Dudley Dursley did not want to be where he was at the moment. His parents didn't, either. In fact, the entire Dursley family was quite displeased that they had to see Harry Potter off to his school for 'magical freaks', as the family had coined it. The only reason they did is that Harry had no other transportation, and, strangely, Dudley's mother didn't want him alone, considering the war that was beginning to rage in the wizarding world. Dudley and his father decided to think that this was because he had supposedly saved Dudley's life the previous year, when some terrifying hooded creature came to suck his soul out, although this alone was not enough to convince Mr. Dursley completely. Although he was not a man to quarrel with his wife, who he thought that, along with Dudley, was one of the most perfect creatures on the face of the Earth, he had tried everything to convince her that Harry could get himself to the train station.
"Petunia, he will be fine! Do you think that that Voldything would come and murder him on his way to a train station? Ridiculous! And why would it trouble us? We could continue living merrily as a family of three, the way we were fifteen years ago! I hardly see why he is our concern."
The misty eyed woman mulled this over for a bit.
"He could find us, Vernon. Just like he found my sister," she said in a hushed voice.
It alarmed Dudley to hear his mother speak of his aunt. All her life, she had taken care to never let on that she had a sister at all. Dudley hadn't even known that he had an aunt until he heard his father address Harry as his cousin the first time, when he was six years old.
"Dudley, go tell your cousin to go get the mail, will you?"
Since Dudley made up with what he lacked in brains with strength from a young age, he couldn't put two and two together.
"Who, Dad?"
"Your cousin, son. Harry."
His father's face scrunched up as if eating a raw lemon when he said the boy's name.
Dudley obeyed, trudging round the corner to find Harry in his sort of dungeon, still surprised that they were related at all.
He kicked the door, his rather large foot making more noise than one of his meaty fists.
"Come out, cousin! Dad wants you to go get the mail!"
He had addressed Harry as 'cousin' ever since, a combination of the fact that, like his father, he didn't like using his name, which made him seem too much like family, and the sheer impossibility of it all, how he could be related to such a scrawny, odd person. Though he did not want it to be real whatsoever, using the pronoun assured him that this was not a very odd ten year long nightmare. If there was anything that Dudley disliked more than Harry, it was unreality. Even if things in his life were sometimes quite unpleasant, he wanted them to be certain that they were real, just to know that he was in touch with reality, just like his parents always hoped for him to be. Vernon and Petunia wanted a son as un-Harry Potter-ish as he could be. Nothing like Harry, whose entire life outside of number four, Privet Drive, was an unreal fantasy, his parents killed by an evil, supernatural creature, his friends the sons of idiots like that strange red-haired man who called the telephone a fellytone. A fellytone! It reminded him of the books by a rather odd man who called himself a doctor, though he obviously wasn't, that his mother would read him before bed at night when he was a young child, filled with nonsense words and creatures, stern talking goldfish and cats in tall hats. He was surprised that those books ever made it through the doors at all, as hardly anything strange was ever tolerated in the Dursley household. Still, both Dudley and Petunia would admit to Vernon, who had a distaste for such books, that they both loved them.
Today, they waited for the train to take Harry away for the year, to make their lives normal again for a school year, an idea that filled Vernon with fancy and nostalgia for his days when Dudley was a toddler, when he could go to his job in the mornings, come home at night to his wife and son and only his wife and son, then watch the news and have a cup of tea, the latter two things exactly what he would do when he returned home from the station. Dudley knew his father's rituals well.
After several minutes of waiting for the train to roll in, Dudley became very bored. He decided to focuse on something to distract him from the long ten minutes they had been waiting. At first he picked his father, though his annoyed expression, teeth bared like the aggressive mastiff at the neighbors' house that growled at Dudley on his walks, did nothing to ease his anxiety. Then he turned to his mother, whose eyes, filled with a sad, strange look of familiarity, broke his heart, which was not a common thing to break. And he didn't even want to try looking at Harry, who was never a very pleasant person to look at at all. So he looked around at other people, strangers, and his eyes fell on a black haired girl. And in that moment, her brown eyes, twinkling with what looked like tears, fell on him, too.
September first was not as pleasant a day for Cho Chang as it was for some. It wasn't that she disliked school; quite the contrary, Hogwarts was more a happy home to her than her own house. The sadness she felt that day had nothing to do with academics. It had to do with Cedric Diggory.
She looked for him in a group of Hufflepuff boys passing by her by default. None were nearly as handsome as Cedric, of course, none having his beautifully eerie gray eyes.
As if reading her mind, which she might have been doing, being the talented witch that she was, her mother leaned down to hug her tightly.
"Be happy, Cho. It will be a good year, I promise. You have cried for so long, over him. He would not want you to cry. Grief isn't as flattering as you may think."
Her eyes filled with tears as her mother spoke.
"Is it possible that I was in love with him, Mum? Is that why it isn't going away?"
"It is quite possible, Cho. We will all feel the ache of first love. I hope you will feel it again, love."
She patted the top of her head as she released her. "Don't cry, okay?"
She nodded, wiping her eyes. Then something caught her eye. Someone staring at her. She stared back to see a Muggle boy standing alongside Harry Potter, the boy she had kissed on impulse the previous Christmas, something she regretted and found embarassing, although she did it in a quest for comfort, perhaps.
The boy wasn't very handsome, with straw blonde hair, pink cheeks, and a rather intimidating build, but he was staring at her with a look that made her insides feel like they were melting.
And he was walking towards her.
He couldn't believe what he was doing. He was going to talk to a, a... Dare he say it? A witch. The very type of woman that his parents hated with great passion. But Dudley was going to break away from them, stop trying to be their perfect son, just for a little while, just so he could cheer this girl up.
As he got closer, he grew more afraid, but he didn't care, they weren't even looking at him. Vernon and Petunia shouldn't be a concern.
He held his hand out to the girl. "Hello, I'm Dudley Dursley."
He expected her to eye him strangely and turn away, as most people did when they saw him. Instead, she took his hand and shook it.
"Cho Chang," she replied.
"Please try not to look so sad."
He instantly regretted his wording. It was random and stupid. But the girl seemed solemn, as if she was acknowledging, even appreciating it.
"I'll try," she said.
Just then, the train rolled in.
"DUDLEY!"
"I've got to go," he said.
The girl nodded.
"Goodbye," she said. And she smiled.
Dudley smiled back awkwardly.
"DUDLEY!"
He ran back to them.
Cho boarded the train, miraculously still smiling. She didn't know if she would ever see the boy again. The odds were slim, but still, just like her love for Cedric, it was a possibility. Everything was a possibility.
Possibilities are what she, and everyone else, lived for. Life itself is one great possibility that not everyone is offered.
They both knew that. They met over a possibility.
Possibility by The Ravenclaw Sheerio
Chapter Endnotes: Several things inspired this story.
1. J.K. Rowling wanted Harry and Dudley to meet up while dropping their children off at the Hogwarts Express, but Dudley is, of course, a Muggle, so she didn't include this in the Deathly Hallows epilogue.
2. I later found out that Cho married an unnamed Muggle man.
These two facts caused me to speculate that Cho and Dudley might have ended up together. I also took a little inspiration from the David Levithan poem, Possibility.
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