Disclaimer: I am not J.K. Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: The following is rated 'T' and is a brief glimpse (set around Christmas, 1995) into a universe where there has been a slightly different allocation of teachers from canon to positions on the Hogwarts staff roster for the 1995-1996 school year.

This piece is a one-shot.

Christmas was coming up and so far Care of Magical Creatures classes this school year had been 'something else'. If Harry had found a couple of years of Professor Hagrid unpredictable and at times a bit too exciting, the woman from the Ministry of Magic had taken things to an entirely different level. Professor Umbridge seemed to believe that in general pupils should only learn about harmless magical creatures – flobberworms had returned to feature prominently in the curriculum for pupils of all years, although a good deal of class-time had also ended up devoted to the slightly more-independent-minded creatures, kneazles, for which Professor Umbridge seemed to have an extreme level of fondness.

But then there had been oddities… such as the somewhat disturbing lesson when Professor Umbridge had had a centaur for Harry's class to study; there had been something wrong with that centaur, Harry had strongly suspected. It had seemed little more than a dumb beast, nothing at all like the centaurs that Harry had met in the Forbidden Forest, and there was this odd look in its eyes. It seemed possible to Harry that Professor Umbridge must have done something to it, to make it act that way. Professor Umbridge had certainly spent that lesson emphasising the utter inferiority of centaurs at every possible point.

And in the meantime, Professor Umbridge's arrival in the Care of Magical Creatures role had been accompanied by Professor Hagrid's transfer to the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher.

Harry loved the half-giant, dearly, but he thought Hagrid one of the worst Defence teachers that they'd had, on a par with Lockhart. Hagrid's idea of a Defence lesson was to bring a dangerous magical creature into class and then to try and persuade the class that they needed to make friends with it, and not actually try to protect themselves against it or try to stop it.

The worst of Hagrid's fifth year classes at the moment were centred around the small giant, called 'Grawp', whom Hagrid seemed to have procured from somewhere, and whom Hagrid thought that fifth years in should learn how to wrestle, or give a bath to.

Harry felt bad for thinking it, but on several recent occasions he'd found himself hoping that over the imminent Christmas holidays that the headmaster sent Hagrid away on some sort of secret Order mission which would conveniently overrun and result in someone else having to be a stand-in teacher in Defence for at least a few weeks at the start of next term. Either that or that Professor Umbridge (who had some sort of powers of school-inspection from the Ministry of Magic) would recommend that Hagrid change his lessons. So far, though, for some reason Professor Umbridge seemed to have been avoiding dropping in on any defence classes – or at least the upper year ones. Apparently she'd shown up in one second year class and rescued them from a crateful of Cornish Pixies (an idea that Hagrid had apparently taken from Lockhart's teaching book, and moved up in scale in terms of volume of pixies involved and order of magnitude of disaster) that Hagrid had wanted class members to 'learn how to tickle'…

Author Notes:

This short piece came about based loosely on the premise 'what might defence classes be like if Rubeus Hagrid took them?', and which then needed a reason for 'why would the headmaster of Hogwarts put said half-giant in charge of defence classes in the first place?' One solution to that second question seemed to me to be that Albus Dumbledore might put Professor Hagrid into defence to try and keep Dolores Umbridge out of Hogwarts during the 'Order of the Phoenix' year (he presumably sends a different negotiating team to the giants, or delays that mission), only in this universe Dolores Umbridge insinuates herself into Hogwarts anyway, in the capacity of the 'Care of Magical Creatures' teacher, which post has just been vacated by Professor Hagrid.

Professor Umbridge takes the opportunity of the Care of Magical Creatures position to occasionally advance her own bigoted views of course... (The centaur she produces in this story is at the very least severely mentally damaged.)

This story is only intended as a brief sketch; for the record, I envision this school year (at least as far as Hogwarts staff go) ending with Hagrid getting the sack from the Defence position after a manticore that he had 'ordered' for a Defence Class somehow ends up in a Care of Magical Creatures one instead. (A situation made worse by the fact that Professor Umbridge had been expecting a crated delivery for an 'end of year special'; just nothing remotely like what was there when she opened it, in the middle of a first-year class.)

As indicated in the opening notes, this piece is a one-shot.