Dudley Dursley had reconciled himself years ago to the fact that he was not quick-witted, nor did his habitual silence do him the favor of making it seem as if he was more intelligent than he was. His face was too broad and moonish, his eyes too small and piggish. Age and years of getting hit had lent his face some appearance of character, but it wasn't a particularly kind appearance. He had reconciled himself to that, too. It was only the truth. He was not naturally inclined toward kindness, having been too deeply ingrained with selfishness from a young age.

And yet...

And yet once or twice each year he opened his home to Potter and his riotous brood so that the children could know their cousins. The adults exchanged few words at these meetings beyond saying each others' names gruffly and thanking each other for the scarf or this or that, but that wasn't the point of the event. It was for the children, to make them different than he'd been made. Because he'd had to learn things like kindness the hard way and he didn't want that for his children.

Dudley's eyes may have been small and piggish, but they still saw. His mind may have been sluggish, but in its own time it reached the inevitable conclusion.

His little girl was not normal. She was like...

"Potter. You there, Potter?"

"Dad, cousin Dudley's on the smellytone!" The voice on the other end of the line was a child's. Sirius Albus, he thought, or whatever horrible name his cousin had inflicted on the poor boy. "And it's not even Christmas!"

The line crackled. "Dursley?"

"It's the lima beans, Potter. Started with 'm, anyway."

"...With lima beans? What started with lima beans?"

"She's always hated 'm, but Mum doesn't listen because Vernie says he likes 'm—though between you and me I think it's only because he knows Little Bessie hates 'm so much. But... suddenly they'd started to vanish right off her plate. Thought she'd just learned to hide them in the potted cyclamens at first. Maybe I just hoped it. Then last week a giant beanstalk sprang up in Mum's garden. Went straight up for eighty feet. Mum didn't take well to that, as you can imagine. Dad had to spend half the morning chopping it down. And the other half cursing." Young Vernie had expended his vocabulary enormously. "And then yesterday..."

"What happened yesterday?"

"Vernie was pulling her pigtails. Calling her a ginger and a piggy. A little ginger piggy. Suppose we're lucky he didn't end up with a pig's tail of his own." He ran a hand over the spot that still twinged from time to time in foul weather. "As it was, she set a flock of these blue fairy things on 'm." Dudley paused. He wasn't certain about that collective noun and figured Harry would likely know and judge him for it.

"Cornish Pixies, probably," Harry said. "Is Vernie alright?"

"Mostly. A few scrapes. I shooed them off. Vernie's sworn he'll have his revenge, but he'll probably just put peanut butter in her hairbrush or something of the like." His son was a little too like him for comfort. "It's Bessie that worries me."

"How old is Little Bessie now?"

"Six," Dudley said in misery. He could remember well enough that Harry hadn't gone to that place until he was eleven. He couldn't make it five more years if they were going to be anything like this week, and he hated himself for wishing her there at all.

"I'm sorry, Dudley. I know you don't much like magic..."

"What am I going to do, Potter? Harry..." Dudley looked down to where his hand was clenched in a fist. He could take down huge men with that fist—he had a left hook that could fell an ox—but it was useless now. "You may think I'm thick, and I am, but I remember... those things. The invisible... things." He didn't even know what they looked like, but that summer afternoon had engraved itself on his soul... and Harry had just shrugged it off like he'd seen so much worse, because he had.

Dudley also remembered the crying in the night. 'Don't kill Cedric!' Who had Cedric been? Murdered, and probably a school boy. They'd all had to go into hiding because people had been trying to kill Harry. There had been a war, they'd told him. It was over now. But... Harry's parents—his aunt and uncle, though he'd never known them—hadn't died in a car accident. They'd been murdered, too, when they were barely out of school. There'd been a war then, as well.

Bessie was his little girl. She had his pale blue eyes and her mother's strong chin and ginger hair of her own that had made her grandmother cry. What was to say there wouldn't be a war when it was his daughter's turn to go away to this magical school where he couldn't protect her?

"Harry... what am I going to do?" How did Harry do it? How did he bring children into that world after what he'd seen?

He heard a sigh on the other end of the line. "We'll take it one day at a time, Dudley. I think it's time for a visit... why don't you and your family come here this time?"

"Can we do that?"

"I'll have to work out the details, but I don't see why we can't. Lily will be happy to see Little Bessie and we can tell you and Elizabeth about the messes that she and her cousin Hugo have gotten into this summer."

Dudley scratched his jaw. "Might be better if we leave Vernie with his grandparents this time." He'd arrange for his mum to suggest an extra special trip for her extra special boy. She was good at that spoiling sort of thing. They wouldn't even mention the visit to the Potters' until he'd gone. "But it could work. I... thank you, Potter."