When she'd lived with her old boy, Charybdis had been neglected. He always forgot to change her water and feed her, she rarely got to leave her enclosure, and the enclosure itself was much too small for her. She hated being trapped and longed to be large enough that simply flexing her strong and muscular body could shatter the glass. She had jumped at the first chance to escape. When that boy left her enclosure slightly open one day, she quickly made her way out, first into the garden, and then into the fields of Surrey, until she came across Guildford.
Wandering around Guildford for the first few weeks of her freedom had been odd. The cobbled streets of town were odd to navigate through and not the most comfortable, as she found herself getting somewhat stuck between the stones. She enjoyed meandering through the tall grass by the riverside and trying to catch ducks as they waited for people to feed them. She liked the sound of the wind in the grass and looking at the cows and horses in the fields. She really enjoyed Guildford castle; she had climbed to the very top and sunned herself on top of a merlon, pretending all the land she could see was hers.
After a while of exploring the town, she made her way to the outskirts. She spent a few days at a golf course, wondering why the humans were whacking such perfect looking eggs with their metal sticks. When she found an unattended egg, attempted to eat it, and found that it was a fake, she decided it was time to move on.
Several weeks into her freedom, Charybdis realised she would either need to hibernate for winter or find a house to sneak into to escape the cold. It was pure serendipity that she stumbled across her new boy. Harry was a strange human, especially because he could speak to her. He sounded a little silly; very excited, like a hatchling speaking before he had quite figured out what he was going to say. Odd as he was, Harry was kind. On the very first day they met, he caught and shared crickets with her and promised that he wouldn't try to keep her in an enclosure like her old boy. She decided then that she would stay and look after this little human hatchling.
When Charybdis first moved into Number Four, she was living in the garden by the shed. As time went on, she moved to Harry's room. She much preferred his room. He made a comfortable place for her under his bed. Her space had a duvet and pillows, some crunchy leaves from the garden, and a few twigs and branches for good measure. Sometimes Harry would bring crickets inside and put them under upturned cups so she could hear some garden sounds. Then they would eat them together.
After Harry told Petunia that Charybdis was interested in fashion, Petunia gathered some magazines for her to look at. She really enjoyed the colours and patterns. In one of the magazines, she came across a bag made of vibrantly pink alligator skin. She didn't know alligators could be that colour, and decided that if an alligator could be pink, she should try very hard to turn some pretty shade of purple. She always liked purple. Harry helped encourage her, and when they both focused very hard, she could turn purple for a little bit. It looked odd when it first happened; her brown and yellow scales faded to the point of looking like a fresh eggshell, then she became splotchy purple all over. After a few weeks of trying, she could become pale purple with shimmery scales in an instant. She didn't even need Harry's help anymore.
For a while, Charybdis, Harry, and Dudley did stretches in the garden. It made Harry visibly taller, Charybdis visibly longer, and Dudley visibly thinner. Unfortunately, the three of them were also visible to the next-door neighbour, which Petunia didn't like, so Harry and Dudley now did their stretches in the garden and Charybdis did hers from just inside the kitchen door.
After accidentally killing and then reviving Ripper, which Charybdis unfortunately did not get to witness, Harry had been testing his powers even more. A lot of his practice involved superpowers from his comic books, but he still helped Charybdis with her goal of being larger than a Titanoboa by stretching with her and focusing very hard on her growing. He must have been very focused last week because she was able to grow to the very respectable length of 7 feet and 4 inches. Both she and Harry got very hungry after that, so they ended up eating all of their crickets, several frozen mice, and even shared a small rabbit.
When Petunia saw Charybdis' new size and pretty pastel purple colour, she was rather impressed. She knew that Harry had been practising his magic, and it appeared that some of his magic had rubbed off onto the snakes. In the safety of her own mind, she wondered whether some of that magic would rub off on her.
Petunia had been jealous of her sister after she started having bouts of magic. She was unbearably jealous, to the point that she had been horrible to Lily – she could admit it now, if only to herself. Back then, she had no nuance, and everything was black and white. Lily had abandoned their family for her magic, and for that, Petunia had hated her. Now, having lost her sister and having gotten to know her nephew – and of course, benefit from magic – she had regrets. She still wasn't fully comfortable with magic, and certainly wouldn't want to live in the magical world, but she could see its benefits.
And so, on one of her trips to the bookstore for fashion magazines, she picked up some books about magic for Harry. These certainly weren't the books that her sister had, but some of them seemed interesting. There was one book on normal people magic – things like Houdini and such; another book that had something to do with British mythology, the Knights of the Round Table, and Merlin; and another book on the occult which seemed to be for shock value. None of them were magic books of the like that her sister would bring back from her magic alleys and villages, but maybe that was a good thing. Vernon had agreed that Harry needed to learn to control his powers, and it would be nice to be able to use them for something beneficial to the family… On that note, she picked up a book about hidden treasures and missing priceless antiques – perhaps there was a way he could find some of these.