The loud knocking gradually penetrated into Harry's dreaming thoughts, and then there was a crash which most mornings would have had him jolting awake.
He had only had a couple of hours of sleep, though, and so he slowly mumbled his way toward wakefulness – the paper he was lying on rustling below him as he shifted.
"…how dare you! Breaking into our house in the middle of the night!"
"Shut up, Dursley, you daft old prune..."
"...what will the neighbours think?"
Still sort of muzzy, Harry yawned quietly.
"...'Arry Potter?"
"No, I'm Dudley Dursley..."
Fumbling around, Harry found the door to his cupboard and opened it. The piles of letters had been destabilized a bit by his movement, and he slid out into the hallway.
"What time is it?" he asked, yawning, then looked at the wall clock. "Five past midnight? Mf, it's too early..."
He turned to look at the cause of the noise, and saw a really quite amazingly tall man hunched in the entryway.
"Is something the matter?" he asked, fetching his glasses with his tail and putting them on his muzzle.
"...Merlin's beard," the very tall man said, his jaw slowly dropping. Harry tilted his head in confusion, and the man pointed at him.
"You're a dragon?" he asked.
"Yes?" Harry replied. "You're the first person to mention that, actually."
"Dragon?" Uncle Vernon said. "What's this about dragon? Is this more freak nonsense?"
"Freak!?" the big man roared. "He's not a freak, he's a cute little talking dragon – just look at 'im! Never seen a talking dragon before, but 'e looks..."
The big man paused, a smile spreading across his big bearded face.
"'e doesn't look like any of the dragons I know," the man added, as Harry padded a little closer and kicked a letter out of the way. "But it all looks beautiful, them wings and everything."
Then he finally seemed to lose whatever internal conflict had been going on, and swept the startled Harry up in a bear-hug.
After the initial shock, Harry was surprised to find he actually quite enjoyed the experience.
Twenty or so minutes later, the Dursleys had more-or-less given up shouting at the giant man – who Harry had learned was named Hagrid, and who had waved a big pink umbrella about to put the door back where it had started. Neither Aunt Petunia nor Uncle Vernon were really happy about the whole situation, but it seemed to Harry that they couldn't just stand there shouting at Hagrid for all that long in the middle of the night.
When he'd pointed this entirely sensible point out, the two adults had shouted a bit more, but then gone back upstairs with bad grace and locked their bedroom door.
"Still can't believe I found a talking dragon," Hagrid said, shaking his head as he examined Harry's wing shoulder. "And to find one in a Muggle house, too..."
"What's a Muggle?" Harry asked, curious, lowering his wing once Hagrid had finished looking at the joints. "Is that what Aunt Petunia was called before she got married?"
"What's that?" Hagrid asked. "No, no, she was an Evans. Must have been. Like Lily."
He paused, then frowned. "Oh, shouldn't have forgotten that. Came here with a job. Don't suppose you know which bedroom's called the cupboard under the stairs, do you?"
"That's my bedroom," Harry answered. "It's not very big but it feels nice and lair-y. Why's that?"
"Well, I'm after Harry Potter, that's why," Hagrid explained. "It's his birthday, an' I was told by Professor Dumbledore to deliver his Hogwarts letter."
"Oh, are you where all those letters came from?" Harry asked, picking up one of the ones which had spilled out of the cupboard. "I was wondering, but I'm afraid a lot of it didn't make sense."
Hagrid paused, looking from Harry to the door he'd come out of, then his gaze went to Harry's forehead.
Harry wasn't sure why. It was one of the places his otherwise-black scales had a little marking on them, a small thunderbolt-like shape… but was that unusual for a dragon or not?
Maybe it was.
"It can't be," Hagrid said slowly. "You're Harry Potter?"
"Yes?" Harry replied. "Is there a reason I shouldn't be?"
He twisted his head to look back at himself, in case he'd changed colour while he wasn't looking, and Hagrid put a hand on the curve of Harry's neck.
"You might not remember me, 'Arry," he began. "But I helped Professor Dumbledore bring you here nearly ten years ago, so you'd be safe. But you weren't no dragon then."
"I know," Harry replied matter-of-factly. "I was very confused when I changed into one, but that was a long time ago and I sort of assumed it was normal when nobody made any comment on it."
"They haven't?" Hagrid asked, now confused. "But… ah, that might be it. There's all sorts of magic what stops Muggles from seeing things they ain't supposed to see, and I remember my old Creatures professor telling me as how dragons is one of them things."
Harry digested that, then opened the letter he'd picked up earlier.
"So this isn't a letter for a dragon school?" he asked. "Why on earth would we need pewter cauldrons, then?"
This seemed to have stumped the big man.
"Cauldrons?" he repeated. "Well… for potions, o' course. What else?"
"I thought snacks," Harry suggested. "Perhaps as a way to prevent the owl shortage."
Hagrid looked confused by that, then shook his head. "No, Hogwarts ain't a dragon school, Harry… it's a school for wizards, like you."
"I'm a wizard?" Harry repeated. "I thought I was a dragon."
"Well, yer a dragon too, o' course," Hagrid said. "But yer a wizard, or you wouldn't be accepted. Like how I was."
He patted the drake on the back. "Yer mum and dad were a witch and a wizard too. Though neither of 'em ever turned into a dragon…"
"They were?" Harry asked, interested, and not surprised by the bit about neither of his parents turning into a dragon. "Well, my uncle and aunt told me they died in a car crash-"
"A CAR CRASH!?" Hagrid bellowed.
"-but if magic is meant to be secret then I can see why they said that," Harry went on, thinking hard, and absently scraping some letters over with his wing as he did so.
That announcement took the wind out of Hagrid's sails, and he mumbled something about that making sense actually.
"Could you tell me about them?" Harry went on, then yawned. "I, ummm… sorry, it's still very late…"
"'course I'll tell you about James and Lily," Hagrid promised. "Could do it over cake, too, I picked one up for your birthday. 'course, I didn't know you were a dragon then..."
Harry's tail flicked from side to side a little, but then he yawned again.
Thinking about it, he decided that his aunt and uncle probably wouldn't mind if he slept on the sofa so long as he kept his claws out of the seats. So, with Hagrid's bemused and interested help, he put some of the letters on the sofa and bedded down to resume his interrupted slumber.