Oh. I delurk very rarely, once something of extraordinary beauty forces me to. And this story made me delurk. That's the epitome of what Beholder stands for, that's taking a cartoon, ridiculed and unpleasant, and showing a real soul underneath. Your story is calm, understated, its pace as natural as breathing and equally changeable. I adore authors who write Petunia and Dudley as full-fledged, three dimensional protagonist, and this particular story exceeds everything I've read this far about them. Not to mention the structure that consists in equal parts of what's said and what remains untold, just left for our imagination. Utterly beautiful. /relurking, ashamed of my flailing and random punctuation/