Welcome to chapter three of Dudley in Tokyo! I hope everyone's doing alright and that you enjoy today's update.
Disclaimer: I own neither Gokusen nor Harry Potter. Additionally, TERF-dom is not welcome on any of my fanfics, and I'd like to deliver a hearty fuck-you to Rowling and others who like to cause harm to vulnerable populations.
Chapter Three
The House in Kamiyama
It was that Saturday evening when Dudley somehow ended up hopelessly lost. He and the rest of the UEL boxers were coming back from a visit to Wakamatsu Castle in Fukushima when they'd stopped for a bathroom break. That was Dudley's undoing.
He'd been washing his hands when he realized that the stop was suddenly a little too quiet. He rushed from the building, only to see the bus rounding a distant corner. Shit, Dudley thought.
Quelling a surge of panic, he took a breath. Now would be a good time to be a wizard, he decided. That teleport-y thing sucked, he knew from side-along experience. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it was something he could do himself?
He could so clearly see the inside of his dorm room. What was it that the witch or wizard always did? Wrapped their arm around him, pulled him close to their chest as they spun a 180° turn on their heel?
Before he'd met Yamaguchi, he thought it must have been magic that helped them spin him so easily. Dudley had been larger than all of them, but they manhandled him well enough.
Was it magic? Or was it Yamaguchi's brand of cheerful discipline?
Just for kicks, Dudley imagined his dorm in Hoshien. He imagined the bed that was too small for him, and the patterned quilt he never would have chosen for himself. He pictured the desk that was already accumulating a pile of junk and souvenirs. He pictured the empty little bookcase. He let himself imagine the smell, the temperature.
Deliberately, Dudley turned 180° on his heel. Nothing happened. No terrifying compression. Nothing restricted his breathing. And when he opened his eyes, it was to the approaching evening around the gas station.
The panic was creeping up again. Dudley blinked it back. So what if he was stranded in a foreign country where he didn't speak the language? He'd managed to keep up with witches and wizards just fine that one, awful, year. He could do this!
"Dursley-kun?"
Dudley jumped, turned to the voice. There, impossibly, was Yamaguchi in her twintails. In a short skirt, t-shirt, and leather jacket. On her feet were a pair of odd wood-and-fabric sandals.
It looked nothing like the vaguely athletic gear she wore to practice, or the smart academic-looking clothing she wore to class. But unmistakably, it was her. "Yamaguchi-san?"
"Doushita koko ni iru?"
Well, there was that "why" word again. Dudley didn't really know what the rest of the sentence meant, but he'd gotten better at parsing context clues.
"Er. The bus left me behind. I've no idea where I am."
It didn't look like she understood him, either. She gave him a narrow eyed stare. "Bus? Basu?"
He checked his pocket dictionary. Yes. Basu was the word for bus. "Uh. Yeah."
"'Iie?"
Bollocks again. He shook his head frantically. "Hai. Basu."
"Sou," Yamaguchi said, understanding appearing on her face.
Sou. Dudley committed that to memory as a better approximation of 'yeah.' He'd forget it in approximately five seconds, but it was something. Maybe if he repeated it enough times it would stick.
And suddenly Dudley couldn't stop talking. "The class was on a trip and the bus just left me here and I have no idea where I am. Where are we?"
There was a pause before Yamaguchi said, "Where. Doko, ne? Ne. Kamiyama-chou. Tochigi de."
One of those was probably a place name. "Not Fukushima, right?"
Her eyes grew wide. "Fukushima jya nai yo! Gakko ni kaeritai? Nan ji des ka?"
He wasn't in Fukushima anymore, Toto. And he definitely wasn't back in Tokyo yet. What was that last part of the sentence? Yamaguchi answered that question by checking her watch.
She looked at her watch, looked at him, looked at her watch. A resigned expression came over her face as she grabbed his wrist. "Ikou, Dursely-kun"
From her tone and the firm grip on his wrist, Dudley could recognize what that meant. Let's go, Dud.
Where she meant to go, he couldn't say. But he'd heard too many people say it with that exact resignation, every time he'd had to change safehouses.
Why there was that familiar element of danger in Yamaguchi's voice, he didn't know.
Kumiko, meanwhile, was keeping up a loud internal monologue of swear words. What was it Grandpa had said? About keeping young foreigners out of her gang life and away from where they might encounter cops?
On the one hand, it was damn lucky that Dursley had ended up stranded where he could find a familiar face. On the other hand, why oh why oh why did it have to be hers? Tanaka would have been thrilled to host a stranded student for a night!
She checked her watch again as she tugged him along. Yup. He might still be able to catch the last transit back to Tokyo, but it was late. And Kumiko wasn't sure she could trust him on public transit. Was his Japanese good enough to recognize his stop? Did he even know the area around Waseda well enough to find Hoshien from the stop?
For the millionth time, she wished her English and his Japanese weren't abysmal. But she and her family had never had much use for English, and she rather imagined that Dursley and his family had felt the same.
Grandpa didn't speak English. And Kyou-san? His English was even worse than hers. Kumiko shouldn't even get started on Wakamatsu and Yasue-anesan. Tetsu and Minoru? English? Teachers who cared enough about them to teach them a whole nother language? Ha.
"I guess you're coming home with me!" She let out a small, slightly hysterical, laugh. "Remember how I said my family was super weird?" she said to Dursley in Japanese. "Well you're about to find out."
"What?" He said in English, and Kumiko swore.
She ripped his little phrasebook out of his hands with more force than was probably necessary. She'd puzzled this out at the ramen stand the other night, but for the life of her she could not remember what she'd said.
"My house. My family. Is weird," she tried again, in English this time. "Really weird. Sorry."
Now he seemed to have understood what she was getting at, because he let out a string of incomprehensible English before slowing down. "Thank you," he said in English - that was something she knew. "Thank you," he said again, in Japanese. Good thing people focused on learning the pleasantries.
"You're welcome," she said, first in Japanese and then in English. And then she cringed, and said in Japanese, "just don't be alarmed if there are guns." Small favor: Dursley didn't know the Japanese word for gun. Or alarmed.
Dudley started to feel alarmed when they walked into a poorly lit neighborhood. Yamaguchi's hand tightened around his wrist and she murmured something in Japanese to him. He didn't know what she'd said, but the straightness to her spine and the nods she received from passerby were more than unnerving.
"Ojou," someone would say.
"Konbanwa," Yamaguchi would reply, and then she'd say what sounded like a name, accompanied by -san. Dudley didn't know the word Ojou, but he knew that it wasn't any part of Yamaguchi's name. He knew his host was replying with a polite but warm good evening.
Dudley didn't know the name of half the people on his parent's block in Little Whinging, but they walked at least three blocks where Yamaguchi seemed to recognize everyone they passed.
She was known in this neighborhood. She was as known as Harry in Diagon Alley. The last time he'd seen Harry had been there, on an off chance. Dudley could only wave awkwardly from his vantage point while Harry was mobbed by people moving to thank him.
Well, there was a difference. Harry was uncomfortable with the attention. Yamaguchi waded through it with a gentle ease. She was kind and courteous to the people who caught her eye. She patted shoulders and gave out slight bows.
Her boundaries must also have been firm. Not a single person overstayed the dictates of politeness. They said their hellos, an edge of worship in their eyes, and moved on.
In this way, Yamaguchi continued more or less without stopping until an older man - his hair was graying and his face creased, but Dudley balked at calling him old for some unfathomable reason - appeared around the corner and out of the gloom in front of them.
"Kumiko!" he said.
"Ojii-san!" said Yamaguchi, tugging Dudley's wrist so that he fell from her side into step behind her. Was she protecting him? What?
He said something in a voice that walked the line between gentle and severe. It was, Dudley realized distantly, almost the tone Yamaguchi had used with the people they'd passed. The gentle-severe balance was just tilted a little differently.
Yamaguchi responded with a tone that was both stubborn and apologetic. The man smiled slightly, said something fond before stepping around her to examine Dudley.
He said something, Dudley had no idea what, but he had the feeling he was expected to respond. So he bowed, said, "Hajimemashita."
The old man laughed, and so did Yamaguchi.
"Ore wa Kuroda Ryuuichiro des," he said, having the grace to speak slowly. Yamaguchi nudged the old man with her elbow and he looked at her askance.
She paused, shook her head, and gestured at them to continue. Both of them seemed to eye Dudley closely, as though he was supposed to react some sort of way. But the name was unfamiliar to him and surprise writ itself across their faces. Yamaguchi seemed a little relieved, too.
"Dursley Dudley," Dudley said, then added "Er. Hajimemashita," again. He really didn't know what else to say.
Kuroda, as he'd identified himself, laughed again. He jerked his head in the direction he'd come. Yamaguchi nodded, took Dudley's phrasebook from him as they began to walk again.
She flipped through the book, said, "My grandfather."
Dudley nodded, deciding that they had to be related. Their faces mirrored each other too perfectly. "Sou," he said, trying out the new word, and Yamaguchi looked pleased.
When they turned the corner, all Dudley could see was a dense hedge. But Yamaguchi grabbed his wrist again and steered him through the gap for the driveway.
If this was her house, Dudley had vastly misinterpreted Yamaguchi's financial status. (The only student at Waseda who would commute from more than two hours away had to be a poor one, right? Wrong, apparently.) It was larger than any single family residence he'd seen yet in Japan, done in a style he supposed was traditional.
Yamaguchi led him up the steps, slid off her wooden sandals at the appointed spot.
Right. That was a Japanese thing, wasn't it? It was a social grace that the collection of foreign students living at Hoshien largely neglected, so Dudley hadn't actually had to take off his shoes before entering a building before.
But he put toe to heel and slid out of his trainers before putting socked feet on the Yamaguchi family flooring. Or wait. He looked at Kuroda. Kuroda family flooring?
This man must be Yamaguchi's mother's father, but it begged the question of who the head of this household was.
Before he could dwell on it, Yamaguchi slid open the door and called out to whomever was inside.
Dudley stepped out of the way, ensuring that the old man behind him entered before him. His parents weren't good people, but once he was old enough to trail Vernon at Grunnings they'd made sure he knew the showy manners.
Kuroda gave him an amused glance, but seemed to take the gesture for what it was and followed his granddaughter in. Dudley went in last to find Yamaguchi holding a heavy-set man about Dudley's size in a headlock.
She was yelling at him in rapid-fire Japanese and Dudley was pretty sure the guy couldn't breathe.
Kuroda sighed. "Kumiko," he said, and Yamaguchi reluctantly let the large man go. He breathed deeply and elbowed the scrawny man next to him.
Yamaguchi whispered something fiercely at the large man, who shrugged. "Tetsu des."
The scrawny one introduced himself as Minoru, scooted over on the couch and patted the seat. Dudley sat. A middle aged man then introduced himself as Wakamatsu.
A young man in a sleek suit who was watching Yamaguchi with shades of fondness, amusement, and alarm surprised Dudley by speaking English.
"I'm Shinohara. You must be Kumiko-chan's exchange student." His English was accented with both Japanese and American inflections but it was more than understandable. Dudley was impressed and terrified all at once. The only men he knew to wear suits like that worked at Grunnings. "I'm assuming she didn't explain about her family to you? She has to keep it a secret from the university at large, I know."
Suddenly, Yamaguchi's face resembled a tomato. She muttered something in Japanese and Dudley thought he might have caught the word for English somewhere in there. Tetsu, grinning, nudged her side with an elbow.
"My Japanese is awful," Dudley said. "She said her family was weird but. Wait. What is this?"
Dudley was considerably larger than Shinohara, but the man's cool confidence and neatly pressed suit made Dudley feel small - the intimidation was there, but so was an instinctive urge to trust him. He felt like a toddler again, blindly taking his father's hand.
He could not help but remember that trusting his father had been an awful mistake.
Shinohara sighed, looked to Yamaguchi for confirmation. She'd managed to get her deep flush under control, and she said something in a soft voice. She looked resolute, but almost guilty. Shinohara nodded grimly, turned to Dudley said, "The Kuroda family is really an extended network of close friends. They like to pick up strays. Tetsu and Minoru were adopted by the family after middle school, for example."
It was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Order members from Dudley's year in hiding still liked to pop in at his London flat. You didn't need to be related to be family.
But somehow he was sure it was a lie. Or perhaps a half-truth. Dudley studied the men, their loud Hawaiian t-shirts, the glimmers of tattoos peeking from their collars. Shinohara wore a suit and Kuroda something traditionally Japanese, but somehow their collective dress was as coded and cohesive as Grunnings executives. Dudley was sure it meant something.
Shinohara regarded him carefully. "Are you alright?"
Dudley waved him off. "Maybe?" He was glad he was sitting on the couch. "I'm sorry to impose," he said.
Shinohara turned to the Kuroda patriarch and the two of them had a brief conversation in Japanese. Part way through it, Minoru stood and nudged Yamaguchi with an elbow and a lascivious smile. Her flush returned in force as she drove her heel into his sternum.
Minoru crashed into the wall. Tetsu laughed, Wakamatsu grinned, Kuroda sighed, and Shinohara ignored the chaos entirely. He turned to Dudley and switched to English, "I'll stay here tonight," he said. "Having a translator will help keep things smooth."
It did help, it turned out. With Shinohara there to translate, Dudley was able to navigate the odd etiquettes of the Kuroda household.
Dinner was delicious. "Hotpot," Shinohara said. "Kumiko-chan's favorite. It's the Kuroda family dinner more often than not."
Dudley tried, really, to wrap his fingers around his chopsticks and get them to move in the deft manner of the entire Kuroda household. It was Shinohara who saved the day again, by saying something quiet in Japanese to one of the tough looking young men. Minoru? Minoru.
A spoon and fork were pressed into his hands, and while there was a certain amount of grinning, nobody laughed outright. Dudley tucked in eagerly. It turned out that Dudley really liked hotpot too. It wasn't the sort of dinner his mother ever would have made, certainly nothing properly British, but it was good. In an exotic sort of way.
He ate quickly, when he reached the bottom of his bowl he was full well prepared to be embarrassed about it. But the Kuroda men simply nudged each other and laughed, lifting their own bowls.
Yamaguchi's was the only bowl even close to full. Belatedly, Dudley noticed it was because she'd already gotten seconds.
So without further ado, Dudley dunked another serving of meat and tofu and vegetables into the simmering pot of broth. He used his mostly abandoned chopsticks to stir and Yamaguchi gave him a fond smile, said something in Japanese.
"She's glad you like it," Shinohara translated. "It was the only thing Ooshima-san knew how to make when she first came to live here, so she eats it and thinks of him."
There was a round of soft muttering, and a look of fierce pride came over Grandpa Kuroda's face. Dudley looked around the table. He was fairly certain that nobody here had been introduced as Ooshima.
So, the person who made Yamaguchi's food growing up was currently absent and had the last name Ooshima. Most of the men here were unofficially adopted into the family, but Kuroda was Yamaguchi's biological grandfather.
What?
"Is Ooshima-san here?" Dudley asked. He had the sudden feeling that the answer was there somewhere, if only he could find it.
A shadow came over Shinohara's face, and like a sixth sense Yamaguchi looked sharply up at him. She tilted her head in question when their eyes met, and though there was a dusting of pink on her cheekbones, the set of her jaw was business. There was a silent communication.
"Ooshima-san is away, unfortunately," Shinohara said. Dudley opened his mouth to ask for details, but something in Shinohara's expression stopped his tongue.
There was a story behind this Ooshima business, Dudley was sure. He just didn't know what it was. After the hot pot was eaten and done, Dudley hastily tried to help wash the dishes. He was spoiled from that mission, however, by Shinohara and Minoru grabbing him by the arms.
"We should show you where your room is," said Shinohara. "You're a guest, and it's apparently Tetsu's turn to clean up."
Minoru, the skinny one, stared rather blankly at the two of them, said something, shook his head.
"He still can't believe I speak English," Shinohara said, not bothering to respond to Minoru in Japanese. "But really, it's part of compulsory education here."
Dudley shrugged. "Did French all through secondary. Had to take a year of it in Uni, too. Think at this point I might know more Japanese than French."
Dudley was startled to realize that that was probably true. He could at least fumble his way through pleasantries, ask for the bathroom, and order food. He'd come a long way from his garbled request for tea at the airport.
Shinohara gave Dudley a look that might have been unimpressed, but might have just been surprised. They'd arrived at a set of sliding doors, and suddenly Minoru vanished.
"Look," said Dudley, trying to figure out if this was his room and if he was supposed to be politely making his way out of the conversation to bed. "I'm not some sort of swot, or anything. I'm mostly just at Uni for the degree."
"Swot?" said Shinohara, apparently unfamiliar with the term. Dudley startled. For all that Shinohara's accent was both Japanese and American, this was their first real difficulty in communication.
Dudley was almost stumped. As he thought of a way to explain, Shinohara slid open the door, and Dudley found himself shuffled into the room. Shinohara followed him, closed the door.
"Um," Dudley tried. "Smart? I guess? But calling someone 'smart' would be a compliment, and 'swot' isn't. I'm not a swot and I 'spose I'm not very smart, either."
Shinohara's eyes lit in understanding. "Well. I don't think Kumiko-chan has ever valued intelligence in her friends."
Dudley wasn't sure if he should be offended on Yamaguchi's behalf. "Yamaguchi-san's no slouch!"
"No? Slouch?" Damn. Dudley really needed to watch his - what were they called? Sayings? Meta-whatsits? Idioms? Idioms.
"Sorry," said Dudley, slouching himself. "I mean she's smart. She'd have smart friends, right?"
Now Shinohara just seemed amused. "She's great at math," he said.
"Maths," said Dudley, not quite able to quell the correction. He managed, however, to twist the end of the word into a question and add, "that's what she studies, right? Maths education?"
If Shinohara noticed the initial trajectory of Dudley's response, he didn't mention it. Instead, he nodded.
That had been Dudley's guess, based off both Yamaguchi's course load and a pieced together conversation they'd had while hunched over the phrasebook.
"She has more of the skills to manage this household than anyone expected," Shinohara said. It was an afterthought, and somehow also a joke.
Dudley's felt something curdle in his stomach. He could remember his mother's eyes tracing a newspaper. I don't understand why these feminists have to be so angry all the time she'd said. Britain is a great place to be a woman. I chose to be a housewife - women in other countries don't have that luxury.
She'd sniffed, and Dudley had puffed with British pride. In college, later, he'd said as much to a classmate, who'd been supremely unamused. Instead of arguing, she handed him a printed-off booklist.
I'm not arguing with you about this, she had said, adjusting her hijab magnets. I don't have the energy. Come back when you've educated yourself.
And he had. After his confused year in hiding, much of Dudley's British pride had been stripped away. The booklist stripped it down to almost nothing.
But now, in this strange land with this strange family, Dudley remembered a conversation about only drinking at the family bar. And. Well. To a certain extent, he couldn't help his ingrained biases. "This lot isn't trying to force her into being some sort of housewife, right?"
Shinohara blinked, laughed. He'd apparently not even considered that his words might be taken that way. After a moment he paused, seeming to consider. "It would make my job a lot easier if Kumiko-chan brought someone suitable into the family through marriage. But Kuroda-san has made it clear that he has no expectations of her. His daughter fled this house to have more choices, you know, and then she and her husband died in a car accident when Kumiko-chan was seven. When Kuroda-san took in his grandchild, he swore not to make the same mistake again."
"Car accident," said Dudley. Lily and James Potter had not died in a car accident. Petunia and Vernon Dursley had taken in Harry, but they hadn't loved him at all. For all Mum and Dad talked about foreign monsters - Dudley's stomach roiled and he broke off the train of thought. He'd puke if he didn't.
"Well. It's good that Yamaguchi-san has him, then." He said it firmly, wished that it had been good that Harry had the Dursleys.
Shinohara nodded agreeably, but there was something guarded in his eyes. "She's a sweet girl."
Dudley looked at Shinohara, at the cheer painted deliberately over something else. He recalled Yamaguchi's flush from before. He thought he understood. But if Shinohara was in love with Yamaguchi, and she him, why were they dancing around each other?
And why did it sound like Shinohara wanted her to bring a different "someone suitable" into the family?
There was something fishy about Yamaguchi's family, and Dudley found himself not wanting to think about what.
Finally, Dudley settled on saying, "She's lucky she has you, too."
Another chip appeared in Shinohara's cheer. If Dudley had still been the boy he was before his year on the run, before his encounter with a Dementor, really, he would have said something.
Who's Cedric, your boyfriend?
Even as the memory made bile rise in Dudley's throat, he reflected that maybe he hadn't changed as much as he'd thought. It took active effort on his part not to say something like: If you like her so much, and if it would make your job easier if she got married to someone suitable, why don't you marry her? Even though Dudley managed not to say it, Shinohara's expression shifted again and Dudley thought he probably heard it anyway.
Bollocks.
There was a hasty change of subject. "How are you liking Japan?"
Grateful for the distraction, Dudley said, "It's beautiful here and the food's incredible. Wasn't expecting the early sunrise, though." He did his best to deliver a wry smile, and Shinohara returned it.
"I overslept so often during my own study abroad," said Shinohara. "I spent a few months at a small University in the middle of the American nowhere, and the late sunrise was awful."
Well. That explained the American accent. "I'd rather get the sleep," said Dudley.
"Speaking of sleep," said Shinohara. "I know tomorrow's Sunday, but I'm sure you'd rather get an early start back to Waseda."
Dudley wasn't sure that was true, but there was a scheduled afternoon practice that he probably shouldn't miss. "I s'pose."
Shinohara nodded, opened up a closet. "The futon is in here. Do you need help setting it up?"
Dudley was not quite sure what a futon was, but the explosion of fabric made him sure it was bedding. He'd wondered, when he'd entered the room and found the springy traditional floor completely bare.
"I can do it, thanks," said Dudley. He wasn't ashamed of how little he knew about Japan and Japanese culture, but by god did Dudley Dursley know how to make himself comfortable in a guest room when his hosts had more important things to worry about.
Damn freaks, his father had said. Couldn't even be bothered to make the beds up for us.
His mother's lips had tightened, but she said nothing as she shook out the sheets.
Here and now, in Kamiyama-chou, Dudley did what he'd done then. Shooed his host from the room, and tried to figure it out himself. It did not take long to do, once he'd closed the door on Shinohara's retreating back - and even laid out on the floor it was surprisingly comfortable.
When Dudley fell asleep it was deep and refreshing, but silencing the whirl of his mind did take some time.
Chapter word count: 4,383
I hope everyone enjoyed this installment. As always, I've been enjoying the comments I've received over on AO3 and wold love to hear what y'all on FFN think. Concrit is welcome and appreciated. Thanks for reading!