Perfectly Normal
The inhabitants of Number 4 Privet Drive were perfectly normal, thank you very much. The house’s self-proclaimed head was a beefy man with a bushy moustache and very little neck, co-owner of a very respectable carpentry company called Grunnings. His wife was a petite lady that everyone thought would be very pretty if only her eyes were a little less sunken in and her neck were a little shorter, who spent most of her time volunteering at the local library and tending to her beloved son while her husband was at work.
Petunia and Vernon Evans-Dursley, plus their tiny son Dudley, had a very happy life, all things considered. Pictures of a redheaded woman and her taller, blue-eyed sister adorned the couple’s bedroom, and a tiny, moving picture of a black-haired baby waved from the bottom of her bedside table. Magic had been a part of her life, you see, for a very long time. A Squib, they called her in the letters home from her sister’s school, a person with a magical relative but very little or no magic at all. Her dear sister, bless her heart, seemed so worried that Petunia would blame her for throwing her into such an unnatural world.
In another universe, maybe she would have.
In this universe, Petunia took one look at her baby sister’s tearful expression and decided then and there that she was the luckiest girl in the world to have a witch for a younger sister.
And then there was that boy; that short, black-haired boy that reeked of neglect and abuse that her dear sister befriended a year before that letter arrived. He dropped a branch on Petunia, once. (She was still bitter about that, even if she did deserve it for spying on them having a private conversation.) Her sister cried, he cried, and Petunia decided that this one was alright, really.
Their parents barely batted an eye when they brought him home that afternoon, tear-stained cheeks red with laughter as they trooped into Petunia’s room because it was bigger and had a carpet, and Severus had never felt carpet before. However, when Severus tripped on said carpet and his baggy shirt flipped up to reveal angry red stripes down his back, Harrison and Katerina Evans brought in an overflowing plate of fruit and coaxed some painkillers into Severus’s strawberry-stained hands.
Lily was too young to be included in the conversation that was had in the kitchen when Severus was sent home, but fifteen-year-old Petunia was not. Petunia knew what the word “abuse” meant, knew that parents yelling all the time and hitting and withholding food was abuse, knew that Severus’s too-skinny wrists and barely-disguised winces when he was touched meant abuse. Katerina told her in her sternest voice that since she was the eldest sibling, it was her job to tell her and Harrison if she saw something bad. Under no circumstances was she to do anything herself, her mother warned her, and she nodded as earnestly as she could. (If Tobias Snape’s car suddenly refused to start the morning after the conversation and Severus had to stay at their place another night while he got it fixed, that was between Petunia, her engineering textbook, and her favourite pair of pliers.)
When Petunia watched him laugh his way up their driveway the summer after Lily’s first year, skin with a healthy glow and elbows less pointy, she smiled and wrapped both of her younger siblings into a hug. Lily squealed and flailed in her sister’s grasp and Severus hugged her back with barely a pause, and Petunia smiled wider. When her parents put up a Slytherin banner in the spare room and forced Severus to leave his trunk at the end of the bed, it was probably telling that he didn’t really put up a fight.
The pair were twelve and thirteen when they brought home a story of lords and ladies and heirs and heiresses. The magical world had a government (which surprised Petunia more than she would have liked to admit) and it was run by the richest, poshest, most stuck-up people ever, if Lily was to be believed. They had a lord in their year, Lily stage-whispered, and Severus laughed and stuck up his nose in an imitation of a boy named Burke. Petunia copied him, sipping her tea in her best impression of the queen and sparking hysterics from the pair, and she grinned from behind her mug.
Lily was not very happy to learn that lords and ladies of proper standing were pureblooded, and was even less happy at the traditions surrounding lordships keeping change from happening. However, stubborn Lily was nothing if not determined to break tradition, and strode onto the Hogwarts Express with a vicious glint in her eye and the knowledge of how to politely insult everyone she talked to.
Over the third-year Christmas break, Lily’s angry little smile told Petunia everything she needed to know, and was dragged with Severus to practise their pureblood-faces, just in case! Severus was very good at it, but Petunia could barely stop giggling at her little sister’s face to try.
In their fourth year, when Petunia turned nineteen, Severus wrote her a shaky letter. Death Eaters wasn’t a term she had ever heard before, but her baby brother’s terror all but ensured she would never forget it. She replied with a calm viciousness and with a book on curses she wrote herself in a cypher the three had made. Severus’s later letters showed no such shake in his spidery writing.
Then, her wonderful, gentle sister wrote a letter home stained with tears in the middle of her fifth year, and Petunia saw red. A flaming red letter landed on Severus Snape’s plate at breakfast the next day. Truly, he should have known better than to ignore her advice, she had written furiously, and had he forgotten that she knew just as many curses as he did? He should get off his arse and use his wand, for goodness sake, and stop fraternising with people that hate him! (Severus all but ran from the Slytherin table where he was sitting between a Malfoy and a Black, and hugged a furious redhead.)
Lily tumbled out of the fireplace that evening into the Evans’s living room, screaming bloody murder at Petunia before hugging the life out of her, and Petunia finally knew she had made the right choice when she sat at her desk with her pen, and thought please, please do this one thing for me, I know I’m not magical but my genius little witch Lily is, so help me God, and tied a smoking letter to Lily’s owl.
Severus got his name changed that summer, after numerous and sincere apologies to Petunia, who got so annoyed that she punched him after his fiftieth sorry. (She still went to the Ministry with him, as did Lily, but it was the principle of the matter.) Severus Prince, he said proudly, and Lily all but wept with happiness and wrapped him in a hug. Petunia was privately more relieved than concerned that Tobias Snape had mysteriously passed away not a week prior.
Severus still visited his mother, sometimes. Eileen Prince was not a nice woman by any definition of the word, but she made an effort for her son, and Petunia could appreciate that.
And then Lily brought a boy home - a tall, brash mess of a man with glasses and untameable hair - who grated on Petunia’s last nerve. “Lily,” she had pleaded. “I would have preferred you to bring home Sirius over this idiot!” Lily had laughed and pointed at Petunia’s boyfriend, about whom she herself had said something very similar not a month ago, and Petunia fell silent.
She never really did approve of James Potter, but, then again, neither did Lily about Vernon. And yet, they cried tears of joy at each other's weddings, hugging each other’s husbands and laughing as Sirius Black shot fireworks out of his wand, Severus staring on with a long-suffering expression. Petunia was sure she still had that photo somewhere, beaming with joy even after the charm to make it move wore off. Her wonderful, strange family was a duality, magical and muggle, and she wouldn’t change it for the world.
She smiled wistfully down at the picture of her sister’s son, a tiny shock of black hair with green eyes Petunia would swear till her dying day glowed with his magic. She had never met him; the war had stolen her wonderful Lily’s time and James’s nerves and the family’s safety, and this picture was the last thing Petunia had received from them before they went into hiding.
She wouldn't know the name of the man that was stealing her sister away until Lily’s dying day, as she opened her door on the first day of November, expecting milk, only to see her nephew and a note in a basket instead.
Her scream woke the neighbourhood.
Marlene from Number 6 sprinted out of her house in nothing but her nightgown and a silk hair wrap, wielding a crowbar, only to drop it and collapse next to a weeping Petunia. She gathered up an infant in her arms and held his stiff, bone-white little fingers to her face, feeling his pulse, as her wife called the police.
The paramedics said that he would have died from hypothermia if he were left in the cold for even an hour longer.