Disclaimer 1: This is fanfic. That means I do not own any of it. I just borrow it to play with for a little while and let people see the pathetic results if they really want to.
Disclaimer 2: I'm not making any money from it. It's just for fun.
Disclaimer 3: What isn't borrowed is all made up. None of this is real or most likely at all realistic. Please don't trust any of the information in here. Most likely you know more about whatever I'm writing about than I do.
Disclaimer 4: Attitudes, views and opinions expressed by the characters or in the story are not necessarily those of the author. Even when writing Science Fiction or Fantasy I do not tend to attempt to create perfect/better worlds in which everybody gets a happy end ... or whatever is best for them. Please accept that some characters will have a bad ending or be unhappy.
Disclaimer 5: I intend no insult to anyone. If I offend anyone I'm very sorry. Please understand that it was an accident as I tend to be very clumsy in these things.
Notes: I kind of missed the Dursleys, so ...
Chapter 3: The Burrow
The festhall of Grunnings Drills had been decorated carefully, the most expensive tables and chairs the company owned had been set up in it and the Grunnings kitchens had produced the most expensive dinner Vernon Dursley and Petunia Dursley-Evans had ever eaten ... or at least would have eaten after dinner that night.
At the moment they were still hungry and standing around with the other top Grunnings executives and executive-wives awaiting the arrival of the Masons, representatives of one of England's most important construction companies. If all went well tonight the Masons would sign a purchase contract for several hundreds of thousands of drills tomorrow morning that would keep the Grunnings factories working at full capacity for at least another year. And if the Masons were happy with the service and quality of those drills many more years to come.
Finally, finally the guests arrived in a black hover-limousine with the logo of their company. Vernon, who had been negotiating the deal for weeks, greeted them, introduced the other executives and their wives and finally Petunia who took Mrs Mason-Dawn's arm as if she were an old friend and led her into the festhall.
"Ah, elegant, elegant," Mr. Mason commented. "Though the style is a little outdated. Built about twenty years ago, wasn't it?"
"Oh yes," Vernon confirmed. "Along with the rest of the building. I suppose we'll have to modernise eventually, but as of now it still serves its purpose well enough and tearing down company buildings is such an annoying disruption of productivity."
"Oh, of course," Mr. Mason agreed. "Quite so, quite so. And when you do want to rebuild you know where to find us."
Drinks and soup were served by nervous waiters, and the conversation continued pleasantly during the meal, the men talking about drills and buildings respectively, while the women soon branched out into the subjects of clothes and jewellery. Women always had it easier when making friends, Vernon thought grudgingly, always at least one shared interest to fall back on.
But luckily he could expand on the differences between drilling concrete and metal while Mr. Mason went on about the respective merits of concrete and metal as building materials.
Over the third course Mr. Mason finally moved on to interior design and Vernon was just about to reply with an explanation of how much he preferred the more drillable wooden furniture over that made of plastics and glass when they were interrupted by shrieks in the hall outside.
"Oh, Mrs. Tanner-Boyd," Vernon shouted to a secretary turned waitress for the occasion who happened to be waiting close to the door with a tray of dessert. "Do have a look outside and ask them to kindly stop that racket."
"Yes Sir, of course Sir, right away Sir," the woman turned awkwardly juggling her tray to free a hand and open the door.
That turned out to have been a mistake. No sooner had she opened it than a strange brown and fuzzy shape fluttered through and collided with her tray.
Mrs. Tanner-Boyd shrieked, stumbled backwards on unfamiliarly high heels, tripped and dropped her tray splashing the delicious looking dessert of whipped cream and flower petals on the ground.
"What the!" Vernon began to roar, but then words failed him as the disaster continued to unfold.
The fuzzy brown thing, apparently some kind of bird that had lost its way and somehow ended up in the building, managed to avoid a collision with the secretary and saved itself by using the table as a landing track, leaving a trail of upset wine glasses, dishes and pitchers before catching hold of the apparent safety of a candle-holder.
That decorative, but not well balanced object had never been intended as a bird's perch however and after wobbling under the sudden weight for a moment tipped over spilling the squawking animal head-first into Mrs. Mason-Dawn's salad.
Almost all of the women present and several of the men screamed, but only Mrs. Mason-Dawn continued into a full-blown fit of hysterics and ran out of the room still screaming before anybody could stop her.
Mr. Mason stayed behind only long enough to ask them whether Grunnings employees considered this a good joke - unfortunately one of the waiters had tried to laugh it off - and inform them that his wife had a horror of birds of all kinds. Then he too returned to their company limousine which left the premises at top speed as soon as he had gotten in and closed the door behind him.
Vernon stared after them in shock. Then he yelled at Mrs. Tanner-Boyd until she too ran out sobbing.
He continued yelling for a while, now at the waiter who had laughed and was then trying to chase the bird out a window.
"That's an owl, isn't it?" somebody asked when Vernon stopped to regain his breath.
"It looks like one in any case. I wonder how it got inside."
"It must be so scared, poor thing."
Vernon was just about to inform them in no uncertain terms of what he thought of people who pitied birds that ruined huge business deals when Petunia touched his arm gently.
"It's no use, Vernon," she said. "Shouting about it now won't improve anything. It'll be more productive to clean up the mess and try to smooth things over in the morning."
"Oh look," somebody discovered. "There's a letter under the desert tray!"
"A letter? But how did it get there?"
"I suppose the bird must have dropped it. Stole it from somebody's in-tray I suppose."
"I thought they only steal glittering things?"
"That's magpies, you idiot."
"Well, who's the letter addressed to?" Vernon snapped.
"Mrs. Petunia Dursley-Evans," the one who'd found it read out. "Grunnings ..."
"Yes, yes," Vernon grumbled. "Just hand it over."
Petunia looking very perplexed, went and took the thick envelope from the man's hand.
"That's strange," she said. "I'm sure I left nothing in my inbox when I closed the office today."
"Maybe it arrived after you left and the owl grabbed it from the sorting desk," Vernon suggested.
He was not at all eager to accuse his own wife of having left the window open through which the bird had gotten in.
Petunia mechanically opened the letter, looked at the contents and gasped.
"It's Harry's annual progress report," she exclaimed. "How could that end up here instead of at the flat?"
"Who knows where the poor confused bird's flight took it before it arrived here," someone said with a shrug. "We'll have to check the entire complex for damage tomorrow."
"Harry?" Petunia's boss inquired. "Didn't you say your son's name was Dudley?"
"Why yes, it is," Petunia confirmed. "Harry is our nephew. The son of my dead sister. She and her husband died ... in a work accident. I get his progress reports because I am his closest living relative."
"We're paying some child support for him, so he doesn't have to be supported entirely by the orphan welfare fund," Vernon added hastily.
"Oh, how nice of you!" one of the older wives gushed. "Can we see the picture of the poor little orphan?"
"Why, he's not at all poor, Mary," her husband chided her. "He doesn't even know that his parents are dead. Thanks to the kindness of our government orphans are raised just the same as everybody else's children."
"And we're paying child support for his education, and sending him birthday gifts so he gets just as many as the other children, too," Vernon added.
It rather annoyed him that Petunia insisted on the gifts, but she claimed that the people at the school would think badly of them, if they didn't send any.
The woman still insisted that she wanted to see the picture and so Petunia fished around in the large envelope until she found it.
"You'll have to understand that we want to keep his health, behaviour, social and grade reports private, though," she said as she handed it over. "Just because he is an orphan doesn't mean that every stranger ought to be peeking into his life."
At first Vernon didn't understand why she insisted on that, but then somebody exclaimed: "Why that photograph's moving!" and he remembered just what sort of institute his nephew was in. Both he and Petunia paled wondering how to explain it away when the elderly Mary once again spoke up.
"Why you silly thing. It's just a vidgraph made to look like an old-fashioned photograph."
"And why are the boys wearing black dresses?"
"Oh don't you see the sticks they are waving around? It's a themed dress-up party and they are pretending to be magicians."
"What a nice idea for the children," a young man commented. "I still remember how much I loved to dress up when I was little."
"Well, personally I think that they are too old to play pretend," Vernon grumbled forgetting for a moment that Hogwarts really was a wizarding institute and those were most likely their normal uniforms. "I'm glad Smeltings doesn't do that sort of nonsense. We should have made them send Harry there along with Dudley. If we had sued ..."
"Now Vernon," Petunia reminded him. "It was his parents' wish that he should attend the same institute as his father. I'm sure it was not a crime of the institute to respect that more than our choice."
Vernon grumbled some more later that night when Petunia confessed that she thought Hogwarts always sent its progress reports by owl and informed her in no uncertain terms that from now on she'd have to spend Harry's birthdays alone in their flat to make sure that nobody else saw the birds.