Disclaimer: It's all JKR's.

Author's Note: Thanks again to Yolanda for the beta-reading.

Chapter Two—In His Relations' Care

The next day, Harry rose a little earlier than usual. He washed, dressed, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Aunt Petunia was cooking breakfast. On every other day, breakfast at the Dursley house was pretty spartan—fruit and cereal, maybe some yoghurt—but Sunday breakfast was an event; it and Sunday dinner were the two meals of the week at which Dudley was allowed to go off his diet. The smell of frying bacon filled Harry's nostrils.

"Would you like for me to take over the bacon so you can start the eggs, Aunt Petunia?" he asked. "Or I could do the eggs, but you're better at them than I am." Harry had been going out of his way to be nice to Aunt Petunia, but he never spoke less than the truth; her eggs were perfect, and his were always either runny or overdone.

His aunt's mouth set in that grim line that it always took when her attention was drawn to him, but she handed him the spatula civilly instead of shoving it at him. Harry considered this action evidence of progress, and he felt his resolve to speak waver again. All he wanted from the Dursleys was a little peace, and he had it; would he be a fool to mess it up?

His musings were interrupted by the entrances of Uncle Vernon and Dudley. "Hurry up with that bacon, boy," Vernon said by way of greeting.

"Yes, sir. Here you go." Harry plopped a few rashers of bacon onto Uncle Vernon's plate. He turned to his cousin and asked, "Shall I cook yours a bit longer?" Uncle Vernon liked his bacon rather limp. At Dudley's nod, he returned to the stove and continued to cook the bacon. He finished just as Aunt Petunia was spooning eggs onto the plates. He served the bacon, took his seat, and began to eat. His thoughts turned back to the conversation that he would have to have with the other three folks at the table. How should he start? How would they react? How awful would it be?

He realized that he was clenching his napkin up into a ball, and he tried to relax. The Dursleys were starting to push away their plates; Uncle Vernon was rising to go to the living room, where he would settle in behind his newspaper. Deciding to stall a little longer, Harry said, "Shall I do the washing up, Aunt Petunia?"

The grim line, the jerky nod. But this time, she added a grudging, "Thank you," and the unexpected politeness made Harry's breath catch. She followed her husband to the living room, and Dudley hurried out behind them.

Alone, Harry quickly washed the dishes. He even dried them and put them away instead of leaving them to drain. He wiped the counters, crumbed the table, and finally caught himself as he was starting to dust the chair legs. "You're stalling, Potter," he said softly. He sighed, squared his shoulders, and strode reluctantly into the living room.

He paused in the doorway for a moment to observe the scene. Uncle Vernon was reading the paper, Aunt Petunia was spying out the window on Mrs. Next Door, and Dudley was doing something on his computer—blowing up aliens, no doubt, although the characteristic "Pow!" noises were absent; Dudley had blown out the speakers the week before, so now his games were blissfully silent. All in all, it looked like as good a time as any. Harry cleared his throat quietly to announce his presence. Three pairs of eyes turned toward him. Dudley moved as if to leave his chair and bolt from the room, but Harry held up a hand to stop him, and he noticed, with a strangely disconnected feeling, that the hand was shaking a little. "Don't. Please, stay. Just for a bit. We … er …." Harry took a breath and continued, "We need to talk."

He let those words hang in the air as he moved toward an unoccupied chair. The silence was broken by a derisive snort from Uncle Vernon. "None of us have anything to say to the likes of you, boy," he said.

Harry frowned as he took his seat. "Okay, then, I need to talk, and you need to listen. Something's happened, and it might affect you … all of you. You need to know." He paused to see whether they were still with him; it appeared that they were, so he continued, "You remember the Dark wizard who killed my parents."

"Stop right there, boy!" Uncle Vernon bellowed. "We will not discuss your abnormality in this house!"

Harry's nerves, already frayed from apprehension, snapped. Here he was, trying to help them, and they were playing their same old stupid games. He stood up abruptly—so abruptly, he noticed, that it startled everyone—and replied coldly, "Fine. Don't listen. Stick your head in the sand. But when you're begging a Death Eater to spare your pathetic life, don't blame me." He stalked out of the living room and up the stairs to his bedroom, where he slammed the door shut behind him. He flopped down on his bed. He'd tried. It hadn't worked, and he'd probably shattered the hard-won peace, but at least he'd tried.

Harry picked up his book and tried to read, but his eyes wouldn't focus on the page. Suddenly, he was interrupted by the sound of a hand on his doorknob. His hand immediately flew to his wand pocket, but he check himself before he had drawn it. "Calm down," he thought. The door didn't open, and Harry wondered if his unexpected visitor had had a change of heart, but then there was a knock—a very tentative knock. Apparently, whoever was on the other side had first planned to barge in but had then decided to knock. Interesting. Curious, Harry called, "Who is it?"

"It's me. Can I … I mean, may I come in … Cousin?"

Dudley? Dudley who had never knocked on a door in his life? Dudley who had never called Harry anything but "you"? "Yes, come in," Harry said, hope and suspicion warring in his mind.

The door swung open, and Dudley stepped uncertainly into the room. He stood awkwardly, and Harry gestured to his desk chair. Dudley sat, and he and Harry regarded one another for a moment.

Harry realised that he hadn't really looked at his cousin in a long time—probably not since the summer before, when Dudley's tongue had been four feet long. He looked different. Not just his tongue, which would be expected to look different, but all of him. "You look…" he started to say, "slimmer," but realised that it might seem insulting, particularly since Dudley was still far from svelte.

"Not so fat?" Dudley said, finishing the sentence. "You're too polite to say it, but it's the truth. I was fat. And I'm still fat, but not so fat as I was."

Harry wasn't quite sure how to reply to that, so he settled on a shrug.

"I quit cheating on my diet," his cousin continued. "So now I'm losing weight. Slowly, but losing it."

"How come you quit cheating?" Harry asked.

Dudley smiled ruefully. "I was getting picked on at school for being so fat. Kind of…whatchamacallit…. When you do something bad for a long time, and then the same bad thing gets done to you? Poetic… license?"

"Poetic justice," Harry supplied automatically. Then he realised what his cousin was saying. "So you figured out that it's no fun being bullied." Dudley nodded. He opened his mouth, and Harry knew that he was about to apologise for bullying Harry in the past. Harry didn't need or want to hear the apology, so he broke in, with more good will than tact, "But you were bigger than they were. Wasn't it dangerous for them to pick on you?"

Dudley took the change of subject as it was meant. The "I'm-about-to-apologise" expression left his face, and he headed off on this new conversational track. "Yeah, I was bigger than each of them alone. But three or four of them together were bigger than me."

"Yeah, I guess all of them together would be bigger." This offhand remark made something click in Harry's brain, but he didn't have time to think about it yet. He wanted to concentrate on Dudley. "Anyway, you look good. More fit. Sorry to blurt it out; it just took me by surprise. I hadn't noticed before. Hadn't really looked at you. Haven't really looked at anything since I got home; I've been kind of preoccupied." His green eyes met Dudley's watery blue ones, and he held his breath, willing his cousin to pick up the conversational gauntlet that he had just thrown down.

He did pick it up. "I've noticed." He paused a moment, and then asked, with worry in his voice, "Are we in danger, cousin? I mean, Mum and Dad and me?"

"Not immediate danger, I think. There's some kind of protective spe-" He cut his own sentence short. "Let's go out in the garden to talk." At Dudley's puzzled glance, he explained, "Your father doesn't want this stuff mentioned in his house."

Dudley, always a little slow, pondered that statement for a moment. Finally, it dawned on him. "So we go outside, and then it's not being mentioned in the house." He grinned. "That's funny!" He sounded surprised, like it had never occurred to him that Harry be funny. He lifted his still-considerable bulk from Harry's desk chair and followed Harry into the garden.

*

Two hours later, Dudley and Harry returned to the house. Harry felt tired, like he had just played a long Quidditch match. He had told Dudley everything. He had started with just the basics—Voldemort's return to power and the dangers that it might mean—but Dudley looked so lost that Harry had decided to tell it all. After he had finished telling about Voldemort, Dudley had asked a lot of questions about Hogwarts and the magical world. At one point, he had said, in response to some description of Harry's, "So some wizards are good, and some are bad, and some are somewhere in between." And he had added, in a tone of near-wonder, "It sounds a lot like regular people." It had been a good talk.

Dudley promised to try to talk to his parents, to tell them enough so that they would at least realise just what sort of danger they might be facing. So long as Harry was in their care, they were probably safe, but they still needed to be on guard. And they needed to know that Harry wasn't just receiving owls in order to annoy them. Dudley would tell them; they would listen to him.

Harry sat in his room and thought, for the first time in a long time, about his cousin. Dudley wasn't very smart, or very brave, or very noble, but he was Harry's cousin, and he was starting to try to grow up and to do the right thing when he could. And that, Harry reflected, was probably all that could reasonably be expected of anyone.