Inclement Weather

by tvsn

Summary:

When Dudley Dursley was fifteen years old, he was kissed by a Dementor.

At sixteen, he kissed a girl, which was far worse as these things went.

Now, twenty years since feeling the sun on his skin, he finds himself acting as an informant to his estranged Auror cousin after bearing witness to a brutal crime, whilst falling in love with a fellow monster as all the rest of his careful isolation comes undone.

Chapter 1: The Stovetop Version of a Bog Standard OnlyFans

 

Her pulse quickened; her feet kept pace with its metronome.

Obligingly, Dudley Dursley crossed to the other side of the cobblestone street. It was simple form. Manners, even. In addition to all of the traits which strangers were otherwise given to transcribe upon blokes in baggy clothes with twilight fast approaching, Dudley was two metres tall and had the robust build of a lapsed athlete. With his shoulders slightly raised as though anticipating light drizzle in the early autumn chill, he imagined he looked particularly predatory to the young woman, herself likely raised on the self-righteous paranoias that served to otherwise define a middle class in an economic recession.

He stopped.

Watched.

And, finding something of his estranged mother in her suddenly hurried gait, felt a familiar twinge of self-pity. But this he was equally quick to dismiss when the stranger disappeared from view.

The heavy fog, a constant feature of the landscape, and one consistent with every locale Dudley had dwelt in or driven though since the summer he had turned fifteen, seemed to further solidify in his vacant gaze, now absent of object though the woman’s sensible heels continued to click on the cobblestone, the scent of her fear lingering like cheap perfume. Dudley squinted, trying to focus the anxiety he took unto himself into condensation, willing it to rain.

Nothing happened.

Not, in truth, that he expected it to.

The important thing was that the impulse had passed.

For now.

 

He arrived late to the Adult Education Centre, where he paid a sum not altogether insignificant to his budget for the same sensation he had gotten on the prolonged walk from his place of employment to this particular hell. For the next hour and a half, he would sit in the back of a crowded classroom with his constantly blank stare, jaw slightly askew as he breathed in the broken hopes of those trying to better themselves, looking for all as though he had not completed the assigned reading at the weekend. He might even make an effort of it and ask Gülnar or Danny (both of whom he knew to take good notes) to lend them to him until Thursday – but no, no, such might commit him to class participation later in the week, if only in the form of being asked if he had not understood isotopes by a well meaning peer from whom he in truth sought nothing save pain. Best not.

It was different, or so Dudley told himself, when it cost him a hundred quid to indulge this darkness, to feed on the hopes tainted by self-doubt of those with, he presumed, far better reasons to be here. Slipping in as best he could with a creaking door, he gave his tutor a nod and sauntered to the back row, another of his small concessions to this curse.

Initially, he had elected the spot owing to his hight. But as the course filled cliques were swift to self-sort and he had defaulted into ‘the Acousticians’ who made up the back left corner: Danny being a weekend-and-wedding DJ; Gülnar programming hearing aids as a matter of profession; Melon having medical need of such devices owing to a depravity of oxygen at some crucial stage of his birth; Christopher inviting the impression that he was part of some subversive music scene on count of his having purchased the wrong deodorant; and Goyle, perhaps even more so than himself, looking like the hired help of a shady locale, more interested in getting his knuckles bloodied before the night was out than assisting in the sorts of activities that might actually keep police from the premises.

In the privacy of his mind, Dudley called their group the ‘Unwanted’. He expected the ‘Young Mothers’ making up the front row, ‘Ex-Cons’ and ‘Pensioners’ in the middle, and ‘Swindlers’ to their direct right of sharing this impression.

When he entered, Gülnar Dagworth was turned around in her chair, addressing a bored Gregory Goyle and bewildered Chrisopher Pearson regards what Dudley could reasonably infer from posture amounted to a rather involved piece of collaborative coursework. Beside her, Daniel Cotes was assisting in this effort by explaining the assignment requirements to Christopher Crenshaw, who already looked to be filling his role by offering complaint. Dudley frowned. He would actually have to take notes today. The group was not likely to get much more form Crenshaw, or ‘Melon’, as he had been since dubbed as to differentiate him from his younger namesake. Especially if the required coursework was long and involved. To judge on the collected and now familiar group posture, it would be.

It was perfect.

At least, as perfect as an evening spent in this place might prove.

Adult Education was the latest in a series of indulged misfortunes in which Dudley Dursley actively sought and passively partook. It was nothing like a trip to the A&E, a payday lone place mid-month, or a bookie during any given cupset, but it served his proposes and seemed, on the whole, less demented than some of his previous schemes.

Visiting retirement homes had not worked half as well as he imagined, for his mere presence broke the spell of isolation and his mother had instilled a sense of performative politeness in him that still tended to manifest when addressing his elders, which society’s disregarded tended to accepting without reservation. Christ. It was little wonder that demographic so often fell victim to phone-scams.

He had joined a handful of MLMs back in the days when recruiting happened in the ‘banquet’ halls of two-star chain hotels, finding such environments spiritually fulfilling and fairly profitable (another product of the enforced polite deference of his upbringing, perhaps) but interactions had to be physical and the move to social media meant he had long ceased to get anything out of it.

Church service and Bible study posed a certain paradox – while Dudley was not himself certain if there was a Creator, he had the feeling that he would stand little chance claiming the souls of His parishioners and had soon abandoned this particular aspiration.

The folk whom Dudley had found himself in lockup with when the mood took him were often too chemically compromised to be emotionally vulnerable; and his presence at AA meetings usually lead to relapse, which both defeated his purposes and felt unnecessarily cruel.

Still, such was preferable to the alternative, the act to which he felt himself drawn, which all of his lasting humanity damned him to resist.

In the twenty years he had been living with this curse, Dudley Dursley had taken but one soul.

He would have traded anything to have been able to give it back.

Not that he had much to offer, in any respect.

Dudley had spent a year in his late teens in a kind of witness protection programme, fleeing from a wizard so evil as to have obtained a place within the folklore of his own age. The constant alert had been character building; at least, the fear consuming his parents and their succession of magical handlers had allowed him to sustain his own illusions as he came to understand them for what they were. He spent the better part of the year in transient places – airports, motels, truck stops – places where everyone was slightly on edge and anxious to leave, where the Aurors attached to their party could dismiss the ever-present fog as an external phenomenon.

There were entities, Dudley had learned in these travels, that existed as a semi-physical manifestation of humanity’s omnipresent, internalised self-hatred. The Ministry for Magic had employed them to guard their prison in the middle of the turbulent northern sea, itself a controversial approach to crime and punishment in an era of human rights. Then, these creatures, Dementors, as they were known, had struck a better deal with the self-styled Dark Lord and abandoned their posts, descending upon the Home Nations as a phenomenon of regional-typical weather few understood as anything but.

Dudley, however, had first encountered Dementors two summers before they officially warranted a threat to public safety* (by proxy – muggles in Britian, of course, remained unaware of the wider situation, but fuck if they did not use the poor weather as an excuse to book holidays abroad en masse, extending the nation’s unruly reputation abroad well past football fixtures and post-colonial hangups.) The wizards at home had been left with the rest of it, which on reflection likely explained why their alcohol hit so much harder.

He had been walking home with his cousin on a summer day that otherwise escaped consideration when the sun set out of rhythm with the automated streetlamps lining their pretentiously middle-class street, plunging them into a darkness Dudley recognised as a reflection of himself for all that there was nought to see. Then, there was a light – something to Dudley’s regret he would later come to understand as a ‘corporal patronus’, a physical but not tangible manifestation of his cousin Harry’s better nature – and the darkness dispersed.

Somewhat.

His mother, strangely enough, had acquired a depth of information regards Dementors in the poorly built and barely maintained post-war council estate on which she had been raised, where the ‘Azkaban Guard’ as she called them seemed to exist as a metaphor for substance abuse ubiquitous to all such places. She found his weed, anyway, after it happened, and somehow found a way to blame this, too, on Harry. Dudley had been too tired to really care.

Dementors, his mother had alleged, ‘kissed’ their victims and stole their mortal souls in the act. What this had to do with the joint she had somehow found in a rolled-up pair of socks with his school crest on them, his cousin Harry, or how she had manged to fit so many terms of endearment into what by all other measures was a tirade would forever remain lost on Dudley, whose personal experience in no way conformed to stated cause and effect.

The attack had robbed him of nothing.

In the decades since, he had questioned if this owed to the blood magic an archaic wizard had once spoke of whilst trying to ply him and his parents with mead. Understanding the science behind what Dumbledore had been preaching far too little to find any great purchase in it, Dudley had come to accept a bleaker explanation to his predicament: he had simply not processed a soul worth stealing. The Dementor to have kissed had left him with the ability to remedy this.

Dudley, through no effort extending those he had otherwise undertaken for years, lost so much weight in the weeks to follow as to be left with sheets of heavy, hanging skin which later muscle building and extents of gluttony had done nothing to ‘refill’. Though he had always been tall enough to warrant remark, he shot up fifteen centimetres that summer (six inches in the old money), forcing him into the slight hunch of the too tall in an unconscious attempt to disguise the extent of his sudden tower.

And then there were his eyes. Unblinking. Blank. Black – at least, when he was not otherwise feeding on such suffering as he was given to seek.

The constant fog, he figured, served to keep them from getting dry. At least, in the year he had spent under Auror protection, it kept them moving, allowing Dudley to covertly prey on perfect strangers in passing, preventing him from draining his parents and their guard entirely, protecting him from suspicion and possible criminal conviction.

And, perhaps just as crucially, it kept Mum in conversation with the Order members into whose care the family had been condemned.

Dudley listened. Learned. And when the ‘Dark Lord’ eventually fell to his cousin Harry’s hand (spell? wand?), Dudley left without a word.

He went to his mother’s hometown, a place he had never visited for pleasure, nostalgia, or familial obligation, but with which he was familiar all the same. At least, he knew the only hotel in town well enough. He had first come at eleven when acceptance letters delivered to his cousin by owl had turn to allegations of child abuse, when his parents had thrown Harry and himself into a four-door sedan and fled, fuelled by the same fear that had caused them to keep Harry’s existence and identity as much of a secret as they might with compulsory education, vaccine mandates and the cumulation of Britain’s CCTV networks.

Dudley had come back, briefly, while in Witness Protection, his mother finding the room not up to her impossible standard of cleanliness and demanding that they leave immediately. To Dudley’s recollection, they had been transferred to different rooms and given a free continental breakfast in consolation. This was not what his mother had had in mind.

It had been at around this juncture that conversation around Dementors had assumed in earnest. Mum had learned about them by eavesdropping on her younger sister Lily and ‘that awful boy’ – who wound up having grown up to murder the intrusive wizard who had rather aggressively offered them hard honey-liqueur in floating glass tumblers, insinuating their refusal had been every bit as impolite as the offering. What had Dumbledore excepted save a shared sense of embarrassment? Vernon Dursley was a recovering alcoholic, Dudley himself had been underaged and while he indulged all the same from time to time, he certainly was not about to do so in front of his parents, especially when his mother Petunia was answering to every number of accusation and underlying threat.

Yeah. Snape killed Dumbledore. Good bloody riddance.

From what Dudley had overheard, and he had overheard quite a lot, Snape was an expert practitioner of the Dark Arts, and as such Dudley had arrived in Cokeworth with designs on confrontation. Fate had, however, by such point denied him the opportunity for professional diagnosis. He had found Spinner’s End easily enough – though, ironically, he later learned that he would not have been able to find the address, even on a map, if the man had survived the war and the concealment charms had been left in place.

Dudley had knocked. Waited. Knocked again and, finding nothing, simply walked in.

Weeks passed. He decided to stay.

Cokeworth, it turned out, came as close to the ambiance of a prison fortress built on a rock in the middle of the North Sea as anywhere else in the Midlands, abandoned by industry and since cloaked in all of the vestibules of existential fear: pawn shops, strip malls that seemed to specialise in international calling cards and artificial hair, graffitied swastikas competing with Brexit stickers to offer offence at bus stops and understaffed government buildings.

After spending his first summer in this post-modern hellscape (itself too commonplace to properly qualify a dystopia) reading through all of the books and manuscripts he had half accidented upon, Dudley himself had gone to the job centre, where work had been found for him and his forged credentials behind the local Tesco’s butchery counter. It suited. No one in a supermarket was happy to be there. The other employees passed their shifts making alternate plans that would never manifest, the customers treated grocery shopping as a chore keeping them from other, yet more taxing engagements, and Dudley was free to feast on the plenitude of baseline misery, the bland makeup of modern Britian.

And he was miserable, too.

He spent his nights and evenings engaged with magical theory, with the late sorcerer whose house he had commandeered, the impressions Snape had left of his person in page margins. They came from similar background despite vast economic discrepancies and Dudley identified with the man’s mental isolation, something he had since come to suppose was the only thing any two people ever saw in each other, latching on in an attempt to let go. It never really worked.

Neither did the magic.

At least, not for him.

At least, not without modifications.

Years of independent study had left Dudley with a sense that what differentiated mages from muggles was the ease in which they were able to manipulate the kinetic energy of forces not fully studied into fairly simple ‘spells’ which a muggle could in theory mimic with a baseline understanding of maths and the natural sciences, to which ‘magic’ was not wholly immune. Potions were probably the easiest, but brewing wandless as it were proved cost-intensive and time consuming, and industrial scale chemistry could compete with most of its workings.

Dudley’s hands bore the scars of a number of attempts all the same, with increasingly successful results. A clockwise turn of a wand, or so he had calculated, equated to .78653 Joules, where a counterclockwise switch this to .53628 Joules, unless there was some stand of nightshade present in the ingrediencies which reduced the reverse motion to a mere .42561, though Dudley could not say why. Alkaline Batteries were unreliable as energy sources, though Zinc ones tended to work more or less, but lately Dudley had been teaching himself how to transform the emotion which he otherwise stole to self-sustain, to keep up what had been left to him of his human appearance, into the measured impulses needed to turn biological decay into the sort of solution he could otherwise pick up for a fiver.

Having been unable to find anything in any of Snape’s books regarding a human being’s rot into what he expected himself of becoming (or having more or less become) Dudley reasoned that if he gained some control of the natural world around him, he would be able better disguise if not entirely disperse with his condition.

Sometimes, if he concentrated, and properly conjugated with his fading secondary-school grasp of Latin, he could briefly cause the fog that had been following him for decades into droplets – and if he could make it rain, theoretically, at least, he could summon the sun he had not been so privileged as to see since the day the world went dark twenty years prior.

But for all this, he needed to better his grasp of all of the muggle sciences which his abrupt departure from Smelting’s had deprived him of, things Snape and those other dead masters who have served his education either understood too perfectly to waste ink on or too little to mourn its absence from their calculations.

And so, at thirty-five, Dudley Dursley was revising for his A Levels with people who had all fallen victim to some common misery in the past, who made up for the energy he was expanding on Polyjuice and Amortentia – the stovetop version of a bog standard OnlyFans account, worth the effort if only for the fact that modern electrics did not function on the estate.

Dudley took his usual spot in the last row next to Goyle who was quick to fill him in on what he missed in his ten-minute detainment.

“The usual,” Dudley’s fellow-giant sighed, passing him a worksheet which Dudley did not even afford a cursory glance. “It was listed in the curriculum we were handed in the first lesson, so Dags already has this shit planned, penned, and bloody colour-coded, and she’s in the process of assigning us all courtesy assignments to make herself seem like a ‘team player’,” he gave with an eyeroll, “and to afford Christopher the illusion of ‘meaningful contribution’ whilst Danny and Melon argue over Peter Jackson’s Hobbit adaptation and I, now having long since decided that this day was well long enough, try to tempt you into exchanging more boarding-school horror stories over a pint once this mess lets out.”

“Pint?” Melon turned, grinning, hearing the suggestion in his electrically augmented ears and immediately succumbing to its promised escape.

“Can’t,” Dudley answered Goyle while Danny laughed, Gülnar frowned, and Christoper swallowed, too self-conscious to ask if the invitation was in fact open, thinking if he simply staggered along at a yet undetermined distance no one could properly object to his presence.

Dudley offered and muttered excuse that would have seemed weak to any other accidental confederation, he was stuck in the latest Rivers of London sequel and would not be good for conversation until he had finished the chapter.

He had finished the book within hours of its release.

Likely, they all had. Dorks.

But the truth was, despite his absence of alternate plans, Dudley Dursley well and truly could not go out. Nothing in the semester so far gave him enough confidence to enter a confined space of lowered inhibitions.

“Where are you at, then?” Goyle asked. Dudley struggled to recall a particular cliffhanger in four hundred pages of scenic description loosely held together by something pretending at plot. He indulged the genre just enough to provide a convincing cover for references he might make to magic within the regular course of conversation, for why he was single, and for that matter why the study group he had accidented into two months prior encompassed the extent of his social existence.

Goyle, he had since gathered, actually needed the escape the pages offered. Like Dudley, he had gone to an expensive, exclusive school, and had likewise not finished owing to extenuating circumstances. Goyle had confessed to Dudley in confidence that he had watched his childhood best friend burn to death in an accident or act of hubris, and the way he phrased this made Dudley wonder if there was a distinction that could be drawn.

Goyle had left school a day later without qualifications of any kind and had languished in the self-imposed exile of the trust-fund variety, backpacking around the continent for a few years until events in America put far greater restrictions on travel. Then, he had joined the army. Now, after witnessing countless other senseless slaughters, Goyle wanted to be an officer, hence the night school.

The thing about being a Dementor, people generally tended to open with their personal worst.

Gülnar, who began guessing until Dudley gave a noncommitted nod to some Peter Grant plot point, seized on popular fantasy as an extension of performative whiteness, which, ignoring the fact that the Rivers protagonist was mixed race, the urban fantasy genre as a whole more or less was.

Gülnar had been born abroad, and correspondingly she had one of those almost-American accents that confessed she had learnt her English from the NCIS reruns as ubiquitous in foreign ports as overpriced coffee and stale pastries. She was Turkish, or Kurdish, Armenian, Kazaki, Uzbeki, Azerbaijani – one of those peoples, anyway, who took pride in the distinction and offence at the error, and because Dudley was not sure he did not ask, caring neither for the answer nor the anger he might well instead receive.

Dudley was not sure if the Empire had dug its claws into her prior to immigration or if such was a product of prolonged exposure, but wherever she had come from, Gülnar fetishised fitting in to an extent that was rather disconcerting unto itself. Dudley was not sure if the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’ could be applied to Ugg boots, Starbucks, and Taylor Swift, but his classmate certainly made a contorted effort to the effect. She had not told him anything about her past. Dudley knew from his own forced travels that magic was more fluid in Anatolia its immediate east, which might account for her ability to resist his pull. That or she had been on a post-9/11 Watch List and had gotten good at offering up nothing of consequence. Regardless, he had ‘fed’ on her enough to know that she had stopped a murder in her childhood and had thus become its victim, fleeing her family, and winding up here, a British officer’s bleach-blond trophy wife in a classroom that proved the only place she felt free enough to let her forceful personality fully manifest.

He doubted she much enjoyed the books she read, which was why Dudley was thankful that she was now dominating the conversation as was right and proper. They would return to the task at hand soon enough, and Goyle and Melon would cut across the wood to the inconspicuous King George afterwards, and Danny would have something better to do has handsome guys with girlfriends always seemed to, and Christopher would pretend he did as well, if only to save face.

And Gülnar would offer him, Dudley, a ride home, ‘spoil’ something in a novel she did not know he had already finished out of the misplaced spite with which she met everyone. And Dudley would have her drop him off at the corner petrol station, where he would pick up a Red Bull and a couple of bags of crisps with the intent of turning his own misery and hers into ‘magic’, his pub invitation long since forgotten and his absence unnoticed.

The was every Tuesday evening unfolded. Thursdays, too.

But unbeknownst to Dudley Dursley, the young woman he had seen earlier had not picked up her pace in response to his presence, but rather in response to someone she knew well enough to fear.

In two hours’ time, he and his classmates would abandon their ideocracies and feigned obligations to react to her desperate screams –

Twenty years too late.

 

 

Chapter 2: The Worst Detective in the Entire DMLE

Summary:

Hands fly in a stressful situation. Dudley becomes acquainted with his estranged cousin after being mauled by Goyle’s patronus.

Notes:

There is a pit bull in this chapter. A *good boy*, because, all dogs, by default, are good boys. It was also a damn good idea, so you can rest assured, I claim absolutely no credit. That goes out to @LaurelsandLumos, @Mr_Pibb, and other mega talents I met on the Discord Panville Server, whom I would be happy to thank publically with permission ;* mwah. (Go check it and them out!)

 

While Dudley Dursley was waiting patiently for a frightened young woman to create whatever she felt was a comfortable distance between herself and the threat social conditioning created of him, Gülnar Dagworth had arrived in class early out of habit.

As she told it (and as Dudley would thus later seriously contemplate beginning his police statement) when Gülnar had walked into the classroom, Zeynab had given her a ‘look’.

The injured party proceeded to imitate the ‘look’ for a group of lads who did not follow its implications.

Not that this did much to help them in that respect.

“A look,” Gülnar had stressed.

Really, it could have meant anything, and probably meant nothing.

But regardless, a look had been given (or, at least, received) and retaliation was in order. For reasons that continued to escape his comprehension, Dudley was duly made to play an active role in this particular engagement of the psychological war of attrition ever being waged by the sex named ‘fair’ in colloquial irony.

Zeynab, he learned that same evening, having not heard the name prior in personal context, belonged to the group of ‘Young Mothers’ who made up the front row. Presumably, she was the one who wore a hajib for the seeming purpose of fixing her iPhone to the side of her face, but Dudley did not know for certain and asking for clarification somehow felt as though it might add to the imagined offence.

While he was deftly attuned to the subtitles of human emotion on account of the Incident, Dudley did not in fact interact with people enough for the self-same reason. Thus, he had no real understanding of how and why feelings drove action. He imagined a number of possibilities in absence of any explanation beyond a prolonged, imitative eyeroll: Gülnar did not have children, Zeynab did, or, at least, soon would, and at thirty this was perhaps a point of envy for the former.

While Dudley’s vision was severely augmented by the way in which the Kiss had broken him, if he focused his mind to it enough, he could tell that Gülnar remained commercially pretty in a way that Zeynab was not, perhaps never had been. Maybe it was Zeynab who was jealous. Dudley really could not tell. Frankly, he could not be asked to care. He wondered distantly if he could see people as they chose to present, rather than as they were, if he would have developed a sense of physical preference. He liked to imagine he was above that, at least.

Maybe Zeynab had faith as the silk scarf would imply without the latest tech; maybe Gülnar found her profession of it all too performative for her own decidedly secular approach.

Maybe they had had a more mundane disagreement over a parking space.

Or maybe it was true that no two women could be in the same room without finding an arbitrary cause for conflict.

Regardless, Gülnar thought she was being looked down upon and was playing up what Dudley could assume was Zeynab’s critique in the kind of passive aggressive revolt to which he personally considered women prone. Going to the pub had become ‘her’ idea, and she, a married woman presumably from the same socio-geographical sphere (at least as relative to the Midlands) was going to go somewhere alcohol was being served with as many men as she could string along for show. And this was all said loud enough for Zeynab to hear, to internalise that, in contrast, she only had her young children’s company and complaints awaiting her that evening.

Both women, Dudley smirked to himself, would feel as though they had been the victor of this particular battle. It would be stupid to point this out.

It would also be fairly pointless to offer protest. No one else had been willing, and by the time Dudley was through with his private misogyny, the point of no return had passed.

Melon, Dudley reasoned, would have gone out even if he had to secure company for himself upon arrival. He possessed the sort of conversational ease where such seldom proved a challenge. The fact that he always had enough weed on him to sell or share likely helped. Plus, Gülnar was Melon’s best friend and if whatever solidarity they shared was strong enough to compel someone so plainly disinterested in study to Adult Education, Melon would not be one to say ‘no’ to a few drinks.

Danny, who might have otherwise had something better lined up, had an only child’s lack of social grace. Dudley had never truly been grateful for having had Harry in his early until he had met the lad, but he saw what the others meant. Danny, though well meaning, came across as being both self-centred and personally careless in conversation, and as such was often the victim of ridicule and reproach. Tonight, he was enjoying an elevated role in group dynamics, as banter was largely being directed at Christopher, which was right, proper, and endearing in its way.

Like Dudley himself, Christopher worked at Tesco, but failed to find personal fulfilment in scanning barcodes. Dudley had no idea how the kid wound up working a till, save that Christopher (whom somehow no one called ‘Chris’) was a spot-faced twenty-year-old and nothing about his predicament seemed out of place. He had been in foster care and likely had not stayed in one place long enough to foster conversation, which, at thirty-five, Dudley was not particularly interested in having with him, either. The others – even Goyle – were engaged enough in affording the boy a typical right-of-passage in the form of: “Are you even old enough to drink?” – “Watch him chose a bottle of something German or Dutch so he can take it home like a primary school participation trophy, place it over his bed and that.” – “With all of his D&D Manuals!” – “And the pricy spot treatment they advertise on TikTok.”

As though someone could afford forty quid for vanity on minimum wage. Wankers.

Christopher seemed to be taking it all in stride, though. Kids were fairly resilient.

Goyle did not say much, but then for his part, he rarely did. He seemed to welcome the escape a pint promised, however, and again, Dudley wonder what it was that he was running from. For a long time, Dudley had imagined that the only member of his study group whom he could actually imagine being friends with fancied his former CO’s wife on some level almost assuredly forbidden. Goyle, however, claimed there was no courtly love aspect to his willingness to conform to whatever bad idea Gülnar was currently propagating, that she simply recalled for him something of a childhood friend.

“The one who died?” Dudley whispered to him, seemingly out of context as the others continued offering Christopher mocking suggestions about how to best conduct himself in public.

“Can anyone, in truth, be said to survive childhood?” Goyle countered, went silent for a moment, and then expanded, “No. Our ringleader. Couldn’t bloody stand simply being the best in our house and had to pick baseless conflicts with his equals in rival colours. Same Mirkwood cum King’s Landing dye-job, too, come to think on it, and probably for the same pathological reasons. His father was part of the old aristocracy, mother a product of talent-based mercantilism that bore substantial generational wealth. Anyway, her former surname name had fallen into disgrace by the time of his birth, so my friend couldn’t much claim the Black genealogy,” Goyle murmured absently.

Something Dudley was ever trying to supress stirred.

“What happened to him?”

“Joined the real dark-side after the,” Goyle paused, blinked, and readjusted. “He’s um, a forensic pathologist for a specialist police division now, down in London. Despite likewise having been in the same room where Crabbe … well, it doesn’t matter. Malfoy actually finished school, immediately went on to get something equivalent to a chemistry degree in homage to his late godfather, and decided to further honour the man’s institutional memory by working with a detective who has the guy’s portrait hanging above his desk. The Zeynab to Malfoy’s Gülnar, if you will. The two never got on, back at school. Might now though. Wouldn’t know.”

“Not a fan then?” Dudley pressed.

“Not against it,” Goyle shrugged. “Just … after what happened, I found I couldn’t much be in the company of my old circle. In company full stop. Sorry … I don’t know why I’m talking about this,” he swallowed. “Dags is alright, when you get to know her. Or she’s a cunt but you get used to her. Something like that. Her husband and I were at the same school, too, but little overlap and we weren’t in the same house. He has … more active connections to that old boy’s network than me. How I remain vaguely conscious of what the others are getting up to.”

“You miss them?”

“Doesn’t everyone want to be who they were at eleven?” Goyle mused.

 

Dudley knew he should not pursue this any further, but he felt suddenly famished, and, anyway, he tried to justify to himself, people liked their own misery. Mostly, because sharing such things let them feel significant.

 

 

This was how Dudley found himself taking a shortcut with his classmates through the wood separating the local secondary that transformed itself in the evenings to suit thirty-somethings seeking the same from the old town centre and what little it could boast of a nightlife: a single pub, a 24-hour laundry mat, a Chinese takeaway, and that one hair-place that kept irregular hours.

Lost in Goyle’s monologue, he mistook something in gloom of his surroundings until Christopher suddenly stopped short before them.

“Guys, I don’t think we should be going this way,” he addressed the group as a whole.

“Scared, Pearson?” Gülnar smirked. “Don’t worry, you’ve only five or so metres more of discarded condoms, cigarette butts, and candy wrappers to contend. The kids only have fifteen-minute breaks between classes. They don’t tend to venture far for their kicks.”

“The fog is getting thicker,” Christoper answered. “We could well get proper lost in here. It would be faster to just go around.”

“Bullocks,” Melon said. “It is a straight path.”

“One we can’t see!” Christopher again protested. “What good are the lamp lights on our mobiles when they can’t increase actual visibility?”

“Be glad its not a clear sky,” Goyle snorted, pressing ahead. “It is a full moon tonight. Merlin only knows what you’d make of that.”

“Melin?” Dudley wondered at the odd phrasing. “Like the wizard?”

“Wizards? I think we’re talking werewolves,” Danny laughed, then howled at the unseen moon.

For a moment, the bickering and banter ceased as the sound echoed back at them.

Almost.

What reverberated through the leafless branches did not sound as though it had originated in jest.

It did not sound human.

Dudley felt his pupils dilate as is mouth opened for a long inhale. There was a difference between fear and worry, though most people did not know what it was owing to the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the Queen’s English. Standard correspondence often began with the phrase ‘I am afraid’ as though to cushion and caution mild disappointment before offering a reasonable alternative. When people spoke about things that scared them, it was most often a temporal response: Chrisopher did not want to walk through the woods in this weather; Danny would not be able to both play a weekend gig in Birmingham and have the time or energy to revise for the quiz they had in physics next Tuesday. None of it mattered; not really, not long term.

Fear though, fear with primeval. Fear was a survival mechanism that made misfortune manifest.

For a moment, in the echoes of the wolf’s call, Dudley felt true fear from every member of his makeshift crew, and it made him whole.

He took a step back. His skin felt clammy in the solidifying fog and his blackened eyes adjusted with ability. He could see them all clearly now, free of the shallow glamours of physicality.

Chistopher, not quite as pot marked as he had been a moment prior was hugging his awkward, lanky frame for a comfort he could not otherwise find.

Danny did not stand quite as straight, though he stood almost perfectly still – his otherwise bright eyes darting between the others, looking for direction and, quite possibly, protection.

Gülnar, never one to accept chivalry on its face, had pulled her own sword and was screaming for a challenger, her otherwise chemically tamed and coloured hair a sudden mess of unruly black curls that fell to her midback.

Melon, much to Dudley’s surprise, was assuming a similar posture beside her, his bloodied knuckles raised as though to say, ‘You’ll have to take me, first.’ He was terrifying in his own terror. Maybe that was what the two saw in one another without – literally – seeing it, as he, Dudley, now could.

But of course, none of this was actually happening. The four were all standing around, same as they had been, Melon suggesting that they amuse themselves with ghost stories in October’s honour; Gülnar claiming to know several that began with girls standing under trees with wet hair at twilight and ended with them forcibly wedded to djinn. Danny thought that sounded like a parable about not seeking shelter under trees during storms; Christopher combed at his own lank hair, damp with atmosphere and nervous sweat, wishing it was really that easy to get laid.

And they all looked like bog-standard members of the fading British middle-class, companions of circumstance rather than choice – at least to judge by the way they reacted to one another.

What Dudley Dursley was seeing was their damaged, desperate souls fighting again the impulse of an unexpected sound. He preferred others in distress. This was not something he could fairly consider a condition of the Kiss; even as a small child, he had taken his pleasures in the tensions he could inspire through a well-timed tantrum.

Missing Goyle in the commotion, he turned around to find the same man he felt he knew well enough, still in a hoodie, sweats, and trainers where he had expected a frightened schoolboy covered in soot. The only thing discernibly different about Goyle as he existed on a metaphysical plane was that he armed himself with a wand, clutched threateningly at his side, pointed at Dudley, but not yet raised.

“What are you?” Goyle hissed. If his voice carried to the others, Dudley did not know. His own attention was immediately robbed by another howl, and, shortly after a scream.

Silence again fell. Melon was the first to break it. “Christopher,” he said with an authority he did not often play towards. “You were right, we should not have come this way. Go, get out of here. Take Gülnar with you, kicking and screaming if you have to, but go. Imma check this out.”

Gülnar crossed her arms as though to say that she would not be escorted anywhere. Christopher reached towards her, then thought better on it.

“I’ll cover,” Danny said, kicking at the fallen leaves in search of a fallen branch he could pretend was a sword or gun or whatever other weapon had necessitated itself in the shared, schoolyard phantasies of his childhood – a wand, maybe, like the one Goyle had found or fashioned for himself.

Except, however well-versed in the ‘magic’ of popular fiction they all might have been, Dudley strongly suspected that none of them had ever read, or even heard of Lyall Lupin.

“Don’t!” Dudley shouted before he could stop himself.

“I’ll go,” Goyle offered as though this would put an end to it.

“It is a full moon, as you stated. Supposing that what we heard is a werewolf,” Dudley stated, trying to keep his voice level as the words suggested madness in and of themselves, “if it is a werewolf attack, the beast has to stay with its victim until the silver alkaloid present in its saliva has had chance to take effect, otherwise they are apt to die of injury. You can’t chase something like that off with a stick, and even if you could, such would be ill-advised.”

Goyle gave Dudley a suspicious look, but there were more pressing matters to pursue. “He is right,” the giant consented. “There are no full-time wolves left in Britian, not in the wild anyway, and certainly not on half an acre of undeveloped land in fucking Cokeworth. Discounting the werewolf suggestion, in all likelihood, what we heard was someone taking their dog for a walk without a lead.”

“No, it’s not,” Gülnar said, her voice an octane lower than its usual perky faux-American prattle, though her vowels remained half-muted. “Barking is socially enforced behaviour. What we heard was an isolated cry – it wasn’t domestic. And that is to ignore that someone could be hurt out there, we are going to look into it. We have to, don’t we?”

“It will be worse if we try to intervene,” Dudley again attempted to argue, fully aware of the implication of his own cowardice.

“Yeah mate, nah,” Melon said, turning to back to the renewed commotion, which, in this fog could have been immediate or miles away. “Danny, c’mon. G, hold back, ring the police or emergency services, or, at least, someone with a car.”

Gülnar nodded, though she otherwise made a performance of her displeasure. Christopher, Dudley noted, was long gone.

The scream – a woman’s – grew louder before it ceased.

Its absence was more chilling than its former distress.

Dudley felt stronger in the shared terror and his governing resolve drained.

He wanted to watch the stranger take her last, desperate breaths. He wanted to watch hope fully give way to horror in his remaining classmates. He wanted anger and blame, and everything awfully born of situations half understood. Dudley began to drift after Melon and Danny, fixated on their shared, panicked pulses when he felt the cold pang of a spell hit his side, ricocheting off of him to hit its intended targets.

He stopped, surprised, which was all that a ‘Stupefy’ could do to him, however expertly cast.

Danny and Melon froze, then softly fell on count of the subdued impact. The leaves of the forest floor barely crunched under their collective weight.

“What the devil are you?” Goyle again demanded, wand raised at the ready. The ‘Lumos’ at its tip cut through the fog, revealing Dudley’s soulless eyes and hallowed cheeks, now a discoloured web of veins, visible beneath his thin, pale skin. Dudley wondered the extent to which the vision was shared, if Goyle’s soul was truly such a near match to his physical presentation as Dudley knew his present monstrous appearance displayed of his own innermost.

The alternate, he considered, somewhat uncomfortably, was that Gregory Goyle, a trained if unqualified wizard, was truly not afraid of what he was now faced with.

But then, people who had already seen hell could face it again with seeming apathy.

Goyle did not flinch. The light from his wand tip grew brighter. Again, Dudley unconsciously stepped back.

Harry had not been afraid of the Dementors, either. But Harry had looked completely different after Dudley had suffered their Kiss. More snake than human. Like nothing Dudley had seen before or, thankfully, since. He had not been calm in the way Goyle proved. Maybe it owed itself to a life spent in uniform, of one kind or another. Had Goyle truly gone to Hogwarts?

“Me? I’m a squib, a cursed one,” Dudley stammered, testing the other man’s reaction to his borrowed vocabulary. It did not seem to make much of an impression. “Sort of. Goyle. Greg,” he tried, though his own Smelting’s experience had taught that Christian names were only used within the immediate families of his betters. “I … my cousin was a wizard. Is, still. You probably know him. You probably fought at his side. Harry Potter?” he tried.

“You have no idea who I am, do you?” Goyle answered bitterly, moving to close the space between them.

“Are you … do you practice the Dark Arts?” Dudley asked with a hope he was surprised he was still capable of feeling. Though, with respect to his present predicament, he hesitated to think of how he might convince this wizard to help him find the illusive answers he had long sought from Snape’s margins and memories.

“You might say that,” Goyle smirked. He raised his wand with a flourish.

“Then stand back,” Gülnar demanded, rising her arms, presenting her palms as though she meant to offer surrender while she seemed to struggle through a spell of her own. But no, she was praying. At least, she was reciting an Ayat in clumsy Arabic, trying to call on her God’s protection as she knelt down to take Melon’s pulse. It was only then Dudley, or Goyle, for that matter, noticed the blood trickling out of his ears.

“Hearing aids use zinc batteries, don’t they?” Dudley asked, not expecting that he would get an answer from an acoustician regressed further into a younger version of herself in Dudley’s compromised vision as she continued to cast a defensive charm, itself only effective in the element of surprise and Dudley’s resolve from his short-lived Bible Study days not to interfere with the practice of faith.

Receiving no response, as was to be expected, he turned to Goyle. “When there is time, I swear to you that I’ll explain how I know this – but where alkaline batteries tend to hinder the flow of magic, zinc ones are a reliable enough conduit for muggles trying to recreate the effect. Unless a nightshade is involved but that’s not –” he shook his head, electing instead to summarise. “I think you may have hit Melon harder than intended. I don’t live that far from here. I have Dittany in my medicine cabinet, if you just let me – ”

But Goyle did not seem to hear him. “What have I done?” he whispered to himself. “I thought … if I didn’t hit them directly, the spell would be augmented enough not to leave lasting damage.”

“You caused the batteries to overcharge, creating an explosion directly in his ear canals?” Gülnar qualified for him, her latent knowledge of Quranic Verse evidently exhausted. “I’m going to call Zey, see if her husband or father-in-law have surgical allowances at Cockworth General, and if not, I’ll damn well get her to wake up an ENT who does, to meet us there when we arrive,” she explained slowly. “Then I’m going to call emergency services and I would strongly suggest you both make haste before the police show up.”

“I inadvertently harmed a muggle with magic. The police are already on their way,” Goyle said, seemingly to no one in particular, resigned to whatever fate awaited.

All things being equal, Dudley was a little disappointed in his former almost-friend’s maturity. Harry, he reasoned, would never accept the censor of a central authority. But then Harry, at heart, was evidently as inhuman as Dudley himself.

“A normal A&E won’t be able to assist,” Goyle told Gülnar, who had produced an Android from the Louis Vuitton knock off she carried, mistaking it for class. “Call the Major,” Goyle ordered, finding that his own mobile was dead – a common reality of practiced magic. “Please. Your husband can get a message to the magical hospital, St Mungo’s, and –”

“I make it a rule not to consort with spell casters or the djinn under their command,” Gülnar spat. “Whatever they say of me,” she said shakily, “I promise you that. You can rest assured, Goyle, that I’ll not breathe a word of this to Jérôme. But in exchange for my discretion, I don’t want to see either of you in class or anymore. At all. Full stop!”

She was fronting, Dudley decided for himself. She was not a witch, but she had plainly dabbled with magic in the past to her own peril. He considered how much of her past was presumption on his part and wondered if the part she now tried to play was a reaction to a fully different set or circumstances. Maybe she had grown up, like him, like Mum, with a sorcerer-sibling who railed in her torment. Dudley remembered Harry whispering with snakes, setting a python at him on his eleventh birthday. He remembered the pig’s tail that had delayed his start at Smelting’s. He remembered the poor Latin congregations Harry came home with after his first term that he claimed were curses, but which had the effect of reminding Dudley that he still had summer assignments of his own to contend, which, frankly, was worse. He remembered that daemon Harry had summoned to Dad’s business dinner. He remembered Harry inflating Aunt Marge like a helium ballon. He remembered the bonbon one of Harry’s friends had offered him, how it caused his tongue to swell and choke him, how sure he had been that he was going to die. He remembered his true mortal death, the chill of the Dementors touch, and Harry’s awful face after the fact.

He remembered his first and last filtration, lending Betty Burkley one of the loose, heavy knitted sweaters he was given to wearing in the Incident’s aftermath, both to cover the extent of his unsightly, sagging skin, and to justify how cold his hands felt to other people – when he had ceased to feel much of anything himself. He remembered the taste of her cherry flavoured Chapstick on his own cracked lips.

He remembered his old school cardigan being presented to him in a plastic bag in the interrogation room of a Sussex police station after she had taken her own life days after telling him she was falling in love.

Dudley knew why Gülnar hated magic, even if he would never truly know her. Even if he was resolved not to know anyone since getting away with what had amounted to murder. Manslaughter. The difference, frankly, was irrelevant.

Magic was torment, both acute and everlasting.  

“You really have no idea, do you?” Goyle asked a shaking but steadfast Gülnar, almost pityingly. “Dags, your husband is a wizard. He acts as a liaison to the Ministry of Magic for mages serving in the armed forces. He’ll have to be involved. I’ll be court martialled for this, at the very least. I used magic against my better judgement. Dudley is right, about batteries, anyway, my phone is dead, I need – ”

“Zey,” Gülnar said sharply into her mobile, holding up her finger for silence, replacing it quickly on Melon’s neck immediately as though she thought he might perish without the pressure. “Yeah, so remember how you gave me the Evil Eye earlier? I need you to come with your holier-than-thou arrogance, and more importantly, your stupid SUV and help me clean up that mess. So, I’m in the woods right, no – closer to the school, we never made it to the bar because get this, turns out you were right … for once. Dudley Dursley is possessed by some kind of evil djinn and – no, I’m not having you on. Gregory Goyle is an evil sorcerer –”

“Wait, are you talking to Zeynab?” Dudley puzzled. “I thought you two hated each other.” He also thought that even if this was true, Zaynab was always on her phone, and therefore might just be the best bet in an emergency.

“Sorry,” Gülnar continued, shooting Dudley a glare. “In addition to all the other hells this night has shown, I’m being made to listen to blatant misogyny masquerading as sympathy. I know, right?”  There was a pause. “Yeah? Apo can meet us there? Have him check to see if a girl came through with like, a dog bite something serious. If not, they might need to send a wagon out, we heard a howl and screaming earlier but it’s too foggy to really see – okay. Sure, bitch, see you in a minute.”

“Regular medicine won’t fix a wound like that,” Dudley insisted, raising his hands to show the extent of his own scarring as he took several steps forward.

“When you burn yourself, Dursley,” she answered, giving her best brave face, “you don’t try to fix it by putting your hand back into the flame, at least, you wouldn’t if you were human. And you, you stand back! You hear me?! You stand back!” The fog was dense, Dudley knew, but with the closing distance, Gülnar could now see his features, or rather lack thereof. Through she retained a defensive posture, she began to sob, speaking illegibly and erratically in whatever language in which she had been sung to and scolded in as a little girl.

Fear, Dudley knew, made misfortune into mayhem. He could not help Gülnar, but if he could eliminate her as an obstacle, maybe he could get Melon and Danny the medical care they would actually need to make a full recovery. He floated towards her, determined to silence her objections, even if it meant adding her body to those of their brethren.

“Stop!” Goyle commanded, raising his wand for all the good it would do him.

Dudley paid the caution no heed.

“Expecto Patronum!” Goyle shouted, the light at the end of his wand intensifying. A dog, the sort bread for underground fight rings bust from it. Snarling, it placed itself between Dudley and the muggles, Goyle bemoaning from behind them that if Aurors were not already on their way, they certainly were now.

Gülnar had been right, Dudley consented, returned to his more human senses, there was decidedly a difference between a bark and a howl, though he seemed to be the only one able to hear the former as he alone was reacting to it.

Something familiar coursed through him, though the current was wrong.

It was fear.

His own.

Dudley felt paralysed.

For a few seconds, lights of the electrical kind caused the pit bull to fade though its snips and snarls continued. Dudley, who had not heard a vehicle approach, saw the path illuminated it its headlights, the one he might have taken to the pub had a number of fictions likewise continued thought the night. He twitched. Could he still make it?

The engine stopped, and he heard a woman screaming curses of the expletive sort from the driver’s seat. Dudley, understanding that in his present state he was incapable of rescuing or rectifying the situation, ran, and the pit bull, saliva escaping its heavy jowls like the sputtering, crackling ashes of a holiday sparkler, growled and gave chase.

Dudley had lost half of his body mass in the weeks following his ‘first kiss’. He had made some effort towards his personal fitness since – at least, he owned and often wore a sport bra and various shapers to prop up his skin enough that he could piss standing up. But fuck if Goyle’s patronus did not make him feel like a fat kid on field day. Again. He pushed himself as hard as he could, at least, he had escaped the headlights of Zeynab’s Range Rover by the time he was choking for breath, but it had not been enough.

Though made of slivery light, the pit bull’s teeth proved solid enough to draw blood.

Dudley tried to scream but nothing came out. He tried to kick himself free but fell with the struggle. The dog countered by tightening its hold, shaking its head for all that it was worth.

Then, something cracked. At first, Dudley assumed it was his fibula. That was, until he heard a voice as familiar to him as fear itself, firing off an ‘Expelliarmus!’ which Dudley might have been able to yet translate if he was not in seething pain, but which here might as well have meant ‘Sit!’

“Is this the same animal?” he heard his cousin Harry ask. Dudley buried his ruined face as much as he might in hopes of biding time. If he could focus, if he could just focus, he might be able to make it rain, to expel enough of the fear on which he had been happy to feast to make him seem more human.

But that proved impossible in circumstance.

“I … I don’t know,” he heard Christopher mutter nervously. “I don’t think so. The thing I saw was solid. At least, I think it was.” Goddamn! The kid had been meant to flee from trouble, not find it!

“Patronuses aren’t supposed to be able to draw blood,” Harry thought aloud. “Furthermore, if Lav had been attacked by a werewolf, she wouldn’t have blead, at least she shouldn’t have. The healing, to my understanding, is instantaneous. It is necessary to that sort of infection.”

“I wouldn’t know, Sir,” Christopher stammered.

“No,” Harry agreed, “Forgive me. I’m sure forensics will tell me I’m wrong on both counts,” he sighed, kneeling down to talk to Dudley. “Hey, hiya. You are going to be alright, okay? I’m DCI Potter, don’t – don’t struggle. You’re not in trouble. Tomorrow, I’ll have you transferred back to the local A&E. All you’ll recall is that you were bitten by a dog that overpowered its owner and took off on its lead. You’ll get a generous payout, too, after weeks of processing, at least, but that is modern policing at its finest,” he tried to joke. “Just first … I’m going to have to take you down to London so my resident pathologist and I can ask you a few questions about what actually happened while he patches you up.”

Dudley did not respond. He hazarded a glance at his cousin and finding emerald eyes behind fog filled glasses where he had expected red slits, he wondered if his own eyes were blue again, if his vision deceived him entirely.

Harry was roughly the same hight he had been the day they said farewell, just tall enough not to be considered short. He had a beard whose cropped trim he must have invested some effort into, and he had grown out his unruly hair, taming it with an elastic and wearing it in one of those messy buns only twenty-somethings who lived on a beach in Mexico or SoCal and taught yoga on Instagram could make cool. Harry just looked like a wizard. The worst of it was the past twenty years had added about four stone to his once slim figure.

Dudley rather missed being fat. For the moment though, he would be content just to look like a social outcast living out of some former chemistry teacher’s basement as opposed to a Dementor who had just been mauled by the manifestation of a classmate’s happy memories –  and probably, at that, ones around Christmastides spent skiing in the Swiss Alps with his equally rich mates, passing Dom Pérignon around a hot tub and trying not to stare at the exposed breasts of the fittest girls in his year. What a fucking way to go! Gregory Goyle could sod it, Dudley though, half resolved to suck out all of his joy in revenge if he made it out of this mess intact.

“I’d say you’ll be in ‘good hands’ but that might be an oversell,” Harry continued to jest in that uncomfortable way that admitted to Dudley the extent of his injury. “Capable hands, at the very least.” Dudley wondered vaguely if this particular London based pathologist was the same Goyle had alluded to before in Gülnar’s defence, and, still thinking about the sorts of exclusive continental holidays he himself had never warranted invitation to from the kids at Smelting’s, decided that Harry’s resident doctor was likewise asking for it. “Here, I’m just, I’m going to put a bit of pressure on it to stop the bleeding and I’m going to reach for your ID. Do you remember what happened, Mr – ” he stopped dead.

“Dursley,” Christopher informed him, evidently deciding Dudley was too shocked to speak, God bless. “We work together. We are in a few of the same night classes, too. A Level Maths, English, Physics and Chem. I’m … not quite as young as I look. Anyway. We heard your friend scream and Melon and Danny wanted to check it out. Dudley here, well, he’s the one I told you about earlier, the one who said that if it was a werewolf, that we would do better not to interfere. Then him and Greg started arguing, and Gülnar and Melon – well, Melon had already told me to leave, so all things being equal, I took advantage of the fog and followed the screaming, but when I got there it was too late. I mean, you saw her face, too, right? I don’t think it was the same animal what did it though. No. Definitely not.”

“Dudley?” Harry gaped.

“What happened?” Dudley shifted to look at him, deciding his frustrations around his cousin were human enough to risk recognition. “You were there for the end of the first act, the part where I was kissed by a Dementor, which somehow turned you into a kind of henti-magna snake thing. I think I was the only one who could see it though,” he frowned, studying the Harry who knelt next to him now, still annoyed at a familiar resemblance that had not existed in their youth to the same extent. “If Mum could, she hid it well, and you know Dad’ve not been capable, but alas.

“Had to leave Smelting’s before I sat my A Levels, as you well know, and as the result of a recent decision to right that, I’ve been attending night school. But, I mean, it is possible that this story – the one that involves me bleeding out in a haunted forest – really begins with two Asian birds shooting one another dirty looks from across a classroom for reasons yet unknown. You know, the standard.”

Dudley considered that he was better at fostering small talk than Harry was or had ever been. Maybe it was a mistake on his mother’s part to have locked Harry upstairs during social gatherings.

“You saw … you saw Voldemort … when you looked at me?” Harry rubbed awkwardly at his facial scar. “Dudley – fuck, that explains so much. I’ll fix this, I swear. I’ll – ” Christ, there was really not help for it.

“Voldemort?” he shrugged. “Dunno. Kind of swore off anime immediately after, as one does. A lot of those references are thus wasted on me.” He would be damned if he was going to let Harry talk about himself after two decades of silence, especially when he, Dudley, was injured and unable to flee. He doubted that he could in the scope of a few minutes make up for sixteen years of his parent’s failures, but he would force some basic manners out of Harry, at the very least.

This, Dudley decided, was the part where they were meant to talk about the economy, football, or something they had both recently watched or read. But neither of them owned a television and Dudley doubted Harry had read or referenced Advanced Potion Making since his school days. Harry had never much been interested in fiction, and Dudley very much doubted that many kids who wandered into Narnia opened books when they could just as well escape into wardrobes (excluding Gregory Goyle and The Magicians protagonist Quintin Coldwater, of course.) That left –

“Erling Haaland – City’s striker, you know him?” Dudley started. “He’s so big. And I don’t know if it is just me, but he seems to get bigger the closer he gets to the opposition goal. Is he part giant or something?”

“Troll,” Harry clarified. “It is not exactly uncommon in Norway, but it is why there was such a problem with his transfer to the Prem,” he tried to smile. “I’m going to get you out of here, okay?”

The problem was, Dudley trusted that he would.

“Harry, and I cannot stress this enough: Please, just take me to a normal A&E. I’ll talk to your pathologist, but I need to be examined and stitched up by real doctors, people who aren’t going to be freaked out by what they find.”

“Dudley, our Healers are more than capable –”

“Even if I were to humour you in respect to all the happy memories we never shared, I need you to understand, I’m not. Capable. I’m not capable. That … the patronus,” best to use the proper terminology, “Goyle cast it to protect a bunch of muggles … from me. From all I’ve read since last we met; they are only capable of outright attack on a certain kind of monster. Being around people who know what I am enough to fear me will bring out my worst. You don’t want that.”

Harry’s expression went blank. Not for the first time that evening, Dudley had to wonder if his cousin was not just the worst detective in the entire Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

 

 

In hindsight, Dudley would have done better to let Harry get on with his original plan of St Mungo’s.

The NHS made even more of a bureaucratic hell out of an unfortunate situation, and Dudley might have blead out waiting for care if the collective fears of his fellow patients had not provided enough substance to let him restabilise.

Between them, or so his cousin later informed him, Gülnar, who fitted assistive and adaptive devices for a living, and Zeynab, who acted as the chief secretary for her father-in-law’s otorhinolaryngological surgery, brought their shared experience arguing with insurance for their contracted fees that they had a small job of sorting everyone out, or rather, forcing the hospital to reevaluate its priorities.

A routine physical showed Danny had suffered no permanent damage from being stunned.

Melon was recovering from emergency surgery, but it would be weeks before the extent of his injury would be determined.

Goyle was facing criminal charges, and he could hardly rely on Major Dagwood’s advocacy, giving that the man’s marriage was presently disintegrating on count of said subordinate outing him as a spell caster.

Christopher, however, was holding up surprisingly well, volunteering to fetch teas and snacks for whomever happened to be awake and peckish.

And Dudley himself was recovering by a strange and particularly cruel twist of fate next to the woman he had seen five hours ago, or perhaps in another life altogether.

Lavender Brown, Harry informed him, had first been made victim to a werewolf twenty years prior during the Battle of Hogwarts. The attack had left her with extensive scaring and partial facial paralysis, causing its right side to sag roughly and inch below the left. Despite numerous reconstructive surgeries, the missing corner of her lips was fixed into a permanent smirk of the sort that promised a bad night to come, showing her sharpened canines even as she slept.

And for all of that, in Dudley’s augmented version, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

He wanted nothing more than to fill himself with her light.

But having kissed a girl before the world fell apart, he knew how such things ended.

Harry continued to talk, naturally, about himself. Dudley pretended to listen, hoping the pathologist would arrive to dismiss him, Dudley, from care before he could make the lovely Miss Brown’s acquaintance, hoping, equally, for the man’s continued absence.

He saw her stir in the bed beside him and smirked when her eyes clamped shut in response to Harry, who, for his part, encouraged by Dudley’s amusement, continued to describe the antics of his teenage godson cum ward.

For the Greater Good, Dudley was willing to leave Lavender Brown to her secrets.

But goddamn was he down bad.

 

 

 

Chapter 3: Muggle Drip

Summary:

Lavender wakes up at an A&E and finds herself increasingly affected by Dudley’s presence. It is not the meet-cute anyone might have been hoping for.

Notes:

Thanks Sprout for convincing me to continue this! This one is for you. <3

 

 

Lavender Brown awoke in a muggle A&E to the unexpected and frankly unwelcome company of a physical manifestation of human doubt and a peaked-at-school copper (who might well be a symptom of the same). The two were having a rather circular conversation around adult life’s mundane disappointments in a mutual, unspoken agreement to avoid their shared childhood and whatever had occurred to warrant their hospital visit.

But Lavender Brown had a complementary morphine drip for a minor flesh wound that hardly seemed to warrant the high, but which quite nearly rendered her wider situation tolerable. She was enjoying this as much as she might.

All things being equal, this was not the worst way the night could have ended.

Having no intention whatsoever of speaking to one DCI Harry Potter about how she had obtained her injuries (or, frankly, anything else) she kept her eye shut as much as she dared. As much as she could. But elements of the conversation peaked her reporter’s curiosity enough that, occasionally, it got the better of her.

His name was Dudley Dursley.

He was Harry Potter’s (*nominally) muggle maternal cousin.

He worked as a butcher at a grocery chain.

He had been squatting for over a decade in a two-up, two-down council house once owned by her former Hogwarts potions master.

He attended adult education classes at night and split his free time between translating magic into theoretical mathematics and reading popular fantasy as a cover for his intellectual obsessions.

And at fifteen he had been kissed by a Dementor. Rather than taking his soul, it left something of itself, evident in Dudley’s stubborn refusal to allow anything to particularly impress him.

Opening her single eye ever so slightly, she ventured a glance. Then another. Until she found herself brazenly staring. She was not certain what, precisely, she had expected a muggle maths nerd who had spent the past decade inadvertently mimicking the late Professor Snape’s performative misery to look like, but it certainly was not the six-foot-and-forever frame muscled only just enough to dissuade any conclusions around petty vanities and fragile masculinity she might have otherwise drawn.

Lavender Brown was intrigued.

Almost to distraction.

Almost.

Harry Potter, naturally, was dominating the conversation with his usual waffle, and this was enough to annoy her. It always did. Lavender found herself wondering if the DMLE prescribed such as a disarming technique, if the conceit masked by feeble self-deprecation owed itself to Harry’s former-child celebrity status, or if the understated depiction of his domestic situation was simply a knee-jerk reaction to his almost-daughter being a regular tabloid fixture.

But she could not really bring herself to care.

Harry Potter had been agreed to becoming a godfather over a round of Fyre Whiskey without really understanding the legal implications of this arrangement should anything happen to the child’s parents, who both promptly died mere weeks after Remus Lupin had gotten to partake in that proud British tradition of immediately getting shit-faced-drunk with his mates as soon as his poor wife was out of labour. At seventeen, Harry had thus found himself a single parent before he could properly contend with the effect the war had left on his psychology. He was struggling. While Lavender could not bring herself to imagine that his close circle of friends did not attempt to support him where they could, they were simply in such different stages of their lives that it proved impossible to relate to soiled nappies and sleepless nights.

Draco Malfoy, by stark contrast, had entered fatherhood with intent. Likewise, his approach to the role came without personally partaking in the release that usually led to such a predicament. He discovered that he had a first cousin who had been given into care around the same time that her foster parents were receiving life sentences. Draco promptly instructed his legal team to fill out adoption paperwork. He then became preoccupied with the idea that Delphi and Teddy were family, sentiment echoed by his forceful mother and surviving aunt, and in due course Harry and the Lupin cub were attending play dates at Malfoy Manor.

Lavander was a little fuzzy as to when, exactly, the pair had moved in permanently. Harry and Draco’s co-dependency had been apparent well before the latter’s short-lived marriage to a former patient, but she was no longer sure if Harry’s residency predated Astoria’s tragic but foreseeable death and Draco’s subsequent decision to abandon his role as a practicing physician and retrain as a medical pathologist. Regardless, the duo had been living and working together prior to any of the three children to have grown up calling Harry ‘Daddy’ and Draco ‘Father’ to have set foot in Hogwarts. Both vehemently denied being ‘together’ to ends Lavander struggled to define, but sometimes she suspected a convoluted effort to hide the sort of happiness she would never herself know.

Whatever.

Lavander Brown had a Pulitzer.

She did not need a partner or patchwork family or any of the psychological hangups that came with such a premise.

Once every few months, Lavender met up with friends from school whose lives’ trajectory had not been recalculated by their participation in the Battle of Hogwarts. They had married their childhood sweethearts, had children of their own, and now caught up over mimosas to discuss (in what Lavender presumed to be earnest) problems they thought could be sorted by Botox and bovine collagen.

Lavender, having lost half her face to a duel with a werewolf, did not get to share in such airs, and she was glad of it. Hearing the ‘girls’ (a misnomer if ever there was one) talk about their impending divorces, dating in their thirties, diets, and dreams that restricted themselves to other commonplace disciplines that collectively defeated them: finishing the bestseller that had been gathering dust on their bedside tables for months, attending a yoga and/or platies course on the regular, meeting up more often for the act of communal bitching – it all sounded so droll. Lavender was glad of the scars that kept her sequestered from the perils of fleeting youth.

At least, that is what she told herself.

Not constantly. Not anymore, which she considered an improvement. But whilst brushing her slightly elongated teeth in those hotel bathrooms with their large, brightly lit mirrors that could not be avoided; whilst lying awake in a squeaky seventy-quid-per-night bed with her vibrator and with heroes from the very books which her friends would never have time to finish, Lavender Brown told herself she was better off with her isolating deformities protecting her from an average life. She had to. Her resolve extended basic self-preservation. Even when she had been a beautiful young woman, she had never exactly been a pretty crier. Parvati could use her gentle swelling of tears to manipulate anyone into giving into her bidding; Pansy made an adorable little sniff before lifting her chin, determined not to give anyone the satisfaction – Lavender, by stark contrast, sobbed as though she had suddenly contracted the flu, clear, sticky snot pouring from her nose with the ferocity of the salty saline that had turned her puffy eyes as red as the rest of her face got when met with sorrow. Tears would not do. They never had.

Dudley Dursley, perhaps by virtue of his peculiar curse, perhaps by virtue of curiosity masked by blatant rudeness, amplified the insecurities which Lavender was keen to ignore. She knew what she looked like. She had made peace with standing behind the camera, family albums that suggested she had died at seventeen giving her sudden departure from their pages. The ‘girls’ had long since stopped suggesting that they all go to the bathroom when occasion arose to be particularly catty – instead, they were openly rude in clubs and restaurants to spare Lavander from the self-consciousness the took it upon themselves to presume. She was used to various editors wanting to conduct meeting over owl or email. It did not bother her that most publications did not print her headshot next to her articles.

Truly, it did not.

Her scars had saved her from having to pretend that the eight-hundred-words she might have otherwise written up on society and celebrity culture qualified ‘news’. Lavender had been able to infiltrate drug cartels. She had altered the course of failing diplomacy by informing public consciousness, saving the wizarding public from another endless war of attrition with the local centaur population. Politicians feared her vitriol rather than her visage. That, or they appreciated the true threat she posed too late.

Reminding herself of this did not allow her to feel any less vulnerable in this stranger’s gaze.

She buried the ruined side of her face further into the pillow, her attempts to fluff it doing little to render the makeshift shield any more comfortable.

She was being ridiculous, she knew. Hypocritical even. After all, she was staring, too.

She supposed if she were being merciful to herself, the difference was that she liked what she saw in the adjacent cot. It was not just that Dudley’s eyes had faded from black to the softest blue as the evening progressed, it was that that they seemed to be looking for reprieve.

And not, strictly, from what must have been a truly damning curse.

When she dared a glance, he met her hazy stare with an eyeroll directed at his cousin’s nervous ramblings. Lavender smiled. She smiled despite her elongated canines, which Dudley neglected to notice in his attempts to make her laugh.

Finally, she surrendered to whatever game they were playing and, with a giggle that caused Harry to jump, she sat up to save Dudley from his struggles to participate in a ‘conversation’ that was developing all the hallmarks of a theatrical monologue on Harry’s part.

“So, come on Harry, how is Page Six?” she baited. “Inquiring minds want to know. Not mine,” she clarified quickly, dismissing the notion with a wave of her hand, “I frankly couldn’t give a fuck how short Delphi’s skirt was or how many G+Ts she was reported to have had at the opening of whatever exclusive club, which pureblood princeling or muggle mogul she was seen dancing with – but I can’t help but to be curious as to how you and Draco fail to appreciate that poor girl for the genius she is,” Lavender could not help but to defend. “She was always going to be hounded by the press and paparazzi. Her antics don’t warrant the byline ‘Voldemort’s biological daughter’ the way they might if she was quiet and diligent and self-restricted to her chosen field of study. She knows what she is doing and she’s having fun besides.”

Personally, Lavander found the girl to be the only truly sympathetic member of the Malfoy-Potter household. Delphi never obfuscated when answering to shouted accusations from behind the safety of a crowd divider, conducted herself well in conversation, used her name recognition to campaign for improving prison conditions, and had only just missed out on being Head Girl because of a five-year fight she had led against the Hogwarts Governors around their refusal to offer vegan menu options in the Great Hall – which, in the end, she had won. Presently, she was training to be an Unspeakable. But for all that she was friendly, social, and often dismissed as a spoilt ‘party girl’, which she took in stride. Teddy might be making a name for himself at school for being a prankster, but Delphi was in on all the jokes circulating about her. Lavender did not know why her makeshift parents were not proud of her level of confidence. She had the feeling it had not been learnt at home.

“That isn’t the way your esteemed colleagues see it,” Harry snorted as though to confirm this suspicion.

“My, ahem, ‘esteemed colleagues’, see her as an easy paycheque,” Lavender sneered in response. “The girls up at Hogwarts probably see her as ‘hashtag’ goals, and witches my age only read those articles in a bid to vicariously experience all that the war robbed them of. Don’t get confused here.”

“Sounds charming,” Dudley attempted.

Lavendar let out a little bark of a laugh. “She is,” she confirmed before briefly shifting, “no, Harry, I mean that. So, what about you, Dudley?” she continued quickly before Harry could offer something else about his cursed child that would cause him to fall further in Lavender’s esteem. “Wife? Kids? Quarter-life existential crisis as manifest in finding fault with your nearest and dearest?”

“I … none of the above?” Dudley stammered.

Lavender, of course, had already gathered as much from her extended eavesdropping. She had only wanted to see how he would respond. To borrow from the limited narrative Harry had once offered on his early childhood and the eyerolls Dudley had supplied his cousin’s attempts at relating to the relative isolation Dudley imposed upon himself through stories of his full and happy home life, Lavender had expected something else. Arrogance, maybe. Or anger. Instead, Dudley seemed awkward, even shy.

She shifted to get a better look at him. In the bright fluorescents of a muggle hospital, she saw that he was not quite as handsome and physically imposing as he had seemed when she had been squinting. He had a large frame and a decent bone structure, but the hospital gown did little to disguise folds of sagging skin the way his regular wardrobe might. She imagined him having been a fat kid, struggling to identify with his body beyond that blanket description. He likely would have had issues with intimacy even if his kiss was not destined to damn.

“Shame, that. What is a pretty thing like you doing in a dump like this then?” Lavender winked at him, partially to return the favour of his perhaps unwitting attempts to invite her to self-doubt. Partially to show him that he had not won. She knew she looked like a monster. She also knew how to use this to her advantage. Let the manifestation of human dread fear for his own life, if only just for a moment.

Except, again, Dudley disappointed her. Rather than recoiling, he blushed, blinking in rapid succession as though he was certain he had misheard. When Lavender, taken off guard failed to respond immediately, Dudley pressed his thin lips into an uncertain smile. Did he mean to flirt?

“Is this off record? She is a journalist, Dudley,” Harry cautioned in a tone that would end most attempts to engage. Except Lavender had known Harry since he was a scrawny eleven-year-old with a pronounced saviour complex and the sort of undeserved swagger that contradicted his stories about being raised in a broom cupboard. She did not particularly care that he had since fulfilled a prophecy and been promoted past his abilities to heading the Auror Department as a result.

No, actually, she did care, she found herself self-correcting. It pissed her the fuck off, just not quite as much in this moment as the insinuation that she had nothing to say to some member of his sacred family whom he kept at an even greater distance than the ones he was living with.

“Off record?” Lavander scoffed. “I’m off my fucking head right now on this muggle drip, I likely won’t recall most of this come morning. But bland curiosity, Dudley, did your long-lost cousin offer you any such reassurances? ‘Off the record’? I don’t know if Harry happened to mention, but he’s an Auror. Well, he is a bureaucrat with a badge, and a rather useless one at that, but it amounts to the same. In your place, I’d owl my solicitor.”

“See? It doesn’t work on the chemically compromised,” Dudley grinned at Harry before returning his attention to her.

“What doesn’t? The whole feeding off human misery thing?” Lavander attempted to clarify. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you are in an Accident and Emergency. People here are spiralling, and it has naught to do with your presence. In fact, your charming self-deprecation paired with all the private eyerolls you’re giving Harry’s mundane hangups has been the best part of my evening so far.”

Again, Dudley blushed, causing Lavander to question if they were in fact flirting. No, nope, she decided immediately. It was the drugs playing with her perception.

“And what exactly has that evening entailed, now that you are cognisant?” Harry snapped. In this too, her riddled mind managed to hear the same tone he had taken with her when they had been sixteen and she had been snogging his best mate in the Gryffindor common room.

He had barely spoken to her at school. He had actively avoided her since.

“I’d be wasting my breath discussing this matter again. You simply can’t allocate any part of your considerable budget to investigate the spike in unexplained deaths among addicts and the unhoused coinciding with the full moon,” she explained with a performative sigh. “I’ll just have to sit back and wait until some pretty, photogenic white girl with a trust fund and a famous name gets her hands on the junk and you are forced to make amends to an angry public.”

Harry flinched slightly. She had not meant to imply Delphi in her calloused observation of how such matters usually entered into the public mind, partially because Lavender considered that Delphi was more of a nose-girlie than a needle one, partially because Lavender still held to enough of her youthful optimism for her to have long surmised that tragic loss would not be the manner in which Harry’s failure the act would destroy his homelife.

No. The Minister of Magic would give him the sack.

Likely prior to the piece Lavender had been working on for the better part of the last year even made it to print.

Harry would lose a position he never should have held, and the Tories would hold the Ministry through another election cycle, and Sunday roasts would prove even more strained than they doubtlessly already were.

Lavender, lost in her small phantasy, wondered if Harry would bother to invite Dudley round to meet his extended family. He had not mentioned Narcissa in his monologue – at least, not in the part Lavander had been awake to hear. But then, were she in his tenuous position, a disapproving mother-in-law in the top job might have ranked chief amongst her fears. Would it in turn be the first thing she would open to a Dementor about?

She looked at the clock.

It had been six hours since she had met with her source. Five or so since she had been attacked. Presuming Dudley and Harry had been in the A&E for as long giving how the beds were allocated, she, too, was beginning to wonder what the hell was holding Draco up.

To look at the increasingly human Dudley, the window of opportunity to run whichever tests Harry had ordered had passed.

Had something happened? Something bigger than the bite on her ankle? She imagined Draco examining carnage at some muggle club, his mother hastily arranging meetings with her counterpart at Number Ten, livid that she was only just learning of the most recent Greyback plot, recalling her late sister Bellatrix in whatever directives she would doubtlessly then give the DMLE’s anticorruption unit as to how, precisely, this mishap ought to be dealt with.

Fuck.

Lavander had to check herself out of this place.

She had to be outside.

She had to –

“Lavender, please just answer my question,” Harry said, interrupting her sudden sense of panic with a reasonable request.

Lavander’s gaze, however, found Dudley, and she knew she could not answer. He had her mind chained to a wild fear that was threatening to quarter her. At least he had the better manners to look bashful.

“Mm. I think not,” she answered blandly for Dudley’s benefit, presuming that if she kept up her standard level of banter and baiting when it came to the DMLE, Harry Potter, brilliant detective that he was, would not suspect that she was battling against her worst impulses to string a sentence together. At least, it might delay his decision to delegate Dudley’s case over to the Unspeakables.

“You’ll have to caution me and then wait for your decades-long situationship to get here to clear me to be questioned, and then we’ll have to wait for my solicitor to show up and I know damn well you don’t want to invite Pansy to this odd family reunion,” she continued glibly as though she was not already planning the letter she would pen to the most famously inconsiderate woman in the circle they loosely shared.

“No,” she shifted, holding up a hand to Dudley, “none of this is on you. Lycanthropes have been infecting silver-infused needles with their sickness and cutting their product with some sort of steroid before putting it on the streets in an attempt at mass infection. Normally, muggles don’t survive the initial shift,” she explained for Dudley’s benefit, “but if my ankle is anything to go by, the wolves are getting close to working out a way around that. But, alas,” she sighed, narrowing her eyes at the decorated DCI, “it is not worth the DMLE’s time or resources to investigate. I’m always in a bad mood when Harry is around. It is worse tonight because I had to watch a homeless teenager who has been working so hard to get their life back together turn into something they’ll have not the culture nor capacity to understand if they should even make it to morning. I’ve had a shit night.”

“My presence can’t be making it better,” Dudley said as though nothing Lavender relayed had registered with him.

Must run in the fucking family.

“Honestly, I didn’t see the family resemblance – really, at all – until this moment,” Lavender could not help but to gape. “I mean you’re so tall, dark, and handsome – well, you would be, in better clothes and worse lighting. Checking all my romantasy-induced, morally grey, shadow daddy boxes, you are – whereas Harry is just a superiority complex in a dadbod,” she said flippantly. “But damn if you are not two of the most self-obsessed, arrogant cunts I’ve ever been forced to share space with – and real talk, I was sorted into Gryffindor. I know of what I speak.”

“The criticism of my physique is fair … I suppose,” Harry acknowledged, patting his fattened stomach almost appreciatingly, “but superiority complex?” he challenged at the same time Dudley commented –

“Didn’t peg you as being a Rhysand-girlie.”

Lavender’s eyelashes approximated a stutter as she blinked, reevaluating Dudley Dursley for what felt like the hundredth time in fewer minutes. She had addressed him half in jest, and while she still considered that he would likely have been a chore to get on with even without a curse influencing all his interactions, well, at least he read the same trash she did. Lavender had close friendships that were based on less. Again, he attempted a thin-lipped, reserved smile.

Lavender wanted to die. Part of her well might have in this seeming plea for her approval.

“Oh, come on!” she complained. “Now I genuinely am in a worse mood. You’ve read SJM, or are at least versed enough in ACOTAR to be conversant in it?”

“I personally preferred Throne of Glass, probably owing to the restrictions on magic now that I think on it for half a second, but … yes?” Dudley squinted as though to inquire what he had done to offend. “I mean I, should I be apologising?”

Maybe, Lavender considered. He reminded loosely her of every ersatz she had sought to protect her heart from feeling the loss of that which she would never personally experience. It was not his fault, not insofar as she could blame him for the sum of her hangups – but Merlin if the way he tried to smile at her did not make her ache!

She did not need this shit. She would check out of emergency care in the morning, make sure her source was alright, return to the only hotel in town and pen a letter to Pansy Parkinson about how she had very nearly found herself flirting with a Dementor, the punchline that would carry her though numerous mimosas to come being that the boy was, or once had been, Harry Potter’s muggle cousin.

The cringe of it all was too much to properly contend.

“Harry, how could you have hidden him from us?” she taunted. “Women, I mean. Or, apologies, that was terribly heteronormative of me,” she hastily self-corrected, “how could you have kept this gem from anyone attracted to men?”

“I’m not sure how much of our conversation you were conscious for,” Dudley returned, “but whatever you think of me, I can all but promise, I’m not that.”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” Lavender dismissed, “all hookups are regrettable.”

At this, the light seemed to vanish from Dudley’s eyes. His soft blue eyes darkened, and the florescent lights seemed to dim. Lavender felt a shiver run down her spine.

“I’m sorry, really, it can’t be helped. You just walked right into that one,” she attempted to diffuse whatever hurt she had carelessly instigated. “I’m Lavender Brown, The Daily Prophet,” she extended her hand, “and in that sense I suppose I also pedal in human suffering.”

“Dudley Dursley, and,” he paused, swallowing, “please understand I’m not trying to be rude in refusing your handshake – ”

Really? Really?! Lavender found herself gawking at palms raised in surrender.

“I’m not infected,” she snapped. “From the bite, I mean. I was inoculated years ago on count of the injuries I received duelling against Fenrir Greyback during the Battle of Hogwarts. I can’t hurt you. My nails are acrylic, but even if they weren’t, no scratch from me would result in permeant, disfiguring scaring.”

“I didn’t think, I didn’t even consider that you might be, or that you couldn’t be a werewolf,” Dudley stammered. “And even if that were the case, I am not a racist. Is that even the right word?” he asked of Harry, pleading intervention.

“I’ll have to ask Hermione,” Harry gave uselessly.

“Best not,” Lavender murmured. She could fight her own battles. The last thing she wanted was to be the cause of a former dormmate masquerading her narcissism as being part of some sweeping feminist agenda. Dudley’s faux pas might well warrant Pansy throwing a drink in his face, Ginny taking it a step further and slapping him across the cheek, Luna turning his clumsy attempts at empathy around and addressing him as though he were an unfairly maligned magical creature, or either of the Patel twins actively ignoring him at all subsequent social gatherings. But Hermionie and her self-righteousness? Lavender would not wish that on anyone.

“I um – there is so much fear here, in general,” Dudley stammered of the hospital. “Christ. I don’t know how to explain this exactly, but it is a struggle for me to see you, or anyone else for that matter, physically full stop – not that, not that I am saying you are ugly. I don’t know, I have no way of knowing. I can only see people’s souls when I get like this, and you are by a considerable margin the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid my eyes on.”

“Excuse me?” Lavender sneered. Was he having her on? Fuck, maybe she would go ahead and write Hermione tomorrow, too.

“Harry said you have scars, but I can’t register them. And I doubt it makes a difference. It shouldn’t. What does though is that the only girl I ever kissed killed herself a few days later. I … I prefer to keep my hands to myself. But I – it is lovely to meet you, Lavender. Truly. You might likewise be the best part of the shit night I have been having.”