Fat Kid

I remember when the world changed. The summer Harry turned eleven. That's when The Letter came.

I never thought much about Harry back then. Hell, I didn't think anything about anything or anybody back them. Not Dad or Mum, certainly not about school.

Looking back, I wonder if I even thought about myself. It was all give me, show me, take me, watch me, back in the Chubby Days.

Once Harry's Letter came, the world changed. Literally. My illusions were shattered, and I've never been the same since. Dad went mad, and Mum revealed the most horrifying truth I could have imagined in my Playstation-dulled mind.

Her dead sister, the one we never talked about, Harry's mum, was a witch. My dead witch aunt had married a wizard, gotten herself blown up by some evil Dark wizard, and had wound us up with Harry to raise.

Not a pretty picture from that point. Not a pretty picture at all. Dad blew a fuse when Harry got the letter. Refused to let him read it, dragged us off to some dreary island cabin where it stormed and the electricity went out and I was bored. All to keep Harry from getting those damned school letters.

And Mum cleaned. A lot. She'd cleaned in the mornings, after breakfast, and then during the day until it was time to make dinner. After we ate, she'd clean some more. She cleaned more when the owls swarmed, because a swarm of owls makes quite a mess. But still, she cleaned a little more than absolutely necessary.

I suppose cleaning helped her deal with the ghost of dead witches.

And when the giant broke down the door of the hideaway Dad rented to avoid the letters and took Harry off to his school, we all went back to Privet Drive. Went home with Dad screaming himself red in the face about freaks and Mum supporting him like a good wife.

I won't lie. I spent the entire trip back complaining. And whining. And demanding.

I did a lot of that in those days.

I'd kill to be that chubby...no, that fat kid again. I'd pull my Mum out of the kitchen and force her to put her feet up, make her relax while I cooked dinner for her. I'd bring Dad into my room, teach him how to play games on the Playstation, ask him about his boyhood.

If I was the Fat Kid again, I'd talk more to Harry, not to bully him but to learn from him. To find out what they taught him at that school.

But I'm not the Fat Kid anymore. Fat turned to muscle when I took up boxing, then muscle pulled tight across my frame as the lean times came. I stick out now. Nobody's fat now, but I can't help being big. My mum was at least right about that--I am big boned.

I would make her enjoy life, if I were that Fat Kid again.

The bar is filling up. I stay out of the light. I am in no mood to show my papers, even though I've never had to defend them yet. I just want to nurse my fire whiskey and be alone until she gets here.

Hard doing, sometimes, because the Scanners are bastards who like nothing more than to find an unregistered Muggle to make an example of. I have no intention of becoming anyone's example.

I went by Dursley then. Bless my parents, they were kind enough to name me Dudley Vernon Dursley. I had to become a bully, really. I mean, who wouldn't? It was kill or be killed, a fat, stupid kid with the name d-d-Dudley d-d-Dursley.

Of course, once I found I was good at it, I really sort of liked bullying.

Everytime I see a Scanner roughing up some poor homeless Techno or Blank, I want to search out every kid I ever bullied and clean out his basement. Or buy him a meal. Or do something to make up for it.

I'm big, but they've got magic.

I pass myself off as a Squib. Gee loans me her blood. A tiny vial, magically preserved, and another of urine, to pass the tests. Squibs get roughed up, too, but not as bad as Muggles, registered or unregistered. Magical blood, yes, but no talent.

I'm big enough that the Scanners don't often play with me like the others, and it gives me a bit of mobility. I still wish I had a bit of magic in me, not just vials of platelets and plasma and urine borrowed from Gee.

A group of rowdy kids are playing eight ball. They use wands instead of queues. I keep my head down. At one point in my life, I might have done one of two things--harass them or join them. Now I drink the burning liquid and wish Gee would hurry the hell up.

It's twenty-past eight, and I'm starting to worry. She isn't usually late. She's the brains of this operation, and I'm the brawn. It works okay that way--I get her through the Muggle ghettos and she helps me deal with the Mags. The fact that she's True Blood, with papers (not forgeries like mine) to prove it, never hurts us.

Not that she always uses her real papers.

God, no.

We're supposed to meet Mione and The Old Lady at midnight. They watch the standard portkeys too tightly to use them, so we had to get an object charmed by one of her contacts in the Underground.

I'm about to try the cell phone. They never did knock down the towers, and there are still a few channels that work. But she comes breezing into the bar, turning heads like she always does.

Gee's like that.

She's not too tall, but she works her body for all it's worth. At 23, with red hair down to her hips and a body to kill, she doesn't need True Blood papers to get what she wants. But it's not her body I'm watching. It's her eyes. Did she get the portkey?

She casts me a lofty look, the kind that would say to anyone who didn't wake up next to her in bed each morning, "Buzz off, loser." But I saw something different. I saw coolness, guarded and calm, but still cool.

She walks straight past me to the other end of the bar and orders a small gillywater. Two guys from the Mags' pool game sauntered over and tried their best, but she blew them off. That's my girl.

I try not to think hard when I look at her. When I see her like that, all brave and cool and undercover, I'm afraid I'll fall in love with her.

Never a good idea to love someone. We sleep together, and sometimes we have sex, but we've both lost too much to let ourselves love.

Love will come later.

When we've defeated Voldemort.

When the Order rises again.

She held me this morning. I woke in another screaming, sweating panic.

She rocked me in those beautiful arms of hers, cradled against those beautiful breasts, as I wept. She knew I'd had The Dream again. She doesn't ask anymore. Not since the first time I described it to her, a memory dream of finding my parents the year Harry and the Order fell, the year they decided to destroy anything that remained of the line that almost defeated the Dark Lord.

...when they bashed my dad's face in and left him for dead on the stairs.

...when they drained my mom's body of every ounce of her precious blood, the very blood that flowed in her dead sister's vein and her soon-to-be dead nephew's vein.

The blood of Harry Potter.

I'd been working as a bouncer in Greater Whinging at the time it happened. I'd done it with Smeltings, having flunked out my last year. I came home to death and the Order.

I've never been Dudley since. Only in my nightmares.

Harry fell, and so many others after him. The Dark Wizards took their war to the streets, to the Muggles they hated so much. I missed a lot of it. I was sheltered by the Order, mainly for my blood. Gee shares hers with me, I give mine to them. Maybe there's something in it that can help.

The Order knows if Voldemort finds another blood relative of Harry, he...I would suffer the same fate as my mother.

Wizards aren't like Muggles. When the war came, between the Wizards and the Muggles, we didn't know how to fight. What is a weapon of mass destruction, what is a machine gun, against dark magic? I heard somewhere the North Koreans launched a nuclear bomb, and the Dark Mages turned it back on their own capital. Then they sealed the borders of the country magically and left them to starve or die of radiation poisoning.

Even the North Korean wizards. An example for those Muggles who tried such tactics, and the local wizards who didn't stop them.

My papers are perfect forgeries. They belonged to a real wizard. A boy who died at birth, the same year I was born, the same year Harry was born, one year before Harry became Number One on Voldemort's hit list. I've never had them questioned. I mean, who'd pretend to be a Squib, right?

The Order gave me the dead Squib boy's life, and in return I give them my blood. And my muscle.

It's better than the camps.

Gee's giving me the signal. Brushing her bangs out of her eyes, twice to the left, then both hands palm-down on the bar.

She got it.

I drop a few sickles on the bar, more than the tab, to keep the bartender uninterested, and head out. There's an alley behind the building, three doors down.

We meet there.

She kisses me, hard. "I'll tell you all about it later, D.," she says. It's enough for me. I take her hand and we touch the portkey together. In no time, the town where we're to meet Hermione and Minerva blinks into view.

Magic is grand, isn't it?

Ginny Weasley, former Kid Sister, is a True Blood, and a spy for the Order, fighting against Voldemort and his goons.

Dudley Dursley, former Fat Kid, is a fake Squib, and a spy for the Order, fighting against Voldemort and his goons.

Funny how things work out.