Stronger Than They Look

Chapter 5

"She stopped to draw a deep breath and then went ranting on. It seemed she had been wanting to say all this for years." PS/SS, Chapter 4

Petunia went into Harry's room before she went downstairs for breakfast the next morning. She found him awake, sitting at his desk and scratching Hedwig under her wing. He looked surprised, but happy to see her so early.

"Good morning, Harry," she said, coming to stand in front of him with her hands folded together. "How do you feel?"

"I feel okay, actually," he said. "Much better."

"Can you stand up, then?" she suggested.

Harry rose from his chair, Hedwig still perched on his arm, and a strong, sour odor hit Petunia's nose.

"Yeah, no problem," he said.

"Yes, that's good. How's your stomach?"

"It's...still a little achey. But it's under control," he said, nodding.

"Well, it's nice to hear it's not bothering you much. Now, you've been sweating in the same pajamas for days and you smell terrible, so put that owl down and go take a shower," she instructed.

To her relief, he didn't bristle at her words. He merely smiled and said, "Yes, Aunt Petunia," as he coaxed Hedwig back into her cage.

"Good morning, Petunia," Vernon said briskly when she entered the kitchen.

"Good morning, Vernon," she replied, opening the breadbox for a couple of slices to make toast.

"This'll be an important day at the office," he continued with a hint of excitement edging into his voice. "I'm going to attend a meeting with Argo Construction; they're in London."

"That sounds exciting," she said habitually. She inserted the slices of bread into the toaster. "It'll be an opportunity for a sale, I suppose?"

"Yes, very much so..."

Petunia nodded and gave words of interest at appropriate points as usual as Vernon told her about his business dealings; the only bit of news that really gave her any concern was that his secretary, Agnes, was about to retire. Somehow, she didn't care about how much more money he might bring home later that year. Instead, she decided that toast would not be enough for her breakfast that morning; she wanted a couple of fried eggs and a bit of bacon, too, but there were no eggs or bacon in the house, as she had very little use for them since Dudley was on a diet. She poured herself a bowl of cereal in its place.

"...so I'll be out of the office this afternoon between one and three. Agnes will give you the number over there if you need to reach me."

"I'll remember that, thank you," she said, sitting down across the table from him.

Dudley stumped groggily into the kitchen. Petunia stood up to give him a kiss on the cheek. "Good morning, popkin."

"Morning, Mum. Dad," he mumbled on his way to the counter.

"Not the morning person, are you, son?" said Vernon with a chuckle.

After Vernon left for work, Dudley turned to Petunia.

"Mum. How's Potter doing?"

"Harry is much better, darling," she assured him, surprised by his sudden anxious tone. "He should be up and about by tomorrow. Why, are you worried about him?"

Dudley shrugged. "Maybe."

At lunchtime, Petunia heated up a can of chicken soup and brought a generous bowlful of it to Harry. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed with an enormous leather-bound book open on his lap.

"I think it's time for you to have a proper meal again," she said, smiling at the look on his face.

"It smells wonderful," he said. He shoved the book aside without a look at where he'd been reading, and rose off the bed with hands outstretched.

"Don't get too excited, now. It's canned, and reduced-fat."

"I don't care," he said, taking the bowl to his desk. He sat down in his desk chair and prepared to tuck into the soup when Petunia cleared her throat, hands on hips.

"Harry Potter, did I teach you manners for nothing?"

"Oh, sorry. Thank you, Aunt Petunia."

"You're welcome," she said, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze. "Enjoy your lunch."

She just glanced back at him on her way through the door again, and he wasn't eating. He was staring at the wall ahead of him, his soup spoon stationary over the bowl. Then he looked back at Petunia.

"Do you...?" He began. He bit down on his lip before he could continue. "Do you have any pictures...of you and Mum?"

It was not a question she'd been expecting, but it was a simple enough request, she supposed. Doing her best to cover up the look of surprise that had surely just flitted over her face, she thought of where she'd stored the photographs. "I may have some left from when we were children, somewhere in the attic. Why, do you want to see them?"

"Yes, please. If you don't mind showing me."

"I'll show them to you if I can find them, after I've finished eating. How about that?"

Harry nodded. "I'd really like that."

The soup tasted wonderful. It may have been canned and reduced-fat, but for someone who'd been living on watery orange juice for the last two days, it was heaven. It felt hot, flavorful, and most of all, real. There was liquid broth interspersed with solid meat and vegetables. It silenced the growling in his stomach, but didn't make him the least bit queasy. Yet Aunt Petunia was still just as kind and generous to him as she'd been the day before.

He'd been wondering since the previous afternoon how much longer it would last; why was he still seeing Aunt Petunia not only look after him, but keep him company? Why was it still going on? He felt much, much better; his temperature had to be nearly back to normal, and he could do anything he could do before he fell ill. And now his aunt had just brought him a very convincing bowl of soup and agreed to show him old family photos.

He would see what clues the pictures offered; see how much further this illusion could go before Harry was faced with reality again.

The photographs were spread randomly across the bed; Aunt Petunia had snatched them all up into stacks and reorganized them in the box at first, but had soon given up on this endeavor and allowed Harry to scatter the old snapshots as he perused them. They were mostly black and white, and they littered the free space on Harry's blanket, where he sat cross-legged next to a shoebox Aunt Petunia had brought down from the attic, and she sat on the other side of it, leaning back against the wall and letting her feet dangle off the side of the bed. She wore an increasingly faraway look as Harry went through the images; at first she was engaged in showing him the pictures and telling the stories behind them, but then she fell back to merely answering his questions as he asked them. She didn't look bored or disinterested so much as tired. Preoccupied. Harry supposed that meant the hallucination was nearing its end and he would soon have to do without her company, though the photographs were still just as solid and detailed as the ones on the mantelpiece downstairs, showing Dudley with his parents.

Harry's favorite so far was a larger print of 5-year-old Lily holding a giggling 3-year-old Petunia on her lap and kissing her cheek. It was black and white like most of the others, and of course they were all Muggle photos, showing little girls motionless and frozen in time, but he could practically see the movement of his mother pulling her little sister down into her lap, he could nearly hear his aunt squealing in surprise as Lily held her down and gave her a kiss. Aunt Petunia had sworn she didn't remember posing for that picture, and Harry figured she didn't have to.

"Who's that sitting across from you, Aunt Petunia?" he asked, pointing to the likeness of a little black girl sharing a small round table with Petunia in someone's back garden as Lily served them tea.

Aunt Petunia looked at the photograph, and a faint smile appeared on her face. "That was my best friend, Joy. Though, she certainly admired your mother, too. We went to primary school together."

"And she looks awfully happy to be having tea with you," Harry observed, grinning.

"It was just warm water in that teapot. We were only children," she pointed out.

"It looks like warm water suited you all just fine," he said. It struck Harry that he was getting a precious (if fabricated) glimpse into not only the childhood of his mother and aunt, but also the world of little girls, which he had never given much thought before. He wondered if Hermione had ever poured warm water into a cup for another girl before she went to Hogwarts. Were there any families in Ottery St. Catchpole whose daughters had once played tea party with Ginny? What had she done to keep their gatherings safe from the twins' antics?

"Joy had two sisters," said Aunt Petunia, "named Hope and Charity. So, you see, our families were well-matched to each other."

Harry looked at her, puzzled, for a moment before the comparison made sense and he laughed out loud. Aunt Petunia smiled to share the joke with him, though she still looked tired.

"Where is Joy now? I mean, do you ever speak to her anymore?"

Aunt Petunia shook her head. "We went to different secondary schools, and we sort of lost touch. I don't know what she's up to now."

"That's a shame," said Harry. He looked again at his grandfather's face, as Charles Evans bounced a toddling Petunia on his knee. Aunt Petunia had told him Lily took after their father. He couldn't tell from the black and white picture, but she'd inherited her distinctive coloring from her dad, whereas Aunt Petunia took after their mother. Harry picked up another print to check the resemblance again, and it was true. She had her mother's pale coloring and similar facial features, but Harry's grandmother was short and plump like Mrs. Weasley, which softened the angles of her face. Then he came across yet another picture involving the rocking chair. He'd found at least ten of them already; he kept finding a child-sized white rocking chair, nearly always occupied by a small Petunia, though occasionally empty. He couldn't quite articulate why this artifact made him so curious, only that he wanted this vision of his aunt sitting next to him to tell him about it.

"Aunt Petunia, what about this rocking chair here?" he asked, holding the photograph out to her.

She took it.

"I mean, I keep seeing it in all these pictures, so I wonder. Is there a story behind it?"

"I was very fond of this chair in my childhood, but there's not much of a story behind it. My grandfather built it for Lily when she was a baby, so it stayed in her room, but I was the one who really liked it. You can't see much of it from here, with me sitting in it, but Granddad painted some pink rosebuds across the top there, it was just the prettiest little thing," she went on. There was suddenly a more energetic pace to her words now; she'd gotten going and wanted to keep it up. "Your mother was very generous with it. She didn't have much use for it, but she often let me come in her room to rock my dolls in it. Just as long as I was quiet while she did her homework, she didn't mind. You know how I said I used to do her hair up for her? I sat in that rocking chair for that."

"Didn't Mum ever use it?" asked Harry.

"She didn't care for it much. She thought it was boring, to play with dolls in a little rocking chair," Aunt Petunia explained. She leaned against the wall again, and her gaze shifted back to Harry's bedroom door.

"But there must have been some reason why she kept it in her room. Did it really mean that much to her that your Granddad built it for her?"

Aunt Petunia looked at him once again. "Why are you so interested in this?" Her tone was puzzled, not amused. She clearly wanted him to stop asking her questions about this, which, of course, only made Harry even more curious.

"I don't know!" he said defensively. He picked up the stack of rocking chair-related pictures and held them up in front of her. "Look at all these! There's you, sitting in the rocking chair and holding your dolly, there's you again, just getting comfortable, there's you sitting there and Mum's bossing you around--and I know what bossing around looks like, because I'm friends with Hermione--and there you are again, reading a picture book, and another, and another, and I still don't know much about Mum, or even you for that matter, so what was so special about this silly little chair that you spent so much time in it but it stayed in Mum's room?" It occurred to Harry, halfway through his tirade, that it was entirely inappropriate for him to be having this conversation with his hallucination, and he had to ask himself why he was getting so agitated. Perhaps he wasn't getting any better, after all. Perhaps he really did need to get out of this house.

"Children are very possessive of their belongings," said Aunt Petunia. "Just because Lily didn't have any use for it, doesn't mean she'd want to let me have it."

"Maybe she just used it when you weren't looking, because she didn't want you to know she liked it."

"There was one thing she used it for," she said, still looking more at the doorknob than at Harry.

"Okay. What was that?"

"When I was upset," she began. "And she wasn't the cause of it, mind you, she'd sit in the rocking chair, and she'd hold me, like this." She held her arms out in front of her to demonstrate cradling a smaller person. "It must have looked silly, because she wasn't much bigger than me, but she'd hold me in her arms, and she'd say," Aunt Petunia paused. Her face suddenly contorted; her mouth closed down to a thin, trembling line, and her eyes filled with tears. "She'd say, 'I love you, Tunie. It's okay,' over and over until I stopped crying." The tears were now streaming down her face, and she sprang up from the bed, trying to keep her breathing under control so she wouldn't sob outright in front of Harry.

"You don't have to leave," he said. Harry dropped the photographs and scooted forward to the edge of his bed, following his aunt's movement toward the door.

"No," she whimpered. "I don't want to trouble you." She finished with a sob.

Harry grabbed her wrist. He pulled, very gently, on her hand until she looked back at him, her face red, damp and twisted into a miserable grimace. "I don't want you to leave."

Breaking down to a hunched-over, sobbing wreck, Aunt Petunia turned around and limped back to Harry's side. He pulled her down into his lap and held her there, and she draped her arms around his shoulders, collapsing against him.

At that moment, a powerful, unexpected swell of emotion came over Harry. His aunt was very thin, moreso than he'd ever been, and he'd always known it, but now he felt it. Her wailing so close to his ear was much too loud, her tears leaking through his t-shirt were too wet, and her bones were too hard, from the ribs he could feel in sharp relief through her blouse to the pelvic bones cutting into his lap, to be any kind of illusion. There was nothing hallucinatory about any of this. He was holding his real aunt, letting her cry on his shoulder over the sister she'd lost years ago, but never mourned.

There was a knock on the door, before it opened and Dudley stuck his head into the room. "Mum? What's the--?" he began. Catching sight of his mother, he stepped properly inside and assumed a fighting stance, with fists clenched and eyes blazing. "Potter, what did you do to her?"

"I didn't do anything to her, we were just talking, and--"

Aunt Petunia held onto Harry even tighter and fell into an especially loud and painful wail.

"How do I know you didn't do a spell on her?" Dudley demanded. "What's going on?"

"Do you see my wand, Dud?" Harry challenged.

Dudley's eyes darted around the room until he spotted Harry's wand next to Hedwig's cage, much too far away to have been in his hand mere seconds before. The anger fell away from his face, to be replaced by confusion and desperation. "Then what's wrong with her?"

Harry glanced down at the dozens of photographs scattered over his bed. Before he could come up with an explanation, Dudley found the pictures, too, and came up closer to see them.

He picked up Harry's favorite, the one of 3-year-old Petunia getting a surprise kiss on the cheek from Lily.

"This is what's making her cry?"

"I'm s-sorry, Did-d-d-dy," was all Aunt Petunia could say.

Dudley looked as lost as Harry had ever seen him. His eyes ranged over half the room before he settled back on his mother. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Why don't you make your mum a cup of tea?" Harry suggested.

"Okay. I'll do that."