A/N:
I can't imagine Mundungus had an easy life. This started out as a bit of a character study to round out my idea of how Mundungus' mind worked a bit better, but it kind of grew. I quite like my Mundungus, I might write a bit more of his backstory at some point. This is based off my story Harry Potter: Scourge of Knockturn Alley in which Mundungus becomes Harry's Dad, for anyone reading this who gets confused by the ending!
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A Life of Impossible Dreams
Aged five years old, the unfortunately named Mundungus had one desire in his heart. Not to be hungry anymore.
A year later, he had long since learned how to gauge the opportune moment to sneak food from an unsuspecting vendor, and had discovered the dubious joys of trash-diving. He was no longer hungry, so you could say his heart's desire had been realised. Except now, he had a new one. Mundungus now wanted a house. A real house with a door, unbroken windows, and maybe even stairs to a second floor. This dream, however, would not be realised until he had forgotten he ever dreamt it.
As a child, and perhaps, too, as an adult, Mundungus never really escaped the streets. However, despite this his hopes and dreams continued to move up in the world. At seven, Mundungus wanted to be able to read. He begged and begged his Mother to send him to school, but eventually gave up, instead stealing a few Galleons from under her mattress when she was passed out drunk and paying one of the phoney fortune-tellers from around the corner to teach him when his Mother thought he was in bed.
At eight, Mundungus was just about literate. He read ratty paper-backs he filched out of the bins, or snuck guiltily from the shelves of a second-hand-bookshop. Another dream which would have been realised had it only still been his dream. Now, Mundungus wanted to be rich. As soon as he learnt to read, Mundungus realised that most little boys didn't live like him. The storybooks the fortune-teller used to teach him talked of little boys who got broomsticks for their birthday, who lived in houses with so many rooms they could get lost, who had magical friends who helped them go on wonderful adventures.
Of course, a few years later Mundungus realised that being rich didn't simply mean going on adventures which always ended with a hot cup of cocoa in bed. He realised it wasn't about getting a broomstick, or a hippogriff on your birthday. He noticed boys the same age as him marching through the streets with their Father's, all dressed up in un-patched robes and shiny shoes. Being rich wasn't about getting what you wanted for your birthday. It was about getting what you wanted, whenever you wanted it. And Mundungus wanted that.
He maintained this wish throughout his years at Hogwarts, but it never quite spurred him on to greater things. Perhaps, had he tried hard in his classes, he might have risen to some sort of greatness. But he was sorted into Slytherin. And in Slytherin at that time, the poor were rarely more than tolerated – if that. Those same shiny shoes he had once seen marching down the alley now kicked at him as though he were nothing more than a dog. His rudimentary reading and writing skills and second-hand, constantly-malfunctioning everything did not endear him to his teachers, so any motivation he had ever had to make an effort was quickly squashed by their universal apathy.
At the end of his first year, he took the biggest risk of his life so far, and stole 5 Galleons out of the trunk of one of his dorm-mates so that he could buy a working wand. It didn't pay off, he was caught. The would-be victim of his crime was the son of one of the wealthiest and most influential pureblood houses in Britain, so in his detention, he received a beating so severe that for the briefest of moments, his heart's desire slipped. Instead of desiring riches, for one moment he only desired death as an end to the pain. The marks from that beating never fully faded, but after that one brutal moment his lust for wealth remained strong. More than ever, Mundungus saw money as the key to a charmed life. None of the purebloods were ever beaten – well, none of the rich ones.
And so, Mundungus continued to struggle through life, never quite achieving the riches he so ached to possess. His methods of accruing any sort of wealth became steadily seedier, as did his life. Without even realising it, Mundungus slipped into a world of shady backstreet deals. Had he managed to save any of the money he earned from these black-market activities he could perhaps have saved himself, but instead he descended even further into the life he had always hovered on the edge of. He scrabbled every day to find the money for his unpaid gambling debts, unpaid whorehouse debts, unpaid bar tab, every day increasing them by giving in to the temporary illusion of a better life these activities offered him.
And so he was doomed to continue.
Until one fateful night, when he just happened to be passing through a quiet suburban street in Surrey. One fateful night when he spotted a non-descript bundle left on a doorstep. One fateful night where, as he turned away, the bundle opened its tiny mouth and began to cry.
For all of Mundungus' lack of moral integrity, he was not yet so far gone that he could leave a small child crying out on the street in the middle of a cold night. Stepping over the low garden wall, Mundungus approached the doorstep carefully and bent down over the bundle. He was greeted by a shock of black hair on the pale, tear-marked face of a sleeping child. On the child's forehead was a scar shaped like a – a lightning bolt?
Merlin's saggy left bollock this was Harry Bleeding Potter!
That settled the matter for Mundungus. Scooping the bundle clumsily up in his arms, he took a deep breath and, before he could lose his nerve, apparated back to his room in Knockturn Alley.
At this point in time, his mind was full only of images of living from the riches of the famous child, basking in the light of celebrity. What little feeling he had in his heart was pity for the child, left out in the cold. There was no love.
His ascension to the light went as subtle and unnoticed as his slide into darkness. It began with him ensuring he always had enough money left over to pay his rent, so the boy would have a roof over his head. Then he was saving to buy the boy what he needed – and then what he didn't. Harry had clean-ish clothes, passable food, and dozens of toys. His smile when he got a new toy was so bright and full of joy that Mundungus would find himself already planning for the next.
Somewhere along the line Harry became his son, and he became Harry's Father, and he realised he was no longer living for the moment, but for the future – he put aside some money to buy Harry a wand of his own, to make sure he would have decent school supplies and pristine new school robes. All the things he hadn't had.
Because he no longer lived for the moment, for an imaginary dream of riches. He had a new desire in his heart – the desire to be not just a Father but a good Father. In the deepest regions of his heart though, what he truly wished for was something lying just out of his reach. He wished with all his soul that he were wholly good. Good enough to be a true role-model for his newly beloved son.
More than all the riches in the world, he wanted now to be as precious to his Harry as Harry was to him.