yer a wizard, dudley
Harry Potter spent his eleventh birthday in a cabin on a tiny rock in the middle of the sea, listening to his cousin snore on the couch.
When a knock sounded on the wind-swept, rain-drenched door, it was not a giant fist (or a half-giant’s fist). It was a short sharp rap that sounded once, twice, three times before Minerva McGonagall simply charmed the lock open and stepped inside.
“Apologies,” Minerva said crisply, as Vernon raced out brandishing his rifle and Petunia pulled Dudley up off the couch and behind her. “I wasn’t sure you could hear me over the weather.” The rain fell down behind the professor in a roar. She was perfectly dry.
Minerva fished in her pocket without looking, because the only things allowed in her pockets were only ever exactly what she needed. “I’ve come to deliver this,” she said, pulling out a letter and handing it to Harry, who was cross-legged on the floor, “because our owl post seems to have been unable to get through.”
“And I’ve come to deliver this,” she added, pulling out a second letter, “because Hogwarts by-laws require a professor to hand-deliver acceptance letters to Muggleborn families for their explanation and comfort.”
The Dursleys did not look comforted, nor did they sound it once they opened their mouths. Dudley rubbed sleep from his eyes while Harry retreated to a corner out of everyone’s reach to open his letter (finally) and read through it. When he looked up again, Uncle Vernon’s rifle had turned into a rubber chicken and the professor was almost yelling.
“Your son has magic,” Minerva snapped. She had just come from a little family of Muggle dentists, who had taken notes on everything she told them, and their bushy-haired daughter, who had stared up at her with big hungry eyes and asked questions at breakneck speed. After that, this was not just exhausting but almost insulting. "Whether or not you want him to be, Dudley is magic. If we do not teach him to handle it, it will still happen.“
“I want to go,” said Harry, very softly.
Minerva couldn’t decide whether to go softer or more fierce. “Of course you will, Mr. Potter, if I have to escort you myself.”
“We won’t– we won’t allow–” Vernon began to bluster, but Dudley was watching Harry’s set face. His little eyes squinted.
“Dudley is not–”
“If Harry gets to go,” said Dudley at the top of his sizeable lungs.
“Dudley,” Vernon snapped, so Dudley raised his voice even higher to announce, “Then I do, too.”
“But Duddikins–”
Dudley’s face was going red. Harry moved quietly out of his radius and Minerva watched him go. “It’s not fair, you can’t stop me, I’m not gonna sit and learn dumb maths while he does magic–”
“Don’t say that word!”
“Neither of you is going–”
Dudley bellowed, no words, just sound, drowning out his parents. Harry watched the rain out the window. Minerva had known James Potter. She had known him well, in war and in peace, from behind a teacher’s desk and beside him in the trenches. This eleven year old looked very little like the grinning boy she’d so often scolded– but he looked a bit like the young man she’d later had the privilege of fighting alongside.
McGonagall drew close to Petunia as Vernon tried to muffle Dudley’s hollers with big hands and wheedling promises. “Mrs. Dursley, you may not be aware, but every letter to the Hogwarts admissions office goes through me, and has for decades.” Petunia’s bony face snapped up to meet Minerva’s eyes. “Including those sent with stamps.”
Petunia was pale, her fists claws at her sides. “Childish– those were childish, absurd wishes–”
“He is a child,” said Minerva. “He’s magical. Let him have this.”
Dudley took a breath and let out another bellow, kicking at his father’s shin.
Minerva tried not to wince. She tried to mean it. “Let him have the chances you didn’t.” Petunia’s gaze shifted away to the ground. Minerva reached out for the other woman’s elbow, her bony fingers as gentle as she could force them to be, which wasn’t very. “Don’t hate him for it, Ms. Dursley.”
“I would never,” Petunia snapped, raising her eyes in a swift, angry jerk, but Minerva had known Lily Evans, too.
Once Minerva had convinced Petunia and Dudley’s caterwauling had convinced Vernon, she set up an appointment date and time to take them to Diagon Alley the next week and left them to their impromptu seaside vacation. She napped on their back porch in Animagus form the day they were meant to meet her, watching with a cat’s focused patience as they piled into the car, snapping at each other. She’d sent them two follow-up reminders by the blandest owl she could lay her hands on.
In the Leaky Cauldron, Vernon cornered Minerva up against a table. She didn’t move a step backward, achingly resisting returning to her schoolgirl ways and transforming him to a lizard.
“If you’re not back from this– this Alley– with Dudley within the hour, I’m calling Scotland Yard.” He put his finger in Minerva’s face, and he miraculously remained human-shaped. Sometimes Minerva impressed even herself. “I have a direct line to one of their superiors. We provided the drills for their latest expansion, and I will not hesitate to call in favors.” Then he stomped off to get himself a drink.
Minerva raised her eyebrows at Raul, behind the bar, whose Head of House she had been for seven years, conveying quietly her expectation that any drink Vernon gulped down would have a generous dollop of frog spawn, and that Raul would charge him extra for it, too.
Dudley started gaping and didn’t stop as she led the boys into Gringotts and changed some of Dudley’s Muggle money for Knuts and Sickles. She watched his little beady eyes tick through an interested count of the little piles moving across the wood. A watery blue, they looked just like his father’s in his pink, squashed face. Minerva apologized briskly to Grelda, the Gringotts receptionist who watched Dudley while Minerva took Harry to his parents’ vault, and promised her some grateful banana bread at their next poker night.
While they clattered through the darkness of Gringotts’s underbelly, Minerva asked Harry about his hobbies, the latest books he’d read, and got brief answers– he was more interested in staring over the edge of the cart, gaze chasing after a glimpse of dragon fire. She nodded and let the silence sit between them as they bounced and screeched toward the Potters’s vault.
When Harry climbed out of the cart, all knees and elbows, she followed, thinking about book lists and schedules, maybe a new set of clothes. The chill of the underground clung to her ankles. She twisted the key in her pocket.
Minerva didn’t expect it to matter to her, the piles of coins that appeared when the vault door wicked away into smoke. It was metal, dead and cold– no, not dead, never even living. This was an errand run, like fetching her mail or a bottle of milk.
But Harry was standing there in his ratty hand-me-downs, and this had been left to him.
Galleons glittered in the dim light. This had been Lily’s, and James’s, and Minerva remembered when they had been as small as the child hesitating before her, staring.
“I knew them.” The words were fluttering behind the ridge of her teeth, and she didn’t say them.
Harry was eleven years old, just barely, and every child in the wizarding world knew his name. Only the tips of his fingers peeked out from the sagging sleeves of his sweater.
Minerva didn’t say, “I took Lily from her family’s house, with its greenish carpet, its lacey kitchen curtains, and big backyard. She wasn’t much bigger than you, and I walked her down this street and picked out her books and her robes and her cauldron, and I never gave her back.
“You’ve got her eyes,” she didn’t say, “but not the ones from back then, finding out magic was real for the first time. You’ve got her eyes from the end, from the last days. Not a single Evans came to her funeral, but I did.”
“Well, Mr. Potter? We have a lot to do,” she said instead, and helped him gather some fistfuls of Galleons into a pouch.
At the equipment shop, Harry looked like he might ask for a solid gold cauldron until Dudley shouldered past him and demanded one himself. At that, the smaller boy peeled away in disgust and found a pewter one. “No,” Minerva said to Dudley, and hauled him along by the shirtsleeve.
Dudley parroted his father’s words about robes, but he ran his grubby fingers over every cloth in Madame Malkin’s until Minerva made him sit. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the Owl Emporium but ended up shrieking, rolling, and pounding his heels on the street when Minerva refused to buy him an owl.
“Apply to your parents,” she told him sternly. She cast a Silencing Charm and sat with him, reviewing the shopping list, until he was done yelling.
She returned them in exactly sixty minutes. Dudley, sulking, went straight for his mother, towing his sack of new possessions behind him.
“I will see you all at Platform 9 and 3/4s at promptly 10:45 a.m. on September 1st.”
“9 and 3/4s?” Vernon scoffed. “There’s no such–”
“It’s approximately three quarters of the way between platforms 9 and 10. I will see you then,” Minerva said and then went off to get a drink from Raul.
–
Minerva expected Harry to get Gryffindor. He was Lily’s son, after all, and she had seen him stand in that shack with his chin high and tell her he wanted a brave new world. (It never occurred to her, and Harry never told her, that for that wanting the Hat had offered him Slytherin first.)
It was the Dursley boy she expected in green and silver. He was a pudgy, unformed larvae of a child. She’d seen him at age one, screaming for sweets, and then again at eleven, screaming to drown out his father’s protests, and she didn’t really see much difference other than size.
The Hat sat on Dudley’s head for ages while the kid fidgeted and sweated. In the entryway, he’d stuck a finger through the Fat Friar’s translucent robes and ignored Harry talking with a freckly redhead. Minerva wasn’t sure exactly how she felt about Harry falling in automatically with a Weasley– she was hoping this latest one turned out more like Bill or Percy, rather than the twins, but Harry was James’s son. He and Ron already looked inseparable, huddled together in the waiting line of first years.
Dudley kicked his heels against the wooden stool, the Hat slipping down over his watery little eyes. The silence in the Hall was breaking to murmurs as the wait stretched on– Minerva frowned. Was this shallow bully going to be a Hat stall? Between what? Slytherin, and–? Merlin, please not Gryffindor–
“RAVENCLAW,” the Hat announced and Minerva almost spat out her mouthful of pumpkin juice.
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Sarah Viehmann 