The (half-)Giant
The entire cabin shook as someone on the outside knocked on the front door, apparently with so much force that it was a minor miracle that the door hadn't given out just yet. Whoever it was, he seemingly was serious about entering, as not even uncle Vernons shotgun - how exactly he had gotten it, Harry did not know, though he did suspect that it was a not quite legal acquisition, as he doubted that uncle Vernon had a license for it - and the threat of it being used seemed to detract the visitor.
Though Harry wasn't too certain that said visitor was a Hogwarts delegate as he stuffed the now read letter under his shirt again. Wouldn't wizards have simply opened the door through magic?
'They could, but I think the envoy is trying to be polite and do things properly', Tom answered when asked, before adding: 'A curtesy that is wasted on these muggles, in my opinion.'
Harry was about to agree when the door, having withstood at least three beats, finally gave out and broke away from its hinges, breaking into at least four different parts in the process. The sad remains which did still hang in the hinges groaned more pathetically than Dudley in the wind as the nightly visitor stepped through the frame with heavy footsteps.
'Oh, you have got to be joking', Tom let out, and Harry had to agree, though he suspected it was for a different reason. Before him stood the biggest man he had ever seen, a veritable giant, standing at least 10 feet tall, possibly even more, and looking very much the part of a vilainous figure from one of these weird german fairy tales. His face was almost entirely hidden behind a bush of black hair and beard, wild and tangled and uncombed, with his small eyes glittering like the shells of black beetles, almost entirely hidden under all that hair, and hands as large as Harrys head rested on a massive brown leather belt, almost entirely hidden beneath the massive black coat. He could not even stand properly in the cabin, being forced to bend his back somewhat to not actually hit the ceiling, and somehow still strifing said ceiling with his hair.
"Could use a cupa tea. Wasn't an easy journey...", the man grumbled in a deep voice as he looked around, past the shaking aunt Petunia, the equally shaking uncle Vernon - who still held the loaded shotgun - before his eyes fell on the couch, where the shaking and whimpering Dudley was hauled up. "Move it, piggy", he grunted, and Dudley, letting out a very piglike squeal, obliged, running towards his mother and taking cover behind her, just as she herself took cover behind her husband and his gun.
"Ah, an' there's Harry!", the giant then exclaimed as he finally spied Harry, who then looked at his face, seeing that it was smiling, something that was almost staggering to see on an adult face directed towards him.
"Las'time I saw ye, ye still were a baby", he carried on. "Ye look might'ly like yer dad, 'cept for the eyes. All yer mom, those." Harry blinked in surprise; he knew that he'd gotten his mom's eyes, but this was the first thing he'd heard about his fathers appearance.
Uncle Vernon meanwhile had found some small amount of sense, as he made an odd rattling noise and yelled: "I demand you leave immediately! This is trespassing!"
The giant was not impressed. "Ah, shut it, Dursley, ya big plum", he grunted before grabbing the shotgun and, in a show of immense strength, twisted its barrel before ripping the now useless weapon from uncle Vernon's hands and tossing it into a corner. At that, uncle Vernon once again made a sound, which sounded oddly high.
"Anyways", the giant carried on as he turned back to Harry, "to you a happy birthday. Got somethin' for ye here - somewhere... Might've sat onnit at one point, but I think it still oughtto taste good." With that, he pulled a somewhat dented box from the inside of his black coat - no, cloak - and handed it to Harry, who proceeded to open it with shaking hands. In it, he found a somewhat flattened chocolate cake with Happy birthday Harry crudely written on it in lime green colour.
'I see his handwriting hasn't improved since school', Tom snarked, as Harry tried to process the fact that he had just gotten a gift for his birthday for the first in... forever, as far as he knew.
He finally managed to open his mouth and brought out a "Thank you!" with a smile that likely split his face, and he resisted the urge to hug the giant man - 'good', Tom commented, 'I doubt he's bathed lately' - and instead asked: "Err.. who are you, exactly?"
The giant chuckled. "Right, haven' introduced meself", he admitted. "I'm Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of the Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts." He extended one of his giant paws towards Harry, which he took and shook - well, Harry shook his hand. Hagrid shook his entire arm.
'Huh, he finally got promoted', Tom observed. 'Guess Ogg finally bit the dust.'
'Wait, you know him?', Harry finally adressed him again.
'We went to Hogwarts together for a while. He was three years under me, and got expelled in his third year - long story, I'll tell you later', Tom answered.
Hagrid meanwhile busied himself in the cabin, somehow managing to light a fire in the fireplace - 'Odd, and almost certainly illegal', Tom commented, but refused to elaborate further in the moment - and pulling all sorts of stuff from his cloak, including some edibles - apparently he was rather hungry.
These edibles included a few sausages, which he was grilling over the fireplace, and when Dudley reached for one, uncle Vernon - doing the somewhat sensible thing for once in his life - barked at him to not eat anything Hagrid had brought.
'As if piggy needs to be fattened even further', Tom snarked just as Hagrid said something similar. Harry meanwhile graciously took one sausage, being quite hungry himself and wanting to save the cake for later.
"Sorry, but I still don't really know just who you are", he said as Hagrid sipped the tea he had made just minutes earlier. "Or what exactly you do."
Hagrid wiped his face with his hand. "Ah, jus' call me Hagrid. Everyone does. An' like I said, I'm the Keeper of the Keys and Ground over at Hogwarts - course, ye already know all 'bout that."
"Err... no", Harry admitted.
'Yeah, my bad', Tom apologized. 'Guess I was too busy trying to teach you to actually tell you about Hogwarts itself. Sorry.'
Hagrid meanwhile looked downright flabbergasted. "Ye mean-- ye don't--", he began.
Harry gave a shrug. "I mean, I kinda figured that magic's a thing, but that's about it. I'm sorry", he added.
"Yer sorry? They oughtto be sorry!", Hagrid thundered. "I knew that ye didn' receive yer letters, but I never imagined ye didn't even know 'bout Hogwarts! Didn't ya ask yerself where yer parents learned all they knew?"
"Where my parents learned all... wait, you mean they were wizards?", Harry asked, hoping for definitive confirmation.
"Were they wizards, were they wizards.... Ye mean that ya didn' know that?", Hagrid asked, growing ever redder with each word.
"Err... no? At least, not for sure?", Harry offered. "I mean, I kinda figured out that the weird stuff that kept happening was magic, and--"
Tom interrupted. 'Best to not talk about me', he warned. 'Hagrid and I weren't on the best terms, and if Dumbledore is running things, it might be good if he doesn't know about my presence.'
'What? Why?', Harry asked, confused.
'Like I said, Dumbledore always looked at me like I was a bomb waiting to explode. I promise I'll explain more later, but for now, let's keep my existence quiet.'
'Alright', Harry replied, unconvinced. 'I'm holding you to that, though.'
Fortunately, Hagrid hadn't realized how he had cut himself off. He was too busy being mad, after all.
"DURSLEY!", he thundered, causing the cabin to shake a bit and uncle Vernon to whimper and grow even paler.
"I mean, ye gotta-- Do you even know anything about yer parents?", Hagrid then asked, almost pleadingly.
'Huh, apparently there is something more to know other than that they were mages', Tom observed.
Harry meanwhile shrugged. "I know my moms name was Lily, but that's about it", he admitted. "I was told that they died in a car crash, but", he shot an angry look at aunt Petunia, whose pale face briefly turned from fright to fury, "I suspect that was a lie."
"Yer moms... ye don'....", Hagrid stammered as he raised his hair with his fingers, shaking his head wildly as he tried to process. "A car crash?!"
Uncle Vernon meanwhile seemingly found his courage and voice anew. "Enough!", he barked. "Don't you dare say another word, Sir! I forbid it!"
If looks could kill, uncle Vernon would be deader than that dog Dudley had run over with his bike once; such was the fury in the glare Hagrid now shot the portly mustached man. "Ye never told him? Ye never told him what was written in that letter Dumbledore left with him? I was there! I saw Dumbledore place him, Dursley! And you kept it all from Harry for all these years?"
Harry narrowed his eyes. "This Dumbledore placed me with them? The one from the letter?", he asked, curious, while Tom let out a string of colorful curses in the background.
"STOP! I FORBID IT!", uncle Vernon yelled, now seemingly panicking.
"Bah, just shut it, all of you", Hagrid grunted, deflating a bit. "Yes, Harry, Professor Dumbledore placed ye with'em. It was meant to keep ye safe, though..." He shot the trembling and yapping Dursleys the dirtiest look Harry had ever seen, "that may've been a mistake."
He cleared his throat. "Now, ye said ye did get a letter afterall?"
Harry nodded with a sheepish grin and pulled it out from beneath his shirt, making sure that the Dursleys saw it. "I read the first part just before you arrived", he added. "Kinda pieced some stuff together already."
"Hah! Aye, I noticed. Brilliant, just like yer mom", Hagrid said with a tearful smile. "Yer gonna make a great wizard once ye get in some practice, I'm sure offit!"
'Now on that, he and I can agree', Tom said.
"Err, I do have a question", Harry began. "It says here that they await my owl until today. Is that meant literally, or how do I..."
"Ah, galopping gorgons, nearly forgot that", Hagrid grunted as he reached into his cloak again, this time pulling out an actual owl, a piece of... some kind of parchment and a quill - to write with, Harry soon saw. He scrawled something almost indecipherable onto the parchment - a confirmation that Harry had received his letter and that Hagrid would take him to get his school stuff the next day - before rolling it together and placing it in the owl's beak, who then swiftly took off.
Harry only hoped the bird would make it through the storm.
"Now, where was I?", Hagrid mumbled to himself, just before uncle Vernon stood up defiantly.
'This ought to be good', Tom chuckled.
"He staying right here", the walrus declared.
Hagrid grunted in amusement. "'D love to see a big muggle like yerself try to stop'im", he stated.
"Wait, what does that word mean?", Harry asked, having heard Tom use it before.
'Muggles are people with no magical background and no magical ability whatsoever', that very same explained just as Hagrid did the same, the latter adding that Harry had the misfortune of having grown up with the biggest muggles anyone could imagine.
"When we took him in, we swore we'd put an end to this... this... this nonsense!", uncle Vernon thundered. "We swore to rid the boy of it! Magic... bah!"
Well.
"So you knew", Harry sneered, barely able to contain his anger. "You always knew."
"Of course we knew!", aunt Petunia suddenly screamed. "How could we not, if the drunken whore next door and her bastard brat were of their sort, and if my wretched sister was one,too? She got the same damned letter and left for that - that - that school with that boy, only to come back during the summer, turning cups into mice and whatnot! I was the only one who saw her for what she truly was - a freak. But noo, with my parents, it was always Lily here, Lily there, oh, they were so proud to have a damned witch in the family!"
She stopped for a moment to gasp for air before carrying on. "And then she met this... Potter, and she finally ran off with him and got married, and then they had you, and I knew right away that you'd be no better than any of them, that you'd be just as strange, just as unnatural, and of course, she just had to go ahead and blow herself up, and we then had to deal with you!"
Harry just barely managed to keep his calm, turning just about as pale as Dudley, though for him it was with fury, and he balled his hands into fists as he tried to ignore Tom muttering what sounded like spells in his head.
Hagrid was lacking such restraint. "Deal with him?! DEAL WITH HIM?! Your lot ought to be thankful for his existence! Do you even have any idea who he is, what he did for our worlds?!"
'What is he going on about?', Tom grumbled as Harry sheepishly raised his hand. "Err... what exactly did I do?"
Hagrid gasped and shook his head. "Bloody hell, you don't even know! A right scandal this is!"
And then he launched into the tale; of how a dark wizard - the worst mankind had ever known - had been murdering people left and right. Of how he had picked James and Lily Potter - Harry's parents - as his targets. Of how they had both fallen to the wizard, and finally, how the killing curse cast at Harry somehow backfired and finally ended the reign of terror that dark wizard - Voldemort, as Hagrid revealed shakingly, with the request that he never have to utter that name again - had brought.
'Do you recognize the name, Tom?', Harry asked when Hagrid was finished.
Tom was quiet for a while. 'I feel like I should have heard of Voldemort, and the name does ring a bell, but that's about it. Odd, he seems to be missing entirely from my memories', he finally answered.
'And Hagrid only spoke of my parents dying. How did you factor into this whole mess, I wonder?', Harry continued his questioning.
'I have no idea', Tom admitted. 'Maybe there wasn't enough left of me to be properly identified, and it fell under the rug that someone else had been present for the sake of the story. Or maybe your theory that I am part of a resurrected soul is true after all, and that I somehow intervened and caused your survival. Either way, I do hope we manage to solve that mystery eventually.'
"I was the one to pick'ya up", Hagrid said with tears in his eyes. "Dumbledores orders. Brought you to this... this lot here..."
"What a load of rubbish!", uncle Vernon finally spoke up again, having seemingly found his courage yet again, before starting on about how to best deal with freakishness, queerness and whatnot in his opinion - only to be cut off again by Hagrid threatening him with a pink umbrella of all things.
Tom laughed loudly at the sight. 'I knew he kept the pieces!', he chortled.
Harry meanwhile asked what had happened with Voldemort, and Tom listened carefully as Hagrid theorized on how he may well still be out there, but with his power broken and without a body - as that one had been found and destroyed.
'Here's hoping someone else finds him and destroys him for good', Tom grumbled. 'That sort of looney tends to be a particularily dangerous sort of boomerang.' Harry quietly agreed.
"So... what happens now?", he then asked Hagrid with a smile.
The giant practically beamed. "I'm gonna take ye to Diagon Alley first thing t'morrow to get yer supplies. Then, ye'll be off to Hogwarts", he answered with the broadest grin Harry had ever seen.
Uncle Vernon however made one last attempt to object. "The boy - is - staying - here!", he barked. "He'll be going to Stonewall High and better be thankful for it! I've read those darned letters, he needs all sorts of utter nonsense - magic books, magic wands and -"
Hagrid merely grunted in response. "If he wants ter go, a great Muggle like you won't stop him. Stop Lily an' James Potter's son goin' ter Hogwarts! Yer mad. His name's been down ever since he was born. He's off ter the finest school of witchcraft and wizardry in the world. Seven years there and he won't know himself. He'll be with youngsters of his own sort, fer a change, an' he'll be under the greatest headmaster Hogwarts ever had, Albus Dumbled—"
"I AM NOT PAYING FOR SOME CRACKPOT OLD FOOL TO TEACH HIM MAGIC TRICKS!", uncle Vernon yelled, interrupting Hagrid.
That however was one step too far, as Hagrid turned red once again, and yelled "NEVER-INSULT-ALBUS-DUMBLEDORE-IN-FRONT-OF-ME!" as he raised his umbrella, pointing it towards uncle Vernon. A purple flash shot from its tip, flying towards the large man, who jumped out of the way -- causing the flash to impact Dudley's fat backside instead. Harry's cousin cried out in pain, and Harry spied how a curly pig's tail broke through the trousers.
'At least now he has one, and no longer needs to compensate', Tom snarked as the elder Dursleys, aghast, escorted Dudley out of the room.
Hagrid grunted as he put away the umbrella. "Shouldn't have lost me cool like that", he said contrite. "Pro'lly wouldn't have worked anyways, though. Too much pig already, the both of'em."
Harry giggled at the comparison. Hagrid continued: "Would appreciate it if ye kept quite 'bout this at Hogwarts. I, ah, am not really s'posed to do magic meself anymore. Was allowed to do a bit to get ye yer letters, partly why I wanted this job, but, ah..."
Harry grinned. "Your secret's safe with me", he promised.
Hagrid nodded, visibly relieved, before taking off his cloak and handing it to Harry. "Can use it as a cover for the night", he explained. "A'm warm enough, and ah, don' worry if it moves in there. Think I forgot a few mice in there..."
Sleep came fairly easy to the giant, Harry noticed, as he began to pester Tom with questions again.
'So, what exactly is it about this Dumbledore figure that makes you want to stay hidden?', he started.
'Remember how I said that Dumbledore was the one who introduced me to magic? Well, from the very moment he saw me, he had me pegged as bad news, and it pulled through my entire schooling - and beyond, I think. If he were to find out that I somehow ended up bound to you, he'd stop at nothing to destroy me.'
'Why would he do that, though?', Harry wondered. 'Is he that vindictive?'
'Dumbledore is a schemer', Tom grimly stated. 'Always obsessed with the big picture, and the 'Greater Good', as he calls it. Probably part of the reason he placed you with these wretched creatures. As for why he'd destroy me, well, I didn't fit into his picture of what a good wizard ought to be, not with my interest in soul magic and other dimensions and the like. He hates these branches of magic, that much I know, partly because he himself dabbled in them, but was too weak and too cowardly to see it through, and couldn't bring himself to stop his partner in these studies for the longest time - I'll tell you what I know of that story some other time.'
'Alright, but you better', Harry agreed. 'And what happened between you and Hagrid?'
Tom was quiet for a while. 'Rubeus has a soft spot for all sorts of dangerous monsters. Werewolves, dragons, hydras... if it can kill you, he wants to pet it. During my sixth year - his third - something in Hogwarts was busy petrifying students, and eventually killed one student. The school was nearly closed, and I was at risk to be sent back to that damned orphanage even sooner than usual.'
'So you framed him', Harry bitterly said, not too happy with his friend. He liked Hagrid, after all, and to hear Tom admit to basically having ruined his life... it made him angry.
'Not exactly', Tom answered. 'I caught Rubeus trying to smuggle an Acromantula - magical spider, gigantic beasts who like human flesh - out of the school. Apparently he'd been raising it in a cupboard and it had grown to large. Blasted beast would've killed someone sooner or later, so I merely presented things in a light that made it look like that spider was responsible for the death and the petrifications. It helped that Hagrid had a history of raising all sorts of nasty beasts, and considering he is half giant himself, everyone believed that he'd been responsible.' He sighed. 'I did not think he'd be sent to Azkaban - wizarding prison, horrible place for this, though.'
'So, you basically ruined someone's life and let someone else get away', Harry summed up and shook his head. 'That is disgusting.'
'I did what I thought I had to do', Tom quietly said. 'I did not think it'd get to the point where it did go, but... and do remember, that spider eats humans, too. Sooner or later, something would've happened, and Hagrid would've faced the music anyways. He's not a bad person, just a naive simpleton.'
Harry thought on that. He didn't think Tom was lying, and the way he described that spider, it did sound like a horrible beast, but... it still didn't sit right with him.
'Did they at least catch the bastard who was truly responsible?'
'I don't think they ever did. Not that it matters, the attacks did stop afterwards. Maybe something came to light after, but...'
'Is there anything else you can tell me on Hogwarts?', Harry then asked.
'Quite a bit, but I suggest we wait until tomorrow for that conversation. We both need some rest, and tomorrow will be a big day', Tom replied, and just as soon as he had finished, Harry's own eyes fell shut with tiredness.