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Growing Up

Summary:

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.
I had forgotten about this fic until it was moved over from an archive. I think that I may continue it (I'll have time after April)

Work Text:

TItle
Growing up

Summary:
Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.
SS/HP, SB/RL, NL/BZ, RW/MB, HG/NT,

Disclaimer and Notes:
This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoat Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
--This applies for the entire story

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Notes
The entire story is based on my desire to write a coming of age fic, conversations held within the Magic Stone Yahoo group and this quote:

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up. -Joseph Barth

This is going to start out a bit slow but please forgive me I want to lay some groundwork.

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I'd stay the hand of god, but the war is on your lips
How can I brace myself for razor blades on whips
When everything with meaning is shattered, broken, screaming
And I'm lost inside this darkness and I fear I won't survive

I could pray and trick with a double tongue, but the only fool here's me
I choose the way to go, but the road won't set me free
Cos I wish you'd see me, baby, save me, I'm going crazy
Tryin' to keep us real, keep us alive

Maybe Tomorrow Is A Better Day,
Poets of the Fall
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Prelude

 

It wasn’t often that Harry saw what his aunt really looked like. Vernon fancied fucking a Barbie, so his wife was always wearing blonde wigs of various styles and lengths with blue contacts long acrylic nails and pretty floral print dresses. Aunt Petunia let her auburn hair loose and took off the contacts so rarely that when Harry was a child he had refused to come to her thinking she had been a stranger.

Right now she looked like a completely different person in a pair of sweat pants and a sports bra, her hair swept up in a high tail, one barefoot thumping against the door of the low wooden cabinet. Her arms bent slightly as she pressed her palms into the countertop.

Petunia stood stiffly, her slim long face drawn tight in frustration. Her thin lips pursed into a tight line and her grey-green eyes half lidded in displeasure and her eyebrows drawn.

Harry eyed her warily. She was mad, yeah, but it wasn’t like he could have done anything about it... The silence had quickly become uncomfortable and the tension in the lines of aunt petunia’s body weren’t helping, there would be an explosion if he couldn’t diffuse the situation. “Aunt P-”

“Not a word.” The tone was so sharp that Harry’s jaw snapped shut of its own accord. Petunia ran a hand over her stomach her muscles tightened when her fingers slid over the large dark bruise near her navel. She looked at the teenagers standing the threshold of her kitchen and closed her eyes tipping her head back against the cool wood of the cabinet. She thumped her head twice against the cabinet before opening her eyes and pushing away from the counter. “I cannot take much more of this! They need to go, now. If Vernon com-”

“He’ll have something to say no matter what! He always does!” Harry shot out before he could help himself.

“Exactly my point! Why make it worse.” She walked over to the wall and plucked the phone from the wall. “You,” She pointed to Hermione who was at Harry’s left shoulder. “Come call your parents and have them come get you.”

“Mrs. Dursley,” Hermione began timidly, “My father isn’t in the area he dropped Ron and I off before he went to the senior center. He’ll come get us right after he takes the dentures. It should only take an hour.”

“See they’ll be gone befo-”

“Why did you come?” The woman snarled cutting across her nephews placating words.

“To make sure he was alive.” Ron had pushed to the front of the group and helped himself to a seat, his eyes locked with Petunia’s. “We aren’t allowed to write this summer, so we came to check that he was alright.”

“There is no need for that.”

“Really?” Ron snorted and wave a hand in dismissal. Harry and Hermione watched the interaction with trepidation. This calm in the face of opposition was unlike Ron. “So there was no need to come three years ago either when you had Harry locked in his room with bars on the window, seven locks on his door and no food.”

“Ron, shut up. Mind your own business!”

Both parties of the conversation again, ignored Harry.

“I did what I could! And that is what I will continue to do!”

“You could lock him in a room and so you do?!” The boy’s voice jumped in volume, “what kind of sick shit is that!?”

“No you idiot! I tried to fix it but I couldn’t! so I let you in!”

“We broke in, you daft bitch!”

“Watch your mouth, boy! You wouldn’t have gotten past the wards had I not allowed it. They’re tied to me no one can come in if they haven’t been once before unless I allow it!”

Just as Ron opened his mouth to retort a echoing Pop ran through the room and in the kitchen stood two men.

The woman was in a towering rage. She snapped her head in the direction the noise had come from. “Dear god! It never ends!”

Dumbledore gave a small smile, “Hello Petunia.”

Petunia huffed and reached for the shirt draped across one of the chairs. She shrugged it on before addressing the intruders. “Dumbledore. Severus.” Her greeting sounded more like curses. “What is it now?”

Dumbledore eyed the three teenagers and raised a brow. The two visitors flushed and looked away and Harry waved awkwardly. The ancient wizard turned his full attention to the woman before him, “Straight to business then, Petunia. I’ve come to tell you that Voldemort had been resurrected.”

Her face paled and her mouth pressed into such a fine line that it almost disappeared. “You said he was gone.”

“I said he had been weakened and incorporeal.” Dumbledore corrected, “not gone.”

“Why isn’t he gone.” Petunia scrubbed her face with her hands once before letting them flop to her sides. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing, my dear.”

“That is utter shit.” The room was silent. Harry openly gaped at his aunt, the woman always managed to surprise him somehow. “Almost all of my family is dead and you lot have condemned me to this life! And that man isn’t dead?”

“Petunia all I asked of you was to look after lily’s child--”

“Asked me? You’ve gone senile old man. You didn’t ask me a damn thing! You dropped a baby on my doorstep without so much as a by your leave! Then you tie me to this house! I can’t leave for more than two days before I start going mad!”

“That was just insurance. You shouldn’t leave the protections of this house for too long--”

“Really? Because this damn house is anything but safe!” Petunia began to pace the short length of the kitchen while ranting, her voice coming shrill and loud. “I’m stuck with a fat, stupid, violent excuse for a human being and the offspring from his sordid love affair.

I play doting mother to a child I had no part in making! And godforbid I instill a little discipline! the moment I tell him no he runs to Vernon gets two of what ever it is and I come away with bruises!”

“You reap what you sow, Petunia.” The low timbre of Snape’s voice carried through the room stopping the angry woman in her tracks.

“Like you have room to talk. Did you forget that I was the one who helped you fit your teeth back into your mouth every time Tobias knocked them out! Or what about when that deranged mother of your beat you bloody for looking her in the eye hmmm? Did you sow that?” Her voice was barely above a whisper but the anger came across as loud and clear as a bell. “How did I sow these seeds, Severus?”

“You ignored common sense and ran off with the first person who looked your way. You were so desperate to leave crystal waters that you married Vernon no mater what anyone told you.”

The onlookers realized that this had deteriorated to a personal argument, they paid rapt attention. How did these two know each other? What dirt was there on the potions master? What did this all mean?

“Of coarse I wanted out! Everyone in that shit Town did! So did Lilly! She married straight out of school and never looked back! She was always so damn selfish. She left you for that man she married and she left me to rot there!

Then when our parents were killed in their bed and my uterus pulled out of my body and mailed to her, what did she do? She tells me that she loves me but some things are more important than death. I ask her ‘what about your kid, your family?’. What does she say? She says that they’ll be okay because some ass named peter was going to look out for them. And now she’s six foot underground and I’m left with a child that you want me to raise like a pig for slaughter!”

Harry drew back as if he had been slapped.

“Enough.” Dumbledore’s bark made petunia quiver in anger her jaw once again set tightly. “You are over reaching your self Petunia.”

“ME?” she flung an accusing finger towards the unwelcome headmaster. “You’ve long ago overreached yourself! You are not god! You can’t really expect me to allow you to send my sisters child to the front lines of a man’s war because some crazy bitch divines a one on one death match!

I’ve raised that boy. His child hood may not have been the best, but I tried! And it will not go to waste because some ass doesn’t want to die!”

The calm, patient and understanding headmaster had disappeared and in his place stood the defeater of Grindelwald. “What do you know of the prophecy, Petunia.”

“I know enough.” She snapped. Before turning to the younger members of the group. “Go upstairs, get your things ready you’re leaving.” The woman lifted her chin belligerently, before turning her back to the room and opening one of the cabinets rummaging through it. “You gave me a baby with a death sentence, tied me to this house and you expect me to be grateful.” She scoffed and slammed two small glass containers onto the counter. Her other hand shot out and grabbed a knife and draw it across the inside of her arm before anyone could comprehend what was happening. In a minute and a half both containers were half full and stopped.

She shoved one at Severus who took it without complaint.

“Put my blood wherever he is to stay. That will keep the protections going right? Because he can’t stay here, he leaves the house to run errands, for chores, for entertainment and to stay away from Vernon. He cant be safe here I can’t do anything to defend him anyway. So you’ll have to put him with someone who can or else I’m withdrawing him from that damn school and sending him on a plane to another country.”