Chapter Text
Dudley Dursley had been raised to be perfectly normal, and he had grown up to be perfectly normal. Or at least, he appeared to be so. He was a tall, solid man who kept a trimmed lawn, drove a respectable car, paid his taxes on time, never drank more than two beers and said “Would you look at that weather? I thought it was summer!” in passing to his neighbours.
His grocer, his mechanic, his doctor, his neighbours, not even his wife knew to look for anything else. Only a shrink, he supposed, would be able to peer deep enough inside to find a well-suppressed truth. But Dudley did not believe in shrinks, and his friends would never suggest he see one.
Only Dudley knew of the countless traumas he had endured; growing up with one Harry Potter.
The first time, Dudley had been but eleven years old. He had been miserable, out of his comfort zone, starved and scared and if all of that wasn’t insult enough, he had been transformed into a pig. By a giant. To this day he could hear his mother’s high-pitched shriek at the sight and feel the deep, sickly embarrassment they had faced at the hospital. Unable to offer any explanation at all.
Technically, he supposed, his very first trauma had occurred on his eleventh birthday, when he had been locked in a cage with a lethal, monstrous snake. Somehow that assault on his well-being had left less of an impact on him than the giant and the pigtail.
He might have written both experiences off as a fever dream, only that his mother never served pork after that day at the hospital. It was enough of a tell that she knew the same thing he did. Of course, they had never, ever spoken of it. In true Dursley fashion, Dudley had also never, ever told Gracie, his doting and good-hearted wife, of this tragic past. Her hugs were such that he would have confessed his soul’s secrets to her in a heart beat, if they didn’t involve unbelievable things such as magic. Or if he didn’t occasionally feel the phantom twitch of a pigtail at his tailbone.
With Harry off in Scotland for most of the year - learning how to grow warts and humps if his parents’ hushed nightly conversations were to be believed - Dudley had been granted some peace. Never long lasting, of course. It took Harry a mere two years at that school to learn how to blow up Dudley’s aunt.
Granted, it was’t Dudley who had inflated to the size of a hot air balloon like the frogs in Shrek, but he still had had to see the thing. Of all the times for his mind to develop an imagination it had to be at night in the months following. The recurring nightmare of his aunt Marge actually exploding into a rain of flesh and blood might as well have been reality for the way it haunted him.
Dudley would have called it retribution when, two years later, Harry was plagued by his own nightmares. But he was getting ahead of himself. That trauma was his least favourite to recall. It easily dwarfed the day four gingers had wrecked his parent’s fireplace, and he had nearly suffocated on his own tongue after eating one of their candies.
No, the fireplace incident had been a walk in the park compared to the fateful night. The worst night of Dudley’s life. The night a cold terror had gripped through his bones and squeezed him empty. The night he had first heard Harry shouting about dark lords and demented ghosts. But the things he’d seen were the ones which never left him. The truths which had blinded him and driven him nearly mad.
They were the ones, the shards of his past, he shoved so deep down that Gracie would never know them. They were the ones which made him believe the tales of a war which was not reported on the news. Dudley did not think of them. Ever. He liked to let bygones be bygones. Nor did he ever ask his cousin about what had transpired that last year after they left their childhood home.
He knew the lore, vaguely. Out of some false sense of Dudely-didn’t-know-what - probably a prank disguised as a kindness - Harry Potter had once invited Dudley to a birthday gathering. It had been Harry’s 18th birthday, a milestone which Dudley had gotten the impression everyone in attendance was surprised he had reached. A reasonable mindset, considering they all chose to carry twig shaped explosives on their persons. Mrs. Figg, his parents odd, cat obsessed neighbour had been there, too. Her presence had not made Dudley feel any less like his presence was some elaborate scheme against him.
While unpleasantly awkward at least the get-together had forgone the opportunity to traumatise him. All of the strange people there had been civilised apart from their strange slang and the odd things they had talked about. It was there that Dudley had learned his cousin was considered the Born Boy or the Boy, who was alive, or something or other along those lines and that there had been a war - the very one for which he and his parents had been ushered into hiding - and that Harry had defeated Lord Vladimir to end that war.
It had all been very confusing, and Dudley had excused himself after all but thirty minutes of pretend-sipping the sparkly drink he had been handed on arrival. He had learned on multiple occasions not to trust food offered to him by wizard kind. It never ended well.
In truth, he wasn’t sure why he had attended at all. His history of interacting with his cousin’s queer world was tainted and scarred. When Harry had come to inform the Dursleys that they could come out of hiding… he had looked different. Scrawny and skinny as always but so tired. As if he himself was surprised to be alive. That same day Harry had invited Dudley, offered to send someone to pick him up in a car - a normal one - and Dudley had agreed. Looking back, it had likely been out of a sense of duty.
Beyond that, Dudley had hardly seen his cousin. Only once more at his mother’s funeral, where Harry had stayed for thirty minutes, drank and ate nothing and left with a nod.
Since then, there had only been annual Christmas cards arriving on the Dursley-Goodlyn doorstep. First with one child. Then two. Then three. All looking as wild and wicked as Harry had his whole life. Dudley had reciprocated only once, three months ago, when for the first time he, too, had a chubby cheeked, round, babbling baby to dress up in Christmas clothes.
It had been Gracie’s insistence they reciprocate for the “simply fantastical” cards they had been receiving. She had gone all out, dressing their nine-month-old in in red and white and gold with a reindeer headband, seated in a sleigh. Daisy, enamoured with the fake snow, had climbed out and crawled out of frame five times before Gracie had managed to capture her round, beaming face.
In all those years, with a healthy distance from magic and importantly, Harry Potter, Dudley’s life had been by design. Trauma free. Perfectly, pleasantly, predictably normal.
Until Daisy’s first birthday, when he had gone to get his daughter out of her crib and instead found her floating three feet above his head.