Chapter Six: Ingrid Two

Vernon obsessed over what that damn psychiatrist had said for days.

He thought about it tossing and turning in bed at night. Distracted at work during the day. Silent during dinner.

Nobody could get him to talk about what had gone on in the private office. Dudley demanded, Petunia wondered worriedly. Only the girl never said anything, giving him sideways looks he had trouble reading. Before, he would usually have assumed she was merely being uncaring and shifty.

But now everything had been called into question for him. He wished he could let all that evidence go - but he could not.

Because there was more evidence, staring him right in the face. He couldn't read the girl, and she did make him nervous. So he assumed a shifty lack of care.

But he had no proof of it, did he?

And this rankled. It rankled. Vernon was a businessman, through and through, a political man. He had always prided himself as a logical man. He hated making uninformed decision.

But the fact remained that Ingrid did act very little like her father whom Vernon had hated so very much. Even Vernon could tell that, reluctantly.

She didn't even look like him.

For some reason, this became the deciding factor for him. Because if he'd sentenced a young girl who had no problems to life with sparse belongings in a cupboard - it would be a horrifying realization, but he had to know. He had to know now.

Vernon Dursley was in the end still only human.

What if what this girl was… was just strange to him? Was not the end of the world?

In the end, the decision to seek treatment was three things: difficult, obsessive, and lonely. And it led to a huge fight with his wife, one of the worst they'd ever had.

"You are entirely normal! You are completely fine, you are not deficient!" Petunia snarled in the living room the night he told her.

"No one is claiming I'm deficient!" Vernon shouted back, anxious and harassed. "But it's not normal, is it? It's not normal to be terrified by brown shoes with black pants, is it?!" His eyes were wide; he was desperate for her to see what he saw.

"Oh, so because you're a bit eccentric -"

"You've always found me eccentric?!"

"I didn't say that!"

"Yes, you did!"

"I CANNOT HAVE AN ABNORMAL HUSBAND! I ALREADY HAD AN ABNORMAL EVERYTHING ELSE!"

Petunia shouted these last words, and both spouses paused wide-eyed and pale as those words hung there in the silence, with no way to take them back. Vernon was hurt. Petunia was breathing deeply, as if this had exploded out of her after being kept inside for years.

"... I have to seek treatment," Vernon said helplessly and quietly at last, throwing out his hands. "For this Asperger's mental illness. I have to. It… It'll be better for everyone, can't you see that?"

Petunia puffed up in fury - and turned away with tears in her eyes, her back stiff. She hated people seeing her cry, always had.

"Petunia…" Vernon reached out to take her shoulder, but Petunia shrugged away from him.

"I thought I'd been attracted to someone normal," she hissed in helpless upset and rage. "And all along… all along I'd just been falling for my family all over again…."

Vernon put his hand back, stung. "That… is wildly unfair. I can't do anything about this."

"... Neither could they."

Petunia looked around - saw both children hiding in the banisters of the staircase out in the entryway, listening. Ingrid was pale and solemn. Dudley was crying.

"Go!" Petunia suddenly snapped, charging for them, snarling. "Back to your cupboard, back to your bedroom! Go NOW!"

Before Vernon could tell her to calm down and stop yelling at the children, both children had scampered away to their separate spaces. The cupboard door closed behind Ingrid. Petunia stood teary and breathing heavily with fury in the aftermath.

She was the one around the girl most during the day. Dudley, too, though Dudley at least could be guaranteed to be treated well.

Vernon watched it all, troubled.


And so despite his wife, who found the whole thing infuriating and frustrating and made it known by storming about and ignoring him a lot, Vernon accepted both the medication and the therapy treatments. It was humiliating at first, accepting help.

Completely humiliating.

But he did it.

He looked down frowning at a little pill one night - then said to himself, "Man up. No use to be afraid of and embarrassed by a tiny white tablet." And he popped one in his mouth there in the upstairs bathroom and swallowed it down with a glass of water.

The medications made him feel a little flat for several days. Finally he realized it was because he wasn't shouting at people or losing his temper anymore. He no longer felt overwhelming sensations of discomfort, fear, and paranoia.

Going about his daily life oddly calm, he felt almost flat.

He was bored by his life, he realized worriedly as he passed blankly through the days. Without the entire world to fight… his life bored him.

His employees treated him like a bomb that might go off at any moment, wary of this new person who didn't yell at them. What the hell had he been doing with his life?

He mentioned this during therapy.

"Do you feel your former anger and fear was keeping life interesting? Is it the routine that's bothering you?" the therapist asked curiously, sitting across from him in her office.

"No, the routine's fine, it's just… there's no… passion," Vernon struggled to explain. "That sounds so airy-fairy and artsy, everything I've always despised."

The therapist gave a small smile. "As these sessions pass," she said, amused, "maybe we might want to talk about why you secretly want a little more airy-fairy and artsy in your life.

"Perhaps, despite your irrational fear of it, it is not so bad. What is it about the imaginative and different that disturbs you, Mr Dursley?"

Vernon sat and thought about this for a long time.

"... I can't control it," he realized, and again he thought of the girl Ingrid and her people. "I can't control it."

He shifted uncomfortably in guilt at this admittance.

"... Perhaps we can teach you," said his therapist gently, "not to instinctively hate the things you can't control.

"Perhaps we can teach you… to see others, including the imaginative, as human and feeling a little bit more."


Over time, Vernon began to see the full depth of how he had been acting - and began to question his hatred of his niece.

As Petunia watched, he began trying to be more measured toward his son, not as worshipful - as well as a bit nicer to his niece. He treated Ingrid differently, and Ingrid became kinder and more understanding in response. A series of images passed:

Ingrid moving her things up to her own brand-new upstairs bedroom, a look of delight on her face.

Ingrid asking Vernon questions over his paper at the kitchen table, being patiently taught things like business and politics. She soaked it all in, listening closely and silently.

Ingrid slowly giving her own thoughts in return. Vernon and Ingrid starting up a dialogue.

Ingrid did listen closely, and she became a very firm-minded, intelligent, stoical little girl - with a large streak of soft and understanding kindness somewhere inside her. Ingrid talked about and was quizzed constantly sharp-minded on the news by her uncle, who she became very fond of, and she began learning cars and other quiet mechanical jobs in a soft-spoken way out in the garage beside him - in addition to her reading and drawing, and her nursing goal, all of which Vernon began funding and supporting.

A final image: Ingrid quietly guiding her uncle away by the arms off to the side, when the crowds became too much on a shopping outing one day.

Of all the people to treat his illness in the most humane way possible, Vernon honestly hadn't expected for it to be the Potter girl. And he felt a new connection to her - a new gratefulness for her.

She was, he realized, genuinely a good person. And in a strange way, he felt forgiven for the way he had behaved in the past. Which was perhaps more than he deserved.

It had been his illness fearing and hating her, all along. It took him some time, to overcome the shame from that.

Dudley was not as understanding and a great deal more spoiled. Vernon watched from a distance, troubled, as a flurry of different images appeared before him on that front: Dudley pushing Ingrid over in a charge to the television set. Dudley and his gang of friends terrorizing the neighbors. Dudley demanding yet another new toy, the old one broken behind him, or a fourth helping of dessert.

And Petunia smiling fondly and giving Dudley what he wanted - every time.

It couldn't be healthy, Vernon started to think. Could it?

Finally, one evening Vernon was sitting in his favorite armchair with the two children, trying to get them to cooperate on the living room rug before him. "Now, Ingrid, you give your toy to Dudley. Come now, don't hesitate, give it over. And Dudley you - no, Dudley, don't break it, what's the matter with you?!"

"There's nothing wrong with the boy," said Petunia from the kitchen behind them in a hissed, nasally tone. They turned to find her standing there, hands on her hips.

It was her most direct acidic barb yet. "What's that supposed to mean?" said Vernon slowly, his eyes narrowed, at last rising to the bait. "... You two," he said seriously without looking to the children as Petunia puffed up. "To your rooms. Now."

The children quickly scampered away, but Vernon knew by now inevitably they'd be listening closely.

"Do you know - people promise in a marriage to support someone in illness?" Vernon stood. "Do you remember that part? Or did we leave that out?"

"How dare you!" She pushed a finger in his chest. "This is not like - like cancer or -"

"So you'd rather I was dying, than that I had something you might actually have to work on?"

Petunia opened her mouth - and closed it again, pale, furious tears sparking in her eyes and her jaw clenched in disgust.

"I'm the one being treated, Petunia, but I'm not the one most determined to hold onto a hatred of oddness," said Vernon coldly. "Not when the mental health problems are gotten past."

"You're - you're saying I'm sick?!" Petunia shrieked - and she tried to shove him, but he grabbed her arms this time, not hard, and held them there.

"I am saying that you have your own problems, and you spoil our son," said Vernon crisply. "After all these months of anger and frostiness when I needed support the most… I might have to rethink a few things."

And he walked away, leaving her standing there sagging and looking stunned and defeated in the silence.

The house was dead quiet - not even the listening children moved or made a sound, though Vernon knew Ingrid at least must be wondering what this meant for her family. She had that kind of mind.

Petunia stood there in the living room for a long time, and the most alarming part was that Vernon up in their bedroom realized he did not particularly care.

He used to care. That was what was different.


Author's Notes: Wow, guys, it's been a month tomorrow at this time since I started posting!

I'm hoping to have childhood finished by the end of summer. Wouldn't that be so fitting for a Harry Potter fic?