The day that Marge Dursley learned that just about everything she thought she knew about Harry Potter's parents had been a lie came three and half weeks after he and Dudley arrived at her home. Prior to her getting some of the facts and changing her views on the Potters whom she had never met, she had attributed Harry's good behavior to Vernon's "training" and had lamented that her brother had never given Dudley any, as it would have done the boy a world of good. To understand in part how this incident came about, you would need to know about a bit of lesser known incident in modern wizarding history and a fact about James Potter that was common knowledge to the Aurors he had trained with in order to gain the skills necessary to aid the Order of the Phoenix during the war, but not so common knowledge to the rest of the wizarding world.

Transporting a nuclear weapon through the wizarding world or by magical means is the only offense on the books with an immediate death penalty, and for good reason, considering the fact that in areas where magic has frequently been cast by large numbers of witches and wizards for centuries or millenia, muggle electronics tended to fail in rather spectacularly and often in an exceedingly unusual manner. The more delicate the electronic device, the worse the effect. The reason most muggle devices such as radios, portable televisions, and radar didn't work at Hogwarts wasn't a matter of it won't work because you need somewhere to plug it in, and the radio signal didn't go over the mountain, it was a matter of the ambient magic that flew through the air in and around the castle got conducted through the wires and whatnot as well as the electricity that came from batteries and jury-rigged generators and fucked with the thing's inner workings, sometimes transfiguring them, sometimes charming them, and almost always screwing with them somehow. There was a reason that the only electrical bit in Colin Creevey's camera which incidentally had belonged to his father before him was the flash, and a reason that even the muggleborn students' watches were analog.

In the aftermath of the "Nuclear Weapon Scare of 1952" in which the American muggleborn wizard Alexander Hinkley had brought a prototype nuclear missile to Hogsmeade with the intention of selling it to the Soviet Union, a Ministry that was well aware of the disaster that could have occured if the missile had been any closer to Hogwarts, since they had received the reports of devastation from the Magical Consulate in Japan regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki seven years before, started frantically passing laws to prevent such an occurrence from happening on British soil. It was in this period that the half-blooded Auror Lewis Greene who was the son of a Constable in the Metropolitan Police had drafted and submitted a bill that would've never been passed at any other time. It is because of Greene's law that all Auror training since 1953 took three years instead the of two it used to. In the extra year all trainees got muggle police training with the Metropolitan Police and spent the rest of the year working in a muggle police station "To familiarize themselves with the muggle world so they could better blend in and be able to tell if something was wrong". Incidentally, this training proved not to be the waste many Aurors seemed to think it was, because it was this training that enabled Kingsley Shaklebolt to protect the Prime Minister as well as he had after Voldemort's resurrection. The Auror office itself was an unlisted Metropolitan police station, and all Aurors held equivalent ranks with the Metropolitan police.

The law was ostensibly created so that the Aurors who incidentally didn't realize that they were the wizarding equivalent of MI5 rather than the local police had authority in both worlds and could get all necessary assistance in pursuing a suspect that went to ground in the muggle world. There was an added benefit to the law that the Purebloods never noticed and that the law's creator was well aware of however. In times when the budget to the Auror department was cut and Aurors, usually half-bloods and the few muggleborns who managed to weasel their way in, were let go, they could opt to transfer to another Metropolitan police station as their jobs in the muggle world had not been terminated.

Police Constable Fred Wilkins had not been such an Auror, but before he left London and headed out to a small department in the country for a change of scenery he had a partner who was. Prior to his move to the countryside, Fred Wilkins had served with the Metropolitan police throughout the Seventies and the early Eighties, and had briefly been partnered with a rookie named James Potter who had incidentally never completed his Auror training and therefore had never officially held a job in the Wizarding World in the end of 1979. In 1983, he received his last partner before his transfer a year later, and it had been this partner who had been a laid off Auror. Upon hearing that he had been briefly partnered with James Potter, his new partner had given him a muggle friendly account of James Potter's fate.

When he was called out to the residence of one Majorie Dursley because of a "Domestic disturbance", which was a first as when he usually came around to her place it was because the neighbors had complained about her dogs, he didn't know what to expect, since as far as he knew the rather unpleasant woman wasn't married and didn't have a boyfriend. He did not expect however to find the woman ordering him to arrest a massive blond boy that looked a bit like her while a rather familiar looking dark haired boy cradling a bulldog pup was being seen to by paramedics. While he was taking Marge's statement, he learned much to his surprise that the boy was the son of the young James Potter whom he'd briefly been partnered with back in London, and that someone had been feeding Marge a pack of lies about the man. The woman was extremely surprised when he told her the truth (which was actually the truth as he knew it, which was: After James Potter had transferred away from London himself, he became involved in an investigation into a serial killer who threatened his family, who he sent into hiding in Wales for their safety. On Halloween 1981, the serial killer attacked, and James was killed while defending his wife, and his wife was killed shortly after. One of the two had fatally wounded their attacker, because he bled out before he could kill the son).

After listening to Constable Wilkins' story she said one word, spitting it out as if it were a curse: "Petunia."

The day that Marge had learned that it actually was Petunia who was the bad seed of her family rather than her sister, had started out normally enough, or as normal as her new routine had become. Harry, who now that he was being fed regularly wasn't looking nearly as weedy, though the awful squint he had that made him look mean was still yet to be corrected, had gotten up and made the bed he had made on the couch which she was tempted to give to Dudley instead. Dudley, who was learning what it was like to be on the receiving end of the no meals until...punishment and had lost a bit of weight, had tromped downstairs without making his bed and cleaning his room, and been sent back up to do so before breakfast.

After Breakfast, Harry did his chores as quickly as he could without cutting corners so he could watch a bit of television and maybe play with the puppies later. Dudley had once again flat out refused to do anything around the house and was learning what the inside of a broom closet looked like, though it was a tight fit, and Marge went out to feed the dogs.

The morning became afternoon, and Dudley went out to cause trouble. Today, instead of running off to break the windows in a vacant house half a mile away like he had taken to doing recently, he ended up doing the one thing Marge would neither condone nor forgive. Dudley had only gotten away with kicking Ripper because Ripper could and did mete out his own punishment. Today however, Dudley had decided to attack the puppies that Harry had taken outside the kennel so they could play in the sun, which Marge allowed Harry to do because there were a couple of families looking to buy, and they would want a dog that got along with children. Dudley's first target was a rather pudgy puppy that Harry had started calling Roly-Poly. Harry, having had the saving people thing practically since he was born, jumped between Dudley and the puppy before he could land a blow, becoming Dudley's second target. Dudley kicked him, hard.

It was fortunate that Marge had been looking out her kitchen window to see what Dudley was up to, as he was still in the yard at the time this was taking place. Coming to a decision, she dialed 999 before running out the door. She wasn't going to have a puppy kicking hooligan in her home a minute longer than she had to. The fact that he was family made it much worse. Her formerly precious nephew had just proven himself beyond rotten to the core, and she wasn't entirely certain he was redeemable. She raced over to where Harry was protecting one of her most valuable puppies with his life, and pulled Dudley away.

The ambulance had arrived first, about two minutes before Constable Wilkins. The Paramedics informed her that Harry had two cracked ribs and would need to be taken to the hospital. She decided that she would of course follow as soon as the hooligan she had once considered family was off her property. She would be having words with Vernon about this as soon as he was feeling better.

It had been while she had been giving her statement to the police that she had learned some interesting facts about Harry's father who, rather being the drunken wastrel Vernon and Petunia had claimed him to be, had been a good man who had died in the line of duty. After she had listened to the story the Constable who kept citing her for no reason told her, she started wondering why her brother had lied to her. The Constable had no reason to lie about something that was so easily confirmed as he had given her James Potter's badge number (which she later confirmed with the Metropolitan Police, James Potter born May 27, 1960 died October 31, 1981 Survived by one son named Harry was listed as killed in the line of duty during an undercover assignment). Her brother had never lied to her before about anything big like this. When they were children he had of course told her a bunch of stupid stories that she could easily tell were lies, but he hadn't sat there and outright told her a bold faced lie about anything important before.

The answer came to her in a flash. There was only one person who would benefit from those lies, one person who had her sympathy for years because she had to take care of the son of a pair of drunks, one person whom she had disliked since the day Vernon had brought her for a visit and all the dogs started growling. The reason her brother had lied to her had been because of the woman who was only good for using her overlong neck for spying on the neighbors, spoiling Vernon's son until he was beyond rotten to the core, and turning her poor brother into a liar.

"Petunia." she spat.

Edited 7/22/12