"Oh don' mind Fluffy. He won' hurt ya!"
Harry blinked in shock as the giant addressed him. He wasn't sure what stunned him more, the fact that the giant could speak English - well, of a fashion - or that he'd called his three-headed dog Fluffy. So that was the question Harry blurted out first.
"Fluffy? You call that animal Fluffy?"
"Well, yeah," the giant replied reticently. "I think he's fluffy ..."
Harry could sort of see what he meant, if that mass of fur around Fluffy's slobbering, snarling snouts counted. Not that Harry was paying much attention to the fur ... not when three sets of razor-sharp fangs were currently being bared at him.
"Wha' would you call him, then?" the giant asked.
"Oh, I don't know," Harry replied sardonically. "Killer? Monster? Beast from Hell? Something like that seems more appropriate. What can I call you, though?"
"Oh, true, I haven't introduced meself, have I?" the giant replied with one of his cannon-like laughs. "Me name's Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of Keys and Grounds and Hogwarts. But ya can just call me Hagrid. Nice to meet ya."
He held out a dustbin-sized hand to shake, which enveloped Harry's entire forearm as he took it. This wasn't a bad thing in Harry's mind, as it protected his skinny flesh from the nearest of Fluffy's snapping jaws, which he hadn't taken his eyes off.
"Aren't you afraid of ... of Fluffy?" Harry asked cautiously. One of the other heads had started sniffing around, perhaps smelling the residue of sausage and bacon on Harry's fingers. "Don't you think he might eat you in the night, or something?"
Hagrid chuckled deeply again. "Nah, these big brutes are fine. You jus' need to know how to handle 'em. Take Fluffy, here ... all you gotta do is play him a bit o' music and he goes right to sleep. Watch."
Hagrid bent down and started singing to all three of Fluffy's heads at once. Well, it was an approximation of signing ... if the vocalist was a tuneless, tone-deaf fog horn. Which described Hagrid's warbling pretty accurately as far as Harry was concerned. But he was good to his word ... for at the very first - very off-key - note, all six of Fluffy's eyes started to droop and the heads all lolled at once.
"See? Told ya!" Hagrid beamed. But as soon as he stopped his demonic lullaby Fluffy stirred, roused and began snarling again. So Hagrid reached into his large overcoat and pulled out three slabs of meat, which occupied each hungry mouth for the time being.
"So you have to keep playing music to subdue him?" Harry mused. "How strange!"
"Ah music!" Dumbledore suddenly exclaimed. "Surely a greater magic than anything we teach at Hogwarts!"
Harry was rather dubious about agreeing. He rather thought potion-making, spell-casting and flying was infinitely more magical than Hagrid's audition for Wizard's Got Talent. But he held his tongue just the same.
"Why don't you join us for Christmas dinner?" Lily suggested. She didn't look thrilled at the idea, but Harry agreed with the expression in her eyes that it was only polite to offer.
"Oh, no, we wouldn't want to intrude," Dumbledore replied softly.
"Nonsense," Sirius insisted. "We have plenty of room and enough food to fill all of Fluffy's bellies, too! So long as Hagrid can get his pet settled for the afternoon, you are more than welcome to stay."
"Well ... if you are sure," Dumbledore smiled. Then he conjured a small, self-playing harp with his wand and handed it to Hagrid, who tied it to one of Fluffy's collars. The dog immediately began to slumber and the giant had to pick up the oversized puppy as he hit the deck with a heavy thud.
"Take him to my room, the one on the left," Sirius announced. "It will have the scent of my dog-self on it, which Fluffy might prefer to Harry and his girly talc!"
"Hey! I do not use talc!" Harry protested, but the others just chuckled at him and James ruffled his messy locks fondly.
"Come on, Harry," Lily cooed. "What say you and I make a start on this lunch? I bet your Godfather hasn't even got the meat in the oven yet."
"I was thinking about doing Christmas pizza, you know ... just to shake the tradition up a bit!" Sirius teased.
"Not on my watch!" Lily cried. "Are you serious?"
"It's pronounced Sih-ree-us. Go on, try and wrap your gob around that if you can!"
"I'll wrap my hands around your throat if you carry on!" Lily admonished, but there was humour behind her eyes as she shared a smirk with Harry's Godfather.
As Harry and Lily headed into the kitchen, James poured cups of tea for Hagrid and Dumbledore as they settled down on the comfy sofas either side of the hearth. Hagrid was so vast he took up an entire sofa on his own.
"So, anything new at Hogwarts, Albus?" James asked from his seat at the dining table. "I hear that Professor Quirrell is into his second year as Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. You might want to keep an eye on him, you know ... it must take some seriously powerful Dark magic to avoid that curse!"
"Curse?" Harry piped up from his potato peeler. "The Professor is cursed, did you say?"
"No, son, not the man, the job," James clarified.
"Well, it isn't really a curse," Minerva chipped in. "It's just that nobody seems able to survive in the job for more than a year."
"Survive?" Harry gasped in horror. "What do you mean by that? The teachers don't ... die ... do they?"
"No, well at least, not yet," Dumbledore smiled amiably. "Though we have had several maimings, a few lost limbs, even more lost minds. Oh, and of course, that curious incident where a male Professor fell pregnant. We never did get to the bottom of that particular mystery!"
There was light and wit behind those flickering eyes and Harry wasn't sure if the old Headmaster was joking with him or not.
"Did ... did he have the baby?" Harry asked, enthralled. "And if he did ... how?"
Both James and Sirius winced as the possibilities crossed both their minds ... and all possible options for a male birthing canal were considered simultaneously. Lily just tutted at them pityingly, and muttered something about men having no concept of a pain threshold.
"We never found out," Dumbledore replied. "I should look into it, really."
"But how can a job be cursed?" asked Harry. "And how can it cause so many injuries? Is Hogwarts simply that dangerous?"
"Teaching Magic often wreaks havoc with both students and Professors," Dumbledore pondered aloud. "I, indeed, have been injured three times myself. My final solution for an easy life was, shall we say, unique."
"Which was?"
"I became Headmaster!" Dumbledore chuckled. "And left all the dangerous bits of hands-on education in the less scarred hands of others!"
Minerva chuckled for a moment, then turned seriously to Dumbledore. "Speaking of scarred hands, how is Pomona? I heard that Poppy was insisting she head to St Mungo's for a course of treatment."
"Pomona?" Harry asked. "Who's that?"
"Pomona Sprout," Minerva replied. "She is another Professor at Hogwarts. She teaches Herbology."
"Study of magical plants," Lily whispered into Harry's ear with a twinkling grin, just as he opened his jaws to ask the question. He beamed his thanks back at her.
"What's happened to her?" Harry asked instead. "Didn't you say St Mungo's is a hospital, or something?"
"A Centre to treat Magical Maladies, yes," Dumbledore took over. "And poor Pomona is having a little trouble with a particularly nasty cutting of a very rare plant I have asked her to cultivate, for a project I am working on."
"What is it?"
"The project? Ah, Harry, I'm afraid I cannot tell you that," Dumbledore smiled benignly. "It must remain a secret, between myself and my old friend, Nicolas Flamel."
Nicolas Flamel. Harry had heard his name before ... but where? He couldn't remember. So much had happened in the last few months that Harry was quite sure he'd forgotten more in that time than his entire accumulated knowledge of his first ten years of life put together. Nicolas Flamel would have to become just another footnote in Harry's overwrought brain for now.
"But the plant," Dumbledore went on. "Is called Devil's Snare. It has snaking tendrils that wrap and coil around living flesh, and squeeze it tight in the hope of drawing blood, which it uses as a source of nutrition."
"As food!" Harry gasped in horror. "This plant eats people?"
"No, not eats, as such," Dumbledore mused cheerfully. "More like ... liquidates ... using enzymes from little suction ducts on the leaves."
"And you have this in a school!" Harry breathed in shock. "Are you insane? Do the giant spiders use the killer plants to spin their webs in! And what do the webs catch? Rolled-up-newspaper resistant mega-bees!? Flies with teeth the size of carving knives!? Mum ... I'm leaning more and more towards going to Eton. At least there I might not get eaten alive in my first term!"
"Eaten alive!" Hagrid chortled. "You're bein' a bit dramatic there, Harry. It's not like we got dragons on the grounds, or nothin'."
Harry swallowed another mouthful of nauseating fear. "Excuse me, but I don't think I heard you right. Did you just say dragons?"
"Aye that I did," Hagrid confirmed.
"What ... like ... real dragons?"
"Yep."
"That fly and breathe fire and stuff?" Harry insisted in wide-eyed disbelief.
"Don' forget the ones who breathe ice instead of fire!" Hagrid chuckled.
"Wow!" Harry breathed. "There are real dragons, then? In Britain?"
"And other parts of the world," Hagrid nodded. "Ministry of Magic has to keep 'em all covered up and in secret, o' course, but yeah there's still a few breeds left in Britain. Crikey, I'd like a dragon."
Harry blinked in his amazement. "You'd like a dragon?!"
"Oh Merlin would I!" Hagrid exclaimed as his eyes glossed over with the thought. "Always have. Since I was a kid."
Harry went to say something then closed his mouth again quickly. He was wondering how Hagrid, who was clearly only partially human, had been conceived at all. He was considering which of his parents was a regular person and which was a giant ... and how that baby-making process had ever happened at all! Harry knew enough about the birds and the bees to have his mind utterly warped by both possible configurations.
He shuddered slightly as he went back to the subject of dragons. "Could you even take care of a dragon then?"
"I reckon so," Hagrid nodded confidently. "After Fluffy back there, I reckon a dragon'd be a piece o' cake. Shame it's illegal to breed them for personal companionship."
Personal companionship ... with a dragon! Harry was starting to think that Hagrid was perhaps a misguided sort of savage. He was deeply curious to understand how he was even allowed up at Hogwarts. But then again, Harry thought, if Hogwarts was full of huge monsters, maybe they need a huge gamekeeper to manage them all. That would make sense, but it didn't make Harry feel any more comfortable about attending this Academy of Absurdity.
"So how did Pomona get injured by the Snare?" James queried. "Seems a little careless of her."
"Well, this genus is a good deal larger than standard varieties," Dumbledore explained. "And the enzyme secretions that much more potent as a result. It burnt through Pomona's work attire and did significant damage to her hands and forearms. She's cheery enough about it, and I'm sure the Healers at St Mungo's will have her right as rain in no time."
"No, what I meant, Albus," James clarified. "Is that it was careless of her to forget how to repel the Snare. It's first year material, that is."
Harry was alert in a flash. There was a way to fight the killer plant? He was desperately urgent to know how, just in case he ever had a run-in with the stuff by accident.
"You can kill Devil's Snare?" Harry asked, eagerly. "How?"
"Devil's Snare likes the dark and damp, so how do you think you'd repel it?" Lily cajoled.
"Um ... I don't know," Harry mumbled. He felt like he was being tested on the spot and it was a test he hadn't studied for.
"Think about it," Lily encouraged softly. "It likes dark places and damp, wet conditions ... so how would you make it uncomfortable?"
"Er ... by making it hot and dry?" Harry tried. "And bright, maybe?"
"Brilliant!" Lily beamed. She kissed him on the top of his head, which made him blush. "And how would you do that?"
"With ... with fire!" Harry exclaimed.
"Great! Ten points to Team Harry!" Lily cried.
Harry grinned back, then he frowned. "But what if you didn't have any wood? Or no matches?"
Lily blinked at him, a smile pulling at the corner of her lips ... as she tapped the tip of her wand pointedly against her temple. Harry laughed at himself as he understood.
"Oh ... oh of course!" he snickered. "You'd just use magic, wouldn't you?"
"You'd think so," James agreed. "Which is why I'm surprised at Pomona. She's a master when it comes to difficult plants."
"I blame myself," Dumbledore sighed. "I should have warned her that this particular species could be problematic due to its size and aggressive nature. I should buy her some flowers by way of apology."
Harry was going to say that he shouldn't bother as - if they went on current form - the aroma of the petals would probably cause hallucinations or something. But Lily seemed to sense that was exactly what he was going to do, and yanked his attention back to the potato peeling.
The Christmas lunch was wonderful. A large turkey dominated the centre of the table, flanked by tureens of peas and carrots and broccoli, while the bain-marie had been re-employed to hold roast and boiled potatoes and bouncy Yorkshire puddings. There were vats of rich gravy, shallow dishes of other sauces, and colourful crackers were set at each place.
But these weren't ordinary crackers. They were from The Wizarding Cracker Company, went off with the sound of an exploding cannon, and instead of yielding flimsy paper hats came out with such things as a pirate hat for Sirius, a tiara for Lily, and one of those hat's with corks dangling from the rim, which Professor Dumbledore had perched onto his wrinkled head.
They also had better gifts. Harry won a little toy broom with his first one, which he set to zoom around and around Hedwig's cage, until it made her so dizzy that she fell off her perch and had to be revived with some water from her little bowl. She pouted crossly at Harry for a while, forgiving him only when he hand-fed her the last of the turkey from his plate, which she accepted with an affectionate little nip of her beak against his fingers.
After dinner they all slumped by the fire to let their food go down. Harry had wolfed down so much that he felt like a fat little egg, and simply rolled around on the floor to offset the swell of his burgeoning belly. That was when he bumped into his unopened presents from his parents. He jumped up in his eagerness and tore off the paper to the first of his gifts. It was handsome leather trunk, that James immediately resized for him.
"For when you go to Hogwarts," he explained. "It is magically modified to have near-infinite space inside ... and to weigh no more than that other gift over there."
Harry reached down and lifted up a feather-light package that was next on the pile. His heart gave a great bound as he tore back the paper and a silvery, gossamer-soft garment flowed out into his lap.
"Your Invisibility Cloak!" Harry breathed in a stunned voice. "For me?"
"As much as it breaks my heart, yes," James teased. "Just as my father gave it to me, I now pass it on to you. It's a rite of passage I'm lucky to get to do."
Then James leaned over and kissed Harry on the crown of his head. Harry jumped up squeezed his father tightly.
"Thanks, Dad!" Harry cried. "I love it!"
"Use it well," James replied, somewhat cryptically. His eyes were full of meaning, but Harry was too overcome with the thrill of the gift to be truly interested in trying to dissect what it might be.
It was gone midnight by the time Dumbledore and Hagrid said their goodbyes. Minerva helped Albus with his travelling cloak, as Hagrid wrestled a grumpy Fluffy into all three of his harnesses.
"Where are you staying?" asked Sirius.
"Other side o' London," Hagrid explained. Then he frowned. "Oh, yeah. It's late, innit? The Tube will have stopped by now. Don't know how we're going to get back."
"Ah, yes, that is a problem," Dumbledore agreed. "I rather feel that I have had a little too much Firewhiskey to trust my Apparition skills ... especially if I would have passengers to take along. Looks like we have a long walk ahead, old friend."
"Here, take these," Sirius sighed reticently. He threw a set of keys to Hagrid, who look puzzled as he caught them. "My aerocycle. Third bay of the basement parking garage. Try not to scratch the paintwork, I've only just got her buffed."
"Cheers," Hagrid grinned broadly. "I'll get her back in one piece, don' worry. Well, g'night all."
And with a cheery wave, the giant led the tipsy old wizard out into the London night.
