Dudley's brain quietly sputtered to a stop as the rest of the first years were sorted, including Harry, whose name elicited amazed silence followed by emphatic applause. Harry's face was bright red as he quickly ducked in beside Dudley at the Gryffindor table, and Dudley absently gave him a congratulatory pat on the back before Harry was absorbed into the cheerful chatter of the rest of the table. Dudley wasn't sure if he said a single thing for the rest of the night, watching the people at the table he'd been sorted into. They were young, fresh-faced, on the whole a good-looking group. Full of potential. He looked back down to his plate, which had at some point obtained a covering of chicken and broccoli with sliced almonds. Dudley hated broccoli. And almonds.

It wasn't long before the exuberance of the group melted into a school song, which in turn bled into long, confusing corridors and turns and passages and staircases, and moving portraits, before Dudley and the rest were safely stowed away in a cozy dorm, complete with lush four-poster beds and red velvet curtains. Dudley got himself tangled in his robes as he tried to extract himself from them, and was barely able to nod goodnight to Harry and kick off his trainers before he sank face-first into the mattress, and sleep.

In the middle of the night, Dudley woke to Harry crawling into his bed.

"Whassa matter?" he slurred blearily.

"Shh. Nothing. Nothing, I just . . . go back to sleep," Harry hissed in the embarrassed tone of frightened eleven year old boys everywhere. Another nightmare, then.

Dudley rolled over and went back to sleep.

Dudley slept the rest of the night without dreaming and woke early to find his nigh perpetual companion hovering close to his face. Dudley groaned and yanked the covers over his head, but it was too late - he was awake. He slid past the gloomy smear of shape and color and pulled back his curtains to find the dormitory still dark and quiet, save for muffled snores. Harry rolled over and buried his face in Dudley's usurped pillow before settling back into sleep.

Dudley wandered until he found the bathroom, tucked away between the two beds opposite the staircase. He took the hottest, fastest shower he could manage, before getting redressed in the same clothes, his body still dripping wet. For some reason he felt hyper-exposed in this place, every draft that touched his neck sending shivers down his spine and bunching his shoulders up around his ears.

By the time the rest of the boys in the dorm began stirring, Dudley had managed to discover his own trunk, somehow at the foot of his bed - had it been there last night? How had they known where to put it, just between Harry and the boy he'd stood behind the night before? Could they read minds? Could they predict the future? Then what was he for? - and sorted his belongings either into the nightstand or into his schoolbag.

"How long you been awake?" Harry yawned as he sat up in bed, his hair even more of a nightmare than usual.

"A while," Dudley said, thumbing through one of his new books for the first time. The few illustrations in the book flickered with independent movement as he flipped past them. The motion itched at the back of his mind, something from his first life he'd long forgotten - a photo of Harry's, tiny people waving furiously, like a television screen embedded in the page of the album filled with other such pictures.

"You might want to get a move on, I think breakfast will be over soon," he said absently as Harry groped blindly at Dudley's bedside table, obviously having forgotten his midnight relocation.

"Here," Dudley said, stretching across Harry's bed to grab his glasses from the nightstand.

"Thanks," Harry mumbled as he took them. Dudley caught one of the other boys (a tall black boy he hadn't remembered from the night before) glancing back and forth between them with a strange look on his face.

Dudley glared at him, but the boy just shrugged and went back to searching through his own trunk.

"You're cousins, right?" the round faced boy - Trevor? - said somewhat longingly. "That's nice, to be at Hogwarts together. Nobody in my family is anywhere near my age." Dudley wondered if the boy knew his shirt was on inside out.

"Yeah, I wish," Ron said through a mouthful of toothpaste. He darted back into the bathroom to spit before continuing. "I've got three brothers here already. And next year my sister, too." He made a face. Dudley hummed noncommittally.

"Does anyone remember how to get to the Great Hall?" Dudley asked, slinging his bag over his shoulder and standing. "I've completely forgotten."

"I think we can figure it out," Harry said cheerfully as he pulled his shirt over his head. "Just give me a minute," he added before disappearing into the bathroom. Dudley wondered what had made Harry so optimistic this time around. Not getting beaten up by Dudley and his lackeys every other week, probably. Dudley frowned down at his shoes.

"I'm going down to the common room," he called to Harry, waiting just long enough to hear the muffled reply before taking off down the spiral staircase. He could feel himself sinking into one of his moods, where it got hard to listen to children and pretend to be one of them. The kind that would usually send him to his room, pretending to have a headache, but here he was stuck in a dorm with five boys, and no place to go to be alone. His chest was getting a little tight at the thought of it.

Walking into the common room was stepping into the heart of a fire, all warm and red, strewn with overstuffed armchairs and spindly, lopsided tables. He sank into the loveseat in front of hearth and it was almost like he was actually relaxed for once. It was only a few minutes until Dudley heard Harry and the others clattering not down the steps, but already he felt simultaneously worlds better and as if his limbs had turned to cement, like they were melded to the cushion and he'd never be able to move again. Maybe it won't be so terrible here, a voice whispered in the back of his mind. Maybe this will be okay.

"Dudley, you forgot your wand," Harry said as he passed by, dropping the heavy stick in Dudley's lap.

{Forgot about that, didn't you?} his shadow said from where it had pooled by the remnants of last night's fire.

Fuck you, Dudley hissed back in the privacy of his own mind. He had forgotten about that.

The other occupants of the castle were quick to take notice of Harry. Everywhere they went, they were followed by hisses of "Is that him?", and

"Next to the tall boy, with red hair,"

"The blonde one, with the ears?"

"No, idiot, the one with glasses."

Dudley began to consider growing his hair out.

Harry seemed to be unsure of the attention. He'd often relished it back home, with Dudley or in his classes, but Harry didn't seem to appreciate it here. He'd taken to pocketing his glasses in between classes, and had begun to develop a nervous tick of tugging on his fringe to make sure it covered his scar. It took him almost walking into the lake on the way to Herbology for him to finally relent and put his glasses back on.

Dudley was facing his own problems. Just getting about the castle apparently took more magic than he'd thought he'd need in classes, let alone outside them. Sometimes the staircases (of which there were apparently an hundred and forty-two, Ron's older brother had informed them pompously) tried to eat them, and the doors seemed to move around behind their backs. Sometimes they only opened on Tuesdays, or if you tickled them just right, or would get into a sulk and disappear completely just when you needed them.

Then there were the classes themselves. Every class they walked into, they were expected to pull out their books and their wands. Dudley had tried to avoid touching his as much as was possible, but the teachers seemed to be trying to get them used to handling them, even if the classes started out mostly theoretical. Who knew magic would be so boring. Unfortunately, they were expected to start doing magic at some point.

"Mr. Dursley, I do believe that your casting might significantly improve if you actually held your wand," Professor McGonagall told him as she towered over his desk. They'd been given matchsticks to turn into needles, but seeing as no one else had managed to make any progress twenty minutes in, he'd figured he might be able to slide by without doing anything.

{You will need to try, eventually,} his shadow informed him as it leaned over his shoulder, leaking cold all over his back and making his head throb. {You're not really meant to have magic, you know, I've had to make all the connections for you in your mind. It's not as easy as it sounds,} it insisted.

So Dudley picked up his wand, and squinted at the instructions that had written themselves neatly on the board, and coaxed his matchstick into a needle. He didn't quite manage the eye properly, and on the whole it didn't seem like needles were meant to look quite like that, but that could be chalked up to his lack of personal experience with needles.

And the world didn't end, and McGonagall's suppressed smile didn't feel entirely terrible, and he and Hermione Granger (the loud girl) had exchanged pleased glances when together they managed to earn five points for Gryffindor.

But there were other classes to consider as well, such as Herbology (the text for which was going to give him nightmares, he was certain), and Charms (which Dudley actually didn't mind, as they'd only done theory so far and the Professor was perpetually cheerful), and Astronomy (which required them to be up at midnight, and was both boring and familiar, as much of it seemed very similar to a class he'd taken at uni all those years ago because he'd mistakenly thought it would be easy), and Defense Against the Dark Arts (the Professor seemed rather pathetic, and Harry often complained that the smell of garlic that permeated the room gave him headaches). And Potions, of course, which the Weasley twins had horror stories about, but that they didn't have until Friday - a double session. The other first year boys whined whenever the subject came up, but Dudley had decided to reserve judgement on whether it was better to have to face a class several times a week, like Herbology, or just have at it all in one go and get it over with, like Potions.

Every morning the mail arrived, hundreds of owls swooping about and dropping letters on heads and laps (and occasionally into the porridge, like Ron's family owl, Errol). Harry had nearly jumped out of his seat the first time it happened, but Dudley felt oddly calm about it all. The first time around, his parents had gone half mad with the way the letters had appeared, under the door and rolled up inside the eggs and shooting out of the fireplace by the dozen. By comparison, messenger birds seemed rather perfunctory.

Harry was the only first year in Gryffindor to have an owl, and the snowy bird came to visit every morning (for the bits of bacon Harry fed her, Dudley suspected - that bird was going to die young, fat, and supremely happy), but never brought any mail. Dudley felt oddly guilty that he and Harry were the only ones who hadn't received any word from relatives, as if it were his fault his parents were bigots, and even more so when he realized that Harry wouldn't have received any the last time around, either. For all Ron's complaining, he saved every letter his family sent him in his nightstand, and Dean never opened his at the table but received them all the same (and Dudley had seen him staying up late, fretting over what to write to his mother and little sister), and Seamus read his aloud with great gusto, and even Neville seemed touched at the overly formal, haughty letters his various elderly relatives sent him in batches, all filled with conflicting advice and the kind of insults that only the elderly could get away with because they were too old to give a shit what anyone thought of their manners. Even those, though, Harry seemed to view with longing.

Friday morning, however, Hedwig dropped a letter onto Harry's plate before swooping down to rest on Dudley's shoulder and pick at his hair. He stiffened immediately, but tried very hard not to dislodge her. The bird seemed to sense his displeasure, though, and gave his ear a sharp nip before fluttering to the table. Harry unfolded to parchment and read for several minutes, not saying a word until Ron nudged him with his elbow.

"It's . . . from Hagrid," he said slowly. "Does anyone have a quill?"

Ron passed one over and Harry scribbled a quick reply on the back of the parchment before sending Hedwig off with it.

"And who's Hagrid?" Dudley asked in what he hoped was a nonchalant tone.

"You know, that huge man, from the boats," Ron answered. "He's the groundskeeper. What'd he say, then?"

"He knew my parents," Harry said as he scraped at his empty plate with his spoon, making Dudley cringe at the sound. "He's invited us to come over, after class." Dudley frowned, before necking the last of his tea and pushing back from the table.

"We should leave now if we don't want to be late," he said.

"Yeah," Harry replied, still lost in his own head. "Okay."

It wasn't until Neville nearly knocked Harry down the stairs when he got caught in a trick step that Harry seemed to come back to them. Dudley tried, and failed, not to worry about what was going through Harry's head.

{You might want to focus,} his shadow said, blending in with the gloom in the dungeons a bit too well for Dudley's liking. {You'll need to watch out for this one.} It had been giving similar such advice all week, though the meaning seemed to change frequently and without logic.

What, another enemy? He bit back, remembering the anxiety that had filled him for hours before meeting Professor Quirrell, only to decide that his personal cloud of misery must have developed a sense of humor.

{No,} it said simply, slithering somewhat menacingly in the murk. {An ally, this time.}

Why do I need to watch out for an ally? he griped in his mind.

{You'll understand when you meet him,} the shadow said - flatly, unreadable, the way it said everything. Dudley sighed. Fantastic.