Imagine: Molly Weasley overhears Harry telling Ron about something the Dursleys did in an offhand way that says he doesn’t consider it a big deal. She hears Ron express horror. She hears Harry claim it wasn’t that bad, as the Dursleys go.
She was always better with the household potions than the high-level fancy-effects ones, but she took a NEWT in Potions and she can brew polyjuice.
Perhaps she overhears this at the Burrow, and has a year to prepare. Or perhaps she hears this in the hospital wing at Hogwarts, the daughter Harry saved from a basilisk and Lord Voldemort lying so pale and unconscious next to her, and she spends a month brewing the potion and so arrives to replace Harry the evening Aunt Marge shows up.
The place is a horror, a bland and soulless house (not a home) with lawn and garden pruned and weeded in a manner that speaks of much labor (there are calluses on Harry’s hands) and the boy yells at her, insults her, shoves her, and his father laughs. The woman (this, a mother?) purses her lips and sneers and orders Harry to weed the back garden.
Several hours later, exhausted and thirsty, hungry and hot, Molly comes back in and goes to Harry’s room to change clothes. The pile of Dudley’s broken or forgotten things is still here; there is nothing of Harry’s save the bed (no one spent money on this, but even she, with seven children to house and feed on a low-level ministry employee’s salary, would never have this lumpy thing for one of her children to sleep on) and a pile of clothes that look like they were bought for the other child (hand-me-downs are a fact of life, but never, never, like this).
When she comes down the stairs, she opens the cupboard under them. Imagines a child growing up here, amid the dust and the spiders, and sees red. The boy comes up behind her and pushes her in, laughing and calling out “Harry wants to go back in his cupboard!”
Perhaps Aunt Marge arrives at this juncture, and adds her own brand of contempt and viciousness to the mix. Perhaps the dog bites Molly, and the humans laugh, deriding the absent-mindedness that caused Harry to forget to run. Perhaps the response to the meal she cooks astounds Molly, who has never in her life dreamed that anyone would react to a meal she cooked with such an absence of thankfulness. Perhaps she innocently takes what seems to her a fair helping, and is lambasted for her greediness (”They were starving him, Mum!”, her poor manners (after theirs!), her general entitlement and ungratefulness (Harry Potter, ungrateful and spoiled?).
Perhaps, it is when Marge says “If there’s something wrong with the bitch, there’ll be something wrong with the pup” about Molly’s dear friend Lily, with no word of defense from Lily’s sister, that Molly’s rage is finally set free. But, still, there is more to come: perhaps Molly corrects this apparently-misinformed woman (misinformed how, though, and by whom?) on the manner of her friends’ deaths, and.
“They died in a car crash, you nasty little liar, and left you to be a burden on your decent relations” or whatever of it she manages to get out, because Molly has put so much effort into maintaining her temper that she has forgotten to maintain her disguise, and is growing, Harry’s messy black hair growing long and brightening to red (Petunia’s first thought is that he is turning into Lily, and no curse could paralyze her better than her sudden terrible fear), growing to tower over the seated Dursleys with a scrub sponge in one hand and a frying pan in the other, dripping soap onto Aunt Petunia’s pristine floor.
Molly Weasley has never heard or seen the muggle story Beauty and the Beast, but no revealed and vengeful fairy transformed from plain, poverty-stricken beggar woman to youthful and terrible magician could ever strike awe and terror into foolish, selfish hearts than Molly’s transformation in the other direction. She is the sort of woman that Petunia would scorn as low-class, that Vernon did—would—will—call “a dumpy sort of woman,” that Marge would sneer at and treat like a servant, that Dudley would dismiss as no one important—and they stare at her with that particular horror endemic to horrible people realizing they have made a very significant mistake.
What she does is scold them, in the tones of a disappointed and angry mother, about what sort of person Harry is. Vernon is the one who tries to argue, and she silences him. She tells them (such an unwilling audience, she notes with something very like sadistic glee, to hear good things said about their least favorite person) about how he somehow defeated Voldemort, about how he was kind to her son, about how he was good at Quidditch, about how he faced near-certain death to rescue a girl from two monsters, about how polite and hardworking and grateful he is, all the time, and how amazed she is that he turned out this way in spite of the truly deplorable example set for him by the four of them.
Aunt Marge, who has been cowed by shock and by this woman’s effortless shutting up of her brother but has no knowledge of magic, nor of the great and measureless power of anger born from love, to tell her why she should fear this woman, stands up and slaps Molly across the face and snaps, “Shut up, you delusional slut!”
(”Slut” has a historical use as a slur against servants. Marge, with her veneration of aristocracy and her pride in her own class status, knows this. Molly, with working-class heritage, Muggle and wizard alike, in her and her husband’s ancestry, knows this as well.)
Molly pulls her wand out and blasts Aunt Marge into the wall.
It happens to be the stairwell wall, and on the other side of it is the cupboard where they once stored an unwanted nephew. Molly waves her wand again, and bars appear, trapping her.
Marge has the sense to be given pause by something she can’t understand, but only momentarily. She opens her mouth to bellow with rage, and Molly casts again, and nothing comes out; Marge gapes like a frog and stares at her with hatred.
Molly continues. She tells them, now, about her friend Lily, and her friend James, and when Petunia sneers she finds herself paralyzed again, this time by magic that feels like she’s numb and freezing all at once. (This is not the standard body-bind curse, but something a Death Eater once used on her; the man was stupid enough to use the incantation out loud, and she has since given several Death Eaters reason to regret their comrade’s foolishness, though never with such satisfaction as she feels now.)
She launches next into a stinging list of everything they’ve done to Harry Potter in the last few hours, and everything she suspects them of doing to Harry Potter the rest of the time, and everything she worries that he’s never received from them. Vernon goes purple at the first time she mentions a lack of physical affection, and tries to bluster something out about why they should fake loving behavior to an unwanted burden. Midsentence, the sounds he is making stop being words, and they stop coming from his mouth; instead, a tremendous ripping fart makes the windows rattle in their panes, and Dudley, next to him, gags at what Molly is certain is a truly terrible smell.
“I curse you,” says Molly. “Henceforth every nasty thing you try to say will come out in the form of flatulence, and every nasty thing you think to yourself will stink up the air around you. I recommend you make yourself a more pleasant man, or your digestive problems will become a significant embarrassment to you.”
She turns to the furious form of Aunt Marge in the cupboard. “I curse you,” she says. “Why don’t you say something? Call me a slut again.” (I dare you.)
Marge starts off with “I dun’ know hoo ye thinks ye are—” and shuts herself up, horrified, at the distinctly lower-class accent and pronunciation and word choice that might have come from an illiterate scullery-maid or perhaps a street-going flower-seller. Molly has no ear for any difference in how the two might talk, but she knows low-class accents and high-class ones, and Marge’s is now certainly, thoroughly, the former.
“I imagine that won’t keep your mouth shut for long,” says Molly Weasley conversationally. “But in case it does, that’s not the only thing I did. You’ll slowly become every harmless thing you despise, and maybe somewhere along the lines you’ll grow a little humility.”
“Dudley Dursley,” she says, and Petunia lets out a screech that manages to be pleading. “Not my son … please.”
“I’m glad to see you have at least one redeeming quality, Petunia,” says Molly. “But I’m sure your sister would have said that to you, every time you ever interacted with her son.”
Petunia’s eyes fill up with tears.
“Luckily for you, I’m not you,” says Molly. “And luckily for him, he’s still a child. I won’t curse him.” Relief on Petunia’s face for an instant. “But I think this is fair.”
She waves her wand at Dudley, and then says, “Look at your mother.”
He does—with eyes as brilliantly green as his cousin’s.
“If you love your son, Petunia Dursley, you will learn to not despise the memory of your sister, whom you loved once.”
Petunia’s eyes are defiant, pained, relieved, sad.
“I’m also connecting this house to your behavior,” Molly tells her. “If you are cruel to anyone, the house will grow filthy. If I had done this when Harry was in your care, you would be living in squalor. Furniture rotting away, mold growing in the carpet and the walls, vermin of all kind. Tomorrow if you so much as address a cutting remark to a neighbor, you’ll think half a dozen stray cats came in and peed here, and cleaned up after themselves by evaporating it with a hairdryer.”
(Arthur’s fascination with muggle objects is occasionally useful. She’s never really gotten the hang of the Drying Charm, but this is an even better use for the knowledge.)
“Harry will be staying with my family the rest of the summer. If Headmaster Dumbledore chooses to send him back next year, I trust you will appreciate that I can do much, much worse.”
She turns to leave; behind her in the doorway is the real Harry Potter, watching the scene play out with his green eyes as wide as owl’s eyes.
She retrieves his trunk through the bars of the stairwell, leaving the bars intact. “Key is in the toilet bowl upstairs,” she tells Vernon. “Have fun.” A truly wicked person would have put a snake in there along with it; Molly is, rather, a truly angry person, and as such, it’s a wad of spiderwebs, unicorn hair, and thin, stringy jellyfish tentacles of a magical species that stings mildly at odd moments in the middle of the night for a few days. She tells as much to Harry, and he grins.
They even meet a nice dog on the way to the bus stop. He eats three orders of fish-and-chips and then settles in Harry’s lap for the ride to Ottery St. Catchpole. Well, after relatives like that, who better to offer Harry some unconditional love than a dog?
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