The Safehouse

Yup, so this chapter has been written for a week or two, but my computer doesn't work and I was reluctant to take the time to type things up on my dad's computer, but it's been longer than I had hoped with my computer, so I decided to just type it up a bit at a time when no one else needed the computer, so here's the next chapter which is more of a getting to know you chapter than anything else. In fact, I think that's what I'll call it.

The Safehouse Chapter 2 Getting to Know You

Four hours later, Hermione was woken up with a shake to her shoulder. She sat upright, pulling her wand from under her pillow and pointing it at the intruder as she blinked into the brightness of the room.

"Hermione, it's only me, Dudley. I've come with ice for your wrist to help with the swelling. I knocked on the door and called your name, but you wouldn't wake up," came a cautious voice.

She paused for a few seconds before putting her wand back where she had had it. By the time she turned back to him, mouthing the word "sorry," her eyes had completely adjusted to the light.

"It's okay," he reassured her. "May I sit down?" he asked, motioning to her bed with the ice wrap he was holding. She looked at him a moment, trying not to be obvious in the fact that she was effectively giving him the once-over. As Harry hadn't really found any reason to describe his cousin to her over the last few years, she had been expecting him to look like a rotund pig, much like his father. Instead, she was looking at a young man with a physique that attested to his status as the top-ranked boxer at Smeltings.

He was already ready for bed in loungepants and a navy tshirt, but she could tell that his six-foot even frame would be considered solid. He may have had a layer of fat over his stomach, but he was mostly muscle with a broad chest and shoulders. While his biceps were large, she found herself happy with the fact that they weren't so muscular that they looked flexed even when they weren't - he would have no problems crossing his arms in front of his chest. His hands were large, and a light pink tinge graced her features as she wondered if it was a sign of other parts of his anatomy.

Looking at his face, he was an average-looking man; not gorgeous, but definitely not ugly either. His blond hair was no longer kept plastered to his head, instead it was cut so that it fell down to his ears. His eyes were a bright blue, drawing attention away from his crooked nose. When his mouth opened to talk, she could see that while his teeth were not perfectly straight, they weren't a disfiguement, either. She was just surprised that he still had all of them. In fact, to her opinion, his only physical feature that detracted from the rest of him was his thick neck, though at least it wasn't quite as wide as his head.

He cleared his throat and she blushed even deeper as she realized that she had been staring. In response to his question, she also motioned to the bed with a slight nod of the head and a few seconds later she felt the bed dip as he sat down next to her. He looked over to her with a smile, pulling her bandaged wrist so it was sitting on his cross-legged lap, wrapping the ice around it.

She cringed at the coldness of it. Looking up at his face, she held out her other hand and pointed to her pillow to warn him that she was going to get her wand. He didn't seem to understand until she actually moved towards it, her wrist still in his lap. He looked a little wary, but became relieved soon enough when she aimed towards the bureau on the other side of the room and a notebook and pen flew into her awaiting hand.

"What time is it?" she wrote in a neat scrawl.

"Just after midnight," he answered, impressed that her magic had helped make things easier for her when she couldn't get up at the moment.

While he was not stupid enough to mention the word "magic" to his parents, even in this past year in the safehouse with various witches and wizards popping in to check on them, Dudley had started to come to the notion that magic wasn't inherently bad. Sure his parents, especially his father, would go on for hours about how magic was the root of all the bad things to ever befall them, but the more and more he thought on it, the more he tended to think they were just being prejiduced and not wanting to take responsibility for their own actions.

"So, Potter said that you were probably hurt from your fall more than you would want to let on. Is there anything I can do to help? Do you want any aspirin or anything?" Dudley asked, trying to fill what he considered to be an awkward silence.

Hermione just rolled her eyes and shook her head in response before writing down her actual answer. "No, thanks, I'm fine. Please stop referring to your cousin as 'Potter.' He does have a first name, you know," she wrote, giving him an indignant look to go along with the words.

Reading it, Dudley had the grace to blush ever so slightly as he looked her in the eye. "I'm sorry, it's just habit. When I was little I used to dislike Po - Harry just because my parents did and I thought that if neither of them liked him there must be a good reason. My parents, especially my dad, always bullied him around and that's the behavior I learned was acceptable. And so I became the school bully and I pretty much stayed that way until a couple of years ago when that Demented thingy attacked me."

Hermione touched his arm to get his attention as she wrote down a question she had been wondering about ever since she had heard of Dudley's reaction to the Dementor attack at Little Whinging. "What did they make you see?"

He looked up at her, as though debating with himself whether or not he should tell her. "Po - Harry says that they're supposed to make you relive and dwell on all your unhappy memories because they take away all the good ones. I don't know if it's because I'm not a w-wizard or what, but that's not really what happened to me. It was the very first glimpse I ever had of the spoiled, fat little bastard that I was. I saw how I treated him and what I actually looked like through his eyes. Up until that time, I had somehow believed everything my parents said about how great I was. I saw all that, and I realized that I wasn't the person I wanted to be."

"I'm sorry," she mouthed to him, her hand running up and down his arm in a consoling gesture.

"Don't be," he responded, smiling wanly over to her. "It was the reality check that I needed. I started to actually adhere to the diet that the school nurse had put me on, and I began exercising, even if it was only a little bit at first. When I went back to school, I joined the boxing club and paid more attention to my studies. As time went by and I didn't want to continue bullying everyone else, I stopped hanging out with my mates because they still thought it was fun times and that I was the one missing out. A few months before school let out last year, Piers finally came to his senses and we became mates again, but then last July we came here and have been stuck here ever since. Every couple of days someone comes by to check on us, but there's not really anyone to talk to other than my parents. I'm just happy that I have my weights and there's a telly so we know what's going on everywhere, otherwise I'm sure I would have gone mad by now. I've even started reading some of the books I've found around here."

"We weren't really in a place to get news on a regular basis until the past few weeks," Hermione wrote. "And then, most of our news had to do with the wizarding world. It's really not safe out there, but especially for those of us opposing him. Harry's number one on their most wanted list and I'm right up there with him because not only have I been known as being with him, but I never showed up to be registered as a muggleborn."

"You're known as being with Harry? But he said you were his best friend, not his girlfriend," Dudley observed, the obvious connotations to the thought going right over Hermione's head.

"Oh, gods, ew! No. Harry has only ever been my friend. A few years ago a tabloid reporter had a large following of people in saying hat it was more than that and I was stomping over his feelings, but there was no basis for the story. But the mass public believes what they want to believe."

When Dudley had finished reading her response, he looked up at her, his face a mixture of shock and confusion. "Why would the tabloids care?" he asked.

It was her turn to look at him with wonder. "You mean you really don't know how famous Harry is?"

"I know that the people who come here practically worship him, but my parents put a stop to any real conversation about it."

Hermione picked up her wand and summoned her purse to her, pulling out a book entitled "The Rise And Fall Of He Who Must Not Be Named." Opening it to one of the last chapters, she plopped the book on Dudley's lap, though she left her wrist where it was, neither realizing that the twenty minutes of icing time had come and gone a few minutes previous. Dudley flipped to the cover, reading the title of the book. "Can I borrow this and read it later?" he asked, causing her to beam up at him.

The look on her face, so obviously happy because of something he had said, was a first for Dudley. He had been with a few girls at school; as one of the schools top athletes he had hadn't had to go looking far for female company. No girl, though, had looked at him as though he had made their day for something so simple and he found it rather disarming. He looked down, avoiding her gaze in his slight discomfort, only to be reminded that it was time to take away the ice.

Not having a further excuse to stay and talk, he insisted she set the alarm next to her bed to go off in another four hours and left the room, book in hand, softly closing the door behind him. His mind was racing; he was slightly put off by his reaction to the witch, having just met her less than six hours previous. He tried to chalk it all up to the fact that she was the first female his age he had been around in almost a year, but deep down he knew that there was just something about her in particular that made him want to help her and make her happy.

Laying in his bed, he tossed and turned for a full forty-five minutes, trying to push the thoughts of the girl sleeping in the room next to him out of his head. Eventually he gave up and pulled out the book she had lent him, opening it up to the chapter on his cousin. Dudley was surprised to find that even he was mentioned by name, just for living with the Boy Who Lived. When he had finished the chapter, he fell asleep instantly despite how full his brain still was with all of his new revelations.

When Dudley had left her room, Hermione was surprised to find herself almost lonely without his company. She hadn't had a conversation about anything other than bank heist plans, details for the war or helping Fleur around the house in so long, and their talk had been more than welcome. She had also enjoyed learning more about Dudley, especially about how and why he had turned his life around from the overzealous bully that she had heard of for the past many years. She could see that he really had changed, mind, body, and soul, and this was only her first time meeting him.

As she tried to fall asleep, her thoughts flitted from one to another, never staying on only one, but always coming back like a cd set to repeat. Her brain was full from worrying about Harry and Ron in the coming day, as well as contemplating the thought of trying to get along with Petunia and Vernon Dursley, though even above all these thoughts were her unspoken fears surrounding her parents. She still believed they were much safer, but while on one hand she hoped they were having a wonderful time in Australia, on the other hand, she desperately wished she had messed up on the memory modification and that they were wondering where their daughter was and that they were missing her. It was with these thoughts that she fell asleep, morphing into nightmares filled with her parents in Malfoy Manor, watching as unbiased individuals while Bellatrix Lestrange tortured her to within an inch of her life, only to be pulled away by Dobby just as her alarm went off, waking her up.

*the description of dudleys muscles and the crossing of the arms comes from laurell k hamilton's merry gentry series. and thanks to those who have taken the time to not only read, but also review, the first chapter:muggleman, lexy malfoy, nutsaboutharry, dudley demented, and deedee92.