A Familiar Stranger
Harry sprang to his feet, gulping as he looked around for a place to hide. The loud noise had come from the door to the hut, almost like a knock, as if someone were asking to get in by breaking the door down.
BOOM.
Harry grabbed his bag and tucked himself behind the fireplace as Dudley sat upright, rubbing his eyes. Vernon quickly rushed down the stairs, almost tripping on one as he pulled a rifle out of the package he had purchased earlier that day.
“Who’s there? I’m armed, bugger off!” Vernon growled, Petunia skulking a few stairs up.
SMASH.
Harry had to dig his nails into his arm to stay quiet as the door flew from the hinges and clattered onto the floor, right where he had been laying. Dudley coughed at the dust and wood that clouded into the air, eyes wide at the shadow lurking in the doorway. Harry tried to deep evenly as he peeked around the stonework.
The man about to enter the house was the largest man he had ever seen in his life. His face and eyes were hidden beneath wild and shaggy hair, his beetle-black eyes glistening from the chaos. The jacket that hung from his massive frame was covered in pockets, and was big enough to fit three Vernons, which was astonishing to Harry.
And terrifying.
The giant ducked through the doorway, which seemed to groan in protest, before turning and slamming the fallen door back into place along the stone wall. While the sound of the storm died down with it, the chattering and uncertain breaths of the Dursleys were still ringing in Harry’s ears as he pressed further into the corner.
He swore he could feel the air of the room shift when the giant took a horrifyingly large breath.
Which was such a contradiction to what happened next.
“Any chance fer a spot o’ tea? That storm’s sommat else.” He shook his hair, water flinging throughout the room, before peeling off his massive coat and striding towards the couch, where Dudley looked up with fearful eyes. “Budge over, yeh lump.”
Dudley squeaked and moved faster than Harry had ever seen him move to hide behind his parents, who were shaking in their places along the stairs, just staring at the strange man who settled on a whining couch.
Which gave him a perfect view of the mop of dark hair above emerald green eyes hiding in the corner.
“An’ here’s Harry!”
His name leaving the mouth of the stranger filled Harry with both endless curiosity and paralyzing fear. Maybe… His mind raced, connecting the dots from the past week. His uncle and aunt were obviously scared of something, of someone, someone who knew him, and knew where he lived. Wouldn’t it make sense that this person was behind the letters? And the fact he seemed familiar, surely that meant something as well?
Harry slowly met the smiling gaze of the giant who put so much well-deserved fear into his relatives, and felt the tension in his shoulders recede slightly.
“You know who I am?” he asked quietly, taking a single step forward to be in eyeline of the dangerously perched door.
“Course! Would recognize yeh anywhere! Las’ time I saw you, you was only a wee tyke, but no denying yer parents. You look just like yer da, cept those eyes of yours. Those are yer mum’s eyes. But I’m sure yer aunt’s told you that a thousand times.”
Petunia let out a quiet sob, and Vernon choked on his own spit.
“I demand you leave this house at once! You are trespassing and have no place here!”
Harry’s breath stopped in his lungs as his eyes flickered between the stranger and his uncle. The giant simply chuckled to himself and turned to face the family. “Shuddup, Dursley, I wasn’t talkin’ to you.” He reached a massive arm across the room and pulled the gun from the trembling man’s hands, twisted into a pretzel like he was… well, twisting a pretzel, and threw it in a far corner.
Vernon squeaked like a mouse caught in a cage and fell, barely catching himself on a stair.
“Anyway—Harry,” the giant turned back to him, and gave him another grin, “a very happy birthday to yeh. Hope you don’t mind I made a point a comin’ today, but it’s not everyday a young’en turns eleven. Got summat for yeh, mighta sat on it at some point, but it oughta taste alright.” He reached a hand into the coat on the couch next to him, somehow reaching in past his elbow before pulling out a squashed box with that same grin.
He didn’t seem to notice Harry’s shaking hands as he pushed it towards his chest. “Go on.”
Harry took a deep breath and tried to center himself before opening the box. Inside was a large chocolate cake, covered in frosting and green icing that read Happy Birthday Harry. He had to blink back tears, a war fighting in his head. This almost felt like what a birthday should, with someone who might actually care making him something that was obviously homemade. At the same time, this man obviously knew far more about Harry than anyone should, almost more than Harry himself.
He didn’t know what was going to come out of his mouth, and sighed in relief when it was “Excuse me, but who are you?”
The giant chuckled again. “Where’r my manners? I’m Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts.” Harry blinked at the word, thinking back to the letter tucked at his feet. “Tea? I’m sure I have some somewhere here. Mayhaps sommat stronger.” He winked at Harry as he leaned forward towards the ashes of the failed fire. Harry instinctively jumped back, but by the time he had righted himself and pulled away from the wall, the fire was roaring happily, and the strange man had laid out all sorts of things to make it a proper tea. Harry couldn’t help himself as he leaned forward, eyeing the six large sausages now sizzling, and the tea kettle beside it. Hagrid let things settle before pulling a stopper out of a large glass bottle full of amber liquid and taking a swig. He held it out to Harry wordlessly.
Harry shrugged, thinking the stranger wouldn’t drink anything dangerous just to get him to, and one sip of whatever whisky it was wouldn’t hurt. He grabbed the bottle with both hands and took a tentative sip, letting it rest in his mouth before forcing himself to swallow it.
Hagrid took it back just in time for Harry to start coughing. “God, that burns!” He sucked in a breath, but could feel his whole body heat from just that tiny bit.
A booming laugh scared him enough to stop coughing. “That’ll be firewhiskey for yeh. Great fer a night like tonight, when yeh need a little warmth.” He leaned forward again and pulled the poker from the fire, depositing six beautifully charred sausages onto a chipped plate.
For the first time since the gun had been dealt with, the two of them noticed the Dursleys—specifically Dudley, who took an audible sniff and fidgeted towards the food. Vernon grabbed his collar and pulled him away with a sharp, “No, don’t touch anything that man gives you, Dudley.”
Harry rolled his eyes, but the giant chuckled dark and low. “Yer cow of a son don’t need fattenin’ anymore, Dursley, not teh worry.” He purposefully set all of the sausages down in front of Harry, who shot one victorious look to his family before eating quickly, keeping a constant eye on the new unknown variable to the equation of the mystery he found himself in.
After he finished the last of the sausages, already regretting eating so much, and so quickly at that, he wiped his mouth and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m still not quite sure who you are. You said you were from Hogwarts, but all I know about that school is what I read from the letter, which didn’t give much information.”
Hagrid choked on his spiked tea, looking shocked.
“Sorry,” Harry quickly said, pushing back towards the wall, but also trying to determine his best exit strategy.
“Sorry? Blimey, Harry, there’s no cause fer you ta be sorry.” He turned towards the Dursleys with a dark expression. Petunia shrieked and took a step in front of Dudley, not realizing he had already run up the stairs.
Vernon, however, had processed Harry’s words, and his moustache trembled with fury. “What letter?” He pointed at Harry with an ugly sneer, rising to his feet.
Harry felt the stones of the fireplace press against his back, but he looked at Hagrid, who seemed to be on his side, at least for now, and gave his uncle a smug grin. “Taking a kip on the doormat like a common dog? After being told for ten years that I was to be neither seen nor heard, you’d think you would have thought of a better plan than hope I didn’t wake you up. You didn’t even twitch when I took a letter from your chest, and I had plenty of time to read it in the meantime.”
Vernon had turned purple at this point and took a thundering step forward. “You insufferable– “
He was cut off as an angry Hagrid jumped to his feet, his anger filling the entire room, almost like Harry’s freakishness tended to do. “Don’t you dare threaten this boy! Simply for taking something what’s owed him!”
Harry felt relieved at the support but still found himself flinching at the word boy.
Vernon scuttled back against the far wall of the staircase as the giant turned back to Harry. “Cor, Harry, I knew ya weren’t gettin yer letters, least that’s what we thought, but yeh don’t know nothing bout Hogwarts? Did yeh never wonder where yer mum and da learned it all?”
“Learned what, exactly?”
Hagrid smacked a hand against his face, making a loud noise that made everyone else in the room flinch. He then cast his eyes to the Dursleys. “Do you mean teh tell me that Harry Potter knows nothin’ bout… bout ANYTHING?”
Harry, while confused out of his mind, still felt a bit protective of his knowledge. “Excuse me, I do know some things, I’m wicked at math and a whizz in the kitchen—”
Hagrid waved a hand, cutting off his train of thought. “About our world, Harry. Not this mundane excuse for a life, the world yer parents wanted fer yeh.”
Vernon proved himself to be the most dangerous thing in the world just then—a brave idiot. “Well, if they wanted him in that world so badly, they shouldn’t have died and LEFT HIM ON OUR DOORSTEP LIKE THE MORNING’S PAPER!”
With an animalistic growl, Hagrid rocketed across the room, only a foot away from the Dursleys still downstairs. “Insult the Potters’ sacrifice ‘gain, I dare yeh.”
At the silence that followed, Harry took a step forward. “Sacrifice? I thought they died in a car crash?” He locked eyes with Petunia, who had started to cry silently.
“DURSLEY! I was there when he was left, I know there was a letter that yeh were to ‘splain everythin’ to him when he got old enough! And yeh’ve kept it from him all these years?”
Harry couldn’t look away from the guilt-ridden face of his aunt.
“We swore we would put a stop to all of this nonsense when we took him in! If you wanted him to know, maybe someone else should have taken him! Or at the very least checked on the brat. All of his freakishness on display at his school, and not one of you lot were there to fix it! So we swore to stamp it out of him!” Vernon trembled as he faced down Hagrid.
Harry’s voice cut through the noise and tension like an icy wind. “You knew? All this time, all the years of learning to hate myself because of what you would only call freakishness, every day I hid away from the world because I could tell I didn’t belong, and you just let me suffer?” He pulled the letter from his bag. “This is real, isn’t it? Magic? I’m a wizard? And you knew?”
Petunia looked into his eyes, her sister’s eyes, and swallowed. “Of course we knew. How could you not be, what with my sister and her worthless husband she met at that school.” She spat on the floor and turned away. “She got a letter just like that and disappeared, coming home for holidays with pockets full of… frog spawn and… telling wild tales about students turning into dogs and deer. Our parents adored her, of course, so proud of the witch in the family. I was the only one who saw her and that Prince freak as just what they were—abnormal.” She wiped at her eyes. “And then she met that fool Potter and they ran off and got married in India and came back and had you. Of course we knew you’d be just as strange and freakish as they were. Only to wake up one morning to nothing more than a note saying my sister had gotten herself and her husband blown up and left us with you.”
Harry forced every ounce of hatred he had into the look he gave his aunt, who couldn’t look at him for more than a second without sobbing into her husband’s shoulder. He then turned back to Hagrid, who was shaking with barely-restrained rage. While he loved the idea of this giant turning his anger on his relatives, he wanted information more.
“Mr. Hagrid, sir, could you tell me about them? I’d never heard any stories or anything like that, and since you knew them…” He trailed off, trying to sound as innocent as possible, as eager as possible, not that it was hard. “What sacrifice?”
In one motion, the tension in Hagrid eased and he moved back to the couch, patting the fireplace across from him for Harry, who tentatively sat on the side closer to the door. He looked, of all things, anxious to tell him more.
“Jus’ call me Hagrid, Harry, all the kids do. Yer parents… well, you too, I s’pose. Yer all famous. Blimey, every kid in our world grew up hearin’ yer name. I didn’t spect this, didn’t have no idea how little yeh know. But yeh can’t go into our world without knowin’.”
He pulled a pink umbrella from his coat and tapped it on the mug he had poured himself tea into, and Harry suddenly saw steam rise.
“Now, yeh need to understand, a lot of what happened to yeh, it’s still a myst’ry, even to those’f us who were there that night. It all started with a person—it’s incredible yeh don’t know his name, everyone knows—” He took a deep breath and looked up at Harry, who kept his eyes wide and innocent and nodded eagerly.
“Look, I don’ like sayin’ the name, no one does—”
“But why?”
“Blimey, Harry, people are still scared. There are bad people in the world, Harry. Ours and the muggle world.”
“Muggle? You mean nonmagical? Mundane?”
Hagrid nodded. “About twenty years ago, one wizard went bad. Real bad. Started lookin’ fer more followers. Found em, too. Some were scared. Some wanted the power he promised. Some say they were forced, magic’ly. These were dark days. Not the kind of time to keep yer door unwarded and say hi teh the neighbors. Fore anyone knew it, he was takin’ over. ‘Course, people stood up to him, good folk who couldn’t stand by. He killed ‘em. Horribly. One o’ the only safe places left was Hogwarts, with Dumbledore runnin’ it. Reckon Dumbledore was the only one You-Know-Who was afraid of, and rightly so.”
He sipped at his tea, and pushed a cup towards Harry, who just held it in his hands, focusing on the warmth as the story continued.
“Yer mum and dad, they were a blast of light in that dark world. As good a wixen as I ever knew in all my years at the school. Head boy an’ girl, plenty o’ influence and friends, just settlin’ down. No one knows why he didn’t come after ‘em while they were in school. Prolly too close to Dumbledore. But once they left… Maybe he thought he could persuade ‘em. Maybe he just wanted to see who the fuss was all about. All anyone knows, he turned up one night. Halloween, ten years ago now. Yeh were all in a small village, hiding away, you barely a year old.”
He took out a handkerchief that was as big as Harry’s shirt and blew into it. “Blimey, sorry. Yer folks were good, an’ always came round for a spot of tea when they could. Fer some dark wizard to hunt them down an’… kill ‘em… Well, not just them.” He gave Harry a look. “That cut on your forehead, it’s no ordinary cut. He tried teh kill you, too, wanted to make a clean job of it. Somehow, after yer da and mum went down to protect you, he couldn’t do it. It didn’t work. That’s why yer famous, Harry. No one ever lived after he decided they were done, not even some of the best. Scept you.”
Harry almost dropped his cup at the influx of broken memories that flooded his mind; dreams, nightmares he hadn’t thought about in years, a warm embrace, a green light, and, for the first time, he heard the echo of a cold, cruel laugh as pain enveloped him.
He dug a thumb into a pulse point on his wrist to maintain his composure, pushing even harder when he saw Petunia give a sob and disappear back up the stairs. It was a strange feeling, mourning what you never really had. People you didn’t really know. “And what happened to the dark wizard? You never told me his name.”
Hagrid shuddered, causing the shack itself to creak ominously overhead. “Most call ‘em You-Know-Who, or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Those on his side called ‘em the Dark Lord. But his name was… Voldemort.” He twitched at his own voice, tea spilling over the side of his cup.
“What happened to him?”
He took a deep breath, Harry wincing at the air flowing past him. “That’s the question, Harry. No one knows. The house was in pieces, I took you from the wreckage meself, brought you to this lot. No one but yer parents were there. That night, after yeh survived, he vanished. Makes yeh even more famous. Some say he died, too weak from what happen’d to heal. Some say he just disappeared. Waiting til the right time to come back, if he can at all. But one thing we all agree on. Something bout you stumped him that night.”
Hagrid looked at Harry with pride, raising his mug in a toast. Harry, however, felt ice in his veins, even with the fire roaring beside him and tea steaming in his hands. “And this school, it will help me control my… magic?”
“Cor, almost forgot.” He started digging through pockets of his coat, plopping something feathery in Harry’s hands. “Hold that fer me.”
Harry instantly ignored his continued search to coo at the grumpy pygmy owl now blinking blearily up at him. “Why, hullo little one. Are you to take some mail for us?” He gently stroked its head.
The owl nipped at his hand, and then nuzzled into it, even as Hagrid rolled up a note and held it out for it to take. The owl clamped it in its beak, and allowed Hagrid to take it to the closest window and throw it into the storm.
“Do you have any other animals hidden in your pockets? What kinds of animals are at the school?” Harry leaned forward, breaking the ice in his mind.
Hagrid chuckled. “Well—”
A stomp on the stairs brought their attention to Vernon, who was the last to be on the stairs, not yet given up on the fight he’d already lost. “He won’t be going, and that’s final. We have him enrolled in Stonewall High, and that’s it.”
Before Hagrid could shift, Harry held out a hand. “Uncle Vernon,” he said sweetly, shooting a venomous look straight in the eyes of the man who scared him to no end. He was secretly thrilled when Vernon took a step back. “You said it yourself, you meant to stomp the freakishness out of me. But it didn’t work. Maybe if I go to this school, they’ll teach me how not to use it in front of you, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley. Not to mention, it seems like this is a boarding school. I’m sure they’ll let me stay for the holidays during the school year, so you won’t even have to see me until summer, and maybe not even then if I find someone else to stay with. Cor, not having me in the house til what, almost July?”
Vernon scoffed, but his eyes flickered between Harry and Hagrid. “Fine. But I’m not paying for you to learn crackerbox tricks. If you can find a way to pay for it, you can go, and don’t expect anything else from us. We’ve clothed, fed, and housed you for ten years without any compensation. You go to this school, we’re done.”
Harry bit back a laugh at the generosity of his family. “Fine,” he echoed.
Vernon disappeared up the stairs and a door slammed shut.
Harry grinned before realizing Hagrid was watching him with a pensive expression. He let his grin fade slowly, and looked down shyly. “I never got to say thank you, Hagrid. Not only for coming all the way out here to bring me my letter, but for baking the cake, and the tea, and… well, for keeping me safe that Halloween. I may not remember much, but I think I remember you and a flying motorcycle?”
Hagrid laughed loudly, and there was a sudden thump upstairs. “Cor, you remember that?”
“I’m serious, Hagrid, thank you.”
Harry noted the strange flinch at the word serious, but instead of asking, put on a yawn.
“Gallopin’ galleons, Harry, it’s late, and we’ve got lots teh do tomorrow. Here, kip under this.” He threw Harry his coat, which almost sent him to the floor with the sudden weight. “Don’ mind if it wriggles, there’re prolly some dormice in one o’ the pockets.”
Harry nodded, using the coat as a blanket but keeping himself in the corner of the chimney, close to the door and the warmth of the still-going fire.
Hagrid sprawled on the dangerously sagging couch and quickly nodded off.
Harry just unfolded his letter, rereading it again and again, tracing over his name as if to convince himself that this was all real.