Head cannon goes off. Fluttering sign dropping out of the smoke says, "I Don't Own Harry Potter But I Do Play In The Forbidden Forest."
When the door opened Dudley reached to shake his cousin's hand. "Harry. It's been a very long time. Sorry Maddy couldn't make it but she has finals this week and Julia wasn't feeling good. I wanted both of them to meet you but..."
Harry shook and said, "I'm sorry too. I was looking forward to meeting her. And this is your son? I can't tell you how good it is to see you after all this time. You're looking good."
Dudley felt a bit of heat on his face thinking how he'd looked that day in July when the only thing he could think to say was Harry wasn't a waste of space, then smiled. "Yeah.
A few years of rugby got me fit and I've tried to keep the weight off since. This is my son Thomas, the handsomest, smartest eight year old boy in England."
Thomas grinned up at Dudley and blushed.
Harry turned to grin at his wife and said, "This is Ginny, the light of my life. She's heard about you so watch your step. She still has the most exquisite Bat Bogey hex I've ever seen."
"I'm pleased to meet you, Dudley," Ginny said, holding out her hand. "And don't worry, I only believed half of what Harry told me about you and the other half probably wasn't true either."
Dudley felt the heat rise again. "Well, that was a long time ago. I'm not proud of some of the things I did, that person I was when I was younger."
Ginny smiled. "It can't be anything compared to what Fred, George and Ron were like.
Would you like to freshen up or anything before we sit down and tell lies about Harry?"
She had a twinkle in her eye as she said it that made Dudley smile and lose the tension that he'd had about meeting Harry and his family.
Thomas was being introduced to James and Albus when the sounds of a thump then breaking glass came from the pantry, followed quickly by a four year old running out of the kitchen. Harry reached out to take hold of his daughter to stop her head long dash away from the scene of the crime.
Harry held her hand and asked the young girl, "What happened" and got the usual kid response that nuffing had happened. "Well, since nuffing happened and no one else was around and now there's a mess on the kitchen floor, what do you think should happen next?"
A rather meek four year old Lily replied, "Clean it up? It wasn't all my fault. I just wanted a cookie and the jar sort of moved and fell, all by itself. Do I have to clean it up by myself?"
Harry held back his grin with effort. Lily was just always so cute and the sound of her small piping voice melted his heart every time he heard it. "Well, I suppose I could help a little. But, young lady, you have to promise not to try to get things that are on shelves.
Things are put there because it s best for you not to get at them. Do we have an understanding here?"
"Yes daddy," Lily said in a soft voice, studying the toes of her red shoes.
The older of the two boys said to Thomas, "You wanna go out and play in the field?"
Thomas turned and asked, "Dad, can I go outside?"
"Be careful and stay in sight," Dudley told him.
Harry looked up and shrugged. "Dudley, there's coffee on the server. Would you mind pouring while I help a lovely damsel in distress?"
Ginny made a sound and said, "What am I? Chopped liver?"
Harry let just a hint of a smile come to his lips and said, "Of course not dear. You're always a gracious and considerate host. We'll be just a few minutes."
Dudley smiled in understanding, turned in time to see his son head out the door with the two boys and moved to the serving counter between the kitchen and living room. "How can I help?" he asked Ginny.
"I'll get the coffee if you'll get the biscuits," she told him and they both held trays as they moved to the sofa. Right off they were trading tales of what kids can get up to and how fast they can get up to it, comparing the size of messes that always seem to appear when kids are involved as if they'd known each other their whole lives.
A few minutes later the sound of sweeping in the kitchen came to a halt, a soft voice was talking then a giggle was heard. The girl trotted out from the kitchen with a cookie in hand to head outside. The sound of laughter came through the open door then it was quiet again.
"Harry, that had better not spoil her dinner," Ginny warned.
Harry shrugged and said, "She did such a good job of helping clean up I thought a reward was well earned. Besides, a few minutes running around outside will burn up the sugar."
Ginny sighed. "Come sit down. Dudley was telling me when Thomas found out how to make mudpies when he was four. He has a picture. He's so darling covered from head to foot in muck with a big grin on his face." They all looked at the picture, clothes and boy unrecognizable in the slippery mud covering, only his huge smile had anything other than brown dirt covering it.
When Harry sat down, Dudley said, "I heard you defeated that Voldemort madman. I learned a lot in the safe house. You know, I found it really didn't matter they were all wizards and witches or that they used magic all the time, they were just nice people I really learned to like. I still trade Christmas cards with a few of the folks I got to know.
They told me everything they knew about what was going on outside the safe house and I found I really wanted to know. I was worried about you, Harry."
With a look of shock Harry said, "Worried? About me?"
"Yeah so don't give me grief about it," Dudley said with a chuckle. "When I heard about all the things that were happening I figured out real fast how lucky I was to be hidden away, no matter how dull it seemed sometimes. One day a girl I liked a lot got a message that her mother had been killed by Deatheaters and Emily was suddenly an orphan. She sat down in a chair and didn't move so we all took turns sitting with her so she was never by herself. We didn't have to say anything, you know, just be there so she never felt abandoned. The third day I was siting with her reading a book when she just started talking about growing up and how her mother would play hide and seek with her at night in the small town they lived in. Then she started sobbing and I pulled her onto my lap and just held her as she cried and I was crying right along with her."
Harry never thought he'd see Dudley with tears.
Dudley wiped his eyes and said, "It still hurts, you know. She was all alone in the world and I thought of you and how your parents were killed and how you were on the run and how this Voldemort was hunting you and how you could have been killed and no one would know about it. I kinda grew up a lot after that."
Harry started to say something but the words wouldn't come out for the longest time.
"Well, it was a hard year," he finally said. "I was lucky. We got captured once ..."
"What?!" Dudley gasped out.
"Yeah," Harry said. "I made a mistake and we got captured. Hermione hit me with a stinging jinx to disguise me that swelled my face up pretty badly. It was one thing that saved me but later on Hermione was, uh, hurt pretty badly. Bellatrix wanted information we didn't have. None of us got out of there without scars of some kind."
He didn't say anything for a little bit but then went on, "Anyway, one of the guys from school was working for Voldemort, we didn't like each other very much but he did everything he could to not tell them who I was. He was on the other side and did a few pretty awful things himself but he didn't tell them who I was. I had a chance to thank him for that later on, helped him get a shorter sentence in jail after it was all over. You just never really know how things are going to work out sometimes, you know, the good guys and the bad guys. Kinda like with us in a way."
Dudley nodded his head and said, "Lots of weird stuff happens in our lives and you never know who or what's going to surprise you and make you into a better person."
The three of them sipped coffee for a bit with those thoughts running around in their heads.
Dudley cleared his throat and asked, "So what is it you do for a living these days?"
Harry let out a long sigh. "I've been running the Auror's office, sort of the wizard Police force, but I'm working my way out of the job. I want to be home with my family more and have a peaceful life. I've used up all the anger I had for those that hurt my friends. And I put a lot of them in prison. Anyways, no matter what happens at work I come home to a lovely wife and three great kids so I think I'm the luckiest man in the world."
Dudley looked at Harry and nodded in agreement. "Wife, home and kids, the best thing life has to offer." He sat a moment longer then asked, "I guess all your kids, you know,
they can do magic?"
Harry turned to Ginny. "You want to tell him how interesting it is to keep up with kids that can pull cookies off the shelf without climbing up to get them?"
Ginny grinned. "Oh, most of the time it's just like anyone else," she said, "but there are times. Like when James decided the Christmas tree was too small, he wanted a much bigger one and got rather hacked off when we told him it was plenty big enough. When we got up the next morning the tree had grown up through the ceiling. That was the first time James manifested his magic so we didn't know whether to be upset with him or to tell him how proud of him we were."
Ginny grinned again and said, "In the end we did both. It can be challenging to have them keep it under control sometimes but it's probably not that much different than anything you have to do, really. It's just a little different but it's still the same. I can't tell you how much respect I have for my mother now, raising seven of us, especially Fred and George. It's a wonder we all lived through it."
Dudley chuckled, looked at Harry and Ginny and laughed. When he got himself under control he said, "We're all mums and dads just like ours were and theirs were and so on for the last hundred thousand years or more. I've always found that a comforting thought, that other parents have gone through lots worse than I've had to and that kids have been trying their parents' patience since the beginning of time."
He sipped at his coffee a moment to gather his thoughts. "I guess the real reason I wanted to visit was to apologize for ..."
Harry raised his hand. "No need. Like you said we're different people now. It's all water under the bridge. Besides, if you got to apologize I'd have to do the same for the pig's tail."
Dudley turned pink then burst out in laughter once again. "The pig's tail, yeah, that was a good one. How's that guy, Haggman or whatever, how's he doing?"
Harry had a grin on his face when he said, "Hagrid's doing fine. Hasn't slowed up a bit but he's too busy with keeping the unicorns, thestrals and a whole host of other creatures happy and well fed to find time to stick tails on where they don't belong."
In a quiet voice Dudley said, "He wasn't all that wrong with mine."
"Like I said, all water under the bridge," Harry said. "What is it you do for a living these days. You said Maddy had finals coming up."
"Yeah. One more year of school," Dudley said in a cheery voice "We'll both be glad when she's out. We met at school. I was tutoring her room mate in chemistry when Maddy came in a little tipsy on a Friday night. We both had to work to get her into bed and the next thing I know I'm asking her out for a date. We got married when I graduated. When Thomas was born he had problems and spent a month in hospital and that's when Maddy decided she wanted to be a doctor. It's been a long haul, what with two kids and all, but she's almost there."
"A doctor. That rocks, Dudley," Ginny said. "What did you end up doing?"
"Oh yeah. I troubleshoot problems with plastics and petro-chemical manufacturing,"
Dudley said. "I was going for a position with BP when I got a summer job at a big production plant, mostly quality assurance and chemical analysis, when my boss was handed a problem with one of the production lines. Turns out I have a real talent in troubleshooting. I figured out that one of the reagents was being mixed in at eight percent too low a concentration and twenty degrees too hot and too early in the process. Made a huge mess when it solidified before it hit the pelletizer section. With a chemistry background and a bit of study in industrial engineering I found I had a job that really challenged me. Pays good and I'm home most every night to be with Maddy,
Thomas and Julia."
He turned to Ginny and asked. "Do you work?"
"I did," she said with a grin. "Professional Quidditch player for four years after school,
but I wanted a family more so we got started on one. With a good man and three energetic kids I manage to keep myself plenty busy."
An old grandfather clock chimed and Ginny looked at it. "Oh goodness, we've been chatting for an hour already. I better get the salad started and the roast out of the oven.
Harry, would you check to see if the boys have destroyed anything important?"
Dudley raised his hand. "I'll check on the kids if you need Harry in the kitchen."
"That would be a great help, Dudley," Ginny said. "Harry, would you mash the potatoes?"
Dudley drank the last of his coffee and got up saying, "Harry, it's been great to see you again. I'd like to invite you and the kids over when you get a chance. I've got a sailboat that's practically magic to me. I can take you all out for a spin or overnight and show you some really beautiful anchorages I think you might like."
"Sounds interesting," Harry said. "Yeah, that sounds wonderful. I'd better get to helping Ginny or I might end up with something growing out of somewhere I don't want."
Dudley chuckled a little, still thinking of his hexing so long ago, now it was just an amusing memory, wandered over to the door and opened it up. He stood there looking at the kids playing, happy as any kids could be, the boys chasing after his laughing son,
Thomas with a huge grin on his face as the boys struggled in pursuit to get close enough to catch him. He could only stand there and watch.
He couldn't move, he couldn't get a word out, his legs wouldn't budge, he could hardly breathe. Thomas was evading every move they made, giving the boys a real challenge trying to keep up with him. Eyes wide and mouth hanging open, he just stood there..
"Dudley," Harry called from the kitchen. "What kind of dressing do you like?"
He got no answer.
"Dudley," he called again. "What kind of dressing do you want on your salad?" Again he got no answer and turned, walked to the living room to see his cousin standing in the door staring out across the field.
"Dudley? Everything okay?" he asked as he walked closer. "Anything wrong?"
No answer. He got closer and tapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, Dudley. You alright?"
No answer so he gently pushed his cousin out onto the porch so he could see. What he saw brought a smile to his face then a frown. Lily was on her small broom with her red shoes just touching the grass, wheeling around in circles to watch Albus and James doing everything they could to catch Thomas.
Thomas kept an arm's length away from either of them as he rode his broom just above the field grass, his shirt tails flying in the wind and a huge grin on his face. He watched as they made another round of the field and Thomas headed toward the porch, stopping in front of his father, laughing and giggling in merriment.
"They said I'd never keep up with them but I did," he said. "Did you see me? I kept away from both of them."
Harry looked to see Dudley standing there with his mouth hanging open, his eyes staring at the sight in front of him. He turned to the kids to say, "How about you make a one more round before coming in to wash up for dinner. James, you know how far you can go so I better not see you going out of bounds."
"Okay dad," the boy said turning his broom. "We race over to the fence, down to the apple trees, along the creek and back to the porch. Whoever wins gets to make the next race course. Ready?"
Three brooms whistled as they sped off. Lily whimpered on her broom and said, "They always go faster than me, daddy. I never get to win."
Harry walked over to pat his daughter on the head. "Why don't you fly right down to the creek from here and beat them there, then you can race them back to the porch."
Lily squealed in delight, "Yeah. I'll beat em this time," and took off as fast as her little broom could go.
Harry gently moved Dudley to the porch swing and sat down next to his stunned cousin.
"You know, Big D," Harry said, "it might be a good idea if you stop by more often.
Seems we have a lot more in common than we thought."
END A/N: I got this idea fleshed out then did some more reading, coming across a tale that night with some similarities. This is my take on Dudley. No story trodding intended. KS
Head cannon goes off again. "Please Review" is on the sign fluttering to the ground.
