Dudley sat picking at his dinner that night as he contemplated the story that the man who looked like a younger version of Charlus and Dorea Potter's father had told him. It was strange hearing about a world where Aunt Lily was dead, and his mother had been alive and married to Uncle Vernon instead of his father. Even worse, without his mother to love him, be there for him, and show him how to stand up for himself and become his own man, his father had turned into a sniveling coward who clung to the coattails of the biggest bully around much as he had done at Hogwarts.

Dudley had few illusions about the man from whom his middle name had come, the man he'd been partially named after. While James Potter had grown up to be a good and well respected man, he had left behind a number of scars on those he had harmed before he'd matured enough to realize the consequences of his actions. Back when James Potter had been in school, he'd been the biggest bully in Gryffindor. Part of the reason his father had become James' friend in the beginning had been out of fear of what James would do to him if he weren't. When they grew up, and his father had begun to stand as an equal in his own right rather than as a hanger-on, the friendship had tightened as the Marauders had stood together as comrades in arms.

Now that he thought about it, he could see his father potentially going the other way, the way that Harry Potter had described, and it disturbed him. There had been many ways that his parents' relationship could have gone wrong, especially considering the fact that his mother had been exceedingly jealous of those who possessed magical talent when his parents had met. If that had happened, he most definitely would not have been born, and his father could have quite likely traded James Potter for Lord Voldemort as Voldemort was the stronger of the two.

Fortunately for him, none of that had happened. But learning about a world where it had happened, and seeing how it could have happened in his own world was upsetting to say the least.

Nobody at the table commented on the fact that he was picking at his food, but that was probably because nobody wanted to be the first to break the strained silence that had fallen over the dinner table. The reason for that silence was sitting next to him because he'd begged him to come home with him for dinner until he'd relented. Now that he was here at the dinner table, he understood why the other "Child of Prophesy had been reluctant to come with him.

His cousin Harry - won't that be confusing now that there were two Harrys who could both be considered his cousin - had spent most of the meal looking back and forth between him, the other Harry, and his parents. Aunt Lily was tense because she'd had some sort of row with the older Harry. Uncle Vernon was unhappy because Harry had come from a world where Aunt Lily married someone else, amongst other things. That, and the boy was a stranger who had no blood ties to him and possibly a threat to the family. Despite his numerous character faults - some of which required potions to correct - Uncle Vernon cared deeply for his family, and was very protective of them. It had taken a bit of time for Uncle Vernon to warm up to him because of the numerous things he'd represented to the man.

The Dursley and the Evans families had been close. Vernon Dursley's father had been childhood friends with his grandfather. When his grandfather and Uncle Vernon's father had gone out in the world, the Dursleys had prospered to a degree while the Evanses had remained at the lower end of the middle class just above the poverty line. They still remained friends though.

The Dursleys had ended up loaning his grandfather the money for both Lily and Petunia's school tuition (though they didn't know what school Lily was going to), as his grandfather had refused to take it as a gift feeling that it smacked a little too much of charity. His grandfather had done his best to repay the loan but eventually found he could not, as he had fallen ill for a long while sometime around Aunt Lily's third year, wiping out what little savings the family had and then some because he'd been unable to work, causing the family to end up in a state where they were living from month to month.

His grandfather offered to have one of his daughters married off to the Dursleys' son in repayment of the loan. The Dursleys agreed, as they weren't certain that their son would be able to find a good wife since he wasn't the best looking or sharpest tool in the shed, and both Evans girls were of impeccable character as far as they knew.

When his grandfather had made the suggestion, it had been something of a Slytherin move, as he noticed that Uncle Vernon had taken a liking to his mother and his mother had seemed to like him back. His grandfather had figured that the marriage would be a foregone conclusion irregardless. Something happened however. His mother and Uncle Vernon had had a fight over something one Christmas, and his mother had ended up running into his father who had been dragged along to Christmas dinner at the Evanses by his friends when his friend James had been dating Aunt Lily.

There had been an even bigger fight when his mother had discovered that his father had planned on erasing the family debt by marrying her off to Uncle Vernon, and that the largest part of the debt had been Aunt Lily's schooling rather than her own. When it was all over, there had been absolutely no chance of reconciliation between his mother and Uncle Vernon as far as his mother was concerned, much less marriage.

After Aunt Lily had graduated Hogwarts, and turned her back on the magical world when she realized that she had no place in it despite the powers she had been born with, she had married Uncle Vernon out of a sense of duty towards her family and as a final break from the world she had spent seven years in. The marriage hadn't been an act of love on Uncle Vernon's part either, as his parents had pressured him to marry Aunt Lily, and he did so in order to not disappoint his father who had been dying of cancer at the time. Over the years, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lily had become rather fond of each-other, and probably would die for the other if the situation called for it, but they weren't "In Love" with each-other.

When he had arrived on his aunt and uncle's doorstep, he had represented a threat to the family to Uncle Vernon because he was a target that any number of people wouldn't hesitate to take the Dursleys out in order to get. He had represented something else as well, because Uncle Vernon had actually loved his mother.

Part of the tension this evening had been as a result of Uncle Vernon learning that there actually had been a world where his mother had loved him back and married him.