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Author: Bronte Story: Dudley's Redemption Rating: Everyone Setting: DH-interview Status: WIP Reviews: 13 Words: 18,441
He’d seen it when he was looking for the telly. It was old and faded and extremely squishy. It was nothing like he’d ever sat on before His mother would never let something like that in the house. Dudley would have liked a black leather one like he had seen in the DFS catalogue but with Daddy still acting weird and not getting a new job, no one would buy him anything. He cracked the spine of the book; he could only have it for two weeks and if it was new then someone else would want it and he wouldn’t be able to renew it or get it back for ages. ‘Concerning Hobbits’ began the prologue. Dudley read slowly; it was much more difficult than the books he had been reading. Hobbits had a nice life; so many meals and apparently not much else. It sounded nice but boring. It was hard enough to live out here with only three channels, but not any telly at all would be horrible. Though, come to think of it, he hadn’t been watching that much anymore. He’s stopped watching so much telly at Smeltings, and in his summers, he’d never got up to the levels he had watched when he lived at home year round. But if he watched telly in Little Whinging, it kept him away from his parents and their Little Diddikins/ Boxer Extraordinaire talk, and Harry. He had been so weird the last couple of summers with those loud nightmares, and he was really jumpy and then those Dementoids. They made him cold just thinking about them. The Hobbits were just leaving the Shire when Mummy came up with his hot chocolate and mince pies. She’d started on the Christmas baking. The Book! Dudley hurriedly dropped the book in his lap so that the cover picture was out of sight. Dudley didn’t think that Mummy would like him reading something with elves and Hobbits and especially a Wizard in it. He must have moved fast enough since she didn’t say anything. It took Dudley a month to read The Lord of the Rings. He’d been doing his homework at thelLibrary in his lunch hour and started planning his essays on the way to and from school, all so he could read as much as possible. The story was great, lots of battles and those Elven cloaks were like an Invisibility Cloak. In nature, anyway; he didn’t think it would blend in with a proper city or a town like Little Whinging. He’d had a lot of trouble following the story, especially in the second book. It was really three books just all printed together, and in the second book they all got split up and then the story would jump between them. Just when he was getting one story straight in his head, it would switch to following someone else. He might read it again, but first he was going to read The Hobbit. Ms Forrester at the library had said it came before The Lord of the Rings and was easier to read as well. Maybe if he read The Hobbit the rest of it would be easier to understand. Dudley returned The Lord of the Rings the first day after the Christmas holidays. Christmas had been weird. He’d had hardly any presents, only four. He’d never had so few, and only two were from Mummy and Daddy. The others were a joint present from Hestia and Dedalus, They’d stuck a note to the cover: Your parents see only a copy of Who’s Who. H &D. He pulled it off and looked at the title underneath. It was a book called A History of Magic. The other one was a large box of sweets. It didn’t have a tag on it but Hestia and Dedalus said it was from the Order. He was pretty sure that’s what Harry had called the good guys. His parents had given him a book voucher, “Since Mummy’s little popkin seems to be reading so much, and we can’t have you reading those nasty public books,” and a new game for his Nintendo. Was Daddy so out of it he didn’t know Dudley didn’t have his games console? Daddy was the one who always bought his games. ~ Dudley was going to the bookshop after school. He wanted The Hobbit and then he was just going to see what caught his eye. The Hobbit was much easier to read than The Lord of the Rings and he found out more about Gandalf. That’s who the guy on the cover was, the guy who looked like the old man who had picked Harry up in the holidays after fifth form. Gandalf was pretty powerful. Fighting a fire-demon and dying then coming back and keeping on fighting bad stuff and not getting hurt, and he seemed so nice too most of the time, and harmless. Dudley finished the The Hobbit and set it on the shelf in his room. He had bought his own copy of The Lord of the Rings with the rest of his voucher. The only other book on that shelf, the books he owned were on their own shelf, was the book he’d got for Christmas. He opened the cover to find a message ‘Dudley, I saw you reading Tolkien and not like it was for an assignment. That’s the magical world that’s myth, I thought you might like be interested in the magical world that is. The one your cousin lives in. H. Merry Christmas, 1997. Hestia and Dedalus’. Closing the door so he’d hear if someone was coming upstairs, Dudley sat down to read. ~ Having been caught out with the Tolkien, Dudley was being much more careful with this book. He only read it in his room and always had a blanket on the settee to hide it in if someone came upstairs, with a decoy book at his side. He didn’t know if whatever had kept his parents from seeing the real cover at Christmas would still work and he wasn’t taking any chances. The book started a bit slowly but Dudley could follow it. It was easier than Tolkien, that was for sure. It started with Avalon and carried on to Merlin and King Arthur. It was weird reading the story from the magical side of things. At school, they had done some King Arthur stuff but in that it was only Merlin that was a wizard. A History of Magic said that half the round table had been magical too, and knights had only stopped being magical right up to the Statute of Secrecy, when they had mostly had to choose which world to live in. Most of them chose the Wizarding world; there, their ladyfolk weren’t at risk of being burnt at the stake, though that seemed to be more of an inconvenience than a real problem. Dudley read of the Mage Royal, the official wizard or wizard to the crown, which dated back to Merlin’s time. The role had been down-scaled over time, so now it was an honorary position given to someone of note and the Minister of Magic did the rest. Dudley likened it to how the Prime Minister did all the running of the country, while the Queen spent her time doing ceremonial stuff. Dudley wondered what would happen if one of the Royals was magic; would they get the Mage Royal position, the pre-eminent wizard for the whole British Isles and nominal ruler over the magical world? The book covered the founding of Hogwarts, Harry’s school, by two witches and two wizards, one of whom had been a Welsh knight. It also had a list of every Headmaster and Headmistress since the last of the founders died. The last one listed was Albus Dumbledore. The book must be out of date, since he knew that Dumbledore was dead. The last chapter of the book covered from the 1970’s up until late 1981, a period they referred as the You-Know-Who war. It was only by reading all the footnotes that Dudley found out that it was all about Voldemort, the nutter who was after Harry. When it came to the last couple of pages of the chapter Dudley found out why. That nutter had tried to kill Harry before and been bumped off himself. So somehow he was back, or was it another guy with another name? If he was a lord then title would be passed down the family ‘Lord Voldemort of Breckenridge’ or whatever. Dudley had never really understood what happened to Harry’s parents to make him have to live with them. His parents had always said a car crash and he’d not thought to doubt it until that big guy who tried to turn him into a pig had said otherwise. Even then, he hadn’t thought about it. Harry’s parents were dead. Harry lived with them. No one was happy about it, but it was just how it was. Dudley had some questions, and he didn’t think his parents were going to like them.
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