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Petunia Dursley gives birth to twins on the twenty-third of June.
Twin boys lie in her arms as her husband Vernon beams proudly at her side. She takes one look at the siblings and promises she will never treat one of them better than the other. She will not force her boys to suffer from the same feelings of jealousy and inadequacy that she did with her sister. Most of all, they will be perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Lily Potter miscarries just a week later. Her baby is stillborn and with the exception of her husband and Alice Longbottom nobody knows of the horrible tragedy. She retreats from the war and isolates herself completely. She is not seen while she mourns. In desperation, she calls up her sister, only to find no remorse from the happy mother of two. Petunia thinks her children are like Lily’s magic. Only she has risen above the pain and hatred and created a happy and normal life for herself. Her sister probably won’t recover before that silly war of her sends her to the fires of hell.
Her world shatters on the thirtieth of July, when her youngest twin cries out for his stolen teddy and the toy just catapults towards him through the air, slipping from the grips of her oldest.
She separates the children with extreme prejudice, clutching a sleeping Dudley against her chest as she flees the house, away from that thing.
Petunia sits down on the bench across from her house, covered by the summer sun. She sits there for hours until Vernon returns home from work and waves him over.
“Tuney, what is the matter with you?” he asks, ever the doting father and husband.
“My sister’s Freakishness,” she chokes out, unable to say the true word and make it real. “He has it too.” She sobs, and Vernon takes a moment to look down the street.
“Not here,” he hisses, and drags her to the house. Once inside, he looks around. “Where is he?”
“In there,” she whispers, her voice trembling. She points at the cupboard under the stairs. The crying is audible now, soft only because his voice is weak from hours of screaming for his mother.
Petunia calls her sister.
She hasn’t even hung up the phone when there is a weird bang at the door and Lily freakishly appears inside her house.
“Tuney?” she asks cautiously, that stick held in front of her as if it can protect her from all the evils in the world.
“I need you to take it,” she says, not looking up from the floor. “I need you to take it and make me forget.”
The redhead frowns, putting her wand away. “Take what where?”
Vernon sneers at her and opens the door to the cupboard. “It has your Freakishness. We want nothing to do with it. Take it and make sure we never see it again.”
Lily gasps as she sees the baby, covered in snot and tears, still whimpering softly even though nobody has come yet.
“You cannot be serious, Tuney,” she says as she picks up the baby and cradles him to her chest. “Magic is not poisonous. He is your son, your baby, your child. He is not evil.”
“I saw what you did to our family. You are not even human.” Lily closes her eyes in pain, one hand going over the infants ears as if to protect him from the insults.
“That’s not true. You know it is not.”
“I can’t love him, and I refuse to let him ruin our Dudders. Take him and never come back. Take him and make me forget he ever existed.”
Another would have argued more, would have tried to persuade these parents to think of some other way to deal with this. But she has grown up with Petunia Dursley, and ever since she went to Hogwarts life at home was hell until her sister got married. She looks at this ignored baby, suffering from just one day of neglect, and cannot condemn it to even one more hour of pain.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” the parents echo.
“Obliviate,” she intones, watching carefully as their faces blank and the house starts to eject every clue of a second boy having lived there. She disapparates.
Harry James Potter is introduced into the Potter family through an ancient and powerful birth ritual that adopts him in every possible way on the thirthy-first of July, just as the seventh month dies.
Just over a year later, he is dropped onto the porch of the people who were once his parents, condemned to a life he had almost escaped.