Title: All the Things We Fear
Prologue
Author's Note: No, I haven't abandoned my fic "Witness". I had almost finished it when my computer became possessed and ate half of the chapters, including most of the ones that came first. I'm working on rewriting them all, and will hopefully post new ones in the next couple of weeks or so. Meanwhile here's a new fic, and a different kind of a one for me. It's a future fic, and while Dudley Dursley is the main canon character, everyone else makes an appearance too, and them some. The title is inspired by a Deepak Chopra quote: "The things we fear the most are things that have already happened to us." Hope you all enjoy!
The owl came on a Thursday.
Dudley Dursley was turning into his driveway when he saw it. Large and tawny, with an official-looking envelope in its beak. His heart skipped a beat for a second, and he had to force himself out of the car and toward the animal. Harry knew better than to send letters by owl, and it wasn't like he sent them often, anyway. He knew what this was. Truth be told, he'd been waiting for the owl's arrival since Niamh's 11th birthday last week. With shaking hands, he took the envelope, then went inside, glad that Rebecca had taken the kids to visit her mother that afternoon. He sat, with the letter in his hands, turning it over and over again, considering his options. He didn't have many.
He had told himself, for years he had told himself, that he was being foolish. He was paranoid, growing up with Potter had made him that way, made him see things that weren't really there. Niamh didn't really make the bottle come to her when she was hungry as a baby. Alfie didn't really turn his sister's Barbie into roach after they had a fight. The two didn't really make their hair grow back after bad haircuts. He was imagining things. It wasn't true. It couldn't be true. He turned the letter over again in his hands. This single square of parchment contained all the things he had always feared within it.
He was interrupted from his thoughts by the sudden opening of the front door. Dudley stuffed the envelope in his briefcase and stood up just as Niamh and Alfie ran into the house, Rebecca trailing behind them. Pasting a smile on his face, he greeted them as normally as he could.
The letter would have to wait.
TBC