Oct 8, 2025
summer might be over but marytunia is forever
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summer might be over but marytunia is forever
microfic - marytunia!!!!! | 1.7k words | i don’t think there’s anything to warn?? so enjoy <3
hiii jen, sending in marytunia for the ask game bc they’re all i think about….would love ur thoughts <3
hiiii i literally love them so much. i was sent an ask about them a few months ago and it changed me forever i fear but i haven’t thought about them in so long….. and i see your tags about them and now @sugarsnappeases is dming about them and im soooooo. so so so.
makes sense/compels me. i dare say
like even in canon i think they could make sense ?? im imagining mary spending the summer at lilys house/mary and lily being best friends and petunia resenting it and absolutely resenting mary. her and lily growing further and further apart from each other…. i imagine lily sneaking out at night, meeting some boy or girl. or when she eventually ends up dating james and sneaking out to see him. and it leaves mary alone in lilys room and thats when her and petunia get closer. maybe lily doesn’t even know…. and eventually mary and petunia are falling asleep together after staying up all night talking
i also especially love it if marys a muggleborn witch, which intrigues petunia will and at first causes a lot of jealousy and resentment. maybe even. dare i say. resentment from mary towards lily because lily is this wonder child, teachers favorite, everyones favorite ?? like mary loves lily but i feel like we’ve all been the ’funny friend’ or ’the ””ugly”” friend’ and that’s how i feel sometimes mary felt being best friends with lily. also none of this is lilys fault obviously she didnt ask for any of this. anyway!!!!!
petunia resents mary, shes obsessed with her, and why does lily even like her so fucking much, and is this what it could’ve been like between me and lily if i had also been a witch, and why are her eyes so golden anyway, and why does she give me these secretive smiles, and why am i up past my bed time waiting to hear lilys foot steps when she sneaks out so i know marys alone, and why am i even walking over there, normal people dont have these sort of feelings for other girls, and im normal, vernon likes me so much, hes a good respectable man, he’d be a good provider, but mary is just so nice, she’s so interesting, and is she falling asleep on my shoulder? i’ll never ever move again, what would lily say if she saw us like this, her lips are so close to my neck, what does mary see in lily anyway, lily is arrogant and gets whatever she wants, what about what i want, she doesn’t even appreciate mary, she leaves her alone nearly every night, how could she not want to wake up with mary every single morning, mary is magic, she makes me feel like magic
also especially good if mary is in love with/or thinks she is with lily.. i love a good angsty secret summer romance plot :/ also love it if petunia feels secretly vindictive whenever mary sneaks into her room. taking something that ’belongs’ to lily
ALSO. also. love it if mary shows up at petunias house after the first war. after lily is dead. thinking maybe they would grieve. be there for each other. but they’re blaming each other. why didn’t you fight? petunia asks, eyes glued the floor. why didn’t you protect my sister?
maybe i also wanted to live a normal fucking life, mary spits back at her, jugdment hot and heavy in her tone. petunia feels nothing but shame when she goes to bed that night. a bed made of it— and her perfectly normal house enveloping her in shame, suffocating her from within
anyway .
ask game!!!
I’ve been really riding my marytunia wave recently….i think part of it is that I just don’t see lily with mary as much. I actually don’t see lily in any friends to lovers type of arrangement, I want to put her in a whirlwind romance always BUT
marytunia is so compelling to me partly because of the sibling’s best friend thing (tried and true formula) but also because of the way they would interact with the magical and muggle world. ESPECIALLY DURING THE WAR! mary is caught between wanting to join the war effort and wanting to stay out of the whole thing, and I think petunia would want to get involved eventually, but then facing offhanded anti-muggle prejudice from wizards in the order,,,,BUT THAT COULD ALSO BE SO FUNNY! Because she didn’t grow up with it, so someone would be like “what’s a muggle going to do to help?” And petunia’s just like what the fuck is a muggle.
For petunia, who has been like the less loved, less magic her whole life, and she finally gets a little magic of her own and it’s her SISTER’S BEST FRIEND! also the internal conflict she has about being a lesbian while still trying to be the most “““normal””” perfect girl because she can never live up to what lily is. still knowing that she is irreparably different and the one who helps her come to terms with it is her sister’s best friend…another girl who walks the line between the magic and muggle worlds, but she understands and wants petunia because she sees her beauty and charm and thinks she’s magic despite the fact that she can’t do a single spell. so just think of all the years of resentment between petunia and lily, years of petunia wishing she was special enough and lily wishing she was normal enough and they meet in the middle over mary
microfic - marytunia :( | 1.6k words | reminiscing on a summer fling - no warnings except potential sadness <33
Petunia looks at herself in the mirror in front of her. She thinks maybe she’s put more blush on the right side of her face than her left, wonders if she should add more to the left or try to wipe some off of the right. She doesn’t make any move to do either.
Instead, she continues to stare at herself, continues to sit at her dressing table in a full-face of makeup and her freshly-ironed blouse, continues to wait.
There are just under two hours until Vernon said he would come to pick her up. It’s their third date. They’re going for dinner at a restaurant that Vernon likes. He’s already told her, in immense detail, all about exactly what he’s going to order. Apparently, they do a delicious steak and chips and have his favourite beer on tap. Petunia isn’t huge on beer, or steak for that matter, but he assures her they do other things too.
There’s still time for her to cancel. There’s still time for the phone that she has out on the table in front of her to start ringing, for the screen to light up with her name. There’s still time for Petunia to pick up.
She likes Vernon. Really, she does. He’s got a good job, and a strong set of teeth, and an inoffensive wardrobe. He’s straightforward, and respectable, and completely ordinary.
Petunia had always wanted ordinary. Normal. Something with both feet steadily fixed to the ground and a decent, stable future stretching out in front of it. That’s what Vernon provides for her and that’s what she’d always wanted. What she still wants.
But, there’s still time to cancel the date. There’s still time to call off the whole thing, to cut the nice, Vernon-shaped rope with which she’s been diligently tying herself to the ground and fly away back to the place that she had been that summer.
It had passed in a sort of magical, swirling haze of stolen time and dazzling colours and a smile that tasted of homegrown strawberries and sunshine.
She had come to stay for the holidays.
Mary MacDonald.
Lily’s friend from school.
Petunia had been ready to ignore her for the entire month that she was there. Ready to turn up her nose at Lily and whichever freak friend she’d brought home from her fancy school. Ready to spend the summer in her room or hanging about town with the few people from her college with whom she’s somewhat more than passingly acquainted. She had planned a pleasant, boring summer for herself, the last one she would hopefully ever have in that sorry excuse for a town, before she headed down to London for her typing course.
The summer she had experienced instead was far more than pleasant and anything but boring. She hadn’t planned for the fact that Lily’s freak friend might worm her way under Petunia’s skin, might learn more about her in a month than her ‘friends’ had in seven whole years of school, might pull laughs out of her like silks from a magician’s sleeve, one after the other until they blurred into a bright string of delight.
Mary was funny, and charming, disarmingly so, and she’d caught Petunia entirely off-guard. She’d been expecting someone like that horrible Snape boy, sure that all of Lily’s friends from her fancy school were equally as nasty and disturbing, but Mary wasn’t anything like that at all.
Or maybe she was, just a little; it’s certainly true that her honey-brown eyes could be bee-sting sharp, and that the bright vibrancy with which she carried herself could cut right to the very quick, and that her presence there that summer had marked a profound disturbance in the things that Petunia had always thought were unshakable.
Little by little, alongside the laughter, Mary had pulled things from Petunia that she had been trying to keep hidden, tucked away and protected down in the depths of her ribcage. Things like the yawning, festering desire to press her lips against Mary’s and breathe some of that sunshine in, to kiss her and be transformed into something that dazzled and sparkled and floated high above that little old mining town like Mary did. Like Lily did.
Mary was contagious. And shimmering gold. And she somehow wiped the greyscale from their perpetually dreary, frowning twilight skies and painted them hues of pink, orange, red. She slowed the turning of the world on its axis, lifted the sun back above the horizon, just for a little while, made everything infinitely more vivid.
That summer was as brisk and unexpected as the time Lily had pushed her out of a little rowboat into the River Tame when they were kids, and as languid and woozy as long afternoons lying on the sofa recovering from the flu - Petunia was both drowning and burning up. Mary seemed to diffuse honey into the air, making it sweeter and slower, viscous, insidious instead of the usual biting bleakness.
Time expanded past its rigorous boundaries, like water in the heat; late-night whispers, muffled giggles and inexperienced fumbling; early morning sighs, fingers running softly through hair like the summer through their fingers; glances that spoke a thousand words, brushes of shoulders, when Lily was there, red hair like fire burning the honey into bitter jealousy. Time melted and intermingled with that strawberry-sunshine smile.
All of it was stolen. All of it was sunset.
And nothing can hold the sun above the horizon forever. The day has to end, just as the summer does.
Mary had to fly back to her fancy school, with Lily and the other freaks. Petunia had to go to London, to endless grey skies and the grounded, absolute life she’s determinedly wanted for herself since the moment Lily had taken flight.
To her typing course and the ensuing clerical job, and to the little flat for which she’d meticulously saved up and to her two dates and counting with Vernon Dursley.
There's an hour and thirty-six minutes until that count goes up to three.
There’s still time to cancel. There’s still time for Mary to call.
Petunia’s been waiting for her to call since they exchanged numbers, lying in her bed in the early hours of the morning on Mary’s last day there - before Mary had kissed her one last dazzling time and snuck back into Lily’s room as the birds started up their singing, before a quiet breakfast of fading colours and coming back up to the surface, before Petunia’s dad had driven Lily and Mary back to where they belonged and Petunia never would.
It’s been five months since then.
February is as miserable as every other month has been since that vivid August, and Mary has not called. Halloween and Guy Fawkes’ and Christmas and New Year have all been and gone. Petunia hasn’t been home, or seen Lily or her parents.
She’s worried that Mary may have soured her hometown and the house she grew up in once and for all, which is ridiculous because she’d lived there under those heavy, grey clouds for eighteen years before Mary had injected them with that swirling colour which had disappeared as she did the second the month of her visit had ended.
London is just as grey as that little town, despite its vast, bustling potential, and Petunia thinks that’s probably Mary’s fault too.
And Mary has not called. Petunia waits. She stares at herself in the mirror and thinks that if Mary called she would cancel this date.
She thinks that she’s being completely absurd, because she’d only known Mary for one hungry, shimmering month. It had felt a little like flying, luxuriating in that special glow that always surrounded Lily, a glow that Mary had shared with her. But it was flying with wax wings and the sky was burning and she’d never really had Mary, not really. It was ephemeral, hazy and always slipping away from her.
And Petunia had never wanted it anyway. She wanted ordinary, entirely non-freakish mundanity - the kind that people like Vernon can provide, artificiality and dullness, simplicity and ease.
And yet.
And yet she sits and waits for her phone to ring, sits and tries to stop those honey-brown eyes from blunting and fading in her memory. She sits and tells herself that if Mary called, she would pick up, that if Mary called, she would cancel the date, that if Mary called, she would painstakingly craft her own pair of real wings, sweat and sinew and laborious work, so she and Mary could chase after the sunset forever.
She knows, really, in the part of her that isn’t trapped away in the fanciful depths of her ribcage, the part of her that had decided that she wanted to be normal, that she would never be able to stay off the ground for that long.
After a moment, she decides that she should add more blush to her left cheek. It is Valentine’s Day after all. She doesn’t think it would be all that out of the ordinary if a woman was a little more rosy-cheeked than she tended to be.
One hour and twenty-three minutes later, Petunia puts her phone in her handbag and heads towards the door. Vernon has come to take her on their date.
Mary has not called.
KARA PRETTY PLS I NEED TO HEAR YOUR MARYTUNIA!!!!
HELLO!!! i would be delighted to go into them i’ve been thinking about them recently (and i’ll let you in on a secret: i’ve been slooowly writing another microfic about them…. it’s august. tis the season yk)
for me a lot of it is just what ifs. i don’t think they could ever really be forever bc a) petunia knows ultimately that she's going to go back to her white picket fence, husband and children and an intensely Normal life even if she's gotten swept up in this thing w mary (and i think mary knows this on some level too) and b) the whole lily shebang. lily is so deeply caught up in everything that happens between them. her sister and her best friend. she is the thing that brings them together and pulls them apart. the beginning and the end, catalyst and inevitable conclusion. everything that happens between them is always a secret from lily, she never knows about it but she’s still a Major presence in their relationship.
the vision i think about the most is mary coming stay at lily's house during the summer holidays. and she's bubbly and brilliant and she watches petunia w something like fascination bc obvs lily has spoken a little about her sister before but mary doesn't really know anything about her. god does she want to tho. petunia is watching her right back bc she's never met anyone quite like her before. bc mary sparkles and makes petunia feel and they fall into this summer fling. nobody knows but them, it's all stolen time and mary sneaking into petunia's room late at night after lily falls asleep, sitting up and chatting, ankles twisting together under the dining room table, lemonade and strawberries, secret smiles and little walks around the park when lily's off doing other things.
it's quiet, and gentle, but it also shimmers and engulfs them and opens both of their eyes to . something . something that could be, a sort of fantasy world, where magic doesn't mean jealousy and bitterness and horrible resentment, where lily doesn’t mean endless arguments and competition. instead there’s this dazzling woman who makes magic feel light, like possibilities and hazy summer sunshine. there’s petunia who is obvs not lily, but mary doesn’t want or need her to be. it’s like seeing into a different world. secret snippets of something wonderful.
but it can never last. bc mary will go back to school, with lily and magic and that whole world that petunia doesn’t belong in (interesting later when mary withdraws from the wizarding world. again. the what ifs). and petunia will go back to the path that she had always planned to follow, meeting a man and settling down and being normal normal normal. and neither of them are the type to try and fight for something that was already so nebulous, to try and desperately cling onto each other when they never even really had each other in the first place. it slips through their fingers and they both let it. it’s hope and brightness and something rising quickly and falling just as fast. like a hot air balloon that’s precious and colourful and soaring high but must inevitably go back down to earth.
i also like to think about them post lily’s death. when they’re both grieving in such different, complicated ways and lily is arguably even more of a presence between them than before (classic lily amirite? more alive in her death etc etc) and they can never go back to that summer, it will only ever be memories. that’s all they really are. a handful of snapshots in time that they think back on w a sort of bittersweet nostalgia. it never could’ve worked but what if it had. it’s all fantasy in the end.
august marytunia song of all time. do you understand
the thing about marytunia is like....think of the delicious post-war angst. think about a girl who didn't want any of her friends involved in this war. who tried to get them to stay out of it. and now they're dropping like flies around her. lily would be her last straw. it's only her and remus left now and remus is drowning his sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. she goes to find petunia to tell her what happened (and maybe scream at her a bit) and falls into her bed instead. i think at the beginning they can't stand each other and then they can't stand to be without each other. the way they feel like a natural fit- mary encouraging petunia's catharsis and petunia's regiments and routines keeping mary from spinning out of orbit. they're two walking disasters but they're stuck in this hole together.
think about the tug of war over lily's memory (she was my goddamn sister). think about mary obliviating herself because she can't live with the grief and petunia being the sole surviving steward of lily's memory? how she would take care of a mary who is missing memories from half her life? how she would shoulder that grief alone?