Disclaimer: Dudley and Oz are not my characters.
"Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty." ~Frank Herbert
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become." ~Buddha
It was Piers who started it. Piers, the lanky pre-teen who used to hold the losers down while Dudley pummeled them; Piers, who had dealt drugs since their fourth year at Smeltings.
Piers, who now aspired to become a priest.
Dudley was a slow learner, and he always had been, no matter what his mother said, but he wasn't stupid, not really. A more accurate description would be...dense...heavy...in more ways than one.
So, at first, when Piers told him, (I'm tired of breaking things, D. That's all we do...all we've ever done: break things), Dudley did not understand. He could acknowledge the truth of the statement; that was easy.
What he had difficulty understanding was why his best friend would bring this up while explaining a decision which, for one thing, entailed living without sex (another concept he grappled with), because Dudley had broken things as long as he could remember. Hell, his parents had devoted an entire room for stashing the accumulated ruins of his childhood entertainments!
He did whatever the hell he wanted with his possessions, and they were his so why the fuck not? And he taught losers that they were losers, because otherwise, how would they learn? If they broke, they were fucking meant to break.
When he had voiced this reasoning, Piers had squeezed his eyes shut and...asked for forgiveness. From God. For Dudley. Then he had opened his eyes, stood up from the floor of Dudley's room, and walked towards the door, where he paused only to murmur, "I broke." And then he was gone. They had not spoken since.
Damn fanatics, Dudley had thought. They've corrupted my oldest friend.
He knew just enough of the bible to know it contained a passage calling witches 'an abomination in the sight of the Lord', and that was the main part his parents cared for him to remember, anyway. (The Dursleys attended church, but only on holidays: Petunia did not want risk her family being labelled as zealots or as atheists, because individuals who fell into either category were viewed with distain by the neighborhood.)
And so Dudley lost his only real friend the summer after their last year at Smeltings, but he could not yet comprehend why, or how, it had happened...
A/N: ...this chapter was meant to be three times as long and include Oz, but I got impatient...should I continue?