With a gentle ‘pop’, Harry appeared outside the large, old cottage. He noticed with slight amusement that the decaying front of the house had been apparently repainted a dazzling brilliant white and the garden seemed altogether too neat and ordered for its surroundings. He straightened himself up, took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. A few seconds later it opened. The woman standing there gave a cry of shock and delight and flung her arms round Harry.

“Harry Potter! It’s…it’s…” She didn’t know what to say. There were tears running down her cheeks. Eventually she just said “Thank you. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Hestia,” replied Harry, but Hestia Jones had already turned away to call into the house.

“Dedalus! Mr and Mrs Dursley! It’s Harry. Harry’s come!”

There was a loud crash from above and heavy thudding on the stairs, and Dedalus Diggle appeared. He took Harry’s hand and shook it so hard he almost dislocated Harry’s shoulder. “Harry, words cannot express… I always knew, I always knew we could rely on you. Come in, come in.”

He led Harry down the hallway. “I’m not staying long, I’m just on my way home to Grimmauld Place. How are you?” Harry asked, quick to deflect the conversation away from himself. “How has it been?”

Hestia and Dedalus exchanged glances. “Well enough, considering,” said Dedalus. “Neither the Death Eaters nor the Ministry ever came looking, and we have been able to aid the resistance in small ways from time to time. We’re only sorry we couldn’t be at the battle.”

“What about…?” Harry began, but he was interrupted. Standing, filling the doorway to the living room, was the enormous bulk of Vernon Dursley. He looked Harry up and down with the same contemptuous look he’d always given.

“So, you won,” he grunted.

“Yes I did,” replied Harry. “Are you going to let me past?” Reluctantly, Vernon allowed him through into the room. Petunia was there, she had apparently deliberately positioned herself standing in front of the fireplace. Dudley was slumped in a chair watching television. He looked up the moment Harry walked in. “Hi, Big D,” said Harry. Dudley nodded.

“So what are you doing here?” snapped Vernon. “Come to gloat? Oh, we’ve heard all about your little adventures. It’s all these two,” he waved a hand at Hestia and Dedalus “will ever talk about when they’re here. So you really killed this Lord-”

“Voldemort,” replied Harry. “Yes I did. Well, sort of.”

“Hmpf,” Uncle Vernon snorted. “So now all of your lot think you’re the second coming or something. How you’ve fooled them all is beyond me. Probably have to be gullible to be able to do all that… nonsense, I guess.”

Harry turned to Dedalus and Hestia. “I’m sorry you’ve had to put up with all this.”

Hestia smiled. “We’re used to it.”

“Don’t you turn your back on me when I’m talking to you,” growled Vernon. “All I want to know is, does this mean we can go back to our old house now?”

Harry snapped. “Yes! Yes, you can go back to your precious little house now, with its neat little garden and its blank, sterile walls! Yes, you can go back and disappear under the rock you crawled out of and hide, and pretend there’s nothing in the world beyond your tiny little box of a life!”

“Now look here, boy…”

“NO! There’s been a war on out there. People have been dying, real people. Muggles too, if you don’t care about ‘us lot’. But you don’t care about any of it, do you, as long as you can sit in your cosy little corner and not get touched. The whole world could collapse around you and you wouldn’t mind, so long as Vernon Dursley’s precious little routine wasn’t affected.”

Vernon was rendered temporarily speechless with rage. Harry didn’t care, his mind was miles away. He was walking through the Great Hall again, gazing on the faces of the dead and their blank, unseeing eyes, body after body after body. He was standing gazing up at the stone memorial again after the service, reading the names, each one chilling his heart until he thought it would stop altogether. Colin Creevey, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Lupin, Fred Weasley, Sev-”

He stopped suddenly and looked up at Aunt Petunia. “Severus Snape is dead,” he said quietly. She gave a sudden gasp of shock and her hand leapt to her mouth.

“Who?” exclaimed Vernon.

“Tell him,” said Harry. “Go on, tell him.”

Petunia’s voice was weak and uncertain. “He, he was a boy who lived nearby where we grew up. One of them.” She waved in Harry’s direction and her voice grew angrier. “My sister thought the world of him, two freaks together, but I saw through him, nasty little piece of work, bad as the one she married, right slimy, vicious…”

“SEVERUS SNAPE WAS A HERO!” bellowed Harry. The words had rushed out of him without thinking. He hadn’t even decided if he believed it yet, so much had happened, but he wasn’t going to have him insulted by Petunia Dursley. “He was a teacher at my school. He gave up his whole life, he died so that Voldemort could be defeated, so that others could live. How dare you talk about him like that!”

He paused for breath and reflected on how astonishing it was for him to be defending Snape. “You never told me,” he continued to Petunia at last. “You never told me my mother had a friend. You never told me anything about her. Not one thing! You were happy to forget she ever existed. You’re as bad as he is,” he pointed to Vernon, “worse even, you at least have seen the truth, you were part of it, and you stood by for seventeen years and pretended it never happened. I wonder if you kept Dumbledore’s letter.” Petunia just stared at him, open mouthed.

Vernon broke the silence. “Bloody hell, a lot of people die around you, don’t they boy?”

“Yes,” replied Harry and the anger drained from him in a moment, the chill returning. “Now do you see why you had to leave and come here? Why you had to be protected?”

Vernon had no reply to that. “Well, is that all you’ve come for, boy?” he said eventually. “Just to stand there and insult us and expect us to be grateful? I would remind you that we took you in as a baby when you had nowhere to go. We raised you, fed you, clothed you. The least you could do in return is be civil.”

Harry refused to rise to the bait anymore. He could stand here and spit bile at the Dursleys all day for their despicable treatment of him, but they wouldn’t understand. “I didn’t come here to argue,” he said, calmly. “I came to say goodbye.”

“Off into their world forever now, boy? Best place for you, you don’t belong with the rest of us. Well at least you had decency to come and tell us properly, after all we…”

Harry interrupted Vernon. “I didn’t say I had come to say goodbye to you. I came to say goodbye to Dudley.”

The wave of astonishment among the occupants of the room was palpable. No one was more shocked than Dudley himself. He hauled himself to his feet out of the armchair and stared at Harry. “Me?” he said thickly.

“Yeah, Dud,” said Harry. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned recently, it’s never to judge someone too quickly. It was all a bit rushed last time we said goodbye and I couldn’t leave without checking you were okay.”

Dudley shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. He wouldn’t look Harry in the eye. Finally he mumbled “Sorry.”

That one word was enough to make the whole visit worthwhile. It said far more than Dudley could ever articulate. “That’s all right, Dud. It was a hard time for us all.” It wasn’t the best of replies but Dudley seemed to understand. He looked up at Harry for the first time and gave the hint of a smile. “So what are you going to do with yourself now?” Harry continued. “Got a job lined up?” Dudley merely shrugged. Harry looked him up and down. “How about the police force, Dud? Put those muscles of yours to good use for once. Actually, I’m thinking of going into a similar line of work myself.”

Dudley slowly pondered the idea. “Yeah, maybe. So, I’m not going to see you again?”

“Maybe not,” admitted Harry. “It’s another world, Dud. You simply can’t go to many of the places I’ll be.” Seeing Dudley’s glum face he added “But I’ll write every Christmas and send you something on your birthday. I’m sure there’ll be other occasions we might meet. Tell you what, if I ever get married I’ll make sure you’re invited. It’d be a wizard wedding, mind, it might be a bit weird for you.”

“Fink I’ll cope,” smiled Dudley. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t see the looks of horror on his parent’s faces at that moment.

Harry stuck out his hand. “Goodbye, Dudley Dursley, until next time.”

Dudley took Harry’s hand in his own and shook it warmly. “Goodbye, Harry Potter.” Harry smiled, turned, walked past Vernon and Petunia without a word, nodded politely to Hestia and Dedalus, went on out of the door and vanished.

That evening, while his parents downstairs were hurriedly packing, Dudley stared out of his upstairs bedroom window, thinking, thinking hard, perhaps for the first time in his life. He thought about his life, about his future and about the world. He smiled to himself and shook his head as he heard from downstairs a crash and yells between his mum and dad over some vase. He gave one last look out of the window into the night sky. “Thanks, Harry,” he said, and closed the curtains.