War, Love, and Riddle //Mattheo Riddle x OC

Chapter Sixteen - The Real Harry

Emma stood silently in the doorway of Number Four Privet Drive while Uncle Vernon wrestled another cardboard box into the overflowing trailer attached to the back of the car. The summer air felt strangely oppressive despite the sunshine overhead, thick with the kind of tension that settles over a place moments before everything changes forever. Dudley was helping where he could, though he looked just as bewildered by the situation as everyone else. Twenty years of their lives were being packed away into boxes and suitcases, reduced to possessions and photographs and mismatched furniture. Soon strangers would live here. Strangers would walk these hallways and sleep in these bedrooms without ever knowing what had happened between these walls.

The thought should have made her happy.

Instead, Emma felt hollow.

This house had never been a home. It had been a prison dressed up as suburbia. It had been slammed doors and whispered insults and learning how to make herself smaller whenever Aunt Petunia entered a room. It had been counting bruises where nobody could see them and pretending she wasn't hungry when there wasn't enough food left after Dudley finished eating. Yet standing here now, watching the Dursleys prepare to leave forever, she couldn't stop thinking about the little girl who had grown up inside these walls. The little girl who spent years wondering why she was so easy to hate.

A movement in the hallway caught her attention.

Petunia stood alone near the staircase.

The house was nearly empty now. The framed photographs had been removed from the walls, leaving pale rectangular ghosts where memories once hung. The furniture was gone. The carpets had been rolled up. Every sound echoed strangely through the bare rooms. Yet somehow the emptiness suited Petunia. She looked like a relic from another life standing there amongst the shadows, her arms folded tightly across her chest as though holding herself together.

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

Emma wasn't sure she wanted to.

Fear was a strange thing. No matter how old she became, some fears remained trapped beneath your skin. They waited quietly in the dark until the right voice or the right memory brought them rushing back to life. Emma had fought Death Eaters. She had stood before Voldemort. She had survived things that should have broken her. Yet one look from Petunia Dursley still made her feel eight years old and afraid to breathe too loudly.

"I've lived in this house for twenty years."

Petunia's voice was quiet enough that Emma almost missed it.

The older woman wasn't looking at her. Her gaze moved slowly around the hallway as though she were memorizing it.

"I know every creak in the floorboards. Every mark on the walls. Every neighbor who walks past the window." Her lips pressed together tightly. "And now I'm expected to leave it behind in a single night."

There was something startlingly vulnerable about the admission.

Emma didn't know what to do with it.

Harry appeared beside her then, his presence grounding her in a way it always had. She was grateful for it. Grateful she didn't have to stand here alone.

"If they think you know where we're going," Harry said carefully, "they'll torture you for the information."

Petunia laughed.

The sound was bitter enough to make Emma's stomach twist.

"Do you think I don't know that?"

For the first time, Petunia looked directly at them.