Caffeine and Magix

rainbow-femme:

While I absolutely agree that Lily Potter beat the shit out of snape when he joined the afterlife don’t forget Petunia Dursley.

Lily was estranged from her sister but still trusted her to take care of her son, who was found bleeding and crying on her doorstep after his parents were murdered. Only to find out that they hurt, starved, isolated, lied to, and locked in both a cupboard and then a room with bars on the window the son she died to protect so he could have a better life? I don’t care what the deleted scene said about petunia being sad lily died when she gets to the afterlife it is round two of lily potter MMA smackdown

“Why did she end up here?”

“James–”

“No, that woman destroyed–”

“Hold on–”

“Stop.” A cool, familiar voice, but there’s something warm lacking in it. “Go. I need to talk to her.” A pause. “Alone.”

“…Call me if you need me, Lily,” the man says. There’s the sound of footsteps on grass.

Petunia wrinkles her nose and opens her eyes to blue, blue skies. I died, she thinks. I’m dead.

It’s not such a surprise. She was nearly eighty years old, after all, and it had been many years since Vernon died. What is a surprise is the body she finds when she sits up. She can’t be physically older than 20, the year she had Dudley and moved in with Vernon. The year that Lily–

“Hello, Petunia.”

Petunia scrambles up, heart thundering in her chest, and whirls around. There, right in front of her, for the first time in over sixty years, is Lily.

She’s just as beautiful as she remembered, long red hair framing a clear face. There’s that familiar curl of envy, but it’s duller now, after all these years, and Petunia drinks in the sight of her sister hungrily. She’s standing in a field, white robes falling from her shoulders, and her green eyes are almost the exact same color as the greenery beneath their feet.

Lily’s green eyes are suddenly a lot closer and, oh wow, Petunia is looking at the sky again. She frowns and tentatively reaches up to touch her jaw. It hurts.

But I’m dead, Petunia thinks first. And then, Lily punched me. She lifts her head up as much as she can.

“What,” Lily hisses, fists vibrating at her sides, “the fuck, Petunia?”

“What?” Petunia asks. She sits up and cautiously stands again. She shakes her head. “Lily, it’s been decades, why–” she swallows heavily “–I don’t want to fight anymore.” It costs her something to say that, something that she’s carried with her her whole life, but it’s true. She doesn’t want to be mad at Lily anymore.

So why is Lily mad at her?

“Too bad,” Lily says. She takes an aggressive step forward and Petunia instinctively takes on back. Lily scowls. “Because I want to fight, Petunia. In fact, I want to fucking rumble.”

“I-I’m sorry,” Petunia says. “The way I treated you was–was wrong. I was jealous and I was immature and–I’m sorry.”

Lily stares at her, eyes a touch too wide. “The way you treated me?” She laughs with no humor. “This isn’t about me. This is about what you did to my son.”

And Petunia abruptly remembers Harry. Harry who she hasn’t heard from in–good god, it must be twenty years? Not since she failed to answer another letter, at least, not since the last announcement of a grand-nephew. She knows that Dudley kept (keeps) in contact, but it upset Vernon so much she just couldn’t. She was being a good wife and it’s not like Harry ever needed her at all.

And then, of course, Petunia remembers, well…everything.

“I was scared,” Petunia blurts out. “Lily, you’d died and I-I found him on my doorstep. I didn’t want my Dudders to grow up like I did–”

“Oh, and how did you grow up, Tuney?” Lily asks, jaw clenched. “Loved? Respected?”

“In your shadow,” Petunia snaps back. “Lily this and Lily that–I couldn’t stand it! I wasn’t going to let my son be relegated to the back burner for another–another freak.”

Petunia knows immediately that she’s said the wrong thing.

Lily goes absolutely still. “You called my son a freak,” she says slowly and clearly, “every day of his life. He didn’t even know his own name until he went to school. You gave him a room under the stairs. You never touched him. You never loved him. You starved him and hit him with a frying pan–”

“He ducked,” Petunia says and then winces. She remembers that day, she was having difficulty getting Dudley to his play date on time, and it had all just been too much. So she’d just swung– “He ducked.”

“I trusted you!” Lily screams. “Even after everything, all the things you said –and Merlin, the things you said!– I thought that you were my sister.”

“I am your sister,” Petunia says in a small voice. She takes a pleading step forward. “Lily, it was too much–”

Wham! Petunia is back to blinking up at the sky. This time, it’s her stomach that’s throbbing.

“My son,” Lily seethes. Petunia sits up again, but doesn’t stand, the wind knocked out of her. Angry tears spill from Lily’s eyes and she’s as red as her hair. “My son. And you left him cold and hungry in your storage space while your son had two bedrooms. Two. Bedrooms.”

“He needed them,” Petunia says dumbly.  She scrambles back as Lily surges forward and splutters, “We did give him that bedroom when he outgrew the cupboard! We did!”

“Because you found out people were watching!” Lily pulls at her hair. “You h-had money, Petunia. James and I left you money and you starved him. My son, Tuney.” She repeats the words as if she can’t understand what Petunia is missing in them. Now, after all these years, Petunia is beginning to wonder what was missing herself. Lily presses a trembling hand to her mouth and then drops it.  “You let your brute of a husband hurt Harry and you did nothing.”

“He never hit the boy,” Petunia says.  She licks her lips and tries not to think of strange bruises or sudden flinches. “I made sure that he never hit him.”

The look Lily gives her could set water aflame. “We both know that that’s not true.” A lost look enters her eyes under the anger. “If Dudley ever came to us, we would’ve treated him right. We would have loved him and fed him and told him about you. We would have made sure he knew you. We would have done our best so he was never alone.” Her voice breaks. “I would have loved him, Petunia.”

Petunia wants to argue, but she knows she can’t.  Lily had always been quick to temper but even quicker to affection. She drapes her arms over her knees and hangs her head. “I-I know.” She waits for Lily to say something, but her sister is silent. She looks up and tries, “I did try, Lily. But his eyes–they looked so much like yours and…the magic. It took you away from me long before you died. I couldn’t see past it. I couldn’t. You can’t blame me for that. You can’t.”

Lily wipes at her eyes. No new tears come to them as she returns Petunia’s gaze. “I used to make those same excuses for you when we were little girls. I’d tell Severus and James that it was so hard for you, that’s why you were mean to me. But now? Now I know that they’re just excuses. So, yes, I do blame you for that. I blame you for all of it.”

Petunia flinches as if struck.Something nasty coils in her, something malicious, because this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Lily isn’t supposed to blame her. Petunia is supposed to forgive Lily. She bares her teeth, a primal reflex to the hurt, and says, “Well, I’m not the one who went and died. I was there for my son, it’s not my fault you were fool enough not to be there for yours.”

Lily is on her between one breath in the next, legs straddling her torso, hands fisted in the front of the white dress Petunia is wearing. She looks like some sort of goddess of vengeance, breath coming faster and faster with her fury, but she doesn’t hit Petunia again.

“I– I didn’t mean–” Petunia starts to say, but is cut off.

“I trusted you,” Lily says again. Her hands tighten in the fabric and Petunia’s come up to grab her wrists. “And you betrayed me. I gave my life for my son and you–” she shoves Petunia into the ground, not letting go “–you hurt him.”

“I didn’t know how–” Petunia breaks off, something crumbling inside of her, and she swallows. “I didn’t know how to do anything else.” There’s something heavy on her chest, something that’s getting heavier and heavier with each moment. “I didn’t know.”

She’d meant it as a defense. She’d had all this hurt inside of her, all this hatred, and nowhere for it to go after her sister died. Instead, grief had been added, and regret, and she hadn’t known how to let it go. How to see the boy without seeing all of the rest. She hadn’t known.

Lily stares at her. “You should have.” She lets go of Petunia and, somehow, it feels like a loss. Lily stands, rises up and up and up until she’s standing over Petunia like a judge. Or an executioner. “ I will never forgive you for not even saying his name once today. For not groveling. For not begging his forgiveness.”

“He–he did forgive me,” Petunia says. She comes up on her knees, a supplicant in the hands of an angry god, and says, “He wrote me.”

“In a letter you never replied to,” Lily says. Nothing gives in her expression. It’s as if she’s been turned to stone. “Harry is better than me, Petunia. He might forgive you but I never will.”

Petunia’s mouth runs dry. “Lily. I-I’m sorry.” She shuffles forward on her knees, uncaring of how it looks, just suddenly terrified at this distance, this coldness, this sense that this is a bad goodbye. “Please.”

Lily looks down at her sister and takes a step back. “Goodbye, Petunia. Enjoy eternity.”

Petunia lurches forward, fingers grasping for the back of her sister’s robes. “Lily–”

But then Lily is on the hill a distance away, her back to Petunia as she walks towards a small group of people Petunia can’t make out. They begin to move away, over the crest of the hill and out of sight. Petunia cries out for her sister as she grows smaller and smaller, begging for her to stay, to not leave, please–

Lily never turns to look back.

Petunia collapses back to her knees and weeps.

(via plutomeetsgenius)