Harry Potter and all related elements of that universe belong to J.K. Rowling.

"Yer a wizard, Harry."

The words, utterly absurd at first glance, nevertheless echoed in his head, insistent and dominating. The first, obvious thought came to him in response:

There's no such thing as magic, and no such thing as-

Harry looked at the man in front of him, whose proportions, he realized, weren't really consistent with the pictures he'd seen of people with gigantism.

"Then... Mr Hagrid, are you a wizard too?"

"Yeh can just call me Hagrid, lad. Everyone does. And I am, though they snapped me wand."

"So then you can't do magic?"

Convenient. So this guy is almost certainly a fraud... and I'm almost certainly dead, Harry thought. Hagrid was several times his size, and it was dark out. The large man would have drawn plenty of attention in Little Whinging under normal circumstances, but in the dead of night, in a back alley, there was no chance of a third party intervening. As Harry struggled to think of something to keep the 'wizard' in front of him talking, to at least prolong his first night of freedom for a bit, the latter gave a surprising answer.

"Well, I'm not supposed ter... But yeh seem like yeh might need a little convincin'. Y'promise not to tell anyone?"

Harry nodded, growing wary as Hagrid pulled out a large umbrella, pointing it at Harry.

"Yeh look a bit worse for wear, Harry. Have them Dursleys been treating yeh alrigh'?"

Harry blinked. This person knew about his foster parents? Maybe he wasn't some random assailant... But then, what of his other claims? "I can't say that they have. I left for good today."

Hagrid looked alarmed at this information, to Harry's surprise. "Wha? Dumbledore ought ter know... Well, first things firs'. This'll get yeh clean... Scourgify!"

At first it smelled a bit worse which made the sight of his dirt-free hands and seemingly fresh-pressed clothes all the more remarkable. He realized that the change in odor was actually the result of being able to experience the stench of the alleyway firsthand, without the scent of the grime he and his clothes had accumulated in the time since he'd gotten back from St. Brutus'.

"Did you just-" Harry stopped, as the enormity of what had just happened washed over him. It would have been one thing for a putative magic trick to sneakily spray him with deodorant, or some such thing... But to effectively wash and dry his clothes? His underclothes? His skin?

Hagrid grinned. "Yeh see? But come on, yeh never felt it? Yeh got magic in yer blood, Harry, yeh must've felt a difference between you and them Muggles."

His mind involuntarily recollected his good luck earlier today. He had jumped just as Piers lunged, slipping out of the way just in time for the latter to crash into Dudley. His fat cousin's profuse swearing only grew more intense at the sight of Harry's perfect landing below the bridge. Before they'd had a chance to regroup, he'd escaped his cousin's gang, for what, hopefully, would be the final time.

Well, it may not be normal to land easily after jumping from that kind of height, but it's not impossible... But even as he tried to dismiss it, countless other memories flowed forth. People and places he'd seen that no one else could, that had earned him beatings at school. An out of place house here, a figure cloaked in black there. And most egregiously, the trip to the zoo. He'd been broken in many ways by that point, but only after he'd held a five minute conversation with a boa constrictor had he accepted what everyone around him had always said: that he was, in the words of his uncle, a nutter. There had been a kind of peace in it, though the visions had continued, with neither countless detentions nor summers in increasingly cramped living conditions had managed to fix.

Could it be that he wasn't, in fact, broken? That everything which he'd attributed to a damaged mind was, in fact, -

"Yeh can remember," said Hagrid, sounding satisfied. "Now then, let's get yeh fixed up. We'll get yeh a room at the Leaky Cauldron, firs'. Yeh look like yeh could use a rest."

Harry dismounted from the motorbike. As he moved to follow the giant, he was struck by an unbidden thought.

Isn't it more likely that this is just another delusion? He'd lost count count of how many times he'd been rescued in his dreams. Sometimes it was the authorities, sometimes he literally flew away. At least that was how it was when he'd been younger. After a while he had dreamed of a quicker, more permanent escape. But whenever things seemed to be going right, he'd awaken. By day, his efforts to flee tended to unravel before they began; and he'd never had the guts to attempt his later ambition.

What's more likely? That I just rode a flying motorbike to London with a giant, or that I'm dreaming?. He stopped in front of the inn, letting the realization wash over him. But as it did, nothing faded, nothing seemed to fall out of focus. He concentrated, testing another possibility, but the leather-clad women in his thoughts failed to materialize.

Not a lucid dream, then... To be sure, he performed one final test, slapping himself hard across the face.

"What're yeh doing, Harry?" asked a surprised Hagrid, who'd been about to enter.

"Just making sure of something," he replied. He'd felt the force of his hand, and the aftereffects. The possibility that he hadn't gone mad suddenly seemed almost plausible.

"Yer not dreamin'," said Hagrid, seemingly having caught on. "An' watch out about doing that inside, it might be crowded, don' want to cause a scene..." He trailed off as they entered the establishment.

The place was packed. People, almost all of whom were dressed in a variety of cloaks, were drinking odd beverages and talking. Some stopped to look at them as they walked in. As they approached the barman, Harry noted, with some nervousness, that none of the people who'd turned to look at them had stopped staring.

"Two rooms, Tom," said Hagrid, oddly abruptly. The barman turned, but whatever he'd been about to say died in his mouth as he saw Harry. He stared, seemingly literally dumbstruck, before finally managing to choke out a few words.

"Can this... Could you be... Are you...?"

Now more disconcerted than when he'd defied the laws of physics on a motorcycle five minutes ago, Harry decided that he might as well try to talk to this wizard-bartender. "My name's Harry Potter," he said.

He hadn't been particularly loud, but all conversation had ground to a halt seconds after he'd uttered his name.

"Bless my soul," said Tom the barman. "Harry Potter. What an honor."

As the crowd began to close in, murmuring and reverent, Harry managed to hiss a few angry questions to Hagrid.

He'd slept more soundly than in is his life, and on the heels of his first birthday party, too. Granted, the way bystanders seemed to treat him felt unbelievably awkward, at first. But after a few shots of firewhisky, he was gorging himself on his cake and singing along with Hagrid.

He'd only panicked for a few moments, as he'd woken up in the morning. Even if the past day had been a dream, he had felt that he was on a comfortable bed, which was an improvement over pretty much his entire life. Or, at least, the parts of his life he could remember. From what he could recall of Hagrid's drunken, sometimes tearful rants from the other night, his biological mother and father had apparently been decent people, until they'd been murdered by.. what was his name? Would a moat? Moldy wort? No... Voldemort. He remembered now, the reluctance with which Hagrid had said the name, the drunken roars of protest from those within earshot. The name of the wizard who had killed his parents, only to somehow die at his, Harry's, hands.

Well, at his forehead, more likely, which had apparently been scarred by the killing curse which had rebounded on its caster, a phenomenon which had not, it seemed, been observed before or since. Even based on the information he'd been given, it seemed impossible for the public to even know what took place, but on the other hand, he supposed wizards probably had their ways of finding out. Apparently, this 'Dumbledore' Hagrid was going on about had played a pivotal role in the investigations.

"Is that normal, Hagrid? For the chancellor of a wizarding university to be a military leader, and the head of your, er, Wizengamot?"

"Dumbledore's one o'a kind," said Hagrid proudly. "Greatest wizard who ever lived."

"Was he the one who decided that I'd be raised by the Dursleys?"

"Yeah." Hagrid paused.

Harry asked the next question quietly, trying to keep his rising anger out of his voice. "I didn't have any other relatives I could have been sent to? If I'm so popular, surely some kind of adoption could have been arranged?"

"Dumbledore has his reasons," Hagrid said. At least, noted Harry with some satisfaction, the giant didn't sound nearly so proud as he had moments earlier. "But anyways, yer father was the last o' the Potters. There weren' any other close relatives. He was firm about that, it had to be a relative. And the on'y other..."

"The only other what?"

"It's nothin'," said Hagrid, trying to brush it off. "He wasn' a blood relative anyway. An' even if he was..."

"Who?"

"Yeh can't jus' drop the subject, can yeh?" asked Hagrid. "It's not anything pleasant."

"Living with the Dursleys for eighteen years was rather unpleasant as well," said Harry shortly.

Hagrid looked guilty. Harry suddenly remembered some utterances of his own, intoxicated ramblings from last night. Well, maybe Hagrid had some idea what he'd been through, especially if he remembered more than Harry did.

"It wasn' anything important. I was thinking about what yeh said, and I'd remembered yer godfather, but you coulda never-,"

"I HAVE A GODFATHER?!" Harry yelled, as the fury growing within him came bursting out. He gazed at Hagrid fiercely. "He'd better be a spree killer or something, because otherwise-"

"Thirteen,"

"What?"

"That's how many people he killed. With his own wand, anyway. That we know about."

Harry averted his gaze from Hagrid, who was now glaring as well. "Then-"

"That's not all. He was a servant o' You-Know-Who, one o' his top wizards. But we didn't know it. He was a traitor, Harry. He was... he was the one who sold out yer parents to Voldemort."

Harry paused, to weight whether being passed into the care of his murdering, betraying godfather would have been worse than the life he'd lived instead. Of course, this Sirius Black would have probably, as Hagrid put it, have chucked him into the ocean, but there were times when that seemed like it would have been for the best.

Times which won't come again. he thought firmly. Hagrid was winding down from his speech, sounding a bit hollow after recounting Black's extraordinary duplicity.

"I'm sorry," Harry said.

Hagrid looked surprised. "Wha'?"

"I'm sorry for yelling, Hagrid. And for bringing it up in the first place."

Hagrid paused. "It's all righ' Harry. And it woulda come up soon anyways, unfortunately."

An odd sense of foreboding suddenly gripped Harry. "What do you mean?"

Hagrid took a deep breath. "He was sent to prison after we caught him, Harry. Azkaban. No one's ever escaped from there, never. Until earlier this summer, that is. He's on the run now, Harry, an' if I had to guess, he's coming for yeh."

I thought I would include this author's note at the end of this chapter, so you could get a sample of this story before I spell out some of what it's about. So yeah, it's an AU, with the biggest difference being that the magical education system doesn't begin until students turn 18, whereupon they are admitted to Hogwarts University, which they attend for 4 years. Most of the time, this results in Muggleborns being considerably less assimilated than in canon; in Harry's case, of course, the consequences are more serious. I'm planning to keep things as similar to the source material as possible, barring those changes necessary or useful due to this alteration. The major exception to this are the Time-turners, which (due their incredible overpowered-ness) right now I'm thinking simply won't exist, seeing as they were basically erased through the course of the canon anyways.

Also, I have no first hand knowledge of any British dialect, so the text will unfortunately be filled with Americanisms, I'm sure. If you happen to be reading this and are British, feel free to point out errors, though I might not change less egregious ones. Also does Chancellor sound like an appropriate title for Dumbledore in this context? (I just got it from a google search).