After burying their parents on that damp and dreary spring day, Petunia Dursley spent two-and-a-half years in blissful oblivion of anything and everything connected to the hated Wizarding World. Occasionally, an owl-borne letter would stray across her path, but rather than opening the letters Lily had so faithfully penned, Petunia banished them to her old hat box. Life could have continued in much the same fashion for Petunia indefinitely and she would not have minded in the least - unhappily married though she was – for she finally had the child she had so longed for, a chubby-cheeked toddler by the name of Dudley. But again, the peace and tranquility of these two years were but an interlude in the turmoil of the elder Evans sister’s life. On another rain-soaked day, she opened the door to Number Four Privet Drive expecting to find a bottle of ice-cold milk and, perhaps, a letter or two…

…Lily was standing on the front stoop with a black-haired little boy squirming in her arms. Tendrils of fog wound themselves around mother and son; they appeared to be standing in the middle of a cloud.

“Are you going to let me in, Petunia?” she asked, lifting her mournful green eyes to meet her sister’s cold gray ones.

“Come in,” she said grudgingly, easing Lily out of her sopping-wet raincoat and exiling Harry to the sitting room to play with Dudley. She shuddered at the thought of Harry, in his abnormality, interacting with her perfect Dudders, but for the moment, there was no alternative.  

“What brings you here, Lily?” Petunia demanded, leading her from the foyer and bustling about the kitchen preparing two mugs of Earl Grey tea.

Teacups in hand, Petunia took a seat opposite her sister at the highly-sanitized kitchen table. Lily was painfully thin, and the light had all but gone out of her emerald eyes.

She sat clutching her teacup, staring at the dregs in the bottom. “The falcon, a deadly foe. The axe, a coming fall,” Lily murmured absently. “I never used to believe in that nonsense, not until the Prophecy…”

“Tea leaves and Prophecies?! Don’t talk gibberish, Lily,” Petunia clucked sternly, snatching the teacup away and rinsing it out in the sink. “We both know why you’re here, Lily.”

Silence.

“James. James is why you are here.”

“James is on assignment,” Lily said tremulously.

“‘On assignment?’ You expect me to believe that you’re crashing here because your husband is on assignment?”

“I expect you to believe the truth, when it comes from your own sister.”

“Did he leave you, Lily?” Petunia demanded scathingly, though her heart ached at the pained look on her younger sister’s face. Don’t feel sorry for her, she reprimanded herself. Lily chose this life. “I’m not the only one with marital problems, am I, Lily?” Petunia goaded.

“You don’t know James,” Lily replied softly.

“You’re right!” Petunia snapped, wiping the kitchen counter with furious intensity. “You’re right!” she repeated shrilly, slamming the cabinet doors closed. “I don’t know James! I don’t know your world!”

A solitary wail erupted from the sitting room, where Dudley had yanked out a fistful of little Harry’s unruly black hair.