Jilytober Day 3
Hopping online a few minutes before midnight to share my attempt at today's @jilytoberfest prompt! Hope you enjoy :) October 3rd Prompt: Spoiling Harry In the corner of the sitting room, Vernon Dursley's face was mottling into an alarming shade of puce. James Potter suppressed a smirk.
"What's this, Dad?" Harry asked, looking up from the gift he'd just unwrapped. His cousin Dudley, who was sitting beside Harry on the floor, surrounded by piles of discarded wrapping paper, turned toward his cousin in envious disbelief.
"Are you kidding?" Dudley asked incredulously. "That's Martian Smash 4!" He turned to his mother, whose lips were pursed. "Mummy, that's the new game," he whined, his voice rising in pitch like a teakettle approaching a boil. "I want one too, Mummy! I want it!"
"Of course, popkin," said Petunia, smiling tensely at her son. "We would have bought one for your birthday" she added, shooting Lily a nasty look, "but they only got it in the stores just last week..."
"Do you even have a computer?" Dudley asked.
Harry looked blankly back at his cousin. "What's a computer?" All three Dursleys started, apparently outraged by this shocking display of Wizardish ignorance.
To James's left, Lily was giving him an exasperated scowl, but James knew his wife well enough to detect the amusement beneath her feigned disdain. All year, Lily had been trying to mend fences with her priggish sister. James and his Dursley counterpart had been the casualties of this sororal reunion, dragged to dinner parties and Quidditch matches and football games with their wives and sons, where they gritted their teeth, pretended to enjoy one other's company, and slipped unsubtle insults beneath the parlor chat.
The most obnoxious of these little get-togethers had occurred last month, on the morning of Dudley's tenth birthday. The Potters had visited Little Whinging for a birthday breakfast, but this was quickly revealed to be nothing more than a smug farce of one-upmanship. The whole event had been infuriating. Dudley had opened a frankly obscene number of gifts, tossing each aside and complaining when they didn't meet his standards, while Petunia cooed and Vernon pontificated loudly about the things a man could buy for his son when he worked a normal job like a proper provider.
Well, James had decided, if that was the sort of game that Dursley wanted to play...
Lily broke the silence. "Looks like James and I have been out of the loop," she said, with a warm smile toward her sister that James recognized as deliberate diplomacy. "What sort of computer—"
"Only two more gifts there, eh, Harry?" Vernon cut in. "Bit of a paltry number, I'd say."
"Open the little one next," piped up Sirius, who was lounging across the sitting room couch. Petunia, perched primly on the edge of the opposite armchair, looked at Sirius as though his existence were vaguely inappropriate.
"Okay!" Harry grabbed a small package wrapped in sparkling turquoise paper. The moment that his hands touched the present, it doubled, then quickly doubled again. "Woah!"
"That makes how many presents total?" asked Sirius, grinning evilly. "Forty-one?" Vernon's face achieved a genuinely impressive purple hue.
Harry, who didn't seem to be listening, tore through the turquoise paper to reveal his quadrupled gift (four variety boxes of Zonko's best). He thanked Sirius before putting the joke sets to the side, turning toward his final present.
This last box was the most impressive of all: disproportionately large and solidly rectangular, it was wrapped in scarlet paper dotted with zooming Golden Snitches. Harry approached it with childish eagerness, and even Dudley paused his incipient tantrum to stare in anticipation. Harry ripped the paper open and—
Dudley gasped. Vernon snarled. Petunia scoffed. Lily groaned.
It wasn't just any computer. James might not fully understand Muggle devices, but he knew how to speak to a salesperson, and was familiar enough with the going value of the Galleon against the pound to know that this computer, whatever it was, was damned good.
"Uh, Dad?" Harry asked. "What...is this?"
"It's a computer," James replied, unable to keep the smugness from his voice. He shot a glance at Sirius, who looked back at him with open glee.
"Okay..."
"It's for your new computer game, honey," said Lily, with the fading optimism of a Chudley Cannons fan who has finally looked at the scoreboard. Petunia, for her part, eyed Dudley's reddening complexion like a woman who has accepted defeat.
"Right. Um, thanks."
James paused his observation of Vernon's quivering moustache to notice that Harry was giving him an odd look. "It's a really good one," he said encouragingly.
Harry looked back at the box, a furrow in his brow. Then, with whooshing sigh, he turned toward Dudley.
"So, I feel a little stupid right now," said Harry frankly to his cousin. "Because I honestly have no idea what a computer game is even supposed to be." James fidgeted. "I do like games, though," Harry continued, pushing the heavy box a few inches closer to Dudley. "Don't s'pose you could teach me how to play?"
Dudley's face, which had been screwed up for a wail, fell slack in surprise. "I...guess I could," he said slowly, absorbing the new idea. "I've never met anyone who didn't know computer games before."
Lily pounced. "I'm sure your cousin knows all about computer games, Harry."
"Oh, yes." Petunia was quick on the uptake. "He's always talking about blasting the aliens, aren't you, sweetums?"
Dudley considered Harry in the way that a general might size up his latest recruit. "You'll need to learn, actually," he said, gaining confidence, "if you ever want to play with normal kids. They might bully you, you know, if you don't know about ordinary things."
To James's surprise, it was Petunia who winced slightly at the insult. Harry, who found his Muggle cousin just as bizarre as Dudley found him, was unfazed. "I'll let you ride my broomstick after, if you like."
"Really?"
Vernon stepped forward with a huff of disbelief. For a moment, it seemed that broomstick riding might be a bridge too far.
But Lily and Petunia swooped in once more. "Vernon, do you think you could help us set the computer up?" Lily asked, bringing out the smile she'd once used to charm Horace Slughorn. "Our house is connected to the power grid, but I haven't even used an electric typewriter in ages, and my darling husband is still mastering plugs."
"Vernon is wonderfully handy," Petunia added. "And he's excellent with appliances. From his work, you know."
Dursley stared. It appeared that a combination of bewilderment, flattery and rage had completely overwhelmed his ability to react. He looked at each of them for a long minute.
"Well, of course," Vernon said finally. "Let's just open this box, here, and I'll take a look and see what it's all about."
Vernon, Lily and Petunia bustled awkwardly toward the large box. Settling into an uneasy truce, they unpacked the computer, which admittedly seemed to have more components than James had been anticipating. After a few minutes, even Sirius wandered over, his contempt for the Dursleys briefly surpassed by his insatiable curiosity about Muggle machines.
"Well," Vernon said. "Of course, any gainfully employed man today has gotten quite familiar with computers in the office. Grunnings hasn't used typewriters since eighty-eight..."
Petunia and Lily exchanged a tentative smile. Harry and Dudley, already bored of Vernon's bloviating, began rummaging together through the Zonko's sets.
As James watched the unusual scene, Lily suddenly met his eyes and smirked. James made a face. Lily stuck out her tongue.
It seemed as though the Potter-Dursley holiday get-togethers might be here to stay.
