I will never forgive them for cutting out this scene.
Tumblr app doesn’t show this gif set but I already know what it is. No need to hesitate to reblog.
And he did this just before a road trip, stuck in the car with his parents asking what he was thinking.
The look of utter defiance Dudley gives Vernon as he steps over the fence though
And how he does it really slowly as well as if to say “What you gonna do about it huh?”
The phone rings. It was an absurd wedding gift from his father in-law, and one which much to Harry’s surprise, had actually worked when he’d plugged it into the landline. Arthur had taken to phoning him on it, just for the pure novelty of the thing—though how they’d managed to get a BT engineer out to the Burrow without causing an incident, Harry doesn’t know. He’s not sure he wants to.
“Hello?”
“Uhm,, is this…is this the Potter residence?”
There’s a beat of silence as Harry adjusts the receiver against his ear, not quite sure he’s heard who he thinks he has. “…Dudley?”
“Yea…uhm, Harry?”
“Dudley.” Harry repeats numbly, turning to look at Ginny who is looking at him expectantly, eyebrows raised. “Uh…Christ, Dudley, hi how did…how did you find this number?”
There’s another beat of silence and the crackle of static that might have been a sigh or simply just the line breaking up. “Hi, sorry I know you probably…sorry this was stupid. I uh, I put your name in the computer and this was the only thing that came up.”
“Oh.” Harry breathes, still trying to recover his equilibrium. Ten minutes ago he’d been using his wand to clear away dinner, he’d been getting ready to sit down and read through some reports before putting the kids to bed, and now somehow, he’s talking to his muggle cousin who he hasn’t seen since… “How, how are you?”
“Good, yea” Dudley replies, seeming to rally, “You?”
“Yea, uh, doing well…”
The conversation lasts maybe a half hour, faltering and awkward. But they’re going for a coffee at the end of the week and Harry supposes…that’s…that’s a thing that is happening.
*
“Harry…”
Harry turns and looks up, and looks up some more at the looming figure blocking out the light.
“Dudley,” he says, standing up and hoping the pang of something awful doesn’t show on his face. For a moment he thought he’d been looking at Vernon. “It’s good to see you.”
Dudley gives him a look that says he clearly knows Harry is lying, but is thankful for being humored. “You too, you’re looking good…”
They pass the first few minutes with awkward pleasantries and even more awkward silences. But it’s…nice would be too strong a word, but it’s not bad either. He even manages to get a smile out of him when he calls him Big D, the other man shaking his head with a self depreciating eye roll.
“Dad died,” Dudley says after a while, and Harry feels an icy hot flash go down his spine, curdling in his gut.
“Oh,” he says, not quite sure how he’s supposed to feel about that, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Dudley snorts into his coffee. “Somehow I doubt it.” and it’s not accusing, but Harry still can’t help but feel like he should defend himself. The words they locked me in a cupboard are on the cusp of his tongue but Dudley gets there before him. “There’s a lot of things…looking back…lot of things…” and it’s not an apology, not really. “Took me a long time to realize certain things weren’t right…too long.”
Harry nods at that, because yes, it had also taken him a long time too to understand the full of extent of what had gone on in 4 Privet Drive. He still doesn’t like tight spaces.
“You realize things though, when you have kids,” Dudley carries on, shaking his head, “Like they’re just kids, how can you do that to a kid? They need you for everything.”
And Harry can relate to that too. Lily is three and Ginny is pregnant again and James already has an alarming alacrity for finding trouble and with or without magic Harry doesn’t have enough hands to deal with it all. But he loves it, and he loves them, and the thought of anyone ever treating his children the way he remembers his first eleven years of life is enough to make the electric lights over their head flicker.
“You’ve got kids?”
“Two,” Harry says, “third one on the way. You?”
“Nice. Just the one, so far.” He hands over his phone, the image of a bright young girl with dark skin and tight ringlet curls staring back at him from the grasp of Dudley’s arms. “Effie.” He smiles ruefully at Harry’s obvious surprise. “Dad wasn’t too happy about that either.”
“She’s gorgeous.” Harry says, handing the phone back and pulling out his own wallet to reveal the moving pictures inside.
Dudley flinches a bit at that, but he guffaws broadly when he spies James. “Cor, he don’t half look like you. No glasses though.”
“No,” Harry says, pushing his own glasses back up his nose. “He’s got his mother’s eyes, thankfully.”
“Actually, Harry, there was something I was hoping we could…talk about.”
And ah, there it is. “What about?”
“It’s…it’s about Effie…”
And when he’s done talking Harry just wants to lean back and laugh and laugh and laugh, because of course Vernon Dursley’s granddaughter is a witch, of course she is. But he doesn’t, because Dudley is doing the one thing he can think of to try and help his child, and Harry can’t fault him for that.
*
They keep in touch after that. Christmas cards, postcards—gifts for the kids on birthdays. The year Effie turns eleven—the same as James—Harry drops a casually long thought out text into the familial void.
“Diagon A this weekend, if you’re up for it?”
The text comes back quickly, a little too quickly for the way Dudders pecks at his phone whenever Harry has seen him typing. “Snds gd, 1st pint on u 😉 – Big D 🍺🍺🍺👌👍”
It’ll be painfully awkward, it always is. But it’s something.
no but bi harry deliberately fucking with ron like they’re at christmas dinner or w/e and harry just goes “you know ron i’m in love with your sister and everything but if bill was single…goddamn. i’d go there”
bill winks across the table at harry
ron screams
“GODDAMN IT YOU CAN’T TAKE ALL MY SIBLINGS, HARRY.”
“Don’t worry, Ron, you can keep Percy.”
I FUKCGIN PISSED MYSELF
Oh God…and Harry flirting shamelessly with Fred and George and them flirting back just to piss Ron off…..I need it
Ron wakes up to harry wearing a different Weasleys sweater every morning
WHAT A FUCKING ICON i feel like the movies and some of the latter books made her seem much less cool than she is and like. what an interesting and intriguing and dynamic character. what a great character for us to sink our teeth into.
we don’t get the opportunity, but we fucking could, is what i’m getting at.
minerva deserves her own book series and WHILE I’M FUCKING AT IT she deserves a happy ending. this whole her husband died and she spent the rest of her life alone and sad thing is bullshit. give minerva a fucking wife you cowards!!! her and pomfrey are fucking, actually. i’ve decided. she and minerva get down in the supply closet every other tuesday, and in minnie’s office evety other friday. they fuck beneath the stars on a quidditch pitch. their relationship is Epic and Sweet and Fluffy and love flows between them as easy as anything. they keep it on the dl because the students would lose their fucking minds if they could bug the wife of their professor just because. it’s to avoid the jokes more than anything else.
“is she this rough with you?”
“what’s her beside manner like?”
“does she use that restraining charm on you?? i didn’t enjoy it, personally.”
how many muggle born kids showed up at hogwarts like, “i get you’re into magic and don’t get me wrong, magic is awesome, but please don’t try and tell me quills and inkwells make more sense than pencils. i realize you have an aesthetic going, but admit it’s that. admit it’s just for looks.”
Imagine how many muggles parents looked at the supply list and went “Parchment? Quills? INKWELLS? Fuck this we’re going to staples.”
And then imagine if the muggle parents start getting into arguments with the teachers when they start getting messages telling them their kids aren’t using the proper materials.
“Okay look we can accept working with frog livers, turning mice into fine china, and whatever the fuck ‘arithmancy’ is but we’re not going to let you shame our kids just because they choose to use a bic pen instead of this ‘ye old inkwell’ bullshit. Also. it’s called a spiral notebook and I’m not gonna make my Abby drag around five hundred feet of loose parchment just because you people have a theme going.”
Aesthetic or death
I’ve got to wonder, though, how much of the school supply list at Hogwarts is based on aesthetic and how much is based on what the Muggle world was like when wizards retreated into secrecy. Like, how many wizards who haven’t taken Muggle Studies are aware that nobody uses inkwells and quill pens anymore? And I bet the Muggle parents over the years have always just assumed “well there must be some reason for all this, it must work better with these supplies, there must be something inherently magical in parchment” and just went with it.
Give me the story of the Muggle-born witch whose parents can’t afford all the fancy school supplies, who literally cringe when they’re told about the fund for “underprivileged students” because they’re not POOR but they’ve got four other children and two of them need special care, who scrimp and save and scrape together until they can afford the school supply list even if most of it’s secondhand, but they start at the top of the list with the things that HAVE to be bought in Diagon Alley and go from there, and when they get towards the end of the list they start making do.
On September 1, in this big crowd of ickle firsties, there’s one who stands out because her robes don’t look quite right but no one can quite pinpoint why, until an older student asks her the next day and she shyly admits that her mother made them for her out of some fabric she’s had lying around for a while. She gets to her first class and sits in the back because she’s a little embarrassed and pulls out the battered secondhand textbook and her wand and everything else she needs, prepared to take notes, and everything’s going along just fine until Professor Flitwick suddenly stops in the middle of his lecture and asks what she’s doing, and she just freezes but manages to stammer out that she’s just taking notes, Professor.
Flitwick is suddenly at her side, how did he get there so quickly, and examining her cheap retractable pen and the packet of looseleaf paper in a flimsy three-ring binder where the center ring is already out of alignment, and the other Muggle-borns and half-bloods in the class are snickering because look at this loser who didn’t know you need parchment and quills for this, who ever heard of doing magic with a biro, but Flitwick is fascinated and asks if he can try one, and maybe she tells him to keep that one because she has more (even though she only has a couple more, but she can make do with pencils, and surely somebody around here will loan her a little bit of ink to refill one of her pens if she needs to, I mean, it can’t be that hard to fill up the little ink sticks inside of them, can it?) and he beams at her like she’s just given him the House Cup and goes back to teaching like nothing has happened.
And then all of her teachers are asking her about these things, and maybe a few of the other Muggle-born students tentatively help her answer them, and when McGonagall presses her she admits that her parents couldn’t afford to get her everything she needed and it was a lot cheaper to go to the shop on the corner and pick up a half-dozen packs of looseleaf and a packet of pens than it was to buy the quill and parchment and honestly, Professor, I didn’t think it would matter, and McGonagall smiles because she remembers her own father and says it doesn’t.
The next year the school supply list says only ink-based writing utensils and parchment or lined paper and a few of the more traditionalist pureblood families insist on only sending their children with quills and inkwells, but there are other students–a lot of other students–with retractables and stick pens and a couple of the older Muggle-born students come in with really nice quality fountain pens and there’s a whole black market (or at least grey market) going on with regards to the buying and selling and trading of glitter gel pens and a lot of debates over whether fine-tipped pens or the broader ones are better and there’s at least one kid who’s got one of those gigantic foot-long novelty click pens because what, you said it had to be ink-based, so what if it’s an inch thick and hot pink with Disney princesses all over it, it’s still a pen, and within a few years nobody can remember why there was such an issue with them in the first place.
Nobody has the slightest idea what to do the first time a student shows up with his grandfather’s typewriter, though.
I love how casually knowledgeable Ronald Weasley is, talking facts, including the year and the venue
like that.
Charlie studied dragons. Ron isn’t just casually knowledgeable, he takes an interest in his brothers’ hobbies
I’ll bet it wasn’t just an interest. In fact, I’ll bet those exact words were repeated in the Weasley household on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
“But Mum, my mate’s cousin’s sister’s uncle has the egg just ready to go and honestly, who better to take care of things than us, because after all—?”
“Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709, Charlie!”
“Dad, seriously, the guy in the alleyway was practically begging me to take the egg and I mean—”
“Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709, Charlie!”
“Good morning, family, let’s say I managed to convert my bedroom into a habitat suitable for a Chinese Fireball, wouldn’t that show that I’m respons—”
“Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709, Charlie!”
It’s just on a gigantic af poster in the middle of the Burrow’s kitchen. Hanging right there above the tea kettle: 𝔻𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕠𝕟 𝕓𝕣𝕖𝕖𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕝𝕒𝕨𝕖𝕕 𝕓𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕜𝕤’ ℂ𝕠𝕟𝕧𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕠𝕗 𝟙𝟟𝟘𝟡, ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕝𝕚𝕖!
It just wasn’t mentioned because it wasn’t relevant to Harry’s journey.
When Tiffany opens her big yellow eyes to kill Tom Riddle and save the world from all the things he plans to do, she resigns herself to another thousand years alone, to another thousand years of eating rats and missing her beloved Salazar.
Instead, within the very same century, another boy makes his way into her chamber.
He speaks her tongue and puts her scales and convinces one of the house elves to bring her fresh meat from the kitchens. He says that his mom is going to be so mad, but it she’d just let him get a pet snake, none of this would have happened, so it’s really not his fault.
Tiffany loves Harry Potter utterly. He reminds her of Salazar.
wupacing 