original here. dated 2013-06-04.
[A/N: The original post has some outlining/brainstorming/ranting related to the below drabble, but it was mostly the drabble that I wanted to cross-post. The brainstorming was a little too stream of consciousness and I’d have to edit it and… ugh. But to summarize: Duelist is a Harry Potter x Yu-Gi-Oh crossover where YGO canon happens after basically all of HP (minus epilogue, of course) and Harry ends up being the kind of exasperated older wielder of the Millennium Scales. There’s some details that would change in HP canon (like, Harry would be close to Flitwick who is both a magical and card duelist) but overall it’s the same.]
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Oddly enough, the first encounter happens several months before he discovers magic is real.
As February draws to a close, 4 Privet Drive is ready to begin spring cleaning–though it would be more accurate to say that the Dursleys of 4 Privet Drive are ready to make Harry begin spring cleaning. This is nothing new; spring cleaning has been part of Harry’s numerous duties since he grew big enough to be physically capable of doing so.
Like many of his other chores, he has mixed feelings about the annual spring cleaning. On the one hand, with the weather taking a turn for the better, his relatives usually go out or at the very least avoid being in the house with him, allowing him a small amount of freedom as long as he progresses enough to meet Aunt Petunia’s expectations (though for the past several years, he’s lowered her standards by unnoticeably and steadily slowing his pace). On the other hand, it never fails to bring up his buried feelings of bitter resentment regarding the Dursleys’ material wealth and his severe lack.
Particularly Dudley’s second bedroom. It never made any sense why Dudley has two bedrooms while Harry slept in the cupboard under the stairs, but he knows better than to voice this injustice. Regardless, why Dudley’s second bedroom is used as a storage space for broken toys instead of something useful (it didn’t even need to be Harry’s first bedroom, it could be Uncle Vernon’s study) has always been especially frustrating during spring cleaning.
He finds them the first day–it usually takes three days to go through the one room, due to having the most stuff, so he usually starts on it first–but he does nothing beyond remembering what they are and when Dudley got them. Them being, of course, five starter and at least twenty booster packs of Duel Monsters cards.
Dudley had been easily sucked into the craze at school, so much so that it consisted of one of his many Christmas gifts, though the complexity of the game meant that he unsurprisingly got bored of it soon enough–leading to the cards being fairly untouched, except for their hasty opening and repacking. Probably for the best, considering that if Aunt Petunia ever found out that Duel Monsters was about magic she’d have quickly thrown them away. Uncle Vernon probably would have burned them.
As it is, the colourful and shiny graphics are little more than yet another reason to be quietly jealous of Dudley. At first.
He finishes cleaning the room on the second day (though he takes care to leave seemingly disorganised piles to ensure the next day’s light load) which leaves him more free time than even he expected. He can’t leave the room, though, since Aunt Petunia is having tea with some of the other ladies from the neighbourhood in the sitting room, which is too close to his cupboard, and she’s expressly ordered that he not make his presence known. He’s already read the few books in Dudley’s second bedroom and everything else is either too loud or too broken to do anything with.
Except that’s not true. He quietly fishes the cards out from a toy chest and places them on the floor in front of where he’s sat. As he arranges them in front of him by card type, monster, spell, and trap, occasionally reading the descriptions on some of the more interesting cards, he can see the appeal of the game. It’s like a whole other world where a player–duelist, he’ll learn later that night from the rulebook he sneaks into the cupboard–can use magic and have magical creatures and it’s amazing! Some of the cards are even called magicians! He discovers, having skimmed enough of the rulebook to get a gist of it, that he really likes Duel Monsters; the game just as much as the cards.
It’s on the third day that Harry realises there are a two problems. One is easily fixed, the other is not. The first: there’s no way he can hide all four hundred or so of the abandoned cards in his cupboard without getting caught–either in the smuggling (it would take multiple trips even with how oversized the pockets are on Dudley’s castoffs) or during Uncle Vernon’s periodic checks for contraband. The solution for that is simple, and even a little fun: gather his favourites into a single deck which he can easily hide and keep with him.
The second is more troubling: Duel Monsters is a multiplayer game. For all that he’s been having fun learning about Duel Monsters and creating his very own deck, he can’t do anything without having another person to duel against. He can’t duel Dudley (for obvious reasons), not that he would want to, and due to the terrible reputation Aunt Petunia has spread and Dudley’s campaign to make Harry’s life miserable and lonely, the other kids at school wouldn’t duel him even if they knew he had his own deck.
Despite that, he still makes a deck (he actually makes several decks, since there are certainly enough cards to do so, but he only takes one with him). And even though he can’t really do much with it, he can still imagine using it to duel with friends he might someday have and dream that the monsters and magic of the cards are real. The former happens several months later. He doesn’t discover the latter is true until after he graduates from Hogwarts.
JackSGreyson Says 