Dudley Demented
There are a few reasons Merlin's in Little Whinging today.
For one, he's staking out the Potter boy. He's important in this, very important. Secondly, he's almost certain Dumbledore's got someone watching the boy, which could be Merlin's in to the headmaster's resistance group. At the very least it's worth a look. He hasn't found anyone on the boy yet, but the boy himself sure looks miserable.
In actuality, Harry Potter does not look much like a boy. He does in what’s considered the traditional sense nowadays, Merlin supposes; he has the wiry frame that’s too tall for its mass and overbalances. He has a wild bush of hair that refuses to abide by the laws of gravity or convenience that falls in his eyes but still can’t obscure the lightning scar cleaving its way down the side of his face, nearly kissing his thin but angular jaw. His knees are bony, his shirt untucked. But there is nothing boyish in the glint of his green eyes, flashing up from under his untameable fringe. His posture is defensive, his movements slow and measured even as impulsiveness jerks through his body with every step. There’s an awful paradox in his learned caution and the boiled aggression curled underneath his tongue behind his teeth as he regards his stupid cousin that puts a little crinkle in Merlin’s brow.
When Merlin was young, men Harry’s age were never boys. It’s a shame to see that that hasn't changed for everyone.
Aside from that, Harry Potter is more than either boy or man. Merlin can feel it like a tumor on his soul, his magic, his life; and unwelcome stowaway. Something that's shrivelled far beyond what you could call human, a parasite plastered onto Harry, worming its way through him like a disease. Riddle is a disgusting blot on an otherwise very strong soul. Merlin curls his lip.
The question is, what to do about it.
“Hey, Big D!”
Oh, hello, something’s happening. Harry’s dragged himself up from his dejected seat on the only not broken swing in the park and started after his cousin.
The cousin, whom Merlin’s forgotten the name of, is very much a boy. Not a particularly nice one, either- he reminds Merlin of the kind of nobles that warranted redefining the term.
The boy turns and squints his piggy little eyes at Harry as if he sees nothing more in him than his knobbly knees and beat-to-shit trainers. He has no idea what he’s looking at.
“Oh,” he grunts dismissively. “It’s you.”
“How long have you been ‘Big D’ then?” Harry provokes. Merlin smirks. He heard the cousin's friends calling him that before and had to snort.
“Shut it,” Big D snarls, turning away again.
“Cool name,” Harry chirps mischievously, grinning and falling into step beside his cousin. “But you’ll always be Ickle Diddykins to me.”
“I said, SHUT IT!” Ickle Diddykins roars, his ham-like hands curling into fists.
“Don’t the boys know that’s what your mum calls you?”
“Shut your face.”
“You don’t tell her to shut her face. What about ‘Popkin’ and ‘Dinky Diddydums,’ can I use them then?”
Merlin purses his lips so as not to cackle. Is he serious? Oh, dear, maybe he should sober up a little- Diddy looks like he’s trying admirably hard not to hit the boy who lived, and it’s a fight he may yet lose.
“So who’ve you been beating up tonight?” Harry inquires coldly, his grin fading. “another ten-year-old? I know you did Mark Evans two nights ago —”
“He was asking for it,” Diddykins snarls.
Oh, so it’s like that, is it? Well, Merlin supposes if you grow up as ‘Diddy Dinkums’, you’re not gonna turn out very agreeable…
“Oh yeah?”
“He cheeked me.”
“Yeah? Did he say you look like a pig that’s been taught to walk on its hind legs? ’Cause that’s not cheek, Dud, that’s true . . .”
Okay, Merlin likes this Harry kid.
They turn down a much darker alleyway that the street lamps don’t intrude on, the world becoming a smaller, quieter place, even with Diddykins’ heavy breathing.
“Think you’re a big man carrying that thing, don’t you?” he accuses clumsily after a few seconds of silence.
“What thing?”
“That — that thing you’re hiding.”
Harry grins again, looking quite like a shark in the lowlight, reminding Merlin of Salazar.
“Not as stupid as you look, are you, Dud? But I s’pose if you were, you wouldn’t be able to walk and talk at the same time. . .”
“HA!”
Merlin really is fortunate that in all his centuries of snooping he’s learned to cast a silencing spell on himself whenever possible, because he had no hope in hell of stifling that one. Yes, he very much likes this Harry kid.
Harry pulls out his wand and Merlin scuffles forward to make it out if he can. Wands can tell you quite a bit about a wizard. Harry’s is about as simple as one can get, deep rich brown wood carved straight and smooth with something a little more rough and natural at the grip peeking through its owner’s fingers as he holds it tightly, less like an old friend and more like an extension of himself.
Diddy looks sideways at it. “You’re not allowed,” he blurts defensively, “I know you’re not. You’d get expelled from that freak school you go to.”
“How d’you know they haven’t changed the rules, Big D?”
“They haven’t,” the bigger boy claims, though he doesn’t sound completely convinced. Harry laughs softly, the chuckles licking out from between his teeth like flames.
“You haven’t got the guts to take me on without that thing, have you?” the big one snarls. He’s playing this all wrong, rising with Harry at all the wrong moments, and soon he’ll break like a cresting wave. Dear Diddykins still doesn’t seem to understand that he is facing down a tsunami. Harry very clearly has some issues to sort through and Popkin over here looks like just the right size for a bit of aggressive stress-relief, whatever form it may come in.
“Whereas you just need four mates behind you before you can beat up a ten-year-old. You know that boxing title you keep banging on about? How old was your opponent? Seven? eight?”
“He was sixteen for your information, and he was out cold for twenty minutes after I’d finished with him and he was twice as heavy as you. You just wait till I tell Dad you had that thing out —”
“Running to Daddy now, are you? Is his ickle boxing champ frightened of nasty Harry’s wand?”
Dudders bares his teeth but recoils at the same time, betraying his heart, before something clicks in those muddy little eyes of his. Some ammunition.
“Not this brave at night, are you?”
Harry is not impressed. He raises a formidable dark eyebrow under his canopy of thick black hair.
“This is night, Diddykins. That’s what we call it when it goes all dark like this.”
“I mean when you’re in bed!”
“What d’you mean, I’m not brave in bed?” Harry frowns, completely nonplussed. “What, am I supposed to be frightened of my pillows or something?”
“I heard you last night,” Dudders crows breathlessly. “Talking in your sleep. Moaning.”
Harry’s eyes darken further, glistening coldly. He seems to retreat further under his fringe and into his skin without moving at all. He takes on a new dimension that makes Merlin wonder how Diddy still can’t see that he should really stop talking.
“What d’you mean?” Harry repeats, voice plunged into a dark, cold, hollow place.
The fool gives a harsh bark of laughter. Then, defying the notion that there may be hope for him after all, he takes on a mocking high-pitched whimper.
“‘Don’t kill Cedric! Don’t kill Cedric!’ Who’s Cedric, your boyfriend?”
Oh, dear. Merlin can guess what this is about. Harry was there when Riddle rose again last year, and another boy died. That must’ve been Cedric. Hell, maybe this is an even older wound- from what Merlin understands, Harry’s had a nightmare of a high school experience. Merlin knows a thing or two about nightmares.
“I — you’re lying —” Harry stammers automatically, the words fumbling past his lips and falling to the floor, dead. His stance shifts ever so slightly into something defensive, his knuckles white around his wand.
“‘Dad! Help me, Dad! He’s going to kill me, Dad! Boo-hoo!’”
Dad? Merlin’s eyes narrow. He sincerely hopes that was the desperation of a boy facing death talking and Harry didn’t actually see Avalon. Dreams can twist in on themselves like that, but if the connection between Harry and the otherworld is that thin...
“Shut up,” Harry murmurs quietly. “Shut up, Dudley, I’m warning you!”
“‘Come and help me, Dad! Mum, come and help me! He’s killed Cedric! Dad, help me! He’s going to —’ Don’t you point that thing at me!”
Harry crowds the little blind pig into the wall, his wand aimed right at his heart. His eyes blaze a brilliant fiery green. His teeth are bared and he sees none of Dudley’s terror, looking right through him into a horrible, cruel place no one Harry’s age should know. He’s seething.
Merlin very subtly weaves an invisible shield around Dudders, who is in very real danger right now and has finally seemed to grasp it. He’s all but pissing himself, shuddering all over like a leaf, sweat beading on his plump face. Merlin frowns. Harry’s a bit of a loose canon, isn’t he? If he gets expelled it might actually be easier to look after him, but Merlin would rather keep all of his pet projects in one place, and he just went to all the trouble to get a job at Hogwarts.
“Don’t ever talk about that again,” Harry snarls viciously. “D’you understand me?”
“Point that thing somewhere else!”
“I said, do you understand me?”
“Point it somewhere else!”
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
“GET THAT THING AWAY FROM —”
Dudley gives an odd, shuddering gasp, as though he's been doused in icy water, and suddenly, all three of them have bigger problems.
Extinguished without so much as a whisper, the night was silently plunged into utter blackness when they weren’t looking. The sprinkle of stars, a fraction of what they used to be, have been swallowed whole. There is no moon, no stars, no misty silver street lamps on either end of the alley. The trees have hushed as if their hearts have just stopped. The distant grumble of cars has run away from the scene. The balmy evening has taken a sharp, chilling turn into the kind of cold that your bones don’t forget. It’s as though someone has just blown out the light and warmth from this place like a candle, and the three of them have been left and forgotten in the dregs of cutting blackened cold.
Life has fled Little Whinging.
Merlin tunes the squabbling boys out as he searches for the source of the emptiness, the black holes that have no business here.
There they are- deep, hoarse, rattling breaths, like shoddy windows shuddering in a storm, letting every freezing gust blow right through the house.
“C-cut it out! Stop doing it! I’ll h-hit you, I swear I will!”
“Dudley, shut —”
Merlin’s momentarily distracted by the sound of a fist hitting flesh and Harry’s stumbling, followed by his wand skittering across the road.
“You moron, Dudley!” Harry yells, feeling around for his wand and his glasses in the dark through watering eyes. Dudley’s booking it across the fence- right at the first Cold One to show its shredded, bottomless face.
“DUDLEY, COME BACK! YOU’RE RUNNING RIGHT AT IT!”
The piggy boy squeals in such a way that almost convinces Merlin not to help him. But another Cold One is seeping across the street behind Harry, and it’s about time he stepped in.
While Harry screams at his cousin to keep his mouth shut, Merlin makes his move. He feels silence and indiscernibility slip from him like oil from water as he steps forward.
Merlin hates Cold Ones. They are the antithesis of him, death where he is life. He was made to create, to bloom- Cold Ones inject nothing into the world, they just take. And they don’t do anything with what they take, either, it’s just gone. A victim of a bottomless, unsatisfied hole. Of circumstance. Of tragedy. Perhaps the only upside to the Cold Ones is that they hate Merlin as much as he hates them.
Even as Harry raises his wand and sends out his spirit, a smoky silver blue stag, the intruders stutter, flickering like corrupted viruses. The closer Merlin gets, the more reticent they are to advance. Faced with Merlin, Cold Ones usually retreat, unable to bear the air he naturally charges with magic. Before they can give him away as something like a living spirit himself, though, Merlin sends a sliver of his own spirit out. He never can control what comes out when he casts this particular spell. Apparently, you’re only supposed to have one spirit creature, but Merlin gets a different one every time. Maybe it has something to do with how long he’s lived, how many different people he’s been, how much he has become. He’s not any one thing anymore- if he ever was.
This time what sparks out of his stick- sorry, wand- is a lean, mean greyhound, rabbiting between the stag’s legs and shooting after the Cold Ones, nipping at the decaying skin flaking off of their withering hands. Harry’s head whips to Merlin, eyes wide, but he doesn’t miss a beat.
“This way!” he shouts, not looking behind him to see if Merlin follows as he darts after his useless cousin, lit wand aloft. “DUDLEY? DUDLEY!”
Merlin’s greyhound makes it first, outstripping them easily and leaving them in its hazy blue stream of smoke. It makes short work of the second Cold One, and by the time they make it there there’s only Dudley, shuddering, curled into himself like a peel of burnt wood, incapable even of whimpering.
The world breathes again. Moon, stars, and streetlamps burst back into life. The wind remembers itself, wrapping them up in a warm breeze as if in apology for its stumble.
Harry stands in it, chest heaving, soaking in the abrupt return of normalcy where there just was none, his shirt sticking to him. Dudley lies quite still, as if afraid to believe it, his arm still clamped over his eves, knees painstakingly tucked into his chest in a position someone Dudley’s size really should not attempt. Harry looks between his cousin and Merlin, eyes assessing.
Neither of them get the chance to say anything before a very distressed clomping interrupts them and one Mrs. Arabella Figg rounds the corner, tartan shawl flapping in the wind.
Harry immediately snaps to shove his wand in his back pocket, but–
“Don’t put it away, idiot boy!” she shrieks. “What if there are more of them around? Oh, I’m going to kill Mundungus Fletcher!”