DISCLAIMER: See Ch. 1.

NOTE FOR ALL NEW READERS: This draws upon some events from “The Heir of Gryffindor,” so if you read that too, it might help.  Go to my yahoo group, and you will find it.

CHAPTER 6: A REPENTANT RELATIVE

In a town in Surrey, a teenager was taking a walk, ignoring the occasional confused look he got from someone he once encountered in the past over bad circumstances.

Dudley Dursley, now looking somewhat average in weight (as opposed to overly obese), and wearing new clothes, was simply wandering throughout town, lost in his own thoughts.

Ever since the dementors attacked him and his cousin nearly two summers before, he had recurring nightmares every now and then.  Among them were when the giant man gave him the pig’s tail, or when the twins left him the toffee which made his tongue grow to absurd proportions.  However, those were only the tip of the iceberg.

Most of his worst memories which he was forced to relive were when he and his friends bullied Harry.

At first, he pondered the dementors, who made people relive their worst memories, forced him to feel what he considered to be his best memories, and yet make him feel pain from it all.

But over the course of his sixth year at Smeltings, Dudley began having new nightmares, aside from those of the dementors.

Dudley somehow found himself as a bystander to the events in time of when Harry struggled against his enemies, ranging from Voldemort and his minions to people at school (and sometimes outside it) who wished ill for him.  Whenever Harry was under stress, Dudley would feel himself under some stress.  Whenever Harry would feel pain, Dudley would feel “echoes” of that pain (not the same amount, but a small idea of what it was like).

Severus Snape.  Draco Malfoy.  Quirrel.  Lucius Malfoy.  Gilderoy Lockhart. Tom Riddle.  Peter Pettigrew.  Barty Crouch.  Rita Skeeter. Igor Karkaroff.  Cornelius Fudge.  Dolores Umbridge.  Percy Weasley.  Bellatrix Lestrange.  Judy Arnold.  Michael Corner.  Zacharias Smith.  Joseph Cornwall.  Voldemort.  Names that once held no meaning to Dudley now seemed to be synonymous in his mind with evil, misery, cowardice, deceit, pain, sadism, greed, ignorance, oppression, and death.

The names of himself and his parents had also been on that list.

Dudley could feel the world he knew for the sixteen years of his life shatter.  He was a spoiled, lying, gluttonous, greedy, stupid, ignorant asshole.  And that was probably putting it mildly.

It was like dreaming that you were rich and powerful, only to wake up and find yourself poor and powerless.  Dudley could no longer see the same things he had known for so long in such a different light now.

Ever since that dark man, Snape, had adopted Harry, Dudley kept thinking about it more and more.  His ponderings also spilled out into his own life.  He couldn’t stop thinking about the cousin he could have cared less about.

By trying to avoid thinking too much about Harry, Dudley unwittingly ended up doing things he normally would have loathed to do, and he didn’t even seem to realize the transition.  He vented out his frustrations in the gym, and started to eat less and less, occasionally skipping a meal altogether.  He paid more attention to his homework to get his mind off the subject when it became too much for him, and ended up performing quite well with his work.

And the whole time, his classmates and professors couldn’t help but wonder what caused such a change in this boy.  Dudley, however, was too preoccupied with those activities to notice this.

The real final catalyst had been when Harry had been unjustly arrested for murdering that one girl one morning in late April.  As images suddenly started flooding his mind, Dudley excused himself from the class he was currently in and back to his own dormitory room (his parents had paid for him to have one all to himself).

From there, he saw Cornwall’s gloating victory over Harry, and over the next twelve days, he could feel the chills of the dementors as they made Harry relive his worst nightmares, with seeing Voldemort attack innocent people as a horrifying bonus.

And then, on the thirteenth day of that nightmarish period, Harry was captured and tortured.  Horrible images flooded Dudley’s mind, and he did his best to deal with it all.  He was so overwhelmed by what he was witnessing that he couldn’t even eat for a whole day after that.

Thankfully, it all stopped after that.  Dudley had no idea how he could have been made to be an unwilling witness to it all, and he was just glad, for both his sake and his cousin’s, that it was now all over.

However, that only left Dudley thinking even more.  He now saw different people, just like him, who wanted both power in general and power over people they hated.  They all wanted nothing but misery for Harry.

Just like he did for the longest time.

For a whole day after it all stopped, he felt like he just wanted to curl up and die.  That, however, wouldn’t accomplish or fix anything, and he knew it.

Dudley made himself think about why his parents hated magic to the point where they spoiled him and neglected Harry.  They hated magic, and their hatred came from their initial fear of it.  He also wondered if perhaps his mother was jealous of the magic which her sister had and she didn’t.

So what did spoiling him and neglecting Harry prove?  Was it just their way of trying to punish Harry as much as possible for even being in their lives?

The more he thought about it, the more he sometimes wished that the earth would simply swallow him whole.

When he got home from school at the end of the term, he went through all of the old and discarded junk he had thrown away over the years.  He fixed, to the best of his ability, whatever he could.  He also went through the dozens of old video games which were still workable, and a couple of relatively recent game systems (he often got video games among his other desired possessions as spur-of-the-moment wants).  He also went through old clothes which were now too big for him.  He saw a couple of old cages and tanks for long-gone pets which were fixable.  He even took a look at the never-opened copies of books that sat on the bookshelf of Harry’s bedroom.

After sorting all of the unwanted things into one gigantic pile that was even bigger than him (also considering he had lost some weight), he went about organizing them and preparing to give them away in a gigantic tag sale.

Progress had been somewhat halted by a strange day of endless owls and shooting stars, and his dad had to be brought home by his employees after he fainted.  Dudley didn’t dare ask what all of it was about, but he had a very shrewd idea what the source of it all was.

After that was all over, Dudley continued with the tag sale on the first weekend of the summer.  Eventually, people from all over the town took interest in buying whatever knick-knacks caught their attention.  Even local kids who were once harassed by Dudley years ago at primary school could buy whatever they wanted without fear of being harassed again.

There, he even encountered Mark Evans, who timidly asked about the birdcage, which once housed Dudley’s old parrot.  Dudley, feeling great remorse over their occasional encounters in the past, sold it to him for five pounds, as opposed to the twenty pounds Dudley had intended for it (it was a big cage).  Dudley had a feeling it was for an owl.

At the end of the day (and after accumulating a whopping amount of several hundred pounds which even he didn’t anticipate), Dudley was approached by his rather confused parents about why he had done that.

“I didn’t need them and I wanted to learn how to do business,” he said with a shrug.  It was at least half-true, anyway.

His father clapped him on the shoulder and praised his business skills while his mother looked at him for a moment before going back inside.

The next night, he used some of it to treat them all to dinner at a nice restaurant in the area.  The rest he saved somewhere in his room for emergencies, should they ever arise.

The dementors had been the first to teach him about emergencies and how suddenly things can change in one’s life.

However, there were still a few things which Dudley still wanted to tell Harry, including one secret he didn’t even dare tell his own parents.

TBC…

Note about this chapter: While chances are the Dursleys will stay as malevolent and unethical as they are in canon, the idea of reconciliation with them (or Dudley, in some circumstances) can be a fun one to play with.  If you like this idea at all, you should try reading “This Means War!” by Jeconais or “Midnight Duel, Midday Love,” by Draco664.

Next chapter, we go back to our brand new villain… –Quillian

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