Rubeus Hagrid and the Firstborn Serpent

AN: I know you know that I don't own Harry Potter or any of the things about it... But I like to pretend I do =] Everything is J.K.'s except maybe my interpretation of Scorpius Malfoy.

This sorta just popped into my head and I had to get it down before the image was gone! First Fanfic ever! *smiles*

Rubeus Hagrid was perfectly content with the outcome of his life. His younger days had been incredibly miserable - bullied for his giant stature as well as his unusual parentage, it had been quite difficult for him to find companionship among those his age. Ejected from wizarding school with dreams even more shattered than his wand, and with nowhere to turn after the death of his beloved father, the gentle giant had sunk into a depth of despair unlike any he had ever felt before.

Eventually he had come to his senses. It was not his nature to give up, back down or scurry off with his tail between his legs. He bundled up the broken bits of wood into a pink umbrella, grew a beard, bought a boarhound... And life went on. Some people were very kind to him, most notably Albus Dumbledore. The man was immortalized in Hagrid's heart as the greatest wizard ever to exist. After the events of the Great War, most of the world came to share this point of view. That fact gratified Hagrid to a great degree.

His relative size did tend to cast a shadow (pardon the pun) on most of his human relationships - prejudice still coloured the vision of many - and he had always had an irrational love for wild beasts. Perhaps it was their completely equitable view of the human race. If something is hell-bent on destroying you in the most painful way possible, it hardly has time to think about what race you are. Never once had the giant spiders made a crack about his mother. Never once! And they could have if they wanted to - they could talk, after all.

The stone, mud and turf hut that he lived in had been the only home he could remember with certainty, so naturally, twenty years after the end of the Great War, twenty-one years after the death of Dumbledore, twelve years since the retirement of Headmistress MacGonagall, and three years since Harry Potter's eldest child had first come to Hogwarts, that is where he remained. By no means shrunken with age, Hagrid was still a force to be reckoned with; an energetic man just shy of eighty, his hair had made a complete turnabout from dark blackish-brown to a muddled iron gray.

It was October. He was sitting at his oaken table on a chair big enough to seat three normal-sized men, with tears streaming down his face. Clenched in one hammy hand was a pint, which seemed pitifully small by comparison. He was staring into the fire, thinking muddy and jumbled thoughts about hippogriffs and large French women when a sudden crash startled him from his reverie.

He snatched his trusty crossbow from a peg by the door, not bothering with boots or jacket. Pushing the door open with one hand, he called out into the night: "What's 'at?"

A frustrated groan was his only reply.

"Now look 'ere, you, you, you -!" He stumbled down the step, unable to complete his sentence. Rounding the back of the house with a dangerous glint in his eye, he bellowed once more "Who's there?!"

He narrowed his eyes against the bleariness of his vision, but still all he could make out in the darkness was an indistinct shape writhing on the ground. Without stopping to look closer, Hagrid barreled forwards and snatched up the creature by the scruff of it's neck.

"WHAT-?" the shape started to shout.

Hagrid blinked. In the dim light from his cabin window he could see that the mysterious creature was just a small frightened-looking boy. At any other time, he would have had at least a little tolerance for the sneak, but not now. He was angry, depressed, and very drunk.

"Stop yer squirmin', yeh little wanker," he said gruffly. The boy disregarded him and continued to struggle with renewed fervour against the giant's grip. Watching the boy's futile fight for freedom put him over the edge. "I SAID STOP YER SQUIRMIN'!"

There was a pause. "Now," said Hagrid, pulling the boy around the house and into the front yard with one hand. "Who are yeh?"

"Let me go and I'll tell you!" the boy said angrily. His voice sounded much more sure than he really was - Hagrid could see a gleam of fear in the boy's gray eyes. He had fine, pale hair that looked nearly white in the semi-darkness. In fact, he looked very like -

"Yer Malfoy's boy, aren't yeh?" Hagrid demanded. The boy looked down before answering.

"Scorpius," he admitted unwillingly. "Yes."

"Well, Scorpius," said Hagrid, his tone a touch more severe than it would have been for any other small boy. "Wha' do yeh think yeh were doin' sneakin' about in the dark like tha'?!"

The boy folded his arms across his narrow chest and looked away, brows furrowed.

"OH," the giant exclaimed, eyes narrowing in frustration, "I see! Not talkin', are yeh?"

Scorpius frowned pointedly into the darkness.

"Tough boy?"

Still no response. Hagrid moved his face closer to the boy's, his wiry beard scratching against the front of Scorpius' robe.

"Eh?!" he grunted, giving the boy a little shake. With a frown, he placed the boy back on the ground. The expression on his pale, pointed face did not change. "Yeh're gonna tell me, or yeh're gonna tell Mr. Filch, an' I don' think 'e's gonna be as easy on yeh as I will."

Sharply, he turned to face the giant. "I was casting the Dark Mark in the sky! I was using the Cruciatus Curse on Mrs. Norris! I was hexing Muggleborns into oblivion!" When he finished his tirade, his little chest was heaving up and down rapidly. His gray eyes were filled with rage, his hands clenched tightly into twin fists. The white of his knuckles stood out like spots of light against his dark robe. "Is that what you want to hear?!"

Hagrid stepped back and blinked. Maybe he was more drunk than he'd originally thought... His sluggish brain was having difficulty processing all of what he had just heard.

"What'd make yeh say a thing like tha'?" The small boy was looking at a spot on the ground as if trying to burn a hole there with his eyes. The force of his gaze caused the giant to briefly think it might work. "All I wan'ed was teh know why yeh were out pas' curfew!"

"Yeah," the boy said angrily, still staring at the ground. "You wanted to know what I was doing out past curfew."

Hagrid still did not fully understand.

"What if I was Potter? Would you ask?"

"I migh', if he'd tripped over my tools like tha'," Hagrid replied softly. "Yeh know, yeh're very young, an' it's very dark."

"You're very old, and you're very drunk," the boy replied acerbically.

Hagrid huffed. "Yeh know, yeh've got a poin' about Potter - he'd never be so disrespec'ful teh his elders!"

"Sorry," Scorpius grumbled, gray eyes still trained on the ground.

Hagrid heaved a sigh. What an incredibly difficult, petulant child!

"What are you doing up this late at night, anyway?" Scorpius asked. He hazarded a quick glance up into the giant's hairy, wrinkled face. All he managed to see were twin beetle-black eyes glittering in a wild forest of iron-gray, before he looked back down. "And drinking?"

The man hesitated a moment before making his decision. Perhaps the way to get an explanation from the stubborn boy was to supply one in an exchange.

"Folla' me," he said, his voice growing husky with renewed tears, as he led the way down the hill to the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest.

----

Scorpius looked into the trees. All he could see, all there was for seemingly endless miles, was trees. Trees and the shadows that played among them, weaving in and out between patches of rare moonlight.

The massive man in front of him blew his nose into a huge handkerchief with a noise like a foghorn.

"There," he said, pointing.

A patch of ground that Scorpius had not noticed was the object of this man's grief. It was a rather small rectangle of freshly turned earth. The giant's spade, presumably what had been used to dig it up, was still embedded in the ground.

"What is it?" the pale boy asked quietly.

"Tha'." Hagrid sniffed. "Tha' is..." He mopped his face with the handkerchief and struggled a moment to find the right words.

"Is someone buried there?" Scorpius asked suddenly. He looked up when the big man did not respond. Tears, glittering like little diamonds embedded in Hagrid's beard, were streaming freely down his face.

"Yeah," Hagrid managed to reply. His voice was thick. "My greatest frien'. 'E was real sick, yeh know, near the end."

Scorpius did not have anything to say. The two stood, a great dark figure and a slight pale figure side by side observing a silence that was not postulated by an excitable bark. It was these strange silences that Hagrid feared the most. Mainly, that had been the cause of his distress at the intruder. Fang would surely have alarmed him before the boy managed to get all the way into the back garden patch.

"'E was... 'e was jus' so lively, yeh know?" Hagrid sobbed. "Bloody coward, 'e was, o' course... But nice as pie. And frien'ly like yeh wouldn' believe." Wiping the fresh tears from his face with one massive hand, he finished his little eulogy. "Jus' took yeh fer what yeh were. 'E didn' want nothin' except teh be fed, now an' then."

So that was it. The boarhound. Scorpius scoured his brain... He had only been at Hogwarts for less than a month and had barely any memories specific to the hound itself, other than that the giant man was rarely, if ever, seen without it. Yet he remained quiet, sensing it was the right thing to do. He could understand the difficulty Hagrid faced, to some extent, even if he didn't have the blood of another species running through his immaculate veins. The role his family had taken, after all... Needless to say most of the other children avoided him. Pale hair and gray eyes were all the warning they needed. And the dog, Fang, had been one grounding point in the giant's tumultuous life.

When a significant amount of time had passed, Hagrid's tired weeping trailed off, and the small boy put his little pale hand against the giant's arm, saying "Let's go back now."

Hagrid looked down and nodded, giving a grand sniff before following the small boy's white-blond head, that stood as a clear beacon in the darkness.

----

Hagrid approached the door and pushed it open before looking back at the slight boy standing at the bottom of his stoop. He looked back out of crystal clear gray eyes. The giant appreciated his uncertain silence more than any simple phrase, or fancy condolence. The boy had not known Fang, and did not quite understand. But at least he was not pretending to.

"Come in an' I'll make yeh a nice cuppa tea," Hagrid said more kindly, his beetle-black eyes crinkling with a small smile. Scorpius Malfoy followed him over the threshold and into the hut, looking around and crinkling his nose from the heavy smell of peat and animals. He looked up in alarm as something in the rafter gave a loud squawk - but it was just a spotted chicken.

He sat in an observant silence as the giant man puttered about with the tea things. Hagrid pulled down four mugs and set them out before shaking his shaggy head and returning the spare two to the cupboard. "Bloody fool," he chuckled quietly, "The trio's off and married wi' their own chil'ren!"

"Caul'ron cake?" Hagrid offered a plate of the rock-hard "pastries" to Scorpius. "Take as many as yeh wan'."

The unsuspecting boy plucked one of the dark lumps from the plate before biting into it. As Hagrid moved off to pour the tea, he bit again. Tore at it with his teeth until they almost chipped - it was as hard as a rock! He shook his blond head, setting it carefully on the table as though he was in danger of being bitten by it. His teeth hadn't even dented the surface of the thing. Sticking out his tongue with displeasure, he pulled a face at the cake.

Just in time to catch the tail end of his horrible expression, Hagrid turned around with the mugs in hand. "Caul'ron cakes not yer cuppa tea?" he asked with a chuckle. "'S alrigh'... Not a lot o' people like 'em for some reason..." He frowned. "Wha' - they too sweet or som'thin'?"

Scorpius cleared his throat nervously. He wasn't sure how the giant would take criticism of his culinary skills. "No," he replied, "They're just a bit hard. That's all."

"Hard?" Hagrid bellowed, scandalized. He took three and flung them into his mouth, chewing with the sort of sound produced by a gravel mixer. "Nonsense!" he concluded, dismissing the small boy's comment with a wave of his meaty hand.

Scorpius took a sip of his tea, holding on to the chipped red mug with both of his comparatively small hands. It was quite hot, but the boy didn't really mind. The autumn air had a bit of wintry snap in it already and he had even worn his green and silver-striped House scarf.

"So," said Hagrid finally, after he settled down to his own tea. "What were yeh doin' out wandrin' the groun's so late?"

The boy sighed before deciding it was probably in his best interest to tell Hagrid willingly than to have it wrung forcibly from him by bitter, dusty, and acidic Mr. Filch. "Well," he began with trepidation, "Sometimes... I like to walk at night. You know?" He paused, looking hopefully at Hagrid. The large man looked several degrees more sober since their initial meeting in the garden, but he still looked fairly hazy. "When I first came to Hogwarts most of the Professors made a face at first roll call - almost all of them made a face when they called my name."

Hagrid looked at the small boy across from him and realized that he was guilty of just the same thing. It startled him greatly, knowing that... He had always imagined that prejudice was above someone who had been on the other end of it. Apparently, not so.

"So when you yelled at me I just..." Scorpius trailed off. "I got mad because I thought of how even Professor Longbottom made a face at me. He tried so hard not to, to be nice, but even he couldn't do it."

Hagrid's heart melted slightly at the boy's downturned face. He looked very lonely, and very little, and very like his father Draco. But not the same. He wasn't Draco. Hagrid had to remember that. He made a promise to himself right then and there that if only one person in the entire school thought of Scorpius as just another child looking for a couple of friends and a good time, it was Hagrid. The immediate connections to Lucius, the man who had sent him to Azkaban, Death Eaters, the slaughter of innocents, and the general negative opinion most had of his pale-haired father had to be severed.

Scorpius was just another kid, the same way Hagrid had been any other kid.

"You know, Father told me you were expelled in your third year," the boy said quietly, trying to break the silence and looking into his empty, chipped mug. "He said you had dangerous creatures locked up in the school!"

Hagrid chuckled warmly before pouring the boy another steaming mug of tea. Setting the kettle back down, he reclined in his chair to begin the telling of one of his favourite tales.

"Well, it all started when I was righ' about yer age... No, maybe a little older. I was in thir' year, an' I was walkin' in the fores' right over there, yeh see?" He pointed one massive finger into the woods just outside the cottage window. "An' I came across this poor, 'elpless little critter, with not a frien' in the whole world! So I put 'im in a shoebox - bes' thing I could think o' at the time! - an' I was keepin' 'im in this cupboard down in the cellars, yeh know, where all o' yeh Slyth'rins live. 'E took a shine to me righ' off, an' I named 'im Aragog. Now, Aragog..."

THE END

I would love it if you would please REVIEW, this is my first fic!!