Title: Family Affair

Author: Daeleniel Shadowphyre

Feedback: darkone2813 at mindspring dot com

Fandom: "Harry Potter" series, by J.K. Rowling

Genre: Angst/Drama

Rating: R (Maybe only PG-13, but R is safer.)

Notes: Please reference the prologue for the summary, disclaimer, and any other relevant information.

Special Note: Hugs and kisses to Ivy for being my 125th reviewer! (Anyone who knows me knows why I like that number.) To the rest of you, all of you rock, really, and thanks for sticking with me-- even if I take forever and a day to post new chapters. ;;;

Distribution: Ask, and ye shall receive.

Chapter Six:

August 1, 1999

4 Privet Drive, Kitchen

If there was one thing that Petunia Evans Dursley understood, it was the value of underestimation. People had been underestimating her for years, ever since she was a child. She was a tall woman and might even have been called pretty once upon a time, but the years of illness from the time she was nine until she had been sixteen had kept her rail thin and ravaged her appearance to give her a pinched, pained look and a rather sour expression. Moreover, she tended to look as if a strong wind might just blow her over and therefore automatically registered as harmless to anyone who bothered to look at her, no matter how much hostility she projected.

Petunia liked being underestimated. It wasn't that she wanted to be invisible, oh no, but to be beneath consideration as a threat, that was good, very good. When she'd been younger, being non-threatening had been doubly important. Small, despite her height. Timid, despite her sharp tongue. Occasionally rather dull, despite her thorough education and unfortunate passion for learning.

Weak, despite her wand.

For Petunia Dursley was a witch. It was a secret she guarded closely, all but ignoring magic and the Wizarding World, staying beneath notice, content to live like a muggle with her muggle husband and completely unmagickal son. She couldn't understand why other witches and wizards, other muggleborns, didn't follow her example. Look at her sister Lily. She'd flaunted her magic, lived like the witch she was with her pureblood wizard husband, and she'd been killed by a Dark wizard in her own home! Which, of course, had left Petunia and her husband Vernon to raise Lily's very obviously magickal son.

Harry was a source of considerable vexation for Petunia. The scar on his forehead, his very name even, made him an instant target to any Dark wizard. What's more, he was attending his mother's old school for magic, learning to use his powers and control them instead of just how to hide them. He actually embraced magic, something Petunia simply could not fathom. Didn't he realise that it was magic that had killed his mother, Petunia's little sister? Didn't he understand that magic was a burden, a curse, something better off left alone lest it destroy the one foolish enough to reach for it?

Petunia scowled down at the ham she was slicing for sandwiches. Magic was nothing but trouble. Lily had gone on and on about how wonderful it was to fly; Petunia hated heights, and had been too ill to learn. Lily delighted in changing teacups into frogs; Petunia wanted her teacup to stay a teacup, thank you. Lily loved how wizard photographs moved as if they were alive; Petunia always felt unnerved by the idea that the people in those photographs were watching her. And Lily had been ecstatic over medical spells and how a wave of a wand or a potion could heal anything from paper cuts to broken bones.

Magic hadn't been able to cure Petunia of leukaemia. That had taken years of muggle medicine, treatment after treatment, surgery, procedures that hurt...

Fourteen-year-old Nia opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the hospital ward. It was white. Plain, dull, unrelieved white. If she turned her head to the side, Nia knew that the walls would be that same stark, unblemished white of the ceiling. She closed her eyes again.

Her body ached, she noticed. Deep down in her bones, she ached. It was a familiar feeling after five years. She knew it baffled her doctors, but she didn't feel like explaining to them that her magic didn't like their treatments and kept trying to fix what they'd done to her. Muggle doctors weren't prepared to handle witches.

Mediwizards weren't prepared to handle leukaemia.

Nia sighed at the reminder of her lose-lose situation and opened her eyes again. The ceiling might be boring but staring at it gave her something besides the insides of her eyelids to look at. Absently, she thought about conjuring an illusion to keep her entertained, but dismissed the idea immediately. Not only was it forbidden for her to use magic outside of her scheduled lesson hours in specific settings, but she was in the middle of a muggle hospital and shouldn't be using magic when just any muggle nurse or doctor could come in and see it.

She wondered when she'd started to get so comfortable with the idea that she could use magic at all. That she had received the letter to Hogwarts at all had been inconceivable, only slightly more comprehensible when her little sister Lily had received her letter.

Her IV line itched. Nia glared hatefully at the thing, metal and plastic digging into and under her skin to deliver the contents du jour from the drip bag. She assumed from the slightly light-headed feeling she had that it was currently a morphine drip instead of the intravenous nutrients they'd started her on when the nausea got too bad for her to handle solid food.

Idly she wondered what time it was. She knew it wasn't Sunday, because Mummy and Daddy hadn't brought Lily to visit. Nia didn't know why they bothered. Lily didn't really understand why her older sister didn't seem to be getting better; she was too caught up in the glamour of learning magic. It only upset her to see Nia lying in the bed, pale and thin and shaky. It made her snappish, and Nia responded in kind and they only ended up fighting which, if Nia was being honest, she knew wasn't good for either of them. It wasn't good for their parents, either, and Nia tried to ignore the growing lines of stress and strain in Mummy's face and the bags under Daddy's eyes. The doctors said that she was actually getting better, but a full recovery would take time.

She had plenty of that, she supposed. Time told by muggle clocks had lost meaning for her with the constant drip-drip of the IV, only really able to tell night from day because the nurses came in to turn the lights on or off. She could count the hours, but that would serve no real purpose except to remind her how long she'd been stuck here between lessons taught by a stern-faced woman with rectangular-lensed spectacles, and treatments heralded by the nurse who would come in to give her a sedative.

A noise by the door drew a flicker of her eyes. Right on cue, she thought grimly, seeing the white uniform before returning her attention to the ceiling.

"Time for your treatment, Petunia"' the nurse said as she approached. Petunia didn't respond, just stared up at the ceiling as the nurse fiddled with the IV out of her line of sight. When she felt the trickle of ice flow into her veins, she closed her eyes and gave herself up to the anaesthesia.

She wasn't going to hold her breath that this would be the cure.

Even now, Petunia wasn't sure just how she had finally been "cured" of the disease. It wasn't even a cure, really, since she knew that if even a few of those malignant cells had survived, the cancer would come back, quite possibly in an untreatable form. Magic couldn't fix that, either.

Yet as much as Petunia resented magic, it was a near-constant presence in her life, the most obvious manifestation being her nephew Harry. It was almost a cruel irony that the epitome of all Petunia wished to avoid was also all she had left of her little sister. She wanted to protect that, to keep what little of her sister was left alive through her son.

It wasn't easy. Harry was determined to follow his parents into the use of magic, and while that determination was... admirable... it set him at odds with Petunia's way of life, drawing unwanted attention. Not just to Harry, but to Vernon and Dudley, and to Petunia herself. Attention was a bad thing, especially for Harry.

Especially for Petunia.

The knife slipped in her grasp, biting into her hand. She gave a faint cry of pain, dropping the knife and pressing her other hand against the bleeding gash. It felt warm and wet and slick and the coppery scent made her want to retch.

Oh, just this once... she thought, hating herself for giving in even as she whispered the words of the spell under her breath. Slowly, more slowly than she remembered, the blood seeped back into her veins as flesh knit together beneath her hand. Moments later, only a thin red line remained of the cut, and even that was rapidly disappearing. Despite herself, Petunia felt the briefest flicker of a smile fight its way onto her face.

"Aunt Petunia?"

Petunia whirled towards the door, wide eyes meeting those of her nephew in shock. His eyes flickered down to her hand, then back up to hers, and she could see a thousand questions brimming in his eyes.

Lily's eyes.

Wonderful; now what was she going to do?

To be continued...