Secrets Unravelled - Part 7

"Of course he's not a wi…a.wi… He's not a freak," Aunt Petunia snapped, her voice nothing more than a high-pitched whisper. "I made a deal with your headmaster. He would block this unnaturalness from Duddydums, and I would take you in. It was all arranged. Then, after last year, whatever it was he did stopped working, because Dudley started having instances of these oddities every few days, and I can't stop them. I want you to fix it. You do whatever it was he had done before. You can fix this, and you owe us that much."

Harry's mind was racing. How could this be? Would Dumbledore really have suppressed Dudley's magic for all these years? It didn't seem like something he would ever do. It didn't make any sense.

As if from a fog, Harry's mind recalled the way Aunt Petunia had always catered to Dudley's every whim. How she'd acted as if the world revolved around keeping him calm and not letting him get upset. Harry's worst punishments always came as a direct result of Dudley getting upset. He wondered if Petunia's obsessive need to clean was only a byproduct of her anxiety over cleaning up what she considered a huge mess.

His mind continued to pick out little instances of times when Dudley had been upset. His thoughts again drifted to the night the dementors had attacked, and Dudley had cowered in fear. Harry had wondered what Dudley could have been remembering. Could it have been some unexplained bits of magic that Dudley had fought to suppress? When Harry had found Dudley in the darkness, he'd had his hands clamped over his mouth. Harry had told him not to open his mouth, but when did Dudley ever listen to Harry? Could Dudley have actually seen the dementors?

Harry felt as if his world had just spun completely out of his control yet again.

"Why would Dumbledore agree to hide Dudley's magic? It doesn't sound at all like Dumbledore," he said slowly, his gaze boring into his aunt's.

"He didn't want to do it. We argued for quite some time about it. I'd seen the strange things that happened from the time my Dudley was still in his cot. I knew what it meant; I remembered it from Lily. There was no way I would allow it to happen again, not after I'd worked so hard to make a normal life for my family.

"It was the only way I would allow you to stay, and he was desperate for that to happen. I told him there was no way he'd ever get his hands on Dudley, anyway. Vernon and I would never allow him to go to that freak school. We raised him with a healthy loathing of all things so unnatural. Dudley is a good boy," Aunt Petunia said, crossing her arms defiantly.

Harry rolled his eyes. It all made sense. Certainly the Dursleys wouldn't have allowed Dudley to attend Hogwarts, and Harry knew from Dudley's reaction a moment ago that he never would have wanted to go, anyway.

"So, what did Professor Dumbledore do, exactly?" Harry asked, unable to contain his curiosity. Aunt Petunia had never willingly told him anything in the past. Don't ask questions had always been her standard response.

"How am I supposed to know how all your nonsense works?" Aunt Petunia snapped. "We took you in, and he did something to take Dudley's name off of a register or some such thing. For a time, Dudley stopped making strange things happen. The only time anything abnormal happened was when Dudley would get upset, and I could easily blame that on you so Vernon never had to know."