Redemption (Dudley Dursley)

VIII. Petunia.

When people look at her, they tend to sneer her way. It doesn't even affect her because she is so used to it from having built up a reputation of being incredibly nosey and never knowing when to keep out of a conversation. The habit hadn't always been there and from her knowledge she was the only person who was aware of why she was like this. Petunia had never even told Dudley the reason, in fact she knows she hasn't told him much at all concerning her own private life. She always protected herself behind a shell and that shell always hid the real Petunia.

It had started just before her twenty-first birthday. When she had woken up expecting to receive the morning post but instead woke up to a letter informing her that her sister had been killed along with her husband (whom she had never really liked) and a basket containing a baby who was only a year old. She knew her life was going to turn around in ways that she wasn't ready for, she was overcome by a giant tsunami of guilt when she picked up the letter. So instead she reasoned she would talk to Vernon about their new problem despite already knowing what his answer was going to be. She didn't even explain everything before her husband had stated that he should be put in an orphanage.

Petunia Dursley- formerly Petunia Evans- had seen his logic and to some extent she agreed with him. Her nephew had been orphaned and it was normal for children who had lost their parents in infantry to be placed in homes. She didn't want this and she knows that this might be her only chance to prove herself. Despite popular belief within her household, she never hated witches or wizards. At least not truly. She hated that she wasn't magic, she hated that she couldn't do the things that those who are magic can do, she hated that she felt so isolated from her sister who was a year older than her, she hated that she was in a sense boring compared to those who possessed the gift of magic.

But she never truly hated witches or wizards. They couldn't help who they were and she realised this now.

Fury? She felt that alright. She was furious that she felt as though she was second best compared to her sister when for ten years of her life she was considered an equal. She hated it when her parents suddenly favoured Lily more simply because she had this extraordinary gift that the majority of people wouldn't even consider to be true.

Anger? She also felt that to the point that even a single mention of the word magic made her blood boil and her body to start convulsing in surges of pure rage. Petunia was furious when she received her reply from when she herself politely sent a letter to a man named Albus Dumbledore asking if she too could go to Hogwarts but had received a very kind rejection in response. She became even more angry when her parents talked to her less, not giving her the attention that a ten-year-old needed. It wasn't that she was neglected because she definitely wasn't but at times it had felt like her parents only gave her attention because they were forced to and not like they genuinely wanted to.

She thinks this was probably where her resentment began for anything involving the magical world. All of that disappeared from her though when she had looked down into the basket that was next to her feet at her sleeping nephew. The gaping cut in his forehead which wasn't bleeding but was definitely reddening to form a permanent scar that would constantly remind her of what had happened on Halloween night, 1981, in Godrics Hollow.

Guilt was the only emotion she felt then but her mind had already been twisted and warped in a way that she genuinely thought that it would never disappear. For almost ten years of her life she had been convincing herself that she wanted nothing to do with Lily anymore and to some extent she can't blame herself because it is a normal reaction when a sibling gets to live a more exciting life than the other. It is logical reasoning but that doesn't mean that her thinking was irrational because it was. After all, it was Petunia who had distanced herself from her sister.