Hagrid's attention was clearly not on Ron's protest.
The shock on his face slowly faded, giving way to the helpless look of a man who knew he'd been found out.
"Alright, alright, you're right, even Ron could tell something was off…"
"Hey!"
Ron protested again, but his words were drowned out by what Hagrid said next.
"Sherlock's got it right. I did bring a giant back with me."
Hagrid lowered his head, his voice was carrying a certain heaviness, and beneath it, a thread of tenderness so faint it was almost missed.
"And I had no choice but to bring him back, because—he's my brother."
"Brother?" Harry finally found his voice again, with astonishment thick in his tone.
"Brother!" Ron's eyes went wide as he repeated the word, his face a portrait of disbelief.
"Brother—" Hermione murmured, her grip tightening on Sherlock's arm.
In that moment, Ron couldn't even spare a thought for the fact that Sherlock had just looked down on his intelligence. His mind was completely occupied by one staggering piece of news: Hagrid had a giant for a brother.
"Hm. As I expected."
Sherlock, however, showed not the slightest surprise, as though he'd known the answer all along.
"So, he didn't want to come here at all—you dragged him here by force, didn't you?"
"That's right!"
Hagrid's head snapped up; his voice was suddenly charged with emotion. And with that, the floodgates were fully open, and there was no holding them shut again.
He told the four of them that after Hagrid's giantess mother, Fridwulfa, returned to the giant tribes, she had soon taken up with another giant and borne a child. That child was Grawp—Hagrid's half-brother, as it were, sharing the same mother. Unlike Hagrid, who was half-giant, Grawp was full-blooded.
But Grawp's treatment among the giants had been dreadful. Without exaggeration, the giants' daily routine consisted of eating, sleeping, and beating Grawp.
As the saying goes, blood is thicker than water—much as Hagrid didn't think Fridwulfa had been much of a mother, he couldn't bring himself to abandon his own brother, especially not after seeing with his own eyes how badly Grawp was being bullied. So, he'd brought him back.
"Why were they beating your brother?" Harry asked, confused.
"Giants have always been a quarrelsome lot—they're just not suited to living together, they love killing each other far too much. And Grawp's too small, on top of that, so the other giants were always picking on him."
"Too small?" Sherlock's interest was immediately piqued. "How small are we talking?"
"Ah—"
Hagrid let out a deep sigh. "He's only sixteen feet tall."
Blimey.
Hearing this, Ron couldn't help but blurt out a comment: "Yeah, way too small. Practically a runt."
To put that in perspective, Hagrid himself stood eleven and a half feet tall. Whether in the Muggle world or the wizarding one, that alone was already enough to qualify as an absolute giant among giants. And yet his brother came in at sixteen feet!
That was nearly two stories high! And of all people, Hagrid thought of him as a runt. Somehow, that was exactly what made it funny.
"Among a giant population that routinely runs to twenty-three or twenty-four feet, a sixteen-foot giant genuinely does count as small."
Ron thought about it and supposed that was fair—compared to those walking hills, Grawp really was on the short side.
Sherlock asked another question.
"So, is that why Madame Maxime parted ways with you as well?"
"No, that's not it!"
The moment Sherlock said this, Hagrid burst into an agitated denial, his cheeks were flushing red.
"Olympe understood. She knew how much Grawp meant to me, but…"
"But over the course of the long journey back, she eventually grew weary of caring for a giant who was both uncooperative and unusually enormous. So, she parted ways with you and returned to Beauxbatons on her own."
Sherlock finished the thought for him calmly, his tone certain.
The fire went out of Hagrid at once. He lowered his head and said in a low voice, "That's how it was."
The four young wizards exchanged glances, and in each other's eyes, they read the same tangle of complicated feelings.
That was simply who Hagrid was—kind, stubborn, and always willing to throw caution to the wind for someone he cared about.
Bringing home a giant might sound like the height of absurdity, but happening to Hagrid, it was somehow both completely unexpected and entirely in character. Hermione's expression was especially conflicted.
Full-blooded giants were different from half-giants. Their intelligence wasn't high—though admittedly still a good deal better than a troll's.
Just as Hagrid had said, giants were bloodthirsty by nature; even left entirely alone, without a single wizard around, they would still dwindle in numbers from all the killing among themselves.
Some giants couldn't even speak human languages, and with Hagrid's limited abilities, there was no realistic way to keep Grawp hidden for long. Judging by the injuries still fresh on Hagrid's own body, teaching Grawp the rules of human society wasn't going to be easy either.
Thinking all this over, Hermione turned stiffly to look at Sherlock and said, in a voice pitched for his ears alone: "Sherlock, this one's on you. There's no one else."
Naturally, Hagrid still didn't take them to see Grawp. In Hagrid's own words, going to see Grawp right now was still a dangerous business. If even Hagrid thought it was dangerous, then it really was dangerous. After all, this was a man who thought Aragog counted as a "old friend."
"You lot mustn't breathe a word of this to anyone."
As he saw the four of them off, Hagrid made sure to remind them.
"I'll spend this stretch of time teaching him English first. Once he's not so quick to temper anymore, I'll take you to see him."
"Teach—teach him English?" Ron's eyes went wide with astonishment.
"Yeah, what's wrong with that?"
Hagrid turned his head and gave him an odd sort of look.
"No—nothing. Good luck with that."
Ron said.
"Oh, and one more thing—"
A mysterious smile spread across Hagrid's face. "I'll be teaching your Care of Magical Creatures lesson next Tuesday, and I've got a surprise in store for you!"
A surprise?
More like a scare, surely.
As the four of them left Hagrid's hut and made their way back toward Hogwarts castle, Harry said with confidence: "Don't worry, Dumbledore's bound to know about this—there's nothing that happens in this school he doesn't know about."
"I'll reserve judgment on that one, dear Harry."
Sherlock let out a light laugh and shook his head. "Not if you remember the Chamber of Secrets."
"..."
Harry suddenly found he had nothing to say to that.
"Sherlock, I honestly don't know what to make of any of this."
Hermione tugged at her own hair in distress.
"How could he possibly do something like this? If he's ever found out, he'll be sacked for certain. He's always putting himself in danger without even realizing it. And just look at the state of him—I really don't think that giant, half-brother or not, thinks of him as a brother at all—"
"Dear Hermione, for a man who considers a chimaera more adorable than an Erumpent, I'd say this sort of thinking is perfectly in character."
"Yeah," Harry sighed too. "Did you hear him? He's actually worried we might go and tell people about it."
"Ha. Him not telling everyone himself would already be a small mercy," Ron said sourly.
"Well, it's done now. Let's go eat."
Sherlock, unlike his three companions, wasn't quite so pessimistic about it. "We'll see how Hagrid's teaching methods pan out after a while."
"Guess that's all we can do."
By breakfast the next morning, right on schedule, Professor Hagrid had reclaimed his seat at the staff table from Professor Grubbly-Plank. Which could only mean that Care of Magical Creatures had once again fallen to him to teach.
Led by the Weasley twins and their good friend Lee Jordan, the young lions surged straight down the aisle between the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff tables. As Head Boy, Cedric Diggory came forward too, shaking Hagrid's enormous hand again and again, extending this warm welcome to mark his return.
Not everyone was quite so enthusiastic, however. It wasn't so noticeable among students below third year, but most of the girls in third year and above shook their heads glumly. Parvati and Lavender were among them. Still, for Hermione and Ron's sake, the two girls held their tongues rather than complaining openly.
Not just Sherlock—even Harry, Hagrid's best friend, knew perfectly well that the vast majority of students preferred Professor Grubbly-Plank's lessons.
Setting aside personal feelings for Hagrid entirely, Professor Grubbly-Plank was simply more like what a normal teacher ought to be. At the very least, her idea of an interesting lesson didn't involve the possibility of someone getting their head torn off.
Soon enough, the first Care of Magical Creatures lesson since Hagrid's return got underway. Sherlock, for his part, was rather curious what surprise Hagrid had prepared for them. Harry, Hermione, and Ron, meanwhile, were worried he'd cooked up something along the lines of another Blast-Ended Skrewt.
Hagrid's appearance in particular did nothing to set anyone's mind at ease. The purple bruises that had marked his skin before had now turned an unhealthy shade of yellow-green, and some of the wounds still looked to be bleeding.
"You don't suppose that Gra—that thing—is some kind of monster, do you?"
Ron said, looking thoroughly baffled. "Something with venom that stops wounds from healing?"
Harry kept shaking his head as well. "Couldn't Hagrid have at least tidied himself up a bit before coming to teach us?"
What made things feel even more ominous was that he had half a dead cow slung over one shoulder…
"We're having our lesson out here today!"
Hagrid, however, looked positively delighted, tossing his head back toward the dark forest with a flourish.
"The trees are a bit thick, it's true—but they like the dark…"
"What likes the dark?"
At that very moment, a fearful voice rang out. It was Draco Malfoy. He shrieked the question at the person next to him, a note of fear was creeping into his voice:
"He said something likes the dark—did you hear that?"
Harry and Ron exchanged a glance and couldn't help but burst out laughing. Even though Malfoy no longer dared to give them any trouble, cowed as he was by Sherlock, the two of them still felt a distinct spark of joy watching him carry on like this.
"So, are you all ready?"
Hagrid, still wearing that same cheerful expression, swept his gaze across the whole class as he spoke.
"Right, then. I've set aside a special field expedition into the woods for you fifth-years today. I want you to see these creatures living in their natural habitat. The creature we're studying today is exceptionally rare. I daresay I might be the only person in all of Britain who's ever tamed one—"
"Are you sure it's actually tame?"
The fear in Malfoy's voice had grown more pronounced. No longer content to just complain to his classmates, he addressed Hagrid directly: "It's hardly the first time you've brought some wild beast into a lesson, is it?"
The Slytherins immediately murmured their agreement.
Ron turned to Sherlock and Harry beside him. "I'm becoming more and more convinced this bloke's some kind of comic-relief character out of a cartoon."
Harry could only manage a wry smile at that. Because after Malfoy finished speaking, quite a few Gryffindors found themselves nodding along quietly, privately conceding he had something of a point.
"Of course it's tame."
Hagrid frowned at the question, hoisting the dead cow a little higher on his shoulder.
"Then what happened to your face?" Pansy Parkinson demanded at once.
"None of your business!"
Faced with question after question, Hagrid finally lost his temper: "Right, if you're all done asking daft questions, come with me!"
With that, he turned and strode into the forest.
But this only made everyone more anxious than before. Everybody dragged their feet, and not a single soul wanted to follow Hagrid in. The little lions all turned to look at Sherlock, and the little snakes were no exception.
"Knew this was coming," Harry said, sighing as he looked toward Sherlock. "Shall we?"
Sherlock shrugged and started walking. Harry, Hermione, and Ron followed right after. With the Lion King and the Boy Who Lived leading the way, the little lions finally fell in behind them. And once the little lions had gone in, only then did the little snakes follow suit.
The deeper the group walked, the denser the trees grew, and the dimmer the light became. By the time they reached their destination, there wasn't even a single patch of snow left on the ground.
Only then did Hagrid finally drop the half-cow to the ground, step back twice, and turn to face the class.
Although everyone had followed him in, at the sight of Hagrid's manner just now, they still crept toward him carefully, using tree trunks for cover. All the while, they kept glancing around, seemingly braced for an attack at any moment.
"Gather round, gather round."
Hagrid took in the sight of everyone and said, encouragingly.
"They'll be along soon enough once they catch the smell of the meat, but I ought to call them anyway—they like hearing it's me calling…"
As he spoke he turned around and let out a strange, piercing cry. The sound echoed through the dim, dense forest, like the call of some enormous bird.
Given Hagrid's track record, no one laughed. In fact, most people seemed too frightened to even make a sound.
Nothing happened.
Hagrid called out again. During this whole stretch, everyone kept glancing around in every direction.
Still nothing happened. A full minute passed like this.
"Sherlock, why has Hagrid stopped calling?"
Ron asked, unable to help himself, still glancing around as he spoke.
"Because they've already arrived."
Sherlock said this while watching a magical creature emerge from between two gnarled, ancient yew trees.
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