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1.
By the time you are six, you know three things.
First: there is something wrong with you.
Second: things are wrong with Harry and so he lives in a cupboard and your parents hate him.
Third: no one can find out about you.
2.
You have a gang, because boys have gangs. You beat up other kids, because that's what boys do. Your parents tell you over and over again that this is you being a boy and you drink it up. As long as your parent thinks you're a boy, they'll never treat you like Harry.
You cannot slip up.
And so you never ever ever try on any of your mother's clothes or her jewelry or her shoes or her lipstick. You never try to imagine what you would look like if you were allowed to grow your hair out. You never sometimes try wrapping a shirt around your waist and pretend it's a skirt just to see what it feels like. You never do any of that, because boys don't do that, and you're a boy. If you want your parents to love you, you have to be a boy.
Even Harry has to be a boy. But maybe it's not hard for him like it's hard for you. Maybe he just got lucky that way.
3.
When you're fifteen, you tell Piers. His face scrunches up and he says, "why? You'd be a really ugly girl, Dudley."
You scoff. "I'm not any better looking as a boy," you say. You know what you look like. You don't really care; being a handsome boy has never been your goal. It's enough to be a boy, you don't have to try to be an attractive one on top of it. So what that you're not a pretty girl either? Everyone's always trying to tell you that looks aren't everything. Which means they think you're ugly, but you agree with them, so what's the problem? Looks aren't everything.
"Yeah, but," Piers says, waving his hand in vague shapes. You know what he means. "Being an ugly boy is a lot better, so why would you pick something else?"
"Because that's not how it works," you say. "Unfortunately." This would all be a lot easier if you'd gotten to pick it.
Piers nods, like he gets it. Maybe he does. "You got dealt a bad hand and are too stupid to fold," he says. Yeah, that sounds about right. "What am I supposed to call you? Are you going to be a girl called Dudley?"
"No," you say. "It's Debra."
Piers is back to looking at you like you're talking complete bullshit. "All the names in the world and you pick Debra? Don't be so boring! Go with Demi! Demi Dursley, now that's a girl I'd fuck for sure."
"I don't want to be a girl you want to fuck, Piers," you lie. You'd been sure no one would want to fuck you, so hearing that Piers might be interested if you had a better name is a boost of confidence. You're not interested in him, but it's a good thought, the idea that you might be able to be picky about it.
"Debra's an awful name," Piers grumbles. Asshole. It's a great name. It took you five years to come up with it. It'd been down to Debra or Dorothea, but you'd decided Dorothea Dursley sounded too much like a murder mystery character. "What was your gran's name? Family names are always good."
"I don't want to be fucking some girl and have her shout out my gran's name," you say. "And it was Dahlia. Dahlia Dursley isn't better."
"That sounds like a stage name," Piers agrees.
"But look, I'm not saying call me Debra in the hallways," you say. "Or anywhere, really." At least you're always Dursley at Smeltings. It's different at home. You don't want to be Dudley at home anymore. But it'll be easier to be Dudley if Piers knows you don't want to be.
Piers snaps his fingers. "Big D," he pronounces. "That's your name now. Much better than Debra."
And much better than Dudley, which is what you need it to be.
"Thanks," you tell him, meaning it.
4.
You pick up weightlifting and boxing because you will never be a pretty girl, but you can at least be a strong one.
You will never be a pretty girl, but at university, you meet some drag queens who help you learn how to dress. They tell you that you'll never be beautiful, but you'll be striking.
No one's ever called you that before. You think it might be a good thing to be called.
You don't wear your new clothes often. It's mostly only at home. Both of your flatmates are like you. One of them teaches you to sew. There are just some skills a girl like you needs to know to succeed in the world; it's not like clothes you like just come in your size anymore.
You're always a boy when you go home, though. Always. You still need their money and you'd like to have as much of their affection as you can greedily grab before it goes away forever. Because they're going to find out one day, and on that day, you're going to lose them forever. Just like you lost Harry, who came by one day to say goodbye and leave a forwarding address just in case. It was nice of him to do, you know that, but all you can think is how fucking lucky Harry is. Because he gets to live in a world where he doesn't have to hide. He gets to live in a world where he fits right in without having to try. Harry got the happily ever after.
And he deserves it after what you and your parents and that genocidal murderer did to him. He does deserve it. But don't you deserve a happy ending, too?
5.
You want to say that you were wrong. You want to say that your parents embraced you when you told them. You want to say that they told you that they'd love you no matter what you called yourself or what clothes you wore. You want to say that they made sure you knew you were always welcome to come home.
You want to say--
You want to say that it was a bad idea for you to have been slowly slipping things out of your old bedroom. You want to say you overreacted by asking your mother for copies of your favorite childhood photos. You want to say you didn't need to have gone through boxes for the scrapbooks your mother made of your childhood accomplishments, your school friends, you boxing wins. You want to say you didn't need to have done any of that.
You want to say that your parents surprised you. You want to say that you worried for two decades for nothing.
You can't say that.
6.
Harry comes back into your life strangely, but when has Harry ever done anything any other way? Everything about Harry is strange to you.
You're probably equally strange to him these days.
He's rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands in his pockets. His clothes fit him now. You never understood how your mother could ignore what all the neighborhood mothers whispered about her, about the way Harry went around in your hand-me-downs that never fit him, that made him look like a posterboy for neglect. Which he was, you know. Strange how child abuse happens in broad daylight and no one does anything about it.
"Aunt Petunia sent me a howler," Harry says. "I didn't even know she knew what those were."
"I don't know what those are," you say. You invite him in and he sits at your kitchen table and looks around your flat. You can't see it through his eyes. You don't know what muggle things look like to him anymore, if they're as weird to him as magical things are to you.
"It's a really angry letter," Harry says. "She thinks I did a spell on you to make you like this."
You sigh. Yeah. That sounds like something your mother would think. "Don't worry, I know you didn't."
"I tried being a girl once," Harry says. "Polyjuice Potion-- it's a magic potion where you can change your body around temporarily. I turned into my friend Hermione for an hour."
"For a lark?" you ask. "Or because of your genocidal arch-enemy?"
"Bit of both," Harry says.
You can't imagine it being a normal thing to switch around your body. But wizards have changed around your body before and it still features in your worst nightmares. Harry might be angling for you to ask him a magical favor, but you'll pass, thanks. "So is that why you came by?" you ask.
"Yeah, I wanted to see how you were," Harry shrugs awkwardly and you realize that maybe this is him trying to be sympathetic. Weird. "It doesn't sound like your parents are happy with you."
You snort. "Don't worry, Harry. I knew they'd hate me more than they hate you for this. I prepared."
"So you don't need, uh--"
Oh my god, you think. He's about to offer you money, isn't he? Harry Potter, who grew up in the cupboard, who you used to beat black and blue and chase around the neighborhood with your gang, that Harry Potter is about to offer you his charity.
Wow.
You're almost tempted to take it, just to give him the satisfaction of being provably better than you. That'd be closure, wouldn't it? The self-help books that your flatmate Jules leaves around talk a lot about closure.
"Don't need anything from you, no," you say instead. His face does fall, ha. "I do have a job, you know," you add. You're a trainer by day at the kind of place where it's expected for everyone to call you Dursley. Nights and weekends, you teach self-defense to those who call you Debra. Every so often, you help out as a bouncer at the clubs when they need an extra hand. It's a living.
"I don't," he says, because you suppose that now that's out of the way, Harry is determined to catch up properly. "I'm as lazy as your parents always called mine."
"Then what do you do all day?" you ask.
"Babysit, generally," he says. "Some of my friends from school have kids, or their siblings have kids. I watch them, change diapers, teach the older ones to fly. I'm Uncle Harry to about fifteen kids."
So Harry's a volunteer nanny. You've heard of worse volunteer gigs. Patty used to go volunteer building houses. Some rich assholes would have enough money to buy land and scrounge for materials, but would pay for labor with food and board and experience. Patty did that for years. She said it was fun and community-building. You're absolutely positively sure none of those rich assholes would ever pay it forward for her if Patty could ever get mortgage money. But Patty called it vacation. She said it was one of the only places where her body type was celebrated, where being a big strong girl was a good thing. She used to invite you to come along.
You haven't seen Patty in a while. Jules said she moved to Scotland. You hope that the Scottish building sites are at least paying her now.
"No kids for you yet?" you ask.
"Nope," Harry says easily. "But if I did, you'd want to be Aunt...?"
"Debra," you say, refusing to be surprised. "Yeah, sure. I'll be Aunt Debra to your hypotheticals."
"So this is why they all started calling you Big D?" Harry asks, like now that the ice is broken, he can be curious about it. "It seemed a really stupid nickname."
"It was," you admit. "Piers came up with it." Piers has never been much for creativity, but he's been a good friend. You've gone out with him a few times, because he's been in a mood to make his parents angry. You go out clubbing and he twirls you around like he thinks the nicer he is to you, the more it'll hurt his parents.
He might be right, for all you know.
Piers is gay now. He told you last week. He'd shouted it at his parents when they tried to tell him about you and what you'd done to your parents by being like this, and then he'd called you up. He'd laughed as he told you, as if being able to call it funny means that makes it better.
No one you know has parents who are happy with them. You suppose if they did, you'd probably not know them. What was that line from that novel you were supposed to read for class? All unhappy queers are unhappy in the same way?
"I haven't thought about Piers in ages," Harry admits.
Harry probably hasn't thought about you in the same amount of time, until your mother got in touch to blame him for what's wrong with you. "Piers has probably completely forgotten you, too," you say helpfully.
"Yeah, I'll bet," Harry says.
You chat with him for a little while longer, enough to know that he's living in London now, but with the way magical people travel, you're not sure that means much.
But he keeps coming over, every month or so.
7.
For lack of anything better to do, you take Harry to Rocky Horror Picture Show. You tell him to dress as a wizard, because there's no one there who'll blink twice at strange outfits. You always get all dressed up for these Saturday nights. Jules helps you with your corset. Harry passes his wand over your heels and all the scuffs go away without you having to do anything.
Neat trick. It seems magic is for more than terrorizing you as a teenager.
Harry likes it, enough to keep coming back. He starts bringing friends, too, who dress like he does when he's himself, and you and your friends are dressed like yourselves, and if your parents could see you now, you're not sure who they'd hate more.
Who are you kidding? Of course they'd hate you more. They expected better from you, and you ended up worse than Harry.
But you should have been able to expect better from them, too, frankly. Your closest relative who'll speak to you is the cousin you used to bully, not the parents who used to adore you. It's not supposed to be that way. Harry should be the one who cuts you out of his life and pretends you don't exist. Your parents are the ones who are supposed to be asking you if you've met anyone nice or if you're up for a promotion at work or if you need some extra cash to cover sudden expenses.
"I wish I'd been nicer to you when we were kids," you say to Harry one night after listening to Mark drunkenly ramble about solidarity and then collapse into a bean bag. You're drunk, too, the kind of drunk that feels warm. Harry'd brought the beer. You hadn't asked what was in it. "I should've been nicer."
"Yeah," Harry agrees. "But I could have been nicer, too."
You scoff at that. You don't remember if Harry was nice as a child. You don't remember if he could have been nicer. You just remember that you'd had to hurt him to protect yourself and so you had. You remember being so sure that if there was someone beneath you, then you would rise by comparison. Your parents couldn't hate you if you treated Harry like they did. You were so sure about that.
You still shouldn't have done it.
"They were never my parents," Harry says. "I knew they were never going to love me by the time I was six."
"Yeah, well, me, too," you say. "So we should have banded together, been the unlovable kids. We could have been awful enough that they'd given us up and let someone else have a chance."
"I used to dream about running away," Harry says.
You rub at your eyes. "I should have dreamed about that," you say. You hadn't, though. You'd never had that kind of imagination. You'd known there was nowhere to go. It wasn't like Aunt Marge would have been more welcoming to the real you.
"I dreamed that one day, my real family would come and rescue me and take me away," Harry says slowly. He's probably drunk, too. "And then one day they did."
"Yeah, to be a child soldier against your evil overlord," you wave it away. "Didn't you say someone tried to kill you at school every year? At least my parents never tried their hand at attempted murder, and the worst I got at school was what everyone gets at boarding school."
"Debra, what I'm trying to say is," Harry starts and then gets distracted by Jules walking by, her corset halfway off. "Look, what I mean is, they fucked you up, too, and I didn't realize it either. I just called you fat and thought you were a pig. You weren't the only one trying to feel superior to make yourself feel better. Some of those summers, did we even talk to each other at all?"
"We never talked to each other at all in our entire lives, I just called you names," you say.
"Yeah, so," Harry says. "I should have come home my first year and said, hey, did you know I was the youngest seeker to make my House's Quidditch team in a century?"
Quidditch is a sport, you've heard. "You were a jock?" you ask. You'd never known that. Harry was always-- Harry. Harry was never good at that shit.
"Yeah," Harry says.
"Wow."
"Yeah," Harry says again. "And you could have said you tried out for the rugby team or you'd started boxing. And we could have talked about the food at school. You could have helped me with my Latin, since Hogwarts thinks everyone comes in knowing it, and Smeltings at least teaches it. We could have been friends for years."
"Shit," you say. "We could have." Could have. But would you have? Would you have ever talked to Harry? Or would you have been too scared?
You think you would have been too scared.
If you were friends with Harry, your parents would think you were like Harry, they'd think you were the wrong sort of person. Which you are, but you'd still needed them. You couldn't have been friends with Harry no matter how much you wanted to, so long as your parents didn't want you to be.
So you have to say, "actually, no, we couldn't have been," because the only friends your parents could know about had to be the right kind of friends. Piers was the right kind of friend, and he still is, even if he's the queer kind now, so your parents wouldn't agree.
You were never brave. Harry was brave. You were just a coward, doing what you could to stay safe. You were never brave until you knew that your parents couldn't hurt you anymore.
But there's safety in numbers. Maybe you could have had that with Harry. Or maybe you'd have instead just given up the years of your life when your parents still loved you.
But that was always a lie. It was never you that your parents loved. But it's you that Harry is friends with now. And you could have had that all along, since you never had their love anyway.
If only you'd been brave.
8.
There's a bookstore nearby. You were never much of a reader, but you like hanging out there. There's teenagers who come by and you know the ones who are like you by the way they do a double-take and then keep looking. They look hungry. They always look hungry.
Outreach, Kacey calls this.
That's too fancy a word for giving these kids some phone numbers and some websites and some addresses. That's too fancy a word for tips on how to hide money away. That's too fancy for you, Debra Dursley, boxing champion of your neighborhood and nowhere else.
Your boxing students are younger than you. Your boxing students are older than you. You teach self-defense to a woman old enough to be your grandmother, who teaches the kids tricks on how to tuck.
You go out to bars with Piers, who is trying to learn how to keep a boyfriend. It's not like he ever kept a girlfriend, so you don't know how much more luck he'll have this way around.
Piers starts dating Mark and you tell them to keep you out of it, no one's getting you in the divorce. Jules moves to Scotland and calls you to let you know Patty's running a construction company now.
Jules moves back and starts her own construction company. Mark and Piers help with the paperwork.
When you need a new dentist, Harry puts you in touch with the parents of a friend of his. The Grangers agree to let you add them to the network of names you hand out.
Somewhere in this, you turn thirty.
Somewhere in this, your old flatmate Phil says he wants to be a dad and could you help?
Somewhere in this, Rupert Alice Dursley-Spencer is born.
Somewhere in this, you see accidental magic again for the first time in years.
Somewhere in this, you call Harry.
9.
Phil takes the existence of magic with more aplomb than you had, the first time it'd come into your life. "No offense, Debra," he says, "but when you're weird like we are, what's a little more weird on top of it?"
Rupert climbs into your lap from the other side of the room and snuggles against your chest. "I'm not weird," he mumbles. "I'm not."
"Nothing wrong with being weird," you say. "We're all weird in this family." You mouth a few choice swear words at Phil, who has the sense to look abashed.
Harry offers Rupert a slice of cake. It's magical cake, which you think must be some kind of magical marketing thing. How could magical cake be different from muggle cake? It's just flour and sugar.
Maybe their ovens fly.
"I checked with Hogwarts," Harry says. "Rupert's on their class list. There are other schools, though, if you don't want to send him there. There's a few local ones that don't board and there's tutors. You don't have to decide until he's eleven."
"What's school like?" Rupert asks, taking careful bites of cake and still managing to get crumbs all over himself and your dress.
"It's very big and there are four Houses," Harry says. "I was Gryffindor, which made me a lion."
Rupert's eyes go wide, but he's a canny kid. He knows when he's being bullshitted. He gets this from Phil's side. "You didn't really turn into a lion, Uncle Harry."
"No, but I can talk to snakes," Harry says easily. "Ask your mother."
"Yes, Uncle Harry can talk to snakes," you say.
"One of the Houses has a snake mascot," Harry says. "That's Slytherin. There's a secret passage to a hidden Slytherin chamber beneath Hogwarts, it's very cool. Then there's Hufflepuff, who are badgers and they're very loyal. I think your mother would have been a good Hufflepuff."
You have no idea if that's a compliment or not. It's probably not. You don't think you're very loyal. Your parents definitely don't think you are.
"And the last one is Ravenclaw, who are eagles. They like to read a lot," Harry says.
"I like to read," Rupert boasts. He has books all over the place. You and Phil had agreed to move back in together to raise him, and you've never lived in any place with so many books. You've never read so many books in your life as you've had to read to Rupert.
If nothing else, motherhood is turning you into a reader, even if it's only a reader of books with large colorful pictures.
"And that's it?" Phil asks. "How do they pick?"
"There's a magic hat that they put on your head," Harry says. "You get to chat with it. It let me pick between Gryffindor and Slytherin."
"Because you don't like to read and you're not loyal?" you ask. It's awfully simplistic, so you assume a lot more goes into this than Harry thinks is suitable to tell Rupert right now. This is the time to tell Rupert all about the cool parts of being magic. It's not the time to tell him about everyone who kept trying to kill Harry over and over again.
Harry says the murder attempts have all stopped. No one's tried to kill him in ages.
It's weird what used to be normal. To you, to Harry, to both of you.
"Everyone has traits from all the Houses," Harry says, because, yeah, that's way too simplistic. "The Hat wants to put you in places where you'll get along and make friends. Some of my friends in Gryffindor weren't always loyal to the same things I was, but we got along in other ways."
"I want to be in Ravenclaw," Rupert decides. You exchange looks with Phil and then with Harry.
"I can start taking him to meet other magical kids," Harry says to you and Phil after Rupert's down for a nap. It's been a very exciting day for him and for you. You don't even flinch when Harry waves his wand to clear up the mess Rupert made of the cake.
"Are they going to be weird about us?" you ask bluntly. "I don't want him feeling like there's anything wrong with him."
"They'll be more weird about you being muggles than you being," Harry waves. "You know."
"That's not better," you say.
"If he goes to that school, he's going to have to meet them eventually," Phil says. You know Phil. You know that's a yes. Phil's not a fan of pushing off the inevitable. You used to be a champion in pushing off the inevitable. But he's right. Rupert's magic, there's nothing anyone can do about it. The only choice you and Phil have is in how to handle it. Rupert's not going to stop being magic just because you pretend otherwise. That's not how anything in your life has ever worked.
"So do it slowly?" you ask him. Phil nods.
"I think we both know the necessity of community," Phil says, his lips twisting a little. "If Rupert's going to go off to live in a different world when he's older, then we shouldn't keep him from it."
"Yeah," you say. Yeah. You know the necessity of community. You know how much better it is to be around people who like you, and who are like you, and who understand you. Rupert shouldn't be the only magical kid in his own life. Uncle Harry shouldn't be the only wizard Rupert knows. There's a whole magical world out there for Rupert; you and Phil shouldn't keep him from it just because you're scared.
"Yeah, okay," you tell Harry. "But Phil and I are going to come along the first few times." Because your child is never going to be alone. Your child is never going to have to feel like he has to decide which matters more to him: his family or being himself. Your child is never going to go through an ounce of the hell you went through.
You don't understand your parents at all anymore. You never did, but now you really don't. You don't understand how they could do that to Harry. You don't understand how they could do that to you. You don't understand how they could do any of it, anything at all.
They don't know they have a grandchild and, if you can help it, they never will.
Harry nods in understanding. "We can do that."
10.
You and Phil take Rupert to the Hogwarts Express and he gets onto it early, climbing aboard like life is exciting and school is exciting and everything is exciting and Hogwarts is the best thing ever and he's definitely going write, he promises, you didn't buy him his own owl just to never use it, he's going to write every single day, and he's going to get into Ravenclaw, just you watch, and he's going to make so many friends and read so many books and do so well on his exams that they let him become a professor and spend the rest of his life reading magical books, and he's going to remember to get enough sleep every night, and he'll eat his vegetables, even the gross ones, and he's not going to try out for Quidditch because it's definitely a waste of time, no matter what Uncle Harry says, and he's going to have a great time, you don't need to worry, goodbye, see you at Christmas, promise he won't be homesick!
After the train pulls away, you chat lightly to the other parents. You and Phil have it down to an art, how not to come off too much like muggles. You don't want to make things too hard for Rupert at school. You'd rather Rupert be known as Harry Potter's nephew than anything more; you know how rumors can stick around and hurt.
The owl comes the next afternoon. Rupert did make it into Ravenclaw, he brags, and he's made a best friend, and he sends his love, but he has to go to class, he has Charms first and then Potions, and then he plans to get lost in the library until dinnertime at least.
You remember boarding school. It was awful, but it was the kind of awful that kept you away from your parents, so it also was wonderful. You hope Rupert has a better time than you did at Smeltings, than Harry did at Hogwarts.
"He's not going to come back the same," you say to yourself, testing out all the words. "He's going to come back a wizard."
"I went to summer camp when I was fifteen and came back a boy," Phil says. "We'll deal with it."
You huff a laugh.
"At least he knows he doesn't need to come back a boy," you say. Rupert knows he can stop being Rupert and start being Alice, or start being anyone at all that he wants. That's one good thing about this new family you've made; everyone knows that everyone gets to pick how they are.
When you grew up, you were perfectly normal, thank you very much. And your parents had enforced that harshly on both you and Harry. And so your parents had lost both you and Harry.
You're not going to lose your child like that. You'll always love him, no matter what. He's a wizard like Harry. He might end up a woman like you.
But no matter what. No matter what. He's your child.
It's something your parents never learned, but you think you knew it even when you were only six. That's why Harry thinks you'd have been Hufflepuff. You're loyal to the ones who are your own. And even when you were six, your parents weren't loyal to you, and you weren't loyal to them. It was survival. It wasn't family.
Family is what you have now. Family is Rupert and Phil and Harry and Piers and Mark and Kacey and Jules and everyone who has slept on your couch or babysat your child or spent a night crying on your shoulder until dawn.
You wish you could tell your six-year-old self about your family now.
You think you'd have thought it was some kind of magic.