What if Petunia Was a Witch Like Lilly?
What if Petunia Was a Witch Like Lilly?
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Voice Acting & Narration: Steven Waters @bobablackfly602
Writing: Myself, @nicholasmartin6526, @khuz377 , @WatashiNoKuraiTenshi, and @PathofDragonsRadio
What if Petunia Was a Witch Like Lilly? Let's explore the depths of it in the video.
Spinner's End sits at the worst edge of it, a row of cramped terraced houses with peeling paint and narrow gardens. The Evans family lives three streets over, in a house that is marginally better kept but still carries the weight of a town that has seen better days.
In the summer of 1969, an owl delivers a letter to the Evans household. It is addressed in emerald ink to Miss Petunia Evans, and it lands on the doormat at half past seven in the morning while the family is eating breakfast. Petunia picks it up. She reads it twice. She puts it on the table between the marmalade and the milk jug, and she says, very calmly, that she thinks someone is playing a joke.
Her parents read it. They agree it must be a joke. Then the kitchen window cracks down the middle, and Petunia's teacup floats six inches off the table, and nobody mentions jokes again.
Professor McGonagall arrives that afternoon. She is tall, Scottish, dressed in tartan robes, and she sits in the Evans family sitting room with the posture of someone who has done this hundreds of times and still takes it seriously. She explains Hogwarts. She explains magic. She produces sparks from a length of polished wood and turns the family cat into a footstool and back again, and when she is finished, the Evans parents sit in stunned silence while their eldest daughter stares at the acceptance letter with an expression that has shifted from disbelief to something harder to read.
Lily Evans is nine years old. She has been sitting on the stairs for the entire visit, watching through the banister, and her face is pure, unfiltered wonder.
Over the following months, the Evans household reshapes itself around this new reality. Textbooks arrive by owl. Petunia studies them at the kitchen table with the focus of someone preparing for an exam that will determine the rest of her life. Lily hovers. She reads over Petunia's shoulder. She asks questions constantly, and Petunia answers the ones she can and admits when she cannot, and there is something new between the sisters: a shared territory that belongs to both of them.
There is a boy down the road. Severus Snape, thin and sharp-faced, wearing clothes two sizes too large. He has been watching Lily Evans for weeks, recognising in her something that he recognises in himself. When he finally approaches her in the park and tells her she is a witch, Lily grins at him.
Lily(amused): "I know. My sister got her Hogwarts letter three months ago."
Severus(thrown): "You already know about Hogwarts?"
Lily(cheerful): "Tuney's been reading all her textbooks out loud to me. I can already tell you about the four houses. Gryffindor is for brave people, Ravenclaw is for clever people, Hufflepuff is for kind people, and Slytherin is for ambitious people."
Severus(recovering): "That's... a very simple way of putting it."
Lily(shrugging): "I'm nine."
She invites him back to the house. He comes reluctantly at first, then eagerly, then daily. Over the remaining months before Petunia leaves for school, Severus becomes a fixture in the Evans garden, sitting cross-legged in the grass with Lily, explaining the things the textbooks leave out. Wand theory. Quidditch rules. The Statute of Secrecy. He speaks about magic with the reverence of someone who has been waiting his entire life to be taken seriously, and Lily listens with the hunger of someone who has just discovered that the world is twice as large as she thought.
Lily learns about magic two years before she otherwise would have. By the time her own letter arrives, she will already have a foundation. But that is later. For now, Petunia is the one who boards the train, and she boards it alone.
The Sorting Hat sits on Petunia Evans's head for close to four minutes. The Great Hall grows restless. First years fidget. Staff members exchange glances. Dumbledore watches from the high table with an expression that reveals nothing.
The Hat is working through a complicated problem. There is courage here. There is intelligence, sharp and practical. But running beneath both, powering everything, is ambition. A deep, structural need to prove that she is more than her postcode, more than her background, more than anyone's expectations. The Hat has seen this before. It knows where it belongs.
"SLYTHERIN!"