Chapter 2: (Petunia's POV)

Petunia usually avoided her nephew's room (er…cupboard) if she could help it. The truth was, she felt a small twinge of guilt when she remembered that it was her fault he was sleeping there in the first place. What would Lily say? But she couldn't bring herself to do anything about it. Much of the time she just couldn't help imagining what her life would have been like without Harry in it; in the cupboard under the stairs, Harry was out of sight, and therefore out of mind. Today, however, was one of those days when she had felt the need to pay the cupboard a visit (after Harry had called her name of course). She couldn't just leave the boy to suffer alone without anything to help his fever. On this particular visit though, she noticed something in the cupboard that she hadn't seen before. Maybe it was new since her last visit, or perhaps she just hadn't been paying attention before, but this time she saw it, and it made her feel quite strange. On the furthest wall of the cupboard, Harry had used tape to hang several of his own crayon drawings. One picture looked rather familiar – a picture of four stick figures standing side-by-side and hand-in-hand. The tallest was a man with scribbled brown hair; the next tallest, a woman with blonde hair scribbled down to the elbows; and the two shortest, boys with scribbled black and blonde hair respectively. The short stick figure with black hair had round glasses traced onto his face. She could tell that it was a drawing of her own family, plus Harry. The picture, however, had been marred by angry red lines running through it in the shape of an 'X.' Petunia looked over at the other drawings on the wall. Many of them included more stick figures: Two taller people (both with black hair) and a small boy (presumably Harry, with his dark hair and glasses), doing various activities together. As she looked closer, trying to figure out what these stick figures were supposed to be doing, she had a realization that made her heart clench and her stomach fill with hot, bubbly guilt. Pulling herself together, she began to ask her nephew about the drawings.

"What is this?" she asked, pointing to the crossed out drawing first.

"Me, and you, and Uncle Vernon, and Dudley," Harry replied, pointing to each stick figure in turn.

"Why is it crossed out?" she continued.

"'Cause it's not real," the boy replied, avoiding eye contact.

Ouch. As much as she kept telling herself she didn't care, somehow those words really stung. It somehow hurt more to hear Harry saying them with such indifference, even though she could tell from the tear stains on the drawing that he had truly cared at some point. "How is it not real?" Petunia pressed on.

"'Cause I thought I was family but I'm not," Harry muttered.

There was a pause, and Petunia felt herself growing distinctly uncomfortable. Still, she pressed on, her curiosity getting the better of her, though she thought she already knew the answer to her next question. "Who are these people?" she asked, gesturing toward the other pictures of the three black-haired stick people.

Harry pointed to each person in the picture as he named them: "Me, Mum, and Dad." He spoke more confidently now, with a little smile on his face.

Without pausing to think, Petunia spoke again, but this time she wasn't asking a question. "Your mother had red hair, not black."

Petunia saw Harry's face light up as he reached over to grab the red crayon sitting on one of the cupboard's shelves, and immediately begin to fix his mistakes, scribbling the red crayon over his mum's hair in every drawing. Petunia thought about leaving but decided against it. Instead, shocking even herself, she began to ask more questions about Harry's drawings. Harry seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the attention, and somehow, she couldn't bring herself to leave. But as Harry spoke, his explanations confirmed her realization from earlier. Every activity that stick-Harry and his stick-parents were doing were activities that she could distinctly remember doing with Dudley at one point or another. This realization left her with another sick feeling in her stomach that she didn't want to think about.

Several weeks later, when Harry somehow managed to turn his teacher's wig blue, the guilt and compassion that sometimes overcame her at moments like the one spent looking at drawings under the stairs was overridden by the familiar thought that popped into her head at least once a day: What would my life be without him? As she pictured herself and her family living a normal, undisturbed life without that freakish boy around, she couldn't help feeling hatred toward him. What would her life be like if he had never been dropped on her doorstep? What would be happening right now if she had never agreed to keep him? A happy family dinner, perhaps, without the moody silence, angry glares, and occasional outburst aimed at Harry for his use of accidental magic? But this was her life now. She had made her decision all those years ago. It was now forever her fate to fight a constant battle between compassion and cruelty; caring and indifference; love and hate.