Pairing: Dudley/Harry.

Rating: PG-13.

Summary: Dudley and Harry strike a truce and a trade.

Dedication: Anna, for the suggestions of sweets, for the very thoughtful beta, and for suggesting the title! Also for looking so fly in the furry beta hat. :-*

Author's Notes: This was written for The First Kiss Challenge.

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns 'em; I just own their leashes.

When Dudley had been younger, he'd been a bed-wetter. Not that Harry hadn't had an episode once that had been blown out of proportion (he'd consequently been blamed for Dudley's problem, but really, Harry had just had too much apple juice before bedtime), but Dudley was doing it on purpose. He seemed to really delight in plastic sheets for his bed and the strange smell it produced in his room, and he would lay there all night without calling for help. Finally, they had resorted to ordering Dudley special adult diapers, and the problem had waned away, but it had re-manifested itself in other areas. It was then that Dudley's favourite pastime, "Harry hunting," had really started to take a violent turn. Harry had longed to tell the other children that Dudley wet the bed compulsively, that he still couldn't tie his shoes, that he wouldn't let anyone touch his special blankie.

But for some reason, he didn't, because without really realising it, he felt a little sorry for Dudley. It was hard to believe that even though Dudley was so spoiled and had so many embarrassing problems, he still had parents who loved him, and for that, Harry was jealous. But even though he was jealous, he never told anyone about those plastic sheets and diapers.

Dudley hadn't seemed to have changed much when Harry came back to the Dursleys' that summer. He was still amazingly sphere-like, still had thick blond hair which tended to curl on humid days, still had small watery little blue eyes and his Smeltings stick at his side. But Harry just ignored his stares and shut himself up on his bedroom next to Dudley's. He didn't want to be there, and he wasn't wanted there. No one concerned themselves with him for several long, solitary days of loneliness, boredom and hastily wiped-away tears.

That is, until one evening, when Petunia and Vernon Dursley called over Eleanor, Dudley's least favourite baby-sitter, for the fourteen-year-old. Harry overheard Dudley's tantrum over having to have a sitter, but Aunt Petunia was insistent that no good could come of Dudley being left to his own devices. They were going to a dinner party and Eleanor was sitting, and that was that - Dudley was to be the lovely boy he always was, not eat the entire plate of cookies while they were gone, and not stay up too late playing that horrible Mega Mutilation 3. Harry was sitting on his bed cross-legged, writing a lengthy and lonely letter to Sirius, who he missed more than ever. He sighed and tried to concentrate on finishing it, but he couldn't keep himself from listening to the Dursleys' loud conversation downstairs. The door chime rang, and Eleanor's familiar voice joined them.

Eleanor had a grand tradition of letting Dudley roam off for the entire evening and never checking on him, opting instead to sit around watching the telly or tie up the phone with her boyfriend. Dudley hated her because she wouldn't get up and fix him food; Aunt Petunia was right when she said that Dudley was fairly helpless on his own. Harry, though, was to pretend he wasn't there, didn't exist, as always. The few times Eleanor had come to sit for the two of them, she hadn't even known that Harry was a semi-permanent resident of the Dursley household instead of just a visiting cousin. Harry would have liked her merely because Dudley hated her, except she had always let Dudley chase him and hit him and pinch him freely while she was there, so by he time she left, Harry was always covered in bruises, and his aunt and uncle never noticed - or cared.

He had just refocused on his letter to Sirius when there was a short rap on his door. He looked up, unsure of whether he should say anything to alert Eleanor of his presence or not.

But it was Dudley who opened the door. He was clearly seeking escape from the embarrassment that was having a baby-sitter at his age, and had decided to come and bother Harry.

"What are you doing?" he pried, looking at the parchment in Harry's lap and the quill in his hand.

"Homework," answered Harry shortly. "What do you want?"

"You're not allowed to do m-magic over the summer," said Dudley, puffing up.

The tip of Harry's quill snapped off against his parchment suddenly.

"It's not magic, it's just schoolwork," he replied, frowning and reaching into his school bag right next to him for a new quill.

"I want to see," said Dudley, waddling into the room and shutting the door behind him. Harry's eyebrows rose. Usually, Dudley displayed a very strong aversion to anything magic-related, ever since the tail incident. This was quite odd indeed.

Quickly, Harry blew his ink dry and slipped his letter into his school bag. "That isn't finished," he explained hastily. "Um..." He pulled out his Potions notes instead. "Here."

Dudley took them in one pink porky hand and stared at the parchment.

"It's a recipe," he declared. "Bat wings! What do you use those for?"

"They're really quite tasty," said Harry. "Like crisps."

"Oh... really?" Dudley's piggy little eyes looked at him and Harry could tell that it would be pretty easy to convince Dudley to eat any manner of the disgusting ingredients found within Professor Snape's concoctions. He turned to his bag and searched for a moment before pulling out the last copy of the Daily Prophet he'd gotten, which luckily had no Triwizard Tournament news on the front page since Rita Skeeter was now a bug in a jar on one of Hermione's shelves. Dudley took it from him, blinking. He nearly dropped it.

"Magic pictures move," explained Harry, standing on one foot and pointing to a black and white photograph of Minister Fudge, who was deep in conversation with another wizard of importance.

"Are they really in there?" Dudley poked a finger at the photo.

"No, it's just magical," Harry said.

Dudley stared at the picture, hard. Harry doubted he was actually reading the article. Inspired, he rooted around in his bag again and found where he'd stashed his wand upon arriving at King's Cross. Dudley saw him pull it out and backed away, straight into the wall.

"No!" he squealed.

"I'm not going to do anything!" Harry assured him. "I can't, or I'll get in trouble. It's all right."

Dudley's pudgy knees were knocking together.

"It's all right," Harry repeated. "Spells aren't allowed outside my school."

It was amusing, as always, to see the bigger boy scared of him. Dudley had dropped the Prophet and was grasping at the wall with shaky fingers. Harry ventured forward a step.

"No, see, it's all right, I won't hex you or anything," he laughed. "It's just a stick. Just a stick. See?" He turned the wand around so its wider base, carved like a handle, was pointed at Dudley instead of the small end. Dudley stared at it, cross-eyed. "D'you want to hold it? You can't do magic, so it won't do anything," he added, seeing the look of trepidation that moved across Dudley's wide face.

After a moment, Dudley reached out and took the wand, which looked delicate in his fist. His mouth dropped open, and Harry found himself smiling, remembering the first time he'd held the wand.

"You can feel the magic, can't you?" he whispered.

Dudley gulped. Harry reached out and took the wand back by its end, polishing Dudley's fingerprints off with his tee shirt.

"Magic isn't bad, Dudley," he said while tucking his wand back into its place. "Some people who do it are bad, but I'm not one of them."

"You - you made the glass disappear. At the zoo. You blew up A-Aunt Marge," his cousin stuttered.

"I didn't mean to," confessed Harry, sitting on the edge of his bed. "Sometimes things happened that I didn't mean to do. I don't know how. But I always did things when I was angry or afraid, on accident. I couldn't control it."

Dudley bit his lip, leaning against the wall. He stared at Harry, considering, for a long minute in which his loud breathing became very apparent and Harry felt like a creature in Defence Against the Dark Arts that was being stared at by a fascinated class.

"Anyway, I have homework to do," he mumbled.

Dudley was slowly bending over to get the Daily Prophet, and Harry had to look away; his shorts didn't quite fit him right and he'd seen quite enough of Dudley's bare bum when the two had taken baths together when they were very little - there was no need to ever see any more.

"Can I borrow this?" wheedled Dudley, who was fascinated by the pictures moving on the paper.

"Uh, sure, I guess," said Harry. "Just don't rip it or anything."

Dudley wandered out without saying anything in return, the Prophet close to his face. He barely remembered to shut Harry's door behind him.

"That was weird," Harry murmured, pulling his letter to Sirius back out, with a long postscript in mind.

It was Dudley's red remote-controlled race car that he'd gotten for his birthday several years ago, and it was sitting on top of the folded-up Prophet. Harry stared at it for a minute, unsure of what it was doing there. When they had been nine or ten, he couldn't remember which, Harry had been absolutely enamoured of the toy, and Dudley had refused to even let him touch it (aside from when he'd run it over Harry's feet on purpose). There it was, like a gift, a peace offering, sitting on top of the newspaper with its remote stuck in the miniature front seat. It was still in good condition, unlike many of Dudley's toys which got sat on or stepped on or just plain ruined from Dudley's rough play.

Harry bent to one knee and slid the paper out from underneath it, fingers touching the cool plastic worshipfully. The memories he had of longing to play with that toy... He turned to look at Dudley's closed door for a moment before tucking the paper under one arm and picking up the car in two careful hands.

If this was a trade of some sort, Harry thought, then it wouldn't go unappreciated. He knew the very thing - the very thing! He put the car on his bed and unlocked his trunk quickly, searching for the box of Bertie Bott's he hadn't been able to eat on the train ride home due to his unsettled stomach and had stuck into his trunk along with his school robes. It was time to give Dudley a slightly more positive experience with wizarding candy, to prove that not all of it would turn his tongue into a gigantic slimy mass bigger than his entire head, even if some of them did taste gross. Maybe if Dudley liked these, Harry would bring him a Chocolate Frog or two next summer.

He found it tucked into his cauldron on top of some of his books, and decided to attach a small note to it - a very small one, which he wrote out on a torn slip of parchment: They're O.K.

On his way to the loo, Harry left it in front of Dudley's door and knocked once, lightly, before shutting himself in the bathroom and grinning. Hopefully, Dudley would read the note and the packaging; he could just see his cousin shoving a handful of the beans into his mouth at once and getting a huge shock.

After a few minutes, he ventured out and back down the small hallway to his room, noting that the box was gone. Harry hurried back to his room, happy for the first time in a long series of miserable days, eager to mess with Dudley's peace offering - the toy car he'd always wanted to play with.

It was much later when Harry, very satisfied with how he'd spent his evening, heard a small tap on his door and Dudley hurrying away with his heavy footsteps.

"Something else?" he wondered out loud, grinning in spite of himself and getting up from his bed. He waited until he could no longer hear Dudley's footsteps, and heard a door slam downstairs; he wondered what Eleanor was up to down there while all this was going on upstairs.

When he opened his door, he saw a lone peppermint, glinting red and white in its plastic wrapper, sitting there in the hallway.

Candy. How like Dudley. Harry stepped out to pick it up, and quickly saw another one gleaming just to his right. He picked that one up, and saw another, just beyond, and then, a little further than that - Rolos. Wide-eyed, Harry's eyes followed a colourful trail of foil, plastic, and paper-wrapped candies down the hallway, and then all the way down the stairs. There was every sort of Muggle candy he could remember - miniature Mars Bars, Soft Mints, Fruitella, everything, dropped in a path like something from Hansel and Gretel, only with pieces of the candy house instead of bread.

One by one, Harry picked them up, until they filled his hands and were dropping from his clutch and rolling this way and that, so he scooped up the hem of his tee shirt into a makeshift basket and knelt along the staircase picking all the sweets up until he reached the first floor. The trail of sweets led right to his old cupboard. Harry paused at the last stair. They used that cupboard for normal things now, and not small children, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to open its door or not. He hadn't since he'd left it, and it was a chapter of his life he wanted to remain forever closed.

But after a quiet moment, he heard movement within, and realised Dudley was hiding inside it.

Harry peered around the corner into the living room to see where Eleanor was; she was sitting in Uncle Vernon's recliner, watching the telly and talking on the phone at the same time. She didn't even spare one look his way as he slid across the hallway as silently as he might have under his invisibility cloak and opened the door to the dark, cramped space.

"Dudley?" he whispered, and was consequently yanked inside by one of Dudley's big hands; sweets went spilling form Harry's scooped-up shirt onto the floor. The door was shut, leaving the two in total darkness except for a few shreds of light which filtered weakly in from the vent on the door. Dudley's blue eyes and wide mouth were illuminated by them. Harry swallowed, caught off guard by several things - Dudley was in his cupboard - Dudley had led him here - they both fit - his was disoriented, only being able to hear Dudley's breaths and see Dudley's eyes and not much else.

"Is all that - for me?" Harry questioned under his breath.

Dudley answered by raising his palm; as something shiny and silver caught the light, he realised Dudley was holding up a Hershey's Kiss, offering it forward to him. Even though he still had a shirt full of sweets, Harry took the melty Kiss, and then found himself crushed into one of much larger proportions.

It was the most surprising thing that had happened all evening, and for what had already happened, that was saying something.

It didn't even register for a minute, but when it did, it really did. Dudley smelled like sweets and sweat and baby powder and, somehow, like the plastic sheets that used to be on his bed, and his lips were uncomfortably wet and warm and even though their mouths were closed, Harry could taste Every Flavour on him. He'd never been kissed like this before. Actually, he hadn't ever really been kissed at all, and underneath the enthusiastic mash of mouth, Harry suspected Dudley had never been either. He wriggled within the huge arms, trying to pull back away from the invasion that was Dudley's mouth, but Dudley wasn't letting him, and finally Harry made a soft noise and stilled. Sweets were dropping between them like candy rain, dancing around their toes, and Dudley didn't let him go until Harry was about to pass out from lack of air.

"Duh - Duh - Dudley," he gasped, bewildered.

"I felt the magic, Harry," said Dudley, breathing harder than ever. "It felt nice."