A/N: This was written for PaintMeIntrigued's The Rock Music Challenge on the HPFC forums. The song it's based on is You're Going Down by Sick Puppies. Challenging, fun to write, and hopefully decent to read. Enjoy!
"Dudders says it wasn't Harry, Vernon." Petunia stated from her spot on the couch. Her green eyes flicked around the room as her husband paced it, watching him closely to make sure he didn't make any signs of leaving.
Vernon only grunted.
His arms were clasped behind his back, face twisted into an angry frown. From one end of the room to the other and then back again he paced. Just like he had for the last twenty minutes; since Harry stormed from the house and Petunia tucked Dudley upstairs in bed, a large mug of hot chocolate sitting on his bedside table.
"I think..." Petunia pursed her lips together as she watched Vernon stop by the window, look out it for just a few seconds, and then turn on his heel and start towards the other side of the room again. "I think that he might be right."
She didn't know much of the dreadful world her sister was involved in but the word Dementors she could recall. Just something small Lily had mentioned when they were growing up. Really, Petunia couldn't even remember what sort of context it had been said in, good or bad. The word just seemed familiar.
Stopping mid-stride, Vernon gave his wife a disbelieving stare. "You don't think it was him?"
"Well, no. No, not really." Petunia wasn't one to defend anything that came from the world that stole her sister from her, but she just couldn't sit there and watch Vernon keep pacing like that. It was starting to drive her mad.
Vernon slowly shook his head. "I think...I think that you should go upstairs and join our Dudders, Petunia. It's late and you're talking nonsense!"
"It's not nonsense!" Petunia snapped, pushing herself from the couch. She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned at the man. "It's just sense! Look at why he ran off! It was because he was caught doing magic warding off these-these things! The boy's lived under our roof for years, Vernon, and he's never done magic on Dudders before."
"Oh, but that's just it." The overweight man drew out the last two words, making sure that Petunia knew it wasn't just the earlier incident that had him in a knot.
It wasn't just that his son, his little Dudley, had been brought into his house by their elderly neighbor and the scalawag that they'd been forced to adopt. It wasn't just that Dudley was still sick and had been sentenced to bed for the rest of the night, even though it was only ten and it was a Saturday which was when they would all gather round the tv to watch Big Money.
No, it was everything that had happened in the last fifteen years.
Every little unexplained problem that had sprung up. Every relative and neighbor they'd had to dodge so they could keep their charge under wraps and out of the way. The lies that he had to weave and the fronts he had to put up. Things had been given up and sacrificed so that Harry could stay in their house.
And what sort of a thanks did they get?
Magic brought into his home and used on his son!
Petunia furrowed her brows and crossed the room so that she was standing next to her husband. Resting one thin hand on his shoulder, she tilted her head to the side ever so slightly. "What's 'it'?"
"This!" Vernon jerked away from Petunia as he shouted, opting to stalk back over to the window instead.
It was raining outside. Dark clouds coating the sky and a grey haze in the air. It wasn't as bad as earlier that evening, when everything had seemed so utterly and completely dark, just a typical rain storm. Perfectly common for that time of year. Perfectly normal.
The rest of the houses on the street looked that way too. Normal. With normal gardens and normal families and no horrendous secrets. Just the type of family that Vernon had always wanted, that he'd almost had.
That he never would.
"I've put up with that boy's antics for too long! Every year it's something new! Something freakish. I'm finished with it, Petunia." Vernon was through with puttering around in his home, afraid that the boy would snap and kill them all. He was through with having to hide from his neighbors, afraid of having them find out that his family wasn't a normal one.
But now the tables were turned.
What had happened tonight was the straw that broke the camels back, so to speak. The incident that pushed him over the edge; pushed him off and laughed as he fell. And it would not happen again.
"How? How can you be finished with it? You know they won't let us make him leave!" Petunia waved a hand through the air, as though she could point right to the wizards that had sentenced her sister's son to live with them until he reached adulthood. "Not 'till he's eighteen, at the least! Maybe not even then!"
Because, really, who knew what would happen? They weren't regular people, those wizards. If they decided that Harry wouldn't be safe elsewhere, Petunia knew that she and Vernon would just have to put up with Harry until he left on his own.
"And that's their own fault!" Vernon snarled. He didn't turn away from the window though, dark eyes staring out into the bleak night. "I will not put up with anything like this happening again, Petunia. I absolutely refuse."
"How do you plan on stopping it? Hmm?" Petunia prompted. She wasn't usually so snappy with her husband, especially not when they both agreed on what was being said. She just had no patience to deal with it right then. Not when her little boy was upstairs sick and there was an owl perched on her chandelier and Harry had taken off. It was actually the last one that worried her the most, because if something happened to him she knew it would be her family that would get in trouble for it.
Vernon was silent for a moment before, abruptly, closing the curtains and turning to his wife. "I will make sure he knows exactly how things are going to be done in this house. If he plans on having us put up with him any longer, then he'd better start following my rules!"
When Harry returned from where ever he'd stormed off to, Vernon was going to lay down the law. He would make sure that the boy, the boy he'd never wanted to get stuck with and never wanted to deal with, knew exactly who wore the pants in the Dursley household.
One of them was going down and it wasn't going to be Vernon.
Not in his own house.
It's been a long time coming,
And the tables turned around,
'Cus one of is going...
One of is going down
- Sick Puppies