The Dursleys

Harry grinned as he looked round, Ginny on his left and Cat on his right. Despite desperately wishing to never see this place again, he couldn't help but be relieved that he had got away from Mrs Weasley's vengeful pre-wedding craze. She was even scarier than she had been last time there'd been a wedding. This time there were a lot more people to invite and it could be a lot more public, unlike Bill's that had been in complete secret. Well ... almost complete secret, there had been some guests, Harry included.

He was startled out of his thoughts. Ginny asked "Which number's the Dursleys?"

"Number 4, Privet Drive. I have so many fond memories."

Cat was ready to explode. It was the kind of dark expression Harry had only seen in Sirius' eyes when he had seen Wormtail. It was a striking resemblance, despite the fact they weren't related.

Before he knew it, they were outside the front-door. Ginny took Harry's hand as they crossed the front garden. The night before, he'd told them the bare bones of his childhood. That was the main reason for Cat's anger.

Before he rang the doorbell, he turned to his companions and asked for their wands. This would be bad enough without getting hauled up by the Improper Use of Magic office. After some rather hushed argument, he manage to get both and put them with his own in his backpack. He rang the doorbell. He hoped that Cat would keep her temper, or this would be even worse than he expected.

Aunt Petunia answered the door, her long neck leading her out of the door head-first. She started when she saw Harry, though it was no wonder she hadn't seen Ginny or Cat, as they were currently behind the door.

"Well, what do you want?" Her voice was still as piercing and as nasal as ever. "I thought you said we'd seen the last of you and the rest of the freaks when you left."

Harry sighed, he had hoped this wouldn't be too difficult. "I left some things here that I need to collect. Some of them may make themselves known in a rather unfortunate way, especially if someone, say Dudley, decided to go wondering in my room."

The threat was thinly veiled and most of the colour drained from her face, before she finally fully opened the door to let him in. However, this also revealed Cat and Ginny, neither of whom looked particularly happy about being referred to as freaks. "Who are they?"

"I'm your niece and this is your future niece-in-law, now you let us in." Cat's voice was menacing and left no room for argument. This was also a trait she appeared to have inherited from her step-father.

Aunt Petunia didn't even attempt to stop them from entering, especially as Ginny was smouldering with fury. As soon as the door was closed, she revealed, "Vernon and Dudley have gone to work. Dudley got the job at Grunnings, just as I knew he would."

Harry would have thought this was said with maternal pride, if it weren't for the fact that she barely focused on what she was saying and there was no inflection in her voice. She appeared to be running on auto-pilot, wiping her hands on the skirt of her blue and green floral patterned dress. She looked no different than when Harry had last seen her, though she did appear to have had a haircut and re-died her hair, for her roots were no longer showing.

"Wait a minute." Harry had just begun leading Ginny and Cat upstairs and away from Aunt Petunia in hope that it would stop the outburst that looked imminent, before his Aunt's interruption. "Did you say you were my niece? That's not possible. I only had one sibling that survived infancy and she had one son and no daughters. You cannot be my niece. You don't even look like my family."

Cat looked like she was going to enjoy giving Aunt Petunia a heart-attack, but Harry thought it was best that that news was best delivered when they could leave very quickly afterwards. Also, he didn't think Ginny would take that long before she exploded, she was already biting very hard on her lip as though to stop herself from saying anything she couldn't take back. "We'll talk about it when I've got my stuff," he called from the landing, before dragging both girls into his room.

"Right, that was close." He shut the door before going over to the bed and bending underneath to prise the loose floorboard up and remove the Marauders Map and his school books that he had left behind, not thinking they would be any use away from Hogwarts. His photo album of his parents was also there, as he hadn't known how safe they would be if he took them with him. They were all he had left of those people, he couldn't let them be damaged or destroyed.

He turned round with them in a bag to find both girls looking out the window at the broken bits of metal where the bars had been ripped off, before turning their eyes to the door with it's cat-flap and locks that could only be opened from the outside. They also scanned the full length of the room, with the barest of furniture, the broken presents and toys of Dudley's, and the untouched books. Cat's eyes were once again 'as green as a fresh pickled toad', and this time they took longer to return to the almost black colour they were now with anger. Like Padfoot before her, she had very expressive eyes.

Ginny looked ready to kill. She had that same look in her eyes she'd had when he'd seen her and Ron fight in that corridor during 6th year. And this time he couldn't prevent it by pushing Ron against a wall and using himself as a human shield. There was no way for him to stop Aunt Petunia from getting the yelling at she was going to receive.

It wasn't that he didn't think she deserved it, because he did. He just wanted to move on with his life. He had learned from his fight with Snape. He'd let his hate consume him, and he didn't think he could ever deal with that again. He's been able to cast the Cruciatus Curse that day. Just seeing Snape in that kind of pain had given him a thrill of power, but it had also made him feel sick. How could he have done that to another human being? He was no better than Voldemort, than Bellatrix Lestrange, than Snape himself. He knew now that he couldn't let that happen again, and if he lost his temper at the Dursleys, he wasn't sure he'd know when to stop.

Ginny was the first out of the room, thundering down the stairs, just as he heard the voices of Uncle Vernon and Dudley begin to echo downstairs. Cat was soon afterwards and Harry felt helpless. He had to follow them, and try and keep a reign on his temper.

By the time he was at the bottom of the stairs, Cat and Ginny were standing, banded together against the three Dursleys, Uncle Vernon turning a familiar shade of purple. He'd barely been in the house five minutes!

"Don't you dare tell me how to raise that louse! He was lucky we even gave him a roof over his head," he roared, spraying spit over Ginny's reddening face. And she certainly wasn't embarrassed.

"He's your bloody nephew and he is certainly not a bloody louse! He saved your ungrateful arses from some who wanted to kill you, the least you owe him is a fucking thank you! It' s a wonder he didn't hand you over on a fucking platter!"

Cat was also furious, her hair bushing out, auburn, her skin paling to Harry's pasty pallor, her nose lengthening, her eyes bottle-green. Dudley looked like he was going to explode with shock. Harry noticed he'd outgrown the covering-his-bottom-with-his-hands-whenever-he-was-confronted-with-magic he had been so used to. Catherine's transformation was much more complete than he had ever seen it. And it wasn't changing back.