Chapter Text
Petunia refuses to drive into London to pick Harry up in June.
It’s just two months, she tells herself. Just summer every year until he’s of age – which is less than five years away. That’s only ten months total, nine if he moves out on his seventeenth birthday. It’s maddening, but she can push through.
And then Vernon comes home, Harry in tow, horrified and babbling about Harry’s murderous godfather. Oddly, he seems to grow calmer as Petunia’s face blanches. Vernon’s always been able to keep a level head, and he switches from fear to comfort with ease.
“He’s just making up nonsense.” He reassures her, “Trying to trick us into obeying his every whim.”
But Petunia doesn’t have the luxury of believing in safety. Sirius Black still hasn’t been caught – his face pops up on the telly every few weeks, and the newscasters are theorizing that he’s gone abroad. Petunia’s been jumpy for months on end. Dumbledore had promised protection, but Black broke out of Azkaban.
She waits until Vernon is snoring heavily before pulling out her wand, which she’s been keeping under her mattress all year, and creeping down the hall to the second bedroom. Petunia hates what having Harry in her home has done to her, hates that she needs to keep her wand within reach rather than safely locked away in the attic. She’s been clawing her way to normalcy for nearly twenty years, and her sister’s son just keeps dragging her back towards magic.
She casts a whispered muffliato on his door before stowing her wand away into the folds of her robe. If Harry finds out – which she’s been working to prevent for nearly thirteen years – he’ll be sure to tell Vernon and Dudley out of spite. She can’t risk them finding out because of a tempestuous teenager’s bratty attitude, no matter how much she wants to hex Harry stupid.
He’s awake, of course, reading under his covers with a torchlight. Petunia had wanted to lock up his school things again, but Vernon had been too cowed by the threat of a mass-murderer to take them again.
Harry jolts when he hears the wood floors of his room creak under her slippered foot, whipping off the blankets and fumbling for his wand. He’s just brushing it with his fingers, about to grab it from his bedside table when she hisses, “Don’t you dare point that thing at me.”
He’s getting older, she realizes. The torchlight elongates the hollows of his face, making him all bones and shadows. Her fingers twitch towards her wand – but then he shifts again, sitting up and pointing the light at her, and he’s just a boy again.
“What is it?” Harry asks warily. Petunia pushes her shoulders back, straightening her spine to make herself taller, and pulls her dressing gown tighter around herself.
“If you threaten my family again, you’re out on the streets.”
Harry’s clearly bewildered by her presence. She knows it’s odd; she never stays up so late, let alone to talk to him. But speaking to him during the day won’t do – he always makes himself scarce until dinner, unwilling to help with the housework, and Dudley is always popping in and out of the house. It has to be now.
Harry shakes off his confusion and settles on his default – backtalk.
“I’m not threatening anyone,” he says, eyes wide with mock innocence. Petunia is incensed, enraged.
“If you bring up your ‘murderous godfather’ one more time-”
“But I’m not making it up,” Harry fakes sincerity, “I really have got a godfather who was convicted for murder.”
“The murder of my sister,” Petunia hisses.
She can’t stand Harry’s insolence, his blasé attitude. Sirius Black killed Lily; the avada kedavra may as well have come from his own wand. She will not allow that same sister’s son to threaten Petunia with Black in her own home.
Harry gapes at her, clearly thrown off again.
“You know about Sirius?”
Petunia is nearly blinded by the vivid image of Sirius Black at thirteen, laughing uproariously across the Great Hall with his idiot friends, as the Slytherin table erupted into pandemonium when all of their hair began to fall off at once. Lounging under a willow on the shore of the Great Lake, lazily exchanging insults with Lily and her friends, none of them able to hide their grins. Harry on her doorstep, the betrayal of her sister outlined in Dumbledore’s swirly script.
“He was at Lily’s wedding,” she says stiffly. But Harry’s confusion is morphing into a hesitant curiosity.
“You were at my parents’ wedding? You met Sirius?”
Petunia can feel the ghosts of the past tearing at her skin, clawing at her ankles in an attempt to drag her down into the deep. Lily is somewhere in Petunia’s mind, twirling in her wedding dress, immature and radiant and so very alive.
“Do not say his name in my house,” she whispers, “Or you’re done here. I don’t care what–”
She cuts herself off before she says Dumbledore’s name. She’s given up too much tonight.
She tugs her dressing gown tight again, suddenly feeling unsure in her hair rollers and pink slippers. She can’t stand to be in the room with him anymore, so she turns for the door.
“Sirius didn’t do it,” Harry says quietly. “It wasn’t his fault.”
As if that explains anything. As if it even really matters, when Lily is bones in the ground.
Petunia does have questions, but she’s too tired to ask them. There was a secret keeper, and then Voldemort was inside the house. Voldemort was killed, but there are Death Eaters who have every reason to want Harry dead.
She doesn’t feel any safer than she did five minutes ago, she realizes. She ignored the problem for years; let herself believe that the biggest threat to her life here was Harry, let herself believe that the magical world was something she had escaped from.
But Harry is still here, which means Petunia and her family are still in danger.
She leaves his room without another word.
-------------------
Harry doesn’t speak to her about it again, although he does shoot her cautiously inquisitive looks over their grapefruit the next morning.
Petunia tries to distract herself with smaller frustrations; Dudley’s new diet, which the whole family is adopting so that he doesn’t feel too terrible about it. Petunia tears up at the grocery store, wishing that she could buy her sweet son a fizzy drink and a chocolate bar. But, as much as it pains her, she obeys the doctor’s orders. The only thing worse than a sad Dudley is an unhealthy Dudley, she tells herself – although he’s always looked perfect to her.
Harry stops mentioning his godfather, much to Vernon’s delight.
“What did I tell you?” he chortles to Petunia over dinner one night. “He was just trying to scare us.”
She gives him a thin-lipped smile in return.
A week later, they’re having breakfast when Vernon goes to answer the ring of the doorbell. He returns livid, clutching an envelope almost completely covered in stamps.
Can’t even use the post, Petunia sniffs to herself with a warm burst of righteousness. The wizarding world was truly backwards.
Vernon is furious with the utterly disrespectful Harry. Apparently he’s been invited to the Quidditch World Cup by some friends. Petunia wasn’t even aware that he had friends, and she had always found Quidditch to be an pointlessly boring sport designed for show-offs, but she certainly doesn’t mind having Harry taken off of her hands. She convinces Vernon to let him go, and he begrudgingly tells Harry to write back with an acceptance.
Harry informs them that the Weasleys (Petunia conjures up vague images of red hair and frayed sweaters) will be arriving to collect him the very next day. Which is exceptionally rude, but Petunia can’t bring herself to be overly upset about it. The sooner Harry is out of the house, the better.
Of course, there’s the matter of Petunia being alive. She doesn’t want Vernon and Dudley to face them alone, and she knows that Harry has probably told everyone about her. But she can’t be seen. She can’t.
She takes down all of the family pictures and drives the car down the street, where she sits and lets it idle. Her heart pounds as she watches the house, waiting for the freaks in dressing gowns on her doorstep to become the talk of the neighborhood.
Instead, there’s a series of flashes of light from the living room window. Petunia realizes, horrified and enraged, that they’re using the Floo network. She’ll have to scrub the carpet for hours if the track soot throughout her spotless home.
She waits a few minutes, until the flashes start and then stop again, to drive back. She walks up her walkway and opens her door with shaking hands; but the house is mercifully empty except for Vernon and Dudley. The people who belong in it.
Only Dudley is sobbing, heaving and terrified. Vernon grits out the story of how those freak children made his tongue grow, purple with rage. Petunia clutches her son close and thinks about how he could have choked to death.
She hates magic. How dare they, just because he’s a muggle? She wants to apparate to the Weasley home – not that she even knows where it is – and hex those boys herself.
She hopes bitterly that something terrible will happen at the World Cup.