Chapter Text
When Dudley Dursley was four years old, there was a single, pivotal decision that would change the course of his life. One wouldn’t expect much from a four-year-old’s choices, but there you have it.
It all came down to a candy bar.
In one life, Dudley saw his father hit his cousin. There was no justifiable reason for this, but then, there weren’t justifiable reasons behind much of what Vernon Dursley did. So, when Harry had accidentally spilled his juice and gotten hit for it, Dudley decided to do the same. He hit Harry as well.
For a four-year-old, this took a great amount of effort and energy. This means that when Petunia Dursley took Dudley to the grocery store, his belly was rumbling and he cried out for a candy bar, which his mother happily bought for him. This, however, took the money that she had originally planned on using to buy a lottery ticket.
So what if Dudley had made a different choice? What if he had decided to be kind rather than be cruel?
In one life, because Dudley hit Harry, he got hungry and cried out for a candy bar.
In this life, Dudley was kind. He gave Harry a hug after Vernon hit him. After all, it was only a week before Harry’s birthday, and nobody should cry in the week before their birthday.
While hugs are incredibly kind, they are not all that energy-intensive. This meant that Dudley was not hungry when his mother took him to the store, and he did not cry out for a candy bar. This left Petunia with a little extra spending money, and she bought a lottery ticket.
When she got home, she scratched that ticket and let out a screech that had her whale of a husband huffing and puffing as he stomped into the room. Where he might have expected to find his ‘freak of a nephew’ doing something to scare his long-necked wife, he instead found her dancing in the kitchen, a lottery ticket clutched tightly in her hand.
With that lottery ticket, Vernon decided that his little family deserved to go on a vacation, and where else would they go but the United States? After all, this is where all of Dudley’s favorite programming was filmed. However, old Arabella Figg from down the street had tripped over one of her cats that week and twisted her ankle. This left her in no state to watch over the quiet little boy with bruises hidden beneath his clothes.
So, it was with great reluctance that Vernon agreed to drag along the freak in their family, without ever actually mentioning their destination to Figg.
…
In one world, Albus Dumbledore waited until little Harry Potter was five years old before he plied the boy with compulsions designed to steer Harry down the path ‘he was meant to follow’, in the headmaster’s words. This would lead to Harry becoming impulsive, brash, and lacking in any sort of common sense. The headmaster would follow up by dousing the boy in loyalty and submission potions, ones which wouldn’t be detected since he ensured the boy would never properly sit down with a goblin at Gringotts.
In this world, however, there was a problem. When Albus arrived to set the foundation for his manipulations in Harry’s life, he found Number 4 Privet Drive to be empty. There was no sign of the Dursley family, and there clearly hadn’t been in at least a week, based on the amount of mail that was piled up.
In this world, he strode over to his agent, Arabella Figg. He demanded the Squib tell him where, exactly, the Dursleys had gone. Not that she could tell him.
And oh, how the Squib screamed when he tormented her for her failure to notify him that his precious Golden Boy had left the country. Of course, he used a memory charm to cover up his use of the Cruciatus Curse in his moment of anger, but Figg would have trembling hands for the rest of her life and an ache that never quite seemed to go away.
Nevertheless, Albus set a charm to notify him when the Dursleys returned, and he traveled back to his home, anxiously awaiting the return of his Golden Boy.
He would wait for eight years.