"How can we let her go?"
Dudley rolled over with a stifled sigh. His alarm was set for seven the next morning, but sleep would have to wait. His wife was staring unseeing up at the ceiling fan, her face creased with worry.
"Amanda…"
"Can we even stop her going?" She turned her eyes towards him and Dudley saw fear. "What are our rights here? What laws do they follow? Because I doubt it is the British penal system. If we tried to stop her would they take her away from us…. Were only mu-muggles after all."
Dudley pulled his shaking wife towards him, she curled up against his chest, fingers clutching his sleepshirt.
"They won't do that." He murmured into her hair, he hesitated for a moment, but she had the right to know. "I asked Harry, we can stop her going, if we want, we can even be made to forget, though Daisy can't, we can forget they were ever there."
"Or they could take her and make us forget she ever existed." His wife said into his chest. Dudley's stomach clenched.
"Harry wouldn't let them do that, they have laws."
"You said your parents didn't approve of Harry going, but they came and took him anyway."
Dudley's mind flashed back to the small stinking shack on the edge of England. His parents terrified anger, the giant figure silhouetted by lightning. They had run and run and it had not been enough.
"Harry was… special to the Wizarding World, even then, and my parents were not his parents."
"But they were his guardian's right? Legally? They had parental rights, at least in our world, but it wasn't enough."
"Amanda my parents…"
Amanda sat up, duvet pooling around her waist, Dudley lent against the headboard.
"Were abusive, yeah I get that, more than ever, but what if they weren't? I've been listening to the boys stories Dudley. Harry got attacked every year from the age of eleven, I think he might have even had to kill someone at that age. At eleven Dudley! What if they had wanted to keep him away for perfectly valid reasons and they came and took him anyway?"
"Daisy isn't Harry."
"But she is related to him Dudley, she is his cousin, or niece or whatever. That's what they were saying when you get right down to it, being related to Harry makes her a target. They didn't ask us if we wanted to send her after hearing all that, did you notice that? They only asked her, a ten year old, if she wanted to go, we were not considered or consulted."
Amanda's voice was rising, and Dudley glanced towards the thin walls. Amanda caught his look and deflated, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"God. God I've been so stupid. I was so excited at first you know, after getting over the shock of it. Getting to be part of this enormous secret, Harry's house was like this wonderful holiday from reality. I started noticing things, things you just dismiss as an adult, strangely dressed people, things out of place, alleys that pushed you away."
Dudley gathered her into his arms again and let her talk it out. He was an inconsiderate ass he realised, he had been so focused on Daisy and the boy's integration that he had taken his wife's adaption and silent support of their new reality for granted. She sniffed a little and continued.
"I went down one you know, pushed passed whatever was dissuading me from going down there and found a little magical neighbourhood, kids on brooms, cauldrons you know? And this woman came out of one of the houses and asked me what I needed, she was friendly but I could see her wand in her hand. The minute I mentioned I had a child going to Hogwarts she relaxed, like it was a passcode. Dudley I've walked passed that alley for seven years and if I had gone down there before last summer I wouldn't have gotten a friendly chat, I would have been kidnapped and had part of my memory stolen. Because Harry and Hermione may talk pretty Dudley, but we don't get the same rights, muggles don't get the right to know, or even the right to our knowledge if they decide they don't want us too."
"Amanda."
"And you know what I really don't get?" She said pushing away from him, "is why you are so OK with all of this. This is our daughter, our little girl."
Dudley sighed, and ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair. He turned his eyes on her and tried to explain something he hadn't even worked through himself.
"If you had walked into our house growing up you would have had no idea another boy was living there, no pictures of Harry on the walls, no bedroom even, no mention outside the house if it could possibly be avoided. Always afraid of what the neighbours might say. I didn't realise it at the time, I thought they just hated him and I am sure he did too, but they were hiding him. They lived in fear, fear the next strangely dressed man to come and shake his hand would blow their heads off. Fear that he would do something strange and draw the attention of 'those people."
Amanda was silent, Dudley knew that he had avoided speaking of his childhood in the past, half out of shame, half out of an inability to explain Harry to her before Daisy, even now he couldn't look at her eyes, staring straight ahead at the opposing wall.
"Don't get me wrong they weren't nice, fear breeds resentment, and they took it out on him for as long as I remember. They tried to beat the magic out of him, or at least encouraged me to give it a go. They wanted to push that part of him down into the deepest part of himself. I wish this had never happened to our daughter because you're right, about all of it. Daisy is the only true citizen of that world, we don't count in their eyes, not really and we can't protect her there. But I can't raise Daisy like that."
"That's not fair, you know it wouldn't be-"
"It would be. Out of fear we would take her education from her, fear would poison our family as it did mine and when she is old enough she would run straight back there anyway. You know she would. Unless you plan to use magic to steal our children's memories from their heads."
Dudley could feel the weight of his wife's helpless anger, and his own.
"So we never had a choice then."
Dudley gathered her back into his arms.
"We can choose not to be afraid."