AN: Hopefully this chapter will answer some questions!

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They left the castle at five to three and made their way across the grounds to Hagrid's house, a small wooden hut on the edge of the Forbidden Forest.

"So," Weasley said as they descended the stairs outside, "Mr Hagrid was the one who told you about magic and everything?"

"Yeah," said Harry.

"Harry—yer a wizard."

There was a silence inside the hut. Only the sea and the whistling wind could be heard.

"I'm a what?"

"A wizard, o' course," said the giant who'd introduced himself as Hagrid, "an' a thumpin' good'un, I'd say, once yeh've been trained up a bit. With a mum an' dad like yours, what else would yeh be? An' I reckon it's about time yeh read yer letter."

Harry stretched out his hand at last to take the yellowish envelope, addressed in emerald green to Mr H. Snape, The Floor, Hut-on-the-Rock, The Sea.

"Dear Mr. Snape,

We are pleased to inform you…"

"It was the strangest experience of my life."

"And you lived with Muggles all the time before that?"

"Yeah. Well, I lived with my grandmother till I was four, and she was a witch, but then I moved in with the Dursleys and they wouldn't touch anything magic with a ten foot pole. It was all I could do to squeeze my parents' names out of them, really, let alone anything about magic or Hogwarts."

"Did they even know?"

"You knew," Harry said to his aunt and uncle when he'd read it. So much made sense now. "You knew I'm a—a wizard."

Aunt Petunia swelled up and exploded. "Knew!" she shrieked. "Knew? Of course we knew! How could you not be, my dratted sister being what she was? Oh, she got a letter just like that, she and that awful boy both, and went off together and came home every holiday with their pockets full of frog spawn and would shut themselves up for hours turning teacups into rats and talking about that—that school. I was the only one who saw her for what she was—a freak, bringing all her little freak friends home! But for my mother and father, oh no, it was Lily this and Lily that, they were proud of having a witch in the family!"

She stopped to draw a deep breath and then went ranting on. It seemed she had been wanting to say all this for years.

"And then the two of them went off and got married and had you and of course I knew you'd be just as strange, just as—as—abnormal, and then, if you please, she went and got herself blown up, and that mad old woman went and died, and we got landed with you!"

"Blown up?"

Harry had gone very white. As soon as he found his voice he said, through his teeth, "You told me my parents died in a car crash."

"CAR CRASH!" roared Hagrid, jumping up so angrily that the Dursleys scuttled back to their corner. "How could a car crash kill Lily an' Severus Snape? It's an outrage! A scandal! Harry Snape not knowin' his own story when every kid in our world knows his name!"

Harry whirled and looked at Hagrid hungrily. "But why?" he asked. "What happened?"

And Hagrid told him…

"I don't think they wanted me to know," said Harry. "And I think maybe that's why they hated me so much. They're so normal and they hate anything not—normal."

"Must have been weird, hearing all that for the first time," said Weasley, "I mean, I grew up hearing all about you, you were like Babbity Rabbity."

"In a way, that was the weirdest bit of all," said Harry. "Finding out that everyone already knew all about me when I didn't know myself."

Weasley nodded in understanding. "A bit like when your folks tell baby stories about you, I guess. Realising you were you before you knew you were you?"

Harry had never had anyone tell baby stories about him, but he nodded anyway.

He told him about Lord Voldemort, the name that witches and wizards still feared to say. Told him about his reign of terror, about how the world had ceased to be safe, about how he killed those who stood up to him…

"An' yer mum an' dad were as good a witch an' wizard as I ever knew. Yer mum was Head Girl at Hogwarts in her day, and yer dad, blimey, the best potioneer I ever saw o' any age, and him only a teenager; he invented spells, too, and had a mind like—well, yeh wouldn't believe it. The resistance wouldn't have survived without him an' that's the truth; beats me how he knew some o' the stuff he knew.

"I guess maybe You-Know-Who wanted 'em on his side, or maybe he just wanted 'em outta the way. All anyone knows is, he turned up in the village where you was all livin' on Halloween ten years ago. You was jus' a year old. He came to yer house an'—an'—"

He suddenly pulled out a very dirty, spotted handkerchief and blew his noise with a sound like a foghorn.

"Sorry," he said, "but it's that sad—knew yer mum an' dad, yer mum was the sweetest little thing, an' yer dad as brave a bloke as yeh'd ever hope to find—anyway…"

And Voldemort had killed them. As Hagrid told the story, about how he'd killed Lily and Severus and then, for some reason, tried to kill Harry, something very painful was going on in Harry's mind. He saw a blinding flash of green light, the one he'd seen every time he tried really hard to remember his parents—and then he remembered something else, for the first time in his life: a high, cold, cruel laugh…

"So much made sense then, though," he said. "The weird things that happened to me all the time. My scar and how it hurt sometimes. The way my aunt and uncle treated me. The fights my grandparents had. The green light in my dreams. The way my grandmother used to look at me…"

"Hold on, you said your gran was a witch? How come she never told you?"

"I just can't believe yer gran never told yeh none of this," finished Hagrid at length.

This startled Harry. "My gran?"

"Woulda thought she'd've said summat," said Hagrid.

Harry tried to remember his grandmother: a thin, unhappy-looking old woman with stringy grey hair and watery eyes.

"She never really said much of anything to me," he said slowly. "Tobias didn't let her."

Harry remembered Tobias, too—just—tall, angular, hook-nosed, always shouting and smashing things, usually smelling of alcohol. When Grandmother died, he'd dumped Harry off at the Dursleys and disappeared.

"Do you mean that Grandmother was a witch?" he asked. "I never saw her do any magic."

"Aye, 'cause o' that ruddy beggar of a husband. Scared to death o' him most her life, I shouldn't wonder. He hated everythin', accordin' to what yer dad used to tell me, and magic most of all. Blimey, I ain't sayin' some Muggles ain't all right, Harry, but you've picked a bad lot to be related to, an' no mistake."

Uncle Vernon stirred. "Now just a minute here…"

"Shut it."

"I only lived with them till I was four," he explained, "and Tobias—that's my grandfather—hated magic almost as much as the Dursleys. At least, I'm pretty sure he did. He took the first chance he got to get rid of me and I haven't seen him since."

"That's awful, though!"

Harry shrugged. By now they had reached Hagrid's hut. A crossbow and a pair of galoshes were outside the front door.

After fighting past Fang, Hagrid's gigantic boarhound, and introducing Weasley, Harry perched on one of Hagrid's enormous chairs and gnawed on one of the rock-like biscuits he was offered.

"Tell us about yer week, then," said Hagrid, pouring them each a cup of tea.

Weasley, as usual, was eager to do most of the talking, so Harry let him. They had all their classes together; Weasley could tell Hagrid virtually everything that had happened.

He told Hagrid how complicated star-mapping was; he told him how everyone except Granger had fallen asleep in Professor Binns's History of Magic class and the Professor hadn't even noticed; he told him how Professor McGonagall turned her desk into a pig and back again; he told him how Professor Flitwick fell off of his stack of books when he'd come to Harry's name in the roll call; he told him how Professor Quirrell always wore a giant purple turban and how his classroom smelled of garlic; he told him how Longbottom made a plant grow thirty feet in four seconds flat during Herbology and burst one of the panels of the greenhouse roof and how Professor Sprout said he was the only one who got the idea of the thing at all even if he did need to tone it down a bit; and he told him about the Flying lesson.

"…I flew around the pitch eighteen times, it was great, but Coach said something was wrong with Harry's handling—there wasn't, really, he was as good as any of the others and better than most everyone—but McGonagall thought he was good, anyway, because…can I tell Hagrid, Harry?"

Harry nodded around a mouthful of unchewable rock cake.

"Harry got made Seeker of the Gryffindor team! Can you imagine?! And him a first year!"

Hagrid grinned hugely and slapped Harry on the back, causing him to spray crumbs across the room. "Well done, you! Good on yeh! Seeker, eh?"

"Yeah, in spite of Coach's evil eye," muttered Harry.

"Eh, that's prob'ly your imagination," said Hagrid.

"But he seemed to really hate me."

"Rubbish," said Hagrid. "Why should he? Have another cuppa."

Then he asked about one of Weasley's brothers, and Weasley launched into another one of his speeches. Harry thought it looked suspiciously as though Hagrid were changing the subject, but he shrugged and idly picked up a piece of paper that was lying on the table under the tea cozy. It was a cutting from the Daily Prophet…

"Mr Hagrid," said Harry suddenly, interrupting the conversation, "Weasley didn't tell you about our adventure last night, did he?"

Now Weasley nearly sprayed crumbs.

"Harry!" he said.

"No, it's all right, Weasley. We'd got a bit lost, Mr Hagrid, and we tried a door that turned out to be locked, but of course that was no big deal, Granger opened that with a simple Alohomora charm, and where do you think we were? In the third floor corridor, Mr Hagrid…the place Dumbledore said was off limits. And you'll never…"

"YEH DIDN'T!" yelped Hagrid, leaping to his feet.

"I was just wondering," Harry continued sweetly, "if that had anything to do with this."

And he showed him the newspaper clipping.

That day for Harry was, literally, magical.

He saw witches and wizards and magical beasts. He saw self-stirring cauldrons and talking books. He got a wand with the feather of a phoenix in it—

("You have your mother's eyes…seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wand…ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow; nice wand for charm work…your father favoured a more solid walnut…eleven inches, phoenix feather, well suited for hexes and inventions…")

—and an owl he called Hedwig. He ate ice cream and got fitted for wizard's robes—

("Hello, Hogwarts too?…Know what house you'll be in? I know I'll be in Slytherin…I think they should keep it in the old wizarding families, some haven't even heard of Hogwarts before they get the letter, imagine…what's your surname?")

—and goggled at unicorn horns and black beetles' eyes.

But Hagrid spent all day carrying around this little secret package he'd gotten out of the goblin bank vault. It couldn't have been more than two inches across and was wrapped in grubby brown paper, but Hagrid treated it like it was top secret and extraordinary and valuable. In the back of Harry's mind, full as it was of this bright new world opened up to him, he wondered a little what was in it, and why it was so vital that Hagrid get it to Hogwarts.

"There was a break-in," he said, "on the very same day we were there, Mr Hagrid. My birthday, July 31. And nothing was taken because the vault had been emptied that same day. Isn't it interesting how there was a vault you emptied that same day? And now…this could just be speculation, of course, but it looks like there's a giant three-headed dog, guarding something, something valuable enough that someone would want to steal it, say, from a wizards' bank, and…"

"Now look here," said Hagrid fiercely. "Yer meddlin' in things that don' concern yeh. It's dangerous. You forget that dog, an' you forget what it's guardin', that's between Professor Dumbledore an' Nicolas Flamel—"

"Ah," said Harry softly. "Nicolas Flamel? And who might he be?"

Hagrid looked furious with himself. "Ain't it about time you lot got back up to the castle?" he said loudly. "Take some o' these rock cakes, I got plenty…"

As Weasley and Harry made their way back to the castle for dinner, Harry thought that none of the lessons he'd had so far had given him as much to think about as tea with Hagrid. Had Hagrid collected that package just in time? Was it being guarded by that giant dog? What was it? Who was Nicolas Flamel?

And did Hagrid know something about Potter that he didn't want to tell Harry?