Chapter Text
1.
The new teacher was a pretty girl, she must’ve been about 28, a bit flat chested but she had a good arse.
She was blonde. Dudley had always had a weakness for blondes.
He swivelled in his chair to smirk at Piers and Monty. That was the great thing about having had these same friends for so long, he always knew what they were thinking, like some sixth sense.
She was wearing a pretty dress, Dudley would never have admitted it to his friends, but sometimes he felt this sting of envy that women were allowed to be beautiful, and free to wear
flowers and skirts and lived these pretty, easy lives and didn’t have to just take everything like the…
Ouch.
Yeah, the rap of a smelting’s stick over their knuckles.
“What the fuck?” he hissed back at Polkiss who’d leant forwards to hit him.
“Daydreaming, Dursley, I asked how much you’d pay to do her.”
Dudley scoffed.
“Depends on what she looks like with her clothes off.”
Piers and Monty roared with laughter and the teacher looked back from the board, where she had written her name, Ms Davis, with a frown.
“Quiet, boys, please.”
They settled down, Piers leaning back into his seat with a final smirk at Dudley.
“Right, everyone, I’m Ms Davis, I’m new to the school, so go easy on me!”
There she waited as the class did the obligatory chuckle and slowly zoned out into another world.
“I’ll go through the register, so when I say your name, please reply ‘Good Morning’ and give me a nice big wave so I can see who you are.”
She had an interesting accent, it wasn’t quite English, there could have been a bit of Irish in there maybe? American?
Dudley gave a slight gesture at his name and droned the same ‘Good Morning.’ As everyone else.
“Today,” she began, walking to centre stage at the front of the classroom, “we learn magic.”
There were some laughs at that, but for once, Dudley wasn’t leading them. He’d stiffened all over at the word and suddenly he wasn’t 14 and terrifying to the younger years, he was 11, and a man with a pink umbrella towered over him.
He listened closely as the teacher spoke, his entire body still and seized.
“Yeah, it is a romantic view of maths, sure, but what else can you call it? It might be boring right now, but you’re just learning the tools. Even then, there really is something so wonderful about it.
When you get a question in your maths papers, the ending is already written, the journey, mm, not entirely decided. If this was English and I told you that with a paragraph, you could rewrite the rest of, say, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, you’d be astonished. And yet, that’s what we are learning with maths. Something as close to magic as people can get.”
Dudley did laugh at that. He knew people that could get much, much closer. His freak cousin and his freak friends who got a laugh out of hurting the normal people like him. It was fucked.
If he was magic, he’d fucking end his pathetic scrawny bitch of a cousin in a second. It was a shame no one at magic school, Hogwash or whatever, had managed it yet.
Ms Davis was still talking, her face open and animated and far more beautiful than Dudley had originally thought.
“Even though they were studying triangles back in ancient Egypt, or in Babylon, what we’ll be learning today starts with the Greeks…”
And Dudley couldn’t help but listen, still frozen, as Ms Davis described in her musical voice how Hellenistic mathematics had moved from Greece to India as Hellenistic astrology, how Aryabhata set up an observatory at the Sun temple and studied the stars. That they were lucky enough to learn about one of the many things he’d discovered today.
She had them practicing finding angles for the rest of the lesson using these sine, cosine and tan functions.
Still quite disorientated, Dudley felt an uncharacteristic interest in the task and even slapped Monty with his Smelting’s stick when he tried to pick up the conversation about Ms Davis, which usually he’d have enjoyed far more than maths.
He didn’t understand how the functions worked really, how they transformed lengths into angles and angles into lengths, it seemed impossible really. Almost like magic.
At the end of the lesson he lingered at his desk, taking such an age to pack up that Piers and Monty, usually loyal to a fault, left him alone. Alone with Ms Davis.
“Do you need help with anything?” Ms Davis had walked right up to him.
It was funny, Dudley would think later, that when he struggled for words, it wasn’t because he was thinking up some crude joke or imagining her naked or whatever, it was that he really was frightened. To talk to her? Of her?
“Dudley?”
For a bizarre moment, Dudley felt thrilled. She remembered my name! Then cringed at his own pathetic excitement.
“I just…I wanted to ask a question.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not…it isn’t really magic, is it? Maths, I mean.”
She shrugged.
“I guess that depends on what you think magic is.”
“Making cups dance or things vanish or…”
he cleared his throat, “putting tails on people.”
Ms Davis laughed loudly.
“No. As wonderful as maths is, you certainly won’t be learning how to ‘make cups dance’. But people used maths to make cars, and computers, and certainly for Aryabhata that would seem like magic.”
Dudley frowned. These were a lot of things to think about. Was magic really advanced maths? Were wizards just really big nerds? He grinned. It would be fun getting at Harry for that in the summer.
“So if there was magic?”
She smiled sweetly at him.
“It’s quite a tired phrase, but people often say maths is ‘the language of the universe’. I think that being able to understand the natural world, whether you think that’s God talking to us, or just some beautiful language we need to discover and mine like any other resource, is much, much better than magic tricks.”
Quickly, In Dudley’s mind, the images of taunting Harry for being a nerd gave way to a far more beautiful one.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if Harry came back from freak school feeling as special and as superior as ever, just to see Dudley being able to speak to the universe? Maybe he’d ask it to drop the freak off a cliff.
He grinned to himself, then remembered Ms Davis was there.
He needed a timeline for this.
“How long does it take to learn all of maths?”
“I don’t think you could learn all of maths in a million years.” She said with a quick, amused smile.
Fuck. The images of his glory dissolved.
Perhaps sensing his disappointment, Ms Davis quickly continued.
“But, I can show you some of the maths I’m doing with my year 13’s if you’d like?”
Dudley nodded sceptically.
She rummaged for an exercise book for a moment and opened it to the most recent page. A mess of scribbles and symbols sat there. He wasn’t sure he could see a single number. Maybe a 0 somewhere?
He frowned. It didn’t look very much like maths.
“What does it mean?”
She thought for a moment.
“I gave them a line on a graph, then they rotated it to create a solid and found the volume and centres of mass, I wanted them to experiment with balancing the solid on slopes. Then I gave them its mass and they played around with it. Dropping it off ledges or sliding it or spinning it in a circle. I wanted them to find general formulas with as few variables involved as possible.”
“Huh?”
She laughed, “I’m sure you’ll be doing the same soon enough.”
Dudley thought. It wasn’t enough, so he thought harder.
“Is it fun?”
“They might not say so. I think it feels like playing God.”
And oh! The images that came to him now…
He, Dudley, balanced on a massive gold sofa of a throne, his friends and family kneeling at his feet, begging to serve him. And, of course, Harry and all those other miserable sickos who thought they were so much better than him, exiled to Hell or jail. Or he’d shoot them. Whatever. It would be something BAD.
Perhaps slightly alarmed by the mumbling trance Dudley had seemingly entered, nodding and smiling to himself as he gazed at a wall, Ms Davis gently steered him out of the room, handing him his bag which he took with an absent “thanks.”
“I look forward to teaching you, Dudley, I hope you keep this curiosity about Maths in my lessons!”
He grunted and began to stamp down the corridor. If Ms Davis had stayed by the door she might have seen the younger students scurrying out of his way, the surprise on their faces as they didn’t receive a stomach-ful of fist.
But she didn’t, and neither did Dudley, so lost in the idea of omni potency that he had quite forgotten the power he already had over the other students in the school.
Dudley returned to his dorm that night with a maths textbook and a head full of God.
Piers looked at him, the book, and back at him again. He frowned.
“Y’alright Duds?” he asked.
Dudley smiled, it chilled Piers to the bone.
“Wonderful.”