Petunia had the occasional bout of insomnia. She had become used to treading through the house on light feet to a nightly soundtrack of sleeping voices: the heavy snores of her husband and son; the soft hoots of Harry's beast from its cage; the rustle of the boy's sheets as he turned in his bed. Only now, in the past months, those typical sounds had been mingled with the discomforting cries for someone she had never heard of, someone named Cedric.
Harry didn't talk about it, but somehow Petunia just knew – the bloody war of years past that had ended up killing her only sister was slowly returning. It scared her more than any pretend curse that boy muttered at her son; it brought her back to a strange, frightening world which she had hoped to leave behind her for good. Having this boy under her roof – it was like having her sister's ghost on her heels, those same green eyes watching her every day.
But then 'those people' had spirited the boy away in the cover of night, leaving Petunia to wonder what was really going on. She went on as usual in Harry's unusual absence, looking after her own family and playing the part of the good wife as she had done before, ignoring the rise in Dudley's temper tantrums and her husband's ill humor.
On occasion, when Petunia was alone in the house, she would stop to clear out the dust gathering in Harry's room, sneaking out to the trash can at the back of the house to throw away some discarded owl feathers from under the bed. Crossing the threshold into his bedroom where he spent most of his summers felt like crossing into a place where things like magic were considered normal.
One summer afternoon, she found a torn scrap of parchment stuck in the corner of the windowsill that turned out to be several lines of the end of a letter from one of Harry's school friends, filled with a kind of warmth she had never bothered to show the boy herself. A young girl's gentle handwriting turned the boy's common name into a curly feat of calligraphy; it was obvious that they were best friends, Harry and this girl he never talked about.
These words had rattled Petunia to her core. She did not want to think about him as someone who went to school and had friends and wrote letters and had crushes and spent his days around freaks who liked laughing and studying with him. She didn't want to think about him as human.
That night, Petunia found herself sitting – or more like squatting, knees awkwardly bent under the lack of height – in the place where years ago she sent her nephew to sleep and eat and live by himself, a beggar and an outcast in his own home. She thought that if she'd have to live like that, year after year, she'd probably hate herself too.
Except that, in small ways, she already did and it was all that boy's fault, him and his father for taking her sister away. It was her husband's fault for making her completely cut off her family. It was her son's fault for stealing all of her love meant for someone else. It was all Albus Dumbledore's fault for dropping everything back onto her at the worst moment without so much as a 'thank you' for the unexpected burden of an extra life.
It was everyone's fault but Petunia's. It made sense to her. After losing Lily, self-pity was all she had left.