Secrets of Other Cupboards at Number Four

A/N: Written as an assignment gift for Chocolate Box 2018 for aponyforyourthroney, requesting (a) redeemed Dudley who has realized his parents were awful to him and Harry and (b) Dudley and Harry sorting through Dudley's parents' stuff after they die and finding stuff about Lily they never knew existed.

Dudley Dursley heaves a great sigh before opening his door with a creak and hauling himself out of the driver's seat. He shuts the door again with a definitive thump, staring at the house in front of him. The house at Number Four Privet Drive.

It's been years since Dudley has been back here and he'd like to not be here right now, either. Unfortunately, there's a job that needs doing and no one he feels comfortable foisting it off on. Despite the necessity, his steps are slow with reluctance as he trudges up to the front door, pulling Vernon's old keys out of his coat pocket as he goes. They had been in among the various contents of Petunia's purse the hospital had given him, presumably kept there in place of her own set for the last year since Vernon died.

Helen had offered to drop Beth off to spend the day with her parents so she could help him, but Dudley had snapped at her far too abruptly to drop it. He's pretty sure if he hadn't managed to bumble out a quick apology, his words tumbling over each other in an effort to explain that he needed to deal with the memories alone, he'd have ended up spending the night on the couch again like he hasn't since some of his biggest blunders in their first couple years of marriage. Dudley's always had a temper, but he rarely loses control of it these days. That's something he's proud of, something he put a lot of work into, but it just figures thinking of his parents would be the thing to mess him up again.

He knows his wife is under the impression his childhood had been a terribly unhappy one. Helen had only met his parents briefly on a few public social occasions, but that had been enough to see how strained their relationship was and to realize Dudley was keeping contact to a minimum by his choice. Dudley wouldn't have described his childhood that way, but he didn't really have words to properly cover the oddness of Petunia and Vernon Dursley.

At the time he hadn't a clue how screwed up their family was. It had taken that incident with those dementors – Dudley stops his progress up the pavement for a moment to shiver despite himself in the warmth of the late spring afternoon in remembrance. It had taken that and seeing his parents ready to walk out the door to go into hiding and leave Harry behind at the mercy of some mad evil wizard without a second glance for him to really start to think about and realize how awful his cousin had been treated all their lives. It had taken a few years more beyond that for him to begin to understand what that ancient and intimidating wizard who had visited them the year before the split had meant about the damage Vernon and Petunia had inflicted on Dudley himself.

His thoughts have carried him up to the door, and now he's out of further excuses to delay. The lock sticks a little after he inserts the key, but then gives after just a moment to allow the door to slowly open. The house beyond feels far too still, and there is a layer of dust over everything visible from the entryway. Petunia was in the hospital for weeks before she finally passed, and he can feel the neglect almost like a living entity, one completely strange to this place. Dudley welcomes the feeling, the obvious separation of then and now – Petunia would never have allowed the house to even approach this state while she had any say in the matter.

Dudley takes a deep breath of the slightly stale air as he closes the door behind him. The big items and the impersonal things like dishes and lamps and various whatnots can be dealt with later. Local charities, a jumble sale, whatever it takes to be rid of it. That Helen can help with, and knowing her, she probably already has a list of calls to make half drawn up to arrange things. No, what he's here for today is to go through his parents' personal things, to see if there's anything worth saving.

If it were up to him alone, Dudley wouldn't bother. His parents haven't been a part of his life for years, and there's too much guilt and regret associated with his childhood now for him to want to keep mementos to remember it. Even looking at pictures just reminds him of how absurdly unhealthy he was then – and how Harry was never loved enough by his own family to even be in any of them. His wife, however, had insisted he would likely regret it in years to come, and he should at least consider that his daughter might want to see pictures of her father and grandparents some day.

There's not much of a personal nature downstairs. A few photographs on the mantel, a couple of the family photo albums on a bookshelf, and a memento or two from one or another of their vacations when he was younger. He packs those up and sets them in the hallway, after which his eyes stray towards the cupboard under the stairs. A strange urge has him walking over to open its door. Part of him knows the cupboard had been converted to the kind of storage it was meant for once Harry had been given Dudley's second bedroom. The other part expects to pull open the door and find Harry's old camp bed still shoved into the small space. An absurd impulse seizes him to climb inside and shut the door, to try and imagine what it must have been like for Harry to be banished to that small dark space for days at a time. Dudley shakes it off, though, not least because he's fairly sure the space is too cramped to fit his less fat but still large frame.

Besides, he knows he's really just trying to put off the inevitable of going through the rooms upstairs. He only glances into his former bedroom and the room that had eventually been Harry's during the summers. The latter was converted into a second guest room as soon as the Dursleys had been able to come out of hiding. It takes only a second to confirm that the former is still standing entirely unchanged from the way he last left it, a shrine to the Dudley Dursley of all those years ago. The one he hopes he no longer is. The one he's ashamed to have ever been. Anything he wanted from that room he took with him when he left the first time.

Most of what he finds in his parents' room is expected. The kinds of magazines and novels Petunia read, clothes and toiletries, a few things of Vernon's Petunia had chosen to keep. What he doesn't expect to find is a large cardboard box shoved into the very back of the clothes cupboard that has "Lily" scrawled across the top in thick black letters. It takes a moment of searching his memory before he remembers that Lily was the name of Petunia's sister – and Harry's mum.

Petunia had avoided ever mentioning her sister as far back as Dudley can recall. At least other than complaining about her death dumping Harry on her family's doorstep. So he can't understand why she'd have a whole box of things related to her sister, even shoved to the back of the cupboard and perhaps forgotten. Dudley can't really reconcile it, the woman who had been so obsessed with being completely normal she'd never noticed how utterly abnormal it was to not keep a single picture of the nephew she was raising in the house. Surely she would have thrown anything of Lily's out?

Dudley wonders if maybe it's not just an old box that previously had Lily's things in it that Petunia dumped and reused. It still doesn't sound like the Petunia he knew, to not at least cross out the name or tape over it, but perhaps it is a more likely option. Wanting to know, he pulls the box out of the dark space and cuts the tape to look inside. His suspicion the contents are unrelated to the label is quickly put aside, however, as the first thing he pulls out is a framed picture of a pretty red-haired woman with what he recognizes as his grandparents from other family photos.

Now sure that the box is actually what it says it is, he carefully replaces the photo and shuts the lid. Not only is the find unexpected, it's something that Dudley hadn't quite dared hope for – an excuse to get in touch with Harry.

It had been a terrifying and confusing time in his life when he'd last seen his cousin. Dudley had only really started to understand how little he knew about Harry when his family had been whisked off to a little house in the middle of nowhere. They'd been forced to remain tucked away for a little under a year while a hidden war raged. It wasn't until months after the fact that they realized Aunt Marge had been killed in one of the attacks. Vernon blamed Harry when they found out, of course. Nothing about that year had changed Vernon or Petunia in any significant way. Once they'd gotten word it was over, Dudley's parents had grumbled about the inconvenience the whole way back to Number Four Privet Drive, where they'd settled back into their supposedly perfectly normal lives as if nothing had changed. For them, somehow, it hadn't.

By that point, however, Dudley's view of the world had been significantly altered. It had been a very strange and tense time, that year. At the beginning he'd been completely terrified of all wizards, and the vague tales of some mad evil wizard who might try to kill him and his parents just for being related to Harry hadn't helped. Still, a year was a long time to be locked away, and it was hard to find someone as aggressively cheerful and completely unflappable by rudeness as Dedalus Diggle particularly scary. Somewhere between boredom and curiosity, he'd found himself spending hours sitting by the wireless with the two wizards, listening to a program called, of all things, Potterwatch, hoping for good news. It had made him less afraid of the wizards protecting him and more afraid of what was going on in the world outside – and what was going on with Harry.

The last night there had been the worst of it. There had been one last message suddenly broadcast in the clear from the familiar voices of Potterwatch declaring Harry was at Hogwarts and was taking back the school. After that, it had been a long night of waiting for news that might never come if the wrong side lost. Time dragged on and on, most of it spent listening to Dedalus and Hestia argue back and forth about whether they should go join the battle over the sound of Vernon's thundering snores from the other room. Finally, near daybreak, there had been a message across all the wizarding channels. The evil wizard who had terrorized the country was dead, killed by Harry in the Great Hall of Hogwarts. Petunia and Vernon had been perfectly happy to forget the whole thing had happened, but Dudley couldn't stand the anticlimax of it all.

He'd wanted to write to Harry, ask him if he was okay. Ask him if his life had always been like something out of one of those fantasy books Piers Polkiss' little brother used to always have his nose buried in. Ask him if the stories about dragons and bank robberies Potterwatch had told were true or some kind of wizarding propaganda. Ask him if maybe he could understand Dudley had been a dumb kid that didn't know any better and if he could be forgiven, at least a little bit, for being such a lousy cousin. In the end, though, he hadn't. It was easier not to. Not to try to figure out what to say, how to say it, or have to worry that Harry would just never respond.

Years had passed, and Dudley kept thinking on it now and then, but kept coming to the same conclusion; he just didn't know what to say or why Harry would care. This, though, this is an opportunity. If not to fully clear the air between them, to at least earn some goodwill from his cousin for returning something that should be his.

With that in mind, Dudley lifts the box and takes it downstairs to set in the hallway to take out to the car with him when he leaves. There's only a few more things to go through after that, and with some relief, Dudley packs up the box and the few other things he'd thought worth keeping and heads home. There he finds a wife who gives him a sympathetic smile with a hug and a daughter who chatters happily away about her day with Grandma and Grandpa, putting the past back firmly in the past. At least for the moment.

The next day, on the way in to work at the local youth centre where he's a boxing coach, Dudley stops in at the post office. Knowing how to write to Harry had never been the issue; he'd asked Dedalus before they'd parted ways. There were certain addresses you could send a letter to through the muggle post to get to a wizard post office to be sent on by owl, and Dudley uses one now.

The letter he sends is short and to the point. Found a box with your mother's name on in Petunia's things. Thought you might want to open it with me. He closes out the note with his current address and signs his name at the bottom. After it's sent, he spent most of the afternoon wondering just how long it took something to get delivered by owl post. It seemed like a terribly inefficient system to Dudley, but then he still knows almost nothing about magic. For all he knew they were enchanted owls that were faster than regular post.

Dudley is almost certain Harry will respond, but he's slightly afraid his cousin will just send a note along asking Dudley to ship the box to him. If he does, Dudley will, but he really wants the chance to see Harry again. To reconnect with not only the only biological family he has left now, but with the only part of that family he wouldn't have to worry about being a bad influence on his daughter. Dudley even wants the opportunity to actually learn something about the aunt he never knew. Better late than never.

He's not entirely surprised to see a strange owl staring in the kitchen window the next morning, a roll of parchment tied to its leg. Cautiously, Dudley opens the window and lets it fly inside, carefully taking the scroll. To his relief, it's a message from Harry suggesting he could drop by this weekend at noon on Saturday. Aware from having seen Dedalus send a few messages that the owl continuing to sit blinking at him is an indication the bird is waiting for a reply, Dudley scrawls a hasty agreement across the bottom of the parchment and ties it back to the bird's leg. Now all he has to do is get through worrying how it will go for the rest of the week.

Come Saturday at eleven, Dudley is full of restless energy, enough so he can tell he's getting on Helen's nerves. It's definitely not that he's afraid of Harry, not even knowing as little as he knows about wizards. As terrible as he'd been towards his cousin when they were kids, Harry had still saved his life when he didn't have to. While Dudley realizes going through a war may have changed his cousin, maybe even for the worse, he has trouble believing it will have turned him cruel where his treatment at the hands of Dudley's parents had failed to do so. The problem is that it's been such a long time, they have a pretty unpleasant history, and Dudley so badly wants this to go well. He's not going to antagonize Harry on purpose, but as much as he's different from the boy he was, Dudley knows he's still insensitive and a little thick sometimes. This could still go badly wrong.

At precisely twelve on the dot, there's a knock at the front door. Helen gives him an encouraging look, and Dudley opens the door to find Harry standing on the other side. He's older, and he's wearing nicer glasses, but he's still got the same messy black hair going every direction and his current expression shows he's not feeling any more sure about this meeting than Dudley is right now.

"Harry."

"Dudley."

They stand there and stare at each other for a long moment before Dudley remembers himself and steps back, opening up the door to let Harry inside. He closes the door behind his cousin and turns to find Harry staring in surprise at Helen and Beth while the two of them stare back curiously.

Dudley clears his throat. "Er, right. Harry, this is my wife, Helen, and our daughter, Beth. This is my cousin, Harry. We grew up together."

"Um, hi," Harry says, still looking awkward.

"Hello," Helen says warmly, as Beth half-hides behind her legs, leaving little more of her face than a blonde pigtail and a curious blue eye visible. "It's lovely to meet you. Dudley's been looking forward to seeing you ever since he went to clean out his parent's house."

"About that -" Harry begins, awkwardly, turning towards Dudley. He waits for Harry to ask for the box so he can just go, feeling the disappointment settle in. Instead, what Harry comes out with is, "did they both pass on? I've been out of touch," he directs the last part at Helen.

"Oh!" Dudley says, feeling stupid. "Yes. Vernon had a heart attack last year. Petunia fell ill a few months ago, then just kept getting sicker. I wasn't – we weren't close anymore. I think when it was just her, maybe she didn't have any reason to go on. I was going through the house when I found the box. I opened it just to check that it wasn't something else inside, and then closed it back up. I'm pretty curious why Petunia kept it, considering -" Dudley flounders, trying to figure out some way of saying-without-saying how they both knew his mother had been about Aunt Lily.

One side of Harry's mouth quirks up. "Right, considering."

"Well, we should let you get to it, right Beth?" Helen says, patting their daughter's head fondly. "The two of us are going upstairs to read for a bit, give you a chance to catch up and look at your family things. Did you want a drink or anything before we go, Harry?"

"No. Er, thank you, though."

Almost as soon as Helen and Beth are gone all the way up the stairs and out of earshot, Harry says, "You haven't been close to your parents? That's not something I expected. At all."

"I didn't go off to fight a war like you did, Harry, but I did grow up. Sometimes I think what happened with those Dementors was necessary – a wake up call. I didn't like what I started to see in my parents after that, or me. After we had Beth and they started trying to spoil her, turn her into another little terror – I wasn't going to let that happen."

"Sounds like you've changed a lot, Dudley."

"We both know I needed to."

"Well, I wasn't gonna say it." Harry smiles just a little and Dudley smiles back. The moment drags on too long, and Harry speaks again before it can become too awkward. "So you found a box?"

"Yeah," Dudley answers, and gestures towards the sitting room. "It was shoved to the back in the cupboard in their room. I recognized our grandparents in a picture with a young woman that has to be Aunt Lily on top when I opened it."

Dudley pulls the box around from where he'd set it aside so that it's between two seats, and gestures at Harry to go ahead. He watches as Harry's hand hovers over the name written on the box before carefully folding the flaps back and pulling out the same photo Dudley had seen before.

He studies it for a long minute before finally saying, "I don't have this one."

"You have pictures of your parents?" Dudley blurts out awkwardly. So far as he'd known, Harry had never even seen pictures of them before now.

Harry looks up from the photo, meeting his eyes for a long moment before replying. "I met some of their friends when I was away at school, they had a few of my parents together. Nothing from when they were younger, though, or with their parents."

"Oh. Well, that's good." Dudley feels dumb saying it, but he notices Harry's posture relax just a fraction and thinks maybe he shouldn't feel bad about being awkward when they are both obviously feeling it.

Under the framed photo is a binder that turns out to be a full album of photos. Harry flips through them as Dudley tries to get a view of what's in it from a fairly awkward angle. He'd known that wizard photos moved, but seeing a whole page of people shuffling and waving, dancing and laughing, it's a little surreal. Especially knowing it had been buried in Petunia's things for years.

"I do have copies of a few of these already, like the ones from their wedding and a few from Hogwarts, but not most of them."

"Could I – could I have a look when you're done?" Dudley asks, feeling unsure. It's not something he's used to, but he is trying here. This may be his only chance to make right with Harry, and he can't imagine what it's like for him, seeing these few things. "I've never seen a picture of Uncle James."

"Sure," Harry says, and passes the album over, open to a page around the midpoint. "Although he pretty much looks like me, just with different eyes."

Dudley looks down to see a moving picture of a smiling couple in fancy wedding clothes. Harry isn't kidding about the resemblance. "Wow."

Dudley flips back to the beginning of the album, where most of the pictures are still. Various shots of Lily and Petunia with and without their parents take up many pages. Pictures of young Lily and Petunia together and happy at birthday parties, days at the park, dressed up, and in pajamas on Christmas slowly give way to pictures of older versions of Lily and Petunia always standing separately. Shortly thereafter, more and more of the pictures are the wizard kind, of Lily at school with unfamiliar faces. The picture of her with a stack of books in a library is a familiar scene, even if it moves. The one of her on a flying broomstick is less so.

More and more of the pictures start to feature Harry's dad, and soon enough he's reached the section of wedding photos again. Harry's parents look so happy. After, there's only a few photos of a house he's never seen before and a couple of baby Harry, alone and with his parents and what must be their friends. There are still several pages left to the album when Dudley turns the page to find the rest abruptly empty. Dudley wonders if his aunt and uncle hadn't yet had time to develop more pictures or if they just hadn't made it into the album yet when they died. It makes the whole thing sadder somehow, his long dead aunt and uncle more real to him, comparing this to the baby album he and Helen have of Beth upstairs. He shuts the book softly and looks up to meet Harry's eyes, his cousin watching him with a considering expression. He hands the album back to Harry, who sets it to one side with the framed photo and turns back to the contents still in the box.

The next item to be drawn out is a small oblong box, slightly bigger than the kind of jewelry box used for bracelets. Harry opens it and stiffens. "How did she even ..."

Practically dying of curiosity, Dudley starts to lean over so he can see, and at the movement, Harry turns the box towards him, displaying two wands nestled into a custom a cushion.

"I figured they must have been destroyed that night or stolen," Harry says. "Nobody ever said anything."

Harry lifts each one briefly, almost reverently, before placing them back in the case shaking his head to himself. Dudley waits to see if he'll say anything about the wands, but eventually he just sets them carefully aside next to the picture frame before reaching back into the box.

The next thing Harry pulls out makes him chuckle, and he hands what looks like a stack of collectible baseball cards directly to Dudley. Instead of sports players, they have wizards and witches on them, and Dudley flips through them curiously, stopping to read a few descriptions.

With a sad little smile for the bundle, Harry says, "Nobody ever mentioned that mum had a chocolate frog card collection."

Dudley makes a face and just has to ask. "Not, uh, actual frogs, right?"

"Oh, no." Surprise and amusement chases the melancholy out of Harry's expression. "Not that there aren't some gross wizard sweets. They make jellybeans in every flavor where they include flavors like dirt and vomit in with the nice ones, for one thing. Chocolate frogs are just regular chocolate shaped like a frog and spelled to move a bit, though."

Next is an old school bag, which Harry goes through the pockets of. It contains old school assignments on rolls of parchment, and a few notes written between Lily and James along with several notes to Lily from people Dudley has never heard of. A whole bundled sheaf of letters exchanged between Lily and their grandparents is at the bottom. Even a couple letters from Lily at Hogwarts to Petunia make up their own small stack, but none of those have replies.

"I don't get it," Dudley says, finally. "Why'd she save all of this stuff, Harry? Why'd she keep it if she hated her sister so much she couldn't stand to hear her name mentioned? That she'd make up that story about her dying in a car crash when she was murdered? It doesn't make any bloody sense."

Harry gives him another of those long, searching looks. Finally he says, "The pictures she probably removed from her own family albums, to get them out of sight. Maybe some of the older school stuff was left behind with our grandparents. I'm not sure why she kept it, but that'd be how she could have it. The later things, I'm guessing Dumbledore – that was the headmaster of my school, you met him once, remember?"

Dudley nods. It would have been hard to forget. He'd had a tender spot on his head for a couple of days after that visit.

"I'm guessing he must have gone through what was left of my parents house and given the more recent things to Aunt Petunia for safekeeping. As to why she kept it all these years ..." Harry trails off in thought, and Dudley waits as patiently as he can manage. Finally Harry says, "Did you notice how close the two of them looked in the pictures from before Lily turned eleven?"

"Yeah," Dudley says, slowly. "But then -"

"Then Lily got her Hogwarts letter. Petunia was so upset at the prospect of being separated, she tried to write to Dumbledore – he was headmaster even back then – asking to let her come, too. When he wrote back and told her that wasn't possible, she got angry. She decided she hated magic because she didn't have it. She started to hate Lily because she did."

"And then she decided she'd rather pretend she never wanted it in the first place. That's so – so like her." It still doesn't explain why she'd kept Lily's things as a guilty secret in the back of her cupboard for years. Had it been some lingering affection for her sister she couldn't completely erase, or maybe if some of it had come from him, worry that Dumbledore fellow would find out she'd gotten rid of it if she didn't keep it? Part of him even wonders if she had encouraged his terrible treatment of Harry to make it so he wouldn't care when Harry eventually left him behind – not that it would be any kind of excuse. They'll never know, Petunia is dead now and likely never would have told them the truth about it anyway.

The silence has now started to stretch too long again, so Dudley asks, "How do you know all that, though? Those friends of your parents that you said you met?"

It doesn't work as a conversation starter, though, as Harry just shrugs. His cousin is focused pointedly on the depths of the box, and Dudley gets the impression that the subject of his parents' friends isn't a welcome one. Maybe they're dead now, or maybe he just doesn't want to talk to Dudley about them. Either way, Dudley lets the subject drop.

There's not a whole lot left in the box now, just a few more loose bits of paper Harry is already pulling out, and Dudley can feel his opportunity to resolve anything further between them slipping away. Trying to hold on to the moment, he asks, "So what are you doing these days, anyway? I'm a boxing coach for kids and teens. Helen's a history professor of all things. I still don't know how she ended up with me."

"I'm an auror. That's somebody who -"

"Catches bad wizards," Dudley says at the same time Harry finishes, "catches dark wizards."

At Harry's questioning expression, Dudley explains, "I did learn a few things about your world from Dedalus Diggle that year we were hidden away."

Before Dudley can try to turn the conversation towards any of the many questions he has lingering from that time, Harry says a little more about the present. "Actually, these days I'm head of the Auror Department at the Ministry."

"Well, then! Good for you, Harry. Is that what you always wanted to do, or did you – after the war did it just seem like the thing to do?"

"A little of both, really. It suits me well enough."

"Great. That's great."

The silence stretches yet again, and Harry starts putting things back into the box, probably getting ready to leave. Dudley panics a little. This is too soon. He's not ready, hasn't gotten to any of what he wanted to talk to Harry about. In haste, he blurts out, "D'you – do you think we could do this again? I mean, get together, just talk?"

Harry blinks behind his glasses. "Er, why?"

"We're family. I mean – I know I was an awful great lump of a bully when we were kids, but I want my daughter to have some family on my side that I wouldn't mind her getting to know. Especially if someday you have kids – if you, I didn't even ask, did I - if you don't already?"

"I have a godson," Harry says, finally. "As to the rest, well, maybe? I'll give you my address so you don't have to go roundabout through the owl post. We could write, I guess. Keep in touch, see how it goes. Maybe I'll stop by for the holiday or something this year if it works out?" Harry gives him a grin that's just a little weak and adds, "Hey, maybe I'll send you a chocolate frog or something."

"Okay. Okay, that sounds good." Dudley smiles genuinely back. He had been hoping for more, some kind of direct acknowledgment that he really has changed, but Harry doesn't owe him that. A maybe is better than a no. It's at least someplace to start.