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1.
Dudley skims the letter. Huh.
"Await your owl?" he mouths and then scrunches his face up, contemplating the problem. Then the confusion clears. He remembers seeing an owl flying around Mrs. Figg's house a few times, it probably lives in a tree near there or something.
Dudley grabs a pen as he wanders out the door. On the way to Mrs. Figg's, he scribbles, "Thank you for your consideration, I am not interested because I am attending Smeltings like my father". It should be mostly legible.
He sneaks around the side of Mrs. Figg's house and looks up at a tree. He doesn't know what an owl nest looks like. "Owl? Are you around?" he asks.
Just when Dudley thinks the owl's probably sleeping, there's owl noises and then an owl flies down to him.
Dudley offers it the letter, feeling self-conscious and hating the emotion, and thus viciously represses it. You will never get anywhere in life if you are not confident. One of his mother's self-help books told him that. "This is for Hogwarts."
The owl makes more owl noises at him, takes it in its -- leg thing, what do owls have? Talons? Whatever, owls are stupid, it doesn't matter. But it flies off with the letter, so Dudley brushes his hands off against each other and heads toward home.
That afternoon, it only takes hitting the television twice for it to play that Japanese cartoon that no one else is able to get on their television, but in the morning, Harry just has to be the center of attention again because he doesn't know how to handle getting any mail.
Dudley rolls his eyes. Harry is so predictable and such an idiot. Dudley's been hiding his magic just fine for years, but Harry just has to do stupid things like fly onto roofs and grow his hair and talk to snakes. And now he can't even manage to respond to a letter in a responsible manner. No, he has to force their parents to flee to some terrible place where magic can't go, Dudley's had dreams about this for years and now he's realizing they weren't just dreams.
Well, he's not going.
"No! I'm spending the night with Piers," he tells his parents and when they try to convince him to come for his own safety, he puts a bit of oomph in his voice the way he's had to a couple times when they've tried to make him do things he really doesn't want, and then his parents spend about ten minutes saying they'll just flee with Harry instead to keep them all safe before realizing what it is that they're saying.
Ten minutes after that, they're arranging bus fare for Harry to some distant island instead.
Dudley's entire life is so stupid and so ridiculous.
"I'll handle this," he sighs at his parents and then grabs Harry by the wrist and yanks him outside. Harry fights him the entire way, as if Harry's ever won any of their fights in his life, which he hasn't and never will.
"Dudley--" Harry starts and then Dudley balls up his fists like he's going to punch him, so Harry ducks, and then Dudley sits on him and shouts at the sky, "OWL!"
Sixteen owls swoop down.
"There," Dudley says, hopping up and dusting himself off. "You're welcome."
Harry gapes at him. "T-thank you? Why am I thanking you?"
"Because you're going to send your acceptance. Aren't you?" Dudley asks pointedly, adding a bit of oomph, which of course slides right off Harry the way it always does. "You're going to go off to boarding school and then never come home to bother us again. How does that sound?"
"That sounds amazing," Harry says, too honestly, and this is always what has gotten Harry into trouble. He doesn't have the sense God gave Piers's cat.
Dudley tosses a pen at him on his way back inside, and then gets to tell his parents, "Harry's going away to school and won't be coming back. This is good news."
They're too overjoyed for it to be entirely Dudley's tone convincing them and doesn't that just go to show, you really can't convince someone of something they don't already want to believe? It really is just like his mother's self-help books.
2.
'They say I can't stay here over the summers, so I'm coming back to Privet Drive,' says the first line of the first letter Dudley has ever received from Harry.
Dudley groans so loud, his friends all stare at him.
"It's my cousin," Dudley says. "He needs me to run his entire life for him, apparently. This is the thanks I get!"
There are two understanding nods and the rest of them just go back to what they were doing. Dudley knows how to be frightening enough not to be bullied, but not bored enough to be a bully. Smeltings is better than he'd thought it would be.
"Have you never heard of summer programs?" Dudley writes angrily. "Internships? Summer jobs where you live there? Summer camps where you can be a counselor? Summers abroad? No one wants you at Privet Drive! Even you don't want you at Privet Drive! Don't tell me you need money. They must have scholarships for poor kids."
Dudley's annoyed enough that after he sends that letter off to Harry, he sends six more off, telling the owls that it goes To Whom It May Concern at any wizarding summer school. He gets far more replies than letters he sent, and then he sends those brochures on to Harry, too.
Of course, now he's on too many mailing lists because the wizarding world has been somehow convinced that Dudley is a parent who is invested his son's education and wants to further his opportunities in life. Dudley sends two more packages of these on to Harry before Dudley thinks to look at them himself.
He flips through them, but they're all some kind of academic or employment, and Dudley's entire summer plan is to relax, so that's nothing interesting. Maybe a couple of them when he's sixteen, since that's the youngest age for anything that actually appeals, but that's a long way away.
3.
Somehow -- and Dudley's not really sure how, even with the magic -- he's convinced several different organizations that not only is he a concerned parent, he's a concerned parent in a marriage between a wizard and a not-wizard, and they think he's got at least five kids. There's Junior, after Dudley made the mistake of using his own name to refer to someone Harry's age, and then the rest of them, who have thankfully not had to be named.
But it means he's now getting a lot of free comic books aimed at children who are growing up as magic in the regular world. They're all very poorly written and poorly drawn, but what do you expect from free educational comics? Dudley reads them just to read between the lines. Their plots are stupid, but after reading a few months worth of weekly comics, he begins to realize that this is an entire part of the world. That there's a big reason there are so many organizations who keep passing along and sharing Dudley's contact information.
There seem to be a lot of wizards who left the wizarding world exactly at the right time to have kids Dudley's age. And these earnest organizations are all trying hard to convince those families that it's safe to come back.
There must be a reason why Dudley, as a parent, should think it's not safe to come back.
Dudley spends about a week wondering if his parents are magical and have just been hiding it his entire life, before brushing that off as wishful thinking. If they were magic, they'd have been better able to handle a menace like Harry. Since they couldn't, obviously they're not.
As Dudley's third year at Smeltings comes to an end, he gets a letter addressed to Dr. Dudley Dursley that's asking for his feedback on a new pamphlet for concerned parents like himself. It's called "How To Talk To Your Kids About You-Know-Who."
And it's the cause of the first letter Dudley's sent to Harry in more than two years.
4.
'How do YOU know about Voldemort?' is Harry's useless reply to Dudley's not-at-all-concerned letter.
Dudley resists the urge to tear it to pieces in his hand. Instead, he imagines an ocean tide, the way the stupid educational comics want his non-existent children to do whenever they feel a lot of feelings so they don't do accidental magic.
Since that question is beside the point, but Dudley knows that Harry won't ever get beyond it if Dudley doesn't answer, when Dudley sends back the exact copy of the first letter he sent, he encloses the pamphlet.
'Someone needs to tell them to hire an editor or fire theirs,' is Harry's belated response. Dudley generally expects more promptness when he's asking a relative if someone is trying to murder them, but hey, that's just Dudley. And the fault's on him, anyway, for expecting Harry to do anything the right way. Harry's always lived to confound the expectations of polite society.
Harry's letter does eventually get to the point, which is that Dudley shouldn't worry, Harry's certain that You-Know-Who isn't around anymore, because of a 'long and funny story' that Harry doesn't include in full about accidentally talking in snake language to his friend Ron's pet rat on the Hogwarts train because the rat has a tattoo of a snake. Somehow this ended up with getting a werewolf to teach Harry a powerful curse, which worked because there was no security on the snake tattoo.
What?
Unfortunately, Harry isn't here for Dudley to shake him.
Harry brushes it off again in Dudley's subsequent letters, saying that he promised the Headmaster he wouldn't talk about it but the Potions professor hates Harry even more than he used to, because now he owes Harry a life debt for freeing him from magical slavery to an evil overlord.
Seriously, though. What?
'We should meet up this summer,' Harry eventually writes to him, three weeks before the summer ends, and Dudley is going to say absolutely not, except he agrees because -- because -- because --
He'll think of a reason.
5.
"You got tall," Harry says to him as they're still trying to figure out if they're supposed to shake hands or do back pats or whatever it is wizards do when they see each other.
"It's called puberty, you should try it," Dudley say to Harry, who looks appropriately larger than the last time he saw him, but unlike Dudley, clearly doesn't need to figure out how to shave yet.
"How are your parents?" Harry asks and Dudley honestly laughs.
"Do you care how are my parents?" Dudley asks and Harry can't bring himself to lie and say he does. "They're fine. Aunt Marge is fine. They've never mentioned you again. Anything more you want to hear about them?"
"No, I want to hear about the entire family you're frauding re-engagement organizations about," Harry says, because Dudley had had to explain how he'd come by a little kid pamphlet in the first place.
Dudley sniffs dramatically. "It's not fraud. They've never even mentioned money, except to tell me stores that will accept British money instead of galleons, since they understand it can be so hard to get to Gringotts at times. It took me five months after that to find out that Gringotts was a bank, not a hidden magic city."
Harry grins. "They really think you're your own dad?"
"No, they think I'm your dad," Dudley says. The grin drops off Harry's face. "You're the one I was asking them for information for in the first place. They extrapolated the rest."
"Oh," Harry says.
"What were you doing this summer?" Dudley asks, feeling like it's his duty to keep the conversation going, since Harry is the one who invited him, and asking Harry to act as a host is more than Dudley can really expect from him, considering Harry's Harryness.
"Home renovations," Harry says. "Turns out my dad owned a few houses that haven't been touched in years, so one of his old friends -- you remember the werewolf, right? -- he's helping me out and he and his pack use the woods on the property during the full moons."
Dudley supposes that's what counts as a good summer when you're Harry. "Sounds fun." It does not sound fun. Aunt Marge redid her kitchen last year and Dudley had to hear all about it from beginning to end.
"You could come visit. Next year. If you want." Harry offers.
"Uh."
"It's fine if you don't want to," Harry says, more fluidly this time. "But Remus -- my dad's friend -- he thinks he can teach you wandless magic since you've gone this long without a wand and you've done at least six wandless spells that I know about, so you must be doing loads more. Some people have a knack for it, Remus says, and he thinks you do. So. If you want. You could visit."
"...Maybe," Dudley says eventually. "I'll think about it."
"It's your world, too," Harry says awkwardly. "Remus told me I should tell you that. He's more sympathetic to you than -- he kind of talked my ear off about you once I showed him the letters you sent me in first year. He think you -- I told him about your parents and he said you must not have thought you had a choice."
Dudley stiffens. "That's not true. I didn't want to go to Hogwarts."
"You could either have Hogwarts or live in Privet Drive, isn't that what you told me?" Harry asks. That was not what Dudley had said, but whatever, if that's how Harry wants to remember things, it's not like Dudley can stop him. "I get it, they're your parents, you love them." Dudley doesn't love them. He doesn't think he loves anyone. He's thought for a long time that he's broken that way, that he doesn't really love the way other people love. There's people he cares about and he wants to make sure they're safe, and that's got to be close enough to love for it to count. But it's not like love the way other people talk about it. He's broken like that, he always has been, because you're supposed to love your parents, and he just doesn't. "But you should get to have the option to have both," Harry continues. "So Remus is happy to do correspondence classes with you. He's a good teacher, he's taught me everything I know about Defense and magical creatures."
Dudley doesn't want Harry's dad's friend's pity, and what a sentence that is. Dudley reminds himself that he's the closest relative Harry has and so Harry probably feels he owes Dudley some kind of care, too, the same way Dudley thinks he should help Harry to become a better, more well-rounded person who doesn't do stupid things like show off his magic in public.
"I said I'll think about it," Dudley says and Harry's face does a weird twist.
"I'll keep writing," Harry promises, which Dudley did not ask for. "Next year should be exciting. My godfather's going to be the Defense teacher and he promised he'll pretend he's never met me."
That sounds incredibly pointless, but who is Dudley to judge?
"And Remus thinks you could do a Muggle Studies NEWT, which he says will qualify you for a lot of jobs, if you want. He said to tell you that werewolves know all about living in the magical world without going to Hogwarts. He said to tell you a lot of things, actually, and then told me not to bog you down in them, but to tell you instead that you can owl him at any time and he'd be happy to help."
Dudley did not, in fact, need yet another wizard trying to get him to enter the wardrobe and come in to Narnia, trust me, the weather's fine. What is it with wizards?
"Is it so hard to believe I like Smeltings?" Dudley asks.
Harry makes a face that means 'yes' but instead he says, "Uncle Vernon said it made him the man he is today. He said that a lot."
Dudley rolls his eyes. "Do you know what he's like when you're not around?"
"Better?" Harry asks.
"No," Dudley says. "He's exactly the same, except he's not shouting at you anymore. My dad's the way he is because that's the way he is, not because of you or because of Smeltings. I've been using magic to boss him around since I was a little kid because he's just that used to not thinking things through, so I can make him think it's his idea. You could have done the same if you'd just tried."
"I really don't think I could," Harry says. "Dudley, you're actually a pretty powerful wizard, do you realize this? I couldn't do that now without a wand."
"Yeah, without a wand you just regrew all your hair overnight and also flew," Dudley says. "I remember. I was there. And so were my parents."
"That's accidental magic," Harry brushes off. "You're doing it on purpose. How did you say you're keeping all your letters secret from everyone at school? You're just jedi mind tricking them? I'd need a wand for that."
"Necessity is the mother of invention," Dudley quotes at him. "You never needed to do it without a wand. I bet you never even tried. You let my parents hurt you like you aren't the baby who killed an evil wizard."
Harry scowls at him, but then pulls his wand out and offers it to Dudley. "Here. Try something."
Dudley takes it hesitantly. Nothing really happens. It feels like a bit of warm wood, which it probably shouldn't. There's some spells in the educational comic books but Dudley doesn't try any of them. He just hands the wand back to Harry.
"So what's your point?" Dudley asks.
"My point is," Harry says, "that you're a wizard, Dudley."
6.
'It will take about two hours,' is Remus Lupin's explanation of the NEWT when Dudley finally bothers to write to him. 'You can do it whenever you have a spare moment if you have someone to proctor it, or I can arrange for you to take it in the Ministry if you have a free day.'
And why should I bother, Dudley writes back, barely making it sound any less rude than that.
'Because if you have one NEWT, people will forgive you not knowing basic spells,' Remus Lupin writes back. 'They'll treat it like you treat an adult who can't remember things they learned in school. It doesn't matter once you have the certification that you completed your schooling, and that's what a NEWT is.'
Hmmm.
That's actually kind of tempting.
7.
Harry's been writing Dudley letters every three weeks or so, and between letters, Dudley meets up with Remus Lupin, gets magically-transported to a windowless room with a desk and a quill that Remus Lupin had told Dudley to spend the last four months practicing using, and then Dudley completes the Muggle Studies NEWT in enough time to go out for lunch after.
Over lunch, Remus Lupin tells Dudley to call him Uncle Remus and then tells him stories about Dudley's Aunt Lily until it's time for Dudley to get back to Smeltings.
Remus Lupin slips some money into Dudley's pocket while patting goodbye into his shoulder and Dudley takes it out later. He can't do the conversion rates in his head but he thinks it's about the same amount that Aunt Marge always slips him.
And for the first time, Dudley wonders about Aunt Marge, who always hated Harry and didn't have any reason to other than Dudley's parents hating him, and who -- well, who Dudley was never able to push into doing things for him magically.
Dudley can't really believe he's doing this, but he sends a normal letter to Aunt Marge and asks her: did you ever hear of Hogwarts?
8.
Aunt Marge greets him brusquely, as always, and feeds him stale cake.
"Why did you leave?" Dudley asks. "Was it the war?"
Aunt Marge scoffs at him and Dudley feels like a child again. He barely felt like this when he actually was a child. "Don't ask why I left! What was my reason to stay? Your mother's sister thought the magical world so wonderful and it killed her! I learned all there was to know and went back to the real world."
Dudley can feel himself about to say 'but it's magic' but that's stupid. It's not like he's lining up to go to Hogwarts and learn magic. He picked Smeltings, thanks. "I suppose," he says instead.
Aunt Marge is gearing herself up for a long rant and Dudley settles in for it, trying to decide if the cake tastes too much like cardboard to eat to be polite. He sits there listening as she tells him about how the wizards always assume everyone wants to be a wizard, and that there's nothing of value in the real world, and how they don't even bother teaching how to get along in the real world -- Dudley has the Muggle Studies NEWT that, sadly, proves her to be entirely correct, based on the contents of that examination -- and how they try to control who can and who can't use magic as if they own it.
And Harry?
Harry's the worst of them! His father was a spoiled brat -- Dudley nods knowingly even though he didn't know -- who bullied everyone and got away with it because he was rich. His mother pretended she'd never been a muggle a day in her life, like she was ashamed of her own family. Petunia was right to disown her! Aunt Marge would never turn her back on her own family like Lily had, how dare she. And look how she'd been repaid! Oh, Aunt Marge had given Harry a chance, she really had, but he'd been a mischievous little brat who didn't know how to keep his mouth shut. And he'd gone off to Hogwarts and never come back just like she thought he would -- he always thought he was too good for his family, just like his mother! No family feeling! Some people you just can't help. Not like her dear Dudley.
"What do you mean?" Dudley gets in.
Aunt Marge huffs at him. "Who do you think pointed you at your own magic? Who told you that you could always have your own way if you just tried?"
Really? It was Aunt Marge? Dudley feels vaguely off-kilter at this. "Oh. Sorry. I must've been too young to remember."
Aunt Marge forcefully waves away his apology.
Hang on, if Aunt Marge knew the entire time... "do my parents know about my magic?"
"Why should they?" Aunt Marge says. "You did the smart thing and avoided Hogwarts. I'd have done that myself if I'd known what it would be like!"
But it's put an uncomfortable thought in Dudley's mind. "Do you think I should tell them?" he asks. He's always felt that the less his parents know about his life, the better. It's not like they're close. But if Aunt Marge has magic, that means Dudley's dad has known about magic the entire time, not just because of Aunt Lily. Surely someone must have thought that Dudley could have magic, too? Surely... surely they thought that much about him to pay attention to if he was doing magic like Harry was?
"Absolutely not," Aunt Marge says. "What they don't know won't hurt them, I've always thought!"
9.
But what they don't know has hurt them. The thought wiggles its way into Dudley's brain and won't get out. His childhood was -- none of that was supposed to happen. Wasn't it?
They had two magical kids and two parents who knew all about magic. Both of them had siblings who attended Hogwarts. They knew Harry was magic all along, and they should have known about Dudley, too.
Why did any of that happen? Why did Dudley grow up like he did, and why did Harry grow up like he did?
Dudley can understand his parents hating and being scared of magic. That's just sensible. They have no protections against its misuse, such as, just as an example, what Dudley did to them more times than he ever bothered to count. It's not like he did it too much, he thinks uncomfortably. But it would be one thing if his parents had known and told him to knock it off. But they didn't, because Aunt Marge didn't warn them, because Aunt Marge probably didn't think too much of it anyway. It was just kids stuff, right?
But why did they hate Harry? Dudley now knows enough to know that Aunt Marge is holding a grudge against Harry's parents on behalf of all muggleborns, and he supposes his parents might have been jealous of their magical siblings, but what did Harry ever do to them that was so bad?
It had made sense at the time, because Harry was just too much Harry to be a Dursley, but looking back... wasn't that just... it really feels like that was just abuse. Harry didn't do anything to really deserve that treatment. It's not like his parents could have possibly thought they could scream the magic out of Harry, when they both knew that magic was real enough to have an entire hidden world for it, a hidden world that had killed Harry's parents already.
Dudley doesn't really do things on the logic that it's the right or the fair thing to do, but he comes to the unsettling conclusion that the right and fair thing to do would be to tell his parents that he has magic. They loved him and hated Harry, but Dudley's just like Harry. No, Dudley's even worse than Harry, because Harry didn't do anything to them, but Dudley definitely did.
The realization makes him feel like he's covered in something heavy. It's one thing not to love your parents, Dudley's used to that. But it's another thing to be an evil magic wizard and hurt them.
But was it wrong? If his parents were going to be like that to Harry, who's to say they wouldn't have been like that to Dudley? Wasn't it just self-defense?
Because what did he even use it for? Dudley didn't keep track, he can't remember. The ones he does remember -- it's not like it was the easiest thing in the world to do, he didn't do it that much. Just when he needed to.
Maybe he was being like his parents were being to Harry, or maybe it was okay. He doesn't know.
He wishes he knew. He wishes he had anyone to ask.
Hang on, he does.
10.
"They aren't going to believe you," Remus Lupin says.
He's probably right but Dudley says, "how do you know?"
"I don't, but I can guess," Remus Lupin says. "I met them at James and Lily's wedding, and I've heard you and Harry talk about them. I've met people like them before. They're going to ignore everything they don't want to acknowledge."
Dudley looks into his cup and tries to figure out if you can do divination based on store-bought coffee. There wasn't an educational pamphlet on that.
"Try taking a few steps back, Dudley. Think of it this way. Two squibs who had siblings go to Hogwarts have a baby. They should know that that baby might have magic. Then they get a magical baby dropped on their doorstep. That baby they know has magic. What do they do? Don't think about your parents did do, think about what you might do, if you were a squib, and Harry dropped his baby off at your house so he could go join a monastery for a few years."
Dudley blinks. "Does that happen often in the magical world?"
"You'd be surprised," Remus Lupin says blithely. "But consider the hypothetical."
"But in this scenario, I don't have magic," Dudley says. "So I'd be scared of the babies, because they could hurt me."
"In this scenario, you have living relatives who can assist you in raising magical children, and who know other magical people who can help," Remus Lupin says. "Do you avail yourself of that help?"
"I'd be stupid not to," Dudley says on reflex and then doesn't know where to go from there.
"Not necessarily stupid," Remus Lupin leads him.
"Stubborn," Dudley realizes. "Really, really stubborn."
"Set in your ways, determined to be normal. I've met many people like that, both magical and muggle," Remus Lupin says. "Sometimes something happens to force them to be flexible. Sometimes even that's not enough. Dudley, your parents are not going to believe you're a wizard, because if they were going to believe you were a wizard, you going outside and summoning a post owl by voice alone--"
"They didn't hear that," Dudley says.
"You went into your backyard, Harry told me," Remus Lupin says. "They heard you, they saw you. Just like they probably saw you doing magic your entire life."
"I hid it," Dudley says. "I wasn't like Harry. I didn't flaunt it."
"Even if that were the case," Remus Lupin says, not conceding the point, "have your parents ever spoken to you about magic?"
"No," Dudley says.
"You can try telling them," Remus Lupin says, "and I'm not a fortune teller. But I'd put my money on you telling them and them completely ignoring it. Even if you did magic right in front of their faces, they're going to ignore it, because you're their son Dudley, and their son Dudley is a normal teenager. If you came home in full wizard robes, holding a wand, wearing a pointy hat, all they'd tell you to do is go change before dinner. They'd treat it like a costume you put on. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge their own strangeness. Because your parents are squibs, Dudley. The line between muggle and squib is messy, but they have magical siblings and a magical child. That puts them firmly in the magical world. But they'd rather be muggles in the muggle world than be squibs in the magical world. They'd rather the magical world doesn't exist at all, since they don't have magic themselves. And so, no, Dudley. They aren't going to ever believe you're a wizard. Because if you're a wizard, you don't belong only to their world anymore. They don't want to lose you, you see."
"I don't think they love me," Dudley admits, horribly.
"I didn't say they did," Remus Lupin says. "Love is irrelevant. You're their son. You're a part of them, as far as they're concerned. But if you're a wizard, then you're not what they think you should be. It's a contradiction and they're dealing with it by ignoring it. You can't be something else and also be their son, because they won't let you. Did you ever for a minute consider going to Hogwarts?"
Dudley shrugs. "I was going to Smeltings."
"But you had the letter in your hand," Remus Lupin says unrepentantly. "You had proof that there was another path you could take. You could be like Harry or you could be like your father. And you chose Smeltings, Dudley. Your parents saw you do that. So of course you can't be a wizard. You're like your father. You're a Dursley who went to Smeltings. But you could have been like your aunt. You could have been a Dursley who went to Hogwarts."
Dudley doesn't like this conversation, so he asks, "did you know her there?"
"Marge Dursley? No. I looked her up in the directory after you told me. She was a few years ahead of me. Ravenclaw, of course."
Dudley has read too many pamphlets not to know what that means and so he doesn't think that's right. "That's for the smart kids."
"You think your aunt isn't smart?" Remus Lupin asks.
"I haven't gotten that impression, no," Dudley says carefully.
"To spend seven years in Hogwarts and choose, with eyes wide open, to leave the magical world entirely because you don't value anything it has to offer you-- Dudley, when people do that, it's because the magical world has hurt them deeply. I have spent more time in the muggle world than most wizards, but it's because I'm a werewolf. I don't claim to know your aunt's experience at Hogwarts, but she did well in her classes. Six OWLs, two NEWTs: Care of Magical Creatures and Transfiguration. There was a world waiting for her after she left Hogwarts, and she looked at it and said no."
Dudley, uncomfortably, realizes he has boxes and boxes of mail that probably should be going to his aunt instead. They're trying to convince so many wizards to come back to them. How many are like his aunt? "There was that war."
"Yes," Remus Lupin says. "And plenty of other reasons, too. I've often thought that the smartest of us leave for good. It's us idiots who keep coming back."
"Your sales pitch needs work," Dudley tells him. "If you want me to be a wizard so badly, you should tell me about all the magic I could learn to do."
"You're already doing plenty of magic, and you're already a wizard. You don't need a piece of paper to say you're a wizard any more than you need a piece of paper to say you're a muggle. Magic is part of you and always will be. Don't confuse the magical world and magical people."
"Aunt Marge said something about that," Dudley said. "She said the magical world acted like they owned magic and so they got to tell everyone what to do, but they don't own it and should go shove it."
"Your aunt Marge is right," Remus Lupin says.
Dudley doesn't think Aunt Marge would want someone like Remus Lupin agreeing with her. He also could have left the magical world, but he's still there. She'd probably tell him to get back into the real world and get a real job. But magical jobs have to be real jobs, too.
"You don't have to decide right now," Remus Lupin tells him.
Dudley scrunches up his face. "Not doing anything is still doing something." He swallows and then swears. He swears again, for effect. "Thank you, Remus. I guess I'm telling them."
Remus Lupin opens his mouth and closes it. "All right, then," he says. "Good luck."
11.
Naturally, Remus Lupin is right. Dudley's mother blinks once, twice, three times and then tells him to pass the peas. Dudley's father's face turns red -- so they heard him, they both heard him -- but then he clears his throat and squeezes his fork, and nothing more is spoken about it, even though Dudley tries.
He really does try.
12.
What did Dudley expect, really? For his parents to be something different from what he's known his entire life? Not even magic can do that.
And what can magic do? Dudley lets Harry take him to Diagon Alley, lets Harry show him broomsticks and bookstores and buy him robes. Dudley changes some money at Gringotts and hesitates over figurines in a gift shop.
Eventually, he buys a small dog that barks and hops around. It rides around in his pocket all day, all week, all month, until Dudley is at Aunt Marge's door.
"Here," he says, shoving it at Aunt Marge. "Happy birthday."
She opens the package. Her mouth opens and closes. He sees her decide not to slam the door in his face.
"It came with a stupid name in the store," Dudley prattles on. "It's meant for tourists, but I was a tourist, so it seemed the thing to do."
Aunt Marge is still staring at him.
Dudley decides retreat is the smartest option. "So. Happy birthday," he repeats, and then he turns to run away.
Aunt Marge grabs him and hauls him inside and feeds him dinner and when he leaves the next morning, it's with a single letter she demands he hand-deliver to an old classmate who was, according to Aunt Marge, not atrocious, and a demand to come back next week with a newspaper.
13.
Dudley graduates from Smeltings. He tells his parents he's taking a gap year.
Remus Lupin welcomes Dudley along with a group of other wizards who had, Remus Lupin says delicately, unconventional schooling. Dudley isn't the only one who doesn't bother with a wand. Supposedly he could learn to use one if he wanted. He doesn't see the point.
Dudley studies there for a year, two years, three years. One day he picks up a rock and squeezes it and after that it rides around in his pocket, changing colors when he needs to concentrate hard to make a spell work. Harry's friend Granger congratulates Dudley on re-inventing wands from first principles. But it's not a wand. Dudley doesn't wave it around. It just helps, that's all. Trying to use his magic on purpose sometimes gives him a headache. He has to visualize what he wants, and he's never been great about visualizing what he wants. He's always just gone for it. He's not a planner, not like this.
This is hard. It's hard in ways that Harry tells Dudley shouldn't be hard, but easy in ways it shouldn't be easy. Dudley is still much better at wandless magic than Harry is, but Harry's more consistent. It grates on Dudley, even though it shouldn't anymore, when Harry is better than he is.
But Dudley's better than he used to be, both as a person and as a wizard. It's okay that Harry isn't completely useless anymore. It's okay that Dudley can't beat him up anymore. Dudley doesn't want to beat him up anymore. Dudley wants a world where his parents had acknowledged they were raising two wizards, but obviously that didn't happen, and all the visualizations in the world won't change anything, so what Dudley does do is move in with Harry into an alley in magical London -- the manor being more of a weekend retreat, which makes no sense when they have instantaneous magical travel but Dudley's not going to complain about free rent in London -- and lets Harry bring him along to pub nights where they all talk Quidditch and Dudley swirls his finger around the table and imagines a Quidditch pitch until the figures appear and Harry and his friends can move them around to talk through their plays.
The appeal of Quidditch still eludes him, and probably always will, but Dudley feels more like a wizard when he's out and about with wizards who went to Hogwarts. He can blend in with them. It's shocking, actually, how easily he blends in with them.
Seems Remus Lupin was right; once they're all out of Hogwarts, it doesn't matter where Dudley went to school, or didn't go to school. He's a wizard like the rest of them.
14.
Dudley's managed to stop getting all the mailers from the re-engagement organizations except for the first one he ever contacted. They're still loyally sending him packages every month without fail. They're interested in how he and his family are doing. They want to know if his kids are thriving. They want to know if he needs anything.
"We're good now, thanks," Dudley writes back one day.
To his surprise, they offer him a job.
15.
On Dudley's sixth day in the office, he receives an owl. The letter is written in beautiful penmanship that might as well be shaky handwriting for the way it asks: should I come back?
And Dudley knows this was the right choice.