I can't understand why is an amazing story like this has got just a few reviews. Interesting point of view, makes you think.

Kudos for seeing the moral quagmire bubbling underneath. Most fans seem to overlook it.

Thank you for this well-written take on an interesting idea. You're right about the feeling of nostalgia in this piece. I enjoyed it very much. And by the way, I love the title.

You know, I'm so happy whenever I come across such a rare story that makes you feel and think beyond the words. Thank you for that. Please keep writing, you bring these characters to life.

Very good take on the Evanses fate although you've taken liberties with a few canon points. I found myself agreeing with quite a few points in your story and in the notes that followed.

The scene with Snape making the difficult choice between saving the Evanses or himself and Petunia had echoes of the holocaust during WWII. Very chilling scene.

Since we don't know when or how the Evanses died, we can assume that this version of events would be possible if Lily hadn't joined the Order yet. Perhaps precautions for other muggleborns were set in place afterwards.

Are we to understand then that Petunia's memory was obliviated regarding her parents deaths? It seems crueler to carry the memory of the choice made that night, though it would explain Petunia's deep bitterness and aversion to the Magical world.

All in all, a very introspective piece. Well done.

Wow. This was very intense. I like your questioning Dumbledore's motives in your author's note. Even though there was no way to really fit that idea into this oneshot, it is the logical next step after considering a muggle's perspective. Very interesting.

Thank you for writing this and providing food for thought.

Isa

Wow, I really liked this story; it's nice to see Petunia's past fleshed out a little, and certainly goes a long way towards explaining why her hatred of magic is so deep (especially if it killed her parents), far deeper than mere jealousy in my opinion.

Also, you're right to point out that little is made of the threat to Muggles, they are very much a side-event, a distraction, in the books. Perhaps this is because prejudice is so ingrained in the magical world, they have been persecuted for so much of their history that they've been driven into isolation, and now, well, Muggles simply don't register on the radar.

I'm not saying it is right, only that is it understandable. The 'good' side are fighting for their very existence, rather than for some lofty, nuanced philosophy of equality for all Humans. I doubt many of them (except Dumbledore, ironically enough given his murky past) ever took a step back and wondered what they were really fighting for, other than some vague notions of 'freedom', 'fairness' and 'goodness' as opposed to Voldemort's sense of blood purity, control, and subjugation.

But well done on the story, I really enjoyed such a well written and thoughtful piece.

I find the "good" side to be as racist as the Death Eaters (not that racist is the right word, but it's probably the closest analogue). The difference is that their racism is expressed as paternalism/farming rather than fear/antagonism. (Fear begets antagonism -the wizarding world is so afraid of Muggledom it went into hiding centuries ago and is still there.) The good guys are at least as ready to destroy/erode a Muggle life through Confundus or Obliviate as the DEs are to end it; let's face it, neither farmer nor slaughterer has the *hen's* welfare in mind ...

Very well-written, although it makes some assumptions which are much more fanon than canon.

The first one, which seems very minor but isn't, is that in the books the Death Eaters' masks are close-fitting black-cloth hoods with eye-and mouth-holes, very similar to the masks worn by real-life British terrorist organisations such as the IRA.

See, the books were mapped out at a time when terrorism in Britain was especially busy. In 1996, when JK was working out her plots, there were two major terrorist attacks on the mainland - one of them taking out the centre of the city of Manchester - as well as numorous minor attacks and the usual constant medium-level warfare in Northern Ireland. The Death Eaters are pretty-clearly based mainly on these British organisations - you can match particular events and debates from the books to the real-life history of the IRA, UDA etc and their interactions with the British military - and one of the noteworthy points about British terrorist organisations is that they rarely targetted civilians. They were quite willing to kill civilians as collateral damage if they got in the way of a military or political target, but for example there were eighty thousand people in the blast zone of the bomb that took out central Manchester, and not one single death, because the IRA warned the police just in time to evacuate everybody.

The idea that the Death Eaters were out to kill Muggles in large numbers is fanon and perhaps in the films (I've not seen most of them) - there's very little evidence for it in the books. We're told in the books that Voldemort wanted the wizard-born (including half-bloods so far as we can tell) to "rule over" Muggles and Muggle-borns but the idea of really murderously oppressing and killing them seems to be mainly Umbridge's private hobby. And if the wizards want to come out of hiding and live freely - which is said to be one of Voldemort's main goals - they pretty-well *have* to plan on getting control over Muggles and ruling them, because Muggles outnumber wizards at least six thousand to one and the wizards have every reason to think that if they show themselves to Muggles, and don't immediately seize power, the Muggle world will destroy or enslave them. But that doesn't mean that they plan to kill them all or even seriously interfere with their lives, beyond making sure they don't nuke Hogsmeade.

Apart from Hannah Abott's mother, of whose rank and position we know nothing, all the killings of witches and wizards by DEs that we *know* of are of military/political opponents - Order members, Aurors, Ministry officials and sometimes also their family members, but apart from one child targetted by Greyback (who is a law unto himself) we're never told whether family members were killed *deliberately* or just as collateral damage.

We're told that there were incidents of DEs torturing Muggles, but the only such incident we actually see, which Voldemort himself calls "Muggle torture", is quite mild - barely worse than the sorts of thing Hogwarts students do to each other for fun. We know that there have been some deaths of Muggles but we don't know if any of them were random or genocidal killings. We know for example that Voldemort carried out an attack on a bridge which killed at least two and probably more like fifteen or twenty Muggles, but it was done for a specific military purpose, to force Fudge's hand. We know Peter killed twelve Muggles at a stroke to cover his own escape but we've no reason to think he wouldn't have done the same to wizards if they'd happened to be there. The resistance radio in DH asks people to protect Muggle neighbours but we're not told *from what*, and internal evidence suggests that the threat to Muggles is mainly from uncontrolled Dementors, not Death Eaters.

So, yes, there's a disturbingly off-hand and sneering attitude to Muggles even from most of the nominal good guys, but at the same time there are sound reasons why they are more worried about protecting wizards than Muggles. It's definitely established that the Death Eaters will kill or torture any wizard who opposes them, but there's no evidence that they will particularly seek to kill Muggles or to severely oppress them, beyond neutralising their ability to threaten the wizarding world.

Beautiful. I have chills running up and down my spine.