A DISCLAIMER

this is a work of transformative fiction. I don't own Harry Potter and its universe, please don't sue me

this story is unbeta'd and all that

(author's note at the bottom)

/

Rubeus Hagrid found the muggles to be the wrong sort to be raising a bairn. He trusted Dumbledore; or at least he thought he did. But he also knew that when Minerva spoke up about something it was good to listen.

Over the years at Hogwarts as the gamekeeper and in the days of the Order of the Phoenix he'd realised that Dumbledore had ideas about things. He was a philosophical man, a studied man -Didn't always mean that the ideas worked, mind. They sounded good, but then when it came down to it, things didn't always carry out as he had told you to expect.

Young Sirius Black's heaving grief for instance. Seeing the man cling to his godson after seeing his best friend laid out on the stairs was enough to rend Rubeus' heart in two it was. Still though. Dumbledore's orders.

Minerva however was a doer. She wasn't known as a battle axe for nothing. She cared about the children she was given to teach and everything she did was for their safety and prosperity. She also very nearly managed not to favour any of the Houses, and having been a Slytherin in his day Reubus knew a thing or two about that.

So when Minerva, who was an upstanding half-blood daughter of a Presbyterian minister thought that Harry's family were 'the worst sort of muggles', it got Reubus to thinking. Minerva knew muggles, she did. She was the one who went to tell muggleborns about their magic.

So when Dumbledore wanted to leave the child outside the muggles' door on a blustery November night and Minerva disagreed, it made Hagrid pause.

So he went back. Just to make sure everything was alright as Dumbledore said it would be. There was something stirring in the pits and burrows of his heart. The same bit of him that always got him when it came to the misunderstood creatures. The beaten down monster types.

He went back.

The thing about Hagrid was that he was a woodsman. He may have been bigger than four full grown wizards, but he was used to being nice and quiet in order to hunt and not scare away all the critters or intimidate the beasties he cared for.

This talent had been used in the war some. He knew he had a reputation for having a loose tongue but that was all a part of the show. If Rubeus Hagrid was talking about something, you'd probably do best to put it out of mind, as there was a good chance it weren't true. Imagine him, a giant, getting as drunk as all that? Impossible. But people bought it. They simply expected a giant to be uncivilised and bawdy, no matter the truth of it.

When he came back to that strange place with all the matching houses and tucked Sirius' bike a while off so that he could creep closer he saw with some consternation that the child was still there hours later. Weeping and wailing and screaming for his mother who was never going to come for him again. Only the storm replied to those cries now. Those muggles in the house surely didn't.

He didn't know if he'd ever really directly disobeyed an order from Dumbledore before except when it came to misunderstood animals. And Rubeus felt like perhaps this little bairn wasn't being thought of when Dumbledore had made his decisions. Couldn't have been.

No matter the breed of the thing, babies needed shelter and warmth. That was the number one thing they needed to develop and grow. And they needed to be watched over and fed and then taught how to walk and hunt and live and how to avoid being eaten and, if possible, taught how not to eat the wrong thing in turn.

Rubeus thought that these people weren't going to do very well with all of that if they'd left the child out there like that.

He thought about what to do next. He'd just check. Maybe they didn't know better. Muggles didn't have wards or proximity alarms after all. He knocked on the door and then hid himself behind a large vehicle across the street, watching the muggles' reaction.

A man who was big enough to fill the whole wizard sized doorway opened the door, yelling about being woken up in the middle of the night. He looked left, then right, and without even looking down he slammed the door shut.

Rubeus frowned.

He moved back to the door and knocked again, hoping that the muggle would look down if there was another knock, but apparently this muggle didn't learn at all. He did exactly the same thing.

After trying a few more times, with the muggle growing more and more angry; furious really, his face turning purple, uttering obscenities and all sorts of things about those unnatural freaks, something rose up in Rubeus and he made a decision.

This was the babe who had killed the dark wizard who had been terrorising their world for how long? It was not to be borne.

He'd seen this face before, the one the muggle had. It was the face of fear. The type of fear that gets violent at that. The fear that gets beasts killed and wands snapped. Witches burned and all the rest. Rubeus had seen it, he had.

Rubeus agreed with Minerva. This man was not a good guardian to leave any bairn with, let alone the saviour of the wizarding world.

He returned to that door one more time but this time he didn't knock. Instead he picked up little Harry, stripped him of his wet clothes and cuddled the poor cold thing in between his shirt and coat to help him warm up as he hurried back to where he'd parked the bike. He swallowed his fear at disobeying the headmaster and rode away, disappearing into the sky. Harry was safe and dry tucked into his coat, and under his beard, lulled to sleep by the rumbling of the engine. It would be alright.

Where could the child be? Even more importantly, what would those magical people do when they found out the child wasn't there?

/

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Rubeus Hagrid gets awfully infantilised in the Harry Potter books, but he's a contemporary of Tom Riddle's, so I wanted to see what we could do here. This is a bit of a fix-it, a bit of a daydream...

This story was borne of a few different irritants, and a few more whims.

-In canon the kids call Rubeus Hagrid by his last name, despite their care for him, and so do pretty much everyone else the whole series. Barely anyone calls him by his first name. He's someone who gets a bad go of things, and I think he has a lot of potential to be a little fun and if he's allowed to distance himself from wixenkind a bit and move a little independently from Albus Dumbledore. Of course canon Hagrid is a bit of an idiot, but this one isn't.

-Also I found the idea that someone who cared for an injured acromantula and raised a cerebus just leaving a baby with horrible people to be a bit off. Minerva McGonagall had her cat instincts as well as her instincts of a teacher (though she is pretty negligent in canon so perhaps she has had those instincts dulled by being around Albus send-them-back-to-their-abusers Dumbledore.

-Filius Flitwick is a brilliant character that is underused.

but mostly I honestly loved the idea of Harry getting stolen by the creatures and brought to the Dark Forest (referred to as the Forbidden Forest by the time Harry goes to school) and turning up all tall and tanned with twigs stuck in his curls and a bowtrukle behind his ear and being absolutely floored by soft boyTM Theo Nott when he comes to live in the castle.

I haven't found a proper end to this story yet but I don't think it will cover all of the years. at this point they are inside the castle but I don't know whether I'll write more or leave it open to the reader's imagination to extrapolate the happily ever after (but oh yes there is always a happily ever after or happy for now in my stories because I'm here for the comfort and softs. I write fan fiction to wrap my faves in blankets and feed them hot chocolate. If you want angst you are at the wrong place.