Air

For the Christmas Character Challenge by The Kawaii Neko

1 – Ham – write about Dudley Dursley

This world is unmistakeable. Dudley doesn't think he overlooked it by accident – oh no – he was quite wilfully blind to it. But now when he opens his eyes and really looks, the magical world and all it holds imprints itself on his mind like a brand on his skin: hard, hot, and brightly burning. He isn't very smart or observant – not at thirteen, when he hid his inadequacies with insults and violence, and not now at thirty-eight, when he's given up hiding them all together. But now he's training himself to read and recognise the small signs of magic in the normal – Muggle – world around him, painstakingly piecing together a confusing but enthralling image of magical Britain.

The colours here are always brighter; the reds are redder, the greens deeper, richer, the chromes and cobalts vivid and sparkling. The smells are stronger, lingering longer, always blended with undertones of rare herbs and spices. But the sounds are muted, strange mutterings and incantations warped from being hidden behind Statutes and Protection Acts and other unfamiliar words he discovered in a large, brittle leather-bound book Harry had once sent him for Christmas.

But it's really the air that makes the difference.

There is an air around Harry. He couldn't pinpoint when he'd first realised it – it was just something that was there, plain as the nose on your face or the sellotape on Harry's glasses. It was a marvellous, fascinating sort of thing, which reminded Dudley of things red and gold with a prominent undercurrent of, strangely enough, lilies and mince pies. It grew stronger and stronger, and sometimes expanded into an invisible pulsating cloud when Harry shattered or levitated things by accident, or turned his teacher's hair blue. Dudley liked it and wanted it, and stretched out his arm to ask Harry if he could have some of it too, but Mum shrieked and came running, and slapped Harry's hand away.

"Unnatural," Mum said in a hushed voice.

"Idiot, stupid boy," Dad growled, and threw Harry into his cupboard.

But Harry's air couldn't be controlled – much like his hair, in fact – and that frightened Dudley. He tried to generate an air of his own, one that he could use and discipline, but as much as he tried, he simply could not. And that angered him.

The boa constrictor at the zoo had an air too. When Harry spoke to it and vanished the glass, he watched it slithering away – to Brazil, Harry mentioned in a letter to him many years later – and then screamed for Mum, heart pounding at the undercurrent of menace that oozed from the snake's scales as they whipped by his legs.

"It was different," he tried to explain. "When it talked to Harry, it was nice – friendly. When it went past me, it – its air changed" –

But his parents looked at him fearfully; Mum's pale irises blown wide, veins turning Dad's flesh a mottled purple, and Dudley stopped short, clamping down on the fountain of words still inside him, and resolved never to speak of the air again.

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He learned that the air is actually called magic when the giant burst through the door to their cottage in the middle of the storm.

Rubeus Hagrid was a swirling mass of love, anger, guilt, shame, pride and joy, underpinned with a vivid streak of mouldy biscuits and something suspiciously like singed eggs.

Then Dudley tried, for one last time, to create the air, staring so hard at the couch with his fingers raised until his eyes watered with effort and he was sure – so sure – that the couch almost moved. Ten – twenty seconds – nothing happened, and Dudley went back to concentrating his energies on punching opponents in the boxing ring.

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Harry's air changed every time he came back from That Place.

The red and gold remained constant, like foundations beneath skyscrapers, but the mince pies vanished, replaced in turns by strange herbs, leather, wood and straw, fruit trifle, owl droppings, wet dog, and in later years, a faint flowery scent that Dudley found both attractive and embarrassing.

The scent of lilies grew stronger with the years.

Harry added an unusual element to his composition, which Dudley understood. Harry had it in thin gangling limbs, scruffy hair, ill-fitting glasses and abrupt pauses in speech. Dudley had it in layers of flesh that he could not shed, a confused lumbering step, and the halting speech that came with the constant filtering of his thoughts. Mentally, he termed it the awkward.

He wilfully ignored the air as much as he could, confining thought and action to concrete, sensory details, carefully drawing down blinds over all that he could not dissemble or fathom out. The doors of That World, the musings of Their Kind were hidden to him. But magic would not stop dogging him, hitting him with a punch that summer in the tunnel. Then, he knew what dark magic was. The sheer all-encompassing despair, that elephantine crushing on his chest – Dismembers, Dad called them – desperately reaching out, trying to find Harry at his side, eyes fruitlessly probing the thick dark mist. And then the horror, the slow-dawning realisation that strong dark magic could not be forever stalled, even by the sharp, burning thing that had been Harry's magic that year.

Subtle power is the next variation he came across. Dumbledore is all of this, everything ancient and wise and somehow dangerous despite the twinkles and the bright robes and the lingering smell of sherbet lemon.

Pure magical might filled the spaces of this normal house. He knew nothing about the mechanics of that world, but he could guess that its residue would remain, long after the building itself was empty.

"I don't think you're a waste of space," he said to Harry, and hoped that it conveyed all he meant.

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Hestia takes him on tours of magical places.

She started with magical objects first – tuning into secret stations on the rusty old wireless, bending her ear close to the tinny speakers, brows furrowed in concentration. Mum turned white, pursed her lips and withdrew to the bedroom. Dad, flesh flushed a dull purple but unable to forgo the protection they offered, retired too, grumbling all the while. But Dudley was drawn in, closer and closer, eyes fixed on the way Hestia's wand would tap into the dents and bumps on the radio, the way the air thickened and shifted whenever sparks of magic flew out.

He began to read the unique lulls and cadences of each voice on the program, and felt a stabbing pain in his gut when he learned that Rapier and Romulus were dead.

The magical world has ruins. Buildings and towns in various states of decay, scattered across urban and rural landscapes still smoking and simmering with the aftermath of battles decades past. He learns to read the differences in levels of magic – the suffocating weight of concentrated dark magic, the shrill sharp burning of curses cast in anger, the airy weightlessness, the soft-burgeoning warmth of what Hestia describes as deep magic – felt, but unseen.

Hestia dropped down on her haunches beside Dudley, watching him poke holes in the scorched earth with his fingers, feeling burning grains of sand running between his fingers. "Can't we go to Hogwarts?" He asked. "Or Hogsmeade?"

She shook her head regretfully. "I just might be able to sneak you into Hogsmeade, but Hogwarts is absolutely closed to Muggles."

Dudley pointed at the dead mansion in front of him. "But these are open…"

Hestia shrugged. "Old ruins, with just the last vestiges of magic remaining. The Statute doesn't bother to protect them because most Muggles don't care about these old things anyway. They'll just see an old decayed building – feel or see nothing beyond that."

He grit his teeth and vowed to find at least one other person – Muggle – with imagination.

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When his daughter was born, she exuded magic from every pore. His wife, who has enough imagination – or perception – to defeat a house of a thousand Dursleys, bent over the tiny wriggling form, eyes alight with pleasure. "Oh this is wonderful," she breathed, "she's all magic!"

It is an apt description. The baby grows from toddlerhood to adolescence, and her air grows with her – warm and light, blue and gold and bubbling. He takes her round as much as he can, all cities and towns and out-of-the-way villages, picking up on all the tiny hints of magic tucked away in the teeming, tumultuous Muggle world. Hestia joins them often, pointing out bricks in walls, redder than the rest, shabby inns and pubs tucked away between glittering Muggle department stores, oddly shaped phone boxes that are portals to that other world, the odd witch or wizard, still conspicuous in bright emerald robes or strange hats. Dudley looks closely at the all, committing each one to memory.

Harry begins to send him things. He starts with Christmas cards, covered in his untidy scrawl, later in neater handwriting, and then with the addition of names: Ginny, James, Albus, Lily. They still smell of flowers and wet dog. The presents follow; leather-bound books with dusty pages and the brittle scent of long-ago libraries, brightly packaged sweets and once, a homemade jumper. Dudley watches his wife read them to his daughter, the unfamiliar words dropping carefully from her lips, conjuring up images of castles and broomstick-games and simmering cauldrons.

With memories of pig's tails and overlong tongues, he still does not dare touch the sweets.

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The train is only a blot in the distance when he finally stops waving and turns his head away. Even now, if he closes his eyes, he can see his daughter's face in the first compartment, brown eyes bright with excitement. She's much smarter than he is, he's certain she'll do well.

Platform nine and three quarters has the thickest concentration of magic he's ever seen. He fights his way through a tangle of robes and wands, wife at his side, looking curiously at a collection of magical knick-knacks in one of the shop windows.

He looks up to find Harry standing a few feet in front of him.

"Hallo," Dudley says.

Harry's air has changed again – deeper, richer, sadder, somehow. But streamlined and powerful, the lilies stronger than they had ever been before. The faint flowery scent comes again; he looks to the left and sees Harry's wife standing there.

Harry's shirt is crooked, his glasses smeared and scratched around the rims. "Er" – says Harry, after a short pause, "Hallo." His eyes crinkle up, and his hand automatically jumps to the untidy spikes at the back of his head, and Dudley smiles in spite of himself. Some things never change.