Dudley huddled under the covers hoping they could provide at least some protection for him in this freakish house with its strange noises and its Ghoul in the attic who hadn't stopped clanging on the pipes since the sun had set. He'd had a happy life with his parents, and these freaks had told him that it was all a lie, and that the reason he was always getting sick wasn't because he was born small, sick, and early like his mother had told him, but because his mother had been feeding him poison so people would feel sorry for her.

His father had blamed all of his illnesses on The Freak, because he had been healthy until The Freak had arrived, if he was to be believed. The people at the freak hospital had been the ones who had been calling his parents evil, and the freaks had put his parents in jail because they were angry at them. But then again, the freaks had welcomed him into their home, but on the other hand that was because they wouldn't take him to his home where he belonged, and where his mother told him she loved him and fed him lots of yummy food, and because they needed him for something involving his cousin.

Eventually, the night in which he'd not gotten any sleep at all because he'd found himself starting at every noise in this strange environment where he was forced to share a room with The Freak and some strange kid who studied him like he was a bug had passed. As the sun was beginning to rise, he heard a bunch of clanging and yelling downstairs. Apparently, the twin freaks had pulled something on their father, and their mother wasn't happy. After she was done yelling at the twin freaks, the red-headed harpy started screaming for everyone to come down for breakfast. The strange kid who looked like he might be a Paki or something snapped awake immediately and started searching around him for something and failed to find it which snapped him even more awake and made him look very unhappy for a few seconds. The Freak took longer to wake up, groaning as he did so before clumsily reaching around on the nightstand next to his bed for his glasses.

Eventually, the two boys were dressed, the strange boy before The Freak, and they headed downstairs. He was reluctant to follow despite the fact that his stomach had told him he was starving, especially since he didn't eat much last night, but if he couldn't trust the food his mother had given him, how could he trust anything that came from the freaks who had taken him?

&!&!&!&

Marge Dursley sat in the courtroom as evidence was presented at trial, her blood growing cold as each new bit of evidence was presented. The Prosecution was painting Petunia as the poisoner, and she was inclined to agree with them as in most such cases it was the mother, but...

Vernon could get strange when family didn't pay him the proper attention, which was one of the reasons she visited her brother so seldomly despite the fact that she lived less than fifty miles away. That, and there was the fact that Vernon's first girlfriend had yet to be found after she'd run away from home following their break-up. It was entirely possible that the girl had changed her name and moved out of the country to avoid Vernon who had taken a good long while to understand it was over as she had threatened to do, but if Vernon was capable of this, or at the very least helping cover something like this up...

One of the early complaints that Vernon had about his ungrateful nephew who'd apparently not been born to a drunkard and a whore who'd killed an upstanding family man as she'd been led to believe had been that the boy was taking Petunia's attention away from his own son. All of that had stopped the first time poor little Duddypoo who'd been born prematurely had gotten sick. Duddypoo who had been supposed to carry the Dursley family name into the future.

Normally, she'd go with family on this and hang the rest, but family had been lost in this case and Vernon who'd once accidentally broken her arm when she'd called him a dirty word was all that was left. Coming to a decision, she left and made a call that under any other circumstances she would never have made in a million years. She would be testifying, and not for the Defense.

Yes, she drowned substandard puppies, and no, she wasn't a saint, but one thing she wasn't was a child killing monster. Like her forbears before her, she had to draw the line somewhere, or society would go completely to the dogs, and not the nice ones like her Ripper.

&!&!&!&!&

Boba looked down at the plate that the Weasley woman had set in front of him. The food was obviously fattening, like most of his meals at the Weasley residence had been, and would've given his father fits if he'd seen his diet. It was a wonder that the Weasley children were as thin as they were if they ate food like this all the time. If he didn't know any better, he'd be willing to swear that the food merely looked fattening because of all of the grease, and that the Weasleys were stretching the food out in some way that wasn't obvious and reduced the caloric intake to something negligible. But, then again, the society the Weasleys lived in had methods for taking about fifty kilos off of someone in under a week without either killing them or necessitating a lengthy hospital stay afterward.

Jedi Healers had been legendary for their abilities, but he didn't think even they could pull something like that off. These "Wizards" obviously could however, the evidence was shuffling into the kitchen and answering to the name of Dudley.