Save One Thing

Save One Thing

Chapter Five

When Harry kisses you, you try not to move. You don't want him to know that no one ever has before. Then you sort of kiss back just to show that you know what you're doing. You think about trying to pull away from him, but his hands are pressed hard against both sides of your face, and your head is too warm and dizzy to think about moving. It's easier this way, you decide, trying not to think that Harry's tongue really is in your mouth. It's easier to let him do what he wants as long as he's not talking about doing impossible things and claiming that you're a freak like him.

Even before, when you couldn't feel the magic as strongly as you do now, you could sense it, and it had always covered Harry completely like a second skin, but it doesn't touch him now. It can't. And when you're this close to each other it seems to have trouble finding you or at least fades for a few moments. It's funny, you think, almost laughing and almost feeling sick, you're being kissed by Harry, and you feel more like yourself than you have in a very long time.

"I don't know what to expect from you, do I?" Harry asks, taking a step back, and you can't imagine what he means by it.

"I don't know what you're talking about," you say.

"Never mind," he mutters, shrugging, as if nothing just happened. "Did you have to make such a mess? There's chocolate all over my shirt now."

You laugh and snort a bit without meaning to. "Your fault there," you say, "and it's really my shirt anyway."

Harry glares, but it doesn't look very threatening with his glasses cocked to the side. "Not since you were ten, it hasn't been."

"Well it was, and I could make you give it back to me right now if I wanted to." Harry raises his eyebrows, and you can feel your face getting warmer. "S-shut up. Just get out of here." Harry rolls his eyes and walks away before you realize that he hasn't cleaned the kitchen yet, and the small owl hops across the table and blinks up at you. "You didn't see anything," you whisper to it, and it seems to nod conspiratorially once before flying out the window.

You fall back into your chair, and your head swims with thoughts of black robes against the night sky and being cold in a way that makes you sure you'll never be warm again and that maybe here are worse things than Harry to be kissed by. You give a brief shudder that has nothing to do with the winds or the magic swirling around you and decide to pretend that you never let yourself think that.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

This time Harry and Dudley do manage to avoid each other, or at least get out of each other's way as fast as they can when they pass in the hallway, as if sharing the same air for too long will make them start kissing again. Harry hasn't seen Dudley for days and would be wondering if he's dead if it weren't for the constant sounds of videogame spaceships exploding that come from his room.

The problem starts itself again when Dudley wanders into the kitchen without seeing Harry there, and Harry knows that if he wants to keep things going as they had been he's going to have to be the one to leave, but he's reading a letter from Hermione and he'll be damned if he's going to get up before finishing it.

"Hey," Dudley says awkwardly.

Harry blinks up at him before answering. "Hey."

"Letter."

"Yeah?"

"What's it about then?"

"Ley lines," he says. "Apparently, no one can see them anymore, and even some muggles used to be able to."

"Oh." Dudley stands in front of him, scuffing his shoes across the tile floor and looking completely out of place.

Harry scoops some oatmeal from a pot beside him to a china bowl and slides it across the table to Dudley. "Here," he says and stifles a laugh as Dudley stares, at it as if it's the most horrible thing he's ever seen.

Dudley sits down, wrinkling his nose. "You expect me to eat this?"

"If you want."

He shovels a rather large spoonful into his mouth and shows Harry that it's possible for him to look even more disgusted than he already had. "This stuff is awful," he says. "It's rubbish. You'd have to try hard to make something taste this bad."

"Shut up," Harry says, folding the letter and putting it in his pocket.

Dudley looks him over carefully, and when he speaks next, something in his voice has changed, become less steady and strangely wistful. "It was my birthday three weeks ago," he says poking his spoon into the oatmeal. "It was my birthday, and I didn't get anything at all."

"I was rather busy," Harry says. "I didn't even know we exchanged gifts, actually. Do we?"

Dudley flinches almost imperceptibly. "They gave you things."

"Yeah," Harry says, "dog biscuits and Uncle Vernon's old socks and once a half pack of stale chewing gum."

"B-but they--"

"They gave me things alright," Harry snarls, and he can feel anger bubbling up from somewhere deep inside him. It's not anger at Dudley or his parents. They're not worth hating, really. Petty and selfish and weak-- it isn't as if they ever had potential to be anything better than themselves, but Harry knows he's nothing like them. He saved a world, and now he can't even figure out a way to make out the front door safely. He's only angry with them because it's their front door he's trapped behind.

"I know they--"

"They gave me chores to do since I could walk," he says, cutting Dudley off again, "and they gave me bad eyesight from never having any proper light to see by. They gave me nightmares and bars on my window and lectures about how I should never tell anyone on the streets that we were actually related, and they gave me bruises, but those came mostly from you, Dudley. "

"Shut your face!" Dudley shouts, pounding his fist onto the table.

"Fine!" Harry screams back at him. "Just keep thinking whatever you want! That's what you'll do anyway!"

Dudley stands up and his chair topples over behind him. "I said shut your stupid freak face!"

The lights in the room get so bright that Harry has to squint to see Dudley as anything more than a large pink blur, backed by a wall of shining white. "Listen," Harry says, calming down slightly. "It doesn't matter. It's not forever. You know that, right?"

"You won't be here forever," is all Dudley says, and for a second, his eyes don't look so dull anymore.

Harry feels an odd pressure building in the back of his head, and he realizes that Dudley knows he's lying. "No, I definitely won't," he says, deciding to give what truth he can.

"Good." Dudley narrows his eyes slightly before turning back to his oatmeal. "It'll be better when you're gone. I don't expect this place is much compared to that castle you're used to staying at, and you can get back to doing all of your freak things-- telling fortunes and wearing your odd clothes and all."

"I will," Harry says, wondering vaguely how Dudley suddenly knows so much. "Trust me, I hate having to be here even more than you hate me having to be here."

"No," Dudley says. "That's not true at all. That's not possible."

"What?" Harry asks, knowing he's not lying this time. "Of course it is. I don't know what certain events have led you to believe, but I don't like you, and I don't like being stuck here now anymore than I did when I had to keep to the cupboard."

Dudley pauses for a second, probably thinking that shoving Harry back in the cupboard under the stairs and locking him in might not be such a bad idea. "I meant that you don't have to be here."

"What? If I leave--"

"But you can," Dudley says. He's not angry, but he's not joking either. "You can leave whenever you want."

"I'd probably be killed."

Dudley shrugs, half laughing through a mouthful of oatmeal. He taps his spoon on his bowl sharply twice. "This stuff really is awful. It's rubbish."

"Yeah," Harry says, rubbing a hand across his forehead and swallowing the lump that rises in his throat. "You mentioned that."

Dudley waddles the few steps across the kitchen floor and starts poking through the refrigerator. "I think we might have a pudding in here."

"You are a pudding, Dudley," Harry says, taking a few blank sheets of paper from his pocket and trying not to think of anything at all, but not thinking doesn't last long, and he starts to wonder how there would be a pudding still in the refrigerator if Aunt Petunia's been gone for months, and Dudley's been eating everything in sight for weeks. He wonders how there's any food left in the house when Dudley hasn't set foot outside since arriving back, and he only has twice to greet Hedwig on the lawn when she looked too tired to find a window on her own. Certainly, neither of them have done any shopping. They don't even have money, though, he suspects Dudley's well practiced, if not actually skilled, at shoplifting. He wonders how they still have electricity and how the telephone still works and how Dudley's remote control toys never run low on batteries even when he keeps them on for days at a time. He doesn't have to look far for the answer.

Dudley emerges from the refrigerator struggling to carry a glass bowl too large to have fit properly on any of the shelves, containing the pudding, which consists almost entirely of chocolate custard with a few pieces of unidentifiable fruit on top. "What did you just call me?" he asks with his mouth already half full.

"You--You . . ."

"HHugh?"

"You!" Harry nearly shouts. "I mean-- I knew some things, but all of this-- You!"

"Shu-up."

"You're doing m-things right now, don't you see?"

"Mggnud."

"Yes you are," Harry says. "How else do you explain it?"

"Ou ar a reak."

Harry gives a frustrated sigh and leans back in his chair. Across from him, Dudley looks very much like he's about to forgo the hassle of a spoon and stick his head directly into the bowl so he can eat faster. He decides this might not be the best time to really talk about everything that's been happening and that there's nothing that really needs to be said anymore, because this isn't forever. It probably won't last very long at all, and there probably isn't any reason to waste energy thinking about it.

All the same, he writes a letter to Hermione about blood ties and advanced shielding spells and the Death Eaters that appear on the lawn every night, and he writes a letter to Ron about finding things in unlikely places and trying to figure out how the world really works and just how much of a lump Dudley is, and then at the last minute, he decides to switch them.

Harry gets up to go see Hedwig, and Dudley stays at the table. Having finished with the pudding, he's moved on to a container of chocolate icing. "Try not to make too much of a mess, will you?" he says on his way out, but Dudley only grunts something inaudible back to him, and he doesn't particularly care to find out what. It's nice being able to walk around the whole house again without worrying where Dudley might turn up. After sending the letters off, he wanders aimlessly through the halls and the guest room, looking over the still pictures of the Dursleys trapped beneath their perfect little frames.

That night, when the sky begins to darken, Dudley groggily shuffles up the stairs to his room, and Harry takes his familiar position beside the lounge window, and he waits. Slowly, the Death Eaters arrive on the sidewalk and huddle together, whispering. Then one pulls something from his robe and a bright light starts dancing through the air. Then another does the same, and another. Soon there are moving searchlights and lanterns shining halfway down the street. He tells himself that he's safe and no small amount of light will make any difference, but he nearly jumps when he hears a voice coming from directly behind him. "Are you watching your freak friends again?"

"They're not my friends," Harry says, turning to look at Dudley. "They're trying to kill me."

"Probably think they'd be doing you a favor," he chuckles to himself. "I don't blame them."

"What are you doing up?"

"I feel sick," Dudley says, rubbing his face with a large, pink hand. "I feel like I'm going to throw up."

Harry rolls his eyes and suppresses the urge to laugh. "I wonder why that is?"

"Probably from looking at you."

"Yeah," Harry says. "Yeah, that must be it-- not the pudding or the biscuits or the ice cream or the fudge bars."

"Shut up," Dudley moans. "Listening to your voice is making it even worse."

"You still have chocolate in your hair, you know, and on your nose and on your shirt."

"Don't worry." Dudley smirks, and for a second, he looks like he's feeling much better. "I'll make sure not to get any on you this time."

The next few moments drag on as Harry and Dudley each practice their own expressions of vague disgust. Harry turns back to the window, but instead of watching the Death Eaters pacing, he studies the reflection of Dudley's face imprinted over the dark street and the moving lights. Dudley does look sick, though whether it's from eating too many sweets or from thinking of the kiss or from something else entirely, Harry can't tell. "They've discovered flashlights," he says more to test out his own voice than anything else. "I'm surprised it took them this long."

"They're stupid, you know," Dudley says. "You'd have to be a ruddy idiot not to follow an address."

"They can't see it because of . . . magic. I told you that."

"Oh, right," Dudley says, flopping down next to him.

"Yeah."

"But you're not doing it?"

"No. I can't. I already told you that."

"So, I guess you're just lucky then, lucky that they can't see you, I mean."

"I know," Harry says, starting to rub away a particularly annoying smear of chocolate on Dudley's cheek. "You're a complete slob, by the way."

Dudley jerks back into the wall as soon as he realizes Harry's touching him and pushes his hand away. "Hey! Get off!"

"Sorry there, Dud."

"Shut up!"

"Shhhh," Harry hisses, just like he did the first night he showed the Death Eaters to Dudley. "I don't know--"

"If they can hear, right-- I remember." Dudley's voice shakes but only slightly, and he leans his head back against the wall, looking exhausted. "Don't touch me again."

"I don't want to."

Dudley gets up leaning heavily on the windowsill, which creaks under his weight, before stumbling over to the sofa and falling asleep.

Harry watches.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When you wake up, Harry's looking at you, really looking as if he hasn't seen you everyday for the past few weeks. He has some paper in his hands and the small owl's hopping around on the floor by his feet, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"Stop it," you say, turning over and half falling off the sofa, but he doesn't stop. He doesn't even look like he's heard you.

"I think you can do it, you know," he says quietly.

"What?"

He holds up the papers-- the letters he gets from his friends delivered by that owl. "I haven't told them yet. They'll say I'm mad, but I really think you can do it."

"Do what?"

"Find your parents," he whispers.

"What?!" You fall the rest of the way off the sofa, and Harry smiles.

"I think you can."

"H-how?"

He rakes a hand through his hair and shrugs. "I haven't got that part figured out, but we'll work on it."

"We will?"

"Yeah." He goes into the kitchen to make breakfast, and you turn on the television and try to make sense of what just happened-- what Harry just said. The voices and music coming from television fade to a low hum that can barely be heard over the volume of your thoughts and the clattering of plates in the kitchen.

Harry wasn't lying-- somehow, you can tell when he is. A sharp buzz in the back of your mind signals every one of his untruths, and they've been frequent over the past few weeks, but he just told you he thinks you can find your parents, and he meant it. You try to keep your hope in check, because you know he meant other things too-- freak things about the men who walk through the lawn every night and the candies that jumped and the top that can keep spinning forever and about you-- you doing things that can't be possible.

By the window, the little owl flaps around, but you don't pay it any attention. You've already conquered some of the magic-- the flashing lights and the cold winds still follow you, but they're not as bad as they once were, or maybe they're just so familiar that you managed somehow to adapt to them, but that seems less likely.

You walk into the kitchen, and at your place, Harry put a bowl of some dry cereal you don't care to try, so you push it to the side and find a chocolate cream pie in the refrigerator that you decide will make a much better breakfast. Harry gives you an odd look for a moment and asks where you think it came from, as if he really didn't just see you take it out. Certainly, your mum must have made it for you before she left along with all the other treats. For a second, you wonder how lucky it is that whenever you look in the refrigerator you can only find exactly what you want and that it hasn't come close to running out of the things you like best, no matter how long you've been here without anyone but Harry to cook for you. You don't stay thinking about it for very long, though. You don't think about anything for very long when there's pie in front of you.

Harry watches you eat, and he pretends he's going to be sick, and he tells you you're going to be sick, and he says you should still be sick from all you ate yesterday. You feel good, though-- better than you have in a long time. You don't even complain when, only halfway through eating, Harry grabs you by the arm and says it's time to start.

It's like playing hide and seek with your eyes shut and your ears blocked up. Harry tells you that when you were little, you always seemed able to find him when he was trying to avoid you and your friends. He says this shouldn't be any different, but he's lying.

He ties the blindfold over your eyes and puts a hand on your shoulder that you try to shrug off, and he tells you to breathe, so you hold your breath just to spite him. You can't do it at first. You can't hear him or feel him watching you, and you don't understand what it is he tells you to look for or why you can't use your eyes to find it.

Harry laughs when you fall up the stairs and stumble over the coffee table, but he keeps it quiet, and he makes sure never to do it to your face and always says things like, 'good job, Dud' when you get close. You want to tell him not to bother, because he never bothered before, and it's not like things are any different between you now, but you already knew none of that could be the same if you stared something like this, and you already knew that Harry couldn't be trusted to tell the truth despite the words that were carved into his hand when he came back from his freak school two years ago.

Still, there was one thing he believed that you want to believe too, and you save that in your mind-- those exact words, and you whisper them to yourself every time you walk face-first into a wall or bruise your knees on table legs.

I really think you can do it, you know, find your parents.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Dudley's getting it now, learning how to find Harry no matter where he hides. He sits on the sofa in the lounge shoving biscuits in his mouth and calling out locations as Harry wanders around a floor above him. "Bathroom. Hallway. Your room. Hallway. My room. Hallway. My room again."

Harry flops down on down on Dudley's bed, and despite being broken, he finds it much more comfortable than his own-- not that this comes as much of a surprise. "You'd better not be touching anything!" Dudley screams up to him and Harry laughs slightly to himself before getting up and walking over to the computer.

"I'm not. Where am I, now?"

"My room, still, and you'd better--"

"Where in your room?"

"Computer," Dudley says after a slight pause.

"Yeah." Harry climbs over the bed and the clutter on the floor to get to Dudley's dresser and examines it curiously. All the drawers except the bottom one are hanging open and overflowing with unfolded clothes. "Now?" he asks casually prying open the bottom drawer and shutting it when he only finds more unfolded shirts and a battered looking shoebox.

"Dresser," Dudley says before shouting, "GET OUT OF THERE!"

"Okay, I'm out! I'm out!" Harry calls back to him, rolling his eyes as all Dudley's electronic toys spark to life and his remote control airplane takes off and starts flying around the ceiling in wide circles. It's better than the time Harry accidentally went into Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's room-- then two upstairs lamps exploded and the birch tree in Ms. Figg's yard shot out of the ground like a rocket. Whether or not he has any control yet, Harry has to admit that Dudley really is getting it.

When Harry first realized what might be possible, he asked himself why he should be bothered to care, but he supposes it has something to do with what Ron said about not being able to sit back and do nothing. Dudley's just might save his parents and that's fine, Harry tells himself, because they love him and feed him and give him gifts, and he always has been selfish. Harry wonders if he should warn him what this could start-- that you save one thing, and you have to save another and another until saving things becomes a habit you can't break, but there's no point to it, really. He couldn't ever understand.

It would take something stronger than magic to make Dudley Dursley a hero.

Something in the room shifts. The remote control airplane lands gently on Dudley's desk and all of the other toys go still and silent. Harry turns to see Dudley standing in the doorway breathing hard, and he wonders how he didn't hear him stomping up the stairs. "Don't touch anything," Dudley says, and Harry walks over to him and holds out his hands.

"I haven't."

"I don't believe you. You were on my bed, and you went in the bottom drawer."

"God job, Dud," Harry says, but he doesn't seem at all appeased, he doesn't even seem to have noticed Harry talking. There are small, brown crumbs around the corners of Dudley's mouth and down his shirtfront, and brushing them away is more of a reflex than anything else, and it doesn't seem as wrong as it should. Harry wonders why his hands haven't been pushed away from Dudley yet, but Dudley isn't paying him any attention. He's concentrating on something, chewing on his bottom lip and narrowing his eyes as if looking off in the distance behind Harry, but there is no distance to look into, only a plain white wall.

"I'm not doing magic," Dudley says finally in a small, unsteady voice. "I've been thinking about it, and I'm really not doing anything. It's just happening. It's not like it is in those books you have that give the words to make things move or disappear or change into other things. I'm not even saying any words."

"Not all spells need words," Harry says quietly. Dudley still doesn't look at him, and he still doesn't move his hands from the front of Dudley's shirt.

"But this isn't like the things you did."

"No, it's not."

"And I'm not a wizard. If I was, I would have gone to that freak school."

"No, I guess you're not."

"So-- so I--"

"You're doing magic," Harry says, and Dudley's head snaps around to look at him.

"But I can't be."

"But you are."

"I-I don't want to," Dudley stammers. "I don't want to be weird. I--"

Harry moves his hands up and pulls Dudley forward by the shoulders and kisses him. He doesn't know what point he's trying to prove by doing it or if maybe he's doing it to prove that there isn't any point at all. He almost laughs through Dudley's protests, and he pulls back so he can laugh fully when he realizes that Dudley tastes like chocolate, though not in any way that could be considered pleasant

"What are you doing?!" Dudley says, staring at him incredulously. "I said I don't want to be weird!"

Harry's laughter becomes thick and scratchy, and he's not sure if it's this or the kiss that leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. "Wow, you really believe that, don't you?" he asks, running a hand along what little there is of Dudley's neck. "You actually think it matters." He kisses Dudley again, rougher this time, and this time, Dudley's ready for it and pushes him away fast.

"Stop it, will you!"

"It doesn't," he hisses, pressing his fingers deep into the too-soft skin of Dudley's arms. "It doesn't matter . . . It doesn't mater what you want."

It's an intricate, sudden motion that sends Harry sprawling out of Dudley's room, one that he would have thought Dudley too slow and stupid to manage, but he doesn't really know what to think of Dudley anymore. Dudley somehow ducked out of his arms while simultaneously pushing him away and slamming the door shut behind him. "Leave me alone," Dudley shouts breathlessly from inside his room. "Just leave me alone."

"What?!" Harry shouts back. "What about everything we were trying to do?!"

"It's nothing! It's not happening! It can't be happening! Just because you think something is true doesn't mean it really is!"

"Stop it! You can't quit! That's not how it's done!"

"I don't care," Dudley says softer than before. "I don't care anymore. I just want this to stop."

Harry pounds his fists into the door, screaming. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare quit now." But Dudley doesn't say anything back. Harry waits for the door to open or for any sound to come from inside Dudley's room, but there's nothing, and minutes later, he's surprised to find himself still breathing at least as hard as Dudley had been, and he leans back against the wall until he feels steady enough to walk the length of hallway to his room and eat a few pieces of Honeyduke's best chocolate before collapsing into bed.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~