Fic: Prompt 33
Title: Inner Beauty, My Arse
Author: anguis_1
Prompt: 33: Beauty
Pairing: Dudley/Luna
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): Dudley is Dudley, and, as such, espouses some views that I find repugnant.
Word count: 5,039 words
Summary/Excerpt: Missing the year prior to sitting one’s A-levels would have been quite difficult for a student of average ability, but for a student of Dudley’s calibre, it was downright disastrous.
Author's notes: Many thanks to all who supported the writing of this fic.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated characters and settings remain the intellectual property of JK Rowling and her associates. We are very grateful for permission to play with them.
Inner Beauty, My Arse
Missing the year prior to sitting one’s A-levels would have been quite difficult for a student of average ability, but for a student of Dudley’s calibre, it was downright disastrous. He had made it through Lower Sixth mostly thanks to Piers, who’d turned into something of a swot that year and would only wander the streets of Little Whinging looking for trouble after they had finished their homework and revised an hour or two. It had been a pain in the arse, but the rest of their gang was slowly dispersing, and no one could restrain a snivelling, squirming whinger quite like Piers could.
Much to Dudley’s chagrin, slogging through piles of homework apparently had helped to keep at least some of the material from leaking back out his ears. He’d tried to work through the problems in an old maths text he’d found during those long, dull months in captivity, but that soon fizzled out without Piers’ motivation and instruction (his parents might have been well-educated, but they were rubbish at explaining things).
After the sudden release from confinement, Dudley had been plunked back into school without any of the school officials realising that he’d not actually attended any of his classes that year. (He had to admit that that was quite a fancy bit of magic, and one that he would have appreciated had it not meant that he found himself, a fortnight after his return, sitting down to a sheaf of exam papers that might have been written in Japanese for all he could understand them.) The other students had looked at him a bit oddly the first day back, but shuffled around to accommodate him as though he’d always been there.
Explaining his absence to Piers had been a different story. Apparently Harry’s magic friends (or whatever they were) had neglected to pursue their research far enough to discover that he actually had a friend, and quite a good one, at that.
Good friend though he was, Piers was no miracle-worker. He gamely spent hours with Dudley trying to catch him up on everything he’d missed that year, but it was a futile effort. He put the whole miserable exam experience behind him for the summer holidays, but summer ended all too quickly as it was wont to do, and results day proved that he had performed just as abysmally as he had thought.
His dad had turned four distinct shades of purple before bellowing something entirely incomprehensible. The bellows eventually resolved into repetitions at increasing volume of “Get out of my bloody house!”
His mum had stared vacantly past him and returned to hoovering the living room with detached efficiency.
If Harry’s magic letters had turned his dad into a raving lunatic (albeit temporarily), then the past year had transformed his mum into a high-functioning madwoman--the quiet sort who scrubbed the kitchen floor twice a day and cooked meals with effortless precision, but who didn’t spy on the next-door neighbours anymore and sometimes served roasts for breakfast and soft-boiled eggs with toast soldiers for supper and once turned on the gas without lighting the pilot. At first Dudley had tried to jolt her out of it with progressively outrageous antics (at least that was the only palatable excuse he could find for his behavior upon later reflection), but then he settled into an uneasy hope that her madness would be just as temporary as his dad’s had been.
Surprisingly, his dad had been serious about the “Get out of my bloody house!” business. The next morning at breakfast, he’d seemed genuinely surprised to see his son join him at the table, so he reiterated it, adding on “effing layabout,” “worthless bastard,” “piss-poor excuse for a son” and a few other epithets Dudley had never imagined to hear coming out of his father’s spit-frothed mouth (particularly aimed at him).
Perhaps the most shocking, horrifying thing was that his mum said nothing.
Under his father’s baleful glare, Dudley only managed to choke down seconds before legging it upstairs to stuff a few changes of clothes in a rucksack. He left without a backwards glance and slouched off to the Polkisses’ house, where he holed up with Piers and his mum. With anyone else it would’ve been awkward, as Piers was packing to go to uni, but Piers was as he’d always been--enough of a wanker about every bit of petty trivia that crossed his mind to mask his avoidance of still-raw wounds. Mrs Polkiss certainly didn’t keep house to his own mum’s standards, but she was hospitable and solicitous in a warm, maternal way that Dudley was sure Petunia would not have reciprocated had Piers showed up at number four, Privet Drive in similar circumstances. (To be fair, even though she had cosseted and coddled him with single-minded devotion, Dudley couldn’t remember a time when he ever would have called his mum either warm or maternal.)
A week later, after helping Piers move in to his room at Guildford and loudly proclaiming his relief at being done with his schooling in a hollow voice that both of them pretended to believe, Dudley went home while his father was at work. He packed most of the rest of his clothing, the laptop he’d gotten for his last birthday, and as many computer games as he could stuff in with his underwear, gave his mum the address of a small flat he’d found in Woking, and left.
When he had been stuck in a house that had both lacked electrical outlets and made his batteries splutter out in a rather alarming shower of sparks, Dudley had resorted to raiding the bookshelves after a few weeks of unmitigated boredom. His first idea had been to test the strength in his hands by seeing how many pages he could rip at a time, but, after the paper proved to be suspiciously indestructible, he resigned himself to actually reading them. When there was nothing else to do besides eluding the overly enthusiastic Dedalus Diggle and avoiding his apoplectic father, reading turned out to be the least repellant of his options. The first book he’d chosen (despite evidence to the contrary, he refused to believe that the book had chosen him) was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. He’d only understood about half the words, but what ghoulish scenes those words evoked!
It was those images of tripods and Heat Rays and heaps of burning corpses that led him to Woking. His rage--at Harry, at his father for being unreasonable and his mum for abandoning him in his hour of need, at the University of Surrey for luring Piers away (and, though he couldn’t quite admit it, at Piers for allowing himself to be lured), at the general unfairness of the world--still blazed deep in his gut and threatened to rise up and choke him. The scene of mass carnage and destruction (even if only fictional) seemed an appropriate choice, and just as logical as anywhere else in Surrey he might have gone.
Pub brawls--swinging his fists wildly through the haze of drink at other similarly inebriated blokes--were not nearly as satisfying as boxing, and were frustratingly thwarted by barmen, bouncers, and every busybody patron who just couldn’t leave Dudley alone to the business of bludgeoning his temper (and a few deserving lager louts) into submission.
After two weeks of blackened eyes, split knuckles, and an amplification of the buzzing in his ears that had made him give up the ring in the first place, he found himself down to his last fistful of crumpled banknotes with no source of replenishment in sight.
Dudley’s particular skill set wasn’t exactly in high demand, and he was frustratingly underqualified for the few positions he thought looked interesting. He laboriously typed up an appallingly short CV anyway. Thankfully, Piers caught the most egregious misspellings (saving him from the embarrassment of, among other things, boasting of having attended Smetlings Shcool), and Dudley began the tedious process of finding himself a job.
It was with fond memories of defacing Little Whinging’s modest Nonconformist cemetery that he applied to be a night security guard at Brookwood Cemetery. Piers had had the inspired idea of painting crosses on the Jews’ stones and Stars of David on the Catholics’. Malcolm had suggested swastikas all round, but that had been rejected as boring (and, though none of them had dared to voice his reservations to the rest of the gang, they were all relieved that Piers had come up with his clever alternative. Vandalism was just a bit of fun, but swastikas spelled serious trouble if you were caught.)
The man in charge of hiring glanced appraisingly at Dudley’s towering, glowering form, cautioned him against nicking the bronze flower holders to fence on the side, and offered him a position on the spot.
****
Even on his nights off, Dudley kept to the same schedule. It had taken nearly three weeks for his body to adjust to his new working hours, but once he’d made the switch, he found it impossible to close his eyes in the dark of the night. He’d managed to find a small selection of businesses that were open all hours, including a chippy, a launderette, and a small shop.
It was on one such night a few months into his employment that Dudley was in the shop at about three in the morning. The only other person in the shop besides the dozing proprietor--though he was just a Paki and didn’t really count anyway--was a girl of about his own age in a ridiculous yellow garment that had enough material for two outfits. She was scrawny and had no proper tits to speak of, so Dudley probably wouldn’t have looked at her twice except that she seemed to be following him. Whenever he would look over his shoulder, she would be standing several feet away examining a jar of Marmite or a box of custard powder as though it were the most fascinating thing in the world (or perhaps something from another world altogether).
His temper wearing thin, Dudley swung about abruptly. “What the hell do you want?”
“What do I want?” She paused to consider, as though he’d asked something profound requiring serious deliberation. “I want to find a Carapaced Slubgublin, to see Hogwarts fully rebuilt, and to shag you senseless.”
She said it so earnestly that, for a moment, Dudley almost believed her. Then the rest of the gibberish registered, and his volatile temper snapped. He hadn’t been to a pub since getting tossed out of the Ox and Ass the night he celebrated his newfound employment, and he was itching for a fight, even if it was just a verbal sparring match.
He drew himself up and stepped forward to loom over her. She didn’t even have the sense to take a step back, but instead cocked her head at him as he growled, “You taking the piss?” Even he thought it was quite impressive how much menace was squeezed into those four short words.
She remained infuriatingly unintimidated, though. “You asked what I wanted.” Her vague gaze drifted to the spill of his paunch over his belt, then jerked away to rest on the tinned beef above his shoulder. She sighed. “You’re very attractive.”
“I don’t want to hear bollocks about inner beauty.”
At this, the girl wilted. “I wouldn’t say anything about that, really, because you’ve hidden your inner beauty so deep I don’t know if you’ll ever find it again. Your outer beauty, though, tempts me terribly.”
It had been a long time since somebody sober had mocked him that blatantly. The packet of crisps he’d been about to put in his basket exploded in his grip. He stuffed it savagely back onto the shelf and tried to think of something sufficiently cruel to counter with.
She was faster, though, and said, “I wish other people could see with my eyes.” A wistful smile curved her lips, and she added, “I’m Luna, by the way.”
Luna-tic, his mind corrected as he turned back to his shopping in disgust. The girl also turned away, and in the edge of his vision, he saw her reach up and pull a stick from her bun, releasing a scraggly cascade of dirty blonde hair down her back.
Dudley didn’t notice her hair or the small, glittering bird that fluttered free of its human nest. All he could see was the slender piece of wood in her hand, and all he could feel was the old pulsating pain in his arse.
He must have made a sound--the strangled gasp that still echoed in his ears had probably issued from his own throat--as she looked at him quizzically. He gabbled something that may or may not have been, “What are you doing with that wand?” and then clapped his hands across his mouth before it issued forth any further idiocy.
“Oh, dear. You know what this is? Hermione assured me that Muggle women use something similar to put their hair up.”
Dudley had been hoping she would deny it, confusion blossoming across her daft face. She’d then have a good laugh at his expense (she’d undoubtedly already had one, so what was one more?) and leave him alone. Better that the familial madness--temporary or not--manifested itself prematurely than to be cornered by some mental wizard-girl with a magic wand.
He wasn’t going to be that lucky (and it was getting harder and harder to remember a time when luck had sided with him). She’d not only not denied it, but she’d used the M-word (the other M-word). Dudley considered throwing a quick shovel hook but quickly discarded the idea. She’d probably blast him before the blow could land, and then do it again because of his temerity. Anyway, it had been a while since he’d last hit a girl.
In the time it took him to process all that (and when one’s brain always insisted on taking the long way round, it was several seconds of standing there gormlessly), the girl had smiled that odd, sad smile again, flicked her wand, and vanished.
****
Dudley’s mum rang him every Sunday evening before he went to work, until one day when she didn’t. He might not have noticed, except that lately he’d been thinking about Sunday dinners and early morning fry-ups and giving himself a most painful stomachache. He’d been a bit surprised that she always managed to call right on schedule despite the rest of her psychoses, but he supposed it went along with a mother’s intuition and all that bollocks.
Dudley arrived back at his flat after work Tuesday morning to a bewildering message from Piers. “Hey, Big D, how’s, uh, bugger! Shit, I’m sorry. I dunno what else to say. If you need to t-- Er, if you need to have a pint, you know where I’m at. Any hour. Seriously. I mean it. Fu--”
Eloquence had never been one of Piers’ recommending qualities, but usually Dudley had some idea of what he was trying to say. After replaying the message three times and coming no closer to deciphering it, he was interrupted by an incoming call that yielded to his Aunt Marge’s familiar bellow upon answering.
She, too, seemed to be babbling, although his lack of comprehension in this case might also have had something to do with the simultaneous conversation his aunt was having with one of her dogs, who howled at regular intervals in response to Marge’s brusque commands. In between “Ripper, down!” and “There’s a good boy”, she demanded to know why Dudley hadn’t been at the funeral. It took another minute to get a word in edgewise to ask whom the funeral had been for. That question silenced his aunt for nearly ten seconds, and when she spoke again, the bluster abated to a rough tenderness quite alien to her voice.
His mum’s insanity had been temporary after all--ended not by a recovery of her humdrum nosy normalcy, but by a slightly larger than prescribed quantity of little white tablets he’d never even known she’d had. Her death had been ruled inconclusively accidental by a charitable coroner on Saturday, and she’d been buried on Monday. His father never called.
****
For the first time, Dudley skived off work. Piers met him at the Ox and Ass even though it was exams week, silently plying him with cheap lager and eventually hauling him back to his flat before catching the last bus to Guildford.
The next month passed in a grey haze. Dudley worked, tramping around the graves of the long- and not-so-long-dead and occasionally scaring away jumpy teenagers intent on causing mischief. Piers rang him regularly to natter on about inconsequential bits of gossip and took him out for drinks and darted sorrowful, liquid-eyed glances (incongruous on his still rat-like face) when he thought no one was looking.
After drifting through another night of work, Dudley found himself on the streets of Little Whinging with no recollection of how he had arrived there nor any idea of why. Out of habit, his tired feet trudged to the play park. Someone really should have fixed those swings by now--it had been a few years since he and his gang had wrecked them, and most of the chains still dangled lazily on the ground. What good was a park without swings? There was one swing still completely attached, and he sat in it. It squealed in protest, but held his weight as he rocked back and forth into a drowsy stupor.
He shivered awake half an hour later. It was late enough that his father must have already left for work. He could stop by the house and collect a few more belongings, maybe pinch some biscuits from the kitchen and a few quid from the not-so-secret hiding place under the ugly dog statue from Aunt Marge, and his father need never know he’d been there.
The house was a disaster. He nearly stepped back outside to check that he had entered the correct house, but his key had opened the lock, and photos of himself at various stages of development grinned, simpered, and smirked from every flat surface in the living room, dust already beginning to dull the gleams in his eyes.
Dudley waded through a month’s detritus of takeaway cartons and other rubbish on his way to the kitchen. It, too, was in nearly unrecognizable disarray. In amongst the haphazard stacks of dirty glasses and plates by the sink was a crumpled letter addressed to his father from Philip Jenkins.
Insomuch as his father had friends, Philip Jenkins was one of his oldest. They’d started at Grunnings together and had climbed the corporate ladder side by side (single-handedly propelling the company from insolvent obscurity into its current prominence and prosperity to hear Vernon tell it, which Dudley had, on numerous occasions).
Dudley had been swiping his parents’ post for years--ever since those letters--and felt no compunctions whatsoever about pulling the note from its envelope and reading it. It was short and to the point. Philip reminded Vernon of their long, illustrious friendship and pleaded with him to pull himself together, or at the board meeting next month, it would be recommended that he be made redundant.
There was only one thing Dudley could do. He caught the next bus back to Woking, dumped some clothes in a case, and returned to Little Whinging.
There wasn’t much in the fridge, and what was there all seemed to date from his mum’s last shopping trip. Dudley binned the lot, although the odour lingered, persisting even despite a swipe with a grimy dishcloth. That could wait, as he’d have to procure something to fix for supper first.
An hour later (he’d forgotten where the nearest corner shop was, and went several streets in the wrong direction), Dudley returned with sausages and potato flakes. He’d become fairly proficient at preparing bangers and mash and figured that it would have to do on such short notice.
****
The front door opened and shut, and Dudley hurriedly took off his mum’s flowered apron and set two plates on the table.
Here was the man who had indulged him and boasted about him for years, then turned around and tossed him out like a lodger in arrears, the same father who hadn’t even bothered to fucking call him when his mum died . . . .
Dudley inhaled deeply before looking up, his fingers already curling to fists.
Vernon Dursley stood in the doorway, dumbly staring into the kitchen. He was clad in a rumpled, stained suit that would have made Petunia die of embarrassment if she hadn’t already been far past the point of caring. If that hadn’t been enough, the scruffy stubble darkening his jowls would certainly have finished her off.
Dudley’s fists loosened as his stomach clenched (perhaps it was a bit high in his chest for his stomach, but then he’d never been very good at anatomy beyond the rude bits). He felt a brief flicker of rage at Harry for the shambles he’d made of the family, but that, too, was quickly snuffed out. His father’s mood was oppressive and contagious, and something had to be said before it smothered his will to speak completely.
“I’m not moving back,” Dudley announced quickly. “I’ve got a job, you know. I work nights at Brookwood Cemetery. Pays well. And a flat. I mean, I’ve got a flat, too, in Woking. It’s nice--” He was babbling now, but his father just continued staring blankly at him. He swallowed and pushed on. “I figured it might help if I, er, stayed for a bit and did some stuff around the house. Until you . . . y’know.” He waved his hands helplessly, trying to communicate get your shit together.
The only acknowledgement he got was a grunt as his father sat down to the already congealing meal.
****
After a week, Dudley was exhausted. It was an oddly satisfying sort of exhaustion, though, and the days fell into a comforting rhythm more easily than he’d expected.
He came home from work in time to fry up breakfast for his dad and maybe something for himself. (He was still confused as to what to call his meals. Eggs, beans, toast, and bacon in the morning ought to be breakfast, but it didn’t seem right when it was the third or fourth meal of his day.)
A few days of watching the ragged advance of whiskers obscure his father’s face, and Dudley worked up the nerve to corner him in the outer bathroom and suggest a shave. The only response he got was a shrug, so he picked up the shaving foam and lathered his father up. The razor felt awkward with his hand twisted about, but not nearly as awkward as watching his father acquiesce to his ministrations without a grumble or harangue.
Dudley wasn’t entirely sure whether his father ought to be driving, but he hadn’t had an accident yet, so maybe it was better to leave well enough alone. After seeing him off, Dudley tidied up, put an armful of clothes in the washing machine, and then slept until it was time to prepare the evening meal, after which he would do the washing up again, switch on the telly, and let his brain go numb until leaving to catch the bus back to Woking.
Piers still rang and even stopped by the house on the weekends he visited his mum. He had long, slim fingers that could reach all the way inside glasses and manoeuvre the fiddly bits of kitchen appliances, so he did the washing up while Dudley mopped the floor and scrubbed the counters. Complaints about chapped hands and not being a scullery maid wove through the conversation, but Dudley noticed that Piers never failed to show up.
****
“Pass the salt.”
Dudley started. He looked up to see who had broken into the house and taken a seat at the kitchen table, but all he saw was his father staring at him expectantly. He moved the shaker across the table, where it was taken and used without comment.
The next day, he was asked for the salt and pepper, and the evening after that, he had company on the sofa to watch a rather lacklustre comedy programme.
Dudley felt embarrassingly close to losing a few tears into the dishwater the morning his dad began shaving himself again, and at supper that night, something prompted him to ask how the work day had gone (his dad had continued to leave and return to the house at his usual times, so Dudley assumed that the board had not made good on their threat). The resulting exchange wasn’t exactly a conversation, but it was more words than the two of them had shared in several months.
****
Spring arrived suddenly, fresh and sharp and new, and Dudley began to look forward to going to work. He was slogging through the mire of a low-lying section of perimeter early one morning when a person appeared on the path ahead of him.
“Oi, you there! Stop!”
Rather than stopping, the figure turned and drifted towards him, purple fabric and long blonde hair fluttering wildly in the breeze. It was the girl from the shop. Luna, his brain recalled with surprising ease.
“Oh! It’s you.”
She inclined her head in assent. “I find it more trouble than it’s worth trying to be otherwise.”
He should have told her to scarper--there was still half an hour to go before visitors were permitted onto the property--but she was staring at him, and there didn’t seem to be much he could do but gawp back. Her silvery eyes looked through him, into him, examining the new neural tracks laid down in his brain and the fish and chips liquefying in his stomach. Then she looked him in the eye, all vagueness gone, and smiled. “You found it!”
Although he couldn’t recall what he had prepared for last night’s supper, he remembered their encounter in the shop vividly and didn’t have to ask what “it” was. The hue of his wind-reddened cheeks deepened, and he ducked his head with an unfamiliar bashfulness.
Luna tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow, her fingers disappearing entirely, and snuggled against his side. Just as he was starting to think that he could get used to this, she disengaged herself and tugged at his uniform.
“You’re working! I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble for shirking your obligations. I’ll just wait here until you’re off.” She perched on a stone bench and began humming softly to herself, clearly dismissing him until he was unencumbered by duty.
The remainder of his shift whirled past as he completed his familiar circuit without really seeing any of the remaining landmarks. She didn’t seem to be upset with him over their previous encounter--quite the reverse, which actually might be the more frightening prospect, if he thought about it (and he spent the time thinking about nothing else).
He’d half expected her to have disappeared with the morning dew, but she was still sitting on the bench, blithely swinging her legs and whistling a complicated birdcall he’d never heard before.
Luna sprang up and said brightly, “I love cemeteries. You’re lucky to work in such a lovely place.” Then she set off into the interior of the grounds. Dudley followed without question or comment.
She was prettier than the first time they met, or maybe the early morning sun was just kinder to her colouring than the washed out fluorescent lights of the shop. Her chest was still considerably flatter than his, but now he saw that the curve of her bum would be more than sufficient to fill his overlarge hands. She was not so much scrawny as delicate, and he had come to appreciate delicate things, like his nascent bond with his father, as beautiful as spun glass and twice as fragile.
Luna had led him into one of the older sections of the cemetery, and they were now wending their way through brush just barely tipped with the promise of a new year’s growth.
“Mind your feet--you’re stepping on John’s knees.”
Dudley looked down in surprise at the headstone jutting from the uneven, tufted ground to his right and its crumbling footstone not far to his left. Most of the words were shrouded in lichen, but he could make out John Atkins and died 1899. That was . . . (without paper and pencil the numbers just jostled around in his brain to no effect) . . . a long time ago. Then he recalled Luna’s words and hastily moved aside.
“Oh, erm, I’m . . . sorry.” He didn’t normally make apologies to the living, and he’d never had much to do with the dead, but the words just spoke themselves before he could give them much thought. It seemed right, somehow, and Luna’s delighted expression was more than worth the momentary self-consciousness.
“That’s all right--he doesn’t really mind. He’s just pleased to have visitors. I still think it’s polite not to walk on them, though.”
Luna plopped down next to the stone and leaned against it, gently smoothing down the straggling strands of grass like a sick child’s wayward hair.
Maybe tonight he’d ask where his mum’s grave was. She was probably just as lonely as John Atkins, except that her relatives didn’t have the excuse of being dead for not visiting her.
He would have ascribed Luna’s earnest nod at that moment to his imagination, except that he’d never had an imagination. Magic seemed a more likely explanation, and he nearly laughed at the irony of it.
Instead, Dudley sat beside Luna, taking care that he hadn’t planted his arse on someone else’s grave. His belly settled into his lap like a large cat curling up for a nap, and bloody hell, was she petting it?
Luna smiled up into his face as her hand stroked his shirtfront. “I still want to shag you senseless, but now I think I’d like to get to know you first.”
Author: anguis_1
Prompt: 33: Beauty
Pairing: Dudley/Luna
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): Dudley is Dudley, and, as such, espouses some views that I find repugnant.
Word count: 5,039 words
Summary/Excerpt: Missing the year prior to sitting one’s A-levels would have been quite difficult for a student of average ability, but for a student of Dudley’s calibre, it was downright disastrous.
Author's notes: Many thanks to all who supported the writing of this fic.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated characters and settings remain the intellectual property of JK Rowling and her associates. We are very grateful for permission to play with them.
Inner Beauty, My Arse
Missing the year prior to sitting one’s A-levels would have been quite difficult for a student of average ability, but for a student of Dudley’s calibre, it was downright disastrous. He had made it through Lower Sixth mostly thanks to Piers, who’d turned into something of a swot that year and would only wander the streets of Little Whinging looking for trouble after they had finished their homework and revised an hour or two. It had been a pain in the arse, but the rest of their gang was slowly dispersing, and no one could restrain a snivelling, squirming whinger quite like Piers could.
Much to Dudley’s chagrin, slogging through piles of homework apparently had helped to keep at least some of the material from leaking back out his ears. He’d tried to work through the problems in an old maths text he’d found during those long, dull months in captivity, but that soon fizzled out without Piers’ motivation and instruction (his parents might have been well-educated, but they were rubbish at explaining things).
After the sudden release from confinement, Dudley had been plunked back into school without any of the school officials realising that he’d not actually attended any of his classes that year. (He had to admit that that was quite a fancy bit of magic, and one that he would have appreciated had it not meant that he found himself, a fortnight after his return, sitting down to a sheaf of exam papers that might have been written in Japanese for all he could understand them.) The other students had looked at him a bit oddly the first day back, but shuffled around to accommodate him as though he’d always been there.
Explaining his absence to Piers had been a different story. Apparently Harry’s magic friends (or whatever they were) had neglected to pursue their research far enough to discover that he actually had a friend, and quite a good one, at that.
Good friend though he was, Piers was no miracle-worker. He gamely spent hours with Dudley trying to catch him up on everything he’d missed that year, but it was a futile effort. He put the whole miserable exam experience behind him for the summer holidays, but summer ended all too quickly as it was wont to do, and results day proved that he had performed just as abysmally as he had thought.
His dad had turned four distinct shades of purple before bellowing something entirely incomprehensible. The bellows eventually resolved into repetitions at increasing volume of “Get out of my bloody house!”
His mum had stared vacantly past him and returned to hoovering the living room with detached efficiency.
If Harry’s magic letters had turned his dad into a raving lunatic (albeit temporarily), then the past year had transformed his mum into a high-functioning madwoman--the quiet sort who scrubbed the kitchen floor twice a day and cooked meals with effortless precision, but who didn’t spy on the next-door neighbours anymore and sometimes served roasts for breakfast and soft-boiled eggs with toast soldiers for supper and once turned on the gas without lighting the pilot. At first Dudley had tried to jolt her out of it with progressively outrageous antics (at least that was the only palatable excuse he could find for his behavior upon later reflection), but then he settled into an uneasy hope that her madness would be just as temporary as his dad’s had been.
Surprisingly, his dad had been serious about the “Get out of my bloody house!” business. The next morning at breakfast, he’d seemed genuinely surprised to see his son join him at the table, so he reiterated it, adding on “effing layabout,” “worthless bastard,” “piss-poor excuse for a son” and a few other epithets Dudley had never imagined to hear coming out of his father’s spit-frothed mouth (particularly aimed at him).
Perhaps the most shocking, horrifying thing was that his mum said nothing.
Under his father’s baleful glare, Dudley only managed to choke down seconds before legging it upstairs to stuff a few changes of clothes in a rucksack. He left without a backwards glance and slouched off to the Polkisses’ house, where he holed up with Piers and his mum. With anyone else it would’ve been awkward, as Piers was packing to go to uni, but Piers was as he’d always been--enough of a wanker about every bit of petty trivia that crossed his mind to mask his avoidance of still-raw wounds. Mrs Polkiss certainly didn’t keep house to his own mum’s standards, but she was hospitable and solicitous in a warm, maternal way that Dudley was sure Petunia would not have reciprocated had Piers showed up at number four, Privet Drive in similar circumstances. (To be fair, even though she had cosseted and coddled him with single-minded devotion, Dudley couldn’t remember a time when he ever would have called his mum either warm or maternal.)
A week later, after helping Piers move in to his room at Guildford and loudly proclaiming his relief at being done with his schooling in a hollow voice that both of them pretended to believe, Dudley went home while his father was at work. He packed most of the rest of his clothing, the laptop he’d gotten for his last birthday, and as many computer games as he could stuff in with his underwear, gave his mum the address of a small flat he’d found in Woking, and left.
When he had been stuck in a house that had both lacked electrical outlets and made his batteries splutter out in a rather alarming shower of sparks, Dudley had resorted to raiding the bookshelves after a few weeks of unmitigated boredom. His first idea had been to test the strength in his hands by seeing how many pages he could rip at a time, but, after the paper proved to be suspiciously indestructible, he resigned himself to actually reading them. When there was nothing else to do besides eluding the overly enthusiastic Dedalus Diggle and avoiding his apoplectic father, reading turned out to be the least repellant of his options. The first book he’d chosen (despite evidence to the contrary, he refused to believe that the book had chosen him) was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. He’d only understood about half the words, but what ghoulish scenes those words evoked!
It was those images of tripods and Heat Rays and heaps of burning corpses that led him to Woking. His rage--at Harry, at his father for being unreasonable and his mum for abandoning him in his hour of need, at the University of Surrey for luring Piers away (and, though he couldn’t quite admit it, at Piers for allowing himself to be lured), at the general unfairness of the world--still blazed deep in his gut and threatened to rise up and choke him. The scene of mass carnage and destruction (even if only fictional) seemed an appropriate choice, and just as logical as anywhere else in Surrey he might have gone.
Pub brawls--swinging his fists wildly through the haze of drink at other similarly inebriated blokes--were not nearly as satisfying as boxing, and were frustratingly thwarted by barmen, bouncers, and every busybody patron who just couldn’t leave Dudley alone to the business of bludgeoning his temper (and a few deserving lager louts) into submission.
After two weeks of blackened eyes, split knuckles, and an amplification of the buzzing in his ears that had made him give up the ring in the first place, he found himself down to his last fistful of crumpled banknotes with no source of replenishment in sight.
Dudley’s particular skill set wasn’t exactly in high demand, and he was frustratingly underqualified for the few positions he thought looked interesting. He laboriously typed up an appallingly short CV anyway. Thankfully, Piers caught the most egregious misspellings (saving him from the embarrassment of, among other things, boasting of having attended Smetlings Shcool), and Dudley began the tedious process of finding himself a job.
It was with fond memories of defacing Little Whinging’s modest Nonconformist cemetery that he applied to be a night security guard at Brookwood Cemetery. Piers had had the inspired idea of painting crosses on the Jews’ stones and Stars of David on the Catholics’. Malcolm had suggested swastikas all round, but that had been rejected as boring (and, though none of them had dared to voice his reservations to the rest of the gang, they were all relieved that Piers had come up with his clever alternative. Vandalism was just a bit of fun, but swastikas spelled serious trouble if you were caught.)
The man in charge of hiring glanced appraisingly at Dudley’s towering, glowering form, cautioned him against nicking the bronze flower holders to fence on the side, and offered him a position on the spot.
****
Even on his nights off, Dudley kept to the same schedule. It had taken nearly three weeks for his body to adjust to his new working hours, but once he’d made the switch, he found it impossible to close his eyes in the dark of the night. He’d managed to find a small selection of businesses that were open all hours, including a chippy, a launderette, and a small shop.
It was on one such night a few months into his employment that Dudley was in the shop at about three in the morning. The only other person in the shop besides the dozing proprietor--though he was just a Paki and didn’t really count anyway--was a girl of about his own age in a ridiculous yellow garment that had enough material for two outfits. She was scrawny and had no proper tits to speak of, so Dudley probably wouldn’t have looked at her twice except that she seemed to be following him. Whenever he would look over his shoulder, she would be standing several feet away examining a jar of Marmite or a box of custard powder as though it were the most fascinating thing in the world (or perhaps something from another world altogether).
His temper wearing thin, Dudley swung about abruptly. “What the hell do you want?”
“What do I want?” She paused to consider, as though he’d asked something profound requiring serious deliberation. “I want to find a Carapaced Slubgublin, to see Hogwarts fully rebuilt, and to shag you senseless.”
She said it so earnestly that, for a moment, Dudley almost believed her. Then the rest of the gibberish registered, and his volatile temper snapped. He hadn’t been to a pub since getting tossed out of the Ox and Ass the night he celebrated his newfound employment, and he was itching for a fight, even if it was just a verbal sparring match.
He drew himself up and stepped forward to loom over her. She didn’t even have the sense to take a step back, but instead cocked her head at him as he growled, “You taking the piss?” Even he thought it was quite impressive how much menace was squeezed into those four short words.
She remained infuriatingly unintimidated, though. “You asked what I wanted.” Her vague gaze drifted to the spill of his paunch over his belt, then jerked away to rest on the tinned beef above his shoulder. She sighed. “You’re very attractive.”
“I don’t want to hear bollocks about inner beauty.”
At this, the girl wilted. “I wouldn’t say anything about that, really, because you’ve hidden your inner beauty so deep I don’t know if you’ll ever find it again. Your outer beauty, though, tempts me terribly.”
It had been a long time since somebody sober had mocked him that blatantly. The packet of crisps he’d been about to put in his basket exploded in his grip. He stuffed it savagely back onto the shelf and tried to think of something sufficiently cruel to counter with.
She was faster, though, and said, “I wish other people could see with my eyes.” A wistful smile curved her lips, and she added, “I’m Luna, by the way.”
Luna-tic, his mind corrected as he turned back to his shopping in disgust. The girl also turned away, and in the edge of his vision, he saw her reach up and pull a stick from her bun, releasing a scraggly cascade of dirty blonde hair down her back.
Dudley didn’t notice her hair or the small, glittering bird that fluttered free of its human nest. All he could see was the slender piece of wood in her hand, and all he could feel was the old pulsating pain in his arse.
He must have made a sound--the strangled gasp that still echoed in his ears had probably issued from his own throat--as she looked at him quizzically. He gabbled something that may or may not have been, “What are you doing with that wand?” and then clapped his hands across his mouth before it issued forth any further idiocy.
“Oh, dear. You know what this is? Hermione assured me that Muggle women use something similar to put their hair up.”
Dudley had been hoping she would deny it, confusion blossoming across her daft face. She’d then have a good laugh at his expense (she’d undoubtedly already had one, so what was one more?) and leave him alone. Better that the familial madness--temporary or not--manifested itself prematurely than to be cornered by some mental wizard-girl with a magic wand.
He wasn’t going to be that lucky (and it was getting harder and harder to remember a time when luck had sided with him). She’d not only not denied it, but she’d used the M-word (the other M-word). Dudley considered throwing a quick shovel hook but quickly discarded the idea. She’d probably blast him before the blow could land, and then do it again because of his temerity. Anyway, it had been a while since he’d last hit a girl.
In the time it took him to process all that (and when one’s brain always insisted on taking the long way round, it was several seconds of standing there gormlessly), the girl had smiled that odd, sad smile again, flicked her wand, and vanished.
****
Dudley’s mum rang him every Sunday evening before he went to work, until one day when she didn’t. He might not have noticed, except that lately he’d been thinking about Sunday dinners and early morning fry-ups and giving himself a most painful stomachache. He’d been a bit surprised that she always managed to call right on schedule despite the rest of her psychoses, but he supposed it went along with a mother’s intuition and all that bollocks.
Dudley arrived back at his flat after work Tuesday morning to a bewildering message from Piers. “Hey, Big D, how’s, uh, bugger! Shit, I’m sorry. I dunno what else to say. If you need to t-- Er, if you need to have a pint, you know where I’m at. Any hour. Seriously. I mean it. Fu--”
Eloquence had never been one of Piers’ recommending qualities, but usually Dudley had some idea of what he was trying to say. After replaying the message three times and coming no closer to deciphering it, he was interrupted by an incoming call that yielded to his Aunt Marge’s familiar bellow upon answering.
She, too, seemed to be babbling, although his lack of comprehension in this case might also have had something to do with the simultaneous conversation his aunt was having with one of her dogs, who howled at regular intervals in response to Marge’s brusque commands. In between “Ripper, down!” and “There’s a good boy”, she demanded to know why Dudley hadn’t been at the funeral. It took another minute to get a word in edgewise to ask whom the funeral had been for. That question silenced his aunt for nearly ten seconds, and when she spoke again, the bluster abated to a rough tenderness quite alien to her voice.
His mum’s insanity had been temporary after all--ended not by a recovery of her humdrum nosy normalcy, but by a slightly larger than prescribed quantity of little white tablets he’d never even known she’d had. Her death had been ruled inconclusively accidental by a charitable coroner on Saturday, and she’d been buried on Monday. His father never called.
****
For the first time, Dudley skived off work. Piers met him at the Ox and Ass even though it was exams week, silently plying him with cheap lager and eventually hauling him back to his flat before catching the last bus to Guildford.
The next month passed in a grey haze. Dudley worked, tramping around the graves of the long- and not-so-long-dead and occasionally scaring away jumpy teenagers intent on causing mischief. Piers rang him regularly to natter on about inconsequential bits of gossip and took him out for drinks and darted sorrowful, liquid-eyed glances (incongruous on his still rat-like face) when he thought no one was looking.
After drifting through another night of work, Dudley found himself on the streets of Little Whinging with no recollection of how he had arrived there nor any idea of why. Out of habit, his tired feet trudged to the play park. Someone really should have fixed those swings by now--it had been a few years since he and his gang had wrecked them, and most of the chains still dangled lazily on the ground. What good was a park without swings? There was one swing still completely attached, and he sat in it. It squealed in protest, but held his weight as he rocked back and forth into a drowsy stupor.
He shivered awake half an hour later. It was late enough that his father must have already left for work. He could stop by the house and collect a few more belongings, maybe pinch some biscuits from the kitchen and a few quid from the not-so-secret hiding place under the ugly dog statue from Aunt Marge, and his father need never know he’d been there.
The house was a disaster. He nearly stepped back outside to check that he had entered the correct house, but his key had opened the lock, and photos of himself at various stages of development grinned, simpered, and smirked from every flat surface in the living room, dust already beginning to dull the gleams in his eyes.
Dudley waded through a month’s detritus of takeaway cartons and other rubbish on his way to the kitchen. It, too, was in nearly unrecognizable disarray. In amongst the haphazard stacks of dirty glasses and plates by the sink was a crumpled letter addressed to his father from Philip Jenkins.
Insomuch as his father had friends, Philip Jenkins was one of his oldest. They’d started at Grunnings together and had climbed the corporate ladder side by side (single-handedly propelling the company from insolvent obscurity into its current prominence and prosperity to hear Vernon tell it, which Dudley had, on numerous occasions).
Dudley had been swiping his parents’ post for years--ever since those letters--and felt no compunctions whatsoever about pulling the note from its envelope and reading it. It was short and to the point. Philip reminded Vernon of their long, illustrious friendship and pleaded with him to pull himself together, or at the board meeting next month, it would be recommended that he be made redundant.
There was only one thing Dudley could do. He caught the next bus back to Woking, dumped some clothes in a case, and returned to Little Whinging.
There wasn’t much in the fridge, and what was there all seemed to date from his mum’s last shopping trip. Dudley binned the lot, although the odour lingered, persisting even despite a swipe with a grimy dishcloth. That could wait, as he’d have to procure something to fix for supper first.
An hour later (he’d forgotten where the nearest corner shop was, and went several streets in the wrong direction), Dudley returned with sausages and potato flakes. He’d become fairly proficient at preparing bangers and mash and figured that it would have to do on such short notice.
****
The front door opened and shut, and Dudley hurriedly took off his mum’s flowered apron and set two plates on the table.
Here was the man who had indulged him and boasted about him for years, then turned around and tossed him out like a lodger in arrears, the same father who hadn’t even bothered to fucking call him when his mum died . . . .
Dudley inhaled deeply before looking up, his fingers already curling to fists.
Vernon Dursley stood in the doorway, dumbly staring into the kitchen. He was clad in a rumpled, stained suit that would have made Petunia die of embarrassment if she hadn’t already been far past the point of caring. If that hadn’t been enough, the scruffy stubble darkening his jowls would certainly have finished her off.
Dudley’s fists loosened as his stomach clenched (perhaps it was a bit high in his chest for his stomach, but then he’d never been very good at anatomy beyond the rude bits). He felt a brief flicker of rage at Harry for the shambles he’d made of the family, but that, too, was quickly snuffed out. His father’s mood was oppressive and contagious, and something had to be said before it smothered his will to speak completely.
“I’m not moving back,” Dudley announced quickly. “I’ve got a job, you know. I work nights at Brookwood Cemetery. Pays well. And a flat. I mean, I’ve got a flat, too, in Woking. It’s nice--” He was babbling now, but his father just continued staring blankly at him. He swallowed and pushed on. “I figured it might help if I, er, stayed for a bit and did some stuff around the house. Until you . . . y’know.” He waved his hands helplessly, trying to communicate get your shit together.
The only acknowledgement he got was a grunt as his father sat down to the already congealing meal.
****
After a week, Dudley was exhausted. It was an oddly satisfying sort of exhaustion, though, and the days fell into a comforting rhythm more easily than he’d expected.
He came home from work in time to fry up breakfast for his dad and maybe something for himself. (He was still confused as to what to call his meals. Eggs, beans, toast, and bacon in the morning ought to be breakfast, but it didn’t seem right when it was the third or fourth meal of his day.)
A few days of watching the ragged advance of whiskers obscure his father’s face, and Dudley worked up the nerve to corner him in the outer bathroom and suggest a shave. The only response he got was a shrug, so he picked up the shaving foam and lathered his father up. The razor felt awkward with his hand twisted about, but not nearly as awkward as watching his father acquiesce to his ministrations without a grumble or harangue.
Dudley wasn’t entirely sure whether his father ought to be driving, but he hadn’t had an accident yet, so maybe it was better to leave well enough alone. After seeing him off, Dudley tidied up, put an armful of clothes in the washing machine, and then slept until it was time to prepare the evening meal, after which he would do the washing up again, switch on the telly, and let his brain go numb until leaving to catch the bus back to Woking.
Piers still rang and even stopped by the house on the weekends he visited his mum. He had long, slim fingers that could reach all the way inside glasses and manoeuvre the fiddly bits of kitchen appliances, so he did the washing up while Dudley mopped the floor and scrubbed the counters. Complaints about chapped hands and not being a scullery maid wove through the conversation, but Dudley noticed that Piers never failed to show up.
****
“Pass the salt.”
Dudley started. He looked up to see who had broken into the house and taken a seat at the kitchen table, but all he saw was his father staring at him expectantly. He moved the shaker across the table, where it was taken and used without comment.
The next day, he was asked for the salt and pepper, and the evening after that, he had company on the sofa to watch a rather lacklustre comedy programme.
Dudley felt embarrassingly close to losing a few tears into the dishwater the morning his dad began shaving himself again, and at supper that night, something prompted him to ask how the work day had gone (his dad had continued to leave and return to the house at his usual times, so Dudley assumed that the board had not made good on their threat). The resulting exchange wasn’t exactly a conversation, but it was more words than the two of them had shared in several months.
****
Spring arrived suddenly, fresh and sharp and new, and Dudley began to look forward to going to work. He was slogging through the mire of a low-lying section of perimeter early one morning when a person appeared on the path ahead of him.
“Oi, you there! Stop!”
Rather than stopping, the figure turned and drifted towards him, purple fabric and long blonde hair fluttering wildly in the breeze. It was the girl from the shop. Luna, his brain recalled with surprising ease.
“Oh! It’s you.”
She inclined her head in assent. “I find it more trouble than it’s worth trying to be otherwise.”
He should have told her to scarper--there was still half an hour to go before visitors were permitted onto the property--but she was staring at him, and there didn’t seem to be much he could do but gawp back. Her silvery eyes looked through him, into him, examining the new neural tracks laid down in his brain and the fish and chips liquefying in his stomach. Then she looked him in the eye, all vagueness gone, and smiled. “You found it!”
Although he couldn’t recall what he had prepared for last night’s supper, he remembered their encounter in the shop vividly and didn’t have to ask what “it” was. The hue of his wind-reddened cheeks deepened, and he ducked his head with an unfamiliar bashfulness.
Luna tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow, her fingers disappearing entirely, and snuggled against his side. Just as he was starting to think that he could get used to this, she disengaged herself and tugged at his uniform.
“You’re working! I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble for shirking your obligations. I’ll just wait here until you’re off.” She perched on a stone bench and began humming softly to herself, clearly dismissing him until he was unencumbered by duty.
The remainder of his shift whirled past as he completed his familiar circuit without really seeing any of the remaining landmarks. She didn’t seem to be upset with him over their previous encounter--quite the reverse, which actually might be the more frightening prospect, if he thought about it (and he spent the time thinking about nothing else).
He’d half expected her to have disappeared with the morning dew, but she was still sitting on the bench, blithely swinging her legs and whistling a complicated birdcall he’d never heard before.
Luna sprang up and said brightly, “I love cemeteries. You’re lucky to work in such a lovely place.” Then she set off into the interior of the grounds. Dudley followed without question or comment.
She was prettier than the first time they met, or maybe the early morning sun was just kinder to her colouring than the washed out fluorescent lights of the shop. Her chest was still considerably flatter than his, but now he saw that the curve of her bum would be more than sufficient to fill his overlarge hands. She was not so much scrawny as delicate, and he had come to appreciate delicate things, like his nascent bond with his father, as beautiful as spun glass and twice as fragile.
Luna had led him into one of the older sections of the cemetery, and they were now wending their way through brush just barely tipped with the promise of a new year’s growth.
“Mind your feet--you’re stepping on John’s knees.”
Dudley looked down in surprise at the headstone jutting from the uneven, tufted ground to his right and its crumbling footstone not far to his left. Most of the words were shrouded in lichen, but he could make out John Atkins and died 1899. That was . . . (without paper and pencil the numbers just jostled around in his brain to no effect) . . . a long time ago. Then he recalled Luna’s words and hastily moved aside.
“Oh, erm, I’m . . . sorry.” He didn’t normally make apologies to the living, and he’d never had much to do with the dead, but the words just spoke themselves before he could give them much thought. It seemed right, somehow, and Luna’s delighted expression was more than worth the momentary self-consciousness.
“That’s all right--he doesn’t really mind. He’s just pleased to have visitors. I still think it’s polite not to walk on them, though.”
Luna plopped down next to the stone and leaned against it, gently smoothing down the straggling strands of grass like a sick child’s wayward hair.
Maybe tonight he’d ask where his mum’s grave was. She was probably just as lonely as John Atkins, except that her relatives didn’t have the excuse of being dead for not visiting her.
He would have ascribed Luna’s earnest nod at that moment to his imagination, except that he’d never had an imagination. Magic seemed a more likely explanation, and he nearly laughed at the irony of it.
Instead, Dudley sat beside Luna, taking care that he hadn’t planted his arse on someone else’s grave. His belly settled into his lap like a large cat curling up for a nap, and bloody hell, was she petting it?
Luna smiled up into his face as her hand stroked his shirtfront. “I still want to shag you senseless, but now I think I’d like to get to know you first.”