Chapter 12
After George’s his nerves were settled once he was convinced that his parents were not going to ship him off to any kind of boarding school, dinner ended calmly. Safe small talk followed, and after dessert, the children were allowed to play outside again.
The weather was nice, so the grown-ups followed them outside, leisurely walking and talking across the grounds.
This time, it was Harry who sought out Dudley, getting away from the conversation between Arthur and Roderick about muggle inventions the last few decades. It seemed that Roderick was more up to date than Arthur, but not by much.
“I want to say sorry again,” Dudley said after a few silent moments have passed.
“Nah, it’s fine,” Harry said, knowing that it actually wasn’t, but nothing was going to change the past and he best get over it soon. If Dudley’s kid was indeed magic, he might just see more of his cousin then he had expected.
“I regret it though, our childhood,” Dudley continued, and Harry shifted uncomfortably, “I wonder how much better we both would have been if they just raised us as brother’s,”
“But they didn’t,” Harry said, trying not to sound harsh, “we just have to work with the cards we have been dealt,”
Dudley snorted a bit, leaning against a nearby fence, looking at the children playing amongst themselves. They had gotten no issues to get along with each other.
“I guess,” he said, “at least we seemed to be able to make something off ourselves,”
“Yeah,” Harry said, “I actually never realised that you had any negative impacts of your childhood,”
Harry looked at the large, heavy man, leaning next to him against the fence. He was still bigger then Harry was and his large size made him seem intimidating, and even though the arms were muscled, he could see that he was overweight.
It was true that harry had never stood still what the effects of their dynamics would have been on Dudley. It wasn’t a normal household they had grown up into, that was for sure. It had been a lot of pretend and blustering, making them seem more normal and important than they were.
“I did though. Never realised how much until I went to Smeltings,” he said, making Harry look up in surprise at the name of Dudley’s old boarding school.
“Smeltings?”
“Oh yes,” Dudley said, with a dark chuckle, “I hated every minute of being there,”
“You did?” Harry asked in surprise, never having suspected that. When he was home in the summers, he never really heard a lot from Dudley’s school. He hadn’t actually believed that Dudley was unhappy there, with the way he acted in the summers. Granted, Harry hadn’t actually sought Dudley out a lot in those days either.
“Yes. You wouldn’t know, but I begged mom and dad to not let me go back there. It was one of the only times they refused, dad telling me to ‘man up’ even,” Dudley confessed.
“Why did you hate it,” Harry asked curiously.
“Well, lots of reasons. At home, I always get to eat the stuff that I liked, and I didn’t have to do any chores,” Dudley began and Harry tried not to roll his eyes at those reasons, “and I was the biggest bully. At Smeltings there were bigger ones,”
“Got a taste of your own medicine,” Harry asked, a bit of vitriol coming up.
“Of course I did. I was totally unprepared for the posh world of boarding schools. I was spoiled and overweight, and I know I’m not very smart,” Dudley said, “I was a target from day one,”
“So, you kept on going?”
“I had no other choice. Mom and dad didn’t want to hear anything negative. I even had to do extra IQ tests because of my low scores and mom and dad insisted that I couldn’t redo a year. Then they found out I probably was dyslectic, and my parents didn’t want to believe it. They kept on saying I was a perfectly normally healthy boy, and that I shouldn’t listen to such nonsense,”
Harry was amazed by the way Dudley could mimic aunt Petunia’s voice so well, the tone clearly mocking. He had never heard Dudley talk about his parents like that before.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Harry said, and was surprised that he actually meant those words.
“It got better once I was on a diet and started to box, then I could fight back. But my bad school experience was one of the reasons I bullied you. My shrink told me so,” Dudley said, “and I’m sorry for that as well,”
“I guess we were both fucked up by them,” Harry said after a few moments, breaking the silence. Dudley nodded at his answer.
“I still love them though,” Dudley said, “I don’t like them, but I love them,”
“It’s good to love your parents,” Harry said and Dudley nodded, and then his eyes widened.
“That’s right, your parents!” Dudley exclaimed, “I totally forgot,”
“Forgot what?” Harry asked, having pulled back a bit from Dudley when he got a bit louder, a defence mechanism from older days.
“I cleaned my parents attic a couple of years ago, and I found a book with your mum’s stuff in there. Picture albums and such from when she was just a little girl, some old clothes and stuff. Mum said to destroy it, but I smuggled it to my place,”
“You did?” Harry said, looking at Dudley in amazement.
“Yeah. You know, you could come with us and get the stuff,”
“Dudley,” Harry said, overcome with emotions, “that would be great,”
“Yeah, well, it’s the least,” Dudley said, blushing and embarrassed about the situation. He still had a hard time overcoming his upbringing.
The conversation was thankfully interrupted by Dudley’s second kid coming over to them.
“Daddy, Lily says that we must go visit their house,” Freddy said, “can we?”
“Did Georgie send you over to ask?” seeing the rest of the kids looking over at them from a distance.
“Yes,” Freddy said with a smile, “So can we?” Dudley rolled his eyes at his son. George liked to send his brother on small messages like this where he could hear a negative response.
“I think that me and Harry need to get to know each other a bit better before that,” Dudley said, glancing at Harry, “but perhaps in the future?”
“Perhaps,” Harry said with a smile, looking at the kid, “so what do you have there?”
“This?” Freddy asked, holding up his Ekans plushie, always having been a Pokémon fan, he had been immediately sold when he saw the purple snake in the shop.
“Yes. I don’t think I ever saw such a snake in nature,” Harry said.
“It’s not a real snake. It’s a Pokémon,” Freddy explained, and Harry looked over at Dudley, not knowing what a ‘Pokémon’ was.
“It’s from a popular cartoon. It’s extremely famous. There’s loads of video games and everything,” Dudley explained.
‘Uncle Harry is very silly, right Ekans,’ he heard Freddy say when he looked at his plushie.
“I don’t think it’s silly,” Harry said, “I don’t have television,”
Dudley was looking weirdly at Harry now, and even Freddy was looking at him in surprise.
“He knows my secret language daddy,” Freddy said urgently, tugging on Dudley’s sleeve.
‘Can you talk like this as well?’ he asks, and it was only now that Harry realised that Freddy was talking in Parseltongue.