"So how are you settling in?" the tall Scottish prefect enquired. Her eyes travelled around the stone walls that were terribly bare, even for her austere tastes. "Have you everything you need?"
Hagrid tried to answer politely. But to be here as a gardener, not a pupil... "I suppose. I don' need much. It's not like I'm goin' to be entertaining much."
"Nonsense" chided Minerva. "Professor Dumbledore and I will be down from time to time, and I'm sure some of your fellow students will come for a cup of tea. Which reminds me..." She rummaged in her robes and pulled out a small bag. "I've brought you a quarter pound. It's hard enough to get hold of what with that silly Muggle war going on, but this should keep you a while."
With this small kindness Hagrid burst into tears, collapsing onto the oversized bed. Minerva decided to give him a minute, and bustled around the hut looking for a tea caddy. She placed the bag onto a convenient shelf, then she filled the kettle and placed it over the fire. After a while though, the young lad's distress became too much, and she sat on the bed beside him. From the depths of her robes she retrieved a fine lawn handkerchief which was quite lost in Hagrid's oversized hands, but he accepted it gratefully and blew his nose. The state of that poor handkerchief after he had wiped his eyes was best left unmentioned, and she told him to keep it.
They sat together silently, her arm around him, Minerva feeling surprisingly tender towards the lad and Hagrid sensing that here he had the closest thing to a home that he would be likely to get for many years. He peered at the fireplace. "I was always burning myself when I was learning to cook" he sighed. "My old dad said there was no better way to learn 'cept by trying, but I went through a lot of messes before I could make something worth eatin'."
"He died last year, didn't he?" Minerva gently asked, holding Hagrid's hands just a little tighter than she needed to. "And your mother?"
"Left us when I were a lad. She weren't too good at the whole mothering thing." Tears started flowing down Hagrid's face. "It were just Dad and I, and now it's just me."
Minerva took Hagrid's face between her hands and kissed his lips lightly. She drew back, and they looked into each other's eyes. "So did mine, Rubeus. So did mine." Eleven years of heartache broke out of the tough shell she had been hiding in, and she laid her head on Hagrid's chest and cried with him.
