The Living Room
After the war the Dursleys had settled back into 4 Privet Drive with a minimum of fuss, but when Harry finally goes back the For Sale sign outside makes him pause.
"Oh yes," Petunia answers when he asks, "Vernon got a marvellous promotion, we're moving as soon as we can. We've put an offer in on a lovely house - a four bedroom detached in a lovely village..." she trails off as if she suddenly remembers who she is talking to.
It's strange to be drinking tea in the sitting room he was never allowed to sit in, opposite the fireplace where the Weasleys came to fetch him, in the chair where he watched Dumbledore attempt to speak politely to his family who stared, ridged and afraid and so full of hate. The room is bright and light. Harry thinks it should be full of shadows.
Harry dressed smartly for the occasion, hoping it would help, and picked a workday so Vernon would be out. They sip their tea in silence, Harry's new wedding ring clinking awkwardly against the cup. Petunia appears to be contemplating the colours of the walls, and Harry wonders if she is mentally decorating the four-bedroomed village home he will never, ever set foot in.
"It's over then?" Petunia asks suddenly but politely, as though she is enquiring about his health. "I mean - the... the business with - everything."
Harry tries not to laugh, to hear it reduced so, as if the war and everything around it was something you might read in a newspaper, before it was folded away and thrown away.
"Yes," he tells her seriously. "It's over."
"And you - you won," she twists the words out, awkward, hesitant, hating every syllable.
"If I hadn't I would be dead by now," he replies, seriously, omitting the small, minuscule fact that he died anyway.
"Oh. I see." Petunia sips her tea. Harry turns his cup in his hand. "Was it terrible?"
"What?"
"I mean - was it - Lily used to write to me sometimes, before - " Petunia clenches her teacup too hard. "She said it was terrible, sometimes, even when she told me she was getting married, when she said she was pregnant, she would say all these terrible things were happening and then she would tell me that she had felt the baby kick and I would think how could she, when it was so terrible, how could she have a baby when it was all like... like that, but then I was pregnant too, and those terrible things were still happening and I wouldn't have know if she hadn't - "
Harry has stopped listening. She had felt the baby kick, Petunia had said, and has his aunt really forgotten who he is? His heart is trapped in his throat and he puts his teacup down so hard that lukewarm tea splashes out over his hand. Petunia stops speaking.
"She wrote to you?" Harry manages to squeeze out, "she wrote about me?" Oh, he sounds hungry, he sounds desperate. Petunia looks at him like he is a barely-caged monster, which was basically how she had looked at him his whole life, and it makes him want to laugh, and cry, and howl.
"I didn't keep them," she tells him defensively. "Why would I? Vernon would have been so cross, and he would have been right - I didn't want anything to do with it! And then she - and we were left with you! She was so careless, she was always so - so foolish!" There are two bright spots of red on Petunia's cheeks and she looks away sharply to cover the bright glisten in her eyes.
Irrationally, Harry wants to hug her. She never loved him, she didn't raise him, but she did keep him. He wants to hug her because she loved his mother once, and because suddenly he can see all the ways that they look like sisters - the angle of their jaws, the long, narrow fingers, the light in their eyes. He wants to hug her because he remembers being four, (and five, and seven,) and wanting to be hugged so desperately his stomach ached, curled in the dark shadows of his cupboard and listening to the muffled sound of the TV and family outside, stifling rough sobs because he knew how cross they would be if he made a sound.
He remembers that feeling suddenly, feeling sick and watery and choked, and desperately, hopelessly, unspeakably alone. He remembers standing in the damp, dark forest, reaching out in hope to feel only air and his approaching death.
"Do you - do you remember Severus Snape?" Harry didn't know what he was going to say until the words were out of his mouth, and they hang heavy and solid in the air between them. Petunia's forehead creases into a tiny frown.
"The Snape boy? Yes, I - why?"
"He died," Harry tells her. "He loved her, he loved my mother his whole life, he spent his whole life protecting me, because he loved her. And he died, protecting me."
Petunia looks pale.
"Where did you live, back then?"
"Oh - in Yorkshire."
"Where?" Harry presses. "I mean, what was the address, where was it?"
Petunia stands and leaves the room and Harry doesn't know if she is coming back. He twists his wedding band around his finger and then reaches a shaking hand to pick up his teacup but he only sloshes more cold tea over his hand. He wipes it on his jumper and stands up, feeling too tall and large for this room. It seems so small now, the frilly decorations, the mantelpiece of frozen photographs that he'd never found a place on. It seems so far from his life, from this new life he is trying, clumsily, to build.
Standing in the corridor he can hear his aunt upstairs. He glances at the clock - he promised Ginny he'd be home early to go to her parents for dinner. Harry has a good idea why she has arranged this gathering and he's trying not to be terrified.
Harry turns his head at a small frail sound. It sounds like its coming from the stairs, or rather, under them. As if drawn by an accio he finds himself in front of the little cupboard door. He turns the handle experimently and the door still sticks in the bottom left corner, like it always did. With the door ajar, he looks guilty upwards, like his aunt is going to catch him escaping, sneaking out into the real world.
Harry has to stoop over to even look though the door, though he's quite short, relatively speaking. Inside the room is completely, jarringly different from his memories. There's a hoover and a collection of winter coats and what looks like Vernon's toolbox. Harry can't remember where all this stuff was kept when he lived in here. Harry leans in further. There are small slithers of light falling between the stairs but most the cupboard is in darkness. He lived in the shadows, he remembers. He played with the thrown away toys he had saved by touch alone. In the furthest, darkest corner he can hear it, can see it, waving its arms in wild desperation, sobbing a rough, deep cry. It sounds hungry, desperate. It sounds like a barely-caged monster.
He's opening the front door when Petunia comes down the stairs in a rush, heading back towards the sitting room. She looks up as the wind rushes through the open door.
"Oh! Oh - here, I found the address - I - " She shoves the paper at him and draws herself up right (and there, a flash, the memory of his mother as a prefect) "you'd best leave, Vernon will be home soon. We're moving soon. I expect you'll be able to find us, though we won't give you the address." She sniffs contemptuously.
"I won't," Harry promises. "I don't - " He doesn't want them, he doesn't want the sight or the shape their new home anywhere in his memories, he doesn't care. They could move to Mars, for all he cared. He strides out the front door without saying goodbye.