, pushing her backward, toward the bed. Her eyes flutter closed.
She feels the back of her knees hit the duvet, then his hand is cupping her cheek, then turning her face to one side, then pushing her back so her knees buckle and she falls onto the bed. A brief moment where he is gone, then he is everywhere. Cool hands trace the contours of her skin, the curve of shoulder, breast, stomach, thigh. That insatiable mouth suckles at her ear, then trails down to nipple, stomach, bellybutton, and, agonisingly slowly, down…
A bubble of emotion wells in her throat – sadness, longing, pleasure, pain. It tightens her chest, then erupts forth from her mouth in a moan as she feels those lips touch her, fingers spreading her apart and tongue teasing against her, within her. Tears seep from the creases of her eyes as he brings her up, up, up and her head arches back against the bed. Then he pulls away, and she cries out in protest, but he is shifting atop her, and in a moment there is a different sort of solidity at hr entrance – hard and cool and moist, and then he plunges inside her and draws her into his embrace.
The visions start then.
…a girl with red hair and a grin from ear to ear throwing open the bedroom door, jumping on the bed and screaming. “Petunia, Pet, wake up, I’m a witch, I’m a witch!” And then Mummy and Daddy are running in and grabbing Lily up and spinning her in the air and crying and laughing and smiling, and the other girl in the bed is just watching, waiting for someone to grab her and spin her and tell her she is a witch too…
She feels nails scrape at her skin, and wraps her legs tighter around him, pulling him deeper within her and feeling fabric and skin against her naked form. Invading her, sending hot shards of pleasure through her. Magic filling her up and holding her tight as he mind crashes and burns around it.
…A huge, grinning skull hovering over the charred remnants of her parents’ house, green light bathing her features as she just stands, staring. “You and Vernon come over for dinner, Pet, I’ll cook a roast”. A roast. Roasted while Vernon tried to start the car. That could have been us. The woman with her arms wrapped about herself does not cry. Instead, a strange sort of emptiness fills her up…
She spins, spins, rides the waves of heat as they build inside her, as he moves about her and within her, as he spins his web of power and she holds tight to him and cries out as the magic pricks at her skin, spinning her faster, taking her higher, right up to the stars behind the closed lids of her eyes.
…A baby cries, but not next to her. Not in the crib in the corner of the room where Dudley sleeps because he cannot bear to be parted from his mother. No, this child is further away, but its cry has woken her as baby cries wake all new mothers. As if in a dream, she climbs from the bed and pulls a robe about herself, searching for the source of the noise. None of the neighbours have new children. Perhaps this is a dream. It sounds like it is coming from outside. Outside the front door. A baby. A baby and a letter. Your sister is dead. This is her son. Not even a person to tell her, as though she is just some thing. Just a Pet. I’m a witch, Pet. Take my child, Pet. She crumples the letter in her fist…
“I hate you.” She whispers in his ear as the stars bloom before her eyes, as the wild horses of pleasure thunder through her body and she comes, crying out like a banshee, clutching hard to him, feeling him spew something wet and icy inside her. The tears are hot on her cheeks, and the wild magical pleasure is fire and ice on her skin.
Then he is gone, and she hopes she did not wake Vernon with her cries.
“It wasn’t me! It was a couple of Dementors!”
“A couple of – what’s this codswallop?”
“De – men – tors. Two of them.”…
Somewhere, in the depths of her memory, a fragment broke free and drifted into Petunia’s consciousness.
It had been many years since she had overheard James telling Lily about the prison guards. They’d been out on a date, and James was bringing her home. Petunia, as always, had watched them through the blinds of her bedroom. Something in her got a thrill out of being witness to midnight hugs and stolen kisses. This time, however, Lily didn’t look happy at all. She looked rather pale, and James grave.
“But what exactly are they, James?”
“The Dementors? I don’t think anyone is really entirely sure. They’re only partly corporeal, I think, and they feed on happiness, suck out your soul if they can. You felt what they do. They make everything go cold, and force you to relive your worst memories. I’ve heard some people say that you become a Dementor when one takes your soul, so then you spend forever trying to find another soul to fill the void. It mightn’t be true, though. I’m not sure whether they’re living or dead, or something in between. All I know is that they sap everything from you, even your will to live. That’s why they have them guard over Azkaban.”
…“And what the ruddy hell are Dementors?”
“They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban.”
Was that her voice? Oh, dear God, why had she spoken?
Petunia’s hand lifted to her mouth as the world seemed to spin around her. She could hear her husband shouting, and knew she was speaking, but would never be able to remember what she had said. Something icy was trickling down her throat, forming a frozen lump in the pit of her stomach.
She thought she might be sick.
Part 2 (ETA for archiving purposes)
“Expecto Patronum!”
Pure, undiluted happiness like a supernova in his eyes. Agony, agony! Then spinning, twisting, falling up, back, away. Away from that light and that love. Hanging for a time, drifting. Weak. He needs something sweet, strong; heady. Some melancholy. He needs her.
Some of his companions enjoy teenagers, haunting schools and orphanages, but he finds them too much. All that angst, like a drink too strong. Too much, and too raw. Too petty. Her sorrow is rather mellow, fermented through her life into something that gently infuses her entire being. Despair coupled with resignation, lust laced with pain. Disappointment, mediocrity. A vintage wine for a connoisseur of unhappiness.
And she seems to want it as much as he does.
There is no candle in the window this night. A boy in the bed they share. A powerful boy with many of those poignant, horrific sorrows that others so love.
They all sleep. This will not do.
She wakes to the feel of icy fingers on her cheek, and her eyes fly open. No one. Everyone. Him. It.
“…living or dead, or something in between…”
She shudders away from the touch, eyes flashing daggers of revulsion and fear. Can it even see her? Or is it just the Incubus of medieval horror, here for its own pleasure, to terrorise and confuse?
It touches her again, this time upon her shoulder, and she flinches. Already she can feel the thoughts being dragged into her consciousness, can feel that thick welling in her throat. But this time she knows what it is. A hand cups her breasts and she grabs what is probably a wrist and pulls it away from her.
If it is possible for the air to fill with malevolence, it does. Something more acute than the usual fear takes hold of her, icy terror as though he has wrapped his fingers around her throat. She feels the cool air flicker over her skin as if he is moving, then Vernon makes a whimpering noise beside her. Her eyes go wide with horror, and she swipes her hand at the air over Vernon’s head, trying hit at it, but striking nothing.
His face has gone pale, and his lip quivers. “Please, don’t. Please, Uncle James. Please don’t…” It sounds nothing like his voice, its very small coming out of him, like there is a little boy in there, but the whispers get louder. He cries out with that not-voice as though he has been struck, and Petunia’s cry echoes his.
“All right!” She takes a shuddering breath, and her voice is next a whisper, badly cracked with something that is probably fear, or shame, or both. “All right. Don’t hurt him.”
Then the thing is on her, all around her and within her, and the memories rise again, memories of a life mostly a failure, and the tears stream down her cheeks. And its hands are upon her, and she shudders and cries out as she climaxes in the bed beside her husband. The sorrow shatters into tiny fragments of shame that embed themselves inside her.
When it is gone, and she is taking great shuddering breaths and drying the cursed tears on the pillow, Vernon stirs, and his eyes open sleepily, but are full of concern. “Are you all right, Pet?”
In a way, she does love him, but it is less wife and husband love than the kind of love that one feels for a classic painting bought in youth, after years of vowing only to look at abstracts. At the time you love it, and compromise your standards of rebellion for long enough to buy it, and over the years it becomes something that is simply there, still stoic and solid, real and beautiful, but a representation of everything you once thought you would never be. She reaches out to touch his cheek. It’s never been his fault.
“Just a nightmare, love. I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Go back to sleep.”
It gets worse after The Boy has returned to The School. It goes on for another year.
The house is dark and the hall clock chiming midnight when Harry slides in through the front door, treading carefully to avoid stepping on those floorboards that creak. Things have been different this year; they’ve been treating him like a human. He’s not sure if it’s to do with the fact that the Order threatened them on the day he came home, or something else. Once back within her usual surroundings and without pink hair to offend her, Aunt Petunia seemed almost glad he was there.
He climbs the stairs, skipping the noisy one. He’s not going to push his luck. Their newfound civility might be pushed by being woken at midnight. When he reaches the landing, his eyebrows narrow. He doesn’t remember closing his bedroom door. Perhaps it was the wind. He crosses the landing and opens the door.
…And there is a Dementor, and there is Aunt Petunia, and it’s on her, with its hood pulled back, but it’s not kissing her, it’s… oh god her knees are spread, and she’s crying, and he’s never seen anything more disgusting in his life. His wand is in his hand before he even knows how it got there.
“Expecto Patronum!”
No, no! Not here! Not her! No! But there is something sharp in this happiness, and it jabs at him and roars in his senses and flings him out, away, spinning, tumbling, disappearing into the darkness. The tendrils he’d wrapped around her thoughts are torn free, and if he had eyes he might weep, because he’d almost forgotten that he had no soul. Almost.
Weak. She is gone. Weak.
In a way that was worse, having it ripped away from her. She is shaking when The Boy offers her his hand, and that makes it worse again. But the memories it brings, that it sucks from her, they’re all still there, and she feels like she’s ridden the roller coaster too many times, and her legs have turned to jelly and her stomach is up where her heart is supposed to be. She takes his hand and lets him help her to her feet.
“Come on,” He speaks in a tone she doesn’t think she’s ever heard him use before. He sounds like Lily. “I’ll make you some tea.”
And then she’s sitting at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped about a mug of tea, and he’s sitting across from her, staring at her like he’s never seen her before.
“Why did you remember what Dementors were, last summer?” the question is careful, brittle, as though he knows he doesn’t want to know the answer. He can see them, she realises. To him it is not invisible. She lifts her eyes from the caramel-brown surface of the tea to look at him, and he seems to see it there, what she cannot say, because if she tries to open her mouth everything tastes like bile.
She takes a sip, and eventually the sick feeling passes. “What do they look like?”
He looks at the clock on the wall, the dirty dishes stacked on the sink, anywhere but at her. “I… you don’t want to know.” He pushes the chair out, then, and stands, crosses the room so to stare out the window into the dark backyard. “When… when they come too close to me, I hear my Mum screaming.”
She cannot feel anything, even when he says it like that. His Mum. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t think she ever cried for Lily, and she doesn’t intend to now.
“Yes. Well. I remember staring at the burned remains of my parents’ house.”
He turns again, and his eyes are wide. “Voldemort killed…?”
She snorts. “Hadn’t you ever wondered what happened to your grandparents? Yes. Magic killed them, too. And to think I so badly wanted to be part of it, as a child. Waited for my letter for weeks.”
He is staring again, staring at her like she’s grown a second head. She doesn’t know why she’s saying all this. But he saw the thing on her. What does it matter? What does any of it matter?
“You wanted…?”
A flush of anger warms her, and her eyes pierce him. “Of course I did! It’s every child’s dream, isn’t it? Being unique and special, powerful? Well, she was, wasn’t she, and I wasn’t. That was all there was to it. The apple of their eye.” She takes a sip of the tea, but it tastes bitter on her tongue. “No one ever stops to question whether the ugly stepsisters lived happily ever after.”
An unreadable expression twists his face. “Well, you did, didn’t you?” He gestures around himself. “You got what you wanted.”
Again, she snorts. “Happily ever after, Harry, me? I have a university degree, did you know that?”
He walks back over to the table, but does not sit. She’s not looking at him. “No, I didn’t. You’ve never bothered to speak to me like I was a person before.” Perhaps she should feel guilty for that, too, but she doesn’t. “What in?” he asks.
She swirls the tea. “Public relations.”
“Why didn’t you use it, then?” There is nothing kind in his voice.
It tumbled out, then. “Because my parents died. I got pregnant. I got married. I got lumbered with a spare child and I promised myself that I would never let my child feel like I was made to feel like. Like I was second best, like being magical was a wondrous gift that would solve all the problems in the world. So I stayed at home to give him the best life possible.”
“Because it was easy and you didn’t have to think.”
“What?” The words are jarring, and her eyes flick up to his. She is looking at Lily. She is looking at James. She is looking at herself. Hard and bitter and cold. He slaps his own mug down on the table, and she jerks back, but can’t look away from him.
“You just did what was easy. You didn’t try to make a life. You just took what was given to you. Why don’t you just stop pitying yourself and do something about it, if you’re not happy?”
She blinks, thinking of its hands upon her, of Vernon in the bed beside her, of Dudley growing more and more like his father every day. Harry is so right that it sears a pain in her chest, and makes her angrier than she has ever been at him. Makes her hate him more than she ever hated her god damn saint of a sister.
“It’s too late for that, Harry.”
Fire sparks in his eyes, and he sends the teacup flying across the room to shatter on the floor. “My mother and father are DEAD, Petunia! A week before the end of school I watched my godfather be killed, and found out that I have to kill the wizard that killed my parents, or die by his hand. I have to save the god-damn world, Petunia. If I don’t win, he’ll kill everyone. I’m sixteen years old, all the people I love are dead and I have to prevent the fucking apocalypse. What do you want from me? You want me to save you, as well? From a crap marriage and a boring life?” He turns his back on her, and crosses to the door, then turns back.
“You know what, Aunt Petunia? Do it yourself.”
She sits for a very long time, unmoving, hands frozen around the mug of tea that is rapidly growing cold, staring at the doorframe, where Harry had been standing. It is no Dementor this time that makes her memories swim to the surface. Those last days of high school, feeling the road stretched out before her and wondering where it might take her. The lectures at university, her head filling with knowledge and the burning desire to succeed. Graduation day; elation. Knowing she was going to live out her dreams.
She stands, and at that moment she is every bit as brave as the woman who threw herself in front of a killing curse to save her son. At that moment she is every bit the Gryffindor the young girl so desperately wanted to be. It is a very different kind of magic pulsing through her veins.
He is not there to hear her speak, but it does not matter. “You know what, Harry? I will.”
A/N: I warned you. This comes from a rather twisted part of my head.
