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Author: Bronte Story: The Last Month Before Hogwarts Rating: Everyone Setting: Pre-OotP Status: Completed Reviews: 5 Words: 12,266
The usual disclaimer applies. Harry and co belong to J.K.R. I’m just playing in the Potterverse and I’m not making any profit. Harry was staring out the window, wondering if Hedwig was going to show up again tonight. She had been gone a couple of days now and he was starting to get worried. She had been gone this long before but part of him still didn’t believe that he deserved such a beautiful owl and was just waiting for something to go wrong. He looked down at the labels in his lap. Aunt Petunia had shoved a package at him after dinner. When he got upstairs and opened it he found it was a roll of H. J. Potter labels to sew onto his school robes, she’d even put in a needle and a roll of thread. He was meant to be sewing them on at the moment. As he stared into the night Harry found himself contemplating the moon. It was full and silver. Harry wondered if he would see a werewolf out the window if he watched long enough, then snorted at his stupidity. Werewolves were wizarding folk and there weren’t likely to be any wizards in boring old Little Whinging. He bet he was the only one for miles. Anyway the book said that they were normal and sane the rest of the time, when they were human, normal sane people wouldn’t have a reason to visit Little Whinging, there’s nothing to see, unless you knew someone who lived there. Harry picked up the needle, a name tag and one of his robes and started sewing again. He had only managed one label so far, and that had taken him nearly half an hour. He had remember what Aunt Petunia had said about not getting him any more school things so he was being very careful, and he didn’t want to stick himself with the needle either. Holding the label in place with his thumb while he stuck the needle through it the label appeared J. Potter, like his dad. Harry knew he had been given his fathers name, James, as a middle name, but only because he had seen his birth certificate last year when the Dursleys had been enrolling him in Stonewall Comprehensive for the coming autumn. Harry was glad not to be being sent there. Harry didn’t know much about his dad. He had been a wizard, a good one according to Hagrid; he had looked like Harry did; he’d been Head Boy at Hogwarts; and Aunt Petunia seemed to think he was a layabout scoundrel. Harry didn’t think that could be true; a layabout scoundrel didn’t leave a vault full of money behind. A layabout had none, and spent any he had. Mr Ollivander had said something about his wand being good for transfiguration too, but what that said about James, Harry didn’t know. Harry finished sewing the name tag onto his robe and packed the needle away carefully. He didn’t want to loose it and then roll on it in his sleep. Needle carefully tucked into the remaining nametags and put on top of his trunk, Harry pulled out a quill and careful not to let any ink drip onto his bed crossed the 25th of August off his chart. Climbing into bed Harry decided that tomorrow he would ask Aunt Petunia about his Mum, he’d waited long enough. ***** Harry hung around after breakfast the next morning helping Aunt Petunia with the dishes. “Aunt Petunia, My mum went to my school, right?” Aunt Petunia looked closely at him, then turned back to the dishes and nodded sharply. “And she wouldn’t have gone till she was my age, so you must have spent a lot of time with her before then. What was she like? Harry blurted. Aunt Petunia froze with her rubber-gloved hands still in the dishwater. Harry waited. She wasn’t yelling or telling him to go to his room, so he waited. And hoped. As long as she wasn’t refusing to answer his question she could still decide to answer. Harry saw her shoulder relax and heard her take a deep breath. When Aunt Petunia started to speak it was in a very tightly controlled tone, “Yes, we grew up together. But the Lily I knew went away to that school was replaced by a freak who came back for the summers. My Lily was normal. My Lily would never think that turning teacups into rats was normal. My Lily fell out of a window and thought that she was lucky not to get hurt. She didn’t think that it was normal for children to bounce OFF THE PAVEMENT!” Aunt Petunia was getting visibly upset but she kept going, her voice starting to wobble. “My parents appeared not to notice the turn for the worse. The new Lily must have cast a spell on them. They didn’t need me after that, not with a witch for a daughter ‘Isn’t magic wonderful’, they said. ‘We’re so lucky to have a witch in the family,’ they thought. ‘PITY WE DIDN’T GET TWO” “Then she brought that other freak home and said they were getting married. That’s when I knew. I had to get away from her; she and the new freak were just going to take away any chance of normality I was going to get. They would steal our parents away from me. And they did, oh not all at once, but very sneakily, magical present here, amazing potion there and slowly but surely they took them away. Mum and Dad couldn’t see it; they kept telling me that everything was the same, pretending that they weren’t playing favourites.” Aunt Petunia turned to face Harry and kept on going. “And finally when I had the chance to get them back, I was going to give them their first grandchild. I told them about my darling baby, I was going to get them back, when YOU had to come along. My nice normal child could never compare to a freak like you. No, a normal child wasn’t good enough; it had to be a magical one. I never got the chance to prove them wrong. Never go to show them how good my darling baby could be, because then your kind killed them. My Duddy is without grandparents because of FREAKS like YOU!” By this stage Aunt Petunia was quite red in the face, and at the last sentence collapsed into a chair, sobbing into her arms on the table. Harry was quite taken aback. He had never seen Aunt Petunia lose control like that. Sure, she had yelled at him dozens of times, but never quite like that. He got the feeling that she wasn’t really yelling at him but that didn’t make sense. Who else would she be yelling at? Harry wasn’t quite sure what to do. Remembering something he had overheard at Mrs Figg’s once, he set up the teapot, and turned the kettle on. Maybe Aunt Petunia would feel better after a cup of tea. He put the teapot on the table, and slunk out of the kitchen. He had a lot to think about. ***** Petunia left her head on her arms breathing deeply as she came back to herself. She shouldn’t have yelled like that. It wouldn’t do to have Harry see her like that again. She’d never be able to keep control of the boy. It was a good thing that Dudley was out playing with his friend Piers. Petunia lifted up her head and saw the teapot on the table. She vaguely recalled hearing the kettle whistle too. Getting up she found the kettle still hot. Good; the tea wouldn’t take long. Petunia sat down at the table again to wait for the tea to steep. She could do with a cup of tea right now. What was the boy thinking, asking about his mother? She had made it perfectly clear that that sort of questions were not appreciated. She had tried to discourage him from finding out about the wizarding side of the family. All her good work had come to nought. That giant of a man turned up, after all those letters. She had told Vernon that they would just keep coming; she knew how their minds worked. And now Harry was going to go off to “That” school just like Lily had done. Lily. She had been different before going to That school. Her little sister. Lily had been adorable when she was little. Always so polite and how she had loved Petunia. Petunia remembered her sitting on the end of her bed watching Petunia do her hair and put on makeup before Petunia’s first real dance. That would have been the year before The Letter came. Lily had begged Petunia to let her put some makeup on too and she had finally given in, handing Lily an old lipstick. Lily had worn it every time Petunia had gone out leaving her at home for the next three months. Petunia wiped a tear away and reached for the teapot. It was silly crying. Lily was gone; she had been dead for nearly ten years, and lost to Petunia ten years before that. Petunia could still remember going with her parents to King’s Cross Station to collect Lily from school after her first year. She had even brought her a present of a brand new lipstick to welcome her home. Petunia had sometimes found Lily annoying, like all little sisters were, but it had been quiet all year with Lily gone. Lily had bounced out of the wall between platforms, (so unnatural coming through walls like that) and after hugging them all dragged them over to introduce them to her friends. Petunia was shocked that she didn’t seem to have missed them at all. She had hung back behind Lily’s trolley, looking after her trunk. On the way home Lily had talked non-stop about her classes, flying lessons and that broomstick game. Flying lessons! It sounded positively dangerous hovering around with only a broom between you and the ground. Her parents had asked Lily all sorts of questions about school. Questions they never bothered to ask Petunia. That was the start of it. All summer they always did what Lily wanted. Her parents explained it away easily enough; Lily didn’t get a chance to do things like go to the cinema during the school year whereas Petunia could go anytime. Same with ten-pin bowling, and roller-skating, and swimming. It didn’t change the fact that they always did what Lily wanted. Petunia had vowed never to let Dudley feel like she had. She would never let Harry push Dudley out of his place. So she had started as she meant to go on; Harry would know his place. She would never let Harry think that he was special and deserved everything he wanted just because was magical. Her Dudley may not be able to wave a wand, but he was magical to her and nothing was going to change that. Petunia sipped her tea and stared at the table. Petunia didn’t miss Lily much these days. She had had twenty years to get used to being without her little sister; but her life would have been much easier if she hadn’t up and died. She wouldn’t have Harry to start with, she’d still have had her parents. She wouldn’t have to be reminded of the sister she lost to another world at age eleven every time Harry looked at her. She didn’t see James when he looked at her, though goodness knows they were alike enough to be twins. It was those eyes, Lily’s eyes, her mother’s eyes. Petunia reached for her handkerchief to wipe away the tears streaming down her face. Would she ever get the chance to go a day without being reminded what “Those” people had taken away from her. Maybe it was for the best that Harry was going away. At least she would get some relief from the memories. ***** Harry sat on his bed thinking. Not about school, nor anything magical. Harry was thinking about his parents. He didn’t really know much about who he was and where he was from. What was he thinking going to a wizarding school? He may have wizarding parents but he’d been brought up in the least magical house possible. Hagrid had said it wouldn’t matter, that he’d be fine, that loads of kids start out with no knowledge of magic and they do just fine. His mum had grown up in a non-magic house and Hagrid had said she had been Head Girl so she must have done okay. That made Harry feel slightly better. Aunt Petunia had said his mum had changed at school. Well, she had actually said that a different person had come back, but Harry didn’t think she really meant a different person, just a changed one. She had said his Mum had had lots of friends. Harry thought it would be nice to have friends, even just one. Harry had never had a friend before, when he was little Dudley had sat on anyone who was nice to Harry, and now everyone was just too scared of Dudley to even say anything nice to him. No-one would know Dudley at Hogwarts so he had a chance. His mum had had lots of friends according to Aunt Petunia, and Hagrid had said that everyone had loved her and his dad, so Harry didn’t know what to make of what Aunt Petunia had said about them stealing her parents away. The two didn’t seem to match up. Maybe Aunt Petunia didn’t mean it, maybe she had just been upset. Maybe Aunt Petunia was right and she was the only one who had realised it. Harry went back to worrying about Hogwarts. Despite what Hagrid had told him, he was a little bit scared, what if they decided to send him home again? Harry didn’t think he could take living at the Dursley’s now he had been given the chance not to. Especially not the way they were acting now. Dudley ran away any time Harry came near and Uncle Vernon ignored him. He didn’t know how Aunt Petunia was going to react next time he saw her. The boy in the robe shop had said he thought magic should be kept in the old wizarding families. Was he one of them? He knew that his Mum hadn’t been from a wizarding family, but what about his dad? Was Potter a wizarding name? Apparently everyone in the wizarding world knew of his family. They were famous after all, you could tell from what had happened in the Leaky Cauldron; what Harry now wanted to know was were they famous just because of the thing when he was a baby, or had his parents been famous already? Would the name Potter mean anything to anyone if he hadn’t survived that curse? Would he belong at Hogwarts if there were people who thought it should only be for the children of old wizarding families? Harry was scared, but he knew whatever happened at his new school, it couldn’t be worse than staying here and not knowing. ***** Harry looked at his chart. It was his last day with the Dursley’s and in a couple of hours he would draw that last cross over the 31st. Things hadn’t exactly been pleasant the last few days, Dudley had kept running away from Harry, Uncle Vernon kept on ignoring him, and now Aunt Petunia had joined in, like he didn’t exist and couldn’t do anything to them if they didn’t look at him. Aunt Petunia still told him what to do a couple of times a day but she hadn’t looked him in the eye since that day in the kitchen. Harry was carefully packing his trunk, his books at the bottom and his school robes on the top where he could get to them easily to change in to them once he was among other wizarding people. He was done. There was only one thing left for him to do… “On the last day of August he thought he’d better speak to his Aunt and Uncle about getting to King’s Cross Station the next day, so he went down to the living room, where they were watching a quiz show on television. He cleared his throat to let them know he was there, and Dudley screamed and ran from the room. ‘Er – Uncle Vernon?’…” PS/SS pp67 UK edition. A/N: As you may have gathered my take on Petunia is that she still feels guilty for hating Lily when they were younger, when Petunia felt marginalised by her parents. I’ve made Petunia the elder sister, because I felt it works better given that Dudley is a month older than Harry. Otherwise Petunia would have had him at the age of about 18/19, married at 17/18. A/N2: This is it. I hope you’ve enjoyed my little diversion. I have another story in the works. A seventh-year fic in collaboration with my pre-beta we’re still bashing out the details but I hope to have the outline done within the next month, Real Life permitting.
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