"The Reverb In Those Holy Halls (Is Like A Long Lost Friend)." (Harry Potter) G
Title: The Reverb In Those Holy Halls (Is Like A Long Lost Friend). (On Archive Of Our Own)
Author:
lannamichaels
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Rating: G
A/N: The title is from Big Houses by Squalloscope.
Summary: Harry Potter is a squib. Dudley Dursley is not.
1.
Dudley Dursley found out that his cousin was famous when they were eleven years old. It capped off what had been the strangest two months of Dudley's life. First he'd found out that he was magic -- a freak like Harry -- and then he'd found out that he would be going to a different school. His father had insisted that no son of his would ever go to Hogwarts. Dudley's mother had cried and cried and held him and cried so much that Dudley had worried something was wrong with her.
But in the end, Dudley Dursley agreed to go to Hogwarts. He bought a wand and some schoolbooks he didn't plan to read. He got onto a train with other wizards. And Dudley Dursley heard the name: Harry Potter.
But his cousin hadn't snuck in and followed him to school. No, it was worse. Harry was famous. And it was his Harry, too! The photos had the scar and the hair and everything.
Dudley's cousin was the savior of the wizarding world. "He lost all his magic doing it, people say," said the girl in the train compartment. "I think it's a tragedy, don't you?"
And Dudley had looked down at the photo of a baby that was definitely his cousin and more parts of his world fell down around him, crumbling into nothing but dust and confusion and words he was definitely not allowed to say in front of his mother.
2.
Dudley dutifully wrote home the first night. He knew his mother would read the letter and his father wouldn't. Dudley had never doubted that his parents loved him, not until--
All the unexplained things surrounding Harry? They'd never been surrounding Harry. They'd been surrounding Dudley. Dudley had been the monster the whole time, not Harry, Dudley was the one who needed to have normal beaten into him, Dudley was--
Whatever, his parents probably still loved him. His mother was sad but also happy for him, and his father would come around. Dudley could always get his father to do anything; why would this be any different?
But, no, it was Harry. It was Harry that Dudley had to write to. Because Harry, Dudley knew, had no idea that he was famous or not a monster or any of it. Dudley's parents had to have known, since Harry got dropped at their doorstep by wizards. But Harry didn't know. Dudley's family wanted to make him normal, so they'd never tell him. But that's what Squib meant, said the girl on the train. It meant a normal person to you and me. It meant abnormal to the wizards.
Dudley's head hurt from all of it.
It took him a couple days to figure out what to write to Harry. It wasn't very long. It didn't contain an apology; Dudley hadn't been wrong. There'd been nothing wrong with what he did to Harry, Harry deserved it for being weird. And even if Harry wasn't weird this way, he had to be some other way, right? There was no way Dudley's parents had gotten it that wrong. They were raising one normal kid and one not normal kid. And they were wrong about which kid was which but--
At the end of the letter, Dudley scribbled, "don't take this as me being sorry". Then he crossed it out and wrote a new letter. Harry should know what he was missing out on, that was all. It had nothing to do with messing up. It was just lording it over Harry, that Dudley got what Harry should have, just like Harry took the blame for Dudley being magic his entire life--
"Fletch?" Dudley asked the other muggle in Hufflepuff in his year. "Did you ever get in trouble for your accidental magic?"
"No, my parents blamed the cat," Justin Finch-Fletchley said. "Why?"
"Just wondering," Dudley replied.
3.
When Dudley went home for Christmas, Harry avoided him. He was so skinny, Dudley noticed. If Harry was a wizard, would he not be? If Harry was a wizard, could he have fought back all the time? Did Dudley only win all their fights because Dudley had magic on his side?
Harry was still sleeping in the cupboard. It looked smaller than it ever did before Dudley left. And Dudley was at school all the time, it wasn't like he needed two bedrooms. But when he offered his spare one to Harry, Harry looked torn about accepting it, like it came with invisible strings that would tie him up and hit him, like Dudley used to do.
"Look," Dudley said. "What if I force you to take it? I'll tell my parents that I'll punch you if you don't sleep in my bedroom and watch all my stuff to make sure nothing happens to it."
"What would happen to it?" Harry asked, because Harry was what people would expect to happen to it-- or Dudley's accidental magic-- or-- or--
"I don't know, it gets dusty and breaks," Dudley said. "That's not the point. The point is you need a bedroom. You live here, don't you?"
Harry shrugged and Dudley had never ever gotten a return letter from Harry while he was at Hogwarts. Dudley was only sure that Harry got them because he sent them with owls, and owls knew what they were doing. Dudley's parents couldn't confiscate an owl post letter they didn't know about.
"How much time do you even spend here?" Dudley asked suspiciously.
"They don't notice I'm gone if the chores get done," Harry said. "I sleep most nights in a friend's basement."
"A friend? Do I know him?" Dudley asked. He should, he knew everyone around here.
"You wouldn't," Harry said. "Anyway, I've got a job, too, and with that and school, I'm really not here that much. You don't have to worry about me."
Dudley never worried about him a day in his life and he'd never start. But about that-- "they made you get a job?"
"I need money somehow, don't I?" Harry asked. "It's just a few hours a week."
"Your dad was super rich," Dudley said. "His whole family was professionally rich for generations, the way they tell it. You've got money, Harry."
Harry crossed his arms. "You said I'm some squib thing. How am I supposed to get this magical money?"
"We'll go together," Dudley decided. "It's got to be in Gringotts, there's nowhere else it could be, wizards have only got one bank. I'll get you there and we'll talk to the goblins. If it's your cash, they've got to give it to you. Or, or tell you who else to talk to. But it's got to be a fortune!"
A fortune should be enough. And Harry'd never touched it in his whole life, so it'd just been getting interest all these years. Dudley was never great at numbers or money, but he'd heard enough to know that if you left money to sit around in a bank, you got more money. But you got the most money if you took it out the bank and invested it somewhere else. Someone should be taking care of this for Harry; it wasn't like Dudley's parents ever had been. And if no one else would do it, then it was up to Dudley to do it. He couldn't go back and stop hitting Harry for things that weren't Harry's fault, but he could get him his money and that should be nearly enough for the words that Dudley didn't want to say. Couldn't say. Couldn't.
4.
"Mr. Potter," said the goblin at Gringotts, which got rid of all the worries Dudley had about Harry having to prove who he was using some kind of magic that he could never do. "Do you have your key?"
Harry and Dudley exchanged glances. "No," Harry said. "Guess I must have dropped it somewhere. What do I do without a key?"
"One moment," the goblin said and had Harry put his hand on a magical pad. It glowed six different colors and Harry gasped, but not in pain. Dudley knew what Harry sounded like in pain and it wasn't this. When Harry pulled his hand away, there was an ornate key left behind. The goblin nodded. "This way," he said. "Try not to lose your copy again, Mr. Potter. The replacement fee is ten galleons."
Harry mouthed 'what's a galleon' at Dudley, who mimed counting bills back at him. Harry nodded. "Okay, sorry," Harry said.
The goblin took them to the Potter vault and Dudley-- Dudley just stared. Harry just stared.
"We can't let my parents know you have all this money," Dudley said. It wasn't the first time he'd really understood what kind of danger his parents were to Harry. No, he'd been understanding that the longer he'd been away from them at school. But-- if his parents knew Harry had this much money, there was no way they wouldn't try to take it somehow, even if it was weird money. It was still money.
"If this is solid gold," Harry started.
"I think it is," Dudley said. "We can ask the goblins, but there's an exchange rate. You don't need to melt it down or anything."
Harry pushed his glasses back up his face. He looked very shaky. "Excuse me, is there an inventory?" he asked the goblin. "And can I get it to take home with me? And do you partner with any muggle banks, by any chance?"
"What are you thinking?" Dudley asked Harry on the way out.
"If I know how much money I have, in real money," Harry said, "and I know how much I can spend and I can access it, then I can run away." He said the words like it was something wonderful, something only to be dreamed of. Dudley'd only heard people talk like that before when it came to sports and playstations and girlfriends. That wasn't the tone someone should have about leaving behind the only life they'd known. And Dudley did that. Dudley was one of the reasons Harry felt like that. But not anymore, right? Dudley was fixing that, right?
"Where would you go, if you ran away?" Dudley asked. "And don't say friends from school, you know they'd just have to send you back home again when they caught you."
"I don't know," Harry said.
"Okay," Dudley said. "Then let me help."
Harry looked at him. "Your magic can conjure up some responsible adult guardians who I can pay off with this money?"
"No," Dudley said. "But let me try to find someone who'll take in a runaway kid with a sob story. My school's got loads of muggles, maybe some of their families will want to take in the Boy-Who-Lived. It's a better plan than you have."
"That's because I don't have a plan," Harry muttered. Then he groaned. "Fine, fine, Dudley. Give it your best shot."
"Shake on it," Dudley demanded, in case he came home next break to find out that Harry ran away and his parents never thought to tell him or, worse, never noticed.
Harry looked really weird when they shook on it but Dudley didn't even squeeze his hand, so it couldn't be that.
5.
"Granger," Dudley said. "Your parents are smart, right?"
Hermione Granger assessed him. They didn't talk that much since they weren't in the same House, but Dudley was a muggle and didn't care that much for Houses anyway, and he couldn't imagine Granger did either. It wasn't like she had loads of friends in hers. "Yes, they are," Granger said.
"And did you ever want a brother?" Dudley asked.
"Excuse me?" Granger put a lot of disdain into those words. It was like she was waiting for there to be a trick. She was a lot like Harry. They'd get along.
"I've got a cousin. Foster-brother. Whatever. But he needs another home and we can't do it legally, so he's going to run away, but he needs somewhere to run to," Dudley said.
"Why can't you do it legally?" Granger asked.
Dudley didn't understand the question. "Because of my parents?"
"Are they abusing him?" Granger demanded.
"Uh." It wasn't a hard question. It wasn't a hard question. It wasn't a hard question. "Yes," Dudley said. "Yes, they abuse him. It's really bad, Granger. We want to get him out of there."
"There's legal ways to do that," Granger said. "Didn't anyone ever come to your school and talk about it?"
If anyone had ever come to Dudley's school to talk about abused children, they'd never done it in any way that had tapped Dudley on the shoulder and told him that he lived with one. "I don't think so," Dudley said.
"You don't want my parents," Granger said. "They're dentists. That won't help. But my aunt's a lawyer."
"My cousin can pay," Dudley said, on the precipice of feeling relieved. "He's got loads of money from inheritance."
"I'm going to forget you offered that," Granger said.
"Uh," Dudley said.
"Grangers don't make people pay to save them," Granger said. "We do it because it's right."
"Uh," Dudley repeated.
"Pretend it because I'm a Gryffindor, if you need to," Granger said.
Dudley frowned. "That's even worse. You know I'm a muggle. But if you won't take his money, we won't argue."
6.
Granger's aunt had been clear: this won't be as fast as they want it to be. But it turned out Harry's friend who hid him had parents who were keeping track. And there'd been some teachers at school who had kept track, before Dudley's parents had convinced them it was all Harry's fault. And some teachers at his new school had been concerned. And--
And there'd been a lot of people who hadn't done anything, was what Dudley took away from that. Because they hadn't. Harry could have run away and never come back and all they would have said was, he had a bad home life. But none of them tried to get him a better one. They hadn't been as bad as Dudley had been, but they weren't being as good as he was being now, and Dudley didn't like that.
Granger's aunt asked Dudley if he felt safe at home and Dudley said of course he did. Granger's aunt asked Dudley if he thought his parents would redirect their abuse at him, with the loss of Harry. And Dudley said no, of course they wouldn't, his parents loved him.
His parents loved the normal him.
Dudley Dursley wasn't normal. Dudley Dursley was a wizard. That wasn't normal.
But his parents would never hurt him. They wouldn't. They loved him.
"Are you ever scared of your parents?" Granger's aunt wanted to know. And of course Dudley wasn't. He never could be.
And he was big. He could fight back, if they tried. Harry'd been starved all his life, of course he never fought back to them. But Dudley was big and he was away at school anyway, and he could always go home for the summer with Fletch or Macmillan. He wasn't worried for himself. This was about Harry.
There were a lot of lawyers, in the end, and people who weren't lawyers. Dudley's parents had lawyers and Dudley had to talk to them and he didn't even understand why his parents were bothering. It wasn't like they wanted to keep Harry.
They wanted the lie, Harry told him.
And Dudley understood. They wanted it to be like what Dudley had thought it really was: that Harry was the wrong sort, that Harry deserved it, and they were right to treat him like that. They were right to tell Dudley to treat him like that. They were right about everything. But they weren't right, and they shouldn't get to keep Harry, and Dudley-- Dudley hurt Harry a lot.
Maybe he should let Harry go, too.
7.
Granger found Dudley sitting in the owlery one day. Dudley had his latest letter to Harry in his hands and one of the school owls was peering at him suspiciously. Granger didn't say anything, just huffed a little and settled down next to him with a textbook and started studying.
Granger'd been a good friend. Dudley could tell her.
"He never writes back," Dudley said. "I should stop writing to him, shouldn't I?"
"If the owl doesn't stick around, he needs to send it to a special post office in Diagon Alley to write back," Granger said.
Oh. Dudley hadn't thought of that. He'd just thought, well, Harry could always send letters. Dudley's parents sent letters. Dudley didn't think that maybe Harry didn't know how to. Stupid. What did he think, that Dudley's mother would tell Harry how to do anything magic? She'd never.
"I don't think he wants to hear from me anyway," Dudley said. "I used to be really terrible to him."
"Does he care about that?" Granger asked, which threw Dudley for a moment. And it was true, Harry never seemed to ever hold it against him, any time they'd talked. Dudley didn't know why. If anyone had ever treated Dudley an ounce of the way Dudley had treated Harry, Dudley would have broken their noses. And maybe Harry cared more about survival now than he did about their childhood, but once Harry didn't have to worry about survival anymore, he could get around to caring about how awful Dudley used to be to him. "Anyway, you should just ask him."
"If he wants me to shove my head into a closet and bang the door a few times and never talk to him again, you mean?" Dudley asked.
Granger sighed at him. "Or something less dramatic than that, Dudley, honestly."
Dudley cracked a smile. "You're really smart, Granger. I'll try that." He gave the letter to the owl and watched it fly away and then he looked down at Granger's textbook. "Why are you always studying?"
"Because magic's interesting," Granger said. "Don't you think so?"
"I suppose," Dudley said. "I like Charms and Transfiguration." Being able to make things fly had been just like being in a video game and being able to turn things into something else was the key feature of every toy Dudley had ever wanted when he was seven. "The rest of it is hard, except Muggle Studies, I take that because it's easy. But it's just school."
"What do you want to do after school?" Granger asked, like every adult had ever asked Dudley in his life. He knew the answer.
"I'm going to go into business with my father," Dudley said proudly. "He runs a drill business and I'll take it over from him. Grunnings, have you ever heard of it?"
And Granger was looking at him again, like Dudley was stupid. And Dudley knew he was stupid, was proud of being stupid, but this was worse. She was looking at him like Dudley had missed something really, really obvious. Harry had used to look at Dudley that way and then Dudley had hit him. "Dudley, you're a wizard, aren't you?" she asked him.
"What's that got to do with it?" Dudley asked.
"Don't you want to get a wizard job?" Granger asked. "I'm going to get a job in the Ministry, I've it all planned out."
That was because she was a girl and she was smart, and who'd want to be a dentist? "I don't need a wizard job, I'll have a muggle job."
Granger looked frustrated with him. Oh, no, was she going to talk about potential? No one saying 'potential' had ever been good for Dudley. He knew what his potential was, thanks. People talking about potential mostly meant they wanted Dudley to stop failing his exams. But instead, Granger tried a different track. "You just took Harry away from them," Granger said. "And you said yourself they don't like things that aren't like them. Well, you're not like them anymore. Why do you think your dad is still going to give you a job when you graduate?"
"Because he's my dad," Dudley said automatically. "You don't know him, I can get him to do anything. I just have to scream or cry."
"When was the last time you tried it and it worked?" Granger asked, which was a good point, as much as Dudley didn't want to hear it. Dudley's parents didn't tell him no that much, but Dudley thought it was more that they were scared of him now, not that they wanted to spoil their dear sweet little baby boy. Dudley was sure that his mother never did really believe he beat up Harry, because she thought Dudley would never hurt anyone. He'd built up their illusions of him so he'd get what he wanted, but those illusions couldn't work if they knew he was some dangerous wizard with a magic wand who could curse them and hex them and turn them into animals if he wanted. And he'd sicced the entire child abuse apparatus on them. They could have gone to prison, Dudley found out later. He hadn't known that was an option when he'd started it, but even if he had been, he'd probably still have done it.
Maybe his parents didn't really love him. Maybe they loved the lie, like Harry said. And they'd loved that lie that Dudley had made himself seem so he could get what he wanted. But Dudley wasn't like that anymore. What was there left of that Dudley for them to still love?
"So what should I do?" Dudley asked her. "It's not like there's a jobs counselor around here."
"That's what your Head of House does," Granger said promptly. "I talk to Professor McGonagall all the time about it. She has office hours for it. It's mostly for post-OWL students, but she says I'm very advanced. I bet Professor Sprout does the same, you should ask her."
"Guess I should," Dudley said.
8.
Professor Sprout wanted him to spend some time thinking about what he liked to do. That was an easy question; Dudley could have told her then. But she'd wanted him to think about it.
When Dudley was a kid, what he'd really liked to do was be better than other people. He'd had a lot of ways of showing people he was better. Sometimes that was hurting them, but sometimes it was just being better. He would get so many toys and he'd never play with half of them, but just having them was enough. He had three computers when no one else his age had any. He couldn't see over his stack of video games. And that meant Dudley was the best, because he had the most, because he could rule the playground with his friends.
And most of that was gone, but Dudley still liked games. He liked winning. He hadn't tried Quidditch because he was scared of heights, but he still played all the magical games in the Common Room all the time, even when everyone else was studying.
That was not a serious answer, Dudley knew. He was supposed to say he liked serious, adult things, that could become serious, adult careers. And that was probably why Professor Sprout had told him to think about it. She wanted to give him time to think up something adult that he liked to do.
Dudley wasn't smart. Some kids had had computers because they took them apart and put them back together and learned how they worked. Some kids played games and then invented their own. Dudley never did that.
But maybe Dudley was still thinking like a muggle. Maybe he should think of... magic things he liked to do.
He liked using his power to entertain himself. There was nothing better than a good Transfiguration joke, taking a block of wood and turning it into any number of punchlines. And Charms was great fun, when Dudley could get it right. He was always behind the class, but eventually he caught up. Granger would say that Dudley should look at the career listings by which OWL he'd need and maybe he should do that. That was the reason they were supposed to start thinking about this around OWL times, right? So they'd know what to specialize in? Some of the careers would require electives he never started, though, so he could throw those right out easily enough. He'd want careers that did Charms and Transfiguration, then.
Oh, and Muggle Studies. But Muggle Studies was easy. Dudley didn't see why all the muggles didn't take it. Why spend time studying things you don't know, when you don't have to study for things you do? And they said Dudley was the stupid one.
9.
It turned out there were a lot of jobs in muggle coordination and Dudley was already sort of doing one of them, since he was maintaining a correspondence with a squib, which counted as helping maintain cultural ties with people from magical families who lived in the muggle world. That was such a weird way to think about Harry that Dudley stopped immediately, but he wrote to Harry about it anyway, and Harry wrote back that if it helped for job placement purposes, he'd write Dudley a reference letter.
"Dudley Dursley keeps me informed of the events in the magical world that I was born in and helps me navigate the wizarding world when I need to," Harry wrote from where he was living with his new family and Dudley wasn't sure if Harry was joking or not, but it still made him feel good, like a cheering charm on his chest.
It wasn't a job in manufacturing, but wizarding manufacturing wanted better grades than Dudley had. Muggle coordination seemed like where all the muggles who didn't do well in Hogwarts went to go work after school. But it was important work. If there'd been better muggle coordination, maybe a wizard would ever have looked in on the squib they'd dropped on a muggle family's doorstep and taken Harry away before everything all happened.
Dudley spent his last Hogwarts summer in France with the family of a Beauxbatons boy he'd met during the Triwizard Tournament. Dudley had been slowly learning French so he could visit, but he spent most of his time in a field with his hosts, learning about French charms. He sent letters home to his parents and they wrote back but they never asked him anything real anymore. It was like they were only going through the motions of being a family. Dudley watched how his hosts interacted with each other, like they all really loved each other and wanted to be together, not that they were all closing their eyes and pretending so hard that everything was fine, while someone who could have been Dudley if their places were switched was living in a cupboard under the stairs.
In July, Dudley bought Harry a birthday present. On the card, he scrawled, "sorry for all that back then. And sorry I never said it before."
Harry wrote back: "what are you talking about? You've apologized loads of times."
10.
Dudley's first job out of school involved visiting new Hogwarts parents and talking to them about what it would be like at school for their kids. The office liked to have new graduates do most of the talking at these visits; the parents seemed to trust them more. Dudley spent his first few months telling parents that their kid wasn't writing home because there was a lot of schoolwork, not because they had been eaten by a walking suit of armor.
The parents always asked about how Dudley's parents had handled it and Dudley always said, "my aunt was a witch, so they already knew about Hogwarts" and that was good enough for the parents, even though every time Dudley said it, he wondered even more about it.
Dudley got good at sort-of-lying. "Did you have any siblings who were jealous?" asked one set of parents, and Dudley had to say, "I grew up with my cousin who isn't magic, but we never had any problems about that." Fletch had done summer classes because he was always headed to Cambridge after Hogwarts, so Dudley had to write to him a lot to get details about that summer school to make concerned families happy.
It was a good thing it wasn't Dudley's job to convince families that Hogwarts provided a good education. It was just his job to convince them that the magical world wouldn't kill them.
Dudley wondered who'd had these conversations with his own parents, or if no one had, because Aunt Lily had been a witch and so the Dursleys would have to know everything there was to know already. These parents were scared or hopeful or concerned or worried. Dudley couldn't help but think about this own parents after these visits. Dudley's father pretended magic didn't exist, that Dudley had some government job now. Dudley's mother was scared of magic but when Dudley had given her an enchanted petunia one year, she had burst into tears and called him her sweet Duddikins. But she didn't want to hear about Hogwarts.
They'd hated Harry because he wasn't normal.
Or maybe they didn't. Maybe they'd just hated Harry. Dudley didn't know anymore.
Dudley stayed on the family visits even after he was offered a chance to stop coming along. He wanted to look at the parents. He wanted to see if anyone was like his parents.
He didn't know what he'd do if he found one. But--
But there was no harm in looking. And it might help someone, too.
Just to make sure, after all.
Someone had to.
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1177281.html.