Post-HBP, but no specific spoilers as such. Dudleycentric, because that poor boy needs love too.
While the wizarding world has lost one of its greatest heroes to the darkness that coils tighter around it, affairs on Privet Drive continue much in their normal order. Even here, however, things have not remained completely static.
Dudley has grown thinner over the past year, much thinner; while his mother, when she greets him, exclaims in delight at how much handsomer, stronger, manly her Duddykins looks like, the boy can't help but shrink into his now baggy clothing, flinching. The amount of weight he's lost, for the time he's done it in, is almost appalling. It's not for the lack of wanting to eat that he's ceased his gluttonous intake of food, but rather, he's come to consider sweets unappealing. After all, you never know if one of them's been hexed.
A new thing, as well, is his sudden fixation on reading; he reads under the sheets, with a flashlight, in unknowing imitation of his cousin. He hasn't missed video games as much as he thought he might, and now even the most breathtaking pixelated scenes can't hold his interest for more than five minutes at a time. His schoolmates hadn't failed to notice his distraction and rib him about it, but Dudley had smiled absently before letting his thoughts move on.
Lately, they linger on Harry a lot, for no reason Dudley can quite explain. It perplexes him. Everything about his cousin does, from his now-decent footwear to the green eyes neither Dudley nor his mother possesses. For all his traumatic experiences with magic, Dudley begins to crave a glimpse of Harry's world, wondering desperately if he'll ever get a chance to see what it is that makes his cousin return from his school year smiling -- only for the expression to drop at the first sight of his relatives.
Dudley realizes, however belatedly, that he's spent quite a bit of his life wasting it, and now, he's trying desperately to cram all the knowledge he can into his head to make up for it.
He stays up reading until midnight, often well past it; as a result, he's the only one awake when Mrs. Figg's door bangs sharply, a sound that draws him to the window.
Black figures converge on the distant house, predatory, and his breathing, already quiet, stops entirely.
The lights in Mrs. Figg's house are dim. He is rather sure she is not awake.
The black figures creep up to her door.
With a recklessness he hasn't had the faintest idea he possessed, Dudley breathes in and hollers out into the night. Even if his mass is now less than impressive, his voice carries quite far, and quite well. It's the bravest thing he's done in ten years.
"Oy! Keep that racket down there!"
The black-robed figures jerk their heads towards the window as one, and Dudley has just enough time to see the whites of their eyes flash (and there, Mrs. Figg's lights flaring on and -- wait, there's more than one person in there) before his common sense kicks in and he dives backwards, scrabbling under the bed as his natural cowardice reassumes itself.
Outside, the street explodes into a diorama of spells and light.