Vernon Dursley was proud to say that he was a perfectly normal man, thank you very much.
He had always been perfectly normal. In all his 20 years of life nothing less than perfectly normal had ever touched his life. He had a had a perfectly normal education, got himself a perfectly normal job and met a perfectly normal woman whom he had quite naturally grown to love, so he did the perfectly normal thing and asked her to marry him.
Because wanting to spend your life with the one you loved, that was normal right?
Sad eyes looked up at him, tears brimming in them. "Vernon I can't. There….there are things you don't know about me, about my family"
"What things?"
He knew everything about this woman, everything, he knew her better than himself.
Or so he thought.
….
In the summer of 1991 a bombardment of owls would drive Vernon Dursley from his home and on a mission to escape the intrusion of a world he had once had no idea even existed, back when he lived in a perfectly normal world where witches and wizards and magic didn't exist.
On July 31st that year he would see magic performed for the first time right before his eyes when a half giant pointed an umbrella at his son and made him grow a pig's tail.
But years before that a twenty-year-old Vernon Dursley would sit and listen to a nineteen-year-old Petunia tell him a tale of a world he had never imagined before that day, tell him with sincerity that magic was real and the world was full of people and creatures and things that he couldn't understand and didn't want to.
She couldn't prove it. She wasn't a witch. Her sister was.
Petunia couldn't perform magic to show him that what she was saying was real and not a madness of her mind that he had somehow failed to see before now. She stared up at him with wide eyes and pleaded silently for him to understand. For him to believe.
He could have walked away, dismissed her words as crazy talk and married another girl. A perfectly normal girl with no ties to magic, no witch for a sister. He could have continued living in a perfectly normal world where things like that didn't exist and never would and forget all about this unfortunate event in his perfectly normal life.
At twenty years old Vernon Dursley took Petunia Evans hand and placed a ring on it, asking her again to be his. Telling her that it was ok. He believed her.
And it was ok, she wasn't dragging him into that world of madness like she feared, he was taking her away from it. Helping her escape.
….
Vernon Dursley was proud to say that he was a perfectly normal man, thank you very much.
A perfectly normal man who believed in magic without a shred of proof.
Not because it was in his nature to believe in such things but because he believed in her.
He had to. He loved her.