But Esau Have I Hated... by OliveOil_Med
Chapter Notes: There is no place like home for the holidays, especially when that home is shared by two sisters at odds with one another.
Thank you to my new betas, book of secrets and Molly, who has been so helpful with making my story sound more British.
Chapter 4
The First Christmas Holiday
Scents of cranberry, pumpkin, and pine needle floated up from the melting candle wax as Petunia straightened the yellowing lace doily resting beneath a fruit bowl filled with Christmas ornaments. The living room in the Evans’ home was already near spotless, but Petunia had to make it look like she had done something while her parents were away. If it even appeared that Petunia had done nothing but lounge around the house all morning, her parents would never let her stay home from the train station again.
Actually, Petunia was shocked to find herself doing any more cleaning at all. For the past week, she and her mother had been completely sanitizing the house in preparation for Lily’s first Christmas home after her first term at that witch school of hers. And now her parents had gone off to the train station to pick up the little golden child. All morning long, Petunia had heard her mother gushing about all that Lily must have learned and how she would have to get her to put on a show for the whole family. This was because the family knew almost nothing about what Lily had been doing all this time. Mostly because Lily’s letters to their parents were extremely censored compared to the letters Petunia had received, leaving most details of actual magic and wizarding society absent.
Lily had sent the family about three letters since she went to school, each one including a separate letter just for Petunia. Only with her older sister did Lily confide the less than perfect details of her new world She was still picked on by the Slytherins for being a Muggleborn, the boys in her year were still nothing but prats. That ‘Potter boy’ and his friends had even made a new game of seeing how many beetles they could tangle in her hair during Potions; and how every day so far for Lily had been met with general shock and confusion. The letters that were written to Petunia were written in a fashion which showed that Lily still considered her older sister to be someone she could confide in.
Secretly, the letters and the tone in which they were written disgusted Petunia, yet she found herself saving every one of them in one of the empty drawers of Lily’s desk. Part of Petunia’s mind told her that if ever need be, she could use these letters to prove to their parents that their perfect little witch daughter was very much a little liar. So far, though, she had found no occasion to do so.
Speaking of which, convinced that the living room could be straightened anymore than it already had been, Petunia made her way for the staircase with the intent of going up to her bedroom. But there was even less to do in terms of cleaning in the bedroom than there had been everywhere else in the house. After all, Petunia was the only one who lived in this room now. She was the one who was always in control of what went in and what went out, leaving no room for surprising anything unexpected.
Petunia sunk down onto the perfectly made sheets of her sister’s bed for no other reason Petunia could think of other than it was the one she was closest to. Sideways, with her legs still dangling over the edge of the bed, Petunia rested her head on the feather pillow. The cool cotton carried fragments of the winter chill, but still did nothing to bring Petunia out of the sudden feeling of fatigue that now griped her scrawny, somewhat frail body.
She curled her spine with her legs still hanging straight, almost like a contortionist. She could see how pale her skin was, how her thin bones poked out, extremely pronounced. Petunia felt a sudden pang of disgust in her stomach. She had seen photographs of prisoners of war that looked less piqued that she did right now. But despite these feelings, she could not find the energy to push herself up off the bed and stop staring at what gave her these feelings. She could not figure it out. She had heard that a lot of people would actually get depressed in the winter; something about the lack of sunlight cutting off vitamins. Maybe she had something like that.
Suddenly, from downstairs, she heard the front door slam shut from the force of the cold wind. A cluster of rushing voices could easily be heard at the foot of the staircase. A few key words that Petunia could pick out from the conversation were ‘Charms homework’, ‘points’, ‘shopping’, and much to Petunia’s disgust, ‘Sev’.
Lily was home, and Petunia could hardly afford to be seen in the state she was in. Using all the strength she had to spare, she pushed herself up off her little sister’s bed.
Petunia nearly went downstairs, though with every intention of stalling as long as she could, but then turned around and saw the rumpled mess she had left the sheets in. Seeing an opportunity to delay having to make herself a part of the cheesy family spectacle, she immediately began smoothing the sheets back. Again and again, she worked silently, almost compulsively so. She became so absorbed in the task in front of her, in fact, she nearly felt herself jump out of her skin when a pair of arms came up from behind her and take a constricting hold around her midsection.
“Tuney!” Lily exclaimed as she threw her arms around her. “It’s so wonderful to see you!”
As soon as Petunia caught her breath and felt her heartbeat return to normal, she finally turned around to meet her little sister.
But when she cast her eyes down, she barely recognized the little girl standing before her. Sure, she was wearing a knit jumper she had seen her little sister wear on several occasions and the hems of her blue jeans were dirty and frayed, just like every single pair that Lily owned. And yet, the child she saw now appeared nothing like the child her younger sister, or any child she had ever passed in the cluttered, industrial town they called home.
Lily seemed to be glowing. Her eyes were bright and her toothy smile shone in a way that caught every fragment of light in the room. She had an ethereal air about her now, making the surrounding scenery seem all the more dingy and dull, even after all the toil that had been done in preparing for her arrival. When had all this happened? Petunia had been certain she had never noticed her sister taking this effect on her former home before.
“Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” Lily asked when her sister wouldn’t answer her. Even her voice had a bright sound to it.
“Hello, Lily,” Petunia remarked dryly with the same tone one would use when running into someone unpleasant on the street. “It’s so wonderful to have you home.”
If Lily sensed this animosity, she certainly didn’t let onto it. Instead, she grasped her sister’s hand and began leading her back towards the doorway.
“C’mon, Tuney,” Lily said, dragging her older sister out of the bedroom and towards the staircase. “Let’s go. I only just barely spoke to Mummy and Daddy about school. I wanted to find you first though.”
And before Petunia could think of any form of protest, she found herself ascending the lower half of the staircase, with their parents waiting for them. Jumping the last three steps to the floor, Lily rushed into her mother’s waiting arms to be caught up in yet another hug, probably the thousandth she had already had today. And once her mother had the opportunity to embrace their younger daughter, then their father needed his turn as well. Sighing, Petunia took a seat on the bottom step and waited patiently for the family to finished the little love fest.
“Petunia,” their mother called out to her once they were finally done, “let’s go into the kitchen. I think there may be some Mince pies waiting on the counter.”
A small squeal of excitement escaped through Lily’s clench teeth. Hopping along like a little terrier, she followed her mother with the promise of sweets. Eventually, Petunia pushed herself up off the steps and followed the rest of her family. In truth, she had no interest in cookies and she doubted her uneasy stomach could keep anything down even if she did.
The kitchen was just as clean as the rest of the house, the floors probably clean enough to eat off. But the table was polished to a gleaming shine, the reflections of everyone seen perfectly as though it were a mirror. In the very center, a plate of pies was stacked in a neat arrangement. Blue, green, yellow, and red hundreds-and-thousands sparkled like treasures and the family members treating them as such once their mother handed them to all of them.
“So tell us all about all you have been doing at school,” their mother said, placing another pie in front of her youngest daughter. “Don’t leave out a single detail.”
After taking a very large bite of the sweet, Lily began telling the family all about her exciting new life, fragments of pastry and red hundreds-and-thousands spraying across the kitchen table as she did so.
“Transfiguration is pretty hard. So far, we’ve only been doing small transformations, like turning toothbrushes into hair brushes. For our final examination, we’re going to have to turn a hedgehog into a pin cushion, so I’ve been doing some practicing on my own.”
“Then how about a little demonstration?” their father suggested as he slid the remaining pies onto the tabletop and handed the empty plate to his witch daughter. “What do you think you’ll be able to turn this into?”
“Well, actually we’re not supposed to use magic outside of school,” Lily explained solemnly. “There are laws about it and everything.”
At first, their father seemed disappointed, like a small child who had been denied sweets at the supermarket. But their mother elbowed him and his expression soon shifted. “Oh, that’s alright. Do you girls know what I feel like doing tonight? Going out to dinner, I’m paying. This last part was added in a joking manner, as though there were someone else who was going to pay. “Everybody out to the car!”
Once again, Lily squealed in excitement, cramming her last pie into her mouth. Their parents pushed themselves away from the table and made their way towards the coat cupboard to get the family coats.
But as soon as their parents were gone, Lily leaned in to whisper to her sister, “But Sev says that these days, the Ministry of Magic is so busy with other things, that almost nobody is paying attention to what students are doing while they’re away from Hogwarts.”
Lily’s eyes scanned the kitchen from left to right before finally rushing towards the sink. Rolling up the sleeve of her jumper, she fished out a still damp teacup and ran back to her sister. First drying it with the rosy red yarn of her jumper, she set it down on the table and pulled her willow wand from her jeans pocket.
“Watch this,” she said, giving the cup two gentle taps with her wand.
Before Petunia could get a word in edgewise, the white porcelain morph into a rather large, furry white rat.
At the shock of what had just happened, Petunia could not help herself; she screamed. She knew that her sister had to have learned to do something while she was away at that school of hers, but to actually see it with her own eyes…
The rat made its way towards the edge of the table and stood on its hind legs to sniff in Petunia’s direction. Once again, a scream that could have shattered glass echoed through the small kitchen.
“Sorry, I’m sorry!” Lily cringed as she apologized. Tapping the rat with her wand once again, the rat shifted back into the delicate china cup before their mother could even respond to the shrieks of her daughter.
“Petunia, Lily, what wrong?”
“Nothing, Mummy.” Lily tried to appear calm as she lied through her teeth. “Tuney thought she saw a rat, but it was just the teacup.”
Assured that nothing was wrong, their mouth let a sigh of relief escape her lips. “Petunia, you really must look more carefully before you scream like that. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Yes,” Petunia answered, lying through clenched teeth as well. “Silly me.”
In town, the high street was an overdone display of tacky Christmas cheer. Ribbons and tinsel of bright red and green stood out brightly against the snowy-white scenery while felt reindeer and elves watched the shoppers pass by with their dead glass eyes. Lily made sure to take the liberty of telling both Petunia and their mother that real elves looked nothing like the somewhat creepy-looking decorations that graced the entrances of most shops.
Their mother led them through shop after shop, gradually working her way through a long list of names to buy gifts for. In most shops, she would encourage her two daughters to run off by themselves so they could buy little trinkets for their school friends. Every time their mother said this, however, Petunia would always think to herself that this was exactly how little girls ended up getting kidnapped and taken away to Portugal.
Petunia herself only had a few girls she considered herself friendly enough with buy Christmas gifts for. Girls who dressed more or less alike, repeated the same conversations day after day at the lunch hour, and seemed devoid of any real individuality or personality. But they had the human ability to speak and they offered Petunia someone to talk to in the secondary school halls; all that Petunia was really looking for in companionship anyway.
In one store, while debating between a fruit-flavored toy lipstick and a plastic compact mirror, Lily made a point of telling her sister about every person she had said hi to since she had been at school.
“Natalie said she wants blue jeans,” Lily said as she rummaged through the discount bin. “It’s a good thing she doesn’t know a lot about fashion. She has some Muggle pieces already, but she has no idea of how to wear them, so she always end up looking completely ridiculous. Mary just said she wants lots of different kinds of Muggle sweets. She the one who first got me to try Bertiebott’s Every Flavor Beans. Sometimes you get these really horrid flavors like blood or moss, but mostly they’re good. I’ll get her something chocolate, something gummy, maybe something sour. Maybe I should get her something rotten-tasting, like sardines, and tell her they’re sweets! Or better yet, we could give them to Potter and tell him they’re sweets…”
On and on, Lily rattled while Petunia pretended to listen only half as well as she truly was. She found herself waiting for her younger sister to tell her about magic. If she couldn’t experience it for herself, the least Lily could do was paint a picture of it all for her. But for as long as Lily spoke, she never said a word about her wand or her classes or anything about what she had learned. To hear her talk, you would never know Lily was a witch or that her school was anything special. Her sister’s words soon became no different that the chattering noise that Petunia heard everyday in the school halls.
“…maybe I’ll get something for Remus Lupin too. He’s not so obnoxious as the rest of the Gryffindor boys. At least he actually does his schoolwork most of the time. Besides, he always seems so sad and tired all the time. I wonder if…”
This was all becoming very annoying very fast. Probably what was wearing on Petunia’s nerves wasn’t that Lily spoke like every other idiotic eleven-year-old in the world when she was anything but. What it really was, she was beginning to realize more and more, was that Lily was still behaving as though nothing had happened between the two sisters. Petunia thought that after her being snubbed by that witch school of hers and the fight she had instigated at Kings Cross, the girls would not even make eye contact with one another during the school holiday. It wouldn’t have made Petunia happy in so many words, but it would have been a reaction she would have expected.
But, as usual, Lily was using her ability to use the unexpected to her advantage.
“Lily, will you be quiet for once in your life?”
Lily flinched as though her sister had snapped her teeth at her.
“Alright,” she spoke softly in almost a whimper.
Then arriving just in time to miss the whole scene, their mother strolled over to her two children, arms completely filled with wrapped presents.
“Girls, do you have everything you need?” she asked her two daughters.
“Yes, Mummy,” Petunia answered quickly for the two of them.
“Alright,” their mother said. “Well, then let’s go on to another shop.”
Without waiting for another word, Petunia followed her mother out of the shop, not even waiting to see if Lily had left too. For all they knew, they could have left Lily in that store with the chance of never seeing her again. For the rest of the day, the two sisters did not speak, not even during the car ride home. The either kept their eyes forward or out their own windows, all conversation going through their mother. Their mother did not even seem to notice, her own eyes busy on the snow falling on the street and her own thoughts on the Christmas season.
The peachy-pink in the wallpaper of the girls’ bedroom offered a warm glow, creating a type of sanctuary from the bitter cold that the sisters had been enduring all week. Identical mugs of hot chocolate rested in each girl’s hand, warming them on the outside, but doing nothing for the inner chill. In many ways, the scene might have resembled a picture perfect postcard for the holiday season, but the animosity between the two sisters carried a chill that could have frozen rapid water.
Lily’s school truck rested at the foot of her bed, her sheets already a rumpled mess, and stacks of spell books and pieces of loose parchment weighted down by quills and an ink well covered her desk. About half of her stuffed animals had been pulled out from under her bed and thrown over the covers. In less than a week, Lily had completely reclaimed the room she had abandoned earlier this autumn; behaving as though she could just as easily live in that magical little world of hers, and yet easily come back to her old family as though nothing ever happened.
“Tuney,” Lily spoke suddenly, bringing her older sister out of her thoughts, “can we talk?”
Petunia made a noncommittal grunting sound that Lily must have taken as a yes, because she kept speaking.
“Tuney, I can’t help being a witch,” Lily said in a sympathetic voice that only succeeded in making Petunia’s blood boil.
Lily didn’t mean a word of this. It was all so fake. These weren’t even her sister’s words. They were drawn from the mouth of someone else, only being repeated by Lily, like a parrot or a record player.
“Well, aren’t we so well rehearsed?” Petunia spat. “Who taught you all these big new words?”
At this, Lily’s eyes shifted down and began shuffling her bare feet against the bedroom floor. “Professor McGonagall,” she muttered under her breath.
“But still,” Lily continued on, though in a somewhat weaker sounding tone, “you don’t have to be so mad at me. You don’t have to treat me the way you have.”
“Me?” Petunia exclaimed, shocked. “You’re the one who ran of and left me here!”
Lily stared dumbfounded at her sister, as though she could not believe the accusation Petunia had thrown at her. As though it were a complete surprise.
“I tried to get the school to take you too, but Professor Dumbledore said I was the only one in our family with magic!”
“Yes, and that makes our precious, little Lily oh, so special!” Petunia spoke in a mocking tone. “It isn’t her fault she was the only one graced with such wonderful abilities that didn’t even touch her only sister!”
But Petunia didn’t stop there. All the feelings she had been holding in since her younger sister left came bursting out as though from a broken dam.
“That hasn’t stopped you from throwing the fact in my face every chance you get,” Petunia shouted, on the verge of screaming. “Using magic out of school, even though you aren’t supposed to””
“You, Mummy, and Daddy asked to see it!” Lily protested.
Still, Petunia continued on, “Pointing out everything the use ordinary and unworthy have wrong about stupid little things like Christmas decorations””
Lily might have protested more, had her words not continually seemed to be getting caught in her throat. So she just sat their, forced to hear her older sister berate her character.
“”not shutting up once about all your wonderful, glorious friends at your new freak school,” Petunia kept going on and on, “and not missing and opportunity to tell the rest of us ordinary people all about how inferior we are to her mighty witchyness!”
Suddenly, the hot chocolate mug came crashing to the floor, creating a horrible mess all over the polished floor. But Lily hardly seemed to notice the terrible state she had created as she bolted from her chair and raced out into the hallway, gulping for breath as she wiped desperately at her eyes.
“What? Can’t stand to hear the truth?” Petunia shouted out the doorway after her little sister. “Freak!”
Knowing that it would only be a matter of moments before the hot chocolate set into the floor as a stain, Petunia crotched down to the ground and began picking up the pieces of broken porcelain. As she began wiping up the spilt drink with a used bath towel, she waited for one of their parents to burst through the door and yell at her for the words she had said to her little sister. The floor was spotless, if not slightly sticky, soon enough, but their parents never arrived. And Lily never even came back to their bedroom that night either.
But Petunia hardly felt surprised. Nothing seemed to surprise her anymore.
Christmas came and went with Petunia barely noticing it. Sure, there were a lot of beautiful presents under the tree waiting to be opened the Christmas goose was delicious, as always; but the entire day seemed to pass, as though a dream.
The rest of the Christmas holiday passed much like Petunia had first expected it to. The two sisters lived in the same house, slept in the same bedroom, but barely acknowledged one another’s presence. Petunia on one side, pouring over algebra equations and The Lord of the Flies, while Lily sat on the other, her work consisting of spell memorization and Potions and History of Magic essays.
When it was time to bring Lily back to the train station, Petunia once again elected not to go. Lily did not even protest, much to the puzzlement of the parents. The two girls did not say good-bye to one another when it was time to leave and did not shed a tear over the departure.
This would be the relationship the sisters would share for many years to come.