NOTES: I wrote this today instead of my Camp NaNoWriMo project. :(

Bakura gets his own body after the final duel because... reasons. :)

xXx

The day the For Sale sign was removed from Number 6 Privet Drive was the start of the best summer of Harry's life.

Aunt Petunia had been following the drama of their previous neighbor's divorce with intense attention, from the wife taking her children with her to a new job in the US, to the husband sitting in his car in the driveway every morning and crying. Petunia had toured the house twice while it was on the market, and spent hours pretending to prune their dividing hedge, spying on potential buyers.

Petunia in a busybody mood was surely annoying for their neighbors, but it was Harry's favorite brand of Aunt Petunia. She didn't make him do as many outside chores, because she wanted to be the one to snoop on their neighbors. She always paid less attention to him, and he could get away with sneaking snacks and hiding Dudley's forgotten toys in his cupboard.

The new neighbor came on the first day of Harry's summer break. Harry was at the kitchen sink, washing dishes from breakfast, when Petunia suddenly sucked a huge gulp of air in through her teeth.

She leaned into the window, her face centimeters from the glass, the spray bottle of generic cleaner forgotten in her hands.

"She's so young," Petunia gasped. "What is she wearing?"

Harry craned his neck to try and see around Petunia out the window. All he could really see was the large shape of a moving van.

"Here," Petunia said, dropping the spray bottle onto the counter. "Finish cleaning up. I have to go trim the hedges."

She hurried out, and Harry hopped off his stool at the sink to peer out the window himself.

The new neighbor was, in Harry's opinion, the most beautiful woman he'd seen not on television. She had thick black hair so dark it shone blue in the June sun, smooth brown skin, and a white linen dress that looked distinctly foreign on the streets of Little Whinging. She did not look or dress at all like Petunia or any of Petunia's friends, and the effect made Harry's young mind think she must be some sort of glamorous movie star.

There were two movers as well, and the new neighbor stood in the driveway directing them for a few minutes before following one into the house. She walked with perfect, almost regal posture.

Harry went back to washing dishes. He was sure Petunia would update them all about the mysterious new woman next door over dinner.

xXx

Petunia, of course, updated them all at breakfast and at dinner every day for the next week. She was so engrossed in her new favorite drama that she didn't tell Harry off for serving himself too much food or complain that he chewed too loudly.

The new neighbor was named Ishizu Ishtar and she was a museum curation specialist from Egypt. She had just gotten a job in London, although previously she'd worked all over the world.

"How's she affording that house on a curator salary?" Uncle Vernon asked, frowning across the table at his wife. "It's got the same floor plan as ours."

"I don't know," Petunia said, her eyes bright with the promise of new, juicy gossip to be found. "Do you think her family is rich?"

"I think," Vernon started, leaning back in his chair and settling into one of his rants about freaks invading the neighborhood, "that property values around here have been dropping ever since all the dregs of London started getting pushed out."

The next day, Ishizu's brother moved in. He rode a motorcycle, had hair past his shoulders, and wore a shirt that showed off several inches of his bare belly. Petunia nearly fainted from the sheer scandalous nature of it.

"His earrings are bigger than mine," Petunia gushed over dinner, which Harry had to finish making because Petunia kept abandoning it to stare out the window some more. "And they look like they're real gold."

The brother had hitched a trailer filled with boxes behind his motorcycle, and then left the trailer parked in the front lawn of the house. It was the most disrespectful thing Petunia had ever seen, and she'd been struggling to tear herself away from the window all day.

"Freaks, the lot of them," Vernon diagnosed, nodding sagely. "Miss Ishtar might seem like a nice professional, but you know these foreign types–"

"Professional, but not married," Petunia agreed, eyes alight with scandal. "Probably some sort of delinquent. How could a woman who looks like that not have a husband?"

"How are they affording gold jewelry?" Vernon said. "That boy looks like he's never had a proper job in his life. Who would hire a kid with hair that long–"

"–and obviously bleached," Petunia agreed.

"Something fishy's going on," Vernon concluded. "Stay clear of those sorts, Dudders."

Dudley was forbidden from speaking to the Ishtars. It just made Harry want to meet them even more.

xXx

Dudley was not allowed to roam the neighborhood unsupervised, but Petunia cared less about Harry being kidnapped off the streets. As long as he showed up at the house on time for his chores, Harry was free to wonder.

There wasn't really a lot to do in Little Whinging, but Harry's primary school was in walking distance and had a playground with a wooded area behind it. Harry would play on the monkeybars until he got bored, then go and see if there was anything interesting in the woods.

One day when he was coming home– having triumphantly found both a salamander and a huge ring of mushrooms– he found a strange man at the mailbox of Number 6 Privet Drive.

The man had the same dark skin as the Ishtars, but that was where the resemblance ended. He was shorter and stockier than Miss Ishtar's brother, with wild white hair that would make Petunia have a conniption. Where Miss Ishtar and her brother had delicate features, this man's face was sharp and mean looking.

The man was flipping through the mail, scowling at each letter. When he noticed Harry staring, he turned to him fully and snapped, "What?"

The other side of his face had three dramatic scars, going from his eye all the way down his cheek. Harry had never seen another person with facial scars before, and his hand instinctively went to his forehead.

"Do you want something?" the man sneered. He had a faint accent.

Harry's survival instinct was to just mind his own business. On the other hand, he was curious, and this man looked a bit cool…

"Do you know the Ishtars, sir?" Harry asked.

"No, I'm just going through their mail because I'm a criminal," the man answered.

"Um," said Harry.

The man ignored him and kept flipping through the envelopes. When Harry made to leave, the man asked, "Hey, kid, do you know what to do with mail that's addressed wrong?"

"Sir?" Harry hedged.

"Most of this shit's for the previous resident," the man said, and Petunia would wash his mouth out with soap if she heard him say the s-word. "If I just leave it, will the postman take it away?"

Harry thought about it. If this man was like the Ishtars, he had probably just moved from some far away country, and maybe he didn't know how their mail service worked, even if he was an adult.

"My aunt always writes something on it first," Harry said. "I don't know what. Sorry."

The man grunted. "Well, that's annoying," he said, and then closed the mailbox and went into Number 6.

Petunia was at the front door when Harry entered.

"Who was that?" she asked, speaking quicker than normal. "Another brother? A boyfriend?"

"He didn't say," Harry answered, deciding it would be prudent not to tell his aunt that the man said he was a criminal.

Petunia huffed, glared at him, and then went into a tirade about troublemakers flocking together.

xXx

The strange man was named Bakura and he was "a friend" of the Ishtars. Vernon learned all this on Saturday, when he asked Bakura if they could move the trailer off their lawn. The conversation ended with Bakura telling Vernon to go do something very rude.

Miss Ishtar came over later that day and apologized. Vernon turned purple and Petunia gawked, but Miss Ishtar's voice was so soothing and polite neither of them could complain. She had the same accent as Bakura.

"Miss, let me give you some advice," Vernon finally said, when he'd calmed himself down from purple to red. "Some people are determined not to contribute to society, and you'd do best to cut them loose."

"Duly noted," Miss Ishtar said blandly. "With that advice taken into consideration, I'll be leaving."

Miss Ishtar was back in her own house by the time Vernon had worked out what she'd just said to him. His face went right back to purple.

Impotent to lash out at the originator of his humiliation, Vernon ordered Harry into his cupboard for the rest of the day.

The next neighbor incident occurred just the following afternoon, when Dudley had his friend Piers over. They'd been eating sandwiches in the backyard and decided to use the hole in the privacy fence to spy on the weird neighbors.

(The hole in the fence was the one part of the lawn allowed to not be immaculate, as Petunia also dedicated much of her time to spying on the neighbors.)

Harry had not been around to witness the event, as the presence of Piers often turned into a game of Harry Hunting, and he'd elected to get a headstart on his weekend chore of cleaning the bathrooms. However, he had been around to witness the aftermath, which involved a lot of tears and then a lot of demands.

As far as Harry could gather, Bakura and Miss Ishtar's brother (whose name started with an M, but Petunia and Vernon exclusively referred to as "The Brother") had set up to play Duel Monsters in their own yard. Duel Monsters was all the rage now, and so Dudley and Piers had been naturally excited to watch. Dudley had "asked politely" for the neighbors to show them their cards. Harry wondered what exactly Dudley's word choice was because the conversation ended with The Brother grabbing the garden house and shooting water at the children through the hole in the fence.

"And Bakura laughed at us," Dudley finished through his sobs. "He was really mean about it."

"My poor Diddykins," Petunia cooed, already in the process of making him and Piers ice cream sundaes.

"Mummy," Dudley continued wetly. "I want Duel Monsters cards."

"Well, we'll get you some for your birthday."

"But I want them now."

Dudley threw a fit. Piers, used to this behavior, just shoveled down ice cream as fast as he could for when Petunia inevitably agreed to drive them to the game shop one town over.

When both boys were gone with Petunia, and Harry had cleaned all the bathrooms, and Vernon was snoring on the couch in front of the television, Harry crept out into the backyard. He could hear Bakura and The Brother talking loudly, playfully insulting each other the way friends on TV did but none of Dudley's friends ever dared.

Duel Monsters had been a fad at school all year long. It was very cool– lots of older siblings played it, and you could watch celebrities on television play it with holograms. Petunia and Vernon had wrinkled their noses at the holograms, calling them ugly slights of hand, and so Dudley hadn't shown much interest in it until recently, when he was home all day and could just whine until Petunia let him turn on any channel he wanted.

Harry had caught a few glimpses in the past couple of weeks. It looked awesome, like magic, which was probably why it made Petunia's face go all funny.

Of course, Bakura and The Brother were just at a stone table in the yard, leftover from the previous resident. Harry could recognize the cards as Duel Monsters, but from the other side of a fence, he couldn't see what was happening on the table at all.

"God, they're back," The Brother suddenly said, leaning around Bakura to glare at the fence.

"Who cares?" Bakura answered. "Embarrassed some kids will see how bad you're about to lose?"

"If I lose, it's because we switched decks, and you designed yours like a crazy person," The Brother shot back.

It was unclear to Harry who won when the game finally ended, because they both managed to gloat over it. They started to clean up and Harry was about to back inside, when The Brother's eye was suddenly half a foot away from him on the other side of the fence.

"Holy crap, it's yet another kid," he exclaimed. "How many do they have?"

"Sorry, sir," Harry said. "It was rude of me to spy."

"And yet you're still peeping at me," The Brother answered, grinning wickedly. "Why don't you tell your parents that if they want their fence repaired, Bakura here is a broke bastard who'll fix it up for a small fee?"

"Shut up, Malik," Bakura said, and then physically dragged him away from the fence.

"Any odd job, really," Malik continued, yelling across the lawn at Harry as Bakura pushed him towards the house. "Yardwork, errands, babysitting–"

Harry jumped when suddenly Petunia was right behind him.

"What," she snapped, "are you doing?"

Dudley had gotten his card game. He and Piers smirked at Harry as he was marched to his cupboard, cards in hand.

xXx

Dudley's tenth birthday came, and he received a grand total of forty presents, including a box of Duel Monsters booster packs to go with the starter deck purchased just the week before, and a duel disk.

"This is the old version!" Dudley complained. "There's a new one out now. Piers said so."

"The new one isn't out in the UK yet, sweetums," Petunia said. "We'll get you one when it's released here, won't we, Vernon?"

Vernon scoffed. "I don't see the point, anyway. Monster battling? Ludacris."

"Everyone is playing it," Dudley pouted.

Sensing an eruption, Petunia shooed Harry away from the stove to serve the eggs he was frying to Dudley.

Harry expected to spend the rest of the day in his cupboard, reading Dudley's old magazines about computer games Harry would never get to play, while Petunia hosted Dudley's birthday party. Instead, Dudley announced he wanted to go to the park and play with his new duel disk with his friends.

"I guess we could take the food as a picnic," Petunia said, sounding very stressed.

Harry had to help her pack things, including running down to the store to get something to transport the cake with. When he came back, half the guests had arrived, and Petunia was desperately trying to convince Dudley to put on a sun hat. She was so stressed she didn't even check the receipt to make sure Harry was giving back the right amount of change.

Once the car trunk was loaded and Vernon had figured out sitting arrangements, Petunia suddenly looked down at Harry in horror.

"Did you call Mrs. Figg?" she asked.

"Was I supposed to?" Harry asked.

Petunia rushed inside and tried ringing Mrs. Figg three times with no answer.

"What are you doing?" Vernon asked, appearing at the kitchen door. "The kids are getting antsy."

"He needs a babysitter," Petunia said, and Vernon glowered down at Harry like he had planned this.

Petunia took a deep breath, grabbed Harry by the back of his shirt, and marched him over to Number 6. Miss Ishtar answered the door, not looking the least surprised to see Petunia and Harry there.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"I heard your– Bakura– is looking for odd jobs," Petunia said curtly, and Miss Ishtar nodded once. "Is he free for babysitting today?"