What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect—what if she took him in? Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them). Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes—she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.

Slytherins–- this is a group who laughs when Neville falls off a broom and breaks his wrist. And what if we had Harry there, who had always been the one laughed at, who had a nice thirst to prove himself, who had green trim on his robes instead of red? This Harry still stepped out in front of Malfoy’s best sneer and demanded Neville’s Rememberall back–- though he got a detention from it, not a Seekership. When kids in the Slytherin Common Room tossed jeers at the pudgy feet of Millicent Bulstrode, Harry rose up to do something about it. When Quirrell shouted “troll in the dungeons, thought you ought to know,” and Harry overheard that there was a girl in the bathroom crying, he still ran off to make sure she got out okay. Harry did not ask Millicent to come with him; this was not a boy who asked for things. When he had asked for things, Dudley had laughed, Petunia had scowled, and Vernon had said, “no,” or just kept reading the newspaper like he hadn’t heard anything at all. But when Harry went, Millicent bunched up her robes in her hands and followed.

Padme lives. She runs. -- Leia is growing in fits and spurts, eating greedily and crying loudly. She stays in a sling on Padme’s chest when they move, Luke held snug in a sling around Obi Wan’s. Luke gets a whole head of thick brown hair while Leia’s is still patchy and bald, but he never matches his sister’s powerful lungs. When Padme had been sitting in her high senatorial apartment on Corsucant, holding Anakin’s sweaty hand, she had never imagined she’d be murmuring desperately soothing noises to her fussy daughter while she shot around a corner at stormtroopers, while R2D2 meddles with a ship’s blast doors behind her. Luke starts teething on a hot jungle planet where they hunker down for three weeks, sleeping in an abandoned old temple and catching the local wildlife for dinner. Leia takes her first steps in the belly of a Corellian freighter they’ve stowed away on. She wobbles between Padme’s outstretched hands and Obi Wan’s knees and boxes of smuggled luxuries. When she falls down, Obi Wan surges forward, heart in his throat, but Leia laughs.