Dudley leaned back away from Jared as he sprayed his swallow of beer out across the table, choking on his laugh as Ben pulled out the punchline of his raunchy joke. It was more disgusting than funny, Dudley thought.

He glanced around the pub, looking for something that might distract him from the assholes he was stuck with for the night. He smiled at a girl he caught looking his way, but she turned her nose up at him and he sighed.

He knew what most of the kids from Uni thought of him. He was dull and stupid, and played rough sports like rugby and generally didn't achieve much of anything outside of a field or a wrestling match or to be honest, even in it. He didn't end up quite as tall as his childhood growth had suggested, and once he'd finally dropped the extra weight he'd carried for most of his life, he didn't really have enough mass to stop larger opponents in their tracks anymore. He'd never be fast, either.

He wasn't a very stand-out personality either. Since the "event" with Harry when he was fifteen, he'd stopped being loud and stopped trying to bully others, and he knew most others found him rather dull. By trying not to domineer every interaction he was involved in, he ended up dumbly nodding along to whatever the other person said.

"You never have any opinions," a girlfriend once told him. "If I wanted someone to just wait up for me and follow me around and never disagree with me, I'd buy myself a dog."

He stared morosely down into his beer. That was the problem, there. Harry had been the only one to ever really try to disagree with him back when he was a general arse to everyone, and even then all of their interactions prior to the end were bitter and tinged with hatred.

Dudley wondered how Harry was doing. He'd heard nothing since the start of . . . the war, he supposed. But he had remembered the sort of things Harry always paid attention to in the news, and had managed to follow along somewhat, and about a year after Harry had left, the strange deaths and "gas explosions" and "terrorist attacks" had tapered off.

Occasionally he'd see someone in the streets or the pubs, and would somehow just know that something was off. They'd be a little too strange, a little too excited about something normal. They'd be wearing the wrong things, or the right things but in the wrong way, or the right but the wrong colors or gender.

And sometimes, just sometimes, he'd stop them and ask . . . ask after the news. Ask after his cousin, in a roundabout way. They all seemed to know each other, especially Harry. And once he figured out the right things to day, they'd usually just spill their guts. It was like being part of a secret club, a bit exciting, a bit inconvenient, but he never really regretted the strange looks he'd get for talking to the homeless bloke outside the Tesco's, or for trying to approach an owl that hung around a little too long.

Dennis nudged him and lifted his mostly empty pint, indicating it was time to either settle up or go for another round. Dudley sighed and thumbed towards the bar, indicating he'd place the orders.

He stepped around a fellow who was looking a little green around the gills and a girl that was gesturing very enthusiastically with a whiskey in hand and rapped his knuckles on the bar, holding up four fingers when the barkeep turned his way. He arranged the stray nuts on the bar into the shape of a frowning face as he waited.

The girl from before, curly black hair and wide dark eyes and ugly purple jumper, suddenly appeared at his elbow. She frowned at him briefly as he quickly dashed the nuts back into a meaningless jumble, before moving into the space between him and the bar and staring eerily up at him. He shifted uncomfortably.

"You're unhappy," she said abruptly. He shrugged. "I'm bored."

"No," she insisted. "Not just right now. Always. Since the dementors."

He startled, and really looked at her for the first time since she'd come over. She met his eyes unashamedly, and he found himself caught in her gaze. She knows, his mind whispered to him, she knows about Harry.

Because that's what it's always been about, hasn't it, it's always been about Harry. Since he was a child, everything had always been about Harry. He was the freak, he was the reason Dudley was the best, until suddenly he wasn't. Then he was the reason Dudley hated everything about himself, felt sick all the time and couldn't even look his father in the eye when he told him he was proud of Dudley, because how could he ever accept praise from the sort of monster that could hate a child for no good reason. The reason that Dudley still woke up screaming some nights because he'd had a nightmare, only the nightmare was him, was that he was still what he'd seen that night five years ago in Surrey. You're a horrible, fat pig who doesn't even deserve to live, you don't deserve anything you have, you're a waste of space, nobody will ever truly love you because you have nothing worth loving about you, look at what you've done, look at the people who made you, look at what they've done . . .

The girl blinked, and Dudley looked away again, burning with shame because she knew. He flinched when she put a hand on his chest.

"Dudley," she said softly, "if you could do anything, change anything, at any cost. Would you want to?"

He forced himself to look back down into her eyes, and he knew what she meant. If you could take it all back, and still have to face it all again, would you? And he knew that he would. That he would face it all again even if it meant nothing had changed, because the him he'd been five years ago wouldn't, and just by facing it again he'd be a different man than the one he'd seen that night.

She must have known this somehow, known it the way she'd known everything else, maybe. Maybe asked him just so he'd know it too, because she nodded and leaned up on her toes to whisper into his mouth "You've got to trust me," before placing a hand on his forehead and shoving, causing him to fall hard on the ground, cracking his head nearly in half on the sticky tile. Everything went fuzzy and dark, and he heard the general uproar in the pub just as his hearing faded.

When he next opened his eyes, everything was too bright and too loud and too wet and he couldn't breathe or speak or cough so he screamed, only it sounded different than normal. And everything was melting together in the harsh light, and he felt like he was being thrown about by the seas before being wrapped in something soft and placed on something warm and firm and a face swam into view.

Somehow he did not feel reassured by the fact that it was his father's face, four stone slimmer and 20 years younger, split in a wide grin as he grumbled proudly of strapping young lads and the good lungs on his newborn son. Dudley thought he might be forgiven for crying just then, so that's what he did.

Nobody listened.