Work Text:
Petunia Evans was an envious, envious woman.
Lily was always too perfect. Petunia was nice. Lily was the family jewel. Petunia, in the good days, received pats at the shoulder and a fleeting smile. Lily was a red, fiery, uncommon and special beaty. Petunia had a long and thin nose, with hair that wasn’t blonde or brown, but a shameful gray color.
With time, people stopped mentioning her. When flowers and cards brimming with love exclamations would be delivered at the Evans house, their mother would immediately run for Lily, the proudest mother in the neighborhood. During vacations from school, the attention would always be directed at Lily. Little by little, Petunia started to feel like she was merging with the gray papel in the walls - unmoving, uninteresting and unimportant.
When she met Vernon, though… It was like receiving an electric jolt. It's true, he really wasn’t the nicest person. He wouldn’t really listen to what she would say, or say nice to her, like how good she looked in that new dress or how she smiled a bit more with him. But it was enough. It was enough because he had this inherent dislike for Lily - “too much of a libertine, way too weird to be a good, normal, God-serving wife”. But Petunia, with her blonde-gray hair, thin lips, beige dresses and her morose movements?Oh, she would do.
Petunia hated Lily. She hated her from the moment she started to do those freaky things, when she received that wedding invitation and when she got news of a baby boy born in late late July. Petunia really did hate her, but she couldn’t refrain from writing to her.
Petunia wrote Lily letters every year, sometimes even twice or thrice a year. But she would never send it. No. These letters' fate was to stay hidden inside her wardrobe for more than 30 years, buried under clothes, documents, photos; to rarely see the light of the day.
Then, Lily died, leaving her with a baby. A baby with eyes so identical to Lily’s that Petunia would spend half those eleven years thinking she was crazy and the other five years hating him and herself for what she would see in them.
So yes, Petunia was an envious, envious woman. But after Lily died, she became more hunted - hunted by what she was complacent of her husband actions; hunted by always being not the second best, but the forgotten; hunted by those eyes that would look at her with such repulsion and fear, and hate, and superiority, and rage, and terror, and love, and longing…
Petunia was hunted.